NOEL FIELDING
‘I’D BE IN THE BATH WITH MY FACE COVERED
IN BLACK MAKE UP ICE CUBES FOR EYES
AND WEARING A BLONDE WIG’
Noel Fielding, prince of surreal comedy, has got his own series, and it’s as strange as you’d expect. Matt Trueman meets him
N oel Fielding arrives at the Groucho Club in Soho wearing his favourite cape. It’s black with red details – very Ripper chic – and when he sits down, it balloons over the sides of his armchair. By the time the comedian and Never Mind the Buzzcocks regular starts telling me about his newfound mouse problem, he looks like a decapitated head in a cheap stage trick.
The combination is classically Fielding: a surreal, fantastical creature and a mundane monologue. It’s a little bit dark and a little bit docile, but totally absurd.
Similarly bizarre bores populate the world of the Mighty Boosh, the absurdist double-act Fielding formed with Julian Barratt in 1998. Early Edinburgh Fringe shows yielded two Perrier nominations. Radio followed, then television. Over three series for the BBC, the Boosh gained a huge cult following. In it, Fielding mostly plays Vince Noir, a fashion-forward zookeeper-turned-shopkeeper, but he also pops up in a number of vivid supporting roles and kooky cameos. These include a hermaphroditic merman with a
penchant for Bailey’s Irish Cream and watercolour paintings, and The Moon, who waxes on about such banalities as spaghetti bolognese, dentistry and dry-cleaning. For his latest project, Fielding has moved into sketch comedy. That means more room for his own breed of oddball. Amongst the recurrent characters in Noel Fielding’s Luxury Comedy, which starts on E4 in January, are a manta ray with his own sound studio and a chocolate finger former PE teacher who spent a week gigging with Status Quo in the 80s.
5 Jan–2 Feb 2012 THE LIST 13