UK Edition
Russell Howard interview: 'Britain is seen as a laughing stock'
Earlier this year, Russell Howard broke a long-standing record, set by Frank Sinatra in the Seventies, by performing 10 consecutive nights at the Royal Albert Hall. Ol’ Blue Eyes only ever managed eight. This remarkable run was part of Howard’s Round the World tour, which took the comedian across Europe and on to Dubai, Canada, America, China (where Howard played the biggest stand-up gig in the country’s history), New Zealand and Australia. Every one of the 87 dates sold out, and the show has been recorded for a coveted Netflix comedy special.
Critics still occasionally turn their noses up at Howard’s perceived lack of edge – and, OK, some jokes early on in his career about his family’s idiosyncrasies were pretty gentle – but no one can seriously deny him his place at comedy’s top table.
Should you need further evidence of Howard’s popularity, try this: 65 million people have watched a single clip from Howard’s 2014 tour, Wonderbox, online. Sixty-five million people, for goodness’ sake.
Having spent so many months on the road this year, Howard could easily be forgiven for putting his feet up this winter. Not a bit of it, though. Since returning home, the 37-year-old has been beavering away on The Russell Howard Hour, a weekly current affairs series that begins tonight on Sky One, which will feature interviews with, among others, Jamie Oliver, Sarah Millican and Naomi Klein, the activist and author.
“I really want to talk about those things that make me shout at the TV,” he says, when we meet for lunch in Soho. “At the moment, if I was trying to make a show that was frothy, I couldn’t do it. Absolutely the aim is still to be funny but it’s about having a little something beyond that.”
Fans of Russell Howard’s Good News, which ran for 10 series on BBC Three between 2009 and 2015, will no doubt spot similarities. Howard is still picking apart the week’s news in an amusing way, hoping to find some levity amid the avalanche of bleak bulletins. But an hour in his company confirms that The Russell Howard Hour will be an altogether more serious affair.
So while Howard is certainly still chipper, nattering away in that unmistakable Bristol accent about his cousin’s recent stag do or his terrible dancing, he only really comes alive when the conversation turns to politics and the problems faced by today’s society. He is armed with damning statistics about child malnourishment, alcohol abuse and domestic violence in the UK. “These are not easy things to be funny about,” he says, between bites of a cheeseburger. “But if you can get it, it’s an amazingly compelling thing.”
But is this what his fans, who are used to hearing Howard make puerile jokes on panel shows such as Mock the Week and 8 Out of 10 Cats, really want? Is he not in danger of alienating his audience? “Because I don’t wear a suit, and have such a horrible boy band face, people assume that I’m not doing satirical material,” he says. “But we covered everything from the NHS to the tampon tax in the last two series of Good News.”
Last month, the joint winner of this year’s best comedy award at the Edinburgh Festival, Hannah Gadsby, announced that she was quitting comedy because she felt that the art form – the pressure to make people laugh – compromised any serious message that she wanted to convey. But Howard disagrees. “I think sometimes we do comedy down,” he says. “There are definitely examples where it can be extraordinary, where it can cut through and make you think as well as laugh. I always go back to Bill Hicks’s routine about Rodney King. That’s how I learnt that a black guy had had the s – t kicked out of him by the police and that it happens quite a lot in America. This kid from Bristol learnt that through a comedian, not through the news.”
Recent political earthquakes – Brexit and Trump – combined with Howard travelling the world has awoken something in him. “Britain is perceived as a laughing stock and a mess,” he says. “It’s a very scary and divided place.”
But don’t worry: Howard assures me that his new show isn’t just a vehicle for him and his chums to peddle a left-wing agenda.
“The last thing you want to do is preach to the converted,” he says. “What you want to do is talk about issues from a non-political point of view, from a human point of view. I don’t want to do a rabidly left-wing show. I think it’s much more interesting to turn the knife on yourself.”
So is this the moment that Russell Howard finally grows up?
Well, let’s not be too hasty; there will, he says, still be plenty of smut on The Russell Howard Hour: “I’m not going to go full Radio 4. I talk about stuff that my mates down the pub would talk about.”
Undoubtedly, though, the way in which Howard views the world has changed. He is more reflective, less flippant, than he used to be. “Things are terrible and things are beautiful,” he says.
“Life is complicated and nuanced. On the show, we’re trying to take the piss out of people who need the piss taking out of them, while also shining a light on beauty.” He pauses, before adding, “But that’s what we’re all doing, right?”
The Russell Howard Hour starts tonight at 10pm on Sky One