Dom Joly rewatched Trigger Happy TV so he couldn't be cancelled
Comedian Dom Joly rewatched episodes of his early 2000s comedy prank show Trigger Happy TV to ensure that there wasn't any problematic content that could see him cancelled.
Dom Joly rewatched Trigger Happy TV to make sure he couldn't be cancelled.
The 58-year-old funnyman is taking the prank show – which initially aired on Channel 4 from 2000 to 2003 – on a tour of the UK and admits that he and cameraman Sam Cadman trawled through old episodes to see if there was any problematic content.
Dom told New magazine: "I suddenly thought, 'What if I was a terrible racist, or a sexist?' So we went through all the old clips but no, there was no Come Fly With Me moment.
"The only questionable thing I did was dress up in a fat suit, but I was already quite chubby. And anyway, we can fat jab it away nowadays. So I'm not cancelled – yet."
Dom explained how revisiting the show – in which he was filmed deliberately putting himself into embarrassing situations in public places – reminded him of how surreal it was.
He recalled: "The first thing we ever filmed was Trigger Happy encapsulated. I was dressed as a Womble. I couldn't get a Womble costume because it was copyrighted, so I got a Wimble outfit – like a s*** Womble.
"I was on Wimbledon Common having a nervous breakdown, littering and shouting at kids. It was funny."
Joly added: "For the 45 seconds we cut to put on Trigger Happy, I forgot there was five hours of me wandering around, like, 'Is this funny, Sam?' All the self-doubt was in there."
Meanwhile, Dom explained that the advent of social media means that he would have to do the show in a "different way" if Trigger Happy TV ever returned to screens.
He said: "The thing that has changed is social media. If I did the snail crossing the road now, 25 years later, by the time the snail had crossed the road 40 people would have filmed it and put it on TikTok.
"Then when I released it everyone would go, 'You've nicked that off Kevin 106256', you know? So it's very different now, but it just means you have to do it in a different way."
However, Dom thinks that the decency of the British public means that the show would still be possible to make.
The former I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here! contestant said: "We had people saying, 'Oh, you couldn't do it now. It's too woke. You'd be stabbed.'
"The narrative is that London is the most dangerous place on Earth, but people are generally really nice. I'd say exactly the same level of nice and gullible as they were back in 2000. They may be a little more aware that when a weird thing happens, it could be a TikTok, but we just hide it better."
