‘I phoned the president of Ghana onstage in a pub’: how we made The Mark Thomas Comedy Product

Mark Thomas, comedian

I remember the producer Geoff Anderson and I having a conversation about making a radical version of That’s Life! But instead of bringing dodgy double-glazing salesmen to book, we’d bring down international capitalism. We failed. But we had a really good go.

We piloted Comedy Product in 1995. I was 32 and had done a bit of telly stuff – The Mary Whitehouse Experience, and I’d hosted Loose Talk on Radio 1. But what most obsessed me was The Cutting Edge, a topical weekly comedy show that I’d been part of founding at the Comedy Store. The immediacy coinciding with the strength of the writing would often reflect or refine the audiences’ feeling about a story. Looking back, that was where I