The Lone Rambler

When I meet Mark Olver at a Bristol bar in June, he is petrified. In two days’ time, he is to undertake the trip of a lifetime, a 400 mile, six week walk from Bristol to Edinburgh, relying for his accommodation chiefly on the kindness of strangers. With his short, stout figure and amiable West Country burr, he has something of Samwise Gamgee about him, the homely hobbit about to wander too far from the Shire.

The consequences of failure wouldn’t be as dramatic for Olver as death at the claws of dragons, but they would be no less devastating for a stand-up: “I’ve told too many people who are brilliant at abuse”, he says. “If I end up not doing it, they will never let me forget it and they will abuse and insult me in incredibly imaginative, constructive and funny ways. If I turn up at gigs as the bloke who said he’d walk to Edinburgh and didn’t, I’d be destroyed.”

You could argue that Olver has brought this risk on himself. Over the past five years, he has established himself as a stalwart of the Bristol comedy scene, organising and compering gigs in the evening and doing his day-job as the “warm-up artiste” for Deal Or No Deal (filmed at Bristol’s Endemol studios). As such, he counts other South West comics such as Mark Watson, Russell Howard, Jon Richardson and James Dowdeswell among his friends, and none of them are likely to be kind should it all go tits up. Given such high stakes, what made him want to try it?

“I’ve always wanted to do something”, he says, somewhat confusingly given his accomplished comedy CV. “Stand-up is… I wake up, I go and do Deal, I go and do a gig in the evening, if it’s in Bristol I go home, if it’s somewhere else I get a burger from a kebab house and then go back to my hotel room. When I lived with Russell [Howard] and Jon Richardson, we used to spend our days playing Xbox and watching telly. But what do I actually do?”

“I’m 33 this year, which is the same age that Jesus was when he was crucified,” he says with a sudden seriousness. “Growing up a Catholic I was always very aware of that. And falling in love with my girlfriend and wanting to have a family, have a house and all that kind of stuff, makes me realise that if I’m going to do something like this, this is the year to do it.”

As well as an attempt to tackle Olver’s mild existential crisis, the trip is a charity stunt, though this element was apparently a bit of an afterthought. “It started feeling a bit weird, doing it for no reason” he admits. “If you do it for charity, it validates it somehow.” With this in mind, he decided to collect sponsorship money from fans, friends and family for St Peters’ Hospices, who cared for his uncle before he died eleven years ago.

Perhaps the most important motivation for the trip, though, is to generate material for his forthcoming Edinburgh show, Ramble On. He wants to get away from doing “jokes about chicken nuggets and the crap sound system at Cardiff Jongleurs”, the fate of many an observational comic who’s been gigging too long. By staying with strangers along the way, he hopes to collect some anecdotes that he can weave into comedy gold. Is he hoping to meet plenty of eccentrics, then?

“Not necessarily eccentrics, just people” he explains. “Just loads of really normal people. I’m expecting to maybe meet the couple who put me up in their spare room, the mental old bloke who has a caravan in his front garden, the lord of the manor who has a castle, or the single student who’ll lend me their floor. That’s about the range of it. And you only need three or four stories to make a show.”

He’s bringing a tent as insurance, but says he isn’t expecting to be left out in the cold too often. “I’m pretty confident that the British people are nice people. I’m not a religious person - I’m an agnostic, which is the laziest option - but I’m erring on the side of the positive.”

This attitude would strike a chord with his Deal Or No Deal colleague Noel Edmonds, who Olver very tentatively describes as a friend. “He’s very into positivity, and he goes on about it in a spiritual way,” Olver says, recounting the time that Noel described losing one’s temper as “a waste of energy.”

“Now, we all know that Edmonds doesn’t need to lose his temper; if he didn’t like someone he could just snap his fingers and get rid of them. But he genuinely believes in being upbeat. He is also a little bit of a body fascist and he’s always taking the piss out of me for being chubby, so I think he admires the fact that I’m doing something about that.”

Given Olver’s homely, hobbity nature, though, his trust in the goodwill of the British public could land him in situations he’s not altogether comfortable with. “At the end of the day, I like a bath, going to bed, reading for half an hour and then lying down on a very specific pillow - not too hard, not too soft,” he says, with some candour. “I am going to be spending six weeks without the power over which pillow I have. And that scares the fuck out of me.”