Simon Munnery, Hyena Lounge Comedy Club, City Screen, York, February 5; Leeds Hifi Club, February 6 (From York Press)

Simon Munnery, Hyena Lounge Comedy Club, City Screen, York, February 5; Leeds Hifi Club, February 6

9:50am Friday 3rd February 2012 in Comedy

Introducing… comedian Simon Munnery’s new show, Hats Off To The 101ers, And Other Material

LAST year, Simon Munnery mounted his long-overdue debut national tour under his own name (although you may remember his alter-ego, Alan Parker, Urban Warrior, doing the rounds). Now he is following up Self Employed with Hats Off To The 101ers, And Other Material, “an extravagant mess of foaming bubble hats, superlative jokes, bad guitar riffs, delightful monologues, hand-made engineering feats and an overly ambitious one-man punk musical about the R101 airship of the 1930s. All performed with a plum. Or some other fruit”.

As the star of BBC2’s Attention Scum and BBC Radio 4’s Where Did It All Go Wrong? heads north for shows in York and Leeds, Charles Hutchinson ponders what fruit he will bring and asks more serious questions too.

What did you learn from last year’s debut tour, Simon?

“Don’t go back to Grantham. There were only 38 people there…”

How did you react?

“Delight that there wasn’t less!”

What else did you learn?

“What a big country it is… but how it all looks the same in the dark. You arrive in the dark, perform in the dark, leave in the dark. What a life.”

Does a show change from town to town?

“Slight alterations, yes, but I think a show varies from night to night rather than town to town because I don’t believe there’s a fixed town identity that you can apply to a gig.

“You just adapt naturally to how it’s going that night. Even if you did a week in Grantham, how the show went would vary from night to night.”

Do you not have the chance to look around a town when on tour?

“I’m more likely to be on a train or driving to the next show, so I know a lot about travelling. It really broadens the arse.”

Here comes your “overly ambitious one-man punk musical”, Hats Off To The 101ers. My first thought was, “Could it be a show about the late, great Joe Strummer and his pre-Clash group?”

“It’s actually about the R101 airship of the 1930s, but it’s in the style of Joe Strummer. It’s kind of a meta-pun. Did you know he specifically changed his name to Strummer because he couldn’t play any chords. I’m with him there!”

So, you’ve built a show around the story of an airship?

“It’s now called Hats Off To The 101ers, And Other Material… and it’s mainly other material. Only seven minutes on the R101, though I’m quite happy with those seven minutes.”

What first drew you to the story of the R101?

“I live just outside Bedford in the village of Cardington, which has these two huge sheds that you can see from miles away. They were the biggest sheds in Britain when they were built, though they’re now about a third of the size of the ASDA distribution building.

“That’s where the R101 was built. The sheds are still there but you can’t get in there. They’re listed buildings and though one of them is obviously rotting, the other has been restored.

“But are they ugly? When I see them I feel a pang of nostalgia for something I never knew, and they’re so old they can’t be ugly.”

The R101 crashed on its maiden overseas voyage in Beauvais, France on October 5, 1930, killing 48 of the 54 people on board. How do you reflect on that in your show?

“It was a massive tragedy, people lining the streets as the coffins came back… but there’s something magnificent about a vast airship and the foresight that they knew air travel was the future. For a short time airships were viable, but the R101 crash ended British airship development.”

Your show features “hand-made engineering feats”. Do you recreate the R101?

“I’ve made a model out of Wickes cellophane dust sheets, which you use when you’re painting, and you can then inflate it with a hair dryer.

“I was thinking of hydrogen, but it has a bad history and I don’t want to re-create the R101 disaster. That would very much be a short tour.”

What other engineering feats have you carried out for the show?

“I’ve built an expandable proscenium arch, eight ft wide, eight ft high, that packs away to two ft by one ft. I hang cardboard animation images from it for a piece called One Down, which is set after Jesus was taken down from the cross and it imagines a conversation between the two robbers. They talk about Jesus, their lives, what they wanted from life, and there are some jokes about one of them having a brother who’s one of the centurions.”

What else makes up the “Other Material”?

“There are a couple of poems, two songs, anecdotes, and I do a Bob Dylan parody.

“It’s quite similar in style to the Self Employed show: a bit of this, a bit of that. I definitely don’t just tell a few jokes. I like to class myself as somewhere between theatre and art…”

And why will you “perform with a plum or some other fruit”, as it says in your tour blurb”?

“I thought I’d written that as a joke – though I don’t want to disappoint fruit lovers! You could always throw fruit; recreate 19th century vaudeville. A plum seems to work pretty well.”

• Simon Munnery presents Hats Off To The 101ers, And Other Material at the Hyena Lounge Comedy Club, The Basement, City Screen, York, on Sunday, 7.30pm, and Leeds Hifi Club, on Monday, 7pm. Box office: York, 0871 902 5726 or thebasementyork.co.uk; Leeds, 0113 242 7353.