When part of your life becomes an anecdote, an interview topic, the key chapter of your autobiography, a comedy routine and finally a film, then whose life is it anyway? Yours or everyone’s? I ask only because I am meeting John Bishop, and the story of a successful 33-year-old pharmaceuticals sales executive of that name finding himself on stage at an open-mic night in Manchester and discovering he can make audiences laugh has gained almost legendary status, a paradigm of second starts and belatedly unleashed talent.
Just as well known is its payoff. In 2001, a year after his accidental debut, his estranged wife, Melanie — they were divorcing, with three children under six between them, having failed to find space for each other — happened to visit the Frog & Bucket Comedy Club. She was shocked, because she had no idea of her soon to be ex’s second career and also, presumably, because one of his jokes involved her decapitation. Yet afterwards she approached the bar and told him she had just encountered the funny 21-year-old Manchester Poly student she had first met and fallen for.
It took months at Relate, but eventually they abandoned their divorce. The Bishops have stayed together ever since, from John’s new career’s fitful beginnings, through his TV breakthrough to his becoming an arena-filling stand-up, Doctor Who star and chat-show host, and therefore — like the tale of how comedy saved his marriage — national property.
Will Arnett and Laura Dern in Is This Thing On?
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Now Hollywood has co-opted their lives. The film version of the Bishops’ post-split romance, Is This Thing On?, starring Arrested Development’s Will Arnett, opens in Britain this month. While missing out on a Golden Globe nomination, it has already won a prize from the Savannah Film Festival and there are hopes of an Oscar nod next week. The critics adored it.
Is This Thing On? has its own origin story. About eight years ago, Bishop tells me, he was chatting to the British film producer Kris Thykier (Mr Claudia Winkleman) after a film screening. Thykier asked how he got into comedy. Bishop explained. Thykier thought there was a movie in it. Bishop started on a script but found writing it was almost impossible because he was always correcting himself about “whether this or that really happened”.
Cut to the Netherlands some years later. Thykier invites Bishop to Amsterdam where he is making the Sky thriller Riviera with Arnett. Bishop retells his story to Arnett, who proposes he has a go at a screenplay with the British writer Mark Chappell. Bishop initially wants to “chip in” but ends up just “downloading” his memories to the pair of them over a three-hour meeting in London. Finally, the actor and director Bradley Cooper (he was both in the eight-times Oscar-nominated remake of A Star Is Born in 2018) signs as director, co-writer and supporting actor. Bishop is left with a “story by” co-credit but does not appear in the film, and Arnett plays not Cheshire-bred John Bishop but the American Alex Novak, with Laura Dern as his wife, Tess.
“We contributed to the story. The story’s ours, but the film’s theirs”
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“It’s like if you write a film: you hand it over to somebody else to make it. It’s not yours any more,” Bishop says when I meet him and Melanie in his dressing room at the Utilita Arena in Birmingham, where he will perform the final mega-gig of his 2025 arena tour, 25 Years of Stand Up. “So we contributed to the story. The story’s ours, but the film’s theirs.”
Yet, I say to Melanie, the film is still based on a difficult period of her life. Was it not triggering? “Actually I am really pleased,” she says. “It’s a beautiful film. I read the script and it’s how I would have imagined it to be filmed. It’s quite grainy. They did it with two cameras, so it’s really up close. You’re right in it.”
Whether there were tussles between the Bishops and the film-makers over their rendition of the story, who can say? Bishop denies it, but without vehemence. Both are certainly pleased that details of their real-life reconciliation made the final cut.
“They filmed it in March/April but [the year before] I got an email from Laura Dern, which again was quite strange,” Melanie says. “We had lunch in Claridge’s and we just didn’t stop talking. I was just thinking, ‘You were in the most amazing pivotal film of my youth,’ which was Wild at Heart. ‘Oh my gosh, it’s you!’ And she was just asking questions. She was really listening. We got on like a house on fire. She kept making notes, and then we parted.
“Anyway, to cut a long story short, there are a couple of things I told her about my memories of when we split up and they’re included. One is among the most hauntingly hard scenes in the film. It’s to do with their children coming home from school with nits in their hair, which is what happened with John and I when we had split up. The kids were with me Monday to Friday, and John had them at the weekend. And I got a phone call from him saying, ‘You’ll have to come round now. The kids have all got nits.’”
“Whoever’s house they’d been in, you had to check their hair for nits,” John explains.
