Paul Foot: ‘It’s not the sort of show you’d expect from a 50-year-old’
A prolific comedian who’s well known as being quite ‘out there’, Paul Foot is back with Dissolve, perhaps his most daring and personal show yet.
Dissolve, co-written and directed by Paul’s long-time collaborator and accomplice, Aaron Kilkenny-Fletcher, was nominated for Best Show at the Chortle Awards 2024.
It also co-won Best Show at the Edinburgh Comedy Awards and was nominated for the NextUp Comedy Award.
In it, the comic reveals how he discovered the secret of life on the outskirts of Lancaster, and also gets distracted by, among other things, King Tutankhamun, the House of Lords and officious lollipop ladies.
“It’s really not like any other show I’ve done before because it’s autobiographical, to an extent,” explains Paul, whose television appearances include Would I Lie To You?, Never Mind the Buzzcocks and 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown.
“It deals with quite serious issues, about how I used to suffer with mental health problems for many years, and it’s a hopeful show because it tells of how I recovered from all those mental health problems, and I’m doing very well now.
“I’m doing more than just well – as people who see the show will find out… So it was a real challenge to talk about these quite serious issues in a funny way.
“And that was the exciting challenge, to put the show together, to make it funny – and people often come up at the end, sometimes just to say they found it funny and they laughed, but sometimes they’ll say that it really gave them hope for their own mental health issues, or that it resonated with them in some other way.
“It is a comedy show – it’s not changing the world or anything – but it is a show that really resonates with a lot of people on various different levels, so it’s been very exciting to be doing it round the country.”
Paul assures me that despite the moments of poignancy and soul-baring, there are “lots of laughs in it” and “lots of silly stuff”.
“People who are used to my silly flights of fancy about silly, ridiculous nonsense, they’ll get all of that,” he insists.
“But yes, there’s a lot of moments when it goes unexpectedly from being very funny to something very serious, and then back to being very funny again, and hopefully wrong-foots people – they never quite know when it’s going to happen.
“It’s quite a journey it takes people on, and it’s been an amazing reaction from people after the show.”
Paul has performed more than a dozen solo stand-up shows and has built up a cult following of comedy-goers, dubbed ‘The Guild of Paul Foot Connoisseurs’.
He says that Dissolve is doing “better than any previous tour”, which is why he’s bringing it back to Cambridge, having already performed it here – to a sold out crowd – earlier this year.
Paul turned 50 late last year. Was that another reason he decided to get more personal and reflective this time around?
“I don’t think it was anything to do with that really,” he replies. “The show is all about a moment, a thing that happened to me on 20 March, 2022, at 4.59pm.
“So that happened back in 2022, when I would have been 48, I think, and I co-wrote the show with Aaron, my writing partner, but we created it because this was such an amazing event.
“I just thought ‘Well I’ve got to do a show about it’. It was so extraordinary that I just thought ‘That’s got to be the next show’.
“That’s really what inspired it, rather than turning 50 – in fact it’s very much not the sort of show that you’d normally expect from someone turning 50, in the sense that a reviewer said that near the beginning of the show, I do a kind of rant about change and about wokeness and things like that, but not from the sort of way that you’d expect a 50-year-old to be doing it, or a 49-year-old as I was at the time…
“I’m very much about embracing changes and I want to be as woke as possible. This word ‘woke’ has been very cleverly hijacked by the right-wing media to mean some terrible thing, to the extent that people sometimes come up and say ‘Oh, I’m not woke but I do believe in rights for people’.
“But I want to be as woke as possible; I mean I’m 50 but I want to be at the forefront of changes, I want to be more ‘getting into the changes’ than the younger people.
“In many ways, I think I ought to be more interested in changing things for the better because I actually remember the 1970s and the 1980s, and they were absolutely horrendous!
“So all the more reason to improve things, and to improve society’s attitude to things.
“It’s definitely not the sort of show for someone who’s 50 and they’re just moaning on about ‘Oh, things aren’t how they used to be’. I find that very boring.”
Paul Foot will be bringing Dissolve to the Cambridge Junction (J2) – for the second time this year – on Friday, 18 October. Tickets, priced £19, are available from junction.co.uk. For more on Paul, go to paulfoot.tv.