CityLife

Interview: Dave Spikey

Dave Spikey

THE phone signal on his mobile drifts in and out as Dave Spikey drives to London for another date on his tour – the M6 toll road being particularly fickle as regards reception.

He’s already performed 60 dates in the first part of his Best Medicine tour late last year and early this one, but has now decided to take that figure over the 100 mark.

“I made a conscious decision to go to a lot of places on this tour that I’ve never been to before.

“So I’ve made a bit of a day out of it all. I’m doing Croydon, Gravesend and Colchester this weekend. I just have a good look round.”

The varied locations on his tour also provide him with further fodder for his stand up material, as one of the aspects of his show that he has been performing of late is to grab a copy of the local newspaper and scan it for amusing stories. Of which there have been plenty.

“One of my favourite stories was that police were warning people that a con man was trying to gain access to people’s homes.

“Be aware of him, he’s in this area of Hastings posing as a tree surgeon to try and get into people’s houses.’ Hang on a minute, he’s not really thought that one through, has he? ‘Have you got any trees need looking at? Are they in here?’,” he laughs.

There have been so many gems in Britian, the small town papers that he has compiled a book of his finds.

“I thought I’d just uncover one or two stories here and there but there’re thousands of them.

“I thought it would make a really good tour – it’s a snapshot of everywhere I’ve been and then a publisher saw it and said it would make a nice little book.”

Horrendous experiences

Indeed, his first solo TV writing project, the ITV sitcom Dead Man Weds, was inspired by a newspaper headline he saw one day in his native Bolton.

It is this keen eye for the absurdities of the parochial that has become Spikey’s speciality over the near 20 years he has been performing stand up. Spikey started out having his interest in comedy piqued by his dad.

“We used to listen to radio comedy and I used to buy LPs of comedy, Round The Horne and things like that, early stuff.

“It just soaks into you and I think that’s possibly why I was writing at an early age.”

After some early success achieved penning sketches on TV comedy shows, Spikey formed a double act with a friend and competed in the TV talent show New Faces.

When his comedy partner gave it up, Spikey struggled to go solo at first, suffering a few horrendous experiences in working men’s clubs.

“I wasn’t aware of any alternative clubs in Manchester at the time. I ended up getting gigs in these awful clubs. They usually want two 45-minute spots.

“I went on for the 45 and people hated it. I sat in the dressing room and thought about climbing out of the window and doing a runner, but your pride gets the better of you so I went back on and did the same 45 minutes. It’s all I had; I was pushing it for that.

“They didn’t notice because they didn’t listen the first time and certainly didn’t listen the second time.

“It was awful. I thought, ‘What am I doing?’”

'Overheard conversations'

After a break compering Cannon And Ball in Blackpool he met Agraman – legendary promoter of The Buzz Club in Chorlton and writer of incredibly bad poetry – at a writer’s workshop at Bolton Octagon and began to play The Buzz Club and subsequently the alternative comedy scene.

In 1991 he won the CityLife Comedian Of The Year competition beating favourite Dave Gorman into second place.

He returned to the competition to compere the final in 1996 when the then unknown Peter Kay performed a similar feat and beat favourite Johnny Vegas into second place.

His meeting of the Bolton comic at that early gig in Kay’s career formed a writing partnership that was to produce one of the best-loved sitcoms of the last 10 years.

Spikey and Kay’s uncanny ability to find humour in the ordinariness of life was key to the success of Channel 4’s Phoenix Nights, two series of which they co-wrote with Neil Fitzmaurice as well as starring in it.

Elsewhere in Spikey’s latest live show there’s further evidence of this skill. “Because I’m a bit of a sponge, I just listen to people all the time, so I’ve also got a selection of my best overheard conversations from the time spent travelling.

“I think it was in East Anglia and I was in a café and two girls were talking and one of them said, ‘Has Doreen had the baby yet?’ ‘Oh yeah.’ ‘What’s she called it?’ ‘Mark,’ she said. ‘Oh, I like that name, you can’t go wrong with Mark.’ ‘Yeah, but get this, she’s spelt it with a ‘c.’

“And she sort of stared at her for a minute and said, ‘What? Cark?’”

And long may he eavesdrop.

Dave Spikey plays The Palace Theatre on November 28 2009 - and will also be signing copies of his book, He Took My Kidney Then Broke My Heart, at Waterstone’s, in the Trafford Centre at 1pm.