Steve Best is Britain's Clowntographer

thejohnfleming

Sep 20

Last year, comic/photographer Steve Best published Comedians, an extraordinarily classy collection of his photos of, you guessed it, comedians.

Now he is about to publish a sequel - Comedians 2.

STEVE: What I wanted to do with the first book was to get a lovely product out and to not lose money. It has made a bit of profit.

But the print cost of the new one has gone up because the cost of the paper has increased. It has gone up massively, like everything else.

But I want to publish it.

JOHN: Why?

STEVE: You want to leave something behind after you've gone. I want the book to be the best possible book I can do. It's printed at EBS in Italy (Editoriale Bortolazzi Stei), the best fine art printers in the world.

JOHN: So what's the difference between the first and second books?

STEVE: Well the first one got my name out there as a photographer and I got a lot of work on the back of it. There's this big project that might be coming up soon.

JOHN: You have an 'in' with comedians because you are one of them. You are a comic AND a photographer.

STEVE: Yes, it gives me access and also I've grown in confidence. Now I've got to position myself - not to be aloof but - to be seen as a photographer rather than a comedian with a camera.

JOHN: The National Portrait Gallery has just re-opened…

STEVE: The Art world is really difficult to understand and break into. And there's a difference between fine art photography and documentary photography. My biggest hurdle now is to convince the Art world that what I do is of some artistic merit.

Some of the photographic galleries are now saying to me These are great photos rather than Oh, you're just a comedian who does a bit of photography.

JOHN: I love your photo of Johnny Vegas sitting in the middle, with Michael Redmond on the left and Dave Johns on the right. Three totally different characters in one shot.

Comics Michael Redmond, Johnny Vegas and Dave Johns in *Comedians*

STEVE: That was one of the first photos I took (2015) and it started me thinking There's something in this.

JOHN: If photography became suddenly very, very financially successful, would you give up comedy performing?

STEVE: Until about six or seven years ago, I… well I… well, there's another article to be written about what happened to the comedy circuit…

JOHN: What happened to the comedy circuit?

STEVE: Twenty years ago, the money was even better than it is now and you could earn a pretty good living by just being a good stand-up.

JOHN: So what happened six or seven years ago?

STEVE: Well, you know, Jongleurs fell apart, but the money hadn't really gone up much anyway. Jongleurs had been paying just as well seven years before that. They were paying you to perform and they were also paying a hotel in advance and then it started slowly changing - you had to stomp up the money in advance and they'd pay you back and then they stopped paying. I wasn't owed any money when Jongleurs went down.

I had a really strong 20-25 minute set I used to take round then but I feel I'm much more creative now with what I'm doing with the photography… because everything IS so different each time.

The very visual Steve Best: "What am I doing it for?"

You think… If I do a gig for £150 down in Sussex, I could instead do a shoot in my little studio - a portrait - and be at home… So what am I doing going down to Sussex and performing much the same material again? What am I doing it for?

JOHN: Surely every comedy gig is different because of the punters?

STEVE: Well, unless you are a really, really prolific writer, the act kind of stays the same. I'm not learning. Why would I carry on doing that? I'm not an observational comic; my act is one-liner jokes and visual routines. It doesn't interest me as much as it used to.

JOHN: Are you getting into a niche of only photographing comedians, though?

STEVE: Well, it's documentary photography. Because of my website and that first Comedians book, I was flown out to Zurich last week for a big pharmaceutical company - I was going up and down glaciers documenting the width and doing various photoshoots of people. Hopefully that sort of thing is the future.

JOHN: People say glaciers have a limited future.

STEVE: But then there's that big project I was telling you about that will hopefully happen. I would be part of a new music school in London. I would be a creative director with a proper studio to kit out so I can take portraits of all the musicians and tour with them when they get good.

It could be the next step for me because I could still do my other comedy projects but also get into the music world as well. It could be really exciting.

JOHN: Have your children shown any interest in performing?

STEVE: My daughter is REALLY good on the violin. My son is on the piano; he's a funny guy but quite shy, like me. I don't think either of them will go into being performers. Their mum is a proper scientist so would want them to get a 'proper' job. She is Associate Professor of Linguistics at University College London.

JOHN: Your father was a mathematician.

STEVE: Strangely, he was also into Amateur Dramatics. He was quite strait-laced. My mum was the 'mad artist'. I was really good at maths in school. I did my O Level a year early and got an A grade. I was going to go on to do Maths at A level, but then I got obsessed by performing magic... In the end, my A Levels were Music, Art and French. I really loved Maths. But I went to a real rough comprehensive school and they weren't really pushing me. Nor my parents.

My parents sort of said: "Well, if you want to do magic, go and do magic."

And before going to school, I used to practise juggling.

JOHN: More than three items?

STEVE: Five.

JOHN: For how long?

STEVE: About a minute.

JOHN: Bloody hell. I'm impressed. Someone explained to me that juggling five items is three times as difficult as juggling three.

STEVE: Y-e-e-e-s...

JOHN: I don't understand how your maths brain links up with comedy performance and photography.

STEVE: I think maths helps with everything else: art and everything.

JOHN: I was useless at science: anything where you had to remember X = Y.

STEVE: I was fascinated by that. I loved the idea of memorising. I tried to memorise a pack of cards in a certain stack. Pictures and numbers; there are ways of doing it. I loved the Rubik's Cube. I learnt the Rubik's Cube when I was young.

JOHN: Malcolm Hardee used to say he was never impressed by juggling or mime because they were skills. With enough practice, almost anybody can become good. Whereas comedy is a talent. You can get better with practice but only to a certain extent; to be superb, you need to have some innate talent.

With photography, too, you have to learn certain technical aspects, but you also maybe need some form of innate talent?

STEVE: Yes, I think with comedy and photography you do have to have something innately - and also it's about timing. There are all these comedy courses and you can teach comedy and you can learn technique, but it doesn't mean you are going to be funny.

JOHN: Do you absolutely need to know the technicalities in photography? Is it like movies? Objectively, The Blair Witch Project (which I have not seen) is technically bad but works emotionally. Is it possible to take a technically bad photograph that works?

STEVE: I think technically you do have to learn - how the shutter works; how the aperture works; how to control the light that comes into the sensor. But there's a photograph of Julian Clary and Paul Thorne passing each other in my first Comedians book. Technically, it's not brilliant because it's a bit out of focus but the actual timing is brilliant because they are looking at each other for that split second. So it's a good photo.

Eye eye - Paul Thorne and Julian Clary in Comedians

JOHN: That's it. We're finished. 38 minutes. I have to transcribe all this.

STEVE: Where are you off to now?

JOHN: I'm meeting the Fabulous Flying Haidrani Twins... Identical twins.

STEVE: You know I'm a twin? Not identical.

JOHN: Now you tell me! After 38 minutes! What does your twin do?

STEVE: He's a teacher down in Portishead, near Bristol. He teaches Art, including Photography, up to A-Level. Though he doesn't really take photos. He is into Art. And he's also a karate teacher. He's very funny off-stage but never took it onstage. Whereas I was very quiet off-stage but went on-stage.

JOHN: Not identical twins, then…

STEVE: What do the Fabulous Flying Haidrani Twins do?

JOHN: Well, separately, they each used to be multi-award-winning journalists. Now they go on extraordinarily exotic and almost incredibly gossip-worthy holidays. But they never write about them. It's a great loss. However successful your photography becomes, you should never give up your live comedy performances.