How Birds Of A Feather star rattled Ross Noble seconds before he took to the stage

Timing is everything in comedy, as Ross Noble unfortunately understands all too well.

The comic has told how he had to take the stage to play the fool as Igor in Mel Brooks's Young Frankenstein just moments after co-star Lesley Joseph floored him with some bad news.

Noble revealed he was waiting in the wings with the Birds Of A Feather star when she chose her moment to share some devastating information. 

‘I’m waiting to go on,’ he told Richard Herring on his Leicester Square Theatre Podcast. ‘I'm all hunched, I'm ready to go… The music goes "doolooloolah", that's our entrance ...

'And she went: "Sean Hughes. Dead at 51."'

'Like literally the second before I went on stage,’ he sighed. 'Thanks.'

Noble also shared some endearing stories of working with Brooks.

The US comedy legend always insisted on picking up the lunch tab. When Noble once defied him by insisting to waiting staff that he would pay the bill, he spotted Brooks arguing with them across the room, before turning and shouting across a packed restaurant: 'Ross, are you fucking kidding me? I got way more money than you!'

Another time eating out, Brooks had disguised himself in hat and glasses, trying not to be spotted.

But when someone in the restaurant recognised Noble, ‘he’s jumped up, took his glasses off and gone "what about me?!",’ the younger comic recalled.

'He's just on all the time … no-one enjoys being who they are more than Mel enjoys being Mel Brooks.'

Noble also spoke of how he took work as a TV extra as a youngster, but always tried to steal  focus: racing an airport trolley through the background of a scene in Spender, dribbling as a hospital patient in a Catherine Cookson adaptation with Catherine Zeta-Jones and performing a hoedown with a friend during a rave in Byker Grove.

Published: 18 Oct 2018