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If there is a nicer man in showbiz than Justin Lee Collins – well, he must be a very nice man indeed. Collins is a great big bundle of hair and happiness, a sort of excited Labrador with a Bristol accent. It is his sheer likeability, combined with his infectious enthusiasm and cheeky humour that has seen him emerge in the last 18 months as one of the rising comic talents on television.
The two programmes for which he is best known are the raucous, studio-based entertainment show The Friday Night Project, and the Bring Back… series, in which he attempts to track down, interview and reunite groups of people who are, or were once, famous. The latest of these is Bring Back… Dallas, in which our hirsute hero travels Stateside to try and track down Larry Hagman, Linda Gray et al for his own Oil Barons’ Ball. What ensues is bizarre, frightening and hilarious, as Collins tries everything from lying in the road to breaking and entering to try and get his celebrity scalps.
Meanwhile, Collins is also about to return with co-host Alan Carr for another run of the ever-popular The Friday Night Project, an hour of good-humoured mayhem, fronted by a different celebrity guest every week. Here, Lee Collins talks about both of these projects, including who he fell in love with from the Dallas cast, and why he's fixated on Jamie Oliver.
Were you a fan of Dallas as a kid?
This was an interesting one for me, because as a kid I was never a big fan of Dallas. It was shown on a Wednesday night, and on Wednesday nights my mum always took me to a karate class in a community centre. My mum would sit in the TV room and watch Dallas while I was doing my moves.
But even though I wasn’t watching it, Dallas was sort of unavoidable. And it ran for so many years, and I only did karate for about three of them, so I probably did watch it quite a lot over the years. I was always aware of the big storylines anyway, like who shot JR. That was so massive that whether you watched Dallas or not you knew all about it. It was front page news, discussed on all the TV shows. It was a cultural phenomenon you couldn’t really escape.
Next: Accosting reluctant celebs
This was an interesting one for me, because as a kid I was never a big fan of Dallas. It was shown on a Wednesday night, and on Wednesday nights my mum always took me to a karate class in a community centre. My mum would sit in the TV room and watch Dallas while I was doing my moves.
But even though I wasn’t watching it, Dallas was sort of unavoidable. And it ran for so many years, and I only did karate for about three of them, so I probably did watch it quite a lot over the years. I was always aware of the big storylines anyway, like who shot JR. That was so massive that whether you watched Dallas or not you knew all about it. It was front page news, discussed on all the TV shows. It was a cultural phenomenon you couldn’t really escape.
Next: Accosting reluctant celebs
