The Sheffield comedian Tom Wrigglesworth does not look like an angry man. Tall, yes. Large-haired, yes — as he says himself, he physically resembles a cross between Postman Pat and Peter Crouch. But, during our interview in his manager’s top-floor London office he briefly gets worked up when I mention that a certain travel company appears to be based downstairs: “I’ve often wanted to petrol bomb that place. The only thing that’s stopping me blowing it up is I’d probably take out my agent too.”
The 33-year-old Wrigglesworth has previous when it comes to getting wound up over ticket issues. If you recognise his name it may well be because he made the newspapers in autumn 2008 when he was met by police at Euston station after organising a whip-round on the Manchester to London express to pay the £115 fare of a pensioner, Lena Ainscow, imposed because she was on an earlier train than the one she had pre-booked. Wrigglesworth was the passenger’s hero but the train manager’s worst nightmare — he phoned ahead, reporting the presence of a beggar on board.
The result was an exquisitely well-told show, Tom Wrigglesworth’s Open Return Letter to Richard Branson, which won an Edinburgh Comedy Award last summer and is now on tour. Oh, and Virgin Trains changed its ticketing policy so that one’s wallet is not put through the mangle if one lacks a valid ticket.
Wrigglesworth, however, is typically modest about the whole affair: “Reluctant hero? More a hungover hero. To be honest my key motivation was to piss off the train manager, not to help Lena. Then, after it appeared in the papers I got texts from virtually every comedian saying: ‘You bastard. You’ve got your next Edinburgh show.’”
That the show was essentially true was merely the icing on the cake. Wrigglesworth was already a rising star, favourably compared to another poetically comedic son of South Yorkshire, Daniel Kitson (Kitson is from Denby Dale, Wrigglesworth from Totley, a 20-minute drive away — there aren’t any direct trains).
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Even before his breakthrough he had been one of the lab-coated boffins in the BBC nostalgia documentary Electric Dreams. It transpires that when not fighting for pensioners’ rights Wrigglesworth, who studied electrical engineering, likes nothing better than messing about with old gadgets. “Give me a tumbledryer to take apart and I’m happy,” he chuckles. “I fitted my old satnav aerial into a Swan Vesta matchbox to stop it being nicked, built my PC inside an old VHS player and put an MP3 into an old Sony Walkman.” He beams with satisfaction: “I got that out on the Tube and people pinched themselves.”
As much as Wrigglesworth is happy to, ahem, rail against injustice, he is also a passionate fan of anything with an old-fashioned engine in it. “I love to be on a station platform when a train thunders past. I went on a little four-seater propeller plane recently and before we took off I was helping a guy with his SuDoku who then put on the pilot’s jacket. I thought, ‘If you can’t do medium SuDoku should you really be messing with those dials?’ ”
He might be a retro-geek who thinks things were better when AA men saluted, but Wriggleworth insists he isn’t a campaigning comedian. Mark Watson recently did a show all about climate change based on Al Gore’s lectures and Alex Horne spent a chunk of his time lobbying to get new words into the dictionary, but Wrigglesworth does not think this surge is anything new. “People like Mark Thomas combined comedy and campaigning before. I guess comedy is more popular now and there is more to campaign about as the world goes to shit.” I suggest that the difference is that while Thomas fought over the big issues such as arms dealing, Wrigglesworth fights for small but valuable individual rights. “Yes, small, but you’d be amazed how angry people are about the railways. On the website (www.lenaslaw.co.uk) one person wrote: ‘It’s the reason I moved to America’.”
He cannot see himself following the European Union-supporting Eddie Izzard, who has said that he plans to run for political office eventually. “I can more see myself becoming a chef. That’s how little a campaigner I am. I’m more interested in the quality of cayenne pepper.”
What worries him is being pigeonholed as the comedian with a conscience. “People expect me to hang around mini-cab firms to see if they are overcharging, but I’m not a natural campaigner. I’ve been offered TV work where I’m a corporate watchdog, but I’m not interested.”
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He has, however, got something out of the experience on the train and the show it spawned. “I’m now much more keen on narrative storytelling with characters than stand up. What I’d like to do next is a murder mystery set in a garden centre. I grew up going to garden fêtes watching people argue about who had the straightest runner bean.”
Although increasingly cosmopolitan — he now lives in East London and recently married his Danish girlfriend Lulu in Las Vegas — he is inspired by his fellow Yorkshireman Alan Bennett. “His voice is particularly soothing and his stories are amazing,” he says. Another local lad, Michael Palin, who shares a birthday with Wrigglesworth, was also a hero until Palin changed football allegiance from Sheffield Wednesday to United.
If Wrigglesworth is stuck for characters for his next narrative he could do a lot worse than exploit his family, who sound like a cross between an unseen instalment of Bennett’s Talking Heads and a lost episode of Palin’s Ripping Yarns. “I’m the fourth of five with a younger sister. My three brothers were much older than me so I was constantly teased and I often had to prove myself by being funny. All the traditional roles were gone, joker was the only thing left.”
His parents, Catherine and Richard, an accountant, offer the most wry comic colour: “They are comically dyfunctional, bumbling through life. They are constantly trying to ‘get something out the way’. I spoke to Mum on New Year’s Eve and she was saying: ‘I’m trying to get Christmas out the way’. What does that mean? No one put it in their way. Now it’ll be: ‘Just get this cold snap out the way.’ It’s a classic South Yorkshire attitude. They want to be overcoming adversity and are not happy unless they are.”
They must, of course, have been happy with their son’s display of public-spiritedness? “Yes. But the Yorkshire way is: ‘Don’t rock the boat.’ They would have pursued official channels and written a letter.”
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Tom Wrigglesworth plays Birmingham Glee Club (0870 2415093) on Jan 27.
For full tour dates see www.tomwrigglesworth.co.uk