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Hello Culture

Home | What is Hello Culture? | The grid | The interviews | Find out more | Credits

Matthew Collings: Can you do any more Trigger Happy TV? Because, now everyone will — you know, like with Ali G — see you coming. And they will all laugh when they see you.

Dom Joly: Well, we did do a first series, I mean, and people saw us, and then we did a second. I could definitely do another one. I’m not going to because I’m bored with it, really. I think we get bored very easily, which is part of the reason why Trigger Happy’s quite diverse, because we just want to move on. Also, having supposedly re-invented hidden camera shows, I think there’s a whole lot of very bad copycats coming in, and we want to get out before they start, so we’re doing something else this year tentatively called A Hundred Things to Do before You Die.

MC: Which is not a Candid Camera type of thing?

DJ: Well, it’ll be sort of 'Reality Camera', but it won’t be to do with fooling the public. It’ll be about doing things that no one really wants to do at all, like finding out whether bears shit in the woods and …

MC: What? If they really do?

DJ: Yeah, sitting on a airport luggage carousel and seeing what happens when you go through the flap — and stuff. But we might have a fantasy sequence through there and have 10,000 Mexicans doing a dance or something, I don’t know yet. But I just want to do something a bit more ambitious, really.

Also, I know Trigger Happy looks like a couple of drunk students make it in two weeks, but it is actually quite hard work. It takes us nine months to make. And for every minute you see, we shoot about an hour of crap. Because there’s no script, you have to make it up — you don’t know what people are going to say. So, I think our claim to fame is that we had more footage on Series 1 than, say, Apocalypse Now, which was quite cool.

MC: Superb.

DJ: Yeah, so we have got, I mean, acres of stuff to release on video, like Now What’s I Call Really Crap and stuff like that.

MC: And when all the labour isn’t happening, do you and the team — is it a team? — do you sort of philosophise about what you’re doing? Or are you always thinking about timings? I mean, do you think, 'Well, what is the psychology of all this? Why are people liking it?'

DJ: I don’t know why people like it. For us, the problem is we always, in a funny way, feel like sell-outs for actually putting it on telly. Because the real purity of what makes Trigger Happy funny is when you do it simply because it makes you laugh and you never explain it to someone and then you just disappear. The fact that we actually film it gives it a purpose and a reason, so we all know why we’re doing it. So even when you feel like a complete twat, dressed as a Scout in Burnham-on-Sea or whatever, you know that you’re doing this because there’s a reason. Whereas, actually, when we used to do it, before we started doing it on a satellite channel, we’d just do it occasionally when we were drunk, just for fun, and that was actually much better.

MC: Oh, so you would actually do it?

DJ: It was a sort of pure moment. You did it and it made you laugh personally and you left, and that was it. So you weren’t doing it for anyone else. It was more purist, in a way.

MC: But what do you think the key to it is? You know, there are lots of elements that seem new, like the sentimentalism, the loveliness of the music — the music was always rather lush and full of feeling.

DJ: Well, there was definitely a lot of pathos. Sam and I are both manic depressives so it really helps. We both like really sad music. We didn’t actually think, right, we’re going to make a sort of comedy programme and then put sad music on it. It was only when we finished that I realised that I’d put my record collection on it and that I had a deeply depressing record collection. Someone told me that it was all in D, which we all know, from Spinal Tap, is the saddest of all keys.

MC: The animals are sad, as well.

DJ: You mean the Fighting Dogs?

MC: The Fighting Dogs.

DJ: People are obsessed with the Fighting Dogs.

MC: They’re cruelty.

DJ: I’ll tell you how the Fighting Dogs started. We used to look at all the CCTV cameras around London and think, ‘Who watches these things? And who actually monitors the tapes?’ So, we thought, if we did a whole lot of mock executions and beating-ups, but which involved furry dogs, it would just confuse. It was nice to imagine these people, at the end of the day, spooling through the tapes and suddenly saying, ‘Hang on, what was that?’ And going back and there’s a dog executing another dog.

