Dom Joly

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Dom Joly
Born	November 15, 1968 (1968-11-15) (age 41)[1] Beirut, Lebanon
Occupation	Comedian, Columnist and Broadcaster

Dominic John "Dom" Joly (pronounced [ˈdʒɒli]; born 15 November 1968)^[2] is a British television comedian and journalist. He came to note as the star of Trigger Happy TV, a hidden camera show that was sold to over seventy countries worldwide. Since then, Joly has continued to make edgy off-beat television like World Shut Your Mouth for BBC1 and Dom Joly's Happy Hour, a spoof travel show for Sky One.

Joly is also an author with several books to his name, and an award-winning travel writer for both the Sunday Times and the Mail On Sunday. He writes several regular columns for various UK nationals and periodicals including a weekly sports column for The Independent and an eclectic weekly column for the Independent on Sunday.

Contents 1 Early life 1.1 Education 2 Career 2.1 Early career 2.2 Television 2.2.1 Trigger Happy TV 2.2.2 2003 BBC contract 2.2.3 Dom Joly's Excellent Adventure 2.2.4 Dom Joly's Happy Hour 2.2.5 The Complainers 2.2.6 Made In Britain 2.3 Journalism 2.4 Political career 2.5 Music 2.6 Radio 3 Future projects 4 Personal life 5 References 6 External links

Early life

Joly was born in Beirut, Lebanon and speaks Arabic and French in addition to English.

It was revealed on the game show Would I Lie To You? that, while in Lebanon, Joly attended the same school as Osama bin Laden; this was widely received as a joke (as the aim of the TV show is to trick people into guessing whether anecdotes are true or false). However, in a 2007 interview with eyebrow magazine, Joly told more of the story. The school was the Brummana High School, a Quaker school in Brummana, Lebanon. Bin Laden was 18, in his last year, while Joly was just entering at six, and Joly has no memory of meeting him.^[3][4]

Education

Between 1976 and 1980 Joly attended the Dragon School in Oxford, England (where he had his shrapnel collection confiscated); From 1981 to 1985 he was at Haileybury College, an independent boarding school in Hertfordshire, England; and then in 1987 to 1990 the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, where he obtained a First Class degree in International Relations and Politics.

Career

Early career

Following university his work included:

• A runner at London
• A year as an intern in the Prague embassy for the European Commission ^[5]
• A year as Political Researcher for Around Westminster (BBC Political Programme)
• A year as Political Researcher for the New Statesman and Roth's Parliamentary Profiles

Television

After being recruited to work as a producer on ITN's House to House, a political discussion programme on Channel 4, Joly went on to work for The Mark Thomas Comedy Product because of his political knowledge. He then created his own show for the Paramount Comedy Channel called War of the Flea. Discovering that working in comedy was both easier and more fun than his previous employment, Joly began to develop Trigger Happy TV which had a similar structure to War of the Flea.

Trigger Happy TV

UK

Joly's anarchic surreal sketches first started appearing as interstitials during advert breaks on the British Paramount Comedy Channel. In 1999, following a successful fifteen minute pilot on the Comedy Lab, Channel 4 commissioned Joly to make a TV series. Trigger Happy TV was born; a hidden camera show that went on to be sold to over seventy countries worldwide. Joly made two series and two Christmas specials before announcing that he wanted to do other things. Joly was nominated for three British Comedy Awards for the show, won the Silver Rose of Montreux, the BBC2 Award for Best Comedy and the Loaded/Goodfella Comedy Newcomer of the Year.

The three DVDs for the shows were best-sellers, as were the soundtrack albums that Joly had personally selected and mixed himself.

US

A spoof documentary about Joly followed, called Being Dom Joly which was produced and written by Joly himself. This aired prior to screenings of Trigger Happy TV in the USA and earned critical acclaim, with one reviewer Bob Croft, LA Times calling Joly "the funniest man in Britain".

A new series of Trigger Happy TV was made for a US audience in 2003 with an altered format in that it featured a band of different "comedians" who performed skits without Joly. Though Joly did cameo sporadically on the show, he was very unhappy with the programme and called it "Trigger Happy by numbers - take joke, put it in slo-mo, add fluffy animals and random indie soundtrack - it was made by uncaring idiots".^[6] He had a producer credit on the show, but disassociated himself with the project.

