Mike Quille interviews Mark Thomas about comedy, politics, pubs, Starmer, the miners, his latest show, and being a pastor. Image above by Tracey Moberley
1. Mark, looking on the internet, your work history is more like an encyclopaedia than a cv. Comedian, author, activist, protestor, actor, artist, curator, playwright, journalist – and what’s this, pastor!? Do you think it’s fair on the rest of us to have succeeded in so many different ways? It would help our readers with self-esteem issues if you could tell us what you can’t do and haven’t done?
Ah, the pastor. I think it was related to finding out that religious buildings were exempt from Council Tax and as an experiment I wanted to see if I could convert my office into a temple, I became a pastor online and in the USA I can legally marry, baptise and bury someone, though the certificate is very clear under no circumstances am I qualified to act as a motel. As things I can’t do: I can’t drive. I have never learnt. Aged 16 I was inserted into the cab of a forklift truck and instructed on how to use it. I promptly backed it into some portable offices and went halfway through them. So that was the end of driving for me. Other things I am useless at include angling, sharp shooting, rodeo tricks, and I have never hunted foxes. I am average at crazy golf.
2. Can you tell us something about your career as a comedian – and what’s the funniest joke you know?
My first political shows were in the Red Shed in Wakefield as a student. It is a socialist club and mates and I would write and perform shows to raise money for local campaigns. During the Miners’ Strike we even took to performing in soup kitchens. I started performing in clubs 39 years ago. It was enormous fun. It was and is a form of monetised showing off. You get up, chat, rant, misbehave and tell jokes and get paid. As I get bored easily, I generally look to do something new and different, but the essentials are the same: mucking about and pissing off the right people.
Some of my favourite gags? Dave Allen, The Clock:
3. What about your lifelong political activism, can you tell us something about its highs and lows?
The highs and lows…well they don’t call it the struggle for nothing. The most formative events for me were punk rock, Rock Against Racism and the Miners’ Strike.
I was a student at Bretton Hall College in Yorkshire when the strike started. We took a collection of money and trays of beer to the local picket line and were greeted by cheers and shouts of “Students – bloody heroes!”
After the ultra vires ban on donations to the miners, my mate was organising a student event and to circumvent the ban he massively over-ordered the catering – on paper he spent money on students, in practice a massive pile of freshly cooked food goes to the miners’ soup kitchen. A great idea marred only by vegan catering and the donations were greeted with the cry of “Wha’ th’ fuck are mung beans!” From heroes to zeros in one fell swoop.
I’m attending the 40th Anniversary of the strike with the striking Notts. miners this weekend and, despite the strike being beaten into submission by the state and its press partners, 40 years later it will be a privilege to be in the same room with the men and women who stayed out in the face of the Notts. scabs.
I suppose one of my favourite things was working with Dr Sam Beale and the Jenin Freedom Theatre in the West Bank to set up a comedy club in the refugee camp. It is something that we are both incredibly proud of because the students and young comics and performers have moved on way beyond our initial engagement and are now trying to establish a circuit for Palestinian comics in the West Bank and beyond. That has to be one of my favourite things.
4. Looking back over the last 50 years or so, what do you see as the main things that have happened to this country?
Gangster capitalism, climate change and debt are the big changes. Corporations have increased their capture of the public realm. It’s socialism for the rich and capitalism for the rest of us. In essence the state has increasingly shed its responsibilities to citizens but has demanded we are more accountable to the state. The Labour Party has increasingly shrunk from the fray. The Tories barely bother to hide their kleptocratic behaviour.
Climate change is the big one, it is the existential threat that we increasingly shrink from acting on.
5. What’s your view of the state of the main political parties, and their leaders?
The Winners: Didn’t win as much not fuck up and allow the Tories to lose. 58% of voters went for the two main parties, that leaves a hell of a lot of people who can and will vote for smaller parties. Labour did not inspire, on Palestine, poverty, spending, future of the NHS… a host of things that just went business as usual. Starmer and Labour are of course better than the Tories, they have scrapped the Rwanda policy and not stolen anything yet. So we are ahead so far.
Starmer’s move to banish the left in the Labour Party has left him exposed on the left. HURRAH!
Green policies on renationalising essential services (train, water, energy) were what the left wanted and in Brighton and Bristol that proved winning. But they managed to put up winning threats to rural Tory lands. Four Greens is a move forward. HURRAH!
Four Pro-Palestinian independents and Jeremy Corbyn: HURRAH!
Tories and Farage: The Tories enter a prolonged period of self-destruction,k and I have popcorn. The threat to move merge with Farage is not as potent as the Tories think. Farage works as an outsider and if he joins the Tories and is forced into positions of accountability and responsibility he is quickly exposed. There would be a sizeable number of Farageists who would not support him working with the Tories. BUT Labour has vacated the battlefield of inequality, when you vacate the ground and the fight against poverty and inequality, the right wing will take that ground and claim themselves the only ones capable of winning.
Image by Tony Pletts
Where were the Labour leaders fighting for safe routes to the UK, for arguing that we should accept asylum seekers, for arguing for migration? If you drop the fight, you again leave the ground open to the right. Labour has basically said we will manage the system better than the Tories (not hard) BUT you cannot beat the far right by trying to be more right-wing, even if it was morally and politically acceptable.
The system: We have a democratic deficit, FPTP is an antiquated awful system that truly does not represent the most important people in a democracy, the voters. Yes I know it would mean the Farageists would get more seats BUT so would the Greens, the Independents, the Lib Dems, Plaid, SNP and the Pro Palestinian vote. Whichever system used other than FPTP would create a because they show a talent for exploiting others.
6. Your last show was England and Son, a tremendously powerful and poignant one-man play written by Ed Edwards. What’s your current project?
England and Son won 6 awards, toured the UK, Adelaide festival, performed the show in prisons and did workshops with addicts in recovery and now there is talk of being invited to bring the show to New York next year… and the team is completely skint. We have no money, so I am back doing standup on the comedy circuit creating a new show for the Edinburgh Festival and then touring. To find my feet again I did a load of free gigs and open spots on the circuit, new performers have not got it easy. One gig was in a pub kitchen, which shows how far I have come from the soup kitchen gigs 40 years ago.
Mark Thomas will be at the Edinburgh Festival 31st July – 25th August, then touring, see here. Get your tickets soon, as his shows sell out quickly!
