Latest news with #DomJoly
Scottish Sun
03-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scottish Sun
Star of iconic noughties Channel 4 show reveals plans to turn it into a movie
He will be coming to Glasgow BIG SCREEN PLOT Star of iconic noughties Channel 4 show reveals plans to turn it into a movie Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) DOM Joly hopes to turn Trigger Happy into a movie after taking the iconic TV show on tour. The popular show was last on TV in 2016, after an original three-series run from 2000 to 2002, when it became a cult classic. Sign up for the Entertainment newsletter Sign up 3 Dom Joly wants to make his hit TV show into a movie Credit: PA 3 The show became a cult hit Credit: Alamy Hidden cameras followed him as he portrayed a number of hilarious characters – from a traffic warden to a giant snail and, of course, his iconic man on a giant mobile phone. Now he's heading to The Pavilion in Glasgow on October 9 as part of a 25th anniversary tour, where he'll show clips, give behind-the-scenes secrets and play pranks on the crowd. He said: 'It's just crazy to me. It feels like yesterday but weirdly my daughter was born in the year Trigger Happy was made, so she's like a physical embodiment of it.' And on the subject of a movie, Dom added: 'The concept is scenes with like 2,000 people in it. So if you liked Trigger Happy TV, come and be in the movie. 'It's quite a complicated thing and it scares people off. But who knows? Maybe we could make it happen.' We previously told how Dom wanted to bring his hit conspiracy tour to Scotland. The funnyman set out on a journey to explore the world's most bizarre conspiracy theories. He found out more about UFO hunters and flat earthers and even the bizarre theory that Finland isn't real. Dom said: 'I'm very happy to talk to people. But it's kind of one of the problems with conspiracy theories. 'If someone comes along they're always focused on a single issue. So they're obsessed with chemtrails and they have literally spent 15 years just studying this thing. Dom Joly creates hilarious comedy skit to highlight small business struggles 'You can't possibly argue and when you get the real single-issue conspiracy theorists, they're like religious zealots. I can say 'I don't agree with you, but I can't argue with you' and that's not very good for either side. 'There's also a geographical element to it. People in Scotland still talk to each other. Whereas a lot of conspiracists in America live almost entirely remote existences online so no one tells you you're talking s***e.' Talking about the Finland theory, he said: 'The conspiracy started off as a joke on Reddit and everyone knew it was a joke. "But 20 per cent of people took it seriously and the conspiracy is that in 1917 Russia and Japan invented a country called Finland and that it's actually just sea so that they could have the fishing rights. 'So they claim when I fly to Finland I'm landing in a remote part of either Sweden or Russia and that all four million inhabitants of Finland are crisis actors like a massive Truman Show."
Scottish Sun
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Scottish Sun
Star of iconic Channel 4 show bringing live conspiracy theory tour to Scotland
THE funnyman, 60, enjoyed a seriously strange sightseeing trip as he learned about the likes of flat-earthers and UFO hunters. DOM Joly hopes Scots can help him tackle tin foil hatters on his bonkers book tour – after travelling the world to learn all sorts of conspiracies. The comedian, best known for Trigger Happy TV, set out on a global journey to pen a unique guide into some of the most weird and wonderful theories. 4 Dom Joly travelled the world learning about conspiracies. Credit: PA 4 Some believe that Finland isn't a real country. Credit: Getty 4 He's coming to Scotland for Boswell Book Festival. Credit: Supplied By meeting the folk behind the unusual beliefs, the funnyman, 60, enjoyed a seriously strange sightseeing trip as he learned about the likes of flat-earthers and UFO hunters. And he's heading for Boswell Book Festival next month and looks forward to meeting believers and non-believers alike when he talks about The Conspiracy Tourist: Travels Through a Strange World. Dom said: 'I'm very happy to talk to people. But it's kind of one of the problems with conspiracy theories. 'If someone comes along they're always focused on a single issue. So they're obsessed with chemtrails and they have literally spent 15 years just studying this thing. 'You can't possibly argue and when you get the real single-issue conspiracy theorists, they're like religious zealots. I can say 'I don't agree with you, but I can't argue with you' and that's not very good for either side. 