John Bishop and Will Arnett
GETTY IMAGES
“So we had this afternoon doing the nits, because at this point there was no contact really. And it’s been worked into the film in such a beautiful way.”
Her husband is 30 minutes from appearing on stage and while showing no signs of nerves (and still in his jeans), he suggests we go to a room opposite and meet “the cousins”, who have also come to the show. We open the door: he has an awful lot of cousins. He regales us with memories of one of his first arena appearances, back in his native Liverpool, another family affair.
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‘One gig I said, invite the family. All 140 of them’
“There were 10,000 people in the audience and I’d said to my dad, ‘Invite the family.’ So we had 140 cousins and everybody — massive guest list. Then in the second half — I’d seen them all and had drinks and stuff in the interval — I was up on stage and I heard someone shout out, ‘John! John!’ I could see this figure and I went, ‘What is it, mate?’ And he said, ‘John, I can’t find my seat.’ It was my Uncle Dave, thinking I’d go, ‘Oh, hang on. I know where you’re sitting, Dave.’ Then my Auntie Carol got up, ‘Dave, you’re embarrassing our John in front of all these people. Sit down, you dickhead.’ ”
Bishop and his wife, Melanie, centre, with their sons, Daniel, Luke and Joe, at the film’s premiere in October. “If I didn’t have a gay son, I’d probably want one”
GETTY IMAGES
I am still laughing as I make it back to the 15,000-plus seat arena and, mercifully, locate my seat unaided. The show marks the 25th anniversary of his debut, and to celebrate Bishop has decreed that all seats should sell at £25. Much of the audience, I realise, will end up spending more on the arena’s two-pint tumblers of beer and fancy hotdogs than on their tickets.
He enters in a T-shirt under a very lightweight suit. There are routines about his accent (he was mistaken for Ukrainian in New York), his “undercarriage” waxing (for a charity cycle ride), and his childhood dyslexia (his father drove him to a Welsh road sign to reassure him he was not alone), and a not-nasty joke about illegal immigrants. It is a rear-view mirror routine from a man who will be 60 in November.
His delivery is hugely confident, bursts with charm and comes with a surprisingly physical sequence (the waxing bit). When I first interviewed him in 2017, he called his act “broad and middle of the road” and so it is. If I have a reservation it concerns his story about “joining the mile-high club single-handed” after pitifully fantasising about a twentysomething air hostess; his semi-nostalgic section about grabbing girls by the hips in teen discos (“the erection section”); and the moment he tells women in the audience, “If you live with a man for more than five years you have already won… He is not chatting anyone up because he does not know how.” Married men do not need to, apparently: they just “press” into their wives’ backs and hope they say, “Oh, go on then.”
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These sequences contrast with the final section in which he relates the When John Got Back with Mel story with so much feeling that his voice cracks at the end, both in Birmingham and, when I watch the recording of the show on Sky, in Dublin. He performs before thousands, he tells the thousands, but Melanie is the one he most wants to make laugh. The show closes with a snowfall of confetti, a family group photo on the jumbo screen and the, by then, inevitable standing ovation.
Appearing in Doctor Who alongside Jodie Whittaker
BBC
Five weeks later, I see a press screening of Is This Thing On? in London and find it everything the Bishops promised. It is a sober comedy of love, disappointment and no-illusions compromise. It treats the wife’s career frustrations as seriously as the husband’s. Its tone is nearer Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage than DeVito’s The War of the Roses. In Birmingham, Bishop described it to me as “an adult film” and Melanie added “about an adult relationship”. It is both those things.
I leave wondering whether it is possible that this movie, to which Bishop granted independence, is more faithful to the truth of his marriage than his own telling of it as the finale to a ribald stage show. I am glad I am to get another chance to talk about it when the compulsive performer returns from a short tour of Australia.
‘Your testosterone levels are low’
Few comedians can have worked harder in the past 18 months than John Bishop. Yet two years before, he had considered quitting the comedy circuit altogether and had to be coaxed back by Melanie, who accused him of becoming a “miserable git”.
Was he clinically depressed, I ask one morning a few days before Christmas in a hotel near their home in Surrey.
“No, I don’t think so. I don’t know. I just felt lethargic. I went with Melanie to see a gynaecologist about her HRT and so on. He did an examination, then I came back in and he said, ‘Look, can I talk to you on your own for a minute?’ I said yes and he said, ‘How are you?’
