Joly Good Show

Best known to comedy fans as the face of Channel 4’s popular prank programme Trigger Happy TV, Dom Joly is also a travel writer who has contributed to the Sunday Times and has just published The Dark Tourist, a travelogue which allowed him to visit various locations newspapers would never send him – such as Iran, North Korea and Cambodia. Joly – who spent part of his childhood in Lebanon – first spotted the phrase “dark tourism” in an Observer article about Guyana, which noted that a minister in the country wanted to develop the site of the Jonestown Massacre into a tourist attraction, and felt that the term accurately described his own long-term fascination with visiting unusual or dangerous countries.

As it happens, our interview takes place on the day the Chilean miners are rescued – I wonder if Joly feels if the site of their ideal is likely to become a hotspot on the dark tourism itinerary?
“Yeah, it probably would be actually,” he considers, sitting in the lounge of the Westbury Hotel. “I was just thinking when I was watching it that I would quite fancy going out there, but more to look at it as a news event. I found it fascinating that there were so many news people. But it was a bit weird. I was just watching it last night and they’d got them all out, and everyone was celebrating – but there were still five engineers down there!”
Undoubtedly one of the most intriguing destinations Joly visited for The Dark Tourist was the notoriously secretive North Korea.
“It’s very difficult to get in, only a thousand get access each year – and that’s from everywhere,” explains Dom. “When I was covering the Olympics for the Independent, I met someone from the main company who go in there, and he got me on the list. It’s not luck – you can go and apply and so on. But some people try loads of times and don’t get in, whereas some people succeed on their first go. They also randomly reject sometimes and you don’t know why. I was worried because, technically, I’m partly a journalist, and you’re not allowed to get in there in that capacity. But they didn’t check.”
Having finally gained access, Joly says he was constantly surprised by the overt Orwellian atmosphere of the state.
“All the other places I went to, I knew they were going to be weird, but they actually turned out to be infinitely better than I thought they would be,” he reflects. “North Korea was a thousand times weirder than I expected – it was like going on the set of The Truman Show. It was absolutely insane, beyond Orwellian. There’s this university dance where you have women in traditional dresses and men all wearing the same suits, and they’re all dancing in this huge open square to a guy just playing music on these weird loudspeakers. And they’re under this huge statue of a hammer, a sickle and a calligraphy pen – because that’s how different North Korea is to normal communism. They don’t kill intellectuals, they’re part of it.
“But yeah, it was the most Orwellian statue I’d ever seen, and it was added to by those loudspeakers everywhere playing tinny music. It’s such an ugly city, it kind of made 1984 feel like a nice place. And it’s all built in a way to make you as an individual feel totally insignificant – all the buildings and statues are huge.”
Of course, with Kim Jong-il’s son, Kim Jong-un, now the heir apparent as has been widely reported, North Korea doesn’t look set to adopt a more open attitude to the outside world anytime soon. Joly feels that his visit gave him a greater insight into the national psyche.
“They hate foreigners and always have,” he says. “It’s always been known as the Hermit Kingdom. Even in the 17th century they hated outsiders, and in the 20th century they were raped and pillaged by the Japanese, then at war with America. Right or wrong, their worldview is that outsiders are trouble, and they hate you. When you walk past there are no smiles, they just look at you like, ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ Basically that felt like the national motto to me – they should have it on top of the airport as you arrive!”
The book also gave Joly the excuse to visit his old school in Lebanon. There could be one or two interesting faces in attendance should the school ever have a reunion for past pupils – Joly learned a few years back that during one of his years at the school, he counted an Osama bin Laden among his fellow students.
“I was there for one year with him,” he explains. “I did a TV show about five years ago where I went back to Lebanon, and I visited my old school. The headmistress came out to see what we were doing, and the fixer explained that I was well-known in England and I was making a TV show. The headmistress said, ‘Oh, I’m not impressed with that, we’ve had much more famous here.’ I went, ‘Who?’ and she said, ‘Osama bin Laden’. We had to go, but ever since I kept wondering if it was true.
“But I spoke to Robert Fisk from the Independent, and I said to him, ‘What do you think?’ and he said, ‘As far as I know it’s true – his two brothers went there.’ And it makes sense, because it was a big international school. It’s actually an English Quaker school, which makes it even weirder, because Quakers are about pacifism, and he’s not exactly a successful old boy. But a lot of rich Arabs would send their children there, because they’d get a good education whilst technically still being in an Arab country. So it was kind of a cop-out.
“What I really wanted was a school picture with me and bin Laden, and that was going to be the cover of the book, but the school totally denied any knowledge of it. They have photos for everything except that period. I was so annoyed. I’ve done all the obvious jokes – gone on Friends Reunited, tried to have a class reunion. The FBI can’t catch him but I can! Also, I got the motto for the school, which is about promoting world peace and so on. He’s the ultimate failure for this school!”

The Dark Tourist is out now, published by Simon & Schuster.