Noble's scary movie takes on Bond

Arts Editor

Thursday 1 November 2012

When we asked him back to be our guest of the week at the Bank of Scotland Herald Angel Awards, comedian Ross Noble was happy to return the favour.

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The stand-up’s first picture puts him in a box-office battle with 007, finds Keith Bruce

"You don't forget getting a winged knick-knack from Dannii Minogue," he memorably quipped, as he succeeded the diminutive Antipodean in the trophy- presenting role.

Noble is back in Scotland at moment, at Edinburgh Playhouse tonight and Glasgow Pavilion on Friday and Saturday. This tour marks his 21st year in stand-up (he started very young) and is his first in the UK for two years.

"I took a year off last year, because I'd never had a break from my day job," he says, "but I'm back with renewed vigour."No two nights of spontaneous surreal stream-of-consciousness comedy in the company of Noble are ever the same, but this tour is predictably drawing on "a certain television personality who has turned out not to be all he seemed," as the man himself puts it. A Jimmy Savile ventriloquism act is the least of it.Some years back, Noble recalls, when presenting a music award, he had riffed on how creepy he found Savile and how suspicious he was of the publicity he garnered for his charity work. Afterwards another well-known DJ had murmered to him: "You've got some bottle.""Now Savile has become pretty much half the show some nights," says Noble. "You can only go with your gut instincts, and he always looked like a wrong 'un to me."Noble should know, because in his first feature film role, Conor McMahon's newly released comedy horror Stitches, he plays a children's entertainer who returns form the dead to haunt teenagers. It's release was not originally scheduled for the middle of Noble's tour, but a Hallowe'en date made sense to the distributors, even if it did put the film up against the new Bond movie in the multiplexes."The was my first thought too," says Noble, "but actually it has worked in our favour. There are not many Hallowe'en films this year and because Bond is taking up lots of screens, once you've seen it there are fewer other movies to see. And we are showing at a time when people who only go to see one big film a year are visiting cinemas."The film is an 18-certificate gore-fest that has been well-received at horror film festivals. "It's ridiculously over the top, darkly comic but still scary," says Noble. "I'm not encouraging teens to sneak in, but when I was 15 it would have been my favourite film."Noble still fondly remembers the occasion when he was presented with his own Herald Angel award on a Saturday morning in August 1999 when veteran comic actor Leslie Phillips was also around to appreciate the assets of Ms Minogue, the subject of some speculation as to their alleged enhancement at the time.In The Herald's photograph of Noble receiving his award, he insists he is looking down at the trophy, but it appears he is examining her cleavage for signs of surgery. That picture was the one his mother displayed proudly on the mantlepiece for many years and was later the subject of discussion when the pair (Noble and Minogue) appeared on the same Australian chat show. The comic confirms The X-Factor judge had clearly taken GK Chesterton's advice that "angels can fly because they take themselves lightly".Ross Noble's new DVD, Nonsensory Overload, is out on Monday.

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Noble's scary movie takes on Bond

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