Shut Up You Fruit Cake

Men In Coats appear to be on a lone mission to revive the lost art of physical comedy. A masterful blend of puppetry, mime, music and slapstick, their painstakingly constructed live show puts a contemporary spin on old-school vaudevillian disciplines.

The idea for MIC was born when Londoners Mick Dow, a hugely versatile entertainer skilled in everything from dance to magic tricks, and Maddy Sparham, a drama school graduate specialising in physical comedy, met through a mutual friend from Dublin, discovered a shared love of silent films and high farce, and decided to devise a suitable platform for their respective talents.
“It was a very much a conscious effort to do something radically different,” elaborates the immensely likeable, ultra-laidback Dow. “I don’t like people to say, ‘Oh, they’ve just copied this or that’. I felt the way to do something completely different to stand-up was to shut-up. So we decided to get rid of the words and just do something that was totally visual. Little did we know what we were letting ourselves in for!
“It has been hard work to put the show together. The one huge advantage of verbal comedy is that you can work the material out over a night, find the problems with it and go to the next gig with your script totally rewritten. Whereas our show is very complex in terms of the choreography and the technical elements, it takes quite extensive rehearsals to perfect and there’s a lot of prop-building etc. I mean, the show has been evolving over the course of three years now, and we’re always looking to improve, so it has been a long-term commitment.”
Having been awarded the Newcomers of the Year gong at prestigious London venue the Hackney Empire’s annual awards in 2001, Men In Coats have since graduated to the comedy premier league of sell-out Edinburgh runs, TV shows and international acclaim. But did they encounter much resistance from comedy promoters at the outset of their career?
“In the stand-up world, no one would book the show,” Dow affirms. “We had one weird lucky break with Malcolm Hardy (manager of comedy venue Up The Creek) which convinced me that it was worth persevering. A mate of a mate knew him, and Hardy’s car just happened to break down outside his door, so he went in and asked for help. So our mate’s mate said yes, provided Hardy came in and watched this video for ten minutes, which happened to be one of our shows. He sat down and looked at it, loved it, and booked us for his club.
“So we went in and performed at Up The Creek – which is an infamous bear-pit – and the show went down a storm. That definitely gave us the confidence to push a bit harder. But generally speaking, comedy clubs didn’t take us very seriously. It’s hard enough to get an open spot anyway, but if you tell them, ‘We’re new, and by the way, the show is totally wordless’, that tends to freak them completely.”
In a previous incarnation, Dow earned a living dazzling the great and the good of the corporate/high society world with impeccably executed sleight-of-hand tricks, gigs at which the hosts tended to enjoy slightly more financial leeway than the average party-thrower.
“I did a private event for the Prince of Saudi Arabia,” he recalls, “where he flew his mates over to the Seychelles and spent three million quid on a party. I did one night of choreographed dance, one night where I played a character in a scene, and one night of regular magic tricks. It was really weird, as those sorts of occasions tend to be to the humble outsider. I did everyone back in those days…Lady Diana, Robert Palmer, Gene Simmons from Kiss.
“Actually Simmons was an interesting man, many strings to his bow. I did the aftershow party at his last gig in England. He was standing there with a queue of women waiting to snog him. It was pretty surreal; one woman would kiss him, he’d say, ‘Thank you very much’, and move onto the next one. But I must admit it was quite exceptional. His tongue is reputedly seven-inches long, you have to give it to him. Or not, as the case may be.”
During his lengthy apprenticeship, the cultured Dow also found employment as resident jester at a medieval-banquet tourist attraction.
“Well, we all have to start somewhere!” he protests in mock-indignation. “Actually that job was absolutely brilliant. Jesus, you’d meet some characters. I worked with a magician there called Ali Baba, whose father was famous at the turn of the century as an Indian magician. Ali himself never wanted to follow in his father’s footsteps, he just wanted to be an actor. But I think the furthest he ever got was taxi driver on Eastenders, so eventually he jacked in the acting, learned about three of his dad’s tricks and made a fortune.
“Then there was a strongman called Sampson, who was mates with Arnold Schwarzenegger from his bodybuilding day. As I used to say back then – and still say about what we do now – it’s a damn sight better than working in Butlin’s.”

Men In Coats play the Olympia in Dublin on October 30