Sean Lock, who has passed away, brought his Lockipedia tour to venues across Tayside and Fife in 2010. Here we revisit a hilarious interview he did before the shows.
I can still remember waiting to call Sean over a decade ago. As with most entertainers who had a show to promote, you had a set time to call and only a short time window to ask your questions.
The reason I have always loved interviewing comedians is that you really can expect to get some good banter – even if you’ve only got ten minutes of their time.
Sean was on great form and I genuinely had a great laugh chatting to him.
This interview was the first thing that sprang to my mind when I heard the news about his death from cancer aged only 58. I looked back in the archives to remember what we discussed.
Sean visited Dundee’s Whitehall Theatre on Saturday October 30, 2010. This tour also took in Adam Smith Theatre, Kirkcaldy, Aberdeen Music Hall and Perth Concert Hall.
The interview, called Lock and Roll, appeared in The Courier on October 27, 2010.
Sean Lock in Lockipedia
You’d think a comedian who has named his show Lockipedia – after online “encyclopedia” Wikipedia – might have a penchant for the internet, but not Sean Lock.
In fact, the stand-up known for his appearances as a team captain on Channel 4 show 8 out of 10 Cats positively despises the worldwide web.
“I’m like the anti-Stephen Fry,” he says, talking about the self-confessed technology geek who hosts QI – another show on which Sean often appears.
“I’ve got somebody on Twitter pretending to be me at the moment. My agent phoned up and asked if I wanted him to be stopped. I thought it sounded a bit heavy – plus I didn’t really care.
“If someone is getting their rocks off pretending to be me, and other people enjoy this pretence, there’s no harm in it. And, anyway, how do we know it’s a bloke? It could be a little old lady called Edna up in Dundee.”
Sean’s new show Lockipedia consists mainly of stand-up, but he’s introduced a new dimension in order to get the audience more involved – and he doesn’t mean hecklers.
“People tend not to heckle a great deal these days as the shows are in theatres and they’ve come for a night out.
“They’re quite civilising environments, theatres. In the old days at comedy clubs and pubs I dealt with loads of them.”
‘Misleading but highly entertaining’
Sean says his show isn’t really based on Wikipedia, the infamous online resource that is written by its users, and therefore subject to highly dubious information.
The only similarity is all about what he knows – which tends to be unreliable, misleading but highly entertaining information.
“It’s mainly a stand-up show but, what I also do is get the audience involved in a very random way. What happens is someone calls out a letter and then a word beginning with that letter and I have a book with some jokes in it.
“It’s technically impossible what I’m setting out to do – which is to have a joke on every possible word in the English language.
“Sometimes I get lucky and manage to think up something on the spot, and actually, what it’s mostly about is how I get out of it.
“It’s really messing around with the idea of the comedian interacting with the audience in a different way, rather than ‘what’s your name, where do you come from, what do you do for a living?’ It lets people who would never normally shout out be involved in the show.”
It’s heartbreaking to lose my dearest friend Sean Lock , he was a true original, a wonderful comic. All my thoughts are with his family.
— Bill Bailey (@BillBailey) August 18, 2021
A veteran of the comedy circuit, Sean has worked extensively in television and radio, including his own BBC 2 series 15 Storeys High. He has won various awards including a British Comedy Award for best stand-up in 2000 and a Time Out Comedy Award.
‘A load of nonsense’
His new show has been described by critics as “surreal” – something Sean says is a load of nonsense.
“I don’t think my act is surreal, I don’t think people know how to use the word. Every now and again, I sort of tread into the absurd.
“I often think people who get the job of describing comedy don’t really know anything about it and then they describe things as ‘surreal’.
“That’s one of the many bad things about the internet; the fact that what some journalist writes is just there, forever, like it’s carved in stone. Or a comment you made in an interview 10 years ago, just stuck there.
“Then people start to collate all the rubbish that’s been written. It’s ludicrous.”
Sean has basically described how Wikipedia works. Information is added by writers and referenced from other web pages. But, if these are incorrect, then the page is wrong, too. Has he looked at his own Wikipedia page lately?
“I haven’t seen it for a while. When I had two children, it used to say I had three daughters, which my wife saw as an omen we should have another one.”
The couple did go on to have a son. The page now states: “Lock has mentioned on several occasions that he has three children, of which at least two are girls.”
‘It doesn’t bother me, but they’re wrong’
“It used to say my first TV appearance was in 1974 having my spoon bent by Uri Geller. This wasn’t true. But I was quite happy for people to believe that, because it wasn’t damaging.
“It also says I was born in Woking, Surrey. I was actually born in a place nearby called Chertsey – but it’s not a big deal. These are little things – it doesn’t bother me – but they’re wrong.
“It’s the same as blogs, I couldn’t bring myself to read a blog because they’re rubbish. There’s a reason these people are writing on the Internet, it’s because they’re bad, scrappy writers.”
His Wikipedia page does have something right, though. Sean used to work as a labourer on a building site.
“I used to go to comedy gigs and see people in pubs in London. Then I started doing open spots and it was a hobby for many years.
“One day, I got my first gig and I got paid 15 quid for 20 minutes. That’s when I realised you could earn a living from it.
“Writing jokes is a lot of work – but you can’t practise being witty, you’d be an insufferable person. It’s about finding what’s funny and what you like doing.”
But, the ultimate question is, was he actually born in 1962?
“Really? Have they go! that? No, that’s wrong. I’m younger than that! I’m outraged – it’s 1963.”
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