Funny man Ross Noble heads to Crawley, Bexhill and Portsmouth

Ross Noble is delighted to be back on the road with his new stand-up show, Humournoid.
Ross NobleRoss Noble
Ross Noble

Dates coming up include The Hawth, Crawley on Friday, February 11; Bexhill’s De La Warr Pavilion on Sunday, February 13 and the New Theatre Royal, Portsmouth on Friday, February 18.

“We did the first half of the tour before Christmas and then we got to the time when Omicron just went mental and then we got back to it. We had to cancel the first two gigs because they were in Scotland. I was in Australia and states were opening up and shutting down and I spent the whole time just dodging between the restrictions and trying to make things work so really the idea of just getting back and doing some gigs and turning up and just getting on the stage is absolutely great.”

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Looking back on all the lockdowns, though, Ross admits that things haven’t been too bad for him: “I know that a lot of comics just fell into a well of despair but I suppose I’ve always been quite adaptable and for me it worked out quite well. It just gave me a lot of time to work on stuff that I had been meaning to do for ages, all sorts of different things. I locked myself in a room and just started finishing off all those things that were knocking around in my head.

“Certainly with stand-up you need an audience but whatever was knocking around my head I had to think of an audience and it was brilliant to be creating things with an audience in mind. You’re writing stuff and even if you don’t know when it’s going to be in front of a live audience, you can still do it.”

It did get tricky at times though: “My wife worries a bit more than I do and we were at a point where I was saying no to stuff that was turning up. I have spent years and years always turning down things especially telly stuff because I always prefer to work in stand-up. I have always thought why do I want to do stuff where I have to jump through hoops and where it’s depending on so many other people when I can just get up on stage, but my wife was saying to me when we were in the lockdowns ‘That has really backfired now!’

“We moved to Australia before the pandemic and I was just looking around and thinking that I might have to compromise slightly on the stuff that I’m prepared to do and then I got a telephone call to see if I wanted to do Celebrity Apprentice Australia. Usually I am really snotty about reality TV shows and just think it is all rubbish but I did it and I really enjoyed it. I absolutely loved it. I got through to the final. It’s not like a show where you’re sitting there getting filmed all the time. It’s about constantly coming up with ideas. The brain is working overtime and you’re having to do stuff non-stop. I decided that I would just come up with the maddest ideas that I could think of. I thought that I’ll either win it or get fired straight away and in fact I nearly won it!”

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Ross grew up in Cramlington, just outside Newcastle – a place he looks back on differently now that he has got his own children.

“Cramlington is one of those new towns. Cramlington on paper is the best place you could possibly grow up. It has got your twisty windy streets and cul-de-sacs and little parks and it is all connected and you just take it all for granted.

“It has got cycle tracks right the way through and I could cycle all the way to the shopping centre and never get on a road.

“I look back on it and I think of course that’s why they wanted to live there but when I was a kid I it used to freak me out a bit.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

“It was a bit Stepford Wives like. It felt very homogeneous but I look back now that I’ve got kids and I can see why my mum and dad wanted us to grow up there.”