The original Chav Cockney Geezer comedian - aka Lee Nelson - has grown-up, and is now touring his own show, under his own name, Simon Brodkin. Find out more and why here......
You would think that nothing would scare comedian Simon Brodkin any
more. This is the man who threw golf balls with swastikas printed on them onto
the grass in front of Donald Trump. This is the man who sneaked into the Tory
Party conference and handed Prime Minister Theresa May a redundancy notice
mid-speech which said on it “from Boris.”
Yet there is something that he reveals scared him more than doing
all of his audacious stunts: “Try telling your Jewish mother you're giving up
being a doctor to become a clown!”
And now Brodkin is doing something even scarier than that. After 13
years as a character comedian he is now standing onstage and being himself
rather than pretending to be his most famous comic creation, cheeky geezer Lee
Nelson. “It felt that now it's right that I want to say what I really think. I
felt ready for it. I think part of that in the past was not feeling completely
comfortable in my own skin. Like most men, I'm not really comfortable about
opening up."
His hilarious new show is called 100% Simon Brodkin, but initially
before premiering the show at the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe Festival where it
garnered excellent reviews, he toyed with a different title. “I thought of
calling the show ‘Debut’ because that’s how it feels. It was like learning a
whole new set of performance skills.”
He can't wait to see what his audience is like on his first
national tour as himself. "Some people know me for the original Lee. Some
know me for the stunts. Some know me for maybe doing Lee on Live at the Apollo.
Some know me for the Lee with the suit, and they might think that's actually
me. I don't know how many people know Simon Brodkin."
In his show he talks entertainingly about his real life. He
discusses growing up in north London and being a rubbish dad who, he confesses,
lets his wife do all the work bringing up their two children. He also chats
about his brief medical career. Maybe not all of it is 100% true here: "I
remember a guy who fell into a canal and nearly drowned, but I put him in a
bowl of rice.” He touches on anti-semitism, masculinity and spills the beans on
being the "stunt dude" who pranked the future American President.
Looking back on those headline antics he seems to like to terrify
himself. “The scarier it is, the funnier it is – in hindsight,” he laughs. He
can smile about the Donald Trump incident now but at the time his fear was that
Trump’s security might get their hands on him. Luckily the Scottish police
dealt with the matter instead. “They drove me to Glasgow airport, gave me a
flight back to London and told Donald Trump they had deported me.”
He has few regrets about those gatecrashing tricks. Not even the
one which predicted Theresa May’s demise and her subsequent successor. “You wouldn't
be doing stunts on those people if you felt bad about it. You don't think, 'The
poor Donald Trump and the leader of Britain.' I think if you do feel sorry for
someone for doing it, you've picked the wrong person."
Brodkin says that the person that he is now onstage in jeans and
T-shirt, talking about being a hapless husband and always playing the fool is
very much the genuine article. “I’m not a serious person and everything I do is
knockabout, whether it's with mates or with family. My wife did really visit
America and I did kind of go, as I say onstage, that the week she was away I
realised that behind my back for the last nine years, that she'd being doing
all the childcare.”
He has always been a joker. But it did not occur to him that he
could pretend to be other people professionally for a long time. "I
originally wanted to be a vet. That's my big regret. I wish I was still saving
squirrels now!" He opted instead for treating humans. “Then I saw Sacha
Baron Cohen doing Ali G on television. "I thought to myself, I do that
when there are no cameras about. I was the bloke who wound everyone up.”
It was through winding everyone up that he met his wife. “We would
all be going out and drinking far too much and being silly and I would pretend
to be other people. The night I met my wife I think I was Spanish pretty much
the whole night. She thought I was from Barcelona and I had to reveal I was
English the next day.”
As for his parents, who used to be solicitors, he admits that maybe
he was not being 100% truthful when he says he was scared about telling his
mother about his career change. They weren’t actually too upset. Maybe they
weren't even that surprised. Perhaps he gets his sense of humour from his
father. “The truth is they were fine about it. My dad's super chilled. I could
have told my dad I'm giving up everything and going and living a solitary life
in Borneo and he would have been like, 'Cool'.
And as for Lee Nelson, maybe we haven't seen the last of him. “He's
currently spending time in a youth offenders institute and depending on good
behaviour he may or may not get out sooner rather than later,” suggests
Brodkin. “I haven't killed him because I love playing him. Maybe I’ll do the
Lee Nelson Farewell Tour. Then two years later, the Lee Nelson Farewell
Properly Tour. And then the Lee Nelson, I Forgot to Say a Proper Goodbye Tour.”
We may not have seen the last of Brodkin’s stunts either. “There's
always more to be done and there's always fun to be had doing that, but this
new show is taking up the time at the moment.” He still sounds as if he has one
eye on the ever-shifting political landscape though: “If there's the
opportunity, of course…”
Simon Brodkin's tour starts
at the Lowry, Salford on February 2 and finishes at the Derngate, Northampton on
April 25. Tickets here: www.simonbrodkin.com
Interview by Bruce Desau
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