PURR-fect gentleman

Griff Rhys Jones is letting the cat out of the bag about his life as the Cardiff-born comedian, actor, writer and broadcaster heads back out on tour. Marion McMullen learns more

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What is the oddest venue you have ever played? Mel [Smith] and I did Live Aid, which was a pretty bizarre sort of experience. It was like walking out on the deck of an aircraft carrier.

You just kept walking until you realised that you couldn't walk any further. It was a genuinely weird experience because you made a joke and then you had to wait because the people near the front would laugh, then the laughter would travel all the way to the very back. It felt like a huge Mexican wave of laughter.

I kept thinking about what promoter Harvey Goldsmith told us before we went on.

He grabbed me by the lapels and said, “Keep it f****** short,” so I was standing there thinking, “This is taking too long.”

Do you get nervous before going on stage?

I get nervous in the early stages because I’m wondering what I’m going to be saying once a tour starts. It’s never a walk in the park.

It’s fun if it’s more of a walk on a tightrope. I did work with one stage manager who said to me, “It’s amazing because what you do, Griff, is different every night”.

After one show he told me, “You left out the big punchlines tonight’.

Some nights I’d be so keen on moving on to something else that I never got to the resolution of the very first story I started, which left people wondering what on earth was supposed to be happening.

Some people go on stage and perform exactly what they've written every night. I’m sure that would be a much better way of doing it but I don’t always do it myself. I get sidetracked by talking about things like what happened to me in the car park on the way to the theatre.