Ross Noble is pro-live

It sounds like a joke. These two Jehovah’s Witnesses walk up a garden path. You could, suggests Ross Noble, write it and “give it to someone like Jim Davidson”. Only this one's a true story. A few years ago these two Jehovah’s Witnesses, a man and a woman, walked up Ross Noble’s garden path. For all his big black hair, thick Geordie accent and a face that says "I am a stand-up comic", they evidently had no idea whose door they'd knocked on.

“They said, ‘Can we talk to you about God?’ And I said, ‘Go on then.’ We stood on the doorstep for an hour talking and then they came in. I said, ‘Do you think God is like a man?’ He said, ‘Yeah.’ ‘But you also agree that there’s the idea of evolution?’ ‘Yeah.’ I went, ‘Well, do the two things marry up?’ At this point the lass that was with him was going, ‘What?’ I went, ‘Surely if God is a man and God has been around more than anything else, if he’s a man he must have evolved from some sort of monkey god. So for a while the universe was run by a giant monkey god.’ And this bloke was looking at the bible and looking at me. He went, ‘Yeah, I suppose.’”

The joke, of course, is that after three hours the Jehovah’s Witnesses were backing away down the path saying, “Well you’ve certainly given us a lot to think about.”

Of late, Noble has also had a lot to think about. Earlier this year his home on a farm north of Melbourne was consumed in the fires which killed 200 people. His wife and daughter happened to be briefly out of the house. They lost everything, but Noble looks on the bright side. “I’ll go, ‘I’d quite like to read that book . . . oh, it’s gone.’ But I’m still alive, so every cloud has a silver lining.”

Though there’s not a lot of laughing matter in a near-death experience, Noble has spent much of the year touring Things, his latest confection which now enters the West End. If a six-week residency in Shaftesbury Avenue sounds like a prodigiously tall order, compare and contrast with his recent arena tour of Australia in which he played to 10,000 people in the round. “If you normally play a 2,500-seat theatre, it was kind of the same. You just had a 2,500-seat theatre on your left, and another on your right, and one in front and one behind.”

For all the challenges to his crown, at 33 Ross Noble remains the one stand-up of his generation who is knocking on the door of greatness. He has the DVD sales to show for it, although the four releases so far - Unrealtime, Sonic Waffle, Randomist and Fizzy Logic - are of course purely notional snapshots of the live shows. Without much of a script and with a new front row to play off each night, Noble is the one comedian whom you can see two nights on the trot and have a sporting chance of hearing not a single joke twice. There is no discernible evidence of an actual routine, only virtuoso unruliness, a random slalom governed by the surreal twists and jags of a lateral logician. The script, such as it is, “is basically like a few words written on a bit of paper.” He’s not quite sure himself what constitutes pre-written material. “If I come up with an idea before I go onstage and think, 'I’ll talk about that,' is that then material? I find it really hard to know when to film it.”

Like a fiendish Sudoku puzzle, there must be some kind of undetectable substructure. Why else would he so fervently believe in junking material the minute it’s broadcast? “I think it’s shocking if people put out a DVD and then keep doing the material. As soon as you’ve recorded something, that’s it. Even though the ideas can develop and you could probably keep developing them, you just think, ‘Draw a line in the sand and then come up with new stuff.’ It would just be stupid because people would have heard it. There’s a million things to talk about. You can become too attached to stuff.”

For similar reasons Noble has astutely avoided the many lucrative offers to do his own television show. Give or take appearances on Live at the Apollo and the odd Have I Got News for You, he stands alongside Eddie Izzard as the least televised star in the comic firmament. “It’s not that I won’t do TV,” he says. “It’s not that I can’t. I’m not anti-telly. I’m pro-live. I think that’s the best way of describing it. I only do stuff where I feel I’m not being hemmed in.”

It makes a lot of sense that, in his early teens, Noble started out as a juggler. “I could do five balls in the air and I could do four clubs. I was working on five clubs.” He practised obsessively for hours on end. He also unicycled. These days he juggles ideas, unicycles thoughts. “It’s fine for you,” he told the audience the first time I saw him live. “I have to put up with this shit in my head all the time.”

