What got you interested in comedy?

My love for comedy really comes from when I was kid. I grew up in a pretty strict household with a very clear regime of ‘dos' and ‘do nots’. I mean, if you swore in front of my dad – that was the end. But those rules sort of loosened up a bit when we sat around the telly and watched Steptoe and Son or Dave Allen. Everyone laughed together and we all seemed to enter this different space – a nice space.

And what made you interested in doing stand-up comedy yourself?

Frankly, the great thing about stand-up is that you get all the applause. That might make me sound like an attention-seeker but I assure you, I’ve been in this game a while and any comic who claims not to have the word ‘ego’ in their raison d’etre is a fucking liar.

So what got you interested in politics?

Oh, god. Well there are probably three things there.

Shall we do them one at a time?

First of all, I became an atheist when I was about nine-years-old.

Early starter, eh?

Well, I was raised in a Christian household and I went to Sunday School every week and all of that. Anyway, one day this pastor comes in and he’s doing magic tricks and he used to try and make them relevant to the bible. One day he brings in this stick, and he uses it like a magic wand and taps on an empty box except, of course, when he opens the lid, there are stacks of coins in there which he then empties into the collection box.

I remember being so impressed; I said to him “Can I do that too? How can I learn to do that?” And he said to me “You can – all you need is faith.” So when I got home that day I went down into the basement and sat whacking an empty box with a stick for hours and absolutely nothing happened. I remember in that moment sitting there thinking: “This is shit.” And so I was an atheist for evermore.

So what was the second thing to spark your interest in politics?

It was punk rock.

I loved listening to punk music: The Clash, Poison Girls, the Tom Robinson Band, The Ramones. I loved how, reading their lyrics, it read like an argument. You've got to think, for youngsters this is all old-hat now, but back then – to discover popular music that actually said something was incredible.

And the third?

I was at college in Yorkshire during the miners’ strike in the ‘80s. I saw first-hand the damage that was being done to these communities by Thatcher, and her total disregard for people’s lives. Me and a few mates ran this thing called The Red Shed, which really was a shed which had been painted red, where we would put on shows and organise marches and benefits. The money we made from The Red Shed kept some of those mining families afloat for months.

So what made you think your style of political comedy would work?

It’s funny that you ask that, if I’m honest. To me, at least, politics and comedy are synonymous. It’s just taking what you see and writing jokes about it. I don’t know why it is, but I always get annoyed at how comedians on the political left are asked to explain their views. It’s frustrating because no-one ever asks Jim Davidson about his right-wing “ideology” or about the politics of what he says.

In all fairness, that might just be because not many people want to talk to Jim Davidson.

Well I suppose that is a point.

But politically-charged comedy does remain outside of the British mainstream. Do you think it’s enough for comedy to just ‘be funny’ or do you prefer it when there’s something else going on under the surface?

I think that’s a very interesting area to get into. I know plenty of people who watch Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer and will say “What’s the point in that? That’s just stupid; they’re just being stupid!” but actually, if you spend a bit of time on it, and what they’re actually doing, playing with and breaking down social norms, it’s really, really interesting. 

Do you think the same applies to modern observational comedians, the kind who play Live at the Apollo or headline their own shows at Wembley?

I do, actually. I think people like Michael McIntyre and Peter Kay just represent the ‘rise of the comic’ thing that we’ve seen in Britain over the last decade or so. Is that ‘rise’ necessarily a good thing for comedy? I don’t know. For some it will be. I personally do not see the attraction of arena tours. I like intimacy. I don’t like being in a venue so big you have to look at a fucking screen to see what’s going on.

Bob Mortimer recently said he thought the British comedy scene was still very much an “establishment thing”. There has been a long history, albeit somewhat diminished, of Oxbridge comedy troupe performers making it to the big-time. Do you have a view on British comedy as an “establishment thing”?

I don’t tend to think in those terms. Take Peter Cook for example. He was undoubtedly one of the most important comedians ever. He changed comedy, and so, to a degree, changed the world. He is in your DNA and you might not even know it. John Cleese called him “the gatekeeper to the field in which we now play”, which I think is just lovely.

And, of course, John Cleese, the famous Footlight himself, was bezzie mates with the most working-class man in the world Les Dawson back in the day. When he was doing Sez Les for ITV, Cleese would pop up in every other sketch. I think comedy is much better for bringing people together than it is for dividing them.

Do you think there are more obstacles now for working-class kids looking to get into comedy than there were in Les Dawson’s day?

