There's being brave, and then there's being a political activist undercover at one of the world's biggest arms fairs posing as a representative for a PR company offering dictators and army generals the opportunity to spin their genocides in a more positive light while secretly recording these heavily-armed men. Meet Mark Thomas, long-time political activist, creator and star of Channel 4’s The Mark Thomas Comedy Product, which is still the benchmark for leftist, humourous documentary making, and one of the ballsiest comedians you're ever likely to meet. What on earth drives this gutsiness? "Ego. It'd be foolish to deny that ego is a major factor given that I'm a performer and I get up in front of complete strangers and try to make them like me... But generally speaking, most of the risks I take are very assessed risks, it's just that people haven't had the gumption to do it before. I kind of like the assumption that you should do things until you're stopped."

Thomas's stand-up tours and productions have largely been heavily political in nature but his new show comes from a very different, more intimate place than its predecessors. Thomas' father sadly developed progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP). In an attempt to reach out to him, Thomas started listening to his father's favourite music which, perhaps uncharacteristically for a working-class builder, was opera- a stark contrast to his Ramones-loving son. After Thomas' talked about how emotionally significant Figaro's Aria had become to him on Radio 4, the Royal Opera House reached out to him and commissioned him to write a one-off show. Thomas was happy to do it, but in return for one little thing- to stage an opera show, starring real opera singers, in his dad's living room. The show premiered to much critical aplomb, although Thomas stays modest about it. "They're odd about clapping at opera- basically, opera prepares you for the Tory party leadership speech, you just applaud until everybody else fucking stops, it's like Soviet Russia." After this success, the decision was taken to take the show on a national tour, stopping off at Cambridge’s The Junction on Sunday 25th November.

Although at first it may seem to be an uncharacteristically non-political production, if you scratch the surface and consider the show to be about a working-class man's relationship with opera, there's a lot of politics at play. "It's a thing about working-class self-improvement, my dad was very much attached to the idea that he would be improved and his family would be improved and incrementally, we would become better, not only materially but intellectually... I think the idea of community self-improvement and individual self-improvement are very much working-class values- the value of thrift, looking after things and taking pride in what you had and what you were." In 2012, Thomas thinks those values are less prevalent, something he pegs to thirty five years of bad politics and working people's wages going up below inflation since 1985, forcing them to rely on credit for housing and to stay alive. In Thomas's view, thanks to communal entities like the welfare state, the NHS and the unions, in the 1950’s people used to have a role in their communities and societies "in a far more profound view than before. [Nowadays] you're taking away people's life chances. So although the values are fundamentally different, so are the stakes that people have in the world that they inhabit."

Mark has always been a strong public objector to the rise in tuition fees and the destruction of the Educational Maintenance Allowance. "I think the government underestimated the feeling of abandonment. It was throwing a generation to the wolves and saying "If your parents have money you'll be OK, but if you haven't, you'll probably be put off and if you do, you'll start life with debt." And I think people underestimated the sense of anger and rage that people felt about it." Thomas has always been a familiar face on the leftist protesting scene and although thinks people who come to protests to start trouble are "stupid," reluctantly can empathise with times when things have gotten out of hand. "Sometimes it's riots that gets things changed. If you look at the history of working people's lives in this country, the right to vote was paved by riots, the right for women to vote had cricket sheds being burnt down and windows smashed and women throwing themselves under horses… The trouble with riots is that people end up shitting on their own doorstep nine times out of ten and burn down things instead of building them up but you have to understand as well that these are frustrations of anger."

Thomas has never looked at comedy as an industry, for him he's always been involved in counterculture- perhaps the majority view of comedians when he started out in the 1980's and the only stand-up on TV was hidden away in a dusty corner of Channel 4- but the climate of comedy has drastically changed in the last decade with the production of panel shows that Thomas describes as "really cheap telly." The material for these big-name comedians rarely revolves around attracting the ire of the political forces unlike when Thomas started out, despite there being "loads of stuff for comedians to get their teeth into," name-checking the closing of libraries, the Murdoch media empire and the end of Sure Start to name a few. “I think it's an absolute fucking disgrace when people like Jimmy Carr get caught dodging tax, when an ex-Etonian prime minister who's funded by tax-dodgers gets the moral high ground on satirists is a fucking sad day. Actually I'd put money that Kissinger's sitting there going "Well, that's the day satire died."”

However, the countercultural comedians are still out there, Thomas stresses and he is a particular fan of Robin Ince, Josie Long (who Thomas once did a gig with on a car park roof in London’s East End) and what he describes as "stuff that doesn't pander to the feedline punchline, here's-all-your-prejudices-in-one-bag type of comedy.” For Mark, comedy has a distinct importance and responsibility to be a part of social movements. “You could see it however long ago when people occupied Westminster Bridge for the NHS and put on a comedy gig in the middle of the bridge- those things are really important... I've been doing this for 27 years and I still find standing on a bridge that we've occupied talking to people about politics thrilling." For Thomas, it is comedians’ duty to challenge, not pander to their audience. "The responsibility I have is to come up with stuff that's interesting and you wouldn't normally see and is intellectually and artistically challenging, that's what I want to do. And that means changing the form as well as the content of it. This show is very much a change of form- this is a theatrical thing, it's also a stand-up thing, it's also a performance thing- I like the fact that it confuses people, I think it's great."