Russell Kane: ‘Money motivates me. When you come from a council estate you have no shame’

“Because I’m a comic, people are always surprised I’m not thick as shit,” says Russell Kane, flanked by the contents of his meticulously arranged home library. But he doesn’t need the literary backdrop to convince me.

Kane might make jokes about all-inclusive holidays and farts, but underneath that sometimes laddish exterior is a fast-ticking brain. His BBC Sounds podcast Evil Genius has been turned into a Sky History show that’s out on Monday, showing him rubbing shoulders with academics and fellow comedians to explore the dark side of history’s big names.

His pacy touring show The Essex Variant has been the biggest hit of his career, he’s a TV regular who’s offered acid commentary on reality shows from Big Brother to Takeshi’s Castle, and he’s even picked up a formidable following on TikTok, rivalling comedians half his age with brutal topical mini rants he calls “Kaneings”.

Kane is a canny operator, bursting with ideas and a seemingly unshakeable self-confidence in his ability to realise them. “Creativity and commerce are not opposites to me,” he says. “In fact, money lights the fire underneath my brain. When you come from a council estate – and I’m not getting my violin out here, I had a great childhood – you have no shame.”

Kane grew up in Enfield, and studied English Literature at Middlesex University before taking on minor acting roles under the stage name Russell Grineaux. But it was when he explored his funnier side, bringing a kinetic energy to his punchline-stuffed observational comedy sets, that his career picked up speed. He won the Laughing Horse New Act of the Year in 2004 before landing telly work galore, including presenting Big Brother’s Big Mouth in 2007 – during his enormous blonde-streaked quiff and dark eyeliner phase – and the BBC Three travel series Stupid Man, Smart Phone in 2016. But his BBC podcast Evil Genius broke new ground for him.

Each episode centres on a different historical figure, from Albert Einstein to Coco Chanel to Richard Nixon, where Kane delivers three so-called “truth bombs” designed to convince a panel of comedians that their hero isn’t so great, after all – from Frank Sinatra’s seedy mafia connections to Mother Teresa’s rather less-than-saintly financial dealings. It’s a natural response to a cultural moment where we’re all still collectively working out what to do with uncomfortable allegations against much-loved public figures.

“So many people are getting cancelled these days, and I find the idea of what we do about that really interesting,” explains Kane. “The whole idea came out of me fully formed on a 20-minute taxi journey.” But does it matter if long dead artists or thinkers like Einstein or Picasso were nice people? Can’t we just enjoy their work? Kane bluntly puts paid to that idea. “What do you think Picasso was thinking of when he painted the cubist female form? A menopausal woman or the young girls he was shagging over and over again? As we stand there stroking our hummus-dribbled chins in the National Gallery, we’re looking at paedophilia.”

Then, ruefully climbing down from his soapbox, he adds, “I just think it’s really powerful when you can learn something about someone from the past and it changes the way you think.” He unleashes a volley of examples: how Roald Dahl was an unapologetic antisemite, the inventor of Kellogg’s cornflakes was a “poo pervert obsessed with getting a more satisfying shit”, and even Einstein was a “cousin-fucking, twisted, plagiarising, weird little man”.

Kane has a penchant for condensing and soundbiting the truth, applying the same strategies to history as he applies to observing the habits of the county in which he grew up, in his live show The Essex Variant. It’s a wildly energetic response to the Covid pandemic that toured even as memories faded of the lockdowns that inspired it. “It’s been by far my most successful touring show, and I have no idea why,” he says. “All I can think of is that I became a bit of a lockdown legend, broadcasting for free three times a week.”

Unlike most comedians, he doesn’t sit down and write his shows. “I was the first one to perform stand-up straight into the camera to an imagined audience and put it on Facebook,” he claims, explaining how he learned to “calibrate it based on what people say they found funny in the comments”.

It was a natural move from there to TikTok, where he’s amassed over a quarter of a million followers: “If someone takes the time to watch a two-minute clip on their phone, that’s high engagement and a much higher conversion to them becoming a fan or coming to see a show,” he explains.

“I just improvise my routines on the spot and take them on the road,” he says. “My thing is: are people laughing? Yes, it stops me doing things that many comedians will bravely do, like a 15-minute segment of social commentary with no jokes. But that’s not my style.”

He then embarks on what initially seems like a tangent, delving into the “Blur versus Oasis” rivalry between 19th-century novelists Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope. “We all know who won, but I’m a massive Trollope fan. He used to get up each morning before his job at the post office and write 3,000 words then put his pen down, even if he was mid-sentence. And he was cancelled” – by which he means that Trollope’s popularity waned by the end of his lifetime – “because of people like Henry James going, ‘Oh, you can’t quantify writing. It should come mysteriously out of the ether.’ Well, I’ll tell you who I’d rather curl up and read, and it isn’t fucking Henry James. What a boring twat he turned into.”

The message here? In Kane’s world, creativity isn’t a magic spark. It’s a natural resource to be meticulously exploited. “I’m not embarrassed by making money, but that’s how I was raised: gold watches and all-inclusive holidays. Mix that with a f**king penchant for literature, and this is what comes out.”

Still, alongside the salesman-like energy, he’s got a strand of pure enthusiasm for life. “I feel like I’m 19 again,” he says. “I still have that wide-eyed graduate enthusiasm to soak things up. I hope it doesn’t stop, but with my age surely it’s got to.” Then, he turns to me earnestly: “That’s the only bit of me that you haven’t asked about. People keep asking me, ‘Are you sure you’re 48? What are you doing?'”

It’s true, I had noticed his boundless energy, gleaming white teeth and full head of hair. In classic Kane style, he’s converted it into a hustle: “My wife and I, we’ve turned that into a business called Jolt, where you can learn your basic diet and exercise but also evidence-based supplementation and bio-hacking all the weird shit I’ve been doing for the last 12 years to slow my biological age down.”

It’s a weird turn for a self-styled everybloke to take. Still, if anyone’s smart enough to make the transition from professional funny man to bio-hacking guru, it’s probably Kane.

‘Evil Genius with Russell Kane’ is on Monday at 9pm on Sky HISTORY (and will be available as a box set)