Lulu would be so disappointed: An interview with Terry Alderton.

Lulu would be so disappointed: An interview with Terry Alderton.

24 June, 2011
by: Rupertspoonfed

The unpredictable stand-up star dicusses with Rupert Uzzell why he no longer cares whether people laugh or not. 

Terry Alderton is a man on a mission. A few years ago, he ditched the mainstream spiel of his early career, forever consigning his Chris Eubank and Frank Spencer impressions to their rightful place in the annals of oblivion. In their stead, he began to unleash the dark and unpredictable forces of his imagination, and now he just wants to continue to push the boundaries.

Few other comedians can claim to have undergone such a radical change of style. Back in 1999 Alderton was hosting The National Lottery with Lulu, being billed as the latest big star of light entertainment. It’s not a time of his career he looks back on with much fondness. “It’s funny that I was once the terrible hack mainstream comic, that I’d watch now and think, ‘Oh God, really?’ At the time, I thought I was going to be Mr Saturday Night, the next Michael Barrymore, and that was the way it was. But I didn’t want that; I wanted to follow in the footsteps of people like Spike Milligan or Steve Martin, not Michael fucking Barrymore!”

In many ways then, perhaps it’s just as well that Alderton’s mainstream TV career went somewhat awry. “Come the millennium, the work all just went ‘Goodbye’. That’s when I really hit rock bottom, and ended up in London’s Burning, and was just walking around going, ‘Fuck me! I did the Lottery, and now I’m doing London’s Burning. What the fuck?’” A major turning point appears to have been a performance at the Manchester Comedy Store. “I was lying on my face, dying on my arse, and looking at all this hack shit I was doing and hating myself for it.”

Ironically, this turbulent period of his career has in some way led to Alderton discovering his current style. One of the main features of his act now is a running gag where he speaks out loud the voices he hears in his head as they commentate on how well the performance is going. I ask him whether this is a sort of therapy for him. “Yeah, of course it is. That’s how it all started. It was the whole thing of this voice screaming at me inside, and me lying on a bed crying, going ‘Make this stop. Make this stop.’”

Obviously, this isn’t really what people expect from Saturday night television performers, and Alderton has suffered from being typecast in this role. “I had people telling me, ‘You’re a great performer. You’re not an artist.’ So I tried to do more performance-based stuff, but I was thinking, ‘I really just want to say what’s in my head.’” So one night, that’s just what he did.

“I just walked on, did some stuff and got a few laughs. But then I turned my back to the audience, put on a voice and just went, ‘This is bullshit. What are they laughing at? Are these people fucking stupid or what?’ Then I turned back round again and carried on like nothing had happened.”

This split personality act has proved a huge hit and is hilarious to watch, with Alderton displaying a striking talent for switching between different characters. “It’s all my mental head coming out. I have this multiple personality, and these crazy moods which are detrimental to my own life, but onstage give you this ability to shape-shift with tremendous speed. I don’t think it’s any skill; I think it’s just craziness, but hey, I earn money from it.”

Now that he’s developed this new style, it appears that the sky’s the limit for Alderton, as he seeks to push more boundaries, break more rules and explore new territory for comedians. “The truth is, I really don’t give a shit whether I die or not anymore, because that’s how you get the great moments. I want to experiment and see how far I can go now. For example, I did something outrageous playing live in New Zealand recently. I pretended to have cerebral palsy. I got Marcel Lucont to push me onstage and put the mic in my hand, and it was just silence. I wasn’t taking the piss out of cerebral palsy; I just wanted a reaction. People knew who I was there, and knew I didn’t have cerebral palsy, so they were all just sat there thinking, ‘What the fuck is he doing?’”

It’s a far cry from working with Lulu, but you can understand why after all those years of bland mainstream comedy, Alderton now tries to be a bit more daring. “That’s what I want to do now. I want to push it to the extreme to see how an audience react, and I’m prepared to die on my arse, because it’s exciting like that.” So be sure to catch his new Edinburgh show this year, as who knows what bizarre anarchy you might happen upon.

For more information about Terry and his live appearances visit http://www.terryalderton.com/

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