So that’s how it started. It used to start on a CCTV camera, float down and then there were the dogs doing their thing. But in the end, it became an excuse to put some Jacques Brel on to some slow-motion violence. Someone wrote in and asked me whether they’d sussed it, that the dogs were an allegory of Pinochet’s Chile, which I thought was quite interesting, but it wasn’t.

MC: But is the combination of something that’s sweet and then something that’s violent …?

DJ: That’s what works with the reaction. People walk past and they see something very violent going on, and because they’re British and they’re not directly about to be stabbed, they ignore it. But they’re also a little bit concerned. And then you can see them look and then think, ‘No, hang on, it’s fluffy dogs, so ...’

MC: They know that they mustn’t get concerned themselves. You imagine, if you did it in Argentina, they’d go, ‘Whoa, what’s going to happen now?’

DJ: Well, we did it in the States and everyone either turned around and went, ‘Hey, what are you guys doing? Like, this is cool.’ Or, ‘Are you filming?’ Or, ‘Ooh, I love those dogs.’ But no one said nothing. Whereas, in England, no one’s ever said anything to the dogs. So, I don’t know what that means. I just think the British have a total respect for — I mean, old people in England have respect for uniforms. You know, the moment you put a uniform on, that’s it, they’ll do anything. Everyone will join a queue. When you do the Big Mobile and shout, everyone just looks really surprised, whereas in New York, everyone just turns around goes, ‘Can you just shut up?’ So, I don’t know. We’re a very meek nation, but it gives me a career, so that’s OK.

MC: Do you think that there’s convention-busting going on in there, the sort of mild little conventions that one hasn’t even recognised as conventions?

DJ: Definitely. I’m really conventional, actually, as a person.

MC: Yeah …?

DJ: I mean, everyone just assumes … When I do interviews and stuff, people ask me what I do at home. I say I really like gardening and bridge. Everyone says, ‘Ha, that’s really funny.’ But it’s true, I’m just so square. So, I think there is something underlying Trigger Happy that allows me to do really stupid things that normally I definitely wouldn’t do. I mean, the worst experience of my life was being a best man. And everyone was, like, ‘Oh, you’re a comedian, that’ll be great for you.’ But it was terror.

MC: So you’re not actually an exhibitionist?

DJ: INo, I’m not an exhibitionist at all. I’m a big mouth but I’m not an exhibitionist. But the moment I don a dog’s head, I can do anything.

MC: Well, at the moment you’ve donned a musical outfit.

DJ: Yeah.

MC: Music for people who don’t want it.

DJ: Austrian harpsichord player.

MC: And do you think there’s something about sanity and madness that one realises, when there’s a rupture in the normal stuff, that, actually, the normal stuff is pretty fragile? They’re just conventions that are held together and they can quite easily be subverted, and when they are subverted, it’s a shock for a bit and then you go back?

DJ: Definitely. And especially in England, there is a freeze-frame moment. When we do a Trigger Happy sketch — when everyone’s sort of normal — we’re trying to inject a moment of surrealism into someone’s day, not in a nasty way but so, when they get home, they say to the wife, ‘God, this weird thing happened to me today.’ And there’s definitely a sort of freeze-frame moment when everyone just stops and looks and thinks: ‘What’s going on here?’ And I think people in most other countries would probably turn and say something, but the English just force themselves back into their routine and carry on and say, ‘I’m sure it didn’t happen. I’m sure it didn’t happen.’

MC: Yes, because we’re the least surrealistic nation …

DJ: Totally, yeah.

MC: … but surrealism has really taken on here as an entertainment, hasn’t it?

DJ: Monty Python and stuff like that …

MC: And ads are surreal, and your TV is surreal, and yet we are not laterally surreal. We just seem to appreciate some foreign imports.

DJ: Belgians are very surreal but actually deeply dull people. We filmed in Belgium. A lot of the humour I like — I mean, if we’re talking about pure humour, I think the Belgians and the French are always supposed to have a sense of humour, do it much better. They have the people who custard-pied Bill Gates and, more interestingly, philosophers and news readers and stuff. And then there's the French group who kidnap garden gnomes and take them away for a year and send their owners postcards and then bring them back. And they don’t do that for telly, they just do that for themselves, and I think that’s much more interesting.

