Geek of the Week: Super geek and Turf creator, Jonathan Ross

By Kate Kotler

Jonathan Ross is a total geek.

He was in San Francisco this past weekend with his children and his (Doc Simian wanted me to be sure to put in “super hot”) wife, Jane Goldman, attending Wondercon.  The trip was in support of the new comic from Image — Turf – which Ross penned and Tommy Lee Edwards provided the art for.  Of course, they were also there in support of the movie, Kick-Ass (which Goldman wrote), and to catch some new Doctor Who at the US premier of Series 5… As we said earlier, Ross is a total geek, a huge Doctor Who fan and lover of comic books.

It is this fact, along with his genuine and just damn-nice demeanor, that makes Ross my favorite interviewee ever.  This past summer I had the distinct pleasure to chat with Ross about Doctor Who while at Comic-Con International in San Diego.  I was a fan of Friday Night With Jonathan Ross before our interview (in which he shared an exclusive photo of David Tennant with me so that I could publish it in my article — the result was over a million hits on the website where the article ran — effectively causing the servers to go “gak!” and shut down. It was the coolest thing I’ve ever been a part of).  Since then I’ve become even more enamored with the geeky, lanky Brit.

He is the most lovely person I’ve ever interviewed.

“Oh Katie, I know you say that to everyone you interview,” quipped Jonathan as he signed a limited edition of Turf #1 for GGotS.

Yes, Jonathan Ross, I do say that to everyone.  But, with you — I mean it.  This is why you are the GGotS Geek of the Week!

GGotS was lucky enough to chat with Ross prior to a Turf signing at the Image booth on the Wondercon floor.  Here is that interview:

Good morning, Jonathan Ross. How are you?

Good morning!  I am very well, thank you.

Fabulous.  Did you enjoy Doctor Who last night?

Oh it was awesome, wasn’t it?  But, we had a weird ending — we got chased out by some weird angry guy who claimed we were sitting where we shouldn’t be and then threatened to break my neck.

Are you kidding me?

It was really weird, it kind of added to the excitement of the show.  I wish I’d gotten to see the last few moments, it was terrific, wasn’t it?  And Matt [Smith] did a fantastic job.

He did do a fantastic job.

It’s such clever writing.

It is clever writing.  You have to trust in Stephen Moffat.  He’s a big fave of mine.

Yep.  “In Moffat we trust!”

Indeed, “In Moffat we trust…”  I miss David and I miss Russell T., but…

I found it very poignant, the moment at the end, where all the old Doctors flash by and when we saw — D 10 — as I believe we refer to him now, it really was, you know, I got a lump in the throat.

Me, too.  He’s my favorite.  I heart him.

Oh I heart David, too.  But, you know, [fans] gotta give Matt a chance.  And he was great last night.  But he does kind of seem to be doing that spitting thing.  If you remember when he first regenerated, he spat in the Tardis.  I asked him why that was and he said that he looked up and they were raining gravel down on him to make it look like [the Tardis was being destroyed] and he got a mouthful.  So he spat it out.  Now, though, it’s turned into a thing — they have him spitting every known food stuff.

I’m hoping that’s not going to continue, but if they do, let’s make it a proper storyline.

Exactly.  I have to ask, is fish and custard a common food combination in the UK?

It wasn’t previously, but such is the impact and power of Doctor Who, I imagine they’ll be serving it in schools from now on.

You just interviewed Matt, how was that?

It was great, he was quite nervous and I don’t know if I handled it well.  I think I should have come and given him a proper “Who are you, where are you from, when did you start?”  Those kind of general questions.  I just started right in and said “You know how hard this is, you know how tough it’s going to be [to fill Tennant's shoes]?  That’s gonna be horrible for ya…”  I think really maybe I blurted out what was on my mind rather than doing the job I should have done.  But he was lovely, I know he enjoyed it.  And I got to hold the sonic screwdriver.

Read the rest of Kate’s interview with Jonathan Ross and find out how YOU can win a signed Limited Edition of Turf #1 after the cut!

You got to hold the sonic screwdriver?

Oh yeah, oh yeah…  I ran off with it after the show and he chased me.  I claimed I was going to keep it and he chased me down the hallway and kind of wrestled it off me.

Jonathan Ross, can I be you for five minutes, you with your fabulous Doctor Who life?

