Talking the talk
11-minute read • 1,846 words
Originally published in the February 2015 issue of Westside Magazine.
Toby Foster has a chest infection. His voice, always gravelly, is practically pebble-dashed today.
It’s that voice which has helped give Toby his hugely successful career. Actually, he’s got several careers – comedian, radio host, TV presenter; the list goes on – but all of them involve chatting in one form or another. Toby Foster is, basically, a professional talker.
I’m at BBC Radio Sheffield – where Toby does a majority of his professional talking, as host of the Breakfast show – to meet the man himself. He bounds through the door, apologising for his cough, and laughs that I’ll need to disinfect my Dictaphone after our interview is finished.
Straight in with the jokes; unsurprising, really. It was comedy which first put Toby on the path to success, and his description of himself on Twitter (@tobyfoster) lists ‘Stand up’ before anything else. Does he still consider himself a comedian first and foremost?
“I’m a stand up,” he says, assertively. “Being a comic, I think, is part of your DNA.”
To many, Toby is best known for his acting role in Peter Kay’s Channel 4 sitcom Phoenix Nights, where he played gruff, perma-smoking drummer Les. But he’d already been performing comedy for years by the time the show aired in 2001.
“I’d toyed with it a bit – I did three months at the Oxford School of Drama, and got a place at Mountview Theatre School, which I ended up not taking,” he says. “A few years later I got back into stand up – I was 24 and I was national sales manager for Mansfield Brewery.
“That’s the point at which I found out that I really enjoyed drinking,” he chuckles. “I found myself staying in hotels four nights a week, so I had to find things to do at night that weren’t [sitting] at the bar, boring the barman. So I started going to comedy clubs.”
Toby’s comedy career started in earnest in 1996. His father, also a salesman, died aged just 52, and the shock of that tragic loss made Toby rethink his options. He quit his job with the brewery and bought a pub in his native Barnsley with his brother.
“I was so overdrawn,” he says. “We put a comedy club on in [the pub] because nothing else was working. The first night was Peter Kay and Phil Nichol, for £3, and a hundred people came. And I had to compère it ‘cause I couldn’t afford a compère!”
Toby continued to book Peter regularly for stand up gigs, and it was this ongoing association which led to his proverbial ‘big break’.
“I booked him to play the Fealty & Firkin, now the White Bear, in Barnsley,” he says. “That night I walked him out to his car, and he said: ‘Oh, Channel 4 are going to make this [programme] – do you want to [play] a drummer in a band?’ I went back upstairs and said: ‘He reckons he’s got a TV show – he hasn’t!’ Then I got a phone call from him, and went and did That Peter Kay Thing. They liked that, so we got Phoenix Nights, and it all went bonkers then.”
The offers to tour the country came flooding in, but Toby opted to stay true to his roots. He turned down gigs at larger venues in favour of clubs like the ones he started out in, as well as continuing to book other acts and work as a compère.
Under his Last Laugh Comedy branding, Toby booked future stars of the industry including Jimmy Carr, Alan Carr, Al Murray and many more. And Last Laugh Comedy is still going strong today, putting on shows in Sheffield – mostly at the Lescar and the City Hall – and across Yorkshire.
“The phrase ‘club comic’ is quite disparaging, but I like the clubs,” says Toby. “I like the fact that comedy’s so vibrant still, and there’s a lot of people going [to see it].”
And as a booker, Toby should know. As well as his popular Last Laugh Comedy gigs, he also runs the Last Laugh Comedy Festival, held across Sheffield throughout October. This year’s festival features a packed line-up, from established performers such as Ross Noble to brand new acts – Toby says he and his team “haven’t got a night off” all month. Why does he think comedy, especially stand up, is so popular right now?
“I suppose it’s the accessibility, isn’t it?” he says. “People watch the Michael McIntyre DVD so they just want to see ten Michael McIntyres. I wish people were a bit more adventurous with comedy.
“Michael and Lee Evans, people go and see them in arenas, and for me, it’s not comedy really,” he says. “You’ve seen a very, very good stand up do a very polished set, but you’ve not been sweated on by four acts at the Lescar.”
Toby’s passion is infectious (much like, presumably, his cough), and he’s made a successful living out of comedy, both onstage and behind the scenes. But he’s equally well known to a different audience from the BBC Radio Sheffield Breakfast show. How did a comedian come to find himself spending his mornings discussing things like sex scandals and budget cuts in front of thousands of listeners?