MC: What do you think the difference is between surrealism and madness? Since funniness doesn’t tend to work in madness.

DJ: Well, I think the difference is that surrealism is something you actively seek. Surrealism appeals to a certain mindset. You actually strive to do something surreal or achieve something surreal, whereas madness is something that I think you don’t have a choice with. It’s just imposed on you. But comedy-wise, I think they are very linked.

MC: You say that you’re a depressive?

DJ: Oh, manic, yeah.

MC: Manic-depressive — what, you actually become ill and have breakdowns?

DJ: I have ups and downs.

MC: And do you think of that as madness or merely as the way your energy is measured out?

DJ: I think it’s balance thing. It’s a resting time.

MC: Do you think humour is an escape from reality, from bad reality or pressure? I mean, do you think humour is escapist?

DJ: It can be. I think what we’re doing as humour is a release, in a way, from something. Especially, if you’re talking, like before, about conventions and conformity and stuff, I went to a boarding school — very strict, regulations and rules. You basically spent the whole time trying to break those stupid little rules. So, in a way what we’re doing with Trigger Happy is not breaking rules but just trying to do stuff that people wouldn’t normally do, just to say you’ve done it. But this is the problem — trying to analyse something like Trigger Happy — because basically it’s a very simple programme. That’s what we were trying to achieve: to break everything down into just something funny.

MC: There’s always a problem with breaking down something funny …

DJ: … Because everyone finds different things funny.

MC: Yeah. And when you’re doing something funny and when it’s your business to do something funny, you tend to want to keep it fresh, so you tend to not want to find the formula, the blueprint. There are a few things one can learn about pacing and timing, and you can analyse other people’s humour. But, on the whole, you don’t necessarily want to break down your own act, in terms of the mechanics of it.

DJ: I’d go nuts if I tried to actually break down what we were trying to do. But I think the secret is to have someone else who shares your sense of humour. I work with Sam. Basically we spend nine months together in a van, and if we both laugh at something, then that’s really all we need. And the fact that everyone else loved Trigger Happy was great — it was nice to know that it had worked. But, it’s a difficult thing to say, but I still think if we’d made Trigger Happy 1 and Sam and I’d been the only people who liked it, I still wouldn’t have thought the year was wasted. We still would have had a very extraordinary year.

MC: Some of your acts are about things that are so obvious that it’s superfluous to talk about them, and yet, when you do, they suddenly become hilarious again. Like the idea that art costs a lot, and you say, ‘Well, bloody hell, you know, 10 quid, that’s a lot.’ Then, when that woman says, ‘£18,000,’ you faint.

DJ: For a picture of an upside-down tree.

MC: Yeah. And you couldn’t really calculate that in advance, the fact that the tree’s upside down … stupid … the fact that you actually faint instead of saying, ‘Blimey,’ you know. Every point of that is obvious and you can predict it, and yet the freshness — that’s the thing that one most laughs at.

DJ: Well, I think comedy sometimes does get over-complicated and overly caught up in trying to be clever. We certainly don’t suffer from that. I think we just went straight to 'This makes us laugh, let’s do it,' and we didn’t worry about trying to give it an intellectual edge, luckily.

MC: Yeah, although it has got a sort of arty edge …

DJ: It’s got an arty edge, but that’s different, I think.

MC: Yeah, what’s causing that? Because one immediately recognises it. There’s the music, the timing — but there’s something else, sort of arty as opposed to, you know, BBC 1, or BBC 1 when one was a kid, and those comedians that we used to like when we were little.

DJ: What — the Goodies?

MC: Well, yeah, or even when I was a kid, before that, guys who are all dead now, like Dick Emery. There’s definitely a different feel in what you’re doing, a sort of art school feel about it.

