Coffee & a Chat: Dom Joly

Coffee & a Chat

Best-selling author and broadcaster Dom Joly wants to share his Holiday Snaps with you. Here he explains why.

Best known as the creator of Trigger Happy TV, Dom Joly is undertaking his first UK tour since 2011.

Dom Joly’s Holiday Snaps see Dom talking about his exploits as a serial globe-trotter and seeker of dangerous travel spots. From North Korea through the Congo and Syria to Chernobyl, he’s visited some of the most unusual spots on the planet.

But it was the cult TV show Trigger Happy that first put him on the map. Sandwiched between Friends and Frazier, Joly had caught the slipstream of Cool Britannia and propelled himself to stardom as one of Britain’s funniest and most clever entertainers.

The former ITN political reporter created Trigger Happy TV with cameraman Sam Cardman. They made 14 episodes and two Christmas specials. The shows was built on clever, timeconsuming editing; original ideas and a perfect marriage of cool tunes and funny sketches. He’d captured the zeitgeist, created a phenomena and his hidden camera show was sold to more than 70 countries worldwide, with America making its own version.

After, he hosted his own BBC chat show, invited The Cure’s Robert Smith to his wedding, bought a big house in the country and started writing about travel for The Sunday Times and The Independent.

At one stage, he persuaded the BBC to fly him to the Seven Wonders Of The World, where he filmed stunts at the Great Wall of China, The Grand Canyon, the Taj Mahal and others. Later, he started writing travel novels and visited Chernobyl, Cambodia and more as he filmed big adventures for Sky and more.

His favourite clip of all time was frightening an eskimo in Newfoundland, which he filmed for a subsequent TV show, World Shut Your Mouth. He’d driven all the way to Newfoundland only to find there were no eskimos. So he drove for five hours to find one then crept up behind him before smashing a cymbal near his ear. Just for giggles.

Joly hates beaches. He hates normal holidays too. But he loves going to weird places. So, after a chat with his agent, he started visiting obscure places around the globe before writing such hit books as The Dark Tourist: Sightseeing in the World's Most Unlikely Holiday Destinations. In that book, he travelled to Chernobyl, visited his childhood home of Lebanon and went to In his second travel book, Scary Monsters and Super Creeps, he travelled the world in search of mythical monsters such as Bigfoot and the Yeti. ‘The cast from Bigfoot’s foot is in my front room,’ he laughs. And it actually is...!

‘North Korea is still the weirdest place I’ve ever been to. It’s insane,’ he laughs. ‘The only people who go to North Korea are hardened travellers whose idea of hell is a coach tour – but they all sign up to a coach tour. And they take you around the Museum of Agricultural Scythes and Lathes and it’s dreadful but because it’s North Korea everyone thinks it’s great. They have a massive bunker to stash the presents given to North Korea by other world leaders. So they have a train from Stalin, a stuffed alligator holding drinks from the PLO, a little plate from the NUM in Derby.’

His most recent book, The Hezbollah Hiking Club, followed a boozy, cricket-filled afternoon at Lord’s, where Joly convinced his two closest friends to agree to the unthinkable: a challenging hike across Lebanon, from the Israeli border in the south, along the spine of the country's mountain range, all the way to the Syrian border in the north. For Joly it was something of a homecoming, having grown up in Beirut.

And now it’s time to share those tales. From outlandish stunts for Trigger Happy TV and Sky to unlikely travel snaps from the Lebanon and Chernobyl; Joly will be sharing uncensored travel tales from the dark side in Dom Joly’s Holiday Snaps.

‘I’ve got this collection of weird holiday snaps,’ he says. ‘And I know there’s that cliché that nobody wants to see anybody else’s holiday snaps Well, my holiday snaps are really good. And I’ve got some really good stories with them.

‘So, for instance, when we did Trigger Happy TV, we went to Switzerland and found out our runner couldn’t ski and then I got arrested for impersonating a yeti. There’s another snap of me at Chernobyl, thinking: ‘Should I eat the vegetables here or not?’ So when I put all of them together, I’ve got a seriously great holiday show.’

Dom Joly’s Holiday Snaps is at The Apex, Bury St Edmunds on March 2nd.