Dom Joly

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Dom Joly bigraphy, stories - British comedian

Dom Joly : biography

15 November 1970 –

Dominic John Romulus "Dom" Joly ( born 15 November 1967) is a British television comedian and journalist. He came to note as the star of Trigger Happy TV, a hidden camera show that was sold to over seventy countries worldwide. Since then, Joly has continued to make edgy off-beat television like World Shut Your Mouth for BBC1 and Dom Joly’s Happy Hour, a spoof travel show for Sky One.

Joly is also an author with several books to his name, and an award-winning travel writer for both the Sunday Times and the Mail On Sunday. He writes several regular columns for various UK nationals and periodicals including a weekly sports column for The Independent and an eclectic weekly column for the Independent on Sunday.

Joly published the The Dark Tourist in 2010, about dark tourism. He also completed filming a documentary on Tintin for Channel 4 (Back2Back Productions) which aired on 19 March 2010.

Joly was a contestant on the tenth series of I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!; he finished in fourth place.

Joly published his second travel book- "Scary Monsters and Super Creeps" in 2012. In the book, he travels the world in search of mythical monsters such as Bigfoot and The Yeti.

Joly also made a high-profile return to prime time TV with his new eight part hidden camera show- "Fool Britannia" which aired on Saturday nights on ITV1 from 1 September 2012 and ending on 20 October 2012. Joly has hinted at a second series in the pipeline.

Early life

Joly was born in Beirut, Lebanon to British parents and speaks French in addition to English.

Career

Television

After being recruited to work as a producer on ITN’s House to House, a political discussion programme on Channel 4, Joly went on to work for The Mark Thomas Comedy Product because of his political knowledge. He then created his own show for the Paramount Comedy Channel called War of the Flea. Discovering that working in comedy was both easier and more fun than his previous employment, Joly began to develop Trigger Happy TV which had a similar structure to War of the Flea.

Trigger Happy TV

United Kingdom

Joly’s anarchic surreal sketches first started appearing as interstitials during advert breaks on the British Paramount Comedy Channel. In 1999, following a successful fifteen-minute pilot on the Comedy Lab, Channel 4 commissioned Joly to make a TV series. Trigger Happy TV was born; a hidden camera show that went on to be sold to over seventy countries worldwide. Joly made two series and two Christmas specials before announcing that he wanted to do other things. Joly was nominated for three British Comedy Awards for the show, won the Silver Rose of Montreux, the BBC2 Award for Best Comedy and the Loaded/Goodfella Comedy Newcomer of the Year.

The three DVDs for the shows were best-sellers, as were the soundtrack albums that Joly had personally selected and mixed himself.

United States

A spoof documentary about Joly followed, called Being Dom Joly which was produced and written by Joly himself. This aired prior to screenings of Trigger Happy TV in the USA and earned critical acclaim, with one reviewer, Bob Croft of the Los Angeles Times, calling Joly "the funniest man in Britain".

A new series of Trigger Happy TV was made for an American audience in 2003 with an altered format in that it featured a band of different "comedians" who performed skits without Joly. Though Joly did cameo sporadically on the show, he was very unhappy with the programme and called it "Trigger Happy by numbers – take joke, put it in slo-mo, add fluffy animals and random indie soundtrack – it was made by uncaring idiots". He had a producer credit on the show, but disassociated himself with the project.

2003 BBC contract

Following the success of Trigger Happy TV on Channel 4, Joly was secured by the BBC for a rumoured £5 million. However, his first show for the BBC, This is Dom Joly, a spoof chatshow in which Joly played an appallingly egotistical media character who had the same name as him, thereby confusing a lot of the audience as to what was real and what wasn’t, did not achieve the same success as Trigger Happy TV, leading to the hidden camera format being revamped on BBC1 as World Shut Your Mouth. It featured all new material and an increased budget relative to Trigger Happy, allowing for pranks to be performed in different countries. It was later released on DVD.