DJ: Well, that’s because, when we were young, people who did those sorts of shows, like Dave Allen and Dick Emery, came from a very traditional and single avenue to get to telly: they were stand-ups or they did shows. And I think people like us, who aren’t performers — I’ve never done stand-up, I’ve never been to Edinburgh — we actually only really exist on TV. And another thing that's changed is the fact that we just had one video camera and that’s it. And you can start with that and just go out and make a full TV programme. So I think it allowed people to do telly from a different area.

MC: Yeah, it allows your sensibility in, but how would you describe why it is coming out with that arty stuff? How would you analyse the components that make it more arty?

DJ: Well, that’s just what interests us. Sam — who films it and comes up with the ideas with me — was an artist. That’s what he actually did — he was a sort of Rothko-type art school graduate. And I used to work for MTV, and I was a diplomat at one stage in the dim and distant past. And I’m a born-again Indie kid, so musically, certainly, that’s where that comes from. And all the stuff I like is Indie. I can’t explain why it’s like that; it just makes sense. Also, I used to watch TV a lot and there just wasn’t stuff on that I liked. I knew that all the people I knew liked certain things, and it wasn’t there, and it was just obvious to make a programme like that. Because, clearly, good music and funny stuff and slightly off-the-wall humour all go together.

MC: Well, there’s also a sort of naff ‘artiness’ that you take and turn into something spooky, like mime or something very visual or people dressed up as animals, all of which are silly. You take them from the silly world and 're-sillify' them so that they go through a kind of art mixer and come out kind of both silly and arty.

DJ: It wasn’t a conscious thing, but there’s something very childish about us, for a start. There is something great about getting up in stupid costumes. Straight away, it creates some sort of reaction with people, which never fails to surprise me.

For instance, you forget in between shots. We’re driving around all day, I’m wearing the dog costume and I don’t take it off every time — you just wear it. And then, at lunch, you go into a newsagent's to get a sandwich, and everyone there stops and stares at you. And you think, 'Well, at the end of the day, I’m just wearing a furry body costume.' I mean, people wear much more stupid stuff just for fashion. But it just stops people dead. And you think, 'As long as we get that reaction, we might as well wear these things and do things.'

But I can’t explain why people behave like that. I’m astounded by it, actually. If I see someone driving down the road in a convertible dressed, say, as a chimp, advertising some radio station or something, the first thing I do is turn away, instantly, because they’ve got that ‘Look at me, look at me’ about them and I’m determined not to give them the satisfaction. But, you know, a lot of people aren’t like that.

MC: That’s another good thing — the animals are very self-absorbed, aren’t they?

DJ: Yeah, they’re not interested in anyone else, definitely. They’re in their own little world and they happen to have stumbled into …

MC: Yeah?

DJ: But, then, that’s analysing it too much, you know.

MC: Do you ever think about madness?

DJ: Yeah, definitely.

MC: And what do you think the relationship is between what you’re doing and madness?

DJ: Well, it’s controlled madness. What’s interesting about it is that you get a strange moment sometimes when you’re in the middle of the street doing something, and you know that everyone walking past just looks at you and thinks, ‘You are totally and utterly insane. What are you doing?’ And yet you’re the only person on that street who knows exactly why you’re doing it and that there is a purpose for it. So you get a sort of strange feeling of power in the sense of …

MC: … control.

DJ: Yes — I’m in control of this street, I know why I’m doing this and no one else does. It’s the bank robber syndrome. If you’re going to do a bank robbery, you need to go into the bank and take control straight away. You need to shout and you need to really take control of the situation, and people will just react to it and sort of dumb down.

MC: And they believe your law? However nuts you are?

DJ: Yeah, you take control, basically. And that’s what we call it in the Trigger Happy world — the bank robber syndrome. And it works, and it does give you a strange feeling of power. In interviews, they say, ‘Ooh, isn’t it terrible? You do all these embarrassing things and everyone thinks you’re nuts.’ You think, 'Well, it isn’t, because I know exactly why I’m doing it. I’m the only person who isn’t mad. I know exactly why I’m doing this, there’s a purpose, and whether you like it or not, that’s what's going to end up.' So I’m never embarrassed by it.

