Dom Joly's Trigger Happy TV comes to Yorkshire venues on major tour

And on Channel 4, a grown man in a snail costume crawled along a pedestrian crossing. That man was Dom Joly, and his Trigger Happy TV, in the first weeks off 2000, marked the beginning of a beautiful new prankster's paradise.

It brought us the giant mobile phone and shouting in places normally ruled by decorum (he is still regularly confronted by strangers screaming ‘Hello!’ at him) while actors in costumes featured heavily – gorillas attacking cars leaving the zoo or dogs fighting at a flower stall.

Looking back, Joly and co-creator Sam Cadman made the show at a point when camera technology had just become more accessible but before the streaming boom of online platforms.

“I think Trigger Happy happened in a really weird sort of no man's land,” Joly tells the YP today. “There were about three years at the turn of Millennium, and I describe it as like moving from analogue to digital, because before Trigger Happy, certainly in the hidden camera world, there were these awful shows like Beadle's About and Game for a Laugh, which were big cheesy studio shows, and it was just like, ‘oh, here's a bloke who likes his car – let's throw his car in the sea and watch him get angry’. Basically, classic rage-baiting that you'd see online now,” he says.

"Then after us came social media and YouTube, and so in a sense, we were the very first YouTube because the way Trigger Happy was really special was because it was the very first year where you could go and buy a camera. It's called a Sony VX 1000, and we bought it.”

That gave them the freedom to film reams of stuff without a traditional camera crew – often costly and disinterested – and to make mistakes but also shoot scenes which would live long in the comedic canon.

Music was also an important element of the show’s atmosphere, with niche tracks not often heard in mainstream media used to juxtapose the often sorrowful sound of songs such as Nick Drake’s River Man, and surreal, anarchic images.

“The music was so important to me,” he says. “I mean, more important than comedy, really.” Long before the show, he was the vocalist in the band Hang David, which once played New York City’s legendary CBGBs.

"I think Trigger Happy was a way of getting getting me associated myself with songs I just loved. Putting beautiful songs on top of things almost made me think, ‘Oh, I'm part of a band,” he says.

“I thought, I want Trigger Happy to be cool and beautiful. So when we got in the edit, I wanted the whole show to be like a really well-produced album,” he says.

"And the music was generally quite sad because I'm a goth, I'm an ex-goth, and I love sad music, and what I didn't realise is when I finished the first series and I handed it into Channel 4, we were the first comedy show ever, as far as I know, with a soundtrack.”

Last year, Joly and Cadman sold out four dates of 25th anniversary shows so decided to take the skits – The Giant Snail, The Traffic Warden, The Morris Dancer, The Scout, A Gang of Squirrels, and his Big Mobile Phone – on the road to theatres including an upcoming date at Scarborough Spa on Sunday, October 4.

Joly, 58, who is also a travel writing author, will share behind-the-scenes stories and insights on how Trigger Happy TV came to life, but fans can expect some live action too,

Born in 1967 in Beirut, Lebanon, Joly’s family moved to England when he was seven after the civil war began.

“Lebanon's not changed since 1975, it has periods where it all explodes,” he says.

"The most extraordinary thing you think about Lebanon, if you went there, was how normal it is. My boy was there last summer, he a took his summer off uni and he went out to work for my sister, and the Israelis are bombing Beirut airport and he's going to work in East Beirut. It's a very surreal thing, but life just cracks on – and it's one of the greatest countries on earth. Where I lived, you can go skiing in an hour, the beach in an hour, best food in the world, it looks like the south of France. It's an incredible place.”

After studying for a degree in politics and international relations, Joly went into broadcast journalism and was even a diplomat for the European Commission, based in Prague.

When working as a journalist for ITN in Westminster, he says, “I used to ring friends and just say, ‘Look, I'm interviewing Paddy Ashdown at 11 o'clock, come down’. And they'd come down as clowns and have a fight behind and stuff.”

Then there was the one that got him the sack. "I was interviewing David Mellor, who was the culture and sports secretary, and I got someone to kick a football, and it wasn't supposed to hit him, but it smacked him in the face.”

He wasn’t even trying to get a bank of footage ready for his future as a hidden camera comic – he was just bored and “amusing myself,” says Joly.

It was a sliding doors moment with Cadman that eventually led to Trigger Happy – he was working behind the bar at a pub in Primrose Hill and, hearing Joly talk about how he needed a camera man, leaned over to say “I can do that”.

Trigger Happy TV first aired on January 14, 2000, when Joly was already in his 30s.

"I spent my whole 20s looking for something that I wanted to do and then suddenly I thought, ‘This is it. I like doing this’. I think because I didn't come from a traditional comedy background – I've never been to Edinburgh, I wasn't in the Footlights. I wasn't Oxbridge, I wasn't all those, I'd never done Week Ending on Radio 4 – I think I came from a very different place. Firstly, I didn't know the rules. Secondly, almost all comedians before then were live performers, stand-ups who then went to telly. Trigger Happy was invented for telly, it was a telly format, so I couldn't then just become a stand-up. So I think we're different in a lot of ways for that and also just the fact that I was 31, I think, when it happened, meant I had a bit of a hinterland which wasn't comedy.”

It was a huge success over three series from 2000 to 2003. Joly went on to make World Shut Your Mouth and two series of This is Dom Joly for the BBC, two series of of the prime time Fool Britannia for ITV1, before in 2016 he brought back an updated series of Trigger Happy to Channel.

A quarter of a century on from the first broadcast, it has a cross-generational appeal as younger people and the original audience turn up to live shows.

One example sticks in the memory. “This kid came up. He was about 21 and he he got domething signed, and then he said, ‘Can I just say, my dad didn't laugh much, but the only time I saw him laugh was when he and I watched Trigger Happy together’. And I said, ‘Well, that's just so nice’. And he said, ‘I think you're a fan of his as well’. And I said, ‘What?’ And he said, ‘Oh, my dad was the lead singer of Talk Talk, Mark Hollis’. That's my favourite band of all time. So things like that are amazing.”

Dom Joly’s Trigger Happy TV: The 25th Anniversary Tour comes to Scarborough Spa Theatre on October 4; and in 2027 at Harrogate Theatre on March 11; Leeds City Varieties on May 8; The Princess Alexandra Auditorium in Yarm on May 22; and King's Hall in Ilkley on June 4. Tickets: www.awaywithmedia.com/tours/dom-joly