Comedy

In his latest full-length stand-up show, ‘Knocking On Heaven’s Door’, Rhod Gilbert talks about growing up in Llanbobl in West Wales. It’s pure fiction. The infant Gilbert was, in reality, brought up in Carmarthen. But it’s not difficult, most of the time, to distinguish those moments in Gilbert’s autobiography where fact morphs effortlessly into sheer exaggeration. Here’s his account of university. ‘I went to study languages at Exeter. I now speak several. I tried learning Welsh, but it’s very difficult. I broke my arm.’ Feature continues

Back in 2003, Gilbert won five different talent competitions. The following year, his show ‘Rhod Gilbert’s 1984’ was shortlisted for the Perrier Best Newcomer Award. He’s still on a roll and much in demand, here and in other countries. He ascribes some of this success to his origins. ‘My act has developed in response to people’s attitudes to a Welsh person on stage. The booing and heckling put me on the back foot from the start, so I’ve stayed there, fighting from a corner. I see the audience as a bunch of school bullies, surrounding me and making jibes. It’s a nice place to play from.’

More recently, he’s taken on the role of professional Welshman. ‘For the last 18 months, I’ve voiced the Welsh Tourist Board television adverts, designed to promote Wales as an attractive destination to tourists. Clearly this is an unenviable task.’ Gilbert, the official ‘Voice of Wales’, follows in the footsteps of Tom Jones and Charlotte Church. ‘It’s nice to have your name in the same sentence as theirs. That normally only happens when a heckler cunningly shout out the names of the only Welsh people they’ve heard of.’

He’s also been given his own Saturday radio show by BBC Wales. This proved a challenge. ‘I have no idea what I’m doing. I know nothing about DJ-ing. Or about music. So I wasn’t a natural, or even a sensible, choice.’ How, then, would he describe what he does? ‘In most music-based radio shows, the DJ is cool, and pretends to know the bands, and to have experienced mind-blowing sex with them backstage at festivals. This show is the antidote.’

Gilbert’s family has frequently cropped up in his stand-up, though, once again, in exaggerated form – his grandmother’s progressive loss of all her limbs and his mother’s affair with the milkman, both described at length and in suggestive detail, almost certainly never happened. So it’s something of a shock to realise that kinship and Welshness feature very little in ‘Knocking On Heaven’s Door’. Instead, it’s an account of Gilbert’s attempts to penetrate the pearly gates.

‘There’s a lot of red tape involved. The audience helps me to go through the application form. I hit some problems because my life hasn’t always been as pious as it might have been.’ He’s not too hot on the good deeds front, either. Worse still, he’s transgressed by eating seafood. That’s on the banned list according to Leviticus.