London, UK
Back in June 2020, after months of stasis, Dom Joly was starting to get cabin fever. The comedian and travel writer was in lockdown with his family at his Gloucestershire home. His Holiday Snaps tour – a one-man-and-a-laptop show in which he would regale his audiences with tales of trips to exotic places like North Korea and Cambodia – had been postponed.
It was, he says, the longest he had been in the same place for as far back as he can remember. “There was suddenly this moment, about four months [into the pandemic] when we started thinking, ‘What are we going to do? How are we going to do gigs?’” he recalls. Joly was, after all, a travel writer without any travel, and a performer without a stage.