It Could Happen to a Bishop

Recently John Bishop gave up the day job as a marketing executive to concentrate full-time on being funny, but comedy was never the career he had planned for himself. In fact, that Bishop is a comedian at all is more by fortuitous accident than design.

“The first time I walked on stage was only the third time I’d ever been in a comedy club,” he tells me. “I was depressed and drunk and ended up on a stage. They were having an open mic session, and if you put your name down you didn’t have to pay to go in. If I hadn’t been so tight-fisted, I wouldn’t be a comedian.”
Since this first performance in late 2000 the comedian fell into a career.
“I did my first open spot, then I got asked to do a weekend and maybe do one weekend a month. I didn’t spend years trying to get booked. I was just lucky. But I didn’t even know that’s what people did – I just thought you do a bit and somebody asks you to do a bit more.
“I had no interest in comedy whatsoever. I wasn’t a fan; I never went to it; I never watched it on the telly. I’ll give you an idea of how much of a fan I wasn’t – about six months after I started doing it, I got asked to do a support spot for Johnny Vegas, and I was that ignorant of comedy, I didn’t know who he was. I thought he was a singer. I was more interested in football.”
Since he started performing Bishop has been paying more attention to what other comedians are doing, but there are still surprisingly large gaps in his comedy education.
“When somebody asks ‘Who would you compare yourself to?’ I don’t know. I haven’t got a reference point. A lot of people say I’m a bit like Billy Connolly, but I don’t know because I’ve never seen him live.”
The comparison is a fair one. Like Connolly, on stage Bishop has the easy conversational manner of a born raconteur.
“I just felt at home straightaway,” he says of performing. “But I can’t explain it, because I never planned doing it.”
For the last eight years Bishop moonlighted as a comic while still putting in a full day’s work at the office. At first, he says, this was easy, but eventually the two worlds began to overlap.
“I did comedy so infrequently, nobody knew I was doing it so I got away with it. But it’s difficult doing a cock joke with some of your staff in the audience and the following day doing their appraisal. It breaks the façade.”
The breaking point came when Bishop was forced to miss his beloved Liverpool playing in the Champions League final in Istanbul in 2005.
“I had a massive meeting for the company in Seattle and I had to go, so I had to give my ticket away to my mate. I was in Seattle on the morning of the game and I remember thinking ‘I can’t do it, I can’t be in America and try and watch it tomorrow morning in an Irish pub.’ I couldn’t get to Istanbul in time but I could get to England so I flew home. I got to my house just as the game kicked off. But all my mates had gone to the match and they’d sent all their wives and kids to our house. So I’m sat in the lounge with little girls doing cartwheels in front of the telly, while my mate’s in Istanbul with my ticket. And then I just thought, ‘I’m not going be told what to do by anyone again’ and within six months I handed in my notice.”
Despite being a part-time comic, in the last few years Bishop has racked up a number of television spots, appearing on shows such as Paramount’s Comedy Store; Brain Candy and How To Survive on BBC3. He is also the only comedian from across the water to have a regular spot on RTÉ’s The Panel. Like many of his breaks, this too seems to have been a case of being in the right place at the right time.
“I don’t really know how that came about. I worked with Colin and Neil on a show up in Northern Ireland and I think they mentioned me to the producer. I dunno, somebody must have dropped out or something, because I got a phone call asking if I could come over.”
Next up is a movie called Whores With Guns, which Bishop wrote.
“It’s a serious costume drama,” he jokes. “It’s a comedy about three lads who make a film called Whores With Guns. They want to get it reviewed and the only way they think they can get it reviewed is to hijack a cinema with a reviewer in it, but in the process of doing so, they spark off an international terrorist incident.”
However, stand-up is Bishop’s first love.
“I like the rawness and the honesty of it. Comedy is instant. You think it’s funny and they don’t laugh, that’s it. It’s like being a lap dancer. You can’t pretend you’re not doing what you’re doing. You can’t pretend, ‘Oh I’m not trying to be funny’, like you can’t get your tits out and go, ‘That was an accident’. You’re just stood there going, ‘Ooh I hope you like this.’”