2003 BBC contract

Following the success of Trigger Happy TV on Channel 4, Joly was secured by the BBC for a rumoured £1 million^[7]. However, his first show for the BBC, This is Dom Joly, a spoof chatshow in which Joly played an appallingly egotistical media character who had the same name as him, thereby confusing a lot of the audience as to what was real and what wasn't, did not achieve the same success as Trigger Happy TV, leading to the hidden camera format being revamped on BBC1 as World Shut Your Mouth. Featuring all new material and an increased budget relative to Trigger Happy, allowing for pranks to be performed in different countries. It was later released on DVD.

Dom Joly's Excellent Adventure

In 2005, Joly starred in a one-off documentary as part of a series on Sky One. Dom Joly's Excellent Adventure involved him travelling back to Beirut for the first time since he left in the late 1980s, and embarking on a road trip through the Syrian Desert to find a cave in which he had scrawled his name in as a child, that he re-discovered after much searching.

Dom Joly's Happy Hour

His next project for Sky One was a critically acclaimed spoof travel series supposedly investigating attitudes to alcohol around the world, entitled Dom Joly's Happy Hour, in which Joly teamed up with his friend, Canadian digital artist, Peter Wilkins. Together, they explored drinking habits around the world, in a very similar way to comedian Arthur Smith's radio show, travelling to the Southern states of the U.S., Russia, Australia, Europe and India. During the first documentary, the pair explored Miami drinking styles, met up with some hillbillies in the Appalachians tasting moonshine, and visited a gay cowboy bar in Atlanta before taking on the Christian right in Alabama's dry counties.

They went on to visit Russia, trying 80% alcohol (by volume) homemade vodka known as Samogon. He explained, "(y)ou have an hour where you feel you can take on the world, then you black out. But because it’s almost pure alcohol, no hangover - sadly because I can’t remember it, I don’t know if it’s worth doing". They then visited Australia, Mexico and Europe before ending the tour in India. It was described in the Guardian as "a brilliantly surreal take on the tired format that is the TV travel show."^{[cite this quote]}

The programme included a lot more than just attempting to discover foreign drinking habits, for instance, in Russia Dom received a haircut from a nude woman and both he and Wilkins performed their own version of a morris dance before a bemused dance academy. Another instance found them catching crocodiles in Australia.

"The premise of investigating alcohol is ridiculous," Joly admitted during an interview. "I wanted an excuse to travel the world, but they (Sky TV) wanted a focal point. So I said as a joke: 'Well, I quite like drinking.' And they went, 'Fantastic, that’s brilliant!'"^{[cite this quote]}

The DVD was released on the 1st October 2007.

The Complainers

Dom Joly has appeared inThe Complainers for Channel Five in the UK. The show, in Joly's words- "intends to try and get a little revenge for the ordinary Brit on the morons, bureaucrats, health and safety officers, traffic wardens, timewasters that make all our lives a daily hell."^{[cite this quote]}

Made In Britain

Beginning on June 8, 2009, Joly fronts a show titled Made In Britain, shown on the Blighty channel in the UK.^[8]. In the show Joly goes on a road-trip around the UK looking at what is still made there after his house is emptied of everything not made in Britain. The programme also has a Facebook group.^[9]

Journalism

Joly writes for various publications. He was alleged to be the writer of a spoof column in The Independent called "Cooper Brown: He's out there."^[10] The column is published as the work of an American character called Cooper Brown and revolves around his putative adventures as "a garrulous American showbiz type".^[11]

His real-life eclectic weekly column for the Independent on Sunday covers subjects as varied as Middle East politics and fifty foot chickens. Joly also writes a weekly column on the "Weird World of Sport" for The Independent Sports supplement on Mondays.

He is also a regular travel writer for The Sunday Times and has written about trips to Costa Rica, Dominica, Syria, Northern California, Vietnam, Canada, Miami, Scotland, Italy, Maldives, South Africa, Zanzibar, New Zealand, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia and Corsica. At the end of 2006 readers of the paper were asked to vote on where Joly would go every week. He travelled the globe performing various adrenaline sports whilst making a weekly podcast from South Africa, Spain, The Arctic Circle, Paris and Fort William. He has also written for Esquire Magazine, GQ, The Mail on Sunday, The London Evening Standard FHM, The Observer and The Spectator.

