Interview with Jack by James Rampton of The Independent

Jack Dee has quite a few things that he’d like to get off his chest – and he’s delighted that you, the esteemed audience, have come along to witness him doing so. After three years occupied in TV studios and on film sets, he is returning to his most abiding passion: live performing.

On his immense new nationwide tour, which runs for the next five months, Jack will be fulminating about some of the myriad things that are currently getting up his nose. He’s back – and this time he’s hacked off.

When I met Jack at his agent’s office in Wardour Street he’s already in full complaining mode, explaining calmly but unambiguously to someone on the phone that “No, of course I don’t want to renew the warrantee . . . if it breaks down I’ll get a new one . . . well that’s a risk I’m prepared to take . . . . then I go without a tumble drier for two days . . .whatever happened to living dangerously … hello … he hung up on me, why do they do that? Ring up to sell you something but they can’t handle it when you put up resistance”.

I’ve interviewed Jack before and the experience taught me that you don’t really need to probe him for things that are currently annoying him. The list comes as his natural conversation. As if moaning is his default setting.

For a start, Jack fumes, he is fed up with “neighbours who try to borrow stuff off you – you have to nip that one in the bud. They come around and ask for greaseproof paper. I know I’ve got a whole drawer full of the stuff, but I’m not getting into that game. If I wanted to get into that, I’d have opened a corner shop.”

He is equally furious about those salesmen who cold-call offering untold rewards. “I hate it when people ring up to say ‘you’ve won ?5000′. ‘Of course I have – I can retire now!’ And I’m also exasperated by those people who call to ask if I want cheaper gas – ‘you can save up to 48p a week, and that soon mounts up.’ ‘To what? 96p a fortnight ?’”

And don’t get him started on the subject of iPods. “I resent them,” Jack moans. “I don’t like the way they look at you. I think people’s love for iPods has got way out of hand. You can’t love them – let’s just calm down here. People are so over-excited about them. I don’t believe it’s a design classic – to me, it looks like a piece of hospital equipment, something you need to keep your kidneys going.”

Hitting his rhetorical stride now, he says: “I reckon music is overrated. The point of having these stupid little devices is so you can do other stuff at the same time. You don’t just sit and listen to music. Music is the only hobby that’s so unfulfilling, you need to be doing another hobby at the same time. You can’t paint the ceiling while playing hockey, can you?

“We should ban music from schools. If you do well at it, you can become a professional musician – and who wants that for their children? You can look forward to a lifetime of wearing funny clothes, walking in a funny way, getting married 8 times and becoming an alcoholic!”

The stand-up is also going to treat you to his typically dyspeptic vision of circuses. “I’m trying to introduce the idea of the English State Circus,” Jack reveals. “It would be held in a massive Burberry big top, and the clown would come on being abusive, smelling of cigarettes and with a betting-shop pencil behind his ear. ‘And now from Manchester, the Fly Tippers!’

“I hope the government picks up on it. It’s crying out to be done. I feel circus workers must be having an awful lot of sex – why ever else would you do that job? There must be some hidden benefit. You learn to juggle just so you can live in an eight-foot-long caravan with the Kosovan hoopla sisters. You can’t stay that fit just by doing 20 minutes’ trapeze a day. They’re up to something.”

He reckons that in his show “the underlying theme is questioning everything that everyone else takes for granted. I look twice at stuff that so far has got off scot-free.”

This is Dee at his best. A comedian at the very top of his game, he is one of our biggest live draws. But the irony is that when he gets behind the microphone, he is happiest being unhappy. The smallest irritants in life are the ones that raise the biggest laughs in his stage show.

His conversation is punctuated with frequent roars of laughter. He laughs loud and long – and most appealingly, many of his best gags are at his own expense.

On stage, of course, Jack exhibits a rather more crotchety outlook – which he has parlayed into a brilliantly funny act. This testy view of the world has not altered since Dee has become one of the most popular comedians in the country over the last fifteen years.

“People say to me, ‘now that you’re a success, is that a problem because it implies that you’ve become happy and therefore unable to do the curmudgeonly comedy you did before?’ But that’s not the case at all. I still get cross about everything. I got into a bad mood when I was 14, and it’s never lifted!”