I’m fully Who’d up.  Of course, I’m lucky enough — when I was a kid we had a very average, normal working-class family.  We didn’t have a lot of money, we had no ties to anyone in television.  Somehow a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend knew someone who was loosely involved with [Doctor Who] and they said they’d brought some stuff back from [the BBC] for their kids and they had a rubber brain… It supposedly had been used in a Doctor Who episode, I don’t know which one, and they gave it to a kid who swapped it with me in the lunchroom for my James Bond car.  And I had it for years.

Do you still have this Doctor Who rubber brain?

No, no — it petrified and crumbled.  I don’t know for sure if it was even in a Doctor Who, it might have been, he might have been winding me up — he wanted my Goldfinger.  You know, with the bulletproof slide-out [window].

Fantastic.

Those were the days.

So, I have two show-related questions, and then I would love it if you’d tell me a little bit about how you got involved with Turf.  Somebody told me, and I have to tell you I haven’t really done the proper research to find out if this is true, someone told me that this is the last season of Friday Night With Jonathan Ross.  Is that true?

It is.  The last season for Friday Night With Jonathan Ross and all my shows on the BBC I’m leaving… It’s a bit weird in the UK, it’s a bit weird at the BBC at the moment.  I had that thing with Russell Brand, and that has made it kind of strained…not just for me, for everyone there.  I don’t really think that [the BBC] handled it right, but I’m not going to blame anyone for that, what happens is what happens.  I think we all agreed that it was time for a clean break — I’ve been there for 11 years, well 13 I’ve been doing some of the shows there — but I’ve been more-or-less full on at the BBC for 11 years.  So I’m moving on.  I will probably be doing a similar show somewhere else very soon.  We’re just negotiating right now.

You just interviewed Tina Fey, how was that?

I love Tina, but the weird thing is, 30 Rock is hardly known at all in the UK.  Because it’s not on [the BBC], it’s not even on one of the bigger satellite channels — it’s on the comedy channel and it’s way up in the numbers — past all the late-night gambling and “ladies rolling around in their underwear” type of shows.

She was fantastic.  I’m a huge fan.  I’m in love with Liz Lemon.  I kind of wanted her to stay single and eating cheese, you don’t want her to have a boyfriend… So I love 30 Rock.  It was a bit weird because the audience didn’t even really know who she was.  They kind of knew Sarah Palin, but they really didn’t even know SNL, because we don’t have SNL in England.

You don’t have SNL at all?

No.

Aw… Well, sometimes you should be thankful for that.

Some seasons, yeah.  I love her, I love [her films] and I wanted to get married in real life… She was great, funny, lovely, and charming and friendly.  It was kind of one with the audience where I was thinking, “Why aren’t they laughing?  She’s incredibly funny…”

She is brilliantly funny.  I kind of vaguely know her and Amy Poehler from doing improv…

Oh I love Amy Poehler!  She’s fantastic!

Yes, she’s fantastic, and they’re so sweet… They [Fey and Poehler] are both just such nice people.  Talk to me about Turf:

Turf, yeah.  I’ve been kicking around some comic-book ideas for years, because I’ve always been a fan of comic books.  And I’d not really been talking to people about them — because you know, when it’s not something you really do, you think maybe you don’t know how to do it… And I don’t really want to open myself up to failure.

But I’m getting to that stage in my life where I’ve been thinking, “You know — all those things you want to do with your life — you should try.”

Jane — she’s such a great writer, my wife — and she said that you should just sit down and try to finish something.  So I wrote something that was first, another book that I might do someday with someone, and then I started knocking ideas around for Turf…

Then Mark Millar said, “You should get [Turf] made.” And he hooked me up with a lot of names, and Tommy was the first person I met that I kind of sparked with… I sent him three ideas over and this was the one he chose.  And I’m really pleased he did, because this was the one which was probably the least developed, so it gave us a chance to really develop a lot together.  He had a lot of visual ideas that spurred me on to create some new scenes and subplots… I’ve been loving it!

It’s hard work, but in some ways it comes very easily.  I don’t know if you write…

I do write, I do write a bit.

Getting yourself to sit down and just start.  Getting yourself to put down those distractions and just start, that’s the hardest part.  Start and don’t get distracted.

Yeah, that is the hardest part — there are so many distractions…

That is the key.  Especially with all those BitTorrents you have on your computer.

Yeah, and Hulu, and Veoh, and…

Chicks who dig the Tardis.

(Laughs) Yeah, chicks who dig the Tardis… Thank you so much, Jonathan Ross.

[Photos by Doc Simian]

Want to win the signed Limited Edition copy of Turf #1 pictured in this article?  Keep reading GGotS and later this week we’ll tell you how!