MC: In the therapy world, control has a lot to do with madness.

DJ: I don’t really believe in therapy, but someone I knew had a therapist who had watched Trigger Happy TV and just said, ‘God, I’d love to get him in a room for half an hour.’ And she’s already identified about 20 syndromes.

MC: Did she name any of them?

DJ: No, she didn’t. I wouldn’t want to know, either. Ignorance is bliss.

MC: In the past, and even in the more recent past, madness had a sort of respectability in art culture, with Surrealism, but also in Romanticism — you know, William Blake and the whole idea of the divine madness of the artist. Do you think that that fascination with madness has perhaps receded in the last 20 years or so? Madness as some kind of access to other other realms?

DJ: Definitely. I mean, you had drug taking, didn’t you? Which was a big, sort of controlled madness, and that was probably the mid-range between, say, the Van Goghs who used to just go mad. I think people thought that the reason why they were so brilliant was they had to pay for this madness. And then possibly, in the 1960s and '70s, you had the Kool-aid acid tests and the whole Doors thing of trying to get through the 'doors of perception', trying to get somewhere with drugs. But I don’t think it did get them anywhere.

I think the problem now is that madness has become something that people really fear. So we have an inordinate amount of drugs used just to control madness, and everything’s slightly damped down …

MC: Prozac-type drugs.

DJ: Prozac …?

MC: As opposed to mind-expanding drugs.

DJ: Yeah, we’ve gone the opposite way now, keeping a lid on any sorts of weird thoughts.

MC: I think that’s even true of the former mind-expanding drugs. I think people go home and smoke a joint to relieve stress.

DJ: Oh, definitely.

MC: Instead of smoking a joint to blow their minds.

DJ: No, no one goes home and smokes a joint to watch the television turn into a melting candle. It’s just ‘God, I had a hard day, so I’ll have a joint.’ That form of drug-taking is non-existent now.

MC: But do you think that has to do with knowledge? That before they might have been seeking enlightenment, but now there is actual knowledge of what madness is, that it’s all chemicals. And we know the sorts of limits of madness and we just don’t want to go there. And maybe, also, we know the limits of drugs, we know what drugs can do. They’re not really a way to access poetry; they’re chemicals as well.

DJ: I think the problem is, everyone’s seen Woodstock and the documentaries of the 1970s, and so they’ve seen that, if you take acid, you basically talk a lot of shit. The whole E thing was a completely different type of madness, a much more physical madness. The drug culture moved into a dancey, touchy, feely, happy drug experience, but it had nothing to do with any great perception opening.

MC: It wasn’t about enlightenment or expanding your mind, but about sort of a lovely whoosy feeling, of cuddliness of the world.

DJ: It was brought down to less cerebral elements. It was just, you know, enjoy yourself and that’s it. And maybe that’s a good thing.

MC: Well, the other thing is that, then, there was the counterculture that wanted to expand minds in the context of a rather uptight mainstream culture. Whereas we don’t really have those two things. We have a mainstream culture that is fascinated by surrealistic entertainments, and itself is not really all that central or homogenised. There are lots of little tribes …

DJ: But the counterculture really doesn’t exist now. It's just a part of a very mainstream industry.

MC: Anyone can sample anything through mainstream culture.

DJ: Yeah. If we were in the '60s, we’d have probably been producing a magazine called Guerrilla Whizz or something and selling it for free or for dope or whatever. And now we’re on Channel 4 and we make loads of cash and it’s great. But it’s not very exciting. You feel, 'Oh, I could do something a lot more idealistic but can’t be arsed, I’m too Prozac-ed up, really.'

MC: Are you on Prozac?

DJ: Oh, totally, yeah.

MC: How much do you take? Ten a day?

DJ: About ten a day, on a good day.

MC: Oh, that’s good. It seems to be working.

DJ: Yeah, it’s all right.

