TALKING HOMES WITH DOM JOLY

WIGWAM MAGAZINE EXCLUSIVE 'TALKING HOMES' WITH THE COMEDY LEGEND & TRAVEL WRITER

Dom Joly.

DOM JOLY TELLS WIGWAM ABOUT LIVING THROUGH A CIVIL WAR, HIS FLAT ON THE MOST DANGEROUS STREET IN BRITAIN, AND GETTING LOST IN SWINDON.

To begin with, what are your memories of the family home in Lebanon where you were born?

It was an extraordinary place to live, in the hills above Beirut. My dad built the house in a traditional Lebanese style which itself was inspired by the Italian Renaissance, so there are red tile roofs, beautiful limestone square buildings, and they always have three arches at the front. And our house was in a stunning location in the middle of a pine forest. I lived a very schizophrenic existence because I went to boarding school in England, but would spend my holidays at home in the middle of the Lebanese Civil War, standing on the balcony watching Israeli planes dive bomb over our house or Syrian tanks rolling past to invade. I even saw a car bomb blow up the Lebanese President. I watched the whole of the war happen from our balcony because we had this panoramic view of Beirut.

Before going to school in England, I’d been at an English Quaker High School in Beirut, and I subsequently found out that Osama bin Laden had also been there. I didn’t know him at the time - I was six and he was sixteen – but I’ve seen pictures and he looked more like a member of (‘70s bubblegum pop group) The Partridge Family in those days.

Sometimes I used to go to school by horse because there was no petrol during the Civil War; and every time a plane went over the entire playground would pretend to have ack-ack guns and fire at them. I didn’t realise that was unusual until I came to school in England, but here was very odd, too. I was at school in Oxford with most of Radiohead and most of the current Tory cabinet. So yes, Lebanon was a very weird place to grow up, but also a stunningly beautiful place. It was always described as the Switzerland of the Middle East, and Beirut as the Paris of the Middle East. It was a Middle Eastern country but only in name. It was incredibly liberal, it was a democracy, it had a free press, it had hookers, it had drugs, it had nightclubs. And the cliché in Beirut was that you could be on the beach in the morning and ski in the afternoons. The food was astonishing, the women looked just look like nothing else, everybody spoke three languages - it really was like heaven on earth, but unfortunately, everyone wanted a piece of it, so that’s how it broke up in the end.

A memory of growing up in a civil war - a piece of shrapnel from one of the rockets that hit Dom’s family home above Beirut.

You eventually moved full-time to London for university, was that a case of student digs?

Well, I turned down Oxford to go to London University and read Arabic at the School of African and Oriental Studies, which was a massive mistake. I went there because I was in love with a girl there, and as soon as I arrived she dumped me, a nightmare! Then I moved into shared student digs in Putney, which was another mistake - it was south of the river and it just didn’t feel right. And my mum was so excited I wasn’t moving into the family home in Holland Park that she went on holiday. Two weeks later she returned and I’d moved in! So all of my way through uni I lived at home in a basement in Holland Park Avenue. Depending on who I was talking to and whether I needed to be posh, smart or hip, I’d say I lived in Labroke Grove, Notting Hill or Holland Park.

Where were you living when you first made Trigger Happy TV?

I bought a flat in All Saints Road, Notting Hill, which at the time was officially the most dangerous street not only in Britain, but in Europe. I was literally the only white bloke on the street, but the price was so good I bought the flat, and then I realised everyone hated me for buying it. I was above The Mangrove Restaurant, which was the epicentre of London Caribbean life, and it was kind of wrong that this posh twat had moved in upstairs. I pulled out all the floorboards when I was doing the place up, and found about 800 credit cards that had been nicked and shoved in there. There was a Caribbean bakery opposite that had a picture of Marvin Gaye leaning out of my window flicking a V sign, and it turns out he had stayed in my flat. When I moved in there were drug dealers everywhere, and then they put up cameras and nothing happened for six months, and then one day literally, the police came in and just took everyone off the street, locked them up and All Saints became gentrified almost over night.

This massive empty flat across the road was bought by Krzysztof Kieslowski who directed Three Colours: Red. Mick Jagger would be hanging out of the window opposite, Jay Kay from Jamiroquai would screech his Lamborghini and knock on the door out of his face at three o’clock in the morning. I felt a bit like Woody Allen in the film where he’s on a really dull train and he looks into the next train and they’re having a party - the flat across the road was constantly having this amazing party. The day Trigger Happy TV came out there were posters all over London saying ‘Do not trust this man” and I literally opened the window and there were posters of me and I thought ‘Fuck what’s happened?’, but at least they invited me into the flat across the road then. It was a weird street with all kinds of weird people, it was an incredibly hip, muliticultural, amazing street. I loved it.

Is it true you sold that flat to Salman Rushdie?

