Mock The Week regular Milton Jones tours Milton Impossible live show to Chesterfield

Milton Jones. Photo by Aemen Sukkar at Jiksaw.

That’s right, Milton Jones – Mock the Week’s resident oddball, Radio 4 regular and king of the surreal one-liner – is back on tour, and this time he’s an international man of mystery.

The wild-haired joke-teller, who is touring to Chesterfield’s Winding Wheel on October 16, might not be the obvious choice for a secret agent, but in ‘Milton: Impossible’ the 55-year-old comic will be taking his audience through an action-packed story via hundreds of his exquisitely-crafted pieces of wordplay.

Milton said: “The show is based on “Mission: Impossible”, but “Mission: Impossible” has a huge budget and lots of special effects. My show is just me and some hats and jokes. It’s low-tech instead of high-tech.

“There are about 250 jokes in the show, but I reckon I end up writing about 350. A lot of them are then used somewhere else – in the next tour, on radio, on Mock the Week – so they’re never wasted. And if they’re particularly brilliant then I might go out of my way to include them in the show!

‘If a gag works, it makes a cartoon in someone’s head – a very brief picture where they think they know where it’s going, and then you pull the carpet from under them and it was all about something else all along. It’s reverse engineering from an idea or a phrase.”

Milton’s last tour played to more than 100,000 people and he has appeared on Mock the Week more than 40 times. Which does he prefer, live or recorded shows? “They’re both good in different ways,” he said. “Going to small place on a Saturday night where they’re all determined to have a great laugh – I don’t think that can be beaten, in one sense. With radio or television, you’re as good as the edit, and it’s out of your control.

“I’m very grateful to Mock the Week for giving me a wider platform, and also a slightly different audience. It’s a younger

audience, and those people will come to a tour show, sometimes even bringing their grandparents or parents.”

How does Milton cater for the different generations in his live shows? “I am aware that if I make a reference to Instagram or something I’m going to lose everyone over 50,” he said. “But that’s fine because overall my references are quite general, and even if you didn’t get it, the joke’s only going to last 20 seconds, so there’ll be something else along soon enough.”

Tickets to see Milton Jones cost £30.40. Call 01246 345222 or go to www.chesterfieldtheatres.co.uk