Comedian Ross Noble nearly killed a camel

Ross has just returned from the Australian leg of his international tour, which he describes as “brilliant”, despite a near-death incident with a camel.

“I started the tour in Australia and did 40-odd gigs there, then went to New York and LA, then I’m heading back to Australia for a couple of months, and then I’ll start the UK leg of the tour in April 2020.

“We were touring around the outback performing at all the desert venues. It’s mad, they’ve got all these little outback towns with art centres because the Australian government spends money on the regions. So you turn up to this place in the middle of nowhere and there’s all these state-of-the-art facilities.

“I nearly killed a camel. We were up in Broome and they have this tourist thing where they have 30 camels all tied together. They must have been taking them back at the end of the day and the problem with camels is, they don’t have any lights on.

“So we were driving around the corner and were like, ‘What’s that?’, and suddenly we were almost on top of this camel. And the thing is, when they’re tethered together like that, if you hit one then it has a domino effect… we could have been the car that broke the camel’s back.”

So how does one keep busy out in the middle of nowhere?

“When we were in Australia it was like a slightly more blokey version of Priscilla, Queen Of The Desert.

“We’d do stuff like find motocross tracks or forests to go off and have fun with some off-road biking. It’s exhausting but you’re full of adrenalin when you go on stage after a day doing that. Sometimes I’ll look down at my hands on stage and my fingers will be bleeding.

“I have been known to still be out quad biking at four o’clock when it’s getting dark and the sound check is at six o’clock, then I come on stage still filthy.

Is this a way of detracting from the nerves of going on stage?

“No, because there’s nothing to be frightened of. I think this applies to life as well. There’s no point worrying about what’s going to happen, you may as well just deal with it when it happens.”

“I do think I’m best on stage when I’m playing. And some people might think this is an emotionally stunted, man-child way of looking at it but I think it’s nice to make everything about playing. Because if you do that, it doesn’t matter if you’re winning or losing, you’re just playing. For example, if I say to my kids, ‘tidy your room’, they won’t. If you go, ‘let’s see how many socks we can throw across the room into that laundry basket’, you get the tidying done and everyone’s had fun.

“I think that might be the secret of happiness: just turn everything into a game.”

Ross is famous for improvising much of his set. I suppose it might be easier to relax before a show when you don’t have any lines to learn?

“What I do is I go on stage at the beginning and improvise, then if something tickles me I might write it down and then the next night, I’ll go back to that idea. But I might go back to that idea and do it a bit differently.

“So it’s never quite the same. I like that white-hot heat of being in the moment.

“I get distracted quite easily. Whatever’s in my head tends to dance to the front. When my show is at its best I think it’s when my brain is open to anything.”

The comedian is keen to get away from the traditional images associated with his profession.

“I’ve always been a fan of breaking away from the thing of a comedian just standing in front of a blank stage with a couple of lights, a stool, and a table with some water on it. Now, if you can’t go two hours without a drink of water, there’s something wrong with you. If you go and see Phantom Of The Opera, he’s not on stage constantly swigging water, is he?”

This desire to move away from the traditional, comedy cellar image has seen Ross create a large version of a certain comedian’s head. “I like to create massive sets. I’ve always loved the idea of this big, theatrical, rock and roll set and then just this bloke walking on and talking. So on the stage I’ve got a massive head, which is my head, and it’s connected by veins which are LED lights.

“It’s like a giant cyborg ‘Total Recall’ version of my head, and I walk out through the two halves of my head. It’s totally unnecessary but it makes me laugh a lot.”

Despite the gimmicks, Ross’ passion for stand-up comedy seems to be rooted in tradition. “There’s so much entertainment these days. When I was a kid, the idea that I could one day access an archive of anything that’s ever been on telly or film, within seconds – that’s mad. I remember trawling through books to find information. If you had a certain hobby, you’d have to write to a certain shop and ask for a catalogue. Whereas we’re always on our phones now.

“So what I love about stand-up is it’s one of the few art forms where people actually come together in a room at the same time on the same night, with phones off, and feel like they’re part of something.”

Ross Noble will perform at Brighton Dome on April 23