Comedian Tim Vine on Elvis Presley, his new show and writing jokes

As a teenager he aspired to be a pop star rather than a comedian and he joined several bands, including The Flared Generation alongside his brother (the broadcaster Jeremy Vine).

“I wanted to be a pop star, but I didn’t have a way of working out how that was done other than writing lots and lots of songs. I did hardly any gigs I just wrote songs and somehow thought that was leading somewhere.”

His pop music career didn’t get off the ground and instead he found himself gravitating towards stand-up comedy, which has been his mainstay for the past 30 years.

And this spring he’s back on the road with his new show, Breeeep!, which includes dates in Harrogate, Leeds, Wakefield and York and sees him team up once again with comedy magician John Archer.

The tour was originally planned for 2020 but, well, we all know what happened next.

Fans, though, will be pleased to hear he’s not used the pandemic to try and reinvent himself.

“The people who’ve enjoyed the shows before will be glad to know I’m not choosing this moment in my career to switch to satire. It’s still silly behaviour and short, silly jokes and silly songs, and before you know it, it’s over,” he tells me.

It's sometimes said that people turn to comedy in troubled times, though Vine believes it has a more timeless appeal.

“There should be more laughter in general. Apparently a child laughs on average 200 times a day and when you get to an adult it drops down to about 14, or something like that. Laughter is the lifeblood of being a kid and then somewhere along the line we’re told to ‘grow up’ or ‘don’t be childish’, which is such a terrible phrase. I think we should be more childish really.”

Vine grew up in the South East and is one of three siblings, all of whom have made their mark in the entertainment business – along with brother Jeremy, his sister Sonya is an actress turned artist.

He describes his parents as “very humble, lovely, straightforward people”. His father was a college lecturer and a lay preacher at the family’s local church which may explain where his own inclination towards performing comes from.

“He had an audience with his students and he had an audience when he preached and he used to be very funny in his sermons. He was a very funny man, my dad, so perhaps it came from him.”

Vine found he enjoyed being on stage and it was in 1991, while working in an admin department in Croydon by day, that he started doing gigs at London’s Comedy Café.

“It wasn’t because I wanted to do it as a career I just gradually became interested in stand-up, in the way that someone becomes interested in playing golf and you want to get better at it.”

At the time, London was a hotbed of new, young comedians.

“I remember getting Time Out magazine and seeing this list of all these comedy clubs. And unlike the route into music which I didn’t really understand, you knew very clearly what you had to do with comedy. You rang up one of these clubs and said, ‘can I do an open [mic] spot?’ and they’d put you on a bill doing five minutes. So I did loads of those.”

He honed his craft, and his comedy style, on the club circuit alongside the likes of Harry Hill, Alan Davies and Lee Evans.

“How I ended up doing one-liners I think was just because I wanted to get to the next laugh quicker. I wasn’t comfortable standing there for a great deal of time without a laugh because I thought they were going off me. But it wasn’t really planned. I didn’t have a meeting with myself in the mirror and say ‘right, what we’re going to do chaps is we’re going to go for one-liner after another at high speed.’ It just organically happened.”

The ‘90s comedy scene was characterised by edgy comedians such as Bill Hicks, Chris Morris and Stewart Lee, but this meant Vine could stand out from the crowd. “If you had a particular type of comic and then I came on after them and said ‘black beauty. He’s a dark horse.’ The contrast is quite extreme, and that contrast really helps.”

The key, he says, was ensuring he wasn’t first on the bill. “It’s like starting a car in fourth gear. If you come on saying ‘I’ve got a sponge front door, don’t knock it’…’Velcro, what a rip off,’ the audience is thinking ‘what sort of an evening have we come to?’ So a lot of my comedy deaths were when I was on first.”

Winning the prestigious best newcomer award at the Edinburgh Festival in 1995, helped pave the way for his future success. “It was the first time I’d gone and done an hour-long show and that felt like a moment for me because you can only make a first impression.”

Vine has gone on to become a household name starring in ITV’s The Sketch Show and Lee Mack’s sitcom Not Going Out, and is a popular TV and radio presenter thanks to shows such as Tim Vine Travels Through Time and The Tim Vine Chat Show on BBC Radio 4.

He’s also twice been the winner of Dave's Best Joke of the Edinburgh Fringe, though he says there’s no magic formula to writing funny jokes. “Sometimes you’ll tell a joke and have high hopes for it and it doesn’t work or nobody gets it, and then there’ll be other jokes you think are alright and you go on and it gets an absolute roar… it’s the audience that chooses which jokes I do, so they are the ones who are to blame.”

It is, though, something he’s given a bit of thought to. “I was chatting to Milton Jones about this and I said the truth is I don’t know how to write a good joke. If I knew how to write a good joke that’s all I’d ever write, I wouldn’t bother with the other ones. I know how to write a joke and I know how jokes work, but then you have to try them. And that’s the thrill of it, discovering which ones are funny and which ones are not.”

Breeeep! – is on at King’s Hall, Ilkley, April 20; City Varieties, Leeds, April 26 & 27; Grand Opera House, York, May 27; Harrogate Theatre, June 30 and July 1; Theatre Royal, Wakefield, Sept 19.