Joe Lycett has a problem: he can’t seem to perfect his roast potatoes. “I love cooking and I love the challenge of a roast,” he says, “but when I parboil my potatoes, it wanders into mash a little too quickly.”
In a pub in north London, Lycett is discussing the pitfalls of cooking Christmas dinner – something he’s no stranger to. “One Christmas I had the turkey in a flimsy tray,” he continues, “and I managed to bend it, sending the turkey fat all over the floor. My kitchen was like an ice rink for the rest of the day, which added a level of peril that was quite entertaining.”
Given his anti-establishment approach to comedy, peril and entertainment feel like Lycett’s forte. The 33-year-old has become one of the country’s most beloved and in-demand comics thanks to standup shows that often feature elaborate tales of him standing up to people who he feels need a reality check. They might be people behaving appallingly online, anti-LGBTQ+ bigots or cold callers, scammers and landlords.
He has hosted two series of Joe Lycett’s Got Your Back – his consumer affairs show on Channel 4. Described as “a cross between Rogue Traders and RuPaul’s Drag Race”, it’s like Watchdog but fun. He successfully set up a dirty skip as a restaurant on Uber Eats to challenge their food hygiene policies. He flashmobbed RBS into refunding one customer £8,000. And in 2020 he legally changed his name by deed poll to Hugo Boss, internationally embarrassing the luxury German fashion brand after it sent cease and desist letters to small businesses, including a Swansea-based brewery, Boss Brewing, and charities that used the word “Boss” in their branding.
Next, he was meant to be taking on Christmas, albeit not in a way that involves exposing the dodgy practices of the baby Jesus. Instead, Lycett was meant to be hosting his own festive special, Joe Lycett: Mummy’s Big Christmas Do, a live TV event that hoped to recapture the anarchic spirit of shows such as TFI Friday, the Big Breakfast and SM:TV Live. It was going to be a celebration of LGBTQ+ culture and, most importantly, filmed in his home city of Birmingham, where Lycett still lives now.
Unfortunately, because of the rapid spread of the Omicron variant, that special was cancelled less than a week before it was meant to air. It was so last minute that the Guardian printed a version of this interview telling the world the show was running.
“Loads of people from the team started testing positive and it was all over very quick, really,” Lycett says just after the show’s cancellation. “Also, with Boris and all his parties, the sentiment wasn’t really there to be hosting what is, essentially, a party. Everyone else is having to cancel their parties, and it just became more and more apparent that if we went ahead, we wouldn’t be reading the room.”
However, the cancellation doesn’t mean that Lycett will be absent from our screens. Describing himself as “very much flavour of the month at Channel 4 at the moment”, he recently took over from Richard Ayoade as the host of Travel Man. The first episode, a festive special that sees Lycett and fellow comedian Bill Bailey exploring Iceland, is set to air just after Christmas.
“I’ve really enjoyed doing it,” Lycett says. “I love comics and I love spending time with them. But normally when I’m working with comics, it’s in quite a heightened environment. You’re working with people when they are full of adrenaline, maybe even boozed up. Whereas with this show, it’s so much more relaxed. With Bill, I sat on the flight with him the whole way there and back. We talked about his memories of Sean Lock, as they were great friends, and his family. You do really get to immerse yourself in a person in a way you wouldn’t if you were just doing a gig with them.”
Iceland wasn’t at all what Lycett was expecting. “I thought it was going to be really miserable and cold, and that we’d eat terrible salted food,” he says. “If I’m going to go on holiday, I want to go somewhere hot. But that trip changed my mind: the food was great and the people were hysterical. It’s such a happy place.”
The episode sees the comedians knitting their own trolls, boiling eggs in natural hot springs and making a traditional Icelandic bread called laufabrauð, which is made with a thin dough that is decorated then fried in lamb fat. Are these activities Lycett chose himself?
