Mark Thomas

“No! You've asked me about this...” Right now, Mark Thomas is having none of my nervous attempts to steer the conversation towards his show. His people politely asked that we keep this interview within the allocated time frame because, apparently, we’ve each accquired a reputation for being a bit ‘chatty’.

It all started wobbling when I reminded him we’ve spoken before. It was 2016, in a landscape dominated by Trump and Brexit. In my wide-eyed innocence, back then I suggested the political sphere and how we interact with it couldn’t get any stranger or extreme. It was only right to now apologise for this naivety. That exchange seems like a very long time ago, and I’ve started watching the clock. I’m also starting to suspect he’s delighting in driving this so far off mission.

Thomas has been at the frontline for nearly 40 years. Breaking through on BBC Radio’s The Mary Whitehouse Experience and Channel 4’s Saturday Zoo. He was emblematic of a new breed of British stand-up, all inspired by the previous decade’s wave of ‘alternative comedy’ and platformed by broadcasters’ amenable attitudes towards edgier new entertainment.

His Mark Thomas Comedy Product would become a mainstay of late-night TV, blurring the lines between stand-up, theatre, surreal pranks and activism. Both on and off-screen he’d highlight injustices as diverse as complex tax arrangements, the plight of the Kurdish people, land grabs in Palestine and human rights violations. This was the springboard for his offscreen evolution into a fearsome campaigner.

Some of his actions have brought around genuine change, got him mentioned in Parliament and established him as a pain in the backside for anyone denying there might be a better way of doing things. This career has seen an MP resign in shame, won entries into the Guinness Book of Records, had laws changed and… produced a show for the Royal Opera House.  

None of the activism should have been necessary. A new era of peace and compassion was promised during the 90s. What happened to everyone? “It's one of the things that's intriguing. People of my generation thought things would always sort of improve. That has fallen away, crushed by 45 years of creating a system which milks the poor and rewards the rich - while giving away services to their mates, running in the interest of profits, rather than the benefit of the people in the country.  So the idea that the state should be something that is ours, that works for us and is for our benefit and is controlled by us, that's the thing that's just gone out the window.”

If we can go back in time for a moment… The year 1997 saw us transform into a land buoyed by Things Can Only Get Better, Cool Britania and the new millennium. Our nation felt like it was turning a corner, the future belonged to everyone, and we were all going to live as a single consciousness under the caring gaze of the Third Way. Obviously, that turned out to be a pipe dream. The same old problems and inequalities persisted.

“I don't think it improved,” agrees Thomas. “What happened was some things did, but the project continued. The first thing Gordon Brown did was hand over control of the interest rates to the Bank of England, enshrining monetarism in its approach. You know, the Bank of England…  which is supposed to be democratically accountable to us… to our politicians.” He points to the continued privatisation of public assets as a factor in the malaise. The policy of creating private finance initiative contracts handed a guarantee of handsome profits to private companies, all paid for by the taxpayer.  

“We end up with a situation where we still have to pay billions every year for PFI. The actual Treasury Building has been constructed and owned by a company registered offshore! The office responsible for raising taxation and the Government's finances, our finances, is renting its building from people who don't pay tax here.” He concedes there were decent initiatives to come from that New Labour period, like the Sure Start schemes, which saw a significant improvement in literacy amongst underprivileged kids. But that Government continued the trend of handing public assets over to private concerns. Reducing the role of the State is an interesting ideological debate, unfortunately not one I’ve time for today. But increased private ownership of critical services doesn’t seem to make anything cheaper.

“I think that the older I get, the more and more I'm convinced that some form of armed insurrection is needed….” We’re off to the races. If Thomas really is trying to distract me from talking about his new stand-up show, it’s just worked. Although I quite like the idea of seeing Janet, my elderly neighbour from over the road, manning a barricade, I must point out revolutions and insurrections are usually accompanied by a heavy human cost. Violence is rarely an answer.  

“Well, there's violence happening all the time,” he rebuffs, gesturing towards the window. “Look at the front page of The Guardian today… They said that nearly nine out of 10 crimes, violent or sexual crimes, no-one gets nicked for. Poverty is a kind of violence. You look at life expectancy beginning to go down. That's violence, you know? I think the idea that we can solve all this democratically is beginning to drift further and further away. In a way, it is emblematic of the way that the ruling class and the State have become so divorced from the problems people face. That Keir Starmer can cut winter fuel allowance is beyond comprehension. That he can have a cap on child benefit is insanity.”

There has been some recent pushback from Government against people gaming an overwhelmed and outdated system. Changes to agricultural property relief have recently been announced, a scheme encouraging huge numbers of wealthy people to take a sudden interest in farming. Or at least in owning land. “I don't see Dyson getting his boots on and coming over from his Malaysian hideaway, where he's producing his factories, like some kind of industrial Blofeld, to sort out harvesting the beets. It's obviously a tax dodge. Anyone who has Jeremy Clarkson as their political leader deserves to be lined up and executed. In fact, I think I'm nearly quoting Jeremy Clarkson on that…”  

He and the TV motormouth turned farming campaigner are roughly the same age. It does set me wondering if there could have been a Sliding Doors moment, where Thomas instead made a fortune showboating in a flash car while screeching inanities to camera. Right now, I’d be talking to an energised Clarkson, trying to steer the conversation to his new stand-up show, while implicitly agreeing about the UK’s inherent inequalities.  

