Dom Joly: World tour with a difference for the holidaying funny man

If someone were to suggest they were going to go on a national tour, selling tickets to strangers for a show in which they shared their holiday snaps and anecdotes, you would probably call the nearest hospital.

Unless, of course, that person was Dom Joly.

The TV star is currently on the road on his first ever live tour, which stops off in Yorkshire next week. As a show title, Welcome to Wherever I Am, could be considered vaguely offensive by an audience – stand-up performers generally like to persist with the fallacy that their show is special for that particular audience, in any particular town. Some even adapt their material ever so slightly to include locally-based humour; Michael McIntyre, when he came to Leeds with his roadshow last year, did a good 10 minutes on the one-way system of the city.

Joly, however, isn’t aiming a slight at his audience with the title – it is a fair description of a stand-up show which is essentially a travelogue of some of the strangest places you can imagine finding yourself as a tourist.

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While the neighbours might invite you round to see their snaps from Magaluf, Joly’s travels take in Chernobyl, Beirut and North Korea.

“Going somewhere with a spa would be my idea of hell,” says a cheery Joly.

“I like going to places where, when I tell people, they look shocked and say ‘why would you ever want to go there?’.”

So it is that this a man who likes to travel alone, set off to visit some of the least tourist-friendly places on Earth.

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It is a type of travel that some have labelled as “dark tourism” – people visiting places associated with the darker side of human nature, which sees tourists pitching up in war-torn countries or places where disaster has struck. Joly insists that’s not his motivation.

“I’m not a spectator to disaster. What I’m really interested in is proper travel, going to places that people wouldn’t normally go. Everything has become so homogenised that it’s possible to travel to places and feel like there is literally nothing different to experience that you wouldn’t at home. It’s not about just being able to say that I have been there, but about the experience of seeing some of theses places,” he says.

The attendant problem with seeking out the places the more rational among us would avoid, is the element of danger. Surely no-one in their right mind would consider Chernobyl a holiday destination?

People ask if it’s dangerous, but the truth is I have felt more threatened on a Saturday night in Cirencester than in lots of the supposedly dangerous places I have visited,” he says.

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“Because the places I go to don’t experience tourists, they are generally really happy to meet someone who has come to visit. In Chernobyl, I gauged how dangerous it was by how metallic my tongue started to taste. The guide I had with me thought I was insane.”

Born and raised in Lebanon, where his parents ran an import and export business, Joly was shipped off to boarding school when he was 10, before studying Arabic and International Relations at university. He was at his parents’ home in 1975 in the midst of the civil war and remembers nights spent cowering in the basement. It’s easy to see where a penchant for travel to interesting destinations came from.

Welcome to Wherever I Am, is the latest twist in a varied career which has seen him become famous as a latter-day Jeremy Beadle-esque prankster in Trigger Happy and as a survivor of the Australian rainforest in I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here. He still has people asking where the big phone is, even though Trigger Happy was last filmed in 2002.

“I really don’t mind it – it’s something I’m really proud of,” he says.

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As far as taking part in the celebrity jungle show, in 2010, Joly says that everyone begged him not to do it, but being a contrarian, he decided to take part “because I wanted to lose weight”.

He says: “I regarded it as this weird idea – it costs the production company millions to make and it’s for a group of Z-list celebrities, but it also fascinated me and I realised it was an experience that money really couldn’t buy.

“Plus, I lost two-and-a-half stone, so it was entirely worth it. I’m a Celebrity was essentially my WeightWatchers.”

Welcome to Wherever I Am, Sheffield City Hall, June 12, Harrogate Theatre, June 13, York Grand Opera House, June 14.