Babatunde Aléshé is the nation’s favourite upcoming comedian, so why did he once give it all up? Emma Higginbotham finds out
There’s a joke in Babatunde Aléshé’s stand-up routine that always gets a big laugh. He’s recalling his years as a customer services advisor at Transport for London, and re-enacts answering the phone, voice as smooth as butter, calmly saying: “Good morning, you’re through to Tunde, how may I help you?” Then, as the voice on the other end, shouts: “WHERE THE FUCK IS MY BUS?”
He can laugh about it now – we all can – but for Babatunde, that time at TfL was tough. Not so much because of the ranting commuters, but because of what he’d given up. A promising young actor who’d appeared shows as major as Doctor Who and EastEnders, he was also a familiar face on the stand-up comedy circuit – until he jacked it all in for the security of a desk job.
Fast forward just three years, and all is rosy again. After sharing a sofa with his old pal Mo Gilligan on Channel 4’s Celebrity Gogglebox, and spending 18 days in the jungle on I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, his stand-up tour, Babahood, is mostly sold out, and new dates are being frantically added to keep up with demand.
“I expected sales to go up because of doing a massive TV show like that, but it’s been mind-blowing,” says the 36-year-old, who lives with his family in Hertfordshire. “And it’s going good!
“It’s called Babahood because ‘baba’ means ‘father’ in my mum’s native tongue, which is Yoruba, from Nigeria. So it’s just a play on fatherhood, and the fact that I’m a father now, and all that entails – juggling fame and parenthood.”
And how is it, juggling fame with being dad to six-year-old Judah? “Tiring,” he says, and laughs. “I’m hardly at home, I’m always out in hotels, and then when I do come home I have meetings and interviews, and my son wants to play... It is very tiring, but very rewarding at the same time.”
The family theme is important to Babatunde, who takes his name – meaning ‘the father has returned’ – from being the first boy born after the death of his grandfather. In Babahood, he jokes that his mum chose it because Granddad still owed her money, “so the first words she said to me were ‘Welcome back, you thieving bastard’.”
He grew up in Tottenham, north London, with his sister Funke, who’s two years older. His mum, a school cook, brought him up single-handedly following the death of his dad, an engineer, when Babatunde was small, and he recalls how tough it was for her.
“When you haven’t got that second income coming in, and you’re living in a crazy neighbourhood like Tottenham, it definitely was a struggle,” he says. “She was very strict in making sure we stayed off the street, but at that time Tottenham was very rough, so the sheer thought of being outside among those types of people was scary enough to keep us inside, because we didn’t want to get hurt. So she didn’t struggle in keeping us disciplined, but financially, it was a massive struggle growing up.”
As a boy, he was “very, very quiet, according to my mum. Apparently I just used to observe people, whereas my older sister was loud and very energetic. I think that’s why I chose comedy as a career, because even now I don’t like to be in the mix of things. I sit on the outside and watch people interacting.”
His mum had high hopes for her boy, calling him ‘Doctor Tunde’ to lodge the thought of an eminent career in his brain. But Babatunde had other plans. “I actually wanted to be an animator, but then I realised I wasn’t that good at drawing, so I had to give up that dream. As I grew older, the thought of being an actor – specifically a comedy actor – came into my mind, especially when I saw Eddie Murphy. I fell in love with his way of acting, the films he was doing, his stand up. He was my idol.”
Being the funny kid suited Babatunde. “Moving to secondary school is where I became more disruptive in class,” he says. “I stopped being the quiet kid, and started making all the students laugh. Sometimes even making the teachers laugh – against their will!”
It had its drawbacks, though. “It helped with drama, but didn’t help in any other subject, it really didn’t. It was so crazy because my grades for drama were through the roof – I was like the best in the whole school – and suffered everywhere else. I wasn’t interested at all.
“All I wanted to do was perform. That’s it. I was obsessed with it, to the point where honestly all I thought about. I would go home and practise jokes, and anything to do with comedy, I made sure I was watching it.”
His obsession paid off when, aged just 17, Babtunde scored his first gig at Croydon Clocktower. “As soon as they called my name, I just ran for the stage,” he recalls, laughing. “It was just like if I don’t run on now, I’m not going to get up on stage and do anything. I had five minutes to make people laugh – and they did. I was just happiest to have done it, because I was petrified. I was literally bricking it.”
He was less nervous about acting and, after studying performance art at college, won a place at the prestigious Central School of Speech and Drama – alma mater of such thespian behemoths as Dame Judi Dench and Sir Laurence Olivier.
It didn’t get off to a great start, and Babtunde admits that he hated his first year. “I was never going to drop out, I was determined to stay, but I just felt that the teachers were too harsh. I wanted to be an actor so badly, and then when you get critiqued on your work in such a harsh way, you think to yourself, well all is lost.” All wasn’t lost, though. “My second year much better, and my third year was fantastic. And I got signed. I was very happy.”
