Mark Steel: ‘It’s getting harder to contact human beings to deal with anything’

[prev] …loved it because they’d all goad it and it would go ‘**** off! **** off!’ I felt really vindicated, because sometimes I get these stories and I think ‘Have I just made this up? Have I embellished this along the way?’.

HOW DID YOU FIND THAT STORY IN THE FIRST PLACE?
It was originally from a book that I picked up in a bookshop in Whitehaven run by this brilliant, eccentric chap. It had a load of quotes in it to do with the power station – because Whitehaven is dominated by Sellafield – including a truly magnificent one from the manager of the whole station, who said: ‘People worry about nuclear waste, but what they don’t realise is that it does disappear of its own accord. Some of it disappears within 20 minutes, and some of it takes 3,000 years, but it does all go eventually…’

DO YOU CONSIDER THIS COMEDY ‘POLITICAL’?
It’s not consciously that. I do love the humanity, and the individuality of towns. I love the fact that everywhere is different – which I suppose is political, because the trend is for everything to be made the same, and to look identical. But also the world of call centres, the fact that it’s getting harder to contact human beings to deal with anything, cinemas and retail parks which look identical, places losing their humanity and identity. All that. But maybe it’s social more than political. I just find these little quirks brilliant. As an example, I was up in Finchley – because even London is like this if you break it down into its 300 villages – and I use Twitter to say I’m coming up to a place and to find out who knows anything about it. And literally hundreds of people said: ‘You’ve got to mention Horace…’. So I looked up Horace of Finchley, and in the local paper there was an obituary of him, sadly, as he’d died recently. He was this big, old, black bloke, who was homeless and eventually living in a hostel, and he used to wander around Finchley, and go up to people randomly and say: ‘Good day to you, sir! Good day to you madam! Best of luck to you, sir!’ And that’s all he did, but the people of Finchley absolutely adored him. I put a picture of him up at the show, and the whole place erupted. ‘Horace! It’s Horace!’ It was just brilliant. There was no-one as famous as Horace in that room at that point. If you put up a picture of Rihanna, there’d be someone in the room who didn’t know who it was. But everybody knew Horace. And they started chanting: ‘Good day to you, sir!’ So I said: ‘Is that all he used to say?’ Then there was all this giggling, and one guy said: ‘He did sometimes say something else…’ They all giggled again. So I said: ‘What did he say?’ And the bloke went: ‘Well, sometimes he’d come up to you and say: “**** off you ****!”’ Bless ‘im! I just love that. In this world where everything’s being made to look so corporate and identical, people cling on to the little quirks that are just theirs.

YOU STARTED OFF IN LONDON IN THE EARLY 80S – I IMAGINE THAT MUST HAVE HAD ITS QUIRKS…
We lived in a squat that was absolutely, staggeringly surreal. It was a whole road of squats, and I was one of the very few people who had an actual job. It was a very straight job in an office for London Transport with these middle-aged people who would sit there all day saying stuff like: ‘So, what did you have for dinner last night?’ ‘Oh, we had apple crumble and actually…’ One night we’d gone round someone’s house, and everyone was drinking and taking drugs, and then at about 3am, a Satanist picked up this axe and started maniacally hacking away at the wall, chanting a load of Satanist stuff, until he severed a cable and all the electricity went off. And everyone just got up and thought: ‘Oh well, I suppose we’d better go home then’. I don’t even remember thinking it was that peculiar a night. But I was sat there the next day in the office, while they were talking about the gravy they’d had last night, thinking: ‘I wonder what you’d think of my evening..?’ It was absolutely bonkers.

HOW DID YOU GET INTO COMEDY?
I normally make something up at this point, but I’m not going to do that. Well, I could do… I used to be a member of a snooker club. I never seemed to be able to do very well, but was entered into a competition and in the first round was drawn against this bloke who was the Kent champion. It was the first to five frames, and he just won all five frames. But he would take absolutely ages taking his shots. He’d be there for twenty minutes while I was waiting. So, I just started telling jokes about this bloke – there was quite an audience there – and people started laughing at the jokes, and I thought: ‘I’m better at the jokes than playing snooker’. Then he missed a shot, but I was half way through a joke, so I said: ‘Sorry mate, I haven’t reached the punchline yet’. And the local manager happened to be there and booked me for a regular slot at the snooker club. The bloke I’d been playing was Ronnie O’Sullivan.*

IS THAT MADE UP?
It might be.

Mark Steel appears at the Key Theatre on Thursday, 20 November at 8 pm. For more information and to book tickets, call 01733 207239 or visit www.vivacitypeterborough.com

* Editor’s note: Ronnie O’Sullivan is famed for the speed with which he takes his shots. At the time Mark Steel was embarking on his comedy career, O’Sullivan would have been seven.