Friday Night Dinner star opens Chichester Festival Theatre season

The play, Tom’s Chichester debut, is The Government Inspector, the opening production in the 2025 Chichester Festival Theatre season.

Running from Friday, April 25-Saturday, May 24, it sees Tom, known to millions for Friday Night Dinner and Plebs, as the “inspector” in question – ie not a real inspector at all.

The residents of a corrupt town are panicking. Word has gone round that a bigwig government inspector is heading their way. The trouble is that they have all got their noses in the trough. So when they discover the inspector is already staying at the inn, incognito, the whole town lavishes flattering attention on him.

This suits the “inspector” just fine, since in reality he’s a lowly and broke government pen-pusher, nursing extravagant fantasies of fame and fortune…

“I didn't know the play before, I am ashamed to say,” says Tom, “I'm not as cultured as my grandfather (who ran an antiquarian book shop in Oxford) would have been! But when I'm reading something, whether it was written in 1836 or in 2025, if it is a comedy then I am thinking does it make me laugh or if it isn't a comedy, then I am thinking does it grip me. And Phil (Porter)’s new adaptation definitely made me laugh!

“And also it feels a bit like the kind of comedy that I try to do. Gogol had this very high-falutin’ feeling towards comedy, that it was just as relevant and important as tragedy and other forms of drama. He was passionate that laughter and comedy should be a device to have a greater impact on society, and actually I have also often been accused of taking my own comedy too seriously. For a long time I had a real rule that I would never lie on stage. I felt like if I was saying something that wasn't true then I was doing something that was immoral. My comedy friends thought I was just being completely ridiculous. But I think in that sense maybe I sound a bit like Gogol. All my shows have that serious intent. My first show was about privilege. My third show was about circumcision and how I think it is a bad practice. All my shows have something beneath them where I was trying to affect change. “And that was the case with Gogol. Reading about him you read about his frustration with the response to The Government Inspector. People laughed and liked it and thought it was really funny but they didn't realise it was actually about them. So Gogol ended up hating the people that loved the play. And I think I see myself in that whole idea of taking comedy so seriously. Gogol wanted his audiences to respond in a certain way and the fact that they didn't was what drove him insane. Which is a kind of warning to me!”

Tom also sees himself to an extent in the character he is playing: “Whenever I am acting I tend to think not really whether this character is good or bad but more which part of myself is it that I can identify and really turn up. I am scatter-brained and chaotic and like to gamble especially when I was a bit younger. I liked to get drunk and didn't really think about the consequences and I liked to hang around with people who were like that as well. And there is something of that in the character that I am playing. He is a real character. He is impulsive. He just wants to push more and more and more and he just goes with the situation.

“There are some people who would have said ‘But I'm not the government inspector!’ but there are also people that would say ‘Yeah, that’s right. I am the government inspector’ and just roll with it. If he was a moral figure, he would have stopped and said ‘I'm not.’ So he is as guilty as the others really but there's actually something quite playful about him. It's interesting when you meet people that are so impulsive that they can't really control themselves. Really he is a playful opportunist.

“And that's how I think about acting. I'm trying to turn up the parts of myself that are most like that character. When I read the script, I thought it was great but the other thing I thought was that I realised there were bits in me that I could realistically turn up.”

Tom was last on stage in The Philanthropist, a three-month run directed by Simon Callow in 2017, and it's all a question of staying true to the two shows that he is most well known for, Friday Night Dinner and Plebs.

“There was a lot of work that I put into those two shows which I'm really proud of and it feels like in the period subsequently I got offered a lot of opportunities where the material did not really chime with me. Almost in a Gogolian fashion I was quite concerned with not doing something that did not work with me. Plebs and Friday Night Dinner had so many fans and meant so much to people that I didn't want to do something that was not as good. So I did other things. I did a lot of stand-up comedy.”

But now The Government Inspector feels right in the same way that Friday Night Dinner felt right, Tom says.

“I'm doing a stand-up show later this year which is about finding fame on Friday Night Dinner. I think comedy is a way of processing your thoughts in a way that makes them more palatable for other people. It allows me to refine how I feel about something, and then when I have made it funny then I know that I've dealt with it. I was maybe 22 when the first series started and as a young person I didn't feel the pressure so much as have just the feeling the excitement of it all. Everybody loved it and then you're wanting to know what next and I was starting to think that there was a lot of me, maybe too much of me, out there in the world.

“But then when I read this script for The Government Inspector I'm really excited now to be thrust back on the stage.”

As for why Friday Night Dinner was the success it was: “I think the answer has to be that was a brilliantly-written recognisable farce weird enough to satisfy a Channel 4 audience.”

Running from February 25 2011 to May 1 2020, it starred Tom alongside Tamsin Greig, Paul Ritter, Simon Bird and Mark Heap and followed the regular Friday night dinner experience of the Jewish middle-class Goodman family in North London.

“For whatever reason it struck a balance that meant that it was the kind of show that a 13-year-old child could watch with adult members of the family and both get something out of it but if I knew what the magic was I would have made ten series like that by now! But we even had children of five or six watching the series and loving it. It was about a bizarre family that felt real and that people could relate to. Even if their own family was not weird in the same way they could recognise the idiosyncrasies. Plus the other actors were brilliant!

“But the longevity was down to (writer) Robert (Popper). There was a set of strict restrictions but he did so much within those restrictions. Every episode was basically Friday night and the two boys coming home and it was all set in the same house basically. It was classic sitcom. It was actually a bit of a sleeper and then became a cult hit during the pandemic.

“It was a really long time in my life and that sort of success weighed on me a little bit. I didn't want to go into anything else I didn't think was as good but that's why I'm happy to be coming back now with a play that's already gone down as one of the best plays of all time. There's a lot of good stuff in it already that I can just slip into.”