Recently banned from bringing a Rottweiler on stage for his Edinburgh run, Tom Allen chats to Emma McAlpine about getting tough in his new show, drawing inspiration from Winston Churchill and dealing with rude hecklers...
King’s Cross St Pancras may not be the first place you’d think of as an ideal interview location, but sitting near the Eurostar platform in Carluccio’s, waiting for Tom Allen to arrive, I realise it is surprisingly quiet and rather smart – there’s even a champagne and oyster bar up here. We could be about to set off for Paris. Sadly we’re not.
Allen lives ten minutes away, in “a tiny studio in Somers Town”. As a busy comedian, working nights on the circuit, he usually gets up at about 10 or 11am. He tells me his inspiration for not getting up early this morning was Winston Churchill. “Apparently Winston Churchill got up late and had lots of meetings in his bed with the war generals. What a perfect way to work. We had an Edinburgh preview in my flat the other day and I thought I could do it from my bed!”
With the Edinburgh Festival almost upon him, Allen is busy testing out his new show on London audiences. It hit the news last week when the Gilded Balloon, his Edinburgh venue, banned him from bringing a Rottweiler on stage, as billed on his poster. “It’s discrimination really”, he says. “If Maggie had been a small terrier, she’d just be considered cute. This huge furore is just because she’s big and black – when really she’s a sweet dog who spends most of the performance staring at me with her big brown eyes and panting at my feet.”
So cute dogs aside, what’s the show about? “It’s called Tom Allen Toughens Up! and it’s about being physically tough, emotionally tough and essentially not worrying about yourself. When we’re born we’re smacked to get us breathing and from then on the world is constantly throwing abuse at us.” He may shave his head, but dressed in a pink (cashmere?) sweater, speaking in a rich, plummy voice, ‘tough’ is not the first word that springs to mind when you meet him.
“Do you consider yourself tough now?” I ask him.
He laughs. “Emotionally I’m getting there.”
As a teenager, Allen started off acting in the National Youth Theatre, but with a gift for monologues and storytelling, he decided to try his hand at comedy, after a friend asked him to do a five minute slot at his comedy club. “I’ve never approached it as joke-telling. Comedy is about confidence and being true to yourself and for me, stories were always the way to go.” This rationale clearly paid off, because he went on to win the ‘So You Think You’re Funny?’ competition in August 2005 followed by the BBC New Comedy Award later that year. Since then he’s been asked to perform in Montreal for the Just For Laughs festival and appeared in several TV programmes including Big Brother’s Big Mouth, TNT and his own documentary Who Is Tom Allen? for Channel 4, which saw him discover he was a teenage girl called Janet in a previous life.
This year will be his fifth Edinburgh show and by now, Allen is pretty relaxed about heading up there for a month of gruelling performances. “I think Edinburgh gets better each time. The more shows you do, the more confident you are and you enjoy it more. There’s something lovely about getting off the train in the Haymarket. All the stress melts away and you think ‘This will be fine.’ The worst one was probably about two years ago when it rained every day. At one point I was crying and it didn’t matter, you couldn’t tell!”
An eloquent and charming performer, with a gift for weaving amusing and detailed anecdotes, you won’t catch Allen ranting about politicians or getting involved in any audience bitch-slapping, no matter how bad the heckling.
“I did a gig once where someone said: ‘You gay ugly cunt!’ and I responded: ‘and don’t forget talented’. I don’t really mind hecklers because they just want to be involved. And sometimes you just have to be a good diffuser rather than shout back. Comedy is one of the only live performances where you have a dialogue with the audience and you feed off each other. I like the sense that we’re all in it together and it’s a live performance so it can only happen that way once.”
Tom Allen Toughens Up! will be previewing at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern on Tuesday 27th July, followed by a run at Edinburgh's Gilded Balloon from 4th-29th August.
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