“I could have done that… I mean, I can't drive. But I could if I tried. I think Clarkson is a fine example of someone who amasses as much wealth as he can, at the expense of any kind of decency or progressiveness. He used the BBC’s state-funded apparatus to climb to the top. It sounds like a familiar pattern.”

For some reason, Thomas has gained a reputation as a political comedian. Perhaps THE political comedian. But this is mainly from those who don’t understand that all art and expression is political in some form. The subtext here is that he’s challenging the establishment by asking if we can all do a bit better in society.

He’s both dangerous and roguishly charming, toughened from years treading that line between comedy and hardcore political campaigning. However, for his new tour, he’s slightly turned down the didactic and returned to his stand-up roots. Traveling around the country, Gaffa Tapes makes a stop at Brighton’s Komedia on Thurs 20 Feb and London’s Leicester Square Theatre on Thurs 27 Feb, it’ll be packed with wit, doubtlessly rants, pissing about and perhaps some singing. Is this a new foray into the world of throwaway gags?

“Yeah, very much so... It's been directed by Tim Vine,” he offers sardonically, relenting just for a moment. “No… It's me talking about the state of the world. This is me going back to what I used to do, when I started out 39 years ago.” Stand-up is his first love, and he starts telling me why he thinks it’s an amazing art form.

“You can do whatever you want up there, you know? Well, if you're good enough, you can. It's the one place where I feel I can be most myself.” He tells me he was out doing some filming the other day, and the people doing the catering approached him. “They said: ‘You're so bloody loud! You scream, chat and tell stories. You're just a big show off!’ Yes, I am! I am a professional show off. That's what stand up is.”

So, is the title Gaffa Tapes some kind of homage to the miracle fix-all used by stagehands across the world? “It's a pun,” he concedes. “There's an old techie saying, If it moves and it shouldn't - gaffa tape, if it doesn't and it should - WD40. That's basically the entire world of techies, right? Any crew, any management, any backstage production, know that gaffa or WD 40 fix most things. So, the next tour will probably be called WD40!”

Thomas says he always likes coming down to Brighton, recalling performing at the legendary Zap Club (now The Arch) when it was still a ramshackle arts venue. “You’d perform on a stage made of pallets, and you'd hear the bloody rats underneath them. It was very rough and ready. And brilliant. I always love watching clubs emerge, rise and fall and new ones emerge, because they always moving forward.”  

One of his favourite local gigs was a benefit show at Whitehawk FC’s ground. “They do loads of work with the community kitchen there, which was feeding 400 people a day during COVID. There’s also a homework club, boxing and social enterprises. They're just astounding.”

He’s also recently worked with Brighton Festival’s Artist in Residence for East Brighton, Victoria Melody, on her Re-Enactment: The Diggers show. It examined the pacifist Digger movement, who occupied common land to grow food for the poor. “The Komedia is a very exciting place to come down and do. It’s a brilliant club, but it seems a bit vanilla after doing a gig in a field over in Whitehawk!”

Thomas starts enthusiastically telling me about the Hawk Soldier Beetle, the discovery of which halted development in the neighbourhood. “It’s only found up there and stopped parts of Whitehawk from being turned into an industrial estate. That’s a wonderful thing. It’s full of really good folk and great community initiatives.”

Brighton has long had a tradition of community organising. Thomas recalls a pub opposite the Royal Pavillion being squatted by anarchists.  “They set up a pirate radio station. I went and performed an hour-long set. It was really, really exciting. I loved all of that. When you go back 20 or 30 years, Brighton was associated with people who had dogs on string. It's always had that sort of counterculture element to it.”

But then, the whole of the coastline has little pockets of people bucking trends and getting things done. Thomas heaps praise on Shoreham’s Ropetackle, along with one of Sussex’s most celebrated punk poets. “Look at the gigs that Attila the Stockbroker organises… Glastonwick is one of those things which always makes me smile and happy. There are loads of really great shows in the area stretching from Worthing through to Hastings.”

It's taken a while, but I’ve managed to get him to soften and relax. It might be the discussion of people getting things done at a local level. Politicians constantly come out with ridiculous and contradictory statements, making the world a confusing place. The cynical might suggest it’s a deliberate attempt to make everyone feel powerless and detach from the wider discourse. But it is possible to group together and make stuff happen on your own doorstep.

“I think that's the only thing, with the exception of armed insurrection, that is a proper alternative to the status quo. People organising amongst their own communities happens across the country. They do it because they have to, sometimes there's no way that some people could survive without it. But it is all really exciting.”

Mark Thomas’s Gaffa Tapes comes to Brighton’s Komedia on Thurs 20 Feb and London’s Leicester Square Theatre on Thurs 27 Feb 2025 as part of a national tour.

www.komedia.co.uk  

www.leicestersquaretheatre.com

www.markthomasinfo.co.uk

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Main image by Tracey Moberly

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