Acclaimed comic Ross Noble is renowned around the globe for his unpredictable, inventive approach to stand-up, featuring plenty of audience interaction. It’s a format he’s also successfully taken to television in two series of Dave show ‘Freewheeling’, in which he calls on fans to join the fun via Twitter.

Next month though, he’ll be appearing on the Liverpool stage as character Franz Liebkind in Mel Brooks’ Broadway and West End hit musical, ‘The Producers’, alongside fellow funnyman Jason Manford.

We caught up with Ross for a chat about his musical theatre debut and what makes his comedy mind tick.

 

You’re making your musical theatre debut in The Producers. Is that a new direction you were looking to take?

I’m a huge Mel Brooks fan and I was a massive fan of the show. I wasn’t actively going ‘I must get into musical theatre’ but when the opportunity came up it was too good to miss, especially because Jason Manford is the lead so it’s win, win.

 

Will your fans see you in a different way given there’s so much singing in the show?

I’m always singing and doing daft accents during my shows when I’m mucking around and that’s why they cast me. Obviously Jason’s in it so they said let’s try and cast somebody else who appeals to a comedy audience. It was him who suggested me.

I think it would be a massive departure if I was suddenly in ‘Oklahoma’ or playing the Phantom, although having that said, that’s the same as Michael Crawford isn’t it? When he did ‘Phantom of the Opera’ everyone was saying ‘but he’s Frank Spencer’!

 

You’re well known for your spontaneity during stand-up shows. How are you finding the idea of playing a fully scripted part?

Because I’ve got lots of lines with other people, if I don’t feed them the lines then they can’t feed me the next line, so from that point of view it’s essential.

Because it’s Mel Brooks it’s one of those things where even if you’re not into musicals it’s worth coming to see because, when you read the script for ‘The Producers’, every single line is either a set up or a punch line. I’m really looking forward to it because there’s no faff on any of the writing, it’s just bang bang bang, hitting those beats. It’s great!

 

During your stand-up tours, one show always seems completely different to the next because the audiences get involved. How much of a routine do you actually start with?

I go on, improvise and then stuff just falls out from that. I might improvise for 10 minutes and get one idea where I think ‘that’s funny, you can play around with that’. Rather than going on with a list of jokes I’m going to be doing, I’ve just got all these ideas floating around and then I collide them together.

Something might happen in the afternoon so I might start talking about that, and then that might take me somewhere else. It’s like a load of cartoons all dancing around in my head rather than a list of jokes.

 

Given that’s how it works, what’s the most unusual stand-up experience you’ve had?

I did a show where a guy got on stage and proposed to his girlfriend – that was a bit different! One of my favourite shows was where, and I can’t even remember how this happened, I think there were some UV lights on the stage and I’d started joking about doing the show in the dark. I then did about half an hour in the dark!

 

It seems like while other comedians get more acts following their style, nobody has come through as a ‘next Ross Noble’ or tried to tackle your act.

All I’ve done is been myself, therefore anyone who comes along and tries to do something similar is obviously going to suffer from comparisons. Also, the reason I can do what I do is because when I started out – I’m 39 this year and I started when I was 15 – back then in the 90s there was a lot more opportunity to take risks.

I’ve always done my shows the way I’ve done them. When I first started and was trying to get gigs at the big clubs everyone was like ‘you’ve got to go to the Comedy Store, do 10 minutes of your best stuff and really make it count’. Whereas I used to go on and play around, and it’s the same with Edinburgh and telly. Because I’ve always done that, people have gone ‘oh right, that’s what he does’ but it would be hard for somebody to establish themselves and then go ‘now I’m going to do this’.

The trouble is, nowadays so many people are trying to do stand-up. It’s become so slick and people have got a real idea of what stand-up is supposed to be. Therefore if you just come along doing something that isn’t that, audiences will just go ‘well it mustn’t be very good’.

When I first started nobody went into stand-up because they thought ‘I can become a household name and become really rich’ either, whereas now it’s more established in the entertainment industry.

Everybody is trying to be incredibly slick and there are people trying to get their five or 10-minute tight set so they can go on ‘Live at the Apollo’. I did the first series of ‘Live at the Apollo’ and the show is an hour long but I got 45 minutes! That was only about 10 years ago, so even in that time everything’s changed.

 

Your approach to comedy has also worked on television, as you’re guided by Twitter followers’ suggestions on your show, ‘Freewheeling’. What’s your favourite thing that you’ve been tasked to do so far?

It was probably when a woman said ‘don’t come to Northampton’, so we spent a whole episode there! Or it might have been getting a bloke with a guide dog to wear masks as the Chuckle Brothers and go through an assault course!

‘Freewheelers’ is another one of those things where I’d stayed off telly for years because everything people were offering me would be a compromised version of what I wanted to do. If you hold out for long enough, eventually when you go to a channel and say ‘I want to make a TV show that completely has no format, we don’t know what we’re going to do, it’s unscripted, we haven’t got a plan, and we’re not going to do any advanced planning; we’re just going to turn up and invent the show as we go along’, you have to get yourself into a position where people will go ‘yeah I reckon that’ll work!’.

 

What have you got lined up after ‘The Producers’?

I’m going on holiday because everyone’s starting to forget what I look like after an eight-month stand-up tour and a few months in ‘The Producers’!

I’m working on a couple of things. I can’t really say what but hopefully I might be doing another film at some point, but as soon as I say anything I might jinx it so we’ll see!

 

Catch Ross Noble in ‘The Producers’ at the Liverpool Empire from 1-6 June. For tickets and further information, visit www.atgtickets.com/liverpool.