Jack, who is married to Jane with whom he has four children, continues. “Being irritated is what makes me tick. I strip everything down and look at it from every angle in order to find out why my response is mild annoyance or absolute rage. If you can sing or write music, you’ll explore that facility. It’s about how you interpret the world. My immediate response is to interpret things comedically, and my sense of comedy is curmudgeonly.”

The comedian carries on that “I do get very annoyed about things. My act is about me working up a head of steam over the smallest subject. Being unreasonably angry about the most minor point is very funny – and it says more about the woes of the world than I could ever manage.

“Road rage is a telling example – that’s just people becoming proprietorial about something they should share. If you blow that attitude up, it shows that so often human nature is its own worst enemy. I don’t have a problem hanging onto my anger – that is actually how I think. It’s not put on – it doesn’t finish at the end of the show!”

So what is it in particular that riles him? “The service industry – in inverted commas,” Jack splutters in mock-outrage. “Shops will give you a refund but never an apology. I also hate to see young people having such a great time. I feel they’re having a much better time than I had at their age.

“You see 20-year-olds whizzing around on skateboards – it’s a never-ending childhood for them. I was a proper grown-up by then. They don’t have gap years, so much as gap lives now. My teenage nephews have been to twice as many countries as I have in twice the time. It’s not fair!

He also gets supremely angry about smug gits who send him postcards from their idyllic and far-away holidays. “That does annoy me. They’re saying ‘I’m on holiday and you’re no’.”

But, perhaps perversely, it is this very sense of irritation that makes Jack’s comedy so universal. His rage at the machine strikes a chord with audiences; we can all listen to his ranting about how the little things in life always seem to go pear-shaped and think to ourselves “I’ve been there, too.”

“All I write about is stuff that happens to people,” the comedian avers. “Being on television hasn’t changed my life. I still have to go to the supermarket and motorway service stations. I’m always able to find a common ground with my audience. I keep my feet on the ground by remaining constantly annoyed about everything. Long may that continue!”

Jack, who is set to compere the huge Comic Aid benefit gig at the Hammersmith Apollo in aid of the victims of tsunami disaster, carries on that “the postcards issue is my problem, but I share it with the audience. Ultimately, everything I’m cross about is down to me, and the audience warm to the fact that I’m sufficiently human to own up to these faults. They enjoy me exposing my frailties because there’s honesty in it.

“Watching me on stage, audiences go ‘phew, he’s thought that, too. I’m not the only person on the planet who thinks that.’ It’s the comedy of recognition. I draw out of people a moment of recognising something that they’d never quite put it into words. It’s like when you read a novel and it suddenly puts in a nutshell something you’d always vaguely thought.”

Jack adds that his tetchiness “also gives audiences the licence to live in that world of unreasonableness that I inhabit for the time I’m with them. It’s like when you’re with a group of friends down the pub – you appoint one person to be the court jester and say those things that shouldn’t be said.”

Ever self-effacing, Jack is quick to point out, however, that he doesn’t want his comedy to be perceived as socially significant. Many things, he explains, “go unspoken until I speak them. That’s all I do. I’m paid to do nothing other than concentrate on the pointless stuff in life. I have to bring up the things that have absolutely no bearing on anything and turn them into routines.”

But does this make any deeper contribution to society, I ask Jack mischievously. “Of course,” he protests, while flashing me an ironic grin, “I’ve prevented many heart attacks! I’m sure they’re about to do a major study on me in The Lancet – ‘Jack Dee is so good for people!’”

He goes on in a characteristically, self-mocking manner. “I talk about things that preoccupy me, but I’ve got nothing significant to add to the greater good. I’m quite happy to admit that I talk about nothing very profound. Big stuff just leaves me behind. When Seinfeld was accused of talking about nothing, he replied: ‘there&’s a shortage of nothing’”.

“I don’t apologise for my show being about nothing. I’d frankly be embarrassed if I tried to address the world’s problems in a didactic way. A comedian who comes on with all the answers is just not funny. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, what we should be doing is this’. ‘And your point is?’ My comedy is all about me being part of the problem.”

All the same, Jack is obviously champing at the bit to get out there on stage once again. There is nothing he loves better than the live arena. “Stand-up is something I’ll always want to be doing,” he enthuses. “Sometimes I’ll leave it alone for a year, but it will always be the bedrock of what I’m about.

“Nothing beats the thrill of live performance. When stand-up is going well, it’s the most exhilarating hit a comedian can get. When the ideas are flowing and you’re improvising, it’s like being able to fly. It’s the biggest buzz you’ll ever have.”