One of his first jobs was a small part in Doctor Who. “I was 22, fresh out of drama school, and because it was such a massive show it felt like a lot of pressure,” he recalls. “We were filming in a park and there was paparazzi everywhere. I was like woah, look how many people! It was me, James Corden and Matt Smith, and they literally surrounded the whole park. It was surreal.”
Equally surreal, he says, was being on the set of EastEnders, as a nurse. “It was proper weird. Proper, proper weird.” Other appearances included Waking the Dead, Law and Order and New Tricks. But although the shows were big, the roles weren’t. After losing the will to keep auditioning, and feeling disheartened about stand-up – “I just fell out of love with it,” he says – at 27, Babatunde gave it all up for that sensible day job, spending six long years with TfL.
“I’d got married, and then we found out we were having a child, and I thought there’s no point in my going to all these auditions where I may or may not get a role. I might as well make sure I get a stable income,” he recalls. “But I was very unhappy working for TfL, and getting shouted at by customers on a daily basis.”
There was no epiphany for restarting the comedy career he’d fallen out of love with. His Jamaican wife, Leonie, simply told him he’d better fall back in love with it sharpish. “Basically there wasn’t enough money coming in, and she said ‘look, we’ve got to make ends meet’. Then once people found out I was back on the scene, that’s when Mo said ‘do you want to come on tour with me?’”
Babatunde had known triple Bafta-winning comedian and TV host Mo Gilligan for more than a decade through the comedy circuit, and they’d always got on well. It was a golden opportunity. “Then the pandemic hit, and the tour got postponed. I was like OK, right, back to square one.
“But then he said, look, we’re still guaranteed to do the tour, but in the meanwhile do you want to join me on Celebrity Gogglebox? And I said hell, yeah! And so it all fell into place. I started doing that, and then my manager at TfL informed me that they had to let me go.”
Being made redundant from a job he didn’t enjoy couldn’t have come at a better time. Babatunde carried on with Celebrity Gogglebox for the year, then Mo’s tour finally got going in 2021, “and it just went crazy from there.”
An invitation to do ITV’s critter-braving, offal-eating jungle-fest I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here was the next turning point. “It turned out to be a great thing, not just because of all the doors that it’s opened, but because it was a great experience, and I met some incredible people,” he says.
People like Matt Hancock. Wasn’t that a bit strange? “It was definitely strange, but we grew to accept him because he was willing enough to get stuck in. We had a lot of meals because of him, you know? So you can’t be mad at that, someone who actually puts their foot forward, not only to take a trial but actually conquer it. We can’t take that away from him.”
For Babatunde, who hates heights (and, weirdly, toads), the show didn’t get off to the best start when he shouted the catchphrase “I’m a celebrity get me out of here” at the very first trial, which involved walking the plank – albeit heavily harnessed – from the top of a skyscraper. Not surprisingly, his favourite moment came a few days later, when he smashed the ‘Horrible Heights’ solo trial, which involved climbing sky high to find stars. “That stands out because I was a wreck before and after doing the trial. Beforehand I was panicking, then after the trial I was just crying my eyes out in the van, because I’d just conquered such a huge fear.”
It was a very happy camp and, despite being the fifth to be voted out (much to Twitter’s outrage), Babatunde won an army of new fans, which was reflected in ticket sales for Babahood.
“That for me was incredible, to come out and to see that the tour has done so well. Now we’re almost sold out, and they’ve added a third leg, so altogether it’s going to be like 40,000 tickets. Even if it was 5,000 I still would have been blown away, because like I said, I was only doing comedy as a way to make ends meet, because I had fallen out of love with it.”
So he’s fallen back in love with it, then? “I’m falling in love with it every day,” he says. “And I’m learning about myself and the craft. Because it takes a lot for me to do anything. If you ever had a conversation with my managers, they’d tell you that they really had to sit me down to convince me to do stuff. Even to do a tour, I was just like ‘I’m not ready, I’m not doing it’, and they were like ‘you are ready, and you have to do it!’ I just never believe that I’m capable. So every day I’m falling back in love with it.”
The best thing about his new-found fame, he says, is “the opportunities that it brings, and the fact that I get to meet people like Ant and Dec. It’s really cool when you meet your idols. Like even having a conversation with you – I love Waitrose! Little things like that, I think it’s incredible.”
Is he surprised how far he’s come since those days of soothing disgruntled commuters? “I'm definitely surprised. I always felt it was in me, to be on the rise as I am now, but that was just like that young confidence, so it is surprising. And that I cherish. I handle it with care.”
An edited version of this interview appeared in Waitrose Weekend in April 2020 (c) Waitrose