Milton Jones on Mock the Week: 'You got a dossier about things that could come up' 

As the UK comedian gets ready to perform in Cork and other Irish centres, Richard Fitzpatrick had a chat with the King Of The One-Liners

Milton Jones is at Cork Opera House in September

When Milton Jones materialised on screen for our interview via Zoom, he was sitting at his computer screen. Propped up behind his head and shoulders, balancing between his back and his seat, was a 2x2 metre cardboard print-out of bookshelves. Jones is a walking billboard of humour. He always has a startled look on stage and purposefully wears loud shirts, with his magnificent hair shooting skywards and off to the side.

“The reason I got [my fashion sense] was to act as a signpost because if I come up and do these slightly offbeat jokes, it would take a long time for people to tune into it, but if I came with my hair up and a zany shirt, they think, OK, this isn’t going to be straightforward,” says Jones.

“They’re sent leftfield immediately. Mainly, it was from retro shops that I used to get the shirts. Sometimes people send me them now. They’re often a bit stag nighty. I don’t want a stag night shirt. I want something your grandmother would have given you for Christmas, and it’s not quite right.

“Another thing I say is, the thicker the crowd, the higher the hair has to go.’ If it’s an audience who know me and know what they’re in for, then it doesn’t have to be very much, but a late show in a nightclub, ‘the higher the hair’ gives me another 15 seconds at the top, while they’re all going ‘Wot’s this? Wot’s this?’ Occasionally you walk into a room that has a low attention span and you need to grab them straight up.”

Jones, 60, grew up in London. His grandmother lived in Belfast so he spent many childhood summer holidays in Ireland – north and south – during the 1970s when the “Troubles” were at their worst. He remembers one holiday being cut short, in his own words, “because there were too many bangs in the night”. Today, his son studies law in Dublin, but lives in Belfast because of the cheaper cost of living and commutes south for lectures.

“When I think of Ireland I think of the colour green,” he says. “I always say that Irish people are 20 percent more friendly than British people, for whatever reason. There’s kind of an openness in the culture, a friendliness, which usually makes the shows of the Irish leg of the tour, the ones I look forward to the most because people often heckle, but it’s rarely aggressive. It’s just joining in. Of course, they’re all the old cliches – if you go into a shoe shop, there’s a bar at the back. Everywhere is a bar.” 

Jones, who is on a nationwide tour in September, has toured Ireland several times. He used to be a regular at the Kilkenny Cat Laughs Festival, too, where, as an avid Arsenal fan, he played in the annual comedians’ football match, which was usually played on the Sunday afternoon at the Fairgreen in the city.

“I always remember it was ‘Ireland Versus the Rest of the World’ except Karl Spain played for the Rest of the World because of his surname,” he says. “He went to commentator after that. As a footballer, in my day, I was like Paul Merson. Not so much the alcohol and drugs, but definitely on the wing and cutting inside. I was on the right wing, and then I went right half and then right back, as I got older.” 

Jones originally trained as an actor. He began doing stand-up in the 1990s. Winning a coveted Perrier award for “best newcomer” at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 1996 kick-started his career. Growing up, he didn’t have any stand-up heroes as the comedians on the circuit in the late 1970s, early 1980s were, in his own words, “all old guys in bow-ties telling mother-in-law jokes”. He veered more towards satirical comedy and TV sitcoms. He singles out Rowan Atkinson.

Milton Jones is known for his one-liners and puns

“I noticed him first in Not the Nine O’Clock News,” says Jones. “He was very precise. One of those people where you laugh before he speaks. It doesn’t matter what he’s saying. He’s doing it in a funny way. A funny bones sort of chap.

“There was a sketch about a gorilla he did in Not the Nine O’Clock News. The man who discovered him in the jungle – he calls him Gerald – said, ‘When I caught Gerald, of course, he was completely wild.’ And then Atkinson says, ‘Wild? I was furious!’ He talked very in a very refined way, dressed as a gorilla. It was brilliant.” 

Jones was a recurring guest panellist on the long-running topical satirical panel show, Mock the Week, which came to an end in 2022. Recording the show – which typically filmed for two-and-a-half hours to be whittled down to 28 minutes of television – had it’s challenges. He doesn’t miss seven people trying to speak at once.

“You got a big dossier about all the things that could possibly come up,” he says. “It was like an exam. You hope you revised the right one. Even if you did, there was going to be another six people trying to speak on it. After three or four people have covered a subject, it’s pretty thin pickings in terms of what’s left. But I can’t complain. It was good for me. I was on it for a long time. It was like sending an advert through a lot of people’s doors [for his stage shows].

“The most enjoyable thing was making other panellists laugh. Everyone had this sort of grimaced smile on their faces. They’re supposed to look like they’re enjoying it. Actually they’re thinking of what they’re going to say next. If you can break through that and say something that genuinely made them giggle, that was the best thing about doing it, because then we’d go off at a tangent.

“Everyone would be making stuff up that they hadn’t rehearsed. That was always interesting. Dara Ó Briain was always very good at that – both making stuff up, but also holding it all together. Not many people can do what he did. I remember going under the desk once during a show and telling people that Dara had no trousers and was wearing gold shoes.”

• Milton Jones will perform at Cork Opera House, 8pm, Friday,  September 20 as part of an Irish tour that also inlcudes the Olympia, Dublin (Sept 18), and Leisureland, Galway (Sept 21). See: www.miltonjones.co.uk

Milton Jones: Five classic lines 

“One of my earliest memories is seeing my mother’s face through the oven window. As we played hide and seek, she said: ‘you’re getting warmer’.”

“If you’re being chased by a police dog, try not to go through a tunnel, then on to a little seesaw, then jump through a hoop of fire. They’re trained for that!”

“My grandfather was a peeping tom. He used to drill holes in the floor and spy on the people in the flat below. He died recently, but I like thinking about him up there somewhere, looking down on us.” 

“To the man on crutches dressed in camouflage who stole my wallet: you can hide but you can’t run.” 

“Most of my relatives are police marksmen, apart from my granddad who was a bank robber. He died recently, surrounded by his family.”