JONATHAN PIE

Twenty years of not acting

Tom Walker decided he wanted to act at the age of 12 and then spent most of his adult life failing to do it for a living. He has described himself flatly as an out-of-work actor for two decades — "I was out of work for 20 years not getting auditions" — and has been equally blunt about what the word jobbing actually covers: "It means not acting." The jobs that paid the rent in that period were call centres, estate agencies and bookshops. Speaking in September 2026 he summarised the position he had reached before anything worked: no money, no prospects, no career.

The character came out of a technical question rather than a political one. Walker wondered what a news correspondent says in the gap between takes, when the camera is off and the earpiece is still live, and built a man who fills that gap with contempt — for his producer, his editor, his viewers and himself. The first Jonathan Pie video went out on 21 September 2015, days after Jeremy Corbyn won the Labour leadership. Walker has since said the political direction was accidental: "The first couple I did happened to be political and I realised that that's what people were tuning in for." He became, in his own phrase, "accidentally this political satirist", and only developed a serious interest in politics after inventing a man who had one.

The video that opened the door

There was a short and awkward staging post on the way up. Walker made Pie videos in association with RT UK for several months before leaving in July 2016, ahead of an Edinburgh Festival Fringe run that August. The split put the character back under his own control just before the thing that made him internationally recognisable.

In November 2016, after Donald Trump's first election win, Pie delivered a monologue arguing that the liberal left had lost the argument by refusing to have it. The video trended on YouTube and has since passed 4.7 million views, roughly double the audience of Walker's next most-watched clip. He has described the moment in mechanical terms: on the third or fourth attempt the numbers jumped to a million and he could see a door had opened.

The first live tour, 51 UK dates across 2016 and 2017, immediately exposed the hazard of the format. Walker has recalled that during that run Brexit happened, Trump entered the White House and David Cameron left Number 10, leaving him rewriting continuously. The lesson shaped how he works now: online videos can be written one day and filmed the next, while touring material is built to survive months of news.

Beyond the webcam

The body of work since then is wider than the viral clips suggest. A book, Jonathan Pie: Off the Record, appeared in 2017. The second tour, Back to the Studio, ran to more than 55 dates across the UK and Australia in 2018, followed by the Fake News shows of 2019 and 2020 and The Corona Remix, 44 dates in 2021. Television took the character to America for Jonathan Pie's American Pie on BBC Three in 2019, and the stage show Jonathan Pie: The World's End followed in 2021.

Two strands have kept Pie in regular circulation between tours. From February 2022 he has made opinion videos for the New York Times, explaining British politics to an American readership — Boris Johnson's premiership, the invasion of Ukraine, Russian money in London, the economic damage of Liz Truss. And on BBC Radio 4 the sitcom Call Jonathan Pie has put him behind the microphone of a phone-in show he despises: ten episodes in 2023, on subjects including the BBC, Brexit, race and the environment, and a further eight in 2025.

The 2024 show Heroes and Villains took him into the West End for a run at the Duke of York's Theatre from 16 to 27 April. Speaking that month, Walker noted something that still rankles: it was his biggest tour to date and had not been reviewed by a single national newspaper, which he regards