The first episode of Trigger Happy TV aired 25 years ago. Its very first sequence was of a man screaming into an oversize phone, startling the unwitting diners at a fancy restaurant. “The following Monday I was on a train, and that ringtone went off,” recalls the show’s co-creator and star Dom Joly. “Three people in the carriage stood up and went: ‘Hello! I’m on a train!’ And I sat there thinking: ‘Holy shit, something extraordinary has happened.’”
Joly isn’t often drawn into conversation about Trigger Happy TV. In the 20-plus years since the show ended in 2003, he has busied himself with plenty of other projects – books, columns, TV shows, podcasts – but nevertheless has found it hard to shake off his breakout hit. “Every time I do anything, even if I’m walking across Lebanon for 27 days for one of my books, someone will go: ‘Did you take the big mobile with you?’” he laughs from his home in Gloucestershire. “Of course I fucking didn’t take the big mobile with me. Why would I take the big mobile with me?”
But the show’s silver anniversary has encouraged him to re-examine his work. In October he’s taking Trigger Happy on tour, showing old clips and reintroducing characters. As such, he’s in a warm, expansive mood, especially when I try to put the show in some sort of context.
After all, 2000 was a big year for prank shows. The form had existed in one way or another since 1948, when Allen Flunt’s Candid Camera first experimented with tricking the public (and in one instance former US president Harry Truman) with hidden cameras. But by the late 20th century, thanks to Noel Edmonds and Jeremy Beadle, the form had taken on a slightly insipid chumminess. “I remember watching those shows,” remembers Joly, “and thinking: ‘I fucking hate this.’”
As such, Trigger Happy TV felt like a violent shake-up. Lower-budget and more prone to surreal flights of fancy, it was also much faster than anything people were used to. Set-ups that Beadle would have laboured over for an entire episode were done within a matter of seconds. It felt like the prank show as guerrilla attack.
“I don’t like calling Trigger Happy a prank show because I’m a ponce,” frowns Joly when I mention this. “It’s hidden camera. Prank shows are the lowest rung in comedy. It’s normally done by thick people or jocks.”
Instead, much of Trigger Happy bordered on performance art. As well as the big phone – which Joly never thought was particularly indicative of the broader show – there were dog walkers performing CPR on taxidermied alsatians, people in rabbit costumes loudly rutting in London’s Prince Charles Cinema, chefs chasing man-sized rats out of their kitchens. People leaving public toilets would be shocked to find Joly and a brass band standing outside, loudly celebrating them as the millionth person to have relieved themselves there. Opera singers would scream atonally at strangers then demand payment.
Unlike previous hidden camera shows, Trigger Happy went without a studio audience. There were no laugh tracks to their stunts, with that role being filled by music; in the case of Trigger Happy, it often provided a sombre counterpoint to the silliness on screen.
Joly credits Trigger Happy’s ability to disrupt the form to his upbringing. He was born in Beirut, and grew up reading French comic books such as Astérix and Lucky Luke, before discovering notorious phone pranksters the Jerky Boys. “There was also a Belgian guy called Noël Godin, who was a very stoned, drunk Belgian anarchist,” he says. “He came up with a manifesto that there’s no better way of judging someone’s character than by how they react when they’re hit in the face with a custard pie. And so he’d go and custard pie people they thought had got above themselves in public life. What I loved about it was they did it for the beauty. They didn’t film it. They were just doing it because they felt it needed to be done.”
This bled into the show. “When we were making Trigger Happy, we had the things we were doing for the show,” he says. “But the things that really made us laugh were actually things we didn’t film. They were stuff we did for the beauty.”
Like what? “I’ll give you a great example,” he replies, grinning. “Our office was just around the corner from a radio station, and every day at 10 o’clock Tony Blackburn would walk past our office. One day we just thought it’d be funny to pose as fans and get his autograph. And he was like: ‘Oh, yah guys,’ and signed something for us. From then on, we decided we were going to do it every day.” He pauses. “We got 262 autographs off him, and never once in those 262 days did he say: ‘Have I not seen you guys before?’”
Not that Blackburn was the only celebrity he encountered. Although most of Trigger Happy TV involved members of the public, who all had to sign consent forms – “If people wouldn’t sign, it was usually because we’d filmed them with someone they shouldn’t be with. The amount of people wandering around having affairs is quite astonishing” – with public figures he could skirt the issue by asking if they’d mind being filmed “for Channel 4”, subtly implying that they would end up on that evening’s news.
Many remained none the wiser. The most recent volume of Michael Palin’s diaries includes an entry that reads: “Terry G [Gilliam] has come from an aborted street interview, in which an annoying busker had his guitar smashed by the interviewer who chased him off into Wardour Street and never returned.” Needless to say, unbeknown to all involved, the interviewer was Joly, and this scene played out at the end of the show’s first episode, with Gilliam blurting out a bewildered “Fuck” as Joly chased the busker into the distance. “We did actually contact him about that,” Joly admits now. “He came back saying it was perfect gonzo comedy. I loved that.”
If 2000 really was year zero for the modern-day hidden camera show, Joly is quick to credit it to a technological breakthrough. “A year before Trigger Happy happened, if I’d wanted to make that show I would have had to hire a proper cameraman, a proper soundman; it would have cost a fortune, they would have been grumpy, we’d have had to have a lunch break. But a camera had come out called the VX1000 and it was just good enough quality to be shown on TV. It meant that we could film and film, and we didn’t have to worry about any of that stuff. In a sense, that was the birth of YouTube.”
In that regard, Joly is now master of all he surveys. “Hidden camera is by far the biggest comedy format in the world,” he asserts. “Almost all the stuff you see online, on YouTube and TikTok, is hidden camera. The ultimate endgame from Trigger Happy is MrBeast. MrBeast online is astonishing. I mean, it’s a bit crass, but it’s so much more interesting than what you see on telly.”
“I’m longing to make a show called International Prank Stars,” he continues, “because we’ve all seen these videos that get like 200m hits, but you’ve no idea who made them. It’s a very anonymous format.” That said, the modern hidden camera scene is still full of tropes that grind his purist gears. “I hate that a lot of them are faked,” he says. “I can smell a fake a mile off, and that’s the thing that really irritates me.”
If nothing else, Joly is finally comfortable embracing the Trigger Happy TV legacy. “Of all the things I’ve done, Trigger Happy is the thing I’m most proud of,” he says. “It was a work of absolute love and total control. Sam [Cadman, the show’s co-creator] and I did everything, from coming up with the ideas to filming everything all day to editing. Every element of it was just us.”
Now that he’s more comfortable with his legacy, Joly has been meeting with the old Trigger Happy TV team. “Not so long ago we had a For the Beauty night back at the pub off Charing Cross Road where we used to come up with all our ideas,” he says. “I met everyone we made it with. And that was so annoying. All my runners are now, like, Bafta award-winning directors and stuff.”
What’s charming is that his notion of “For the Beauty” – just doing something for the hell of it, not to make content – still seems to be his defining mantra. “If I ever write a proper autobiography, I think it’ll be called For the Beauty,” he explains, before grumbling. “Obviously someone would want it to be called Pranks for the Memories.”
The Trigger Happy TV: Live! 25th Anniversary Tour starts 7 October.