'There's also a geographical element to it. People in Scotland still talk to each other. Whereas a lot of conspiracists in America live almost entirely remote existences online so no one tells you you're talking s**e.' Amongst Dom's favourite conspiracy theories is the belief that Finland isn't a real country. A Reddit user once shared a joke about the small nation and it was quickly picked up by some impressionable people. He said: 'The conspiracy started off as a joke on Reddit and everyone knew it was a joke. But 20 per cent of people took it seriously and the conspiracy is that in 1917 Russia and Japan invented a country called Finland and that it's actually just sea so that they could have the fishing rights. 'So they claim when I fly to Finland I'm landing in a remote part of either Sweden or Russia and that all four million inhabitants of Finland are crisis actors like a massive Truman Show. 'I found the bloke who started it and he said he was told that Finland didn't exist because Russia and Japan conspired to invent the country so that they could have all the fish, which was then transported to Japan for sushi. Dom Joly creates hilarious comedy skit to highlight small business struggles 'Clearly that's BS ecause I just flew there, right? I couldn't 100 per cent prove to you now that Finland exists. I could probably prove 99 per cent that it does and it's that one per cent where all conspiracy theories live.' He's also heard how Paul McCartney was cloned in 1966; how Avril Lavigne stopped performing 10 years ago and was replaced by a woman called Melissa; and that Prince Philip killed Diana by going to the tunnel in Paris and putting in an industrial laser to blind the car driver. But Dom reckons conspiracy theories can best be broken down into three big causes — the assassination of JFK, 9/11 and Coronavirus. He also thinks the advent of YouTube and social media has emboldened dangerous characters who are profiting from things they don't even believe in. 4 Dom Joly in the iconic Trigger Happy TV hidden camera and prank show Credit: CHANNEL 4 The comic said: 'I can pinpoint the exact moment when they went from being harmless and fun to more dangerous and it was when Kellyanne Conway, who was Donald Trump's spokeswoman in 2016, used the term 'alternative facts'. 'And the moment you have alternative facts, frankly we're f***ed. During lockdown I was stuck in my room and spending too much time online and I noticed the rise in conspiracies. 'Conspiracies tend to happen a lot when everything's in turmoil and the economy's bad and people get troubled, and I started to talk to these people a lot or argue with them 'And I just couldn't work out whether they were genuinely believing this stuff or were just doing it for clicks. I don't think many were harming anyone, except for that erosion of truth. But it's the grifters that I really have a problem with. 'The people like Alex Jones who literally are making money by claiming the kids killed in school shootings are actors, then the parents get hassled online and they have to move house and stuff. BOSWELL BOOK FESTIVAL Main festival events will be live at Dumfries House. Tickets range from £5 to £15. Events in the main three venues will also be live-streamed. Online tickets are £5 per event or £40 for a Rover Pass giving access to all online events. You will receive the links needed to access online events via the e-ticket that will be emailed to you. Tickets also available over the phone by calling 0333 0035 077. Lines are open Mon - Sat, 09:00 - 18:00 until Friday 9 May. However, there are some conspiracy theories that even Dom was swayed by. He explained: 'I'm not sure UFOs are a conspiracy. I just think we'd so be arrogant to think that in all the universe we're the only people. 'And there have been more and more verified sightings of weird things in the sky. But UFO means unidentified flying object and it doesn't necessarily mean aliens. 'So I'm in two minds about that. I think there is some sort of phenomenon that maybe we're not aware of, but it seems very odd because all they seem to do — if they do exist — is land in Alabama and probe toothless rednecks. Why not just go to the White House?' He added: 'Weirdly, as much as I had a massive problem with the anti-vax people because I think they did a lot of damage to vulnerable people by frightening them, I have questions about the idea that Covid started as a bat in a wet market in Wuhan, when weirdly the largest coronavirus research facility in China is like half a mile from that market. 'It seems quite a coincidence and I think it's not beyond the realms of possibility that it was a lab leak, and that the Chinese government might try and shut that down. 