CityLife

What I Meant To Say Was... Hughes returns

CELTIC WIT: Hughes

AN interview with Sean Hughes is an entertaining affair, a little like a catch up with your amusing older brother.

The sardonic humour and slightly curmudgeonly nature that the Irishman is well known, and has won awards, for (he was the youngest recipient of the Perrier award in 1990 at just 24) are in full evidence.

Plus he’s unrelenting, in his affectionate ribbing. So how was the recent Fringe run? You did a week didn’t you?

“Eight shows. Around about a week if you want to be incorrect and vague,” he teases laughing.

CityLife were up for the full run. “And you didn’t get to see me? Thanks a lot, you make me feel very good about myself,” he taunts hearing CityLife’s ill-advised confession.

Coming to see you in Salford though. And I used to watch Sean’s Show before it was my job to so that’s a compliment!

“What that you used to watch telly? You’re digging graves for yourself here, lady…” he prods the stick further, chortling some more.

The telly is where Hughes has mostly been seen in the last few years only making a return to stand up in 2007 with the show The Right Side of Wrong.

That’s got to be a toughie coming back to performing live comedy after years spent on TV sets and in studios?

“It depends on if you’ve got funny bones. I know that sounds a bit…” he pauses, “but I was kind of born to do this thing. I had no intention of ever doing it again and then I realised that it’s what I’m best at. I love it.”

Though he loves the job, all of the peripheral palaver outside of that stage time isn’t time that Hughes enjoys.

“I hate the fact that I have to stay in a hotel room, I want to be in my house. I do the show and people go, oh we love you, and I know I’m never going to see them again and I go to my hotel with my tour manager, I don’t go out partying.

"I don’t really fraternise with people because that’s a bit sad. Anyone who goes to the bar where they are playing is basically looking to have sex with people.”

We’ll be sure to bear that in mind in future.

So on this tour What I Meant to Say Was… apart from not hanging around the bar, what will you be up to? What’s getting your goat?

“Well, basically the news, which I know sounds tedious. I talk about the subtleties of getting older rather than the things that you’d expect.

"(One of the things is) of waking up early when you don’t want to and I turn on the news and there’s 24 news on and only three minutes of news.”

Plus he’s increasingly lacking in patience with certain other hoggers of the TV airwaves – the celebs.

Michael McIntyre

“I hate slagging off people but I’ve started doing that, but I’ll only do it if I can defend myself, I’d hate it if someone started slagging me off what’s the point in that? But Michael McIntyre… well more Michael McIntyre’s audience to be fair. It’s not his fault morons love him,” he quips.

Going back 20 years when you started out, oh god that’s making CityLife feel old.

“What? Implying that I already knew that I was…” he teases again.

Well you are 43 now… But what possessed you to get up and try to make a roomful of people laugh?

“I was always driven. Pretty much since I was 12 when I saw Richard Pryor do Live on the Sunset Strip and I just went, ‘I want to do that.’ And I don’t mean comedy, I mean I want to do that – go on and talk about my life but be brilliantly funny like he does.”

Though he’s finally got back to doing just that, he hasn’t given up on the TV roles. What’s more, he likes to pop up in the most unexpected of places, not least Eileen Grimshaw’s love interest in our very own Corrie two years ago.

“I love popping up in things that people go, what the f*** is he doing on that? I only do the ones that are really, really popular and only for a tiny bit. I’m in the new series of Miss Marple because I get to say a sentence that no ones ever uttered in real life, I play a detective and I’m the only person ever in the world to say, ‘I should say.’ Have you ever used that?”

I should say not (ahem).

Sean Hughes plays The Dancehouse on Thursday, November 19. £12, £15. Call 0161 237 9753.