In September 2008 Joly won an award at the 2008 Canada Media Awards for "Best Travel Piece" - the piece was written for the Mail on Sunday about a trip to Muskoka in Canada

Joly wrote a spoof autobiography called Look At Me, Look At Me!, published by Bloomsbury in 2004. Joly's second book, Letters To My Golf Club, is a book of humorous letters and correspondences sent to golf clubs around the world published by Transworld Publishing on October 8, 2007.

Joly recently starred in the ITV2 reality programme Deadline with Janet Street Porter where he had to become a paparazzo. Amongst other highlights he was punched by Lily Allen, hit over the head with a guitar by Pete Doherty, called a "persistent little fat fuck" by Pierce Brosnan and snorted vodka with Ingrid Tarrant.

Joly was a "special correspondent" for the Independent at the Beijing Olympics. He says- "it's always been an ambition to be a foreign correspondent and this is as close as I'll ever get." While in Beijing he also appeared daily on the "Drive" programme on Five Live with Peter Allen

Political career

In the 1997 UK general election Dom Joly formed the Teddy Bear Alliance ("Mr Blair, where do you stand on fleas?") and changed his name to Edward 'Teddy' Bear, he stood in Kensington and Chelsea against Alan Clark. Hiring out hundreds of teddy bear costumes, he staged mock protests at Westminster and came fifth out of nine candidates.^[12] The Alliance is not registered as a political party under the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000.

Music

Joly was the singer in an Indie band called Hang David in the early Nineties. He was a Goth and said that he looked more like Robert Smith than Robert Smith. Joly personally selects all the soundtracks for his TV shows. All three soundtracks albums for Trigger Happy TV were huge commercial hits. He has also directed a couple of music videos. Ian Brown - Golden Gaze, in which Joly made the whole video in one take, making Brown run through the streets of London being chased by gorillas, frog-men and ninjas before he took refuge in the Prince Charles Cinema. WigWam, the duo consisting of Betty Boo and Alex James from Blur asked Joly to direct their first single. Joly decided to pay a weird homage to The Beatles concert on a roof and filmed the band performing in cat costumes on the roof of a building opposite the Groucho Club in Soho.

Radio

In June 2008, Joly became the co-star of the Cobra Pubcast, a podcast from British beer company Cobra Beer that he hosts with humorist Danny Wallace.

Joly also frequently sits in for Gabby Logan on her Sunday Five Live show.^[13] Joly was also a roving reporter for Five Live at both the Beijing Olympics and Wimbledon 2009.

Future projects

Joly has stated in interviews that his next project is a travel book called The Dark Tourist.^[14] In the book Joly is travelling to places like Chernobyl (which he visited on May 4, 2009), Rwanda, Lebanon, North Korea and Hiroshima among others. It has been commissioned by Simon and Schuster and is due for delivery January 2010.

He is also developing a hidden camera movie with his old sidekick, Sam Cadman - Joly has just been in Los Angeles writing the script - tentatively called War of the Flea.

Joly has also talked about plans for a television show based on popular social networking site Facebook, visiting random people who have added him as a 'friend'.^[15]

In June 2009, it was reported that Joly had completed a script for "a Trigger Happy movie" set in the US.^[16]

Personal life

Joly is married to Stacey, a Canadian graphic designer. The couple have a daughter named Parker (2000), a son named Jackson (2004), a black Labrador called Huxley, a flat-coat retriever called Oscar and a black cat named Dr Pepper, or The Doctor for short.

Having lived in Notting Hill before their children were born, Joly and his wife fell in love with the Cotswolds. They sold his flat to Salman Rushdie, and the family now live in Quenington, just outside Cirencester.

While they were on holiday in Canada, the house was affected by sewage from the 2007 UK floods.^[17]

They also still have a flat in Notting Hill Gate

Noticeably left-handed, Joly is obsessed with golf, scuba diving and photography.

References

External links

• Dom Joly in The Independent
• Dom Joly in the Sunday Times
• Dom Joly on Twitter
• Bluffer's Guide to Gadgets with Dom Joly on Comet.co.uk
• List of Cooper Brown columns
• Goth Recruitment by Dom Joly on Funnyordie.co.uk.
• Dom Joly at the Internet Movie Database
• Agent's site
• Dom Joly eyebrow magazine interview