“I came in to be interviewed about Phoenix Nights series two, and as I walked out they asked me to cover for [former presenter] Tony Capstick the following Wednesday,” he says. “That went well, they asked me to come in the following Wednesday, and then within six months they’d moved Tony to the mornings and put me on afternoons.
“It was literally such a fraud,” he jokes. “You’ve got people going through university, and I just walked in the door and they gave me a job!”
Toby proved just as successful at radio presenting as he is at comedy: shortly after moving from the afternoon show to Breakfast, he was nominated for a Sony Radio Academy Award. He’s been nominated twice more since.
Despite the plaudits, there was doubt at first as to whether a comedian would make a good radio host. It’s true that Toby is perhaps not the stereotypical BBC news anchor – today he’s sat opposite me wearing shorts and trainers. But the man himself never had any qualms about his suitability for the job.
“You know, I’m a 45-year-old father of two, really, who pays his council tax in Rotherham,” says Toby. “And the fact that I swear at people for a living on a Friday night doesn’t change the importance of my views.
“I am genuinely interested in all this stuff, and I think people like me to ask the questions for them,” he says. “I get stopped in Asda: ‘You should have asked them this.’ So you remember, and then the next time you do ask.”
Toby is a firm believer in the importance of local media – for him, it plays a vital role by filling the gap left by the national press.
“People can get [news about] plane crashes in Gaza from all over the place – they want to know what’s happening next door now,” he says. “Not only do we ask about what’s going off, we ask about how that’s going to affect Sheffield.”
Born in Barnsley, resident in Rotherham and based in the Steel City, Toby is South Yorkshire through and through. Listening to his show, it’s obvious how much the area means to him. In the July 2014 issue of Westside, we ran an article entitled ‘City on the Slide’, about the perception that Sheffield is lagging behind other nearby cities such as Leeds, in terms of retail and other areas. What does Toby think?
“I have a view – I think that we need to stop talking about Leeds and Manchester,” he says. “They’re never going to open a Harvey Nicks on the Moor. We need to look at what Sheffield can do really well, and indeed what South Yorkshire can do really, really well.
“I think we need to look at the kind of events that we run in this city, the celebratory stuff,” he continues. “The Tour de France was amazing. Tramlines did 100,000 tickets – that’s crackers! You can’t do that every week, but let’s be positive.
“Sheffielders and South Yorkshire people are really good at being out together and partying,” he says. “People will tell us, when they come to play a gig, that being in Sheffield is one of the best dates in the diary, because the punters are just so good. So we need to stop moaning.”
In his capacity as host of the Breakfast show, Toby is arguably the voice of Sheffield. On Monday evenings at 7.30pm, he’s also the face of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, as the main TV presenter for Inside Out, BBC One’s regional current affairs programme.
After being asked out of the blue to present occasional short films for the show, he was made the main presenter two years ago. Past topics have included the ‘Battle of Orgreave’ and the impact of immigration on Boston, Lincolnshire, and the current series will be more of the same.
“We film the links in some far-flung part of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, so at some point I’m sure I’ll be stood beneath the Humber Bridge or strolling enigmatically across the Moors,” he jokes. “But being on camera presenting is the world’s most alien thing – nobody walks down the street talking to thin air!”
Toby’s only previous onscreen appearances were in comedies, so you can understand why he might feel odd presenting on telly rather than acting. But if he is out of his comfort zone, it doesn’t show; at this, as with his other careers, he’s a natural.
“It depends how you tell the story, obviously,” he says. “You can tell really interesting stories boringly, but Inside Out are good at not doing that.”
The Inside Out presenting job is another string to Toby’s brimming bow. But being a professional talker – on the radio, on TV, on the comedy club stage – means putting himself in the public eye, subject to criticism both positive and negative. So: which are worse, listeners and viewers, or hecklers?
“Hecklers are fine these days – I’m used to them,” he grins. “I’ve got all my standard putdowns. I’ve been at it too long to get worried about hecklers.
“On radio I tend to get texts telling me how much they’ve enjoyed the interview,” he says. “On telly, I just get a load of tweets telling me how fat I am!”
Interview over, Toby and his hacking cough are off to the pharmacy (“Menthol crystals, I’ve been told to get”). Chest infection or no chest infection, Toby Foster won’t be stopping chatting for a living any time soon. Me? I’m going to get some Dictaphone disinfectant.
Inside Out Yorkshire and Lincolnshire is on BBC One on Mondays at 7.30pm.
The Last Laugh Comedy Festival is held at venues across Sheffield throughout October. For more information, visit http://www.lastlaughcomedyfestival.co.uk.