Being Noble is a chronic condition. When he was seven or eight his parents, both teachers, took him and his older sister on their first foreign holiday. They drove from Cramlington outside Newcastle down to the ferry in Kent. “Basically I grew up in a new town, a real Milton Keynes type place, and it was so… not dull but there was no outside excitement. Apparently I talked non-stop from the minute we left our house. We went on a cross-channel ferry and my head nearly exploded. It was one of the five-hour crossings. And by the end of it they were just going, ‘Please can you just go to sleep? Just please please stop.’ When I was a kid I thought it was like a real problem. I tried to suppress it for a while.”

At school they told him that “this would be good if it was directed in some sort of positive way”. He was dyslexic, though he prefers not to shout about it. “It’s just become quite fashionable to be dyslexic and I find that slightly unpleasant. Everyone you meet, ‘Oh I’m slightly dyslexic.’ I could have been a lot worse.” Izzard, who riffs in a similar freeform style, is dyslexic too. For the record Noble does read – slowly – but gives fiction a wide berth. “Fiction is lost on me because it takes so long. Probably the joy of reading a book would be creating the pictures in your mind."

He got an A in performing arts at GCSE, a C in something else and failed the rest. “From a very young age I always envisaged myself doing a job that wouldn’t matter what qualifications I’ve got.” Initially, that job was going to be in the circus – hence the juggling and unicycling -  until, aged 14, he won a ticket to go to a comedy show compered by Jack Dee. “It wasn’t until I saw that that I just went, 'Ah there’s people that actually…'” The sentence, like many of Noble’s, remains unfinished as he scampers off in pursuit of another thought.

Within a year he had done his first open slot. He was compering on his third gig. He worked all over the North. “When I first started, I had a suitcase full of crappy props. I had jokes and stuff which I thought were ideas and themes and as soon as that stopped working I’d go, ‘Hey, what about this crazy thing?’” By the time he tried his luck in London at 18, the props had been whittled down to a copy of the Highway Code. “In the back of the Highway Code it says, ‘If you get caught driving whilst disqualified the punishment is six months in prison,’ and then in brackets, ‘or 12 months in Scotland.' It’s such a brilliant joke. I only had it so that people knew I wasn’t bullshitting. Because I kept forgetting my Highway Code all the time, I would turn up to wherever I was doing the gig, find a newsagent, buy a copy of the Highway Code. So for a while when people came round my flat there were like a hundred copies of the Highway Code. And then I got a moped like a pizza bike thing and got stopped by the police one night and they asked me to open the box on the back and I opened the box and there was like 50 copies of the Highway Code. 'Why have you got these?' 'Just being on the safe side...'"

The capital was not initially welcoming. There were rats wherever he lived and hurdles wherever he worked. “You’ve done it for a few years and you turn up in London and you’ve got these people that run not particularly great comedy clubs going, ‘Yeah you can do five minutes for free.’ A lot of acts from the North do go, ‘Just don’t play London.’ It’s like if you train to be a plumber and you are working every day fixing people’s pipes and then all of a sudden somebody goes, 'Right, well you can now join those apprentice plumbers over there and sit your plumbing exams because you are not affiliated with the London Guild of Plumbers.” I just came down and bit the bullet. Luckily there was enough word of mouth.”

By 23 he was nominated for a Perrier award in Edinburgh. Two years later he had his first West End run. “That was the one that I just went, 'This is mental.' I was trying to get my head round the fact that I was in the theatre next to Chicago. But now it’s just like doing a tour but you don’t have to travel.”

The shrewd thing about steering clear of television is that, unless you invest in another ticket, you can’t just catch him next week. Unlike Ken Dodd, who has to be dragged offstage way past bedtime, Noble could yak on indefinitely but is careful to leave the audience wanting more. “There are certain performers who just go, ‘I’m enjoying this, I’ll stay on for hours.’ But that’s kind of selfish. As much as I’d like to go on and do five hours, I’m aware of the fact that it’s just as rude to stay on. If they’ve paid for their ticket, in your head you’re going, ‘Oh they’re getting value for money.’ Not if every half hour onstage they are paying more for a babysitter.”

Clamber into Ross Noble's webyrinth here.

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