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Dom Joly

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Dom Joly
File:Domjoly1.jpg
Dom Joly on Trigger Happy TV
Born15 November, 1968[1]
Beirut, Lebanon
Occupation(s)Comedian and Writer

Dominic John Joly (born 15 November 1968)[1] is an award-winning British television comedian and journalist. He is best known as the star of Trigger Happy TV, a hidden camera show, and Dom Joly's Happy Hour, where he explored the drinking habits of other cultures.

Biography

Joly was born in Beirut, Lebanon and speaks Arabic and French in addition to English. While in Lebanon he attended Brummana High School in Brummana.

Between 1977 and 1982 Joly attended the Dragon School in Oxford, England (where he had his shrapnel collection confiscated), in 1983 to 1987 he was at Haileybury College, a famous boys' independent boarding school in Hertfordshire, England, and then in 1988 to 1991 the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, where he got a First Class Honours Degree in Arabic and International Politics.

Early career

Following university his work included:

In the 1997 UK general election Dom Joly formed the Teddy Bear Alliance ("Mr Blair, where do you stand on fleas?") and changed his name to Edward 'Teddy' Bear. Hiring out hundreds of teddy bear costumes, he staged mock protests in Westminster and came fourth beating the UK Independence Party .

Television

After being recruited to work as a researcher for The Mark Thomas Comedy Product for his political knowledge, Joly then worked for two years as Producer on ITN's House to House programme, a political discussion programme on Channel 4. Discovering that working in comedy was both easier and more fun than his previous employment, Joly began to develop Trigger Happy TV.

Trigger Happy TV

Joly's anarchic surreal sketches first started appearing as interstitials during advert breaks on the British Paramount Comedy Channel.

In 1999 following a successful fifteen minute pilot on Comedy Lab, Channel 4 commissioned Joly to make a TV series. Trigger Happy TV was born. Joly made two series and two Christmas specials before announcing that he wanted to do other things. Joly was nominated for three British Comedy Awards for the show, won the Silver Rose of Montreux, the BBC2 award for Best Comedy and the Loaded/Goodfella' Comedy newcomer of the Year.

The three DVDs for the shows were all best-sellers as were the soundtrack albums that Joly had personally selected and mixed himself.

A spoof documentary about Joly followed, called Being Dom Joly which was produced and written by Joly himself. This aired prior to screenings of Trigger Happy TV in the USA.

This new series of Trigger Happy TV was made for a US audience in 2003, and changed the format of British Trigger Happy TV in that it featured a band of different "comedians", who performed skits without Joly. Though Joly did cameo sporadically on the show, he was very unhappy with the programme and called it "Trigger Happy by numbers - take joke, put it in slo-mo, add fluffy animals and random indie soundtrack - it was made by uncaring idiots." He had a producer credit on the show but disassociated himself with the project.

2003 BBC contract

Following the success of Trigger Happy TV on Channel 4, Joly was secured by the BBC for a rumoured £3 million[2]. However his first show for the BBC, This is Dom Joly, a spoof chatshow for the BBC in which Joly played an appallingly egotistical media character who had the same name as him thereby confusing a lot of the audience as to what was real and what wasn't, did not achieve the same success as Trigger Happy TV, leading to the hidden camera format being revamped on BBC as World Shut Your Mouth. Despite featuring all new material and an increased budget relative to Trigger Happy, allowing for pranks to be performed in different countries, the show sat awkwardly on BBC1 but was critically acclaimed. It was later released on DVD.

Dom Joly's Excellent Adventure

During 2005, Dom starred in a one-off documentary as part of a series on Sky One. Dom Joly's Excellent Adventure involved him travelling back to Beirut for the first time since he left in the late 1980s, and embarking on a road trip through the Syrian Desert to find a cave where he scrawled his name in as a child, which he discovered after much searching. His next project for Sky One was a critically acclaimed spoofy travel series supposedly investigating attitudes to alcohol around the world, entitled Dom Joly's Happy Hour.

Dom Joly's Happy Hour

Dom Joly's Happy Hour was a surreal, spoof travel investigation in which Joly teams up with his friend, Canadian digital artist, Peter Wilkins to explore drinking habits around the world. They travelled to the Southern States of the USA, Russia, Australia and Europe. During the first documentary the pair explored Miami drinking styles, then met up with some hillbillies in the Appalachians tasting moonshine before taking on the Christian right in Alabama's dry counties. After that Joly hilariously visited Russia, trying 80% proof homemade vodka known as Samogon. He explains "You have an hour where you feel you can take on the world, then you black out. But because it’s almost pure alcohol, no hangover - sadly because I can’t remember it, I don’t know if it’s worth doing." They then visited Australia and Mexico before ending the tour in Europe and India. It was described in the Guardian as "a brilliantly surreal take on the tired format that is the TV travel show."

The programme included a lot more than just attempting to discover foreign drinking habits - for instance, in Russia Dom received a haircut from a nude woman. Another instance found Joly and Wilkins catching crocodiles in Australia. In Russia, they performed their own version of a morris dance before a bemused dance academy.

"The premise of investigating alcohol is ridiculous," Joly admitted during an interview. "I wanted an excuse to travel the world, but they (Sky TV) wanted a focal point. So I said as a joke: 'Well, I quite like drinking.' And they went, 'Fantastic, that’s brilliant!'" It was the best blag in the history of television.

Journalism

Dom Joly writes for various publications. His eclectic weekly column for the Independent on Sunday covers subjects as varied as Middle East politics, fifty foot chickens and stalking Liz Hurley. He is also a regular travel writer for The Sunday Times and has written about trips to Costa Rica, Dominica, Syria, Northern California, Vietnam, Canada, Miami, Scotland, Italy, Maldives, South Africa, Zanzibar, New Zealand and Malaysia. At the end of 2006 readers of the paper were asked to vote on where Joly would go every week. He travelled the globe performing various adrenaline sports whilst making a weekly podcast. In 2007 Joly started writing a monthly article for FHM under the title "Dom Joly's Life Lessons Learned". He has also written for Esquire Magazine, GQ, and The London Evening Standard.

Joly wrote a spoof autobiography called "Look at me, Look at me!" which was published by Bloomsbury in 2004. He is currently writing a book of letters sent to golf clubs around the world for Transworld Publishing.

Personal life

Joly is married to Stacey, a Canadian graphic designer. The couple have a daughter named Parker, a son named Jackson and a black Labrador called Huxley. He is obsessed with golf, scuba diving and photography.

References

  1. ^ a b "Dom Joly". The Internet Movie Database. Retrieved 2007-01-12.
  2. ^ "Dom Joly Biography". Chortle.
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