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Joe Lycett sits in a pub, an untouched pint in front of him. “Since I had my son, I’m not drinking anywhere near as much,” he laments. “Children do not respect hangovers, or tiredness in general.”
His son is almost two, and Lycett has readjusted his life accordingly. “I’ve started going to bed when he does, which is about seven o’clock,” he explains. “I’ve seen a few nights where I’ve just gone: ‘Right, well, that’s me, then.’”
However, this is all set to come to an end thanks to the comic’s new television programme, Live from the Lycett Arms, which will not only be broadcast live three hours after his new bedtime, but absolutely surround him with alcohol. The Lycett Arms is a continuation of what began with his previous live Friday night show, Late Night Lycett, only with a more ambitious premise. This time, Lycett will host while simultaneously operating a working pub. It sounds as if it has been specifically constructed to maximise impromptu chaos – more on that in a bit – but for now Lycett has a pair of larger anxieties to deal with.
The first is that, even though we’re meeting just a couple of weeks before the first episode, the pub isn’t ready. “It’s not fully constructed yet, so I’ve been to where it will be,” he explains. “It’s going to be in fashionable east London, and that’s everything I can say about it, because I don’t actually know the full address.”
Nevertheless, he promises that the finished building will be “identifiably a pub. There’ll be an outdoor area and a cellar. There’s a bar. There’s a kind of back room. There’s a saloon bar. There’s a pool table. There’s darts. There’s karaoke. It should be really fun. That’s the goal. If it isn’t fun, there’s no point in doing it.”
A bigger issue, though, is that, since the Lycett Arms will be a real pub, Lycett will be its licensed operator. This is a role that comes with a legal requirement: he needs to pass a mandatory exam to be accredited with a Level 2 Award for Personal Licence Holders. It is an accreditation he does not yet hold.
“I took the exam but I failed,” he says. “I didn’t do any work, so that is a problem. I needed about 70% to pass, and I got something like 38%. I tried to use common sense, and I don’t have a lot of it apparently.”
Eager to help him out a little, I ask if he knows the four primary licensing objectives, as per section four of the Licensing Act 2003. The blood briefly drains from Lycett’s face. “Safe … safety … safe drinking environment to create … happy places, for people … to dwell?” he yammers.
That isn’t what’s written on the test. The answer is: “Prevention of crime and disorder. Public safety. Protection of children from harm. Prevention of public nuisance.”
“Yeah, that’s what I said, isn’t it?”
No, not really.
“Well, I think I paraphrased that. And I think that’s their problem that I didn’t get the licence because I did essentially paraphrase it right.”
After strenuously assuring me that the show will go on, with a stand-in licensee if he continues to perform as disastrously as this, Lycett starts telling me how excited he is for people to see the show.
“So, it’s my pub,” he says. “But from week one, there will be a celebrity manager who’s doing a trial shift. My aunties are going to be working the bar. There will be a weekly quiz and rotating regulars. I’m well up for weird and wonderful celebrities to just turn up, drink a pint and leave. I just want it to be constantly surprising and silly.”
It’s also exciting that he gets to be the face of live, late-night television, I tell him. It’s a dying breed of show. “I’m kind of amazed they’ve commissioned it, because nobody’s commissioning anything at the moment,” he replies. “TV is in freefall – I don’t know if you’ve heard.”
So in essence, running a pub could be a fallback career if the TV work ever dries up? “I mean, hospitality is in freefall as well,” he points out, not unreasonably. “Like most industries, it’s all just sort of fucked, isn’t it? Should I join the Guardian? Is that doing well?”
Still, the thought of turning the Lycett Arms into a permanent nightspot is something that appeals to him. After all, if Jeremy Clarkson has proved anything, it’s that tourists love nothing more than a pub with a celebrity landlord.
“I think lots of people feel like they could open up a pub or restaurant or whatever, and obviously it’s really hard,” he says. “But I do like the idea of it. I think it’s the cachet of being, like, ‘Let’s go and have a lock-in at mine.’ When the reality must be doing invoices and working out VAT.”
This is a big year for Lycett. As well as Live from the Lycett Arms, he is returning to standup after stepping aside for a couple of years. This is something he is palpably excited about. “I’m touring next year, but since last October I’ve been trying to do one gig a week,” he says. “It took me a good few months to feel even close to like I knew what I was doing. I still don’t feel like I know what I’m doing. But I’m really enjoying being on stage, and I’m not panicked about it in the way I was when I had just come back from paternity leave.”
Since his last tour, Lycett has become more recognisable and beloved in a way that nudges him towards national treasure status.
“I dispute that,” he growls.
Please agree for the sake of my question, I beg.
“Fine, OK, I’m a national treasure, yes,” he says, rolling his eyes.
Because people pay more attention to him now than when he last toured, does he feel a greater weight of responsibility for the topics he covers? “No,” he says. “If I started to change who I am on stage to fit what I think people want of me, I’d go mad. When you get reviewed, and the reviewer doesn’t like what you do, there’s this temptation to write the sort of show that the reviewer would like. But there are only about 10 comedy reviewers left in the whole country, and it wouldn’t be good to write something just so that 10 white men will like me.
“I think the thing that has changed what I do most is being a father,” he continues. “I feel more risk averse, but I also want to stand up for things more than I used to. It’s like this weird tussle between not wanting to annoy the wrong people because I just want a calmer life, and also really wanting to annoy those people a lot more. But then a big part of this new show is also about swimming, so if you’re into swimming-based material, you’ll love it.”
Lycett will take part in The Celebrity Traitors later this year, which will almost certainly be 2026’s biggest show. He is sworn to such secrecy that he practically ties himself in a knot trying to give the blandest non-answers imaginable. “The production team were very nice, as was Claudia Winkleman. I can’t say anything about the other players, so I can’t say whether they’re nice or not,” he offers apologetically.
But before that airs, Lycett has six episodes of Live from the Lycett Arms to deliver. As I leave, he is taking notes on the decor of the pub we are in, particularly the quality of the bar itself. “Apparently it’s been treated with Danish oil,” he says approvingly. “That might be a future requirement for any pub I go into. The bar must have been treated with Danish oil.”
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Live from the Lycett Arms is on Friday at 10pm on Channel 4
