Guildford, Crawley and Brighton: Stand-up Tom Houghton reflects on his privileged and unusual background.

Tom Houghton - Photo by Steve Ullathorne

He will be regaling audiences with tales of a dad who is the ex-chief of Defence Staff, stories of living in the Tower of London (his father is consul of the Tower of London) and anecdotes lifting the lid on the all-boys boarding school environment he enjoyed. Dates include Friday, March 4, Guildford’s G Live Studio; Friday, March 11, Crawley’s Hawth Studio; and Friday, March 18, Brighton’s Komedia.

“I was tour support for Milton Jones and then I was going to do my own tour, going back to some of the venues that he was doing but just playing the smaller rooms. And that was going to be in June or July 2020. We had started planning the tour.

“When lockdown happened I was on the road with Milton. We had got to Newcastle on his tour and we had started putting some coronavirus jokes into the show. And then that was that. No one knew how serious it was. As the tour went on the jokes started to get less and less of an amused reaction. Come March and we realised that we really couldn’t include those jokes at all. And then of course everything had to stop.

“I live in the Tower of London when I am in London but my family home is near Darlington and because we had been in Newcastle I just stayed up there... and stayed for years! It was very sad about the tour. It would have been my first full tour and I realised that I had got the momentum going. As a comedian, obviously self-employed. I had spent a long, long time building up to getting my first months of diary full and then half a year of diary full and then it was just completely wiped out.

“And then during the lockdown my agent quit being an agent and my relationship broke up. My entire life was taken away. I’m certainly not going to say that I have got the biggest sob story of the pandemic. Of course I haven’t but it was difficult. But now I’m in a new relationship and now the tour is happening.

“But I don’t think anyone is the same now as they were. There are certain elements in the show that I’ve had to change because it’s not who I am now. I think I’ve grown up a lot more. My value system has shifted. I’ve learned to value my family more. I had been an on-the-road comedian but I went back and I connected with my family a lot better. We took the time to sit down and have the talks that we didn’t have the time to have over the years. We all lead really busy lives. But my sister gave birth at the start of the lockdown and I had a nephew and I was able to see a lot of him because we were bubbling so in some ways there were good things too.”

As for his approach to comedy: “I think you always elevate yourself a little bit characterwise on stage but I am as honest and as self-evaluating as I can be. It is me telling stories. I found myself in a very privileged and unique position growing up as I have. I’m trying to share a side of life that people might feel that they don’t have any connection with. They might just think ‘He went to boarding school, his dad is a Lord, he lives in a palace’ and so on but I’m trying to shine a light and look at these situations and hopefully show that human emotions are universal. We are all framed slightly differently and we have a different set of circumstances but at end of the day we are all happy or sad or scared or lonely. The emotions are the same.”

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