Tom Allen Interview

We caught up with comedian and writer Tom Allen, ahead of his gig in Edinburgh.

Your new show, Tom Allen Toughens Up, opens at the Gilded Balloon in Edinburgh tonight. Can you tell us what it’s all about?
It is a comedy show based on the idea of being not only physically tough but also emotionally tough enough to deal with all the shit that the world generally throws at you.

So, do you see yourself as tough then? You’ve got to be pretty strong to get up and perform in-front of so many people every night!
That’s certainly true! One of the things that actually made me write the show was that I walked onstage one night and got this heckle where somebody shouted out ‘GAY’ just as I was walking up to the microphone.

Just ‘gay’, by itself?!
Yes! It was such a difficult heckle to deal with because it’s accurate, but it was just so odd! It made me wonder who this person was and if they walked through life labelling everything so accurately – ‘man’, ‘woman’, ‘tree’, etc. I was just so, so taken back by it and I just didn’t know what to say!

So what did you do?!
I just sort of carried on, really. I tried to ignore it but it just felt quite winding to be honest with you. Of course afterwards I thought of loads of things I could have said like a ‘your Mum’ joke or something but I was just so taken aback by it that I didn’t know what to say or do and it made me realise that I needed to become tougher. I love doing stand-up comedy and I love standing up in front of groups of people and I don’t usually mind when people shout stuff out, I think it’s fine because people only tend to shout things out when they want to be involved in the show. I think that’s what’s so brilliant about comedy – it’s the only art form where you can go and see a show and what you shout out will be included in the performance, but on this occasion it was just so aggressive that I was just like ‘Oh my God!’ and didn’t know what to do – I thought I was tougher than that!

So, how did you get involved in stand-up in the first place? Is it something that you were always interested in?
Well, I’ve always been a bit ‘talky’ so I think that must be part of it! I’ve always loved telling stories and if you think about it, a joke is just a really long and detailed story. A friend of mine was actually organising a club night and asked me if I would like to apart of it and I said yes. It was at Bethnal Green Working Mans Club which is a fairly rough type of place to perform and I only played for about five minutes but people liked it so I just kept going, telling stories and talking!

It’s worked out pretty well for you…
Yeah, it’s working out pretty well – I’m enjoying it! I’m learning all the time too – I think you never stop learning because there’s always something weird that happens which gives you something new to talk about!

We heard that the venue banned your Rottweiler co-star, Maggie, from taking part. What happened there?
Basically, I was going to have a Rottweiler onstage who I know, called Maggie. She’s lovely but it was about people being fearful of dogs because she’s quite big – sort of like a cross between a horse and a Labrador. Somebody saw it in the previews and complained and mentioned the Dangerous Dog Act. It was just some moron bringing up the law.

Interview continues on page 2.