Yes, when I found out he was buying it I assumed there was still a fatwa on him (in 1989 the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa ordering Muslims to kill Rushdie for writing the blasphemous The Satanic Verses), but the fatwa had kind of been relaxed, and he was a bit more relaxed. I mean no one swore me to secrecy or whatever, but I’d painted the outside of my flat bright orange.

The place had a lovely double roof top, it was a lateral conversion over two buildings and it had this really nice roof garden and I told everyone that before I left I was going to re-tile the roof so the next time Google Earth came over it was either going to say in massive letters ‘Salman Rushdie is hiding here’ or it was just going to have a massive target on it. But then I thought ‘God what would it be like if he gets killed because of that?’ So I passed on my best ever joke!

I had also bought the flat below when Trigger Happy TV was happening and I turned it into the ultimate bachelor pad. The only problem was that I wasn’t a bachelor, I was married, I already had a kid, and I was thinking ‘Fuck, why didn’t I have this ten years ago?’. But while it was being done up I had to move out, and renting in Notting Hill was so expensive.

Luckily, a cousin of mine who was an estate agent in Wiltshire told me there’s this place to rent in Quenington in Gloucestershire, do you want to go down there? So we went down there for six months, almost like an extended country weekend, and we thought it will be fun, we’ll live in the country for a bit, my first kid wasn’t at school yet, and we got down there and three weeks later I had bought my first dog, and that was it really, we never went back.

Six months after that I rented the house next door which was this massive place called Knights Gate. The gatehouse used to be a hospital for Knights Templars and it was built in 1210, it was like 800 years older than my wife’s country (she’s Canadian)! And we just absolutely loved it and we lived there for eight years.

We know you came to the GWH to treat your sleep apnoea, is that when you became familiar with Swindon?

Yes, and let me say, I never set out to annoy anybody, but Swindon is weird because it just never seems to have been planned, when I go in my satnav will just say ‘Leave, I’m frightened, I don’t know where we are!’. And I always get confused on the Magic Roundabout and can never find the fabled Old Town. But there are interesting things about Swindon, it is supposed to have the perfect demographic.

When anyone is doing polls in Britain they go to Swindon because it has the perfect medium British population. But my favourite thing ever in Swindon I spotted when changing trains for Kemble. I got off at the station and I went to the end of the platform and there was just this weird little fence which was about waist height, a really shitty fence, just about the size of a table tennis table, and inside was a bench that had been broken and a dead flower and I swear that there was a sign that said, ‘Sensory zone, please feel free to come in and

relax’. It’s my favourite photo I have ever taken, and it’s still my most viewed photo on Facebook. So, well done Swindon for that, and I like to think that it was a joke rather than a real sensory zone.

Another time I was doing a show in Swindon and I discovered Swindon’s best-kept secret is that airfield on a hill above the town (Wroughton airfield) where they keep a lot of stuff that they don’t put into The Science Museum in London. Oh my God, the stuff in there is insane, decommissioned Polaris missiles, the world’s first cashpoint machine. And you’ve given us Diana Dors, well done, Swindon! And The Supertramp singer (Rick Davies).

You try and pretend that the Oasis Leisure Centre inspired Oasis to choose their name, but I’ve met Noel Gallagher and it’s not true. There’s Gilbert O’Sullivan, as opposed to Gilbert and Sullivan, but he’s crap. Then there’s Melinda Messenger and XTC,; Andy Partridge is very cool. I do draw the line though when you call Swindon something to do with Venice because there’s a lot of canals, the Central Venice or whatever.

Are you now living in your ‘forever home’ in Cheltenham?

I always have hankerings to move on, both my wife and I are very restless. The perfect solution would be to impersonate the Royals and move every season, to have four houses. We go to the lakes north of Toronto in the summer, which I love. If I could I’d buy a place in Morocco, too. But I love it here in Cheltenham.

When I used to visit my grandmother here when I was young I would think “I’d kill myself if I had to live here’. Now I love it, it’s a really hip town, my kids are at school here, and I love my townhouse. I had to persuade my wife to get it because she’s Canadian where there are vast spaces. She says ‘Why the hell would we want to live next door to somebody else?’. But there is something really special about Cheltenham and this is a really lovely Georgian Regency townhouse. It’s just beautiful, it has got real details, lovely cornicing, and I got to the stage living on this massive farm with all these outbuildings we weren’t using. So we are slightly downsizing here, but as a travel writer I want to be able to just lock up and leave.

But I still want to live in the States, so if I have a late career resurgence I shall move to the States. If not I will move to Canada, but I need to follow the sun, so at some stage I need to have a house somewhere sunny, maybe Greece, Turkey or Morocco.

Not Swindon I’m afraid, it’s not part of the plan, unless global warming kicks in and then who knows?

You can find what Dom is up to at domjoly.tv