Rollercoaster ride

An unfulfilled salesman walks into a bar… Sheryl Garratt meets John Bishop, the man who changed his life with comedy

COMEDIAN John Bishop is smart and likeable and has a ready laugh and a strong Scouse accent. He grew up on a council estate, dreaming of playing football for Liverpool. He played semi-professionally but settled for a season ticket and a job in sales, and is surprised to have found fame in middle age as a comedian: “It just wasn’t on the radar.”

We meet at the Mere, a health club and spa in Cheshire with its own lake and a golf course. “I joined because it’s close to where we live, but I’ve been a member now for nine months, and so far I’ve played seven holes, with two of my lads,” he says. “We were about to start the eighth hole, and I just went, ‘I’m bored, let’s go in’?” As we talk, one of his three teenage sons rings. “They do your head in, don’t they?” he says, after the call. His observational comedy captures how you love your offspring but can be so frustrated with their behaviour you could scream — or go on stage in front of thousands and take the mickey.

Bishop’s comedy is his eye for detail weaved into hilarious stories. “It’s about what I’ve been doing the last 12 months. It’s not like I sit down and write jokes,” he says of his act. From his wife’s first grey pubic hair to his son’s voice breaking, his family is central in his act, but as his audiences have increased and his sons have aged — they’re 14, 16 and 18 — he consults them about what he can say. “But they’re mostly OK with it,” he says. “Provided I can still pay for holidays.”

Ten years ago, his life was different. He had separated from Melanie, and had moved out of home. He had a good job as a sales director in a pharmaceuticals firm, but he wasn’t happy. ! He and Melanie had met at university in Manchester, in 1987. Bishop got his job in sales, and Melanie wanted to get married, but he didn’t. So she took a job abroad, working for Emirates Airlines. He had paid his way through college by playing football for Southport FC and coaching in America every summer, but he longed to see the world, so he quit his job after 18 months, went to Australia for two weeks and cycled back — that took nine months. Then, in 1993, he and Melanie married and he returned to his old job. When his sons were born, he took life more seriously. “I was doing a master’s degree in business, I was progressing through the corporate world, I was doing everything you’re supposed to do, and I was developing a little line on my forehead I didn’t even know I had,” he says. “The person who rode a bicycle home from Australia had gone.”

Bishop and Melanie separated in 2000, and he saw his sons most weekends. Monday nights, when they had gone back to their mother, were miserable. “I would never judge, but I’ve never understood how people leave their kids. I can understand leaving your partner, but I just want to be the best I can as a dad. You can’t do that if you’re not there,” he says.

In Oct 2000, bored, he went to the Frog and Bucket comedy club in Manchester. It was an open-mic night. He put his name down. He was to do five minutes, but he talked and talked about his split from Melanie. So he began playing the comedy circuit in the north-west, graduating to paying gigs, but still as a hobby. He didn’t tell his friends for two years. One of them had a baby, and a celebration was planned that clashed with a Bishop gig. “I didn’t want to give up the gig, but I didn’t want to tell them about it, either, so I suggested we all go to the comedy club. So, everyone’s sitting at tables having a drink, then halfway through the night I slipped out and came on stage. That’s how I told them I did stand-up.”

Melanie learned when she went to the Frog and Bucket in 2001, still separated from Bishop and not knowing he was on the bill. His act consisted of discussing their problems, but she told him it reminded her of the man she loved, the one who made her laugh. He and Melanie got back together. In 2006, she told him to quit his job for stand-up. Their hope was enough gigs so Melanie could give up her job, be a stay-home mother and they could pay the bills. “It was betting on myself, really,” he says. “It’s not like I left the job and had a DVD contract or a telly series. I had two weeks of gigs in the diary, and that was it. But well before I was getting any recognition or financial reward, I’d taken a weight off my shoulders. And I just knew I was never, ever going to go back. It was like taking off a suit that didn’t fit very well, and you didn’t know until you were wearing other clothes.”

His first show at the Edinburgh Comedy Festival, in 2007, was about quitting the corporate world, and attracted audiences so small he could count them. But he persisted, booking his own tours, and in 2008 he did a little better at the festival. His breakthrough was in 2009, with a show called Elvis Has Left the Building, in which he talked about turning 42 — the age Presley died. It was nominated for the Edinburgh Comedy Award, and TV panel-show bookings followed. Touring with the show, he did routines on Michael McIntyre’s Comedy Roadshow and Live at the Apollo, and in Feb 2010 was a guest on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross. Suddenly, he was hot property. In March, he became a regular on a new comedy sports quiz for Sky, A League of Their Own; by July, he had his own peak-time BBC One show, John Bishop’s Britain. His first live DVD, of the Elvis show, was a bestseller by Christmas 2010, and within a year he had gone from playing a small room in a London theatre to selling out Wembley Arena. “It just went berserk. The tour got extended and extended. From doing the Edinburgh Festival in 2009 to doing it again in 2010 — that was when everything changed,” he says.

This has been an adjustment. Bishop’s family is working-class. His mother worked in a sewing factory and in school kitchens; his father was a labourer, a doorman, and worked in car factories. When Bishop left school at 16 to work in the mail room at ICI, his family was thrilled, and when he went back to school a term late to do his A-levels they tried to talk him out of it. “From my family’s point of view, the attitude was ‘if you’ve got a job you’re winning’,” he says. !

This March, he featured in Sport Relief, doing a 290-mile triathlon billed as Bishop’s Week of Hell. He cycled from Paris to Calais, before rowing across the Channel, then running three consecutive marathons in three days, from Dover to London. He raised £3.4m for good causes. He trained for three months, getting up at 6am to do two hours, then two hours more in the evenings. “It felt all-consuming, and without realising it, that was all I was thinking about,” he says. “I was a lot sicker this winter than I’ve ever been, my immune system got worn out. I underestimated it. I’d never done anything like that before, then I didn’t take time off afterwards. It’s that working-class thing. You think, ‘I’ll be all right,’ but it took more out of me than I anticipated. There’s a massive degree of pressure.”

Bishop is about to do a short stadium tour. To prepare, he played small, low-key theatre gigs around Britain, trying out new material, then taking questions from the audience, to know what interested them, and the Sport Relief ordeal was popular. It’s difficult to turn such an intense, personal experience into comedy, but it will be in the new show, along with other tales from his rollercoaster rise.

“The stakes are a little bit higher now, because expectations are higher. In a theatre, you can talk to the front row, you can build up something in the room. In an arena, it’s got to be ready from the moment that you walk on. So you’ve got to test all of this material,” he says. The tour will be short, due to his filming commitments, including an ITV Christmas special. But stage is where he feels at home. “If you say something and everyone laughs at it, there is an addictive element to it, you want to hear that sound again. So you don’t enjoy it, because you’re already thinking, ‘What can I say to make that happen again?’ It’s very odd, very intuitive, how you sort of sense an audience and you work within that moment. And it’s brilliant, just brilliant.”

Bishop is that rare, beautiful thing: someone doing what they’re supposed to be doing, and loving it. He knows this, and his joy is infectious. “If the bubble bursts, in terms of being at this kind of level, I would still want to do it. I had a conversation with my father-in-law the other day. Somebody out of a 1960s band was on at the Stockport Plaza, and he said, ‘He used to be massive, and look at him now’. And I said, ‘Whoa! They haven’t failed They’re still doing it, they’re on the stage singing to an audience, they’re still living the life.’ When I’m 70 or 50, or if all of this is gone in two years’ time, as long as I’m still on a stage, then I’m winning.”

* John Bishop’s Rollercoaster tour reaches the O2 on Nov 7 for four nights