'But that's an accident. Then it gets turned into this massive conspiracy that it's being used as a bio-weapon and that it's not affecting Jewish people or Chinese people, which was one of the conspiracies, and that vaccines are being used by Bill Gates to put a microchip in your brain. So all these things maybe start with a kernel of something and then turn into insane theories.' And for anyone coming to see Dom at the book festival, he urges folk to show some common sense. He joked: 'In the old days you'd have some guy raving in the village square about how the world's ending or whatever. Now they can all meet up and that gives them power.' Dom Joly is appearing at Boswell Book Festival on May 10, tickets can be booked
The Guardian
21-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Prank shows are normally done by thick people or jocks': Dom Joly on the return of Trigger Happy TV
The first episode of Trigger Happy TV aired 25 years ago. Its very first sequence was of a man screaming into an oversize phone, startling the unwitting diners at a fancy restaurant. 'The following Monday I was on a train, and that ringtone went off,' recalls the show's co-creator and star Dom Joly. 'Three people in the carriage stood up and went: 'Hello! I'm on a train!' And I sat there thinking: 'Holy shit, something extraordinary has happened.'' Joly isn't often drawn into conversation about Trigger Happy TV. In the 20-plus years since the show ended in 2003, he has busied himself with plenty of other projects – books, columns, TV shows, podcasts – but nevertheless has found it hard to shake off his breakout hit. 'Every time I do anything, even if I'm walking across Lebanon for 27 days for one of my books, someone will go: 'Did you take the big mobile with you?'' he laughs from his home in Gloucestershire. 'Of course I fucking didn't take the big mobile with me. Why would I take the big mobile with me?' But the show's silver anniversary has encouraged him to re-examine his work. In October he's taking Trigger Happy on tour, showing old clips and reintroducing characters. As such, he's in a warm, expansive mood, especially when I try to put the show in some sort of context. After all, 2000 was a big year for prank shows. The form had existed in one way or another since 1948, when Allen Flunt's Candid Camera first experimented with tricking the public (and in one instance former US president Harry Truman) with hidden cameras. But by the late 20th century, thanks to Noel Edmonds and Jeremy Beadle, the form had taken on a slightly insipid chumminess. 'I remember watching those shows,' remembers Joly, 'and thinking: 'I fucking hate this.'' As such, Trigger Happy TV felt like a violent shake-up. Lower-budget and more prone to surreal flights of fancy, it was also much faster than anything people were used to. Set-ups that Beadle would have laboured over for an entire episode were done within a matter of seconds. It felt like the prank show as guerrilla attack. 'I don't like calling Trigger Happy a prank show because I'm a ponce,' frowns Joly when I mention this. 'It's hidden camera. Prank shows are the lowest rung in comedy. It's normally done by thick people or jocks.' Instead, much of Trigger Happy bordered on performance art. As well as the big phone – which Joly never thought was particularly indicative of the broader show – there were dog walkers performing CPR on taxidermied alsatians, people in rabbit costumes loudly rutting in London's Prince Charles Cinema, chefs chasing man-sized rats out of their kitchens. People leaving public toilets would be shocked to find Joly and a brass band standing outside, loudly celebrating them as the millionth person to have relieved themselves there. Opera singers would scream atonally at strangers then demand payment. Unlike previous hidden camera shows, Trigger Happy went without a studio audience. There were no laugh tracks to their stunts, with that role being filled by music; in the case of Trigger Happy, it often provided a sombre counterpoint to the silliness on screen. Joly credits Trigger Happy's ability to disrupt the form to his upbringing. He was born in Beirut, and grew up reading French comic books such as Astérix and Lucky Luke, before discovering notorious phone pranksters the Jerky Boys. 'There was also a Belgian guy called Noël Godin, who was a very stoned, drunk Belgian anarchist,' he says. 'He came up with a manifesto that there's no better way of judging someone's character than by how they react when they're hit in the face with a custard pie. And so he'd go and custard pie people they thought had got above themselves in public life. What I loved about it was they did it for the beauty. They didn't film it. They were just doing it because they felt it needed to be done.' This bled into the show. 