Fame for Micky Flanagan is not fast cars or big houses; it is a sausage sandwich. The Cockney comedian likes nothing better than having a quiet moment in his kitchen making a sandwich.
“That’s the kind of thing that is an adventure to me these days,” he said smiling.
It certainly makes a change from playing sold-out shows, which is what he’s spending most of 2013 doing on his biggest tour yet, entitled Back in the Game.
Micky turned 50, last October but shows no signs of slowing down. His tour puts him firmly in comedy’s premier league, alongside the likes of Michael McIntyre and John Bishop, but fame brings about all sorts of changes, as the genial gagsmith joked.
“You can’t nick things any more,” he said. “These are the problems of being successful – a sandwich here, a chocolate bar there. Apparently, crime and success don’t go hand in hand.”
He says that hitting the big 50 didn’t really worry him: “Someone suggested I should lie about my age. If I was a film star or a pop star, maybe, but comedians are supposed to tell the truth. Frankie Boyle says you can’t be a stand-up after 40. On the other hand, Bob Monkhouse once said you can’t be funny until you are over 40. So how much time does that leave you to be funny? About a year.”
If Micky’s last show was all about his life up to becoming a comedian via Billingsgate market, living in America – “where I was an international lover and player” – and doing a City University degree in social science, Back in the Game is about where he is now, living in Dulwich, south London, with his wife, Cathy, and six-year-old son Max.
During the interview, Micky claimed that all the really exciting things happen when you are young. Yet his meteoric rise from comedy club to arena superstardom in a handful of years disproves the rule.
“By the time my dad was 26, he had kids, a council flat and a job on the docks,” he explained. “His life was more or less done. When I was 36, I was still looking around for opportunities.”
Micky found that opportunity when he was in the audience at a comedy show. It was seeing Billy Connolly that made him think he could have a go.
“I love Harry Hill’s surrealism and Chris Rock’s ability to say the unsayable, but I could never do that. But I thought I could tell stories like Billy Connolly.”
He started doing stand-up in his mid-30s and initially combined comedy gigs with a job as a painter and decorator.
“For about two years, I’d be travelling to gigs with a bottle of white spirit in my bag so that I could clean the paint off my hands,” he said.
“Eventually, I was doing gigs every weekend and another comedian said to me: ‘If you don’t quit your day job, you won’t enjoy either. Just take the rest of the week off like the rest of us.’ At first, it felt like I’d won the pools getting up on a Monday and not having to work again until Thursday.”
Micky has always enjoyed performing in Scotland, where he picked up an Edinburgh Comedy Award nomination for Best Newcomer in 2007.
“I thought that might be the last place they would like me, but they came onboard quite quickly. Their perception of London is often through TV and things like Del Boy, so when I do my Cockney walk they find that very funny.”
That said, he is typically modest about making audiences everywhere laugh their socks off: “I can make no sense of it, except that we took a few risks and they seemed to pay off. There are only two things to keep in my mind: I’m enjoying it and the audience is enjoying it. If we can keep those things bubbling along for a while, that would be great.”
With that, he gets up from the sofa. Presumably to make a sausage sandwich.
Micky Flanagan will be at the Aberdeen Exhibition and Conference Centre on Wednesday, October 9. Call 01224 824824 or visit www.aecc.co.uk for more information.