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Dom Joly

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Dom Joly
Born (1967-11-15) November 15, 1967 (age 56)[1]
Lebanon Beirut, Lebanon
Occupation(s)Political Researcher, Comedian and Writer

Dominic John Joly (born 15 November 1967)[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.

Early life

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.

Education

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 degree in Arabic and International Politics.

Early career

Following university his work included:

Political career

Main article: Teddy Bear Alliance

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 fifth out of nine candidates.[2] The Alliance is not registered as a political party under the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000. .

Television

After being recruited to work as a producer on ITN's House to House programme, a political discussion programme on Channel 4, Joly went on to work for The Mark Thomas Comedy Product because of his political knowledge. He then created his own show for the Paramount Comedy Channel called 'War of the Flea'. Discovering that working in comedy was both easier and more fun than his previous employment, Joly began to develop Trigger Happy TV which had a similar structure to 'War of the Flea'. He has recently appeared as a celebrity participant in reality television programme Deadline and was a finalist on the show. The show saw ten celebrities compiling a gossip magazine where each week, one would get sacked by Janet Street-Porter.

Recently Dom has hinted in his articles that he is making a new TV series titled "GSOH" (Good Sense of Humour). However this has not been confirmed.

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 and earned critical acclaim, with one reviewer Bob Croft, LA TImes calling Joly "the funniest man in Britain."

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[3]. 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 BBC1 as World Shut Your Mouth. Featuring all new material and an increased budget relative to Trigger Happy, allowing for pranks to be performed in different countries, the show was critically acclaimed and gained a further huge fan-base.[citation needed] 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 U.S., Russia, Australia, Europe and India. During the first documentary the pair explored Miami drinking styles, then met up with some hillbillies in the Appalachians tasting moonshine, and visited a gay cowboy bar in Atlanta 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, Mexico and Europe before ending the tour in 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.

The DVD was released on the 1st October 2007.

Happy Now?

Dom Joly is currently working on a new hidden-camera sketch show (presumably in the vein of Trigger Happy TV and Dom Joly's Happy Hour). The show is titled Happy Now? A trailer is currently linked from Dom Joly's blog.[4]

Journalism

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, Malaysia and Corsica 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 from South Africa, Spain, The Arctic Circle, Paris and Fort William. In 2007 he started writing a monthly article for FHM under the title "Dom Joly's Life Lessons Learned". He has also written for Esquire Magazine, GQ, The Mail on Sunday 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. Letters to my Golf Club is due to be published on 8th October 2007.

Joly recently starred in the ITV2 reality programme Deadline with Janet Street Porter where he had to become a paparazzo. Amongst other highlights he was punched by Lily Allen, hit over the head with a guitar by Pete Doherty, called a "persistent little fat fuck" by Pierce Brosnan and snorted vodka with Ingrid Tarrant.

Music

Joly was the singer in a Indie band called Hang David in the early Nineties. He was a Goth and said that he looked more like Robert Smith than Robert Smith. Joly personally selects all the soundtracks for his TV shows. All three soundtracks albums for Trigger Happy TV were huge commercial hits. He has also directed a couple of music videos- Ian Brown- Golden Gaze Joly made the whole video in one take making Brown run through the streets of London being chased by gorillas, frog-men and ninjas before he took refuge in the Prince Charles Cinema. WigWam- wigwam This duo composing of Betty Boo and Alex James from Blur asked Joly to direct their first single. Joly decided to pay a weird homage to The Beatles' concert on a roof and filmed the band performing in cat costumes on the roof of a building opposite the Groucho Club in Soho.

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. Joly is left-handed.

It was revealed in Would I Lie To You? that he attended the same school as Osama Bin Laden; this was widely received as a joke (as the aim of the TV Show is to trick people into guessing true or false to facts of people`s lives), but it was revealed to be true. Joly said he is tracking a photograph featuring the two.[5]

Notable Quotes

  • "No, I'm trying to download the Wok Wok!" - Big mobile (Trigger Happy TV)
  • "I've been attacked by wild Shih Tzus!"- (Trigger Happy TV): the Mark and Mike years.
  • "I was young, dumb and full of glum." On his mispent youth as a Goth.
  • "I don't come to your office and tell you what to do" - Stand up in the Comedy Store
  • "And I suffered a shattering nervous breakdown....whicha was difficult" - Various Pranks
  • "Ciao!!" - Mobile Phone Prank
  • "Do you want some more, do you?" - Various Pranks
  • "Helloooooooooooooo!!" - Mobile Phone Prank (Trigger Happy Tv)
  • "I want it clean on my patch." - Street Cleaner (Trigger Happy Tv)
  • "See you at the Baftas!!" - (This is Dom Joly)
  • 'I had what you might call a shattering nervous breakdown." - Insane gardener (Trigger Happy TV)
  • "Vous retournerez ce soir a la maison...dans une ambulance" football hooligan learning French in a park (Trigger Happy TV)
  • "MR GUND???" - Various Pranks
  • "Where...what do you mean where? I didn't ask where when I got to Normandy, I just killed Germans!" - Grumpy Old Man (World Shut Your Mouth)
  • "Have you ever...you know just wondered about the terrible, all encompassing darknesss of death that is our mutual future?" The Goth to a bemused picnicking couple who'd just said good morning to him (World Shut Your Mouth)
  • "Up yours Tiger!" Dom Joly's Happy Hour
  • Dom as hermit "At night, in the cave, I can hear the screams."
  • Old lady picknicker- "What, from the wild animals?"
  • Dom- "no....it's me."
  • Standing in front of a famous landscape or monument, such as the Pyramids of Giza, he turns to another person - " That ... is shit" (World Shut Your Mouth)

References

  1. ^ a b "Dom Joly". The Internet Movie Database. Retrieved 2007-01-12.
  2. ^ "Guaardian Unlimited Politics, Kensington and Chelsea". The Guardian. Retrieved 2007-09-27.
  3. ^ "Dom Joly Biography". Chortle.
  4. ^ http://www.domjoly.tv/
  5. ^ "Osama Bin Laden and I went to school together, reveals Dom Joly".
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