Class works in an insidious way. It undermines people’s expectations and aspirations and teaches people to expect the worst. The middle-classes, on the other hand, are often equipped with a sense of ease and confidence that allows them to enter a Radio 4 studio quite comfortably.  

What I find really interesting is the way the comedy scene has been somewhat marketised. There are so many people coming through now who have learned to tell jokes, actually learned how to be a comic, by going to these comedy classes they run now. I’m not knocking it, I know lots of talented people who have taught at and learned from these things but, I don’t know, I do find it a bit strange. I wonder if I would have been put off by that kind of thing when I was younger.

What do you make of the current Conservative government and its approach to the working-class?

I read a thing by the economist Paul Mason quite recently. It basically explained how, throughout the ages, capitalism has created this cycle of boom and bust. However, even though it has become standard practice to hack the welfare state to bits during periods of bust, it never really recoups its losses because it doesn’t get investment during the booms. I think David Cameron is doing things to the welfare state that Margaret Thatcher wouldn’t have dreamed of. Or maybe she would – but she would never have believed she would have got away with it. For whatever reason, I don’t think she would have ever come down to this level.

So when you see Jeremy Corbyn, an old-school and proud socialist, elected to lead the Labour party, are you filled with a bit more optimism?

I think it’s important to know that the left movement – and it is a movement – is not made up of a single political party. But I think if Corbyn does well then that would broadly help the British left. People are fucked off with how the Labour party has been managed over the last twenty years. They seemed to be forever chasing the centre but, of course, as the Conservatives reached further to the right, so did the centre. We live in an age of extremist centrism. They didn’t even oppose the welfare cuts when they had the chance, for fuck’s sake. As far as I’m concerned, Corbyn’s win represents a disconnect between the grassroots activists and the people running the show. I think it’s great we’ve finally got a major political force challenging austerity.

You were famously awarded the Guinness World Record for performing the most political demonstrations in 24 hours a few years ago. Can you tell me a bit more about that?

I wasn’t originally going for any kind of world record when I did that. I basically found out that if you want to protest in Parliament Square, you have to go to a little office around the corner from Number 10 and, so long as you’re not promoting any kind of hate speech or whatever, they pretty much can’t deny you the right to protest.

So I thought, for a laugh, I’d go in there and ask if I could protest in ‘Defence of Surrealism’. Everyone behind the desk looked a bit confused when I did, but they didn’t have any way of stopping me, so off I went, cheering about how great surrealism was in the middle of Parliament Square. Anyway, that got boring after about five minutes so I decided to pop back to the office and request a form so that I could set up a demonstration hoping to ‘Smash Surrealism’. This went on for a good while and I ended up performing 20 demonstrations that day.

Do you still hold that record?

No, I lost it to a sixth form Amnesty International club in Hertfordshire a few years ago. They invited me to present them the award and they were all brilliant. It was really great to see.

You published a book, Extreme Rambling, in 2011 detailing your experience walking the Israel/Palestine border-

No.

Sorry?

I think it’s very important to make it clear that although I did walk the wall that has been put up to act as a barrier between Israel and Palestine, the wall itself goes well over the border and claims about 10% of the West Bank, transferring that land over to Israel’s side. It is not the border.

Clearly I need to do my research…

This is the thing. The only reason I did the walk was because I didn’t know enough about the conflict. I understand politics, I understand war, I understand all of that, but I had never properly got my head around the Israel/Palestine problem. So I thought, right, the only way you’re really going to get it is if you see it for yourself. All walls, or at least the ideas they stand for, are destined to fall. Whether you’re talking about Hadrian’s Wall, the Great Wall of China or the Berlin Wall – they all just become tourist attractions eventually. I believe the same will come to pass with this one, I was just doing it ahead of time!

Finally, your latest show, Trespass, comes to Cambridge on September 29th. What’s it all about?

The majority of it deals with the way space is being bought up in major cities, such as London, by big money investors, and the kind of social cleansing that occurs as a result of that. You know, there’s this bizarre situation that emerges where you have beautiful great properties in the centre of town and no fucker’s living in them.

As well as that, it’s about the ways people’s behaviour changes when they know they are on private property and they are subject to the will of a private owner rather than, to an extent, the state. A fundamental question I want to ask is: do your human rights still exist when you walk into John Lewis? I would argue that they do. Basically, Trespass is about me finding something I don’t like and seeing what I can do to fuck about with it.

'Mark Thomas: Trespass' is showing at the Cambridge Junction on 29th September at 8pm.