A Noble Calling

This fortnight s installment of London Calling comes from The Bell tavern in Walthamstow, where local resident Ross Noble is explaining his rather ambitious plan to turn East 17 into London s latest celebrity hot spot: Aye, a taxi driver told me I should buy a property here, so I went into a local estate agent, asked if they had any houses and they just looked at me in total astonishment. When they realised I wasn t taking the piss they found me one in a few minutes, basically. I ve started the trend, so hopefully all London s celebrities will follow me over here from Crouch End, Notting Hill and the pages of Heat magazine and help make Walthamstow fashionable. The only problem I can foresee is that having Chris Evans, Billie or the girls from All Saints as neighbours would just make me want to up sticks and leave immediately.

Aged just 24, this reluctant comedy star has already established himself as one of stand-up s most popular international draws. A former Perrier Award nominee and Time Out Comedian Of The Year, the amiable Geordie has wowed crowds as far afield as Montreal, South Africa and Australia with his unique brand of free-form, high-wire whimsy. Blessed with an astonishing ability to make even the most mundane topic seem side-splittingly hilarious, Noble is a comedian s comedian: that rare breed of stand-up guy who s lucky enough to number the majority of his colleagues among his biggest fans. Noble s induction into the stand-up ranks was far from orthodox, however, for when he first took to the stage at the tender age of 15, he was already a grizzled showbiz pro.
When I was in school I got really into circuses and stuff like that and taught myself to juggle, he explains. So I ended up busking and doing street entertaining, children s parties, folk festivals, carnivals I would literally do a gig anywhere. There was a juggling shop in Newcastle where me and this mate of mine used to hang around at weekends. People would ring up and say that they were doing a gig for 500 four year olds. It d be in a football stadium or something and they d need someone to entertain the kids before the stars of Sunderland Football Club and Gladiators came out to meet them. Nobody else would do it because it sounded crap, but we always said yeah, because to us it sounded like big time showbiz.
We did every nightmare gig you could possibly imagine, travelling around in a van with this bloke who sold balloons, sleeping in a two-man tent and performing at these country shows and festivals. There d be displays of sheepdogs in one corner of a field, an old man whittling in another, people demonstrating spinning over here, cow-pat bingo over there, a display of falconry, the re-enactment of a famous battle and then us juggling somewhere in the middle of all this crap. But then me mate went off and trained as an architect and that left me a bit stumped. That s sort of how I got into stand-up. I started doing the clubs a couple of months before me 16th birthday.
Anything to avoid hard work, eh?
Exactly, he chuckles. I ve done five days work in me life, two of which were hard and three of which were really dull. I used to hand out flyers, standing on stilts dressed as Uncle Sam that was a bit boring. I also did a couple of days work as a runner for a special effects company. We were doing a battle scene for a Catherine Cookson adaptation, which was good fun, cos I m really into all that sort of stuff. Special effects, that is not Catherine Cookson.
They had these big massive bomb tanks which they put in great big holes in the ground. Then they d bury explosives and put in cork, cement and other bits of debris, so that when it went off it looked like a proper explosion. They were filming this scene where I was in a hole with this smoke machine and a pilot light, simulating gunfire. As soon as the director shouted Action! , this explosion went off in a hole next to me and the blast caused me to fall over backwards, set my jacket on fire with the pilot light and then get covered by this torrent of mud and shit from the bomb tank.
When they checked the rushes afterwards, all you could hear was the director shouting Action! , followed by this actor shouting Alright men, it s time to go over the top! , followed by a big explosion and then me in the German trench shouting Fuckin hell, ya bastards! Then I came staggering out of this trench surrounded by hundreds of German soldiers pissing themselves laughing. I looked like Wile E. Coyote after he s just been blown up by his own bomb. The director insisted on setting up the shot again although I thought he should have left it in. It would have made for a magnificently entertaining slice of gritty war time drama.
For now, Ross Noble has eschewed this perilous pyrotechnic world in favour of a grueling fortysomething date tour of the UK and Ireland which should see him coming soon to a town near you.
I know a lot of people won t know me because I haven t been on any of those terrible spin-the-wheel type shows, he observes, but surely that alone is a good reason for people to come. Boom, boom indeed.

Ross Noble plays Vicar St., Dublin on 19th; Baja Brown s, Castlebar on 20th; The GPO, Galway on 21st; The Hawks Well, Sligo on 23rd; Opera House, Cork on 25th; Kilworth Village Arts Centre, Cork on 26th; Mousetrap @ Cat Laughs, Kilkenny on 27th & 28th and Maynooth College on 29th January