Comic Ross Noble is renowned for his improvised flights of fancy during his stand-up routines.
Now, in a new Dave travelogue, Ross Noble: Freewheeling (Tuesday, Oct 29), he is improvising an entire travel series as he puts himself at the beck and call of his Twitter followers and sets off into the unknown on his beloved motorbike.
TV&Satellite Week magazine caught up with him to find out more…
In Freewheeling, I take off around Britain on my motorcycle and Tweet where I am… People come down to see me and stuff just happens. It’s a bit like when I talk to members of the audience at a live show, but instead of asking ‘What’s your name?’ I’ll go and visit them.
In one episode, I went to a monkey sanctuary… I pretended to present a wildlife programme, but instead being about real monkeys, it was all people wearing monkey costumes. In another, someone tweeted that they worked in a strip club, so we staged an impromptu Antiques Roadshow there and asked people to bring along stuff they had lying around the house.
It’s all made up as we go along… As a rule TV is very structured, so when Dave gave me an opportunity to make a show without constraints, I jumped at the chance. Nothing in this show is pre-planned or faked, and the bottom line is it’s really good fun.
The US talk show host David Letterman is my comedy hero… He used to deconstruct the talk show by doing silly stunts and not following the rules. Hopefully, with this, I’m deconstructing the travel show.
I talk to strangers, even in London… It’s partly because I spent a lot of time in Australia, where people naturally do that. The whole idea of ‘Don’t make eye contact, they might be a nutter’ doesn’t figure in my world – although it does help when you’ve got a film crew, because without them you’re just an odd bloke dicking about in the street.
I can’t watch those scripted reality shows… I managed one episode of Geordie Shore and I got 10 minutes into The Only Way Is Essex. The people in them are just human puppets, with no control over how they’re portrayed. With Freewheeling, not only am I in the show, I’m also deciding what the show is, which is the next evolution of the reality show.
Having kids allows you to be spontaneous… My eldest daughter, Elfie, is about to turn five, and what’s brilliant about kids is that they haven’t worked out what the rules are. So she’ll be like: ‘Can I climb that?’ and I’m like: ‘Yeah!’ When I play with her, she’s so in the moment.
I love living in the country… My wife is Australian and we lived outside Melbourne for a few years, but moved to Kent three years ago. I miss Australia, but we got caught in the 2009 bush fires. It’s all a little bit dangerous there, so I’m enjoying the wetness of the UK.
