Les Dennis talks to Neil Cooper about playing Jigsy and north of England clubs

Tuesday 7 August 2012

MARK THOMAS has exposed corporate chicanery, clandestinely filmed torturers, pursued arms dealers and phoned the President of Ghana during a live gig.

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"He actually picked up the phone before hanging up on me!" exclaims the award-winning comedian, political campaigner and investigative journalist.

But no interview that he's done has been quite as challenging as those he did with his mother, Margaret, for his latest show. Bravo Figaro! tells how he staged a concert with Royal Opera House singers for his sick father in his parents' Bournemouth bungalow. It's also Thomas's attempt to investigate his own dysfunctional family in much the same way he digs into, say, multinational corruption, unearthing shocking facts.

"Brave Figaro! is the simplest of stories: father and son don't have great relationship, father gets ill, son tries to communicate with him," says the "resolutely parochial" 49-year-old, in a cafe near the South London home he shares with wife Jan and their teenage son and daughter. We're only streets from where he and his three siblings grew up with their father, Colin, a self-employed builder, and midwife mother.Colin Thomas, 73, suffers from the degenerative illness, progressive supranuclear palsy, for which there is no treatment. "All they can do is treat the symptoms, which include dementia. Eleven years ago, my father began to have the shakes and walk backwards, then he'd fall over. Technically, he should have gone six years ago. My mum says, 'I've looked after him too well'. But she won't put him in a home until she has to."When I think of mum, I see that Uccello painting of Saint George and the Dragon, with the woman chained to the dragon – this hulking, great brute. That's mum, that's dad." His mother was a tough interview subject, despite Thomas's track record at getting people to reveal unpalatable truths on camera. "I said, 'OK, talk me through the illness.' She said, 'Well, you know what it is. You've seen him.' All the defence mechanisms went up. I've recorded interviews with all my family. I know that some of them won't come and see the show because it's too raw. Some of it was painful for them. There's a lot of people getting very upset in the interviews."Part of what I was trying to do was resurrect what my dad was like, remembering how he was, how we communicated, how we lived. All families have things that are emotional and brutal." Secrets and lies, too? "Oh yeah, there's a lot of those and a lot of rules and roles," replies scholarship-educated Thomas, whose show, The Mark Thomas Product, ran for six series on Channel 4 and who is in the Guinness Book of Records for organising the most protests in one day."Like all the reportage stuff I've done, Bravo Figaro! is about how I use all the footage I've recorded. How do I get the accuracy and match it with comic timing? Real life's so f***ing dull! So this piece is far more theatrical than anything I've ever done, yet it's close to home because it's really personal. There's little point in doing what I do if I'm not going to look at important stuff and that has to apply politically to my own life – and my own family."I've always obsessed about freedom of expression, about having a voice, talking about things we're not allowed to talk about. But this has been hard, really, really hard."Hard does not begin to describe Colin Thomas. "Da was a hard man in every sense. His physical strength was incredible. He had disrespect for anybody trying to tell him what to do – which I've sort of inherited, although I've narrowly missed the family profession," says Thomas."Dad was a Wesleyan lay preacher, my great grandfather was a Baptist non-conformist preacher and my sister's an Anglican vicar." He's inherited their evangelical zeal, however, with his desire to change the status quo. His troubled relationship with his father led to violent quarrels. After an argument – usually about politics since his father was "more Thatcherite than Margaret Thatcher" – they'd work together on building sites and not speak for days. "You didn't mess with my dad – he often got bound over to keep the peace. But he also had a passion for words, despite being virtually illiterate." He had a love of opera, too. Thomas listened in agony as arias by Verdi or Mozart blasted out while his dad sorted the scrap metal. "Mum's very funny about dad going to the Royal Opera House. She says, 'Yeah, he loved the opera, but part of it was him going, 'F*** you! I'm a builder from Sarf London but I'm as good as you lot!' I cherish that image of him."What did his dad make of having opera performed in his living room?"His eyes were open – and that's quite a thing. Mum was going, 'He's as deaf as a p***-pot, but he does love his music.'" replies Thomas. "Thanks, mum, that's in the show."Bravo Figaro!, Traverse, Edinburgh, until August 26.

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Les Dennis talks to Neil Cooper about playing Jigsy and north of England clubs

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