He's Fucking With The Hashtag

“We did realise perhaps we should have written out the word ‘sharp’. I did one radio interview where the host said ‘We’ve got Paul Foot coming on now; he’s got his new show Paul Foot’s Hovercraft Symphony In Gammon.’ They didn’t know what to say because they didn’t know what they were seeing, and I didn’t know what to say because I was stunned at the ignorance that that was the sharp symbol.”

Foot says this year’s show includes “a tale of a lady living with snakes; subjecting a bed and breakfast landlady to a red Indian-themed nightmare; a piece about Scotch finger biscuits in a sadomasochistic suburban whipping session, and also some aquarium humour”. If you’re a connoisseur of his humour (he doesn’t believe in having fans), you’ll know precisely what you’re in for. Foot says since he first started doing shows in Australia five years ago to small audiences “not all of whom were on board”, now more and more of the right people are coming to see him.

A recent show in Oxford, where he did his very first gig 20 years ago, got Foot musing about his act. The material was very different, and he was far more confident as a performer, but it struck him that he’d maintained his “amateurishness, in a good way” and “absolute shambolic-ness” over two decades.

“I think that’s quite unusual for performers, to keep whatever it is about them that they had when they first started. You see comedians start up fresh and interesting, with something slightly vulnerable about themselves and their performance, and then a year into their careers they’ve been ‘taught’ how to be a comedian by the clubs and they’ve had all the freshness and originality crushed out of them. I managed to do the clubs for years, and it wasn’t necessarily the right environment for me to create the kind of comedy I was creating, but I managed to not have all the creativity and the innovation crushed out of me. Now I’m doing theatres full of people who’ve come to see me and I’ve not lost that. I kept true to what I wanted to do.”

His unique brand of comedy defies labels – a rarity in today’s comedy climate. “I just create and let other people interpret it. I didn’t read reviews, but then I was persuaded by a reviewer that I could read reviews. I don’t read all of them, and I don’t read none of them. It’s one of the rare examples in my life where I do things by halves; I normally go to one extreme or the other, like if I get on a train I have to sit at the very front or the very back.”