Mark Thomas is in the serious business of shining a beam into the darker corners of bad behaviour in big business and government, but gets lots of laughs out of it, writes Brian Boyd
When, last year, a minister in Tony Blair's government sent an e-mail to civil servants asking them to "gather background dirt on (Mark) Thomas to rubbish him", the comic and activist was overjoyed. The minister who wrote the e-mail was Richard Caborn, then trade minister now sports minister.
"This was tangible success," says Thomas. "I wasn't in the least bit angry that one of Blair's ministers was out to smear me, which he was caught doing by a leaked e-mail, I was just thrilled that I had proven myself to be enough of an annoyance to the government that they would actually use such tactics. It was a result."
Mark Thomas is in the business of annoyance. To call him a comedian is overly reductive; to call him "the English Michael Moore" is too simplistic. He's a manic street preacher who uses the medium of stand-up to expose corporate injustice and political corruption. There's little point in trying to separate his comedy from his activism - it's like trying to separate the dancer from the dance. Although he doesn't perform so much as lecture, his shows are deeply comic, it's just that given the nature of his material, it's more tragi-comedy than anything else.
Probably best known for his Channel 4 series The Mark Thomas Project, he has a formidable agit-prop CV.
Once he gatecrashed an international arms fair, posing as a PR consultant for land mine manufacturers. Along the way he got Maj Gen Widjojo of Indonesia to admit, "We do some torture. It is to protect the security of our society."
Later, he got the Indonesian defence attaché, Col Halim Nawi, to say that British-made equipment had been used by the Indonesians to crush dissent in occupied East Timor. After the programme was aired, the Indonesians claimed "entrapment".
In the same series, he hilariously exposed tax loopholes for the British upper class; reminded the House Of Commons that former press secretary Alastair Campbell once wrote stories for the sex magazine Forum. After he ambushed a train carrying nuclear waste by taking over a level crossing with a couple of armoured cars - "it was to expose the vulnerability of dangerous cargoes," he says - the Daily Mirror opined that "Mark Thomas must be stopped".
He once flew a hot-air balloon over a US military base in Britain shouting into his mobile phone "Semtex, AK-47, Downing Street, Martin McGuinness" and another time was arrested in Edinburgh, along with 80 fellow-travellers, for wearing a "F--k Bush" T-shirt. Handy to know: wearing such a T-shirt is legally an incitement to racial hatred.
It's all very much "a funny thing happened on the way to changing the world" - he puts himself about, annoys and irritates those who should be annoyed and irritated, and then comes back and tells you all the funny things that happened in the process.
Thomas, 40, from South London, began as a common-or-garden stand-up, but soon got sucked into agit-prop and now, he says, there can be no going back to "knob" jokes.
"Simply because of the nature of my material, some gags have to be lost sometimes and that's heartbreaking for me as a comedian," he says, "but it's a trade-off I'm happy to make. Political comedy has always been around, it has never died, as some people might tell you. All it's about is a sense of justice and the idea of highlighting something that is so obviously wrong. And political comedy is always going to be around until we get to that glorious anarcho-Zen Shangri-la."
Clever enough to refer to some of his fellow activists as "a bunch of beard-wearers singing protest songs about fish", and self-deprecating enough to mock his own presumption to pronounce on human rights, Thomas is well aware how out of synch he is among his fellow comics who associate "politics" with limp Ben Elton "Isn't Maggie awful" routines from a different era.
In his column in the New Spectator, he once wrote witheringly about a call for a boycott of the Perrier Prize in Edinburgh over Perrier's parent company controversial activities in the developing world. "Asking a comic to join a boycott is like recruiting a Teletubby to join the Zapatistas."
Thomas's new show is about the Coca-Cola corporation.
"I was sitting in the pub one night with a friend who was drinking a bottle of Coke and we were complaining about the Labour Party and how they had just become a brand like Coca-Cola," he says, "and then my friend told me that if I dug deep enough into Coca-Cola, I would probably find lots of interesting stuff. Such a big company was bound to have a skeleton in its cupboard, as it turns out there are quite a few skeletons in the Coca-Cola cupboard."
The particular Coca-Cola story he's interested in concerns union workers in Colombia who bottle Coca Cola products. There have been allegations, denied by Coca-Cola, that right-wing paramilitaries have been hired to murder leading trade union officials at the bottling plants (six union officials have been murdered either in or outside the plant).
"It's quite complex but this particular bottling plant in Colombia is ostensibly independent of Coca-Cola but the company own 46 per cent of the shares in it," he says, "what is happening now is that some very clever people are using a little-known part of the US constitution called the Alien Tort Claims Act which means that alleged crimes overseas can be tried in a US court.
As it stands now, the Teamsters union in the US and the International Labour Rights Fund have combined to bring this case to a US court."
The ongoing Colombian case sparked a consuming interest in the workings of Coca-Cola.
"It's just so strange, it's just a drink, it should be so benign but then you hear these serious allegations of collusion with paramilitaries to murder trade unionists - and the story just continues to unfold. I found out that of the countries that the US gives massive amounts of military aid to - Israel comes in at number one, Egypt at number two and at number three it's Colombia. So the Colombia story aside, in the show I also talk about links with child obesity and soft drinks and how advertising is aimed at young children. I mean, this drink is incredible - in some places it's used in religious ceremonies for baptisms.
"I went back further and researched the role of Coca-Cola Germany during the second World War. I found some astonishing stuff - did you know, for example, that when Coca-Cola Germany couldn't import the raw materials to make their drink, they invented Fanta - Fanta is a Nazi drink. It's mad. I mean, Coca-Cola sponsored the 1936 Olympic Games."
To illustrate his research, Thomas asked a number of artists to come up with imaginary advertisements for Coca-Cola as they would have appeared in official Nazi publications of the time.
The resultant art exhibition, snappily titled "Coca Cola's Nazi Adverts" is now showing in London.
"So far, Coca-Cola's lawyers have ignored me," he says. "I'm not sure if that will change with the exhibition now on, we'll see."
He refers to himself as Channel 4's "pet rebel - they can point to me when people complain they show too many US sitcoms."
He describes himself, after much thought, as a "libertarian anarchist." I think that so long as anyone's in power, there will be someone who isn't, which will lead to conflict and people being ripped off. It's simplistic, I know, but that's what I've learnt."
• Mark Thomas plays Dublin's Olympia Theatre on Sunday, June 13th