'When we were making Trigger Happy, we had the things we were doing for the show,' he says. 'But the things that really made us laugh were actually things we didn't film. They were stuff we did for the beauty.' Like what? 'I'll give you a great example,' he replies, grinning. 'Our office was just around the corner from a radio station, and every day at 10 o'clock Tony Blackburn would walk past our office. One day we just thought it'd be funny to pose as fans and get his autograph. And he was like: 'Oh, yah guys,' and signed something for us. From then on, we decided we were going to do it every day.' He pauses. 'We got 262 autographs off him, and never once in those 262 days did he say: 'Have I not seen you guys before?'' Not that Blackburn was the only celebrity he encountered. Although most of Trigger Happy TV involved members of the public, who all had to sign consent forms – 'If people wouldn't sign, it was usually because we'd filmed them with someone they shouldn't be with. The amount of people wandering around having affairs is quite astonishing' – with public figures he could skirt the issue by asking if they'd mind being filmed 'for Channel 4', subtly implying that they would end up on that evening's news. Sign up to What's On Get the best TV reviews, news and features in your inbox every Monday after newsletter promotion Many remained none the wiser. The most recent volume of Michael Palin's diaries includes an entry that reads: 'Terry G [Gilliam] has come from an aborted street interview, in which an annoying busker had his guitar smashed by the interviewer who chased him off into Wardour Street and never returned.' Needless to say, unbeknown to all involved, the interviewer was Joly, and this scene played out at the end of the show's first episode, with Gilliam blurting out a bewildered 'Fuck' as Joly chased the busker into the distance. 'We did actually contact him about that,' Joly admits now. 'He came back saying it was perfect gonzo comedy. I loved that.' If 2000 really was year zero for the modern-day hidden camera show, Joly is quick to credit it to a technological breakthrough. 'A year before Trigger Happy happened, if I'd wanted to make that show I would have had to hire a proper cameraman, a proper soundman; it would have cost a fortune, they would have been grumpy, we'd have had to have a lunch break. But a camera had come out called the VX1000 and it was just good enough quality to be shown on TV. It meant that we could film and film, and we didn't have to worry about any of that stuff. In a sense, that was the birth of YouTube.' In that regard, Joly is now master of all he surveys. 'Hidden camera is by far the biggest comedy format in the world,' he asserts. 'Almost all the stuff you see online, on YouTube and TikTok, is hidden camera. The ultimate endgame from Trigger Happy is MrBeast. MrBeast online is astonishing. I mean, it's a bit crass, but it's so much more interesting than what you see on telly.' 'I'm longing to make a show called International Prank Stars,' he continues, 'because we've all seen these videos that get like 200m hits, but you've no idea who made them. It's a very anonymous format.' That said, the modern hidden camera scene is still full of tropes that grind his purist gears. 'I hate that a lot of them are faked,' he says. 'I can smell a fake a mile off, and that's the thing that really irritates me.' If nothing else, Joly is finally comfortable embracing the Trigger Happy TV legacy. 'Of all the things I've done, Trigger Happy is the thing I'm most proud of,' he says. 'It was a work of absolute love and total control. Sam [Cadman, the show's co-creator] and I did everything, from coming up with the ideas to filming everything all day to editing. Every element of it was just us.' Now that he's more comfortable with his legacy, Joly has been meeting with the old Trigger Happy TV team. 'Not so long ago we had a For the Beauty night back at the pub off Charing Cross Road where we used to come up with all our ideas,' he says. 'I met everyone we made it with. And that was so annoying. All my runners are now, like, Bafta award-winning directors and stuff.' What's charming is that his notion of 'For the Beauty' – just doing something for the hell of it, not to make content – still seems to be his defining mantra. 'If I ever write a proper autobiography, I think it'll be called For the Beauty,' he explains, before grumbling. 'Obviously someone would want it to be called Pranks for the Memories.' The Trigger Happy TV: Live! 25th Anniversary Tour starts 7 October.