MC: Do you ever philosophise about the programme? About what happens there, as opposed to actually analysing the mechanics of it? Do you ever think, 'What is this in terms of ideas or even in terms of ideology?'

DJ: Yeah, when we called it ‘guerrilla comedy.’ We only philosophied about it when we were trying to explain to people what it was. We’d made this programme and we were fairly clear about what it was, but the problem was trying to get it across to people without saying ‘Candid Camera on acid.’ People would immediately think, ‘Oh, right, another hidden-camera programme’ or ‘It’s Beadle.’ And we felt really strongly that it wasn’t from that school, that it was much more from a slightly thinking, arty end. But the problem was, we didn’t want to say that, because then you sound like a real ponce. So, really, we tried not to philosophise about it because we wanted other people to make their own judgements about it. But we were fairly clear, mind-set wise, about what we wanted to make, what was good, what was bad.

MC: But do you have an awareness of surreal traditions and art traditions and mind-expanding moments of culture?

DJ: I think we definitely have an awareness of traditions. Sam’s very into Dadaism and both of us like Situationism and the punk ethos. But because of what we’re doing, we’re worried about saying it. But definitely we’re aware of the sorts of things made us laugh. We love the newer types like culture busters and ad busters, and I've just read No Logo, which has the philosophy of trying to fuck with big corporations and change adverts on the street and guerrilla activism. Just the idea of trying to do something to annoy people. But if you can point it and not just do it on members of the public but actually try and get at some corporation or some advert that really pisses you off ... And also the continental stuff that we’re really influenced by. We decided to take those ideas and make them into something really silly. That’s what we did.

MC: I suppose the value put on madness in Surrealism and Dada is that madness is anti-bourgeois — you’ve got an uptight situation and madness loosens it up. And when you think of it in a homoeopathic sense, you want a bit of this derangement, which would be alarming if it was permanent, to put into a situation where it’s too congested. But our life is a cluster of loosenesses, isn’t it? There certainly is no ideology, there’s no politics, no one’s bossing you around. Even capitalism is rather benign, or has its benign sides.

DJ: There are no real goals, definitely.

MC: There ares no goals and there’s no particular oppression. There’s nothing to rebel against. There’s too much comfort, in a way.

DJ: I think that’s the problem, I think we live in a very anodyne culture at the moment. To show how anodyne it is is the fact that some people find Trigger Happy quite subversive. And that is pathetic. I mean, compared to truly subversive things, Trigger Happy isn’t in the slightest bit subversive. I think we live in a very dull age at the moment. We’ve got no cause, nothing to really rebel against. I mean, if we’re rebelling, we’re rebelling against a tobacco company or something, and even then all we’re doing is disfiguring a poster or something.

MC: Well, I think subversive is a key word because it’s become a useless word. It’s like the word ‘nice’ in the '60s. It’s become meaningless. But something can be very good without it actually being subversive. It’s just that we haven’t really worked out what the word is yet. It is just a gag, but the gag’s quality is that it’s describing something to you, so people recognise something in it. And in your case, they recognise some aspects of convention, when we hadn’t realised we lived by these conventions, and so when you tweak them, you see what’s been taken away and how near to the void you are.

DJ: Sometimes, when we watch a joke, it’s just something that makes us laugh, but then when we watch it later, we do sort of realise and philosophise a bit and think, ‘Oh, actually, that’s really hit a nerve,’ and maybe we were actually trying to say that. But, at the time, it’s much more of a natural instinct in the sense of 'Ooh, that makes us laugh. Let’s do it.' So, it’s a weird combination. There’s no great master plan.

MC: No. I don’t suppose there really was with Dada and Surrealism.

DJ: I don’t think there was afterwards. I mean, it’s just like punk. Malcolm McLaren has been re-inventing what he did in punk for the last 20 years. I think, while it was happening, he was living by the seat of his pants.

MC: Yeah, but it’s become his act, in a way.

DJ: Well, he’s thought, ‘Oh, I’m sure I did that because I meant that,’ but actually I think it was all made up as he went along, which all the best things are.

