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Born in Rockhampton, Gloucestershire, in 1985, Joel Dommett is a comedian and presenter. His career began with acting roles in shows such as Skins and Casualty, before making his name as a standup comedian, performing on Live at the Apollo, and becoming a household name on I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! in 2016. Dommett is the host on I’m a Celebrity … Unpacked and The Masked Singer on ITV.
This was taken outside the front door of the bungalow I grew up in. I’m stood next to my grandpa’s yellow pickup truck. That T-shirt was a gift from Uncle John who lived in South Africa.
Growing up in the countryside, I would spend all weekend in the woods – having a decent stick was enough to fill an entire day. I was a quiet child and, according to Mum, very good at being by myself. If we ever did anything wrong we would be sent to our rooms. It was the ultimate punishment for my brother to be by himself. Whereas I’d think: “Yes! I get to just sit in my room alone for hours.” In the end Mum would end up knocking on the door, saying: “You can come out now, if you like?” I was in my happy place when it was just me and my imagination.
I wasn’t the class clown, but I always gravitated towards them. At secondary school that was a guy called Steve – he’d happily risk detention if it meant getting a laugh, whereas I was more inclined to blend in and keep my head down. To this day, we’re still best mates, and he’s now my main writer on I’m a Celebrity and The Masked Singer.
I loved alternative music growing up, but I wasn’t quite confident enough to commit to the necessary rebellion. When I was 14, I gravitated towards a group of like-minded teenagers who also listened to grunge, rock and nu-metal like Korn, Limp Bizkit, Slipknot and Nirvana. The only problem was my mum wouldn’t let me grow my hair long, so I had to spike it up using gel, a bit like Robb Flynn from Machine Head in the 90s. And only on non-uniform days. I would also wear eyeliner and paint my nails. Again, my mum wasn’t keen on that, so I had to do it on the school bus and then remove it all on the way home. I had a Boots bag full of beauty products, hidden in my bedroom cupboard.
The TV show Bottom was a real lightbulb moment for me. I was obsessed with Rik Mayall and Ade Edmondson and used to rewatch the episodes again and again on the home VHS player. I knew it was naughty, even though I didn’t fully understand the more sexual jokes. I just liked watching a guy smash another guy around the head with a frying pan.
When I left school, I ended up moving to London. It was a mad choice that came out of nowhere. A friend had a spare room, so the next day, after he offered it to me, I left without any purpose or job. I got the room for £60 a month, which I remember at the time being very expensive, so I tried to haggle him down to £30. He was an actor so I ended up following a similar path, although I never really enjoyed it as everyone took themselves too seriously. Comedy was really my passion, but I didn’t realise it could be a profession. Then I landed a role with Ade Edmondson on a sitcom called Teenage Kicks. I told him about my aspirations and he suggested I give standup a go. That planted the first seed.
LimeWire, the illegal peer-to-peer sharing website, was my other gateway into standup. My iPod was filled with songs I had downloaded, but it got to the point where I ran out of music to steal. I’d downloaded all of it, there was no genre left unstolen. So one day I typed in the word “comedy” and thousands of standup shows appeared. I spent months listening to them on repeat, subconsciously learning how to write jokes.
Two years later, I did my first show. My friend had flown to LA to network, so I tagged along. I didn’t manage to set up meetings with any Hollywood bigwigs, but I did do three minutes in the rooftop bar of the Rainbow Bar & Grill on Sunset Boulevard. If you paid the promoter $10, you got a short slot in between the bands playing. The set went fine, but I loved the experience and was hooked. Afterwards I did the cliched thing of walking down Sunset Boulevard over people’s stars, thinking: “This is it! This is what I want to do for the rest of my life!”
Around this time, I read Jimmy Carr’s memoir. In it he wrote that during his first year of comedy, he did 300 gigs to overcome the fear. I decided to do the same: I bought a bike from a charity shop and I’d ride it from gig to gig, three shows a night sometimes. I was so lucky with the community that I found – Josh Widdicombe, James Acaster, Joe Lycett, Romesh Ranganathan, Rob Beckett – all of the comics who started out doing weird gigs in front of four people are now household names. I look back on it as such a special time. Trying something cool and creative every night and not doing it for money, but to find a joke that would make your friends laugh.
I spent eight years learning how to be myself on stage before I ever got a TV presenting job, which meant I didn’t have to invent a persona later: the version of me you see now is the one I honed over years on the circuit. I’m quite a soft person, and I’ve tried to hold on to that. If I have a selling point, it’s probably that I put a lot of effort into everything I do – sometimes too much. When I’m doing the jungle, for example, I’m always thinking: “There are 500 people working on this, most of them haven’t seen their families for weeks and they’ve barely slept. I can’t mess this up.” So if I fluff my words, it really gets to me.
When the call for The Masked Singer job came in, my agent said: “This show from Korea needs a host but the first day of filming is on the day of your wedding. Are you interested?” I thought: “Oh God, I’ve been given the opportunity to do my first primetime Saturday night television show on the worst possible day imaginable.” I asked my then fiancee what she thought and she said: “Obviously we can’t move the wedding.” I wasn’t in a position in my career to get them to shift the entire production date, but luckily I was with the same agency as Jonathan Ross so they claimed it was his scheduling conflict instead of mine. I got married in Mykonos, then flew back the next day; 24 hours later, I was in Bovingdon revealing Patsy Palmer as Butterfly.
Now that I am a dad to a little boy, I feel constantly reconnected to the version of me in the Swaziland T-shirt. I go on slides, wear wellington boots, splash in puddles, and revisit all of the things I used to do when I was two. I hope that I can bring him the joys of life that I had as a child: it won’t all be plain sailing, but he can wear as much black eyeliner as he likes.