Telegraph
23-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Remember your first mobile phone? Prepare for a nostalgic rush
Like many early 50-somethings, my very first mobile phone was a Nokia. It was a 5110, to be exact: a model that with its dinky aerial retained a touch of the walkie-talkie about it. I acquired it in mid-1999 on the eve of a new job as an editor on the website for the bookseller Waterstones. The millennium loomed, the internet was still new and exciting, and the site marked the company's tentative steps into what was then – laughably – called e-commerce. The buzz phrase at the time was 'bricks and clicks' (a retail strategy of both physical and online stores) – and a brick-ish mobile phone was deemed an essential accessory for the cutting edge of cyberspace. The chasm between that innocent time of dial-up modems and SMS messaging and our smartphone-enabled, social-media-dominated era was brought home to me recently by a new website hosted by Aalto University, in Finland, showcasing the complete archives of the manufacturer of that first mobile: Nokia. It seems almost impossible now, but Nokia phones were once omnipresent. The company, which began life with a hydropowered wood-pulp paper mill on the rapids near Tampere, in southern Finland, in the 1860s, had by 2001 become a mobile-phone giant, with a 40 per cent share of the global handset market. Nokia's signature ringtone, based on Gran Vals, a 1902 piece for classical guitar by the Spanish romantic composer Francisco Tárrega, was so ubiquitous that older readers may recall that the comic prankster Dom Joly built a television career on a sketch from Trigger Happy TV in which he bellowed 'I'm on the train' (or in the cinema, or the jungle, or wherever he was) into a suitcase-sized handset that emitted its trilling notes. Today, answering a telephone call seems positively quaint, especially to a younger generation. Speaking to people seems practically the last thing anyone does with their phones. So the Nokia archive serves as a portal back to the lost world of the late 1990s and early 2000s, when mobiles were dumb (and dumber), but we felt smarter with them. The archive contains everything from back-of-a-fag-packet sketches of truly bonkers concepts that never saw the light of day – a fan-shaped phone anyone? A phone tie? – to glossy publicity material for handsets that sold in their multi-millions, as well as press releases, internal marketing plans and design briefs. It is an astonishing resource that design students, cultural historians and corporate leaders fearful of hubris can browse at their leisure. An 'Industrial Design and Styling Strategy' from 1996 (the year the 8110, the phone featured in The Matrix, launched) includes a photograph of a Nokia beside a folded newspaper, and a mood board of phones aimed at teenagers is juxtaposed with a Fila watch and a pocket calculator. It led me to smile about the subsequent fate of newsprint, watches, calculators and countless other gadgets supplanted by smartphones. Elsewhere, a bullet-point document about phones for children that lists 'safety' and 'child locator' as offering 'unique market opportunities' strikes a rather queasy note, given the current concerns about the ill effects of smartphones on school-age kids. The design links between Nokia's phones and the trends of the period – from mountain bikes and G-Shock watches to Oakley sunglasses – jump out at you. The inventive play between eggshell-shaped cycle helmets, for instance, and the curved, clam-like casing of some phones is laid bare. Nokia's pre-millennial 'Vision '99' project, an almost free-jazz, think-the-impossible initiative to come up with the next generation of mobiles, led to the creation of one of the company's best-loved phones: the 3210. An ergonomic handset with interchangeable fascia, allowing users to personalise their phones, the 3210 was a revelation when it landed in 1999. It dispensed with an aerial, making it pocketable, and came with predictive and proto-emoji image texting, and the addictive, Pac-Man-like game Snake. Arguably, this is where doomscrolling began. Preliminary sketches go further, with phones cased to look like dinosaur bones ('Lost World'), flowers, clowns and lime-green Roswell-style aliens. Most disturbing of all is the 'Pooh the Borg' phone, a horrifying mix of A A Milne and H R Giger that thankfully never left the drawing board. It's startling how ahead of the game Nokia's designers were. Artist's drawings for wearable devices, including wristwatch and bangle phones, appear as early as 1995. The company produced its first smartphone, 'The Communicator', just a year later, and in 2002 it