How a marriage crisis kicked off John Bishop's 'highly unusual' comedy career

With zero previous experience as a performer, John Bishop stepped onstage at the Frog and Bucket one night in 2000 and performed his first-ever gig for a handful of people.

This week, Is This Thing On? - a new film based on Bishop's unusual start as a comedian - premiered at the New York Film Festival. For the 58-year-old, it's "incredibly fascinating" that 12-time Oscar nominee Bradley Cooper chose to make this story his directorial follow-up to the 2023 Leonard Bernstein biopic Maestro.

"[Bradley Cooper] doesn't need to prove himself anywhere," he tells Sunday Morning's Jim Mora.

Because the story felt too close to him, Bishop didn't write the screenplay for Is This Thing On?, which stars Laura Dern and Will Arnett, who helped get the film off the ground.

While writing his 2013 autobiography How Did All This Happen?, the former semi-professional football player realised what a "pivotal" experience it was visiting his dad in jail as a six-year-old.

"I could remember the noise of the doors and especially the way prison officers looked at the families and looked at my mum and looked at us.

"I didn't realise, until I was reflecting on that, that it started in me this determination to do something, to not be looked at like that again, to not be judged.

"It also settled in me, the idea of empathy, the idea of don't judge people because you don't know what put them there. Judge people on what you know of them, not what you think of them."

What audiences see when Bishop is performing onstage isn't much different from what they'd see in any other setting, he says.

"I'm not one of those people who went to drama school and learned to perform… I didn't watch comedy. I didn't know how to be a comedian. I only knew how to be me… I'm probably as natural on stage as I am off."

After realising his love for stand-up comedy that night in Manchester, it took a while for Bishop to become a full-time performer.

Between his day job and family, Bishop was "very, very busy" and didnt have time to write jokes.

"I'd just turn up at a comedy club and go ', Has anyone got any questions? Someone shouted something, and that would be the basis of the act. It was a cheat, it saved me writing jokes."

Before getting into comedy, as a young dad from a "very working-class background", Bishop says he had a massive motivation to do well at work and provide for his family.

"Within all of that, I was becoming more and more boring… I just kept on thinking, 'I'll just do the job, because that's doing the right thing'."

He doesn't think he would ever have gone to a comedy club, let alone take the stage, if he and his wife Melanie's marriage hadn't "sort of ran out of road" in the months before.

In a twist reminiscent of 'Escape (The Piña Colada Song)', Bishop says the decision to get on stage that night at the Frog and Bucket Comedy Club was what eventually led to him and Melanie reconciling.

"Melanie didn't know I'd started doing stand-up comedy. I didn't tell anybody. I didn't even tell my mates.

"She happened to come into the comedy club one night when I was on, telling jokes about how I would have killed my ex-wife. It was as bizarre a situation as you can imagine.

"Then one thing led to another, and we ended up getting back together."

In a recent appearance on the BBC podcast Desert Island Discs, Bishop chose a Simple Minds track that Melanie once included on a mixtape as his number-one song of all time.

"You've got to pick one song that you would gladly listen to for the rest of your life - I picked Simple Minds' 'Don't You Forget About Me'."