Born in Beirut in 1967, Dom Joly is an author and comedian. He spent his childhood in Lebanon, living with his father, John Joly, who owned Henry Heald & Co, a shipping agency operating in Beirut. After the civil war broke out in 1975, he moved to England, later studying politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and working as a diplopmat in Prague. His hidden camera show, Trigger Happy TV, first aired in January 2000 – defined by a sketch in which Joly answers an oversized phone in a crowded space. This Is Dom Joly and World Shut Your Mouth followed, and he has since published three books of travel writing. His fourth, The Conspiracy Tourist, is out this month, and the accompanying tour begins in February 2024. He has two children with his wife, Stacey, and lives in the Cotswolds.
This photo was taken for Channel 4, right before the first series of Trigger Happy TV aired and my whole life changed. We left the studio and I went outside dressed as a traffic warden so we could do some shots where I was strangling Sam Cadman, who I made the show with.
I was really enjoying this moment, but very quickly I learned that I am bad at being famous. A week after the first episode went on TV, I was sitting on a train and a Nokia ringtone went off. Three people on the carriage shouted: “HELLO!! I’M ON A TRAIN!!” I thought: “What the hell has happened?” I was terrified. There was no rulebook to this kind of exposure and I hated every second of it.
Perhaps it would have been easier if I had picked a different ringtone for the sketch. I used Grande Valse purely because it’s the most annoying sounding melody. By chance, Nokia changed their default ringtone to that same one, so it meant every time a phone went off it was like a subliminal ad for Trigger Happy. The noise was inescapable.
The show was hugely popular and we ended up selling it to 60 countries. But the actual thing you’re supposed to want – the success, being number one – was terrifying. When you’re up there, the only way is down, and I didn’t want to be up there in the first place. I just wanted to make a hidden camera show that was cool – a beautiful thing that you could enjoy if you were a bit stoned.
I’ve always been fascinated by madness. I have anxiety, and I think it opens up a part of my brain that makes good comedy, but it comes at a cost. I loved making Trigger Happy, but I had a breakdown four weeks into filming. We were shooting a sketch near Sloane Square, and I was dressed as a Dutch tourist in a union jack hat reading from a dodgy phrase book. I got into a cab and started saying the line “My egg must be boiled,” to the driver. Suddenly I had this weird feeling. I got out of the car and said to Sam: “I need to go home.” When I got back, I had a series of panic attacks – they were terrible but I had always experienced them, I suspect because I grew up in a war. A few weeks later, someone involved in the show rang me up and said: “If you don’t come back and shoot the rest of this we’re going to have to close the whole thing down.” I thought: “Fuck, it’s all going to go away.” So I dragged myself back in and we carried on.
I spiralled for about five years after the series had aired. I was depressed, anxious and felt totally out of control once it was out of my hands. It was very odd. But also incredible in terms of how it opened a lot of doors for me – and still does.
When a TV show takes off everyone starts putting their oar in, which is what happened to Trigger Happy, and there’s nothing worse than comedy by committee. Eventually, I thought: “I’ve got to stop this” and I went to the BBC instead, where I totally fucked up.
I wanted to do the thing that all massively famous people do – start a chatshow and surround myself with sycophants. I call it “doing a Johnny Vaughan”. The idea was to do a parody called This Is Dom Joly. My wife said: “You can’t, people will think you’re being serious!” But as I was wearing glasses, I thought it would be obvious I was in character. Unfortunately, the verdict was: “This is the real Dom Joly – and he’s a wanker.” Which is a shame, as it was great fun to make: I had the Cure playing in the studio, and I sang The Ballad of Lucy Jordan with Marianne Faithfull and fell through the stage.
A lot of my comedy comes from being an outsider. For a lot of my childhood I lived in Lebanon, and while I was there I was always regarded as “the English kid”. When I came back to the UK I was “the weird kid who looked Lebanese but wasn’t, and lived in a civil war”. As a result I was always on the fringes of social groups and observing. I read Belgian and French books like Asterix and surreal comics, which I credit for my slightly detached and twisted sense of humour.
At school I was always the rebel, but a pretty pathetic one. My rebellion would mainly revolve around whether or not my tie knot was too small. I was a goth too – full Robert Smith as a teen. I liked that being a goth was about finding beauty in sadness.
My ambition was to be a diplomat or correspondent, and I did both those things in my 20s. I got the seriousness out of my system early. Because I started later than most comedians, I’ve often felt like an impostor in the industry. But I always felt sure of my craft. Hidden camera is always seen as the lowest rung in comedy, but I loved that it was based on improvisation and reality.
Once I left the BBC, I needed a break and went away. I knew I wanted to write a book, and after reading an article about dark tourism the goth in me wanted to investigate further. So I became a travel writer. I went to North Korea and the Congo. I went monster hunting in the Himalayas and Japan. I wrote a book where I walked across Lebanon and another about driving around Britain – which was a bit dull.
There have been many years of uncertainty when it comes to my career. I still feel like I don’t know what I’m doing, but 20 years later I’m managing to make a living out of working on stuff I love. My wife says I’ve become slightly nicer as I’ve gotten into my 50s. I’m still very argumentative, especially if I am online. But I have relaxed a bit, and I’m a lot less stressed than I was, especially when I was making Trigger Happy.
As for the fame, now it’s great. I’ve got to a really nice level where I can see the people who will recognise me before they’ve even seen me. It’s normally a bloke who used to watch it every Friday night, who leans over and tells his girlfriend that it’s me, and then the girlfriend whispers: “Who?” I think: “Oh God, they’re going to have to explain the whole phone thing.” Aside from that, I get someone shouting “HELLO!!” at me three times a day. I still don’t have an answer. I just smile and say hello back.
