Justin Time

Justin Lee Collins has become a familiar face on television in recent years thanks to his roles fronting such British television programmes as The Sunday Night Project (which he co-hosted with Alan Carr), and the Bring Back… series, where he set about reuniting the casts of trashy TV classics like Dallas and The A-Team.

Collins recounts his arduous trek to success as a television presenter in his new memoir Good Times. Leaving school at 15, he worked for a period at Marks and Spencer before taking a drama course and eventually pursuing stand-up comedy, which in turn led to him landing a few promising TV gigs, including hosting a series for MTV. However, this success faded away and Collins once again retreated to the stand-up circuit (which, for the most part, he loathed), and feared that he would never secure his longed-for break in the world of TV.
A period of initial career success followed by a drought is a familiar enough experience for most people, although it’s a pattern that still manages to surprise most of us. Collins, now older and wiser, recognises that the path to one’s ideal life can be a fairly circuitous route.
“I don’t believe in the existence of the big break,” he asserts, sitting in his room (the JFK Suite, no less) in the Shelbourne Hotel. “It’s lots of little breaks - it’s a buffet of breaks. There’s no one big thing. The most significant period – I suppose the turning point – was the two years I spent on XFM. I got a gig there and that led to me popping up on a digital channel by the name of Nation 277. Now, literally no one was watching this thing.
“There was a show on it called Flipside, it was a live television review show, and the hook was, ’We watch TV so you don’t have to.’ So you’d have a presenter - which most of the time was me - and a panel of three contributors, each of whom would be watching their own TV. We’d have a lot of journalists and comedians on the show, and for example, I would go, ‘Dan, what are you watching?’ And that person would go, ‘Well Justin, I’m on channel number whatever, and I’m watching this.’ And we would give a live critique of what was on.
“No one was watching us watching TV! But you never really know who’s watching. But it turns out that the former head of BBC3 – his wife found that show, I would imagine through channel surfing. The BBC had just decided to bring back Come Dancing with celebrities, and call it Strictly Come Dancing. BBC3 were going to commission a spin-off show, and the head of the channel’s wife saw me on this programme on Nation 277, called her husband in from the kitchen and said, ‘That’s the guy who should host that series’. I jumped at the chance, because I adored Come Dancing as a kid, and one of my all-time favourite films is Strictly Ballroom.”
Presenting BBC3’s Strictly Come Dancing spin-off ultimately led to Collins working for Channel 4, where he first came to the attention of a wider audience thanks to his role fronting the Bring Back…series. Did anyone on the show particularly surprise him?
“Once or twice,” replies Collins. “On The A-Team one, I seem to remember that Mr. T was a joy. Dirk Benedict – who played Face – wasn’t quite so nice. He’s a big cigar-chomping guy. The first portion of the interview with Face was totally unusable because for a start, he refused to put the cigar out. This is now the time when you can’t smoke.
“So Simon, my producer at the time, was saying, ‘Look, Dirk, I’m really sorry, but if you smoke we can’t use it.’ Obviously, you’re trying to butter him up and make him feel good, so he was going, ‘What you’re saying is gold, and you’re coming across so well, but we’re not going to be able to use it because you’re smoking.’ That set him off into a rant about screaming liberals, and what is America coming to. It was, ‘This is America, and I’m a guy’, and he’s talking about amendments and constitutions, and how a man should be able to smoke wherever he wants.
“The first third of that interview was totally unusable! But on that note, do you know what I found really interesting? About a year after, he went into the Big Brother house in the UK. It’s interesting how that show is put together and edited, because he actually came across as being alright. I spent a few hours with him, and I know he’s difficult, and I didn’t find him to be an especially nice guy. I found that kind of intriguing.”
The next stop for Collins was The Sunday Night Project. Originally broadcast on Fridays and anchored by Jimmy Carr and a revolving team of guest hosts, the show was eventually taken over by Collins and Alan Carr. The programme was subsequently moved to Sunday nights, a decision which still irks Collins.
“To this day we still don’t understand it,” he says. “There’s an established show called The Friday Night Project, and then someone has this brilliant idea for I think series seven - ‘I know, why don’t we take this well established show called The Friday Night Project - and move it to a Sunday’.
So we wrestled with that decision, me and Al, and I remember at the time that both of our agents were at loggerheads with Channel 4. They were going, ‘This is crazy. It’s called The Friday Night Project - it reeks of Friday. It’s one of those here-comes-the-weekend kind of shows, and you’re now going to put it out at 10 o’clock on a Sunday night, when people are thinking about work the next day and have to go to bed?’”
Presumably, they were thinking that the people who would watch the show were going out on Friday nights.
“There was a certain amount of logic behind it,” acknowledges Collins. “That was certainly part of it, but I think the bigger thing was there was a concerted effort, not just at Channel 4 – ITV at the time were doing a similar thing – where TV execs and programme controllers wanted to turn Sunday into a new entertainment night. Partly based on the fact that most people out are on Friday night. So the thinking was, ‘Why don’t we make Sunday the new Friday?’ Of course the thing is, everyone’s got to get up for work the next day, and we also we had a lot of younger viewers as well – from 15 to 17 – and a lot of those people are being sent to bed because they’ve got to get up for school the next morning.”
In any event, Collins has now moved on to pastures new, having signed a contract with Channel Five. What projects does he have in the pipeline? “The first thing we’re gonna do is a game show,” explains Collins. “It’s called Heads Or Tails, and the hook is that you can win a million pounds on the flip of a coin. And in January we’re going to do a chat show. I did one for ITV2, and I enjoyed it on the whole, but the problem is that with ITV2, they have a very clear remit, and they’re going for a younger audience, 16-24.
“I wanted to do a grown-up chat-show, something that was assured – I wanted a stab at being Letterman, I suppose. So hopefully, now that we’re on Channel Five, I can to do the kind of chat show I want to do, without any interference.”

Good Times is out now, published by Ebury Press