What's News?

British comedian Russell Howard is perhaps best known to Aussies for his Good News show, shown here on Foxtel's Comedy Channel. With its blend of topical stand-up and bite-sized, easily-digestible news nuggets, it attracts huge audiences of 5 million viewers each week when aired on the BBC.

“It's disposable telly really, just daft stuff about the news, but the young 'uns seem to have latched on to it,” the unassuming Bristol-born comic admits modestly.

The show has enjoyed nine seasons in the past five years, and Howard says with the vast amount of bizarre news stories unearthed each day, the show has the fuel to run and run. “Because of the 24-hour news channels, these huge corporations that are churning out news even when there isn't any, that's when you get some of the best stuff, when they're scrabbling around. The hardest thing is convincing audiences this array of crazy stories are true. Luckily in Good News we can show a headline or show footage, but if you try to do that in (live) stand-up, people won't believe you. Like, there was this story last year where a woman had tried to kill her husband by putting poison in her vagina and she'd encouraged him to go down on her...”

It's a story that, by that logic, probably won't make it into Howard's new stand-up tour, Wonderbox. “The title comes from this wonderful thing German families do where they literally have a box full of little mementoes and each has a story attached, and they pass it from family to family.” Howard has performed in Australia before, with a spot at Melbourne Comedy Festival in 2007 and a smaller hit-and-run tour in 2011 that included towns such as Darwin and Colac – but despite not having done much stand-up since falling down the TV rabbit hole the past few years, he says he'll be match-fit.

“I've been doing gigs around the (London) comedy circuit and it's been really good fun, going up with bits of paper and trying things out. Some nights you're going on and dying but you kind of have to, really, to try stuff out. It would be like Coldplay going on stage at Wembley and going 'It was all green ... nope ... It was all blue ... nope, that's not going to fucking work. Yellow, that's it!'”

After his Aussie run Howard will be returning to hometown Bristol to film a DVD. The Music recalls another comic Bristol native, Stephen Merchant, lamenting once in a podcast that Bristol didn't roll out the red carpet every time the prodigal son comes home. Does Howard expect the hometown hero treatment?

“Well, Stephen did a lot of stuff away from Bristol, so he conquered the world before he came back,” Howard suggests. “Whereas I've done every shitty gig – and nice gig – in Bristol, and I still do loads of small gigs there. For instance there's a pub gig you can do, a 60-seater called the White Bear. And the only time there's a red carpet there is when someone's been glassed. Classy it ain't.”