Celebrity Interview – Griff Rhys Jones: The Cat’s Pyjamas
‘The jokes come faster than the rapids on the River Tay’ The Guardian Multi award-winning comedian, writer, actor, and television presenter Griff Rhys Jones is set to embark on a national stand-up tour this autumn with the second leg of his sell-out 2024 show ‘The Cat’s Pyjamas’. Sharing witty observations and rambling comic stories, Griff’s funny anecdotes have covered an astonishingly diverse range of subjects: from TV travel, his childhood, Welsh family, age, fraud, late night trains and nostalgia to the TikTok generation, crocodile smuggling, and opal noodling in Australia. Questions and improvised interaction with the audience mean the show varies from night to night. And takes him from adventures, holidays, dog sitting, burning boats, drink and anger-management, to meetings with rock celebrities and royalty. Wherever his associations wander. GRIFF RHYS JONES: THE CAT’S PYJAMAS What can fans expect from the show? It’s the fourth show I’ve done where I tell stories from my life – about myself and things I’ve been involved in. Trouble is, some of the stories get longer and longer and longer. I start out with list of about 20 and end up with a list of about two. If you come to see me early in a tour you tend to get all the stories. If you come late in the tour, a lot of them have gone by the wayside. There was one show on one tour where I was on stage at the Sherman Theatre in Cardiff, talking about my family and things like that. I looked into the wings and my stage manager was tapping his watch signalling the end of the first half and I hadn’t even properly started the show at all by that point. What’s the significance of the title The Cat’s Pyjamas? I just like the sound of it. Funnily enough my daughter said ‘You can’t call it that’ and when I asked her why not she said ‘Because it means you have to be good!’ But as I say, I like how it sounds. Also ‘the cat’s pyjamas’ is a very interesting phrase and I might talk about how it started in the 1920s in New York. Apparently there was a famous society hostess who used to take her cats for a walk along Fifth Avenue and she would wear pyjamas when doing so. But really what I’m saying at the start of the show is that it’s you the audience who are the cat’s pyjamas. I start with egregious flattery of my audience. After all these years, do you still get nervous before going on stage or indeed during a performance? I get nervous in the early stages because I’m wondering what I’m going to be saying once a tour starts. It’s never a walk in the park. It’s fun if it’s more of a walk on a tightrope. I did work with one stage manager who said to me ‘It’s amazing because what you do, Griff, is different every night’. After one show he told me ‘You left out the big punchlines tonight’. Some nights I’d be so keen on moving on to something else that I never got to the resolution of the very first story that I started, which left people wondering what on earth was supposed to be happening. Some people go on stage and they perform exactly what they’ve written every night. I’m sure that would be a much better way of doing it but I don’t always do it myself. I get sidetracked by talking about things like what happened to me in the car park on the way to the theatre. I once had a Birdman moment where I went to get a shirt out of the car and I couldn’t get back into the theatre unless I walked in with the audience. A woman turned to me and said ‘I hope you’re going to be good tonight’ and I replied ‘Well, I’ll do my best!’ Isn’t throwing it open to audience questions asking for trouble? Not really because I put up a list of topics for people to ask me about, although I don’t know if I’ll stick with it. That’s in the second half of the show and often it starts with people asking me about Not The Nine O’Clock News, which was so long ago can’t I can’t remember it, let alone answer questions about it. And if you play a really big theatre you have difficulty actually hearing the questions and you have to clamber down off the stage to find out what the question is. But I do put up a list which I scribble out in the dressing room before I go on and it’s a list of things that are currently on my mind. Is there a question you definitely don’t want to be asked? Probably but I don’t know quite what they’d be until I’m asked them. But it’s unlikely because what I usually do is sort of sidestep it by saying ‘I can’t answer that question’. Sometimes it might remind me of something else and off we go. One time I got into talking about Africa with the intention of moving on to killer bees. I got so bogged down in the story of the railways in Africa, which is the story of colonialism. When I looked at my watch I realised I’d taken the entire second half of the show just trying to explain colonialism. I’d been wondering why I hadn’t been getting as many laughs as usual. Is comedy harder in the current woke climate? I get asked that a lot and the honest answer is I don’t know because I don’t play the comedy scene. I don’t go to Edinburgh and all that stuff. So I honestly have no idea. It’s never affected me in any way whatsoever. With the idea that I might be canceled, for the most part my audience probably don’t know what being canceled means. I do tell quite a lot of jokes but