was among the first to offer camera phones with decent resolution. The Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto supplied the ringtone for the top-of-the-range Nokia 8800 in 2005. That year also saw Nokia unveil a trio of phones (the 7360, 7370 and 7380) aimed at the fashion crowd, finished with real-leather trim, gem-like buttons and floral patterning. Their look – part-bling, part-Glastonbury Festival henna tattoos – exemplifies the gaudy excesses of the mid-Noughties as perfectly as a bottomless prosecco brunch. In 2006, with confidence still riding high, the new Nokia N93, which sported a digital video camera, was promoted with a short film shot on the phone by Gary Oldman. Entitled Donut, it comprised two-and-a-half minutes of pixelated footage of a ring-shaped shadow dancing on the surface of a Hollywood swimming pool. There were no Oscar nominations. Within months, Apple unleashed its iPhone and nothing would ever be the same again. Ironically, perhaps, it's plain that Nokia had always looked to Apple and other electronics companies for inspiration: Nokia's breakout car phone, the Talkman, offered from the mid-1980s, was self-confessedly modelled after the Sony Walkman and went on sale shortly after Apple's Macintosh computer, in August 1984. The archive includes a 1999 study on trends, where Apple is praised for creating 'a whole new hi-tech style'. As the birthplace and training ground of Alvar Aalto, the Nordic modernist architect who, with his wife Aino, designed the Paimio sanatorium chair in 1932 for a tuberculosis hospital – it remains in production to this day – Finland was already established as a centre for forward-thinking, functional design. Nokia inherited Aalto's legacy of design excellence and carried it into the digital era. Yet Frank Nuovo, Nokia's head of design from the mid-1990s to 2005, was a native of Monterey, California, who had taught at the Pasadena College of Design. His stateside team was based in Calabasas, while the company's development wing was up the West Coast in Mountain View, in Silicon Valley, less than 10 miles from Apple's headquarters at Cupertino. Like Apple with the iMac's star designer Jony Ive, Nokia's design team employed a Briton, Royal College of Art graduate Alastair Curtis. However, in contrast to the notoriously difficult-to-repair-and-recycle iPhone, it's striking to find that a commitment to 'eco-efficiency' and 'working with recyclers' was already among the briefs for Nokia phones in 2005. Nokia very nearly beat Apple to a smartwatch, too. Its Moonraker phone-watch was due for release in 2014, only to be pulled at the last minute. Soon after, the company's entire mobile division was sold to Microsoft, who offloaded it again two years later. Happily, Gen X-ers seeking to reclaim their misdialled youth, or anyone looking for a digital detox, can still buy something close to a classic Nokia 3210. Current models are fitted with a camera and are available in three overknowingly retro colours: Scuba Blue, Grunge Grey – and, fittingly, Y2K Gold.
BBC News
22-02-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Warwickshire ALSO Festival announces line-up
A Warwickshire festival that promises a "magical and immersive experience" has announced its line-up and Festival is held at Park Farm, Compton Verney from 11 to 13 July and hosts a variety of events, activities and guests - ranging from literature to science and theme for its 12th event is Love and Horror, with 142 events being held over the names attending include comedians Dom Joly and Robin Ince, and musicians Molotov Jukebox. "As we've always known, to come together to go wild in the wild each summer is what we humans are built to do and a summer festival is an essential part of a year lived well," festival CEO and co-founder, Diccon Towns. Other notable guests include author Ella Berthoud, who will lead a guided Jane Austen tour, as well as a panel hosted by Paddington writer, Joel Morris. Stand-up comedian and writer, Athena Kugbleno will host a talk on misinformation, and comedian Rob Deering is set to host a music-based comedy pop acts will include Samba drumming workshop, Tribo, rapper Madeleine MINX Dunbar, and lead vocal coach for The Voice, Juliet this, there will be other activities including murder mystery games, run clubs, wild swimming, horror movie workshops and a bat walk. Mr Towns described the festival as "highly immersive, truly experiential, and highly curated"."We make it effortless for our guests to engage with big, life enhancing ideas and live a wild summer weekend in an extraordinary location." Follow BBC Coventry & Warwickshire on BBC Sounds, Facebook, X and Instagram.
