Griff Rhys Jones ‘could do a whole season in Newbury’
Comedy legend and National Treasure Griff Rhys Jones is on his national stand-up tour with his much-anticipated show The Cat’s Pyjamas.
He will be performing at the Corn Exchange, Newbury, on Wednesday and Thursday next week (May 8 and 9).
"I've gone for a second night in Newbury, which is tempting fate isn't it?” says Griff.
“But Newbury was such a success the last time I was there and they said 'You could do a whole season in Newbury.
“I hope that there are enough people in Newbury who enjoyed it the last time who will come back for the new show."
The multi award-winning comedian, writer, actor, and television presenter will share witty observations and rambling comic stories, with anecdotes from TV travel, his childhood, Welsh family, age, fraud, late night trains and nostalgia to the TikTok generation, crocodile smuggling, and opal noodling in Australia.
Griff is widely known for Not the Nine O'Clock News, Smith and Jones. Restoration, It'll be Alright on the Night and multiple arts and travel documentaries, including Griff's Canadian Adventure: a critical and ratings success for Channel Four last August.
His theatre work includes lead roles for Alan Ayckbourn, Sam Mendes, Peter Hall, Nick Hytner and any others.
Griff has won two Oliviers, two British Comedy Awards, two Baftas, an Emmy and, pleasingly, a regatta in Barcelona last July.
Griff tells us more about the show:
What can fans expect from the show?
It's the fourth show I've done where I tell stories from my life - about myself and things I've been involved in. Trouble is, some of the stories get longer and longer and longer. I start out with list of about 20 and end up with a list of about two. If you come to see me early in a tour you tend to get all the stories. If you come late in the tour, a lot of them have gone by the wayside. There was one show on one tour where I was on stage at the Sherman Theatre in Cardiff, talking about my family and things like that. I looked into the wings and my stage manager was tapping his watch signalling the end of the first half and I hadn't even properly started the show at all by that point.
What’s the significance of the title The Cat’s Pyjamas?
I just like the sound of it. Funnily enough my daughter said 'You can't call it that' and when I asked her why not she said 'Because it means you have to be good!' But as I say, I like how it sounds. Also 'the cat's pyjamas' is a very interesting phrase and I might talk about how it started in the 1920s in New York. Apparently there was a famous society hostess who used to take her cats for a walk along Fifth Avenue and she would wear pyjamas when doing so. But really what I'm saying at the start of the show is that it's you the audience who are the cat's pyjamas. I start with egregious flattery of my audience.
After all these years, do you still get nervous before going on stage or indeed during a performance?
I get nervous in the early stages because I'm wondering what I'm going to be saying once a tour starts. It's never a walk in the park. It's fun if it's more of a walk on a tightrope. I did work with one stage manager who said to me 'It's amazing because what you do, Griff, is different every night'. After one show he told me 'You left out the big punchlines tonight'. Some nights I'd be so keen on moving on to something else that I never got to the resolution of the very first story that I started, which left people wondering what on earth was supposed to be happening. Some people go on stage and they perform exactly what they've written every night. I'm sure that would be a much better way of doing it but I don't always do it myself. I get sidetracked by talking about things like what happened to me in the car park on the way to the theatre. I once had a Birdman moment where I went to get a shirt out of the car and I couldn't get back into the theatre unless I walked in with the audience. A woman turned to me and said 'I hope you're going to be good tonight' and I replied 'Well, I'll do my best!'
Isn’t throwing it open to audience questions asking for trouble?
Not really because I put up a list of topics for people to ask me about, although I don't know if I'll stick with it. That's in the second half of the show and often it starts with people asking me about Not The Nine O'Clock News, which was so long ago can't I can't remember it, let alone answer questions about it. And if you play a really big theatre you have difficulty actually hearing the questions and you have to clamber down off the stage to find out what the question is. But I do put up a list which I scribble out in the dressing room before I go on and it's a list of things that are currently on my mind.
Is there a question you definitely don’t want to be asked?
Probably but I don't know quite what they'd be until I'm asked them. But it's unlikely because what I usually do is sort of sidestep it by saying 'I can't answer that question'. Sometimes it might remind me of something else and off we go. One time I got into talking about Africa with the intention of moving on to killer bees. I got so bogged down in the story of the railways in Africa, which is the story of colonialism. When I looked at my watch I realised I'd taken the entire second half of the show just trying to explain colonialism. I'd been wondering why I hadn't been getting as many laughs as usual.
Is comedy harder in the current woke climate?
I get asked that a lot and the honest answer is I don't know because I don't play the comedy scene.
I don't go to Edinburgh and all that stuff. So I honestly have no idea. It's never affected me in any way whatsoever. With the idea that I might be canceled, for the most part my audience probably don't know what being canceled means. I do tell quite a lot of jokes but all the stories are about unfortunate and terrible things that have happened to me, so I'm not really causing offence to anybody else.
Do you engage with social media?
My take on social media is that I like Instagram and I get cross with people who put up anything other than a picture. I don't see the point of going on Instagram as a substitute for Twitter/X with some wisdom that you wish to confer on us with words. I go to Instagram to see interesting pictures and that's what I put on there myself.
What’s the weirdest venue you’ve ever played?
Mel and I did Live Aid, which was a pretty bizarre sort of experience. It was like walking out on the deck of an aircraft carrier. You just kept walking until you realised that you couldn't walk any further. It was a genuinely weird experience because you made a joke and then you had to wait because the people near the beginning would laugh, then the laughter would travel all the way to the very back. It felt like a huge Mexican wave of laughter. I kept thinking about what [promoter] Harvey Goldsmith told us before we went on. He grabbed me by the lapels and said 'Keep it f*****g short' so I was standing there thinking 'This is taking too long'.
What do you most enjoy about touring?
I like touring a lot. I like the feeling of moving around the country. And I like the idea of sitting on a railway station at one o'clock in the morning when I'm close enough to be able to travel home, waiting for the train that's going to take me back to London. The worst side of it is realising you've just missed the last fast train but when I sit there I'm thinking: 'OK, all you bastards out there, I'm paying my dues now, aren't I? I may have been plucked unworthily to huge fame at the age of 26 but look at me now.'
Do you have any more travel shows in the pipeline?
I'm hoping to do one on Vietnam at some stage. It's interesting as regards travel shows and my tours. I did one on Canada for Channel Four and the Canadians were so nice that I didn't end up with any funny stories. So I hope there aren't too many questions about Canada on this tour because not a lot of the things that we did out there were funny. It was a great series and it got great reviews, fantastic ratings and things like that. That just shows you, doesn't it? [Laughs] Well, I don't know what it shows you except perhaps that the smoother the operation, the more aplomb you pull it off with and the fewer things that go wrong, the less material you have for a comedy tour later.
