Joe Pasquale opens up on inspiring career

Joe Pasquale was thirteen when he was mowed down by a hit-and-run driver.

“It was petrifying, I was in agony for weeks,” Joe, 61, tells me, flinching at the memory.

“There was nothing I could do. It felt like it all was happening in slow motion. It still haunts me to this day. It feels so vivid, it could have been yesterday.”

He was on his Chopper bike doing his paper round in Grays, Essex, when the silver Vauxhall smashed into him breaking both his legs.

“It was about half a mile from my house. The driver didn’t stop. It was right outside where Mac and Katie Kissoon, the brother-and-sister pop duo, lived and they kindly looked after me until the ambulance came.

“Then I was in a hospital ward with old boys who were at death’s door…which was frightening in itself.

“I was a bit late delivering the papers,” he adds with a smile.

The accident left Joe’s right leg slightly shorter than his left, and he missed nearly a year of school. Yet the much-loved comedian, ITV’s former King of the Jungle, credits the traumatic incident for his side-line as a horror writer.

His legs heavily plastered, Joe couldn’t make the toilet on his own and relied on an old-fashioned chamber pot.

“I slept on the living room settee for months and watched telly at all hours. Every night there seemed to be a horror film on – either classic Hammer horrors like Dracula and The Curse Of Frankenstein, or US sci-fi movies like Donovan’s Brain…

“My mum had these old porcelain dolls and she used to tell me some of them were possessed – what a thing to tell a kid! So with them and the films I became obsessed with horror, the gorier the better.”

The obsession served Joe well in his three impressive Celebrity Mastermind appearances, and inspired his freshly published collection of fiendish short stories, Of Mice & Wolfmen.

Leaving school with no qualifications, squeaky-voiced Pasquale had more jobs than George Osborne – tea-boy, garage mechanic, Ford’s factory worker, labourer, plasterer, civil servant, and a meat market porter, “humping carcasses” at Smithfield.

“I had loads of jobs but they didn’t last. I was always plagued by the thought, ‘Is this it for the next forty years?’

“I wanted to be an actor because you didn’t have to get up in the morning.” The next best thing was a job as a Greencoat at Warners Holiday Camp in Lowestoft.

“You had to do whist drives, run discos, oversee the snooker and the swimming, be a life guard and perform on stage.

“If the cabaret didn’t turn up, the manager would tell me, ‘Go on and do five minutes’,” – the genesis of the act he performed on ITV’s New Faces, coming second to ventriloquist Jimmy Tamley in the 1987 Grand Final.

Riding the TV exposure, Joe was booked to open for singer Grace Kennedy at Blazers nightclub, Windsor. He did his New Faces five minutes and came off-stage.

“The stage manager was pulling his hair out. He said, ‘Get back on, we need another 40minutes!’.”

Pasquale’s then agent, former magician Michael Vine, gave Joe a trunk full of all his conjuring paraphernalia and his real act was born – a cocktail of daft jokes, slapstick tricks, prop gags and a song “that’ll get on yer nerves, get on yer nerves, get on yer nerves…” He calls it “cack”, but that old cack magic gave him a career spanning five decades.

Joe frequently reduced Des O’Connor to tears with one-liners like “This is my stepladder, my real ladder left me.”

He stormed the 1993 Royal Command Performance, which also showcased Bradley Walsh, Joe’s life-long chum from the talent contest circuit.

ITV instantly commissioned I’m Pasquale, He’s Walsh. But the star’s favourite TV achievement was An Audience with Joe Pasquale.

The 2005 special, watched by nine million, was filmed a fortnight after Joe won I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out Of Here.

“They wanted it yesterday! I had to write it in two weeks with Colin Edmonds” – a comedy writer and author renowned for his decades-long association with Bob Monkhouse.

That sums up Joe’s can-do attitude. He has cheerfully submitted to public indignities for his craft – having a nipple pierced on ITV’s The Nightly Show, appearing dressed as a rabbit to over-dub Putin in recent episode of The Last Leg…

He’s broken toes tap-dancing in panto, set his foot on fire on TV, and fractured his right hand on a Dancing On Ice tour. In a varied career, Pasquale has filmed with the Muppets and voiced Monkey in Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman.

He has also demonstrated a disciplined approach to the stage. Joe made his theatrical debut in The Nerd in 1999 and went on to acting triumphs in hit productions including Spamalot and Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em with Sarah Earnshaw as Betty to his Frank.

The knock-about farce might come back, he says, adding, “Although I’m getting too old to throw meself down the stairs every night.”

Joseph Ellis Pasquale was born on August 20, 1961, in Grays, Essex, the third child of four.

“My dad Joe worked in a margarine factory; mum was a housewife. Money was tight growing up, most of my clothes came from jumble sales. My nickname was ‘second-hand Joe’.”

The twice-divorced star, who has five children and eleven grandchildren, currently lives alone in a 500-year-old flint cottage near Thetford in Norfolk.

“I’m happy,” he says. “I’ve got nobody telling me off.” Despite his daffy persona, Pasquale has a degree in Geo-Science, boxes to keep fit, runs marathons and pilots his own plane, a second-hand Yak 52.

Comedy kept him content, until the calamitous Covid lockdown.

Joe delivered PPE for the Helping Hands charity “rather than sit doing nothing – I did it for three months, whenever they called me.” But not performing had depressing side-effects.

“Being a comic saved me,” he says. “I genuinely love comedy. And when I wasn’t doing it, I found myself thinking, ‘What is the point of my existence?’ “Without comedy, I was just a bloke in my pants.

“I became me again, and I buried the other me, the comedian me, deep inside.”

When the restrictions lifted, West End star Lee Mead asked Joe to do a warm up gig as his special guest.

“I agreed but I was worried. I thought what if it’s just me that turns up and not the comedian me? I was terrified. I thought it could be the worst gig I ever did, but it was great, it was like slipping into a warm bath full of honey; it all came back to me. I realized how much I’d missed it.”

Joe is one of the few comedians who plays well on the variety circuit and the comedy club one. The self-deprecating clown recently played a swathe of northern club gigs.

“I love them, they’re so intimate.” He abhors comedy snobbery – “You’re either funny or you’re not; that’s the only criteria.”

Joe’s ambition is “to keep working with nice people, doing nice jobs, no drama. I don’t like stress. Life is stressful enough.”

His summer tour starts this month, and he’ll be in Peter Pan facing Judge Rinder’s Captain Hook at Southend this Christmas.

“After the tour I’ll start writing a horror novel about vampires in Whitby,” he says.

“On TV Dracula moves to London, in the books, he came from Whitby to Purfleet, to the Carfax Estate which was the site of a mental asylum not far from where I lived. So when I was a kid, I got on my bike and went there. It was a fixation.”

Pasquale has survived real horrors along the way. He was nearly shot out of the sky over Iraq while flying in to entertain 5,000 troops in 2007 with Katherine Jenkins and Gary Rhodes. And he lost £100,000 in an ill-advised investment in a defunct TV company, made shortly after his mother Ethel died.

“It wiped out my savings but you live and learn,” he says. “It didn’t kill me. Over all, I’ve been lucky, I’ve learnt to roll with the punches. “I’m really happy I’m still doing it after forty years.

“Don’t look back at anything,” he advises. “You’ve got to deal with today.”