Tom Wrigglesworth gets his money's worth

“He's the kind of guy things happen to”, says Tom Wrigglesworth's agent proudly as she ushers me over to a table to wait for him to arrive. We're in one of the upstairs bars in London's Soho House – by all accounts very hip, actually pretty sleepy on a Monday afternoon in June.

Wrigglesworth walks in looking dishevelled, though dishevelled is probably your default setting when you're six-foot-five with an explosion of red hair. I begin by asking him how he's finding writing the follow-up to his 2009 Fringe show, Open Return Letter to Richard Branson, but it's clear he's distracted. Every so often he cranes his head back to peer at the football match glowing silently on the far wall. It's the first round of the World Cup, and Portugal are playing the Ivory Coast. “I put two quid each on Drogba and Ronaldo to score first,” he says speculatively, sucking orange juice through a straw. “I'm up about six quid either way.” 

Why only bet a pound, I wonder. Surely that's not enough to make it interesting. But before I can say anything he volunteers the answer. “I signed up with Bet 365 the other week 'cos it turns out they give you a 20 pound free bet. Only you've got to bet twenty quid of your own money before you can claim it.”

The ploy is transparent enough—that you'll be sucked in by the heady gambling experience and squander your gift as soon as you can claim it—but whoever came up with it is lucky that most people aren't like Tom Wrigglesworth, who isn't about to be played by some ad-man. Intent on claiming what's his, he's been inching his way to the freebie in a sequence of tiny wagers, each as close to a cert as he can find.

Maybe it's this no-nonsense refusal to play along with such inane contemporary bullshit that makes the Yorkshireman “the kind of guy things happen to”. Open Return Letter, his breakthrough show from last year, was inspired by a celebrated episode of citizen heroism: the time he rescued an old lady from an officious Virgin Trains employee.

The old lady was forced pay an expensive penalty fare because her ticket wasn't valid for that exact journey, and Wrigglesworth responded by going from carriage to carriage doing a whip-round until he'd raised enough money to pay off the fine. This act of deviance got him arrested on the station platform, made him something of a hero in the media, and provided the perfect subject matter for a Fringe set.

So perfect, in fact, that some of his fellow comics immediately began texting him saying how jealous they were – although he swears that he had no thought of using the episode as material for a show till it was over. Sometimes, he admits, he does find himself in a situation which would lend itself to comedy, and a voice in his head starts thinking about how he could tell the story. “I try to switch it off,” he says. And now and then a friend will stop what they're saying, look at him askance, and say “You're going to use this in a story, aren't you?”

But for the most part he seems to get himself into interesting situations by being himself: good-natured, opportunistic, a bit mischievous. Take the story behind his current Fringe show: a trip he took to Las Vegas, where he ended up getting married (incidentally, he's not just married now: he's no longer officially Tom Wrigglesworth. He took his girlfriend's surname, though “changing my comedy name wasn't going to happen.”)

They were flying to LA, but it was cheapest to go via Las Vegas, which subsidises stopover flights in the off-season in the hope of filling the emptying casinos. “It's a classic example of yield management,” he enthuses, sounding like a true aficionado of yield management. “That's how they suck trade in – you think it's a great deal till you spend a grand in Las Vegas.” Wrigglesworth refused to do what was expected of him, naturally, and spent his time in Vegas obstinately not gambling. The city of sin still had lots of local colour to keep him interested, though. “You see these bikes nipping about delivering bail money. You can borrow 2 grand to get bail at four in the morning!”

It was one of his final acts as Tom Wrigglesworth—buying the discount plane tickets—that got him into the scrape that inspired this year's story. Chuffed at the money he was saving on the flights, he went a little bit mad on the booking website and clicked “yes” to all the extra add-ons you normally say no to before paying. Not just the airport taxi – whatever was going. “I was ordering loads of things cos it was so cheap.” Somewhere among all that enthusiastic option-checking the website asked him whether he needed a respirator.

Or maybe that's what happened. Wrigglesworth is hazy about the details, possibly because it's early days and he hasn't finished writing the show yet, possibly because he genuinely can't remember how there came to be a massive respirator waiting for them in reception when they arrived. “I'm there all jetlagged and hungover. Well, still drunk, really.” The oxygen supply sat there for a day or two, taking up room and irritating the staff, till he agreed to take it off their hands. After all, he'd “always wanted to try oxygen.”

“Well, I broke it. I fucked it. Problem was, I wasn't medically trained. So I took it to pieces. I was convinced I could fix it, and I was so scared of taking it back damaged. So I was there in the hotel room trying to fix this respirator with my girlfriend screaming at me. And it turned out it belonged to this old woman.” 

He sounds almost pleased, as though this episode will ensure he's not pigeonholed as some do-gooder who can't do anything except be nice to old ladies: he's a do-gooder who also likes to get drunk and fix things. 

This August is arguably a big moment for Tom Wrigglesworth. The direction his career takes might depend on how he reacts to his huge success last year, and whether his shift to elaborate story-shows from straightforward standup pays off. This year's story will still be mostly true, he says, but he doesn't rule out moving away from anecdotes entirely. ("I don't feel confident writing something that's total fiction yet," he says.) 

It's a move that might yet backfire, but he seems relaxed today, happy to talk about anything. Later on we're wandering around London looking for spots to take photos, and he keeps up an endless and frighteningly well-informed techy chatter with the photographer. The camera she's using, the difference between a geosynchronous and a geostationary orbit, the ins-and-outs of designing concert spaces. As he leaves he's debating whether or not to get an iPad for his wife. "I'm gonna do it," he concludes. "Not a 3G one though. No point in buying a 3G one if you've jailbroken your iPhone already."

The big stuff—the career, the pressure of having a show to write, the new marriage—doesn't seem to get to him too much. Not when there's so many interesting things to think about.