“No, I leave that entirely up to the production company,” he says. “If I was in control it would be catastrophic. You wouldn’t see any activities. You would just be watching Joe and someone else get pissed.”
One thing he has done in every place he’s visited for the show is enquire about local politics, especially when it comes to LGBTQ+ rights. Iceland was progressive, but Lycett says he could feel the encroaching anti-LGBTQ sentiment making its way through Europe.
“We went to Vilnius in Lithuania and a lot of eastern Europe are starting to have dangerous curbs on LGBT rights, which is really concerning,” he says. “The local fixers who helped us seemed really embarrassed by it. But there are lots of things to be embarrassed about by our politics, so we can’t throw stones.”
Lycett’s own queerness is part of why he’s so keen to challenge authority figures, big companies and establishments. “I think I have a disrespect for authority because authority, both when I was growing up and now, is quite a straight, cisgender thing,” he says.
“It doesn’t respond well to camp, flamboyance and people being silly. I think comedy is almost part of that rebellion; I use it as a way of making authority figures look silly. It all comes from a place of wanting to piss off boring grey people, basically.”
He did this most recently in a documentary about Shell, where he attempted to confront the fossil fuel mega-corp about their advertising, which shows them as eco-friendly but is actually an egregious example of greenwashing. Nevertheless, he was aware while filming that there might be accusations of hypocrisy levied at him, especially as it turned out that Shell advertised with Channel 4, something that did come up.
“But everyone is a hypocrite when it comes to climate change,” he argues. “We are all going to produce emissions. Even if you become homeless, you’d still be producing emissions. You can’t avoid it.”
He played with this concept during a segment on Got Your Back where he successfully got yoghurt drink brand Yop to stop using white PET plastic for its packaging. Appearing on daytime TV to talk about the issue, Lycett stormed off set when a photo of him with one of the bottles appeared on screen. It was all staged, though it still led to him “getting cancelled” online.
“It was an interesting and quite useful exercise in understanding the speed at which the public can change their opinion of you,” he says. “There was definitely a sense of people going: ‘Aha! We’ve got him. He’s a prick.’ People were really relishing that. Now I don’t think I can be cancelled because I’d just pretend it was a stunt. I’d just be like: ‘No, no, I was trying to see what would happen if I saw lots of sex workers for my show.’”
One adversary he still can’t topple, though, is Peppa Pig – whose Heinz pasta shapes are marketed as one of your five a day, despite being full of salt and sugar. “I’m sick to the back teeth of her,” he sighs. “It’s not a healthy meal. But Peppa Pig should be worried about what Heinz does, because sometimes they put little sausages in those tins. Be careful who you get into bed with, Peppa!”
The battle with that anthropomorphic pig might have to wait, though. Along with the upcoming series of Travel Man, he also kicks off his next tour, Joe Lycett: More, More, More! How Do You Lycett? How Do You Lycett?. It’s set to include his biggest stunt yet.
“I wondered if there was a way of doing a show that calls back to something in the world outside: that you’ve seen, but you didn’t know you were seeing until later,” he says. “It’s slightly Derren Brown-like.”
While he’s vague about the details, the show is about how he attempted to raise the price of his house in Birmingham. “It’s ended up becoming this huge, long-form stunt – which some may call madness – that I’ve been doing for about three years,” he says. “Purely by chance, I ended up making something a lot more moving than I anticipated.”
It is, of all the things he’s done in his career, the thing he’s most proud of. So much so that touring it seems bittersweet. “I’m a bit sad to let it go because it’s been such a fun project to work on and it’s not something you can tell twice,” he says. “It’s bigger than I could have ever anticipated. I’m very proud.”
Hopefully after this Christmas, he’ll be saying the same about his roast potatoes, too.
Travel Man: 96 Hours in Iceland is on Channel 4 at 8pm on Monday 27 December. Tickets for Joe Lycett: More, More, More! How Do You Lycett? How Do You Lycett? are available now.
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