“I said, ‘I’m feeling lethargic. I’m feeling more emotional than normal.’ So he said, ‘I’m sending Melanie’s bloods off to get her hormone level. I’ll do the same for you.’ So he sent them off, they came back and he said, ‘Your testosterone levels are low.’ So he said, ‘I’ll give you testosterone gel.’ What testosterone does is…”
Control your sex drive?
“No, no, it’s brain function as well. It enhances brain connectivity. It enhances your energy levels.”
There is a male menopause!
“Oh, 100 per cent. I think anybody who doesn’t think that is backwards. It’s well documented.”
Performing in London, in 2019. He considered quitting the comedy circuit: “I felt lethargic. It was male menopause”
ALAMY
So the gel helped, but so did the medicine Bishop prescribed for his career, which was to perform in small spaces in lands where nobody knew who he was. He had mourned, he realised, the “rough and tumble” of his early years as a comedian. Nowadays he might turn up unannounced at a club to try out new material and the audience would be surprised and pleased to see him. “But sometimes when you’re trying new material that maybe doesn’t land, you get a bigger applause when you walk on than when you walk off.”
Playing small clubs in America
He particularly wanted to perform in New York, where he was unknown, and even more particularly in its legendary Comedy Cellar. Jimmy Carr, who plays the States more than most UK stand-ups, put in a word with Estee Adoram, the comedy matriarch who has been booking acts at the Cellar for ever. She asked for a tape of his act, watched it and, ouch, offered him ten minutes. The ten minutes went well. After all, he was drawing from decades of material new to Americans. “So I did a little tour, but I’d keep coming back to the Comedy Cellar.”
The “little” tour included Philadelphia, Boston, Nashville, Chicago, Denver, Seattle and San Francisco and, as his few weeks in Australia demonstrated, it has never finished. Bishop clearly chases the dragon of his original Frog & Bucket high, but also, he insists, he missed the camaraderie of club comics. At the Cellar, he was proud to be invited to sit at the comics’ table, just as Arnett’s Alex does in Is This Thing On?. Although Bishop promises me comedians are not competitive, he was competitive enough to be miffed when he returned to the club and spotted on the stairs a portrait of Arnett as Alex Novak.
Is This Thing On? stars Will Arnett and Bradley Cooper at the New York Film Festival last October
GETTY IMAGES
“I went, ‘What the f***?’ So I said to Liz [Furiati, who runs the club], ‘How can he be there? Alex Novak’s not even real. I haven’t got one up.’ ”
Is he up there now?
“I am. Alex Novak is right next to me. So of all the things that have come out of this film, me getting my picture on the wall at the Comedy Cellar is one of the best.”
Slated by critics at Edinburgh
Bishop was there when Arnett performed his film act. “He did well. He didn’t storm it. He went on and he was a good new comedian.” Equally, one of the misunderstandings about Bishop is that he became an overnight success that first night at the Frog & Bucket. In reality he did not give up his £70,000-a-year job and turn full-time comic until 2006, six years later, when he was almost 40. His excellent 2013 autobiography, How Did All This Happen?, recounts a series of dismal visits to the Edinburgh Fringe where he was slated by critics and attracted tiny audiences. His firstborn, Joe, handed out flyers for his dad on the cobbled streets.
“You go from letting your kids see that side of things — someone following their dreams — to them seeing you as everyone else’s property. You walk into an airport and you’re stopped all the time and asked for photographs and someone’s handing the cameras to the kids to take pictures. I very quickly stopped that.”
How?
In 2014, at a charity event with the Duchess of Cambridge
PA
“Melanie and the kids would go ahead. I honestly don’t mind being stopped, but when you’re with young kids…”
And it was not just stand-up and the television show Live at the Apollo that kept him away from home. At the time of our first interview he was doing a series for the W channel (now U&W) called John Bishop: In Conversation With… It was extraordinarily good, with Bishop extracting candour from names such as Lindsay Lohan, James Corden and Steve Coogan. If you know only ITV’s recent lightweight The John Bishop Show — which he has given up, reasoning it was unable to compete either in guests or series length with Graham Norton and Jonathan Ross’s chat shows — these interviews would astound you. Sadly, he has also stopped his often revealing podcast interview series, Three Little Words, in favour of The Bishop Exchange, a harmless weekly chat with the American stand-up Des Bishop.
‘Doing stand-up, you’re vulnerable’
So, as Bishop prepares to enter his seventh decade, it really is once more all about stand-up. I want him to define the thrill of it. “It’s disarming,” he says. “You have to put your shield down. You have to put your sword away, because if you’re blocking out what you’re feeling or saying or blocking out the room, it’s not going to work.”
