CityLife

Why less is Moor for Justin

BIG 2009: Moorhouse

JUSTIN Moorhouse is a little disappointed that he doesn’t own a pencil case anymore.

The rest of his family selected new novelty pencil sharpeners for theirs as his little girl started nursery, his son high school and his partner university to study Criminology.

“They’re all doing something new except me. I’m carrying on working.

"The little one came home from nursery and was telling me how big it was and what was going on, Justin Junior came home saying how big his school was and how he couldn’t find his way round, then Catherine was saying how huge the campus is. I said you want to see the size of the real world where I live so you can all afford to do these things,” he laughs.

Not that he’s under any illusion that working in comedy is the real world. Hyde born Moorhouse made his first move into the fantastical realm of comedy in 1999.

“I was 29, a salesman and I watched a documentary with that girl from Bolton, what’s she called? Bisexual mother of one. She moved to Lesbos to live with a man bizarrely.

"I was watching that one Saturday and thought that’s not hard I’ll have a go. So I went to the Frog (and Bucket comedy club) a few weeks later and did the Raw night.”

He appeared on the scene an affable, jovial figure and just over a year later he won the CityLife Comedian of the Year 2000, though he very nearly didn’t make it to the final.

“On the way I was coming down Hyde Road and the window fell out of my car. The back window was already out so it was a black bin liner, which Sally Lindsay (formerly the put upon Shelley Unwin in Corrie) had already taped up for me – look at me name-dropping – me and Sally used to go about doing open spots together.

“I was dead late for the competition and I was so irritated I didn’t even think about the comp I just walked in and walked on stage and changed the way that I did it.”

Semblance

It worked, he won and the final thing to erase all semblance of anything ordinary in his life was that the very next week he was playing Young Kenny in the first series of Phoenix Nights with Peter Kay, Dave Spikey and Neil Fitzmaurice.

As well as becoming a weekly columnist in the MEN’s CityLife supplement, in the time since he’s gained a radio show – first the breakfast now the afternoon slot on Key 103, he’s performed four solo shows – two at the Edinburgh fringe and in 2003 appeared in panto at the Lowry.

“Stand-ups have laughed that I’ve done panto as though I’d sold out.

"It’s brilliant! Making kids laugh how good is that? What better job could you have where you make mums, dads and kids laugh? I’m not here for the art of it or to change the world, it’s about entertaining people and my son could come and see it and be proud of his dad.”

One of his finest moments over the years though, has been writing a play for Radio 4.

“It was a totally different departure, it was the afternoon play so there were people making jam in Bishop’s Stortford listening to it and that’s the funniest thing ever.

Some retired headmistress is pruning her geraniums in Leighton Buzzard. The radio actually said out loud, ‘and now a play on Radio 4 by Justin Moorhouse’. What?!”

He’s currently on tour with his latest show Justin Moorhouse’s Ever Decreasing Social Circle, which he performed in Edinburgh.

Stemmed

The idea stemmed from the kind of frustration many of us can identify with after we sign up to networking sites, Moorhouse was finding that Facebook was taking over, if not his life, then his inbox.

“I was only adding friends, and genuine friends, I wasn’t even adding friends of friends, then people were adding me and they were all Jason Manford’s (fellow Manc comedian) friends and I thought maybe I met them at his wedding, then I found out he was adding fans, so I’ve got a load of Jason Manford fans on my Facebook.

“And I was getting bombarded with invites and pokes and superpokes, invites to gigs that people have booked me for. I thought, God, they’re not really all my friends.”

It was time for a purge and what better way to go about it than create a show out of it where he attempted to whittle the triple figure number down to a single figure digit of true friends, as his old Gran once said ‘you’re blessed if you can count all your friends on one hand’.

Besides soon he won’t have the time to keep up with anymore people as he’s got a radio series to record and two films out, “I’ve got a Ken Loach film (Looking For Eric also starring other figures from the local comedy scene including Smug Roberts) coming out, that’s going to be good. I’ve also done another film with Neil Fitzmaurice who wrote Phoenix Nights and a film called Going Off Big Time.

“It’s with John Thomson, John McArdle and John Henshaw, great people. I think it’s going to be really good. That’s going to Cannes at the same time. I’m going to Cannes with two films!”

It’s certainly a long way from working in sales for the lad from Hyde.

Justin Moorhouse is at Bury Met on Friday, February 20. £12.