MC: Do you think that as a way of exploring madness TV is a better medium? Your programme has a kind of skewed look at the world. Do you think it's doing the same thing that poets used to do when they were getting divine inspiration and being a bit mad?

DJ: Possibly. If we do give people insights, the joy of it is that those little moments that we’ve created and then put in a programme are then shared by the mass viewership. So you suddenly have a shared insight. So, if there is something that people get from Trigger Happy, a particular viewpoint, suddenly you have the opportunity to promote it to a vast amount of people, which you certainly didn’t have with poets or artists. I mean, you’d go and view something and possibly get someone’s skewed or weird vision of the world, but I don’t think it was the same next morning. You know, what has become our main conversation piece now — the next day is ‘Did you see …?’ and then we all talk about pop stars or something and have a collective viewpoint.

MC: Yeah, pop stars and TV have become the new kind of archetypes. The other day I had to give a tutorial at St.Martin’s, and they all had their videos and stuff, and one of them had a load of animals all standing outside some bank somewhere.

DJ: What, stuffed? Dead animals?

MC: No, your guys, the animals in outfits. Which I think is a very typical thing now — art feeding off the media, which used to feed off art.

DJ: Yeah, it has gone the other way round. It’s weird.

MC: And there's the jealousy of art for your access to things.

DJ: It’s because we get mass access for something that is basically what art students used to do when they were drunk and then would turn it into their end-of-year exhibition. Now someone like me can turn out a TV programme, having done nothing close to an art degree. I did politics, which is really useful in what I do. In fact, some of our jokes are so akin to bad art installations that we have to stop and say, ‘No, this has become an art installation rather than a joke.’ The other day, we were waiting for someone to fall asleep in a park. And finally, this guy did fall asleep. And then we built a railing around him and a plinth, and I sat down as a security guard sitting next to him, and there was a little sign: ‘Man asleep in park.’ And we sat there and people walked past and looked very weirdly, and then you suddenly thought, 'Actually, this isn’t funny because I’ve seen this sort of thing as an art installation.'

MC: Yeah, people just thought, 'This is bloody art.'

DJ: They’re just saying, ‘Oh, bloody art students.’ But I think because we make it funny, we can possibly get a better message across.

MC: Yes, I think that’s right. And also it strips away that layer of boring pretentiousness that art can often have.

DJ: Yeah, definitely. Even if someone finds something funny in an artistic placement, they think, ‘Oh, I shouldn’t be finding this funny. I should be thinking, "This is a view on Pinochet’s Chile."’

MC: Have you formed any sort of political views on what you’re doing?

DJ: Not at all. It’s just that I used to work in politics, as a reporter at ITN and I just got so bored.

MC: So that’s where you got your contempt for the …

DJ: It was total contempt. I used to have to go out and do these pieces to camera asking some Tory MP, ‘What do you think?’ And then he had a soundbite and then you’d say, ‘Thank you very much’ and walk back. And I used to get so bored doing this. Then I realised that, actually, all news really wants is for things to go wrong, because that’s what makes a much more interesting story.

So, rather than Paddy Ashdown standing on Westminster Green telling us why he thinks the Liberal Dems will never be in government, it was Paddy Ashdown attacked by clowns. I’d arranged this with three bored people. I’d say, ‘I’m doing Paddy Ashdown at 12 o’clock. Just turn up dressed as clowns and dance around behind him and attack him. We’ll film it. Everyone’s happy.’ So we did that about six times until ITN cottoned on to the fact that extraordinary things happened in nearly all my pieces to camera, so it couldn’t be a coincidence.

And so, having done that, I then went somewhere else and did it properly. But, yeah, it was definitely a training ground. But all it bred was contempt for politicians and authority. They’re so dull, it was horrible.

MC: I like the utterly disengaged, bored, contemptuous feeling that your presenter persona has when you’re coming up to those people.

DJ: But you are totally bored. That’s exactly where it came from. It was nearly falling asleep on Westminster Green. And when you’re talking to celebrities, there is this dullness about people talking about what they do and how fascinating they are ....