Viva Brighton September 2015 Issue #31

comedy
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Mark Thomas
Forgive us our trespasses...
Mark Thomas is the guy who drove a tank, decorated
as an ice-cream van, to a minister’s house, and
asked for tips on exporting it to Iraq. He’s the guy
who, in the late 90s, posing as a PR consultant, got
an Indonesian Major General to admit that ‘we do
some tortures’.
He’s ‘stopped arms deals… investigated everything
from Coca-Cola to inheritance tax avoidance,’ and
‘been arrested on numerous occasions’, according
to the press release for his latest show. That document
also quotes prominently the Metropolitan Police’s
description of him as a ‘general rabble-rouser’
and ‘alleged comedian’.
Thomas started out in the 80s, ‘working on a building
site by day, and hammering the comedy circuit
by night,’ in the Times’ words. In the 90s, he got a
Perrier nomination and his own Channel 4 series,
which lasted six seasons. But he fell out with them,
he later said, ‘when they suggested making Celebrity
Guantanamo Bay and offered me a place’.
A hard-to-classify comedian/performer/journalist/
activist, he tells me his latest show is “what I normally
do: go away, have adventures, cause trouble,
fuck people off, come back and tell the story.”
What is Trespass about? It’s about public space
and the privatisation of it. About corporations buying
it up, and the consequence of what I think is a
mass takeover of public space.
Who’s buying them? Hedge funds, management
groups, the Qatari wealth fund, Mitsubishi… all
sorts of people.
Why? Just as an investment? Yeah. How much
do you think London property has risen? It’s huge.
You can basically buy a shed and wait five years and
make a fortune.
Why would they then want to control these
spaces? If you’re going to buy it then you will
want to control what happens within it. So if you
buy a shopping centre, what you’ll want to do is to
maximise the number of people in your shopping
centre who are shopping, rather than, say, having a
social gathering.
What kind of effect does that kind of thing have
on the public? Well, there’ll be all sorts of things
that you can and can’t do. So if I go onto a public
highway I can demonstrate, hand out leaflets, hold
a meeting, make a speech, busk, do pavement art,
anything I want. But there, you wouldn’t be able to
do any of that, it’d be forbidden. Which means that
rights that we have as individuals, in law, are eroded
from these spaces.
How did you start to realise that the subject
– which at first glance seems unpromising
and potentially dry – would actually make an
interesting show? It’s kind of what I specialise in.
I always find things that look really unsexy and go:
‘Let’s make a show about that’.
Do you think politicians in general are wellmeaning
people? I think people have ideas and
ideologies and practicalities and agendas, and someone
can be totally nice and honest and reasonable
and still be an utter bastard in the way they treat the
poor. Steve Ramsey
The Old Market, Sept 16, 8pm, £15/£13
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