He’s one of the biggest names in comedy whose gigs often sell out in minutes… but John Bishop says he still wants to get at least one per cent funnier.
Not content with the huge success since first picking up a mic 23 years ago which has seen him pack the biggest arenas, the Scouse funnyman says he’s now hired a comedy coach to help teach him how to get even more laughs out of his audiences. And he reveals he would have quit the comedy circuit two years ago if it wasn’t for his wife Melanie, who told him to get back on tour because he’d become a “miserable git” – a quip that led to him rediscovering his zest for stand-up.
John, 57 and currently selling tickets for a nationwide tour including huge arenas the O2 and Manchester ’s Co-op, says he’s more critical of his performances that people might expect. He says: “There’s also been multiple crashes, multiple times when I’ve gone ‘Jesus, that was sh*t’.
“Most comics will sit with another comedian then and they’ll try and make the jokes funnier and they’ll try and write more jokes. But I don’t need the comedian to talk to me about comedy. I need someone who knows about comedy to coach me, so I’ve brought a friend in, Cameron, as my comedy coach. He’s a producer, he’s produced a lot of my television shows.
“I said to him, ’I need you to come with that critical eye and tell me what’s gone wrong here’. And it’s been brilliant. And literally, my words to him were ‘I just need to be one per cent better’.”
John, whose comedy success has earned him an estimated £18million fortune, added: “High performance in stand-up comedy is harder to judge because you can still make people laugh. To make it to the top level you need somebody outside of your head, but somebody who knows what’s in your head, and that’s what this guy Cameron is doing for me.”
Unlike most of his contemporaries, John’s arrival in the world of comedy came much later in life.
Growing up in Winsford and Runcorn in Cheshire, he played for non-league teams Winsford United and Southport, then at 24 began a 16-year spell as a medical rep for pharmaceutical firm Syntax, working his way up to a highly-paid six-figure position with all the corporate perks.
He was 33 when he stepped onto the stage at the Frog and Bucket in Manchester for his first ever gig in front of a handful of people. It was open mic night, and John, who who gone along just to cheer himself up after splitting up with wife Melanie, agreed to try to make the audience laugh so he wouldn’t have to pay the £4 entry fee.
He would later tell how his regular spot at the comedy club saved his marriage, after Melanie came along one night and heard him tell a joke about how much he missed her. ‘I used to do a joke about missing my ex so much that I kept her severed head in the fridge. It’s not the best joke, and as I said it I realised the head that was meant to be in the fridge was in the audience,” he said.
“We were at the decree nisi stage in our divorce at this point, so we only had to finalise the finances. I remember thinking, ‘That joke’s going to cost me another £20,000.’ Afterwards she came over to the bar. I was expecting a row but instead we started chatting.” It led to the couple agreeing to go to counselling, and getting back together after 18 months apart.
John, who only quit his job to become a full-time comic aged 40, reveals how the tables turned two years ago when Melanie, who he got back together with after 18 months and with whom he has three sons, eldest Joe, 29, and Luke and Daniel, recently convinced him to to not walk out on his comedy career.
Speaking to the High Performance podcast, John said: “I was so close a couple of years ago to saying ‘I’ve had enough’. Financially, were were ok. I said ‘I don’t have to do this’, and, oh my God, I’d finished the tour, I went home.”
But he said he found that sitting at home was not good for him. “I just atrophied. I just found my relationship with the world getting smaller and smaller. And it was Melanie that just said ‘go and do a gig, don’t do a gig because you’re thinking of doing a tour, just go back and do a gig, because you’re a miserable git’. And honestly the zest I’ve got for it now is exactly the excitement I had when I began. I found myself again.”
John, also a successful actor and who has previously had his own TV chat and variety shows, says he is now planning a huge world tour when he’ll even try to crack new countries in 2026, the year he turns 60 – and when if he had still been working in pharmaceuticals he could have been retiring.
He says: “I had a corporate job, and the significance of that number 60 is everything would have kicked in, the pension would have kicked in – your whole career is built around the fact there’s an exit.
“Instead when I turn 60, I’ve decided I’m going to spend time outside the UK going to Canada, America, Australia, New Zealand. In Canada and America I’m just starting off – I’m in clubs. And I was talking to my wife about it, and I said ‘the idea of starting off again, when I worked in the pharmaceutical industry, at 60, I wouldn’t fancy it’.
“The idea in my 60th year of being on a comedy club line-up in Denver on a Thursday night, I said, just floats my boat. I just love the essence of it.”
And John says that both he and his family couldn’t be happier with the way comedy unexpectedly changed his life for the better. “The person I’d become when I got married was so driven, I did the things I thought you should do as a young father – make money, get on, get some security, get in the corporate world and work hard, and head down.
“I was your classic. I’d be away for three days at a sales conference, I’d put my key in the door, my wife would be there with three kids under the age of four and I’d like kiss her on the head, pat the kids, and go upstairs on my mobile phone to the office making phone calls.
“I was that person and I lost my sense of silliness – that you have to have in stand-up comedy. Right now, on a Friday, in London I’d have probably been ordering a bottle of Bordeaux on expenses and thinking ‘I’ve done well’. That’s not the life that I’m living now.”
