Warts And All

Following a six-year absence from stand-up, British comic Jack Dee has the microphone back in his hand, and you'd be forgiven for thinking he almost sounds happy. The Englishman made a name for himself as a kind of comedy curmudgeon in the 1990s, when he got his break and his own TV show. Television has kept him off the stage for the best part of the last six years, too, as he wrote and starred in four series of his popular sitcom, Lead Balloon. But Dee says he's lately been feeling the need to get in front of live audiences.

“I've been doing a lot of writing and acting over the last six years and as much as I've enjoyed that, I've been getting twitchy to get on stage again. I started doing a little tour of small market towns in Wales, Cornwall, Devon, across to Ireland and God knows where. I just started getting a feel for being on stage again and enjoying it for its own sake, really. About five months after that I decided I did like it again, and decided to do a proper tour.”

He last toured Australia doing stand-up in 1995, but Dee says his comic 'voice' hasn't changed – he's still the same slightly surly, put-upon, perpetually disappointed fellow he always was on stage; it's pretty close to how he is in real life and audiences love him for it. He's returned to his favourite topics material-wise, too.

“As before, I think the main thrust of my material is a rolling review of my life,” he admits. “But as well as that, I'm trying to bring in philosophically where I'm at and how I've changed. It can include thoughts about religion and politics and conspiracy theories and how that's affected me. I've never sat down and thought, 'I'm going to write a show now and the entire theme of it's going to be electricity.' It's just always been, okay, I'm going to be with the audience for a couple of hours and we're going to hopefully have fun talking. It's good to walk away from stand-up for a while until you're brimming over with material and hungry for it again.”

Dee says he enjoyed bringing his character Rick Spleen to the small screen in Lead Balloon over the past few years. He calls Spleen a what-if, Sliding Doors-style version of himself – what he might be if he hadn't had his big break.

“Rick is partly that, and partly a composite of other comedians I encountered along the way, who are totally disillusioned and negative and quite bitter about their position. Without being cruel, I've always been amused by the disparity of someone who's meant to get on stage and entertain people and make them happy being incredibly bitter and frustrated deep down. That's where Rick comes from.”

The other side-project that's sucked up a lot of Dee's time was writing his 2009 autobiography, Thanks For Nothing. It covers the first 25 years of his life, until he first started stand-up – some difficult years in which he battled depression and alcoholism. It was difficult to write and Dee says he is mostly pleased with the result – even if he feels he may have shied away from some hard truths.

“I did evade the darker stuff in favour of writing about the more entertaining stuff. As much as people enjoyed it, I'm not sure it's a great document of what I did in my life. It's more of a flight of fantasy, a lot of it, and what I learnt from that is that I'm much more honest about myself on stage than I could ever be in a book.”