When – as they say in the comedy business – Jack is really cooking in his live shows, “success breeds success on stage. Once you’ve got something good going, it mushrooms into something you’ve never considered before. If you can tap into that vein of inspiration, it just keeps on working and there’s no end to what you can produce.”

He is able to grow a stunning half-hour routine from a tiny acorn of an idea. He gives a good example. “I hate it when people want to help after dinner,” Dee complains. “They always offer to do the drying-up – that really gets on my nerves because they don’t know where to put anything. Why don’t they just put their money where their mouth is and volunteer to do the washing up -which is clearly a far worse job? Once I started developing this theme, the resentment just mounted and I built it into a whole section of the show.”

Jack’s massive popularity on the live circuit has gone hand in hand with a burgeoning career as a straight actor. In recent times, he has been on the receiving end of critical acclaim for such diverse dramas as Tunnel of Love, The Deputy, Spivs, Silent Witness, Dalziel and Pascoe and The Grimleys.

In the pipeline, he has two further movies: The Last Drop, a Second World War Thriller, where Jack takes the part of an intelligence officer and headlines opposite Michael Madsen , Billy Zane and Nick Moran; and Short Order, a culinary comedy shot in Dublin in which Jack plays a restaurant critic and co-stars with John Hurt. Elevated thespian company indeed.

Clearly, his acting career is on a roll, but Jack has played it very cannily, rejecting many offers to portray “zany best mate” -type roles. His crafty approach is reaping benefits now.

“I’m glad I’ve taken my time and not done too much, too soon,” Jack muses. “I’m going softly, softly, but I definitely feel more comfortable in drama now. I’ve taken on dramas where I really think I can have a good crack at it.”

He says that “I turn a lot of things down on the grounds that if it’s something I wouldn’t watch, then I don’t want to be in it. For two or three years, I was offered endless series about maverick cops. They always had a passion for be-bop or played chess on the internet with their estranged son or travelled round Britain on a barge solving crimes.

“It was like the producers thought, ‘we know this is third-rate, but if we get a name attached, then we’ll get it through the commissioning editor’s door.’ I used to say to myself, ‘if a vintage car crops up by page 20, I’m not reading any further’ – and it always did!”

The other thing that has boosted Jack’s profile is Celebrity Big Brother, which he agreed to appear on for Comic Relief in 2001. “That programme has distorted my CV,” harrumphs Jack.

“But in the long run it’s also been very good because it’s helped people understand a lot more about me. They have realized what the big joke about me is. I’m pissed off – and able to translate that into my stage performance.”

Despite his manifold successes, Jack remains an attractively modest character. For example, he has an absolute horror of our current obsession with celebrity. “I want to be defined by my output and not by my profile,” the comedian asserts. It’s a very easy trap to fall into – spending too much time keeping up your profile and thinking that’s really important.

“Publicity should only ever be a means to an end, a way of communicating what you’re doing. I never want to become part of the celebrity machine where you’re expected to be photographed at the latest film premiere. I know certain people who, if they’re not appearing in celebrity magazines or the newspapers on a daily basis, feel they don’t exist. They ring up their PR and say ‘why aren’t I in the papers today?’ Usually I breathe a sigh of relief if I don’t see myself in the papers.”

He goes on to observe that “so far – I’m glad to say – I’ve managed to avoid photo shoots in the house with the kids. I was offered lots of money to do a celebrity mag, but I turned it down.

“My home life is the only part of my life I can keep private. I don’t want success at the expense of thinking ‘what I did today was rubbish’. Then, I really couldn’t sleep at night. Me grinning like an idiot with my kids on the pages of a glossy magazine wouldn’t work. I have a hard enough time smiling for family photos, so doing it for Hello! would just be impossible.”

In the same way, Jack is quite happy to acknowledge that he could never be comfortable as an all-singing, all-dancing TV game-show host. “I’m not a natural telly star,” he concedes. “I’ve never been a person who wants to dance every time someone opens the fridge-door.

“Matthew Kelly is a natural telly star. If I was put in the situation of doing his show, I’d be genuinely, deeply unhappy. Imagine me hosting Stars in Their Eyes. ‘Who the hell are you going to be? Who gives a toss? My God, that was nothing like Bono, you twat.’”