Viv Hardwick finds that Bobby Ball is ready to open The Dressing Room to comedy fans

VETERAN comedian Bobby Ball is moving into the playwriting business and the second “play wot he wrote” arrives in Middlesbrough tackling the subject of what happens to a band of comics on and off the stage.

The 72-year-old follows his debut project of last year, Rock Off Tommy, with The Dressing Room and says: “I just enjoy writing. I wrote all the sketches for Cannon and Ball and then people said we were getting on so well now that I wrote Rock Off Tommy. It was about Tommy (Cannon) buying a place abroad and booking a turn to sing in the bar and in turned out to be me because I’d changed my name to Tommy Giggles. We toured it last year and I talked to my mates Stu Francis and Johnny Casson about what happens in a dressing room and that we’ve all got stories to tell.

“Then all of us go on stage and do ten minutes of our acts before returning to the dressing room to continue with the play.”

Ball dubs the project as play-variety because the audience is offered the chance to watch a comedy alongside a chance to see variety acts. He claims that little is based on what really happens when long-established acts prepare for a show.

“You go into a dressing room and meet acts you’ve never met before and you become friends with them... or you don’t. You then travel 200 or 300 miles and get into another dressing room, completely shattered, and don’t want to smile or anything. Then you get on stage and the adrenaline pumps in and it’s a different world altogether. It’s a strange business,” he says.

Perhaps it’s not surprising to learn that the UK’s longest-running double act play themselves, but the other three cast members adopt other personas. “Stu Francis plays a camp compere, who is called Jimmy Laugh, and Johnny Casson is a really morose comic who never smiles, but his play-on music is all about being happy,” Ball adds.

“I’m not sure how I came up with the characters, but I wanted Stu’s Jimmy Laugh to have a little bit of sadness behind his upbeat manner, so that each person has something about them. I don’t think I’ve based the events on anything that really happened to us, and if I did I wouldn’t tell you.”

Ball says he’s quite happy for his fellow comics to improvise around the script he’s created .

“I particularly give Tommy a little licence to improvise because you’ve got to make the lines comes to life. I allow him to do that."

Originally, the cast included comic Kate Robbins, but she has moved on to TV work.

Ball, born Robert Harper, met his wife, Yvonne, at Stockton’s Fiesta Club and the couple married in 1971. She’ll be taking the opportunity to return to Teesside when The Dressing Room plays Middlesbrough Theatre and then tells a “just between us” I’m A Celebrity story of suffering from diarrhoea, then constipation and spider bites while missing his wife in a six-star hotel. The pair met on the programme’s famous bridge and her first words were: “You don’t know what I’ve been through”.

“I was that far from throwing her off the bridge,” he jokes.

Cannon and Ball started out as a singing act in the 1960s before making their TV debut as comedians in 1968 and were a sell-out act in the 1980s. The falling out as an act as the celebrity lifestyle took its toll is part of the duo’s history, as is Ball’s conversion to Christianity, which sees the comedian giving four months a year to gospel shows and church functions.

“I’ve come through one of the darkest periods that you can have as a comedian and survived. We’ve had a good run.”

These days Ball is filming Mount Pleasant for Sky, Not Going Out with Lee Mack for BBC before finishing theatre tours with pantomime in Crewe.

“We’ve been in the business for 54 years, which now seems a long time. We’ve never thought about what would have happened if we’d stayed as welders in Oldham or kept on with the singing act. I rang up Tommy the other day and said, ‘I can’t believe you’re in Celebrity MasterChef’. I think he did fantastically, but I had to tell him that he was a bit of a liar. When we were in digs together he told me he didn’t cook. Then he goes on TV making all this stuff. I can’t cook, but the next time we’re in digs together, he’s doing it all, he’ll be delighted to know.

“When I was on Mount Pleasant one of the actors said she’d just judged Tommy on his beautiful lemon posset. I said, ‘Lemon posset, he’s from Oldham’. Tommy told me he’s always made them and I told him, ‘Well you’ve never made me one’. So, he’s hiding things.”

Ball isn’t considering turning his plays into a trio just yet. His next thoughts are of taking an old-fashioned variety show on tour.

“At the end we’d have four or five stools on stage and come on to answer questions. We’ll answer every question. If you can make a life in showbusiness then you’re a success. My two sons are in a double act as The Harper Brothers and I’ve told them that as long as you can pay the mortgage, you’re a success. And that’s how we’ve always looked at it. Showbusiness is a roundabout and feast or famine. You can be massive or not working. I sometimes think about where these new performers are going to be in 30, 40 or 50 years time. Showbusiness is a lifetime, not two or three minutes. If you’re working, you’re a success. If means people still love you.”

“You’ve got to plug two dates for us,” says Ball. “On September 24, we’re bringing our comedy show to the Empire Theatre, Consett."

  • The Dressing Room, Middlesbrough Theatre, Wednesday, July 27. Tickets: £18. Box Office: 01642-815181 or middlesbroughtheatre.co.uk
  • On hearing that Darlington Civic Theatre is closed for refurbishment until 2017 and changing its name to the Hippodrome, Ball says: “I love that theatre. We did pantomime there. My picture had better still be on the wall when it’s finished or I’ll be putting a new one up.”