12 hours ago
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‘It’s the racist grandad!’
It’s not the first time Jeff Innocent has had this shouted at him while out and about.
Jeff may be a grandad – in fact he has two grandkids – but he’s quite passionately anti-racist.
Yet after his viral clips, Jeff has found himself on the receiving end of this name-calling in public. After all, it’s how he referred to his aesthetic during his last tour, Smart Casual.
Wearing a blue tracksuit top, camo print trousers and trainers, he told the audience: ‘I call this look “Racist Grandad”.
‘If I ever had my own celebrity fashion line, I’d call it the “Jeff Innocent Retired Cockney Criminal Leisurewear Collection”‘.
When I log on to our Zoom call, I’m not greeted with the Jeff I’m expecting.
Yes, he’s still shaven-headed, dressed in a tracksuit and sporting his signature hoop earring, but he’s also wearing very trendy circular glasses and has a well-maintained beard and curly mustache.
I ask whether he’s grown facial hair to stop people assuming he’s far-right and he admits that that, actually, that did factor in.
‘How people perceived me often got me into trouble’, Jeff admits.
‘The only problem is, I’ve gone from looking like a 1990s racist to a Victorian racist’.
But still, the facial hair has undoubtedly softened Jeff’s appearance, and he reveals that it’s changed the way people – especially people of colour – react to him, too.
We’re speaking ahead of Jeff’s new show, Leaning In, which starts touring in early 2027.
Find out more about Leaning In
You can find out more about Jeff Innocent, and his new tour, here
It’s about how he is changing now that he’s hit 70: ‘It felt like a bit of a milestone moment for me to reassess’.
And one of the revelations the comic had was that he should probably start becoming ‘less incident prone’; that he was ‘too old to be getting into tricky situations’.
‘I’ve always been mischievous’, Jeff says. ‘I probably do and say things I shouldn’t’.
In Smart Casual, Jeff opened with an anecdote about why he wears a pair of colourful Crocs.
‘I’ve started wearing them for driving because I suffer, a little bit, from road rage. I figure, I’m never going to get out of the car wearing a pair of pink Crocs, am I?’
In Leaning In, he reveals that he got into an altercation at his local gym that saw him dragged into the manager’s office.
I ask for more examples and he confesses a recent confrontation on the train.
A man sat down at a table seat not far from Jeff and brought out a laptop, papers and his phone, on which he started making loud phone calls.
‘He hadn’t even done anything yet but I was annoyed, so I went over to his table and sat opposite him and said he was getting on my nerves. We had a bit of a back and forth, he said it wasn’t a quiet carriage and I said it wasn’t his office.’
While all this was happening, someone got a conductor, who intervened and asked the man if he wanted to go first class. As he left, everyone started clapping Jeff.
‘I felt vindicated but I asked the conductor why I wasn’t offered first class. He turned to me and said: “Even if you were offered, I knew you wouldn’t be satisfied because you would have seen it as the other man winning”.
‘He was right’.
Jeff doesn’t let things go. He’s still boycotting South African products after apartheid.
For Jeff, it’s not about being grumpy or curmudgeonly, it’s about taking a stand – and also about that mischievous streak, which he insists is behind most of these actions.
‘I give comics feedback on their sets when they don’t ask for it.
‘When I was picking my grandson up from nursery, the lady who handed him over was telling me about how all the little girls fancied him.
‘I knew I shouldn’t – she’s just a 20-something doing her job – but I told her what a weird thing it was for her to say. He’s a child!’
It’s not been easy for Jeff to give up his intervening ways. ‘It’s like trying to stop smoking; like breaking a habit of a lifetime and I haven’t always been successful’.
He also admits that when I sent over questions to his agent in advance of our chat, asking ‘why does Jeff think he gets into fights?’, he got defensive.
‘Is she trying to psychoanalyse me?’, he grumbled about me.
Still, he decided to go ahead with the interview and held his tongue; a sign of his growth.
This ‘new Jeff’ is not only a result of the fact he is getting older and that his body is experiencing wear and tear (wearus tearus to fans of his comedy), but also because he keeps getting spotted in public.
Despite being a comic for 30 years, it’s only in the past couple of years that Jeff has started having fan interactions, and it means that he’s more wary of who might recognise him if he does get into one of his scuffles.
Another side of this is that his comedy is now reaching a bigger audience, and so he is having to be accountable in a way he never used to.
‘In my special I did this bit about rescue dogs, and a couple of words of it centred around travellers. ‘A woman from the traveller community got in touch afterwards and called out my use of stereotypes. I’d never experienced that before.
‘I realised she was right and on reflection, I should have framed the joke differently. The joke was never about travellers – it was about dog owners – and so I took it out.
‘While I can’t remove it from my specials, I removed all clips of it online and I won’t tell it again.’
These clips have brought Jeff a whole new audience. He’s now got 286k Instagram followers, his special – which is free to watch on YouTube – has 653k views, and Leaning In is selling out quickly.
And he couldn’t be more excited.
‘If I could, I would always be on tour. I love performing to people who have come out just to see me. I love the travel and hotels’.
‘My previous tour was decades of material, carefully honed over 30 years. With Leaning In, I’m having to start from scratch. It’s a full time role.’
And he already knows what look he’s going for on his first day on the job: The Victorian racist grandad.
Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing jess.austin@metro.co.uk.
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