“I’ve been with her almost 40 years now. We met in a burger bar, like you do, in Stanmore. It was called Barbecue. Apparently Matt Lucas used to go there when he was a kid. Our eyes met over a griddle, and she was different from every other woman I’d ever met. And she was interested in me! She said to me, after about three weeks, ‘You should do stand-up comedy.’
Ian Stone[Missing Credit]
“I was an engineer at the time, like a normal job, and even though I didn’t think I must do stand-up comedy, I did think, ‘Who is this woman?’”
Rosie also encouraged Stone to write a book about his obsession with his hero, Paul Weller, and The Jam, which he did five years ago. To Be Someone became a bestseller, and was endorsed by Weller himself. Autobiographical, it also is a sort of exorcism of Stone’s troubled and unhappy childhood.
“It was toxic really,” he says. “My mum and dad hated each other basically. But they stayed together because that’s what people did in those days. It’s all in the book. My dad got a suspended jail sentence for phoning in a bomb scare at the main sorting office around the corner. Don’t ask me why, he was annoyed at something! It all got very messy and horrible. After that, my mum tried to kill herself, and was in hospital. I was shipped off to my aunts for a couple of weeks because my dad couldn’t cook for me and my sister Beverley. She’s six years younger than me.
The way we were: a young Ian with his sister Beverley[Missing Credit]
“It was horrible, to be honest with you. You don’t become a comedian for no reason.” His mother, Helena, died in 2020 but his father, Ken, is still alive. “My dad used to work various street markets, selling materials. We used to watch West End shows in the Seventies on TV and he’d go ‘I sold them that Brocade! Twelve yards at £4 a yard.’”
In his book Stone doesn’t pull any punches about his parents, particularly his dad. “I say he was the worst, the single, most useless adult human I’ve ever met in my life. He read the book, and I phoned him up, and asked him if he liked it. ‘I loved it!’ he said. I said, what about when I called you the single most useless adult human I’ve ever met in my life? He said ‘I didn’t mind that, because it’s true!’ What can I tell you? My life is a sitcom!” Despite the bad example given to them, both he and his sister have maintained long marriages.
He and Rosie have two grown-up sons, Eli, a dancer who lives in Brussels, and Alexsander, who lives in America and runs a Pickleball company. “I think I knew I wanted calm in a marriage and I must have seen that in Rosie and she is a very calming influence. I’ve been lucky in meeting the right person.” He attended JFS secondary school, but it was primary school that provided him with a lifelong friendship and an alternative family to his own.
Childhood friend: Ian with David Baddiel[Missing Credit]
“Ivor Baddiel was my best friend and I grew up with him and his brothers, David and Dan. Because my house was so horrible, I spent a lot of time at the Baddiels’, like three or four days a week, right through my childhood. Their mum, Sarah, was like a second mum to me. She used to cook lovely meals. It ws a very warm home. And their dad, Colin, as well, he definitely had a paternal influence on me. I miss them very much. I still keep in touch with the boys obviously. As much as Dave would talk about how crazy their house was, and there were definitely crazy times, it was a bit of calm compared to my house, where there was a lot of shouting and screaming.
“I went to both Sarah and Colin’s funerals, of course. It was funny because Dave said to me when Colin was still around, that he’s got a thing called Pick’s disease, a form of dementia where he says inappropriate things and swears a lot.
“And I said, ‘Well, has he always had it? Because he was like that when I was a kid.’ Dave said, ‘That’s what everyone says about him’. It was funny, funny sad, you know.”
Now Stone is a consummate performer, but he recalls very clearly his first performance, in his early thirties, at the Comedy Café in London in 1991. “As I say, I was engineer. I’d taken some time out and had gone to India and when I came back, I decided to go for it. Rosie, of course, was amazingly supportive. She had told me to do stand-up seven years before, so it took a while.
“Finally, I got it together. I was terrified. The whole right side of my body was shaking. My mouth was dead dry.
“It was also a very strange moment, because I stood on stage for a minute or two, and I thought, ‘Everyone’s, looking at me!’”
At the end of his set, he thought he would never perform again. “I think I got one laugh! I was terrible. But there were two people in the audience who sat behind Rosie talking about me, not realising who she was, saying, ‘He’s a terrible performer, but the material is all right.’
“And I thought, well, I can live with that because I’ve never done the performing before. I can improve on that.”
Improve he did, becoming a regular on the comedy circuit and moving into radio and television. He’s been fortunate to combine his love of football with presenting, co hosting Rock ’N’ Roll Football on Absolute Radio and the Arsenal FC podcast The Tuesday Club with Alan Davies.
He still suffers from nerves when he performs. “I will not phone it in! I can’t, I mean what’s the point of being there if you do?” he jokes.
Stone is so obviously Jewish and given some of his humour is based on Jewish life, you wonder how he fares in terms of antisemitism. “I’ve had instances in the past, but I’ve been out there every night, pretty much from October 7 and I haven’t had any nastiness at all.
“I know that people have had stuff going on. I know how the community is feeling, but personally, and I can only really talk about my own personal experience. It’s been OK. I mean, I tell people I’m Jewish, and I talk about it.
“I think most people who go to comedy nights, they don’t want to give you a hard time. They just want a laugh and hopefully, that’s what I give them!”
Ian Stone’s show Keeping it Together is at the Edinburgh Fringe until August 25 and on UK tour from September. For tickets, visit ianstonecomedian.co.uk