So he feels vulnerable?
“Oh yes. I’ve often said being a comedian is like being a stripper. You build up to a big reveal, which is the punchline, and people either laugh or they don’t laugh. With a stripper, you take off your top and people are either impressed or they’re not. You can’t put it back on and take it off again. You’ve got one chance. So nobody thinks about laughing and comes back half an hour later to do so. It’s instant communication. So that’s vulnerable. That’s the challenge of it, but it is also addictive.”
James Corden appearing on the “extraordinarily good” John Bishop: In Conversation With…
ELLIS O’BRIEN
Yet in Is This Thing On?, the comedy stage appears to be Alex’s safe place, one where he can confess to having slept with another woman. “I never did that,” Bishop says quickly, but what he did do was tell a joke about how he had cut off his wife’s head and kept it in a fridge. “And,” he added winkingly, “it is surprising how handy that becomes after a while.” When Necrophilia Met Fellatio. Was that him channelling his anger towards Melanie after their marriage went wrong?
“No, it was just a gag, but I did do things. Like in the film [where Alex performs the same routine], I used to do this joke about her going out with a fireman and then this whole narrative about how I hate firemen. I hated this fictional person, just in my head.”
But was it an expression of a real fear?
‘My biggest fear was there’d be a stepdad’
“Yes. When you split up, when you’ve got kids, the biggest fear is there’s going to be somebody else, a stepdad. That was my biggest fear in life.”
There is a much more recent joke he tells about Melanie’s menopause: “That woman you thought had a hot body really has a hot body.” Does she, I ask, ever take offence?
“No, no. If they’re funny, she doesn’t mind. They either make her laugh or make her angry.”
I suggest, choosing my words, there is a tension between the show’s knowingly sexist first two-thirds and then the third that movingly exposes his love for his wife.
“I’ll be honest with you,” he says, “the last part became much more confessional and emotional than I was expecting.”
But, again, not even an observational comedian’s life is entirely his own. In his 2022 documentary, John and Joe Bishop: Life After Deaf, about his son Joe, who at 15 contracted a virus and lost much of his hearing from an autoimmune disease, Bishop talks about using his family in his act. “We’re not the Kardashians,” he says plaintively. “Not everything is for public consumption.” There follows an agonising clip of him on stage in 2010 when he mocks the teenage Joe’s breaking voice and jokes about him facing up to him, “little lion to big lion”. Bishop reads in his son’s eyes the thought, “I can take you.” But in the film, Melanie says her husband was wrong. “John sees his role as the traditional head of the family, but I actually don’t think Joe… he’s never wanted to be the big lion. That’s not Joe.” When Joe is asked what he thinks of his father’s comedy, he replies, with great timing, “It is not up my street — because I tend to be in it.”
Yet the film redeems John’s parenting for us by showing him learning British Sign Language, not just so he can perform to a deaf audience but so he can better communicate with his son. He tells me Joe now plans to train as an actor and their relationship is solid. There is so much that is impressive about Bishop, a man who rose to stardom from the least promising beginnings — no other showbiz memoir I have read contains a sentence as striking as, “My dad had been sentenced to a year in prison as a result of an altercation with two men outside a chip shop.” But the work he has put into his relationships with his boys is as impressive as anything, and it must have required sacrificing material that as a younger father he might have used.
‘I’m called an LGBT ally. Really all I’ve been is a dad’
He has, I should add, never made comic capital out of his second son, Luke, a dancer, being gay. Indeed he seems almost embarrassed that in 2018 he received the Ally of the Year accolade at the LGBT Awards. “I’ve been celebrated as an ally when really all I’ve been is a dad,” he says. “I’m lucky enough to have three healthy sons who are good lads and one of them happens to be gay, but if I didn’t have a gay son, I’d probably want one.”
There is one remaining family story he does want telling, but not by him. Melanie, who previously worked for an airline and then a ski company, is a good writer, he says. She is also passionate about the menagerie she keeps: three horses, two Shetland ponies, two donkeys, six pigs, six sheep, two dogs, twelve chickens and a couple of ducks. Two of the horses are mother and son; the latter they bought seven years after his mother.
“So now they’re stabled next to each other. They look like each other. That’s a children’s book story, isn’t it?” Bishop says hopefully. I agree. And the great thing about it is that neither of its protagonists is likely to fret about its ownership.
Is This Thing On? is in cinemas from January 30
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