Mark Thomas, comedian
I remember the producer Geoff Anderson and I having a conversation about making a radical version of That’s Life! But instead of bringing dodgy double-glazing salesmen to book, we’d bring down international capitalism. We failed. But we had a really good go.
We piloted Comedy Product in 1995. I was 32 and had done a bit of telly stuff – The Mary Whitehouse Experience, and I’d hosted Loose Talk on Radio 1. But what most obsessed me was The Cutting Edge, a topical weekly comedy show that I’d been part of founding at the Comedy Store. The immediacy coinciding with the strength of the writing would often reflect or refine the audiences’ feeling about a story. Looking back, that was where I began to grind out the daily practice of political comedy.
Channel 4 approached us about making the show but the commissioning process took so long. The commissioning editor at the time, Seamus Cassidy, was a great bloke – he was responsible for Father Ted and some other brilliant shows. Trouble was, he took ages to make up his mind. We did a pilot but it was another year before we were up and running.
No one had tried to make this kind of show before. We were constantly asking each other, “Can we do this?” In the pilot, we were chasing Lord Bethell in his open-top election battlebus, heckling him with a megaphone, worried that we were going to get arrested. The final thing we did was catch a Finnish arms dealer moving guns around the world illegally. Our exposé led to Finland tightening up their legislation. It was a steep learning curve, from shouting abuse at a Tory MEP to chasing international arms dealers.
The standup bits were filmed on a Sunday night before an audience in a south London pub called The Bedford, which used to be on the edge of Balham’s red-light district. Hard to imagine now, with the gentrification that’s happened there. We’d write the script on Friday afternoons. I’d do a couple of warmup gigs on Friday and Saturday night, with the researchers sorting out any problems as we went along. Then, on Sunday, we’d record the show.
We made 45 episodes, and Channel 4 gave us a chance to learn on the job. Their lawyers tried to make things work and, on the few occasions they knocked us back, it was executives higher up the food chain on issues of taste and decency. We always shot two shows of the standup with different audiences. In between, we’d get the lawyers’ notes. It gave us space to have fun with it: there was a playful version and the legally required one. Sometimes, I was with the lawyers right up until I stepped back on stage.
We had tenacity, an ability to improvise, and sometimes we got lucky. We got Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, CEO of Nestlé, on camera at a time when they were mislabelling their baby milk products in Africa, after a tip-off that he was giving a talk at Oxford University. The college had these great big gates, and a student just let us in. Within two days, he was faxing us new designs for their products with the change of wording.
We had scientists, activists and whistleblowers helping us. Someone told us about the radioactive bird shit at Sellafield and we thought: “That can’t be true, can it?” Someone passed us the phone number of Jerry Rawlings, the president of Ghana, and there I was, phoning him on stage from a Balham pub! Some MPs were very open. One just called, I went round to their office and they handed over a load of information about how Britain was refurbishing guns for Morocco in the occupied area of Western Sahara.
It became a badge of honour that we were being spied on, a feeling that we were doing something right.
After the show finished, I carried on investigating the arms trade and presented evidence to the quadripartite committee [on arms export controls]. I got a call in 2006 from the chairman [Roger Berry MP] who said: “We’ve just published our report and if you look, right at the beginning, it says: ‘We commend the work of Mark Thomas’.” I told him, if you ever say that again, I’ll sue.
Geoff Atkinson, producer
Channel 4 gave us the money to shoot the very basic pilot, and from there, they commissioned a series and we just got on with it. The biggest motivation was keeping that journalistic integrity – the fear that getting something factually wrong would undermine everything. That drove us.
We’re not journalists, we both came from a background in comedy and converted. I made the leap from writing for the likes of The Two Ronnies and Spitting Image to writing and producing for Rory Bremner a few years before. We were constantly performing mental gymnastics because you never had control of all of the elements. We didn’t think we’d get through to Jerry Rawlings, then we had to make sure it was actually him. It was completely absorbing, and the hard work repaid you when you got that extra bit of information or luck.
There was no restriction on the subject matter. The format was originally a series of mini-adventures with standup in between, but it later became much more narrative-driven. That was something we grew into, rather than a conscious shift to longer-form storytelling.
In the episode about Indonesian clothing factories, where we had schoolchildren interviewing Adidas’s [global director for social and environmental affairs] David Husselbee about the working conditions, we filmed a pre- and post-watershed version, with the former having kids in the audience. And that was the one that went out.
After finishing the series, we did a few longer-form episodes for Channel 4’s Dispatches. At that time, [production company] Vera had a third-floor office. And there was a break-in one Sunday afternoon, they smashed their way in with a fire extinguisher, but they didn’t take anything. We put a security guard in, just to keep an eye. And on the next Thursday, at three in the morning, the main door was opened, and a smartly dressed guy came up the stairs. He’d obviously come back for something, and I can only think a bug had been planted. It could have been anyone but we had our suspicions. I used to naively think we were just comedians having fun. But afterwards, I realised they were taking us more seriously than we were [taking ourselves].
I don’t know why Channel 4 haven’t repeated it. We were useful at the time because we allowed them to say they were independent and critical of politicians. But they don’t need that at the moment: they’re fighting a government trying to privatise them. I often think of doing a series called Mark Thomas Déjà Vu, and we’d go back and see who still hasn’t cleaned up their act. Export credit guarantee is still abused, dams are still being built where they shouldn’t. And the arms industry isn’t exactly clean, is it?
We were lucky in many ways but we made our own luck. We set out to have fun, doing what we thought an audience would like. Someone once dubbed it “Thomas the Prank Engine”. And I quite like that description.
Mark Thomas: Product, a live UK tour with the comedian introducing clips from, and discussing the story behind various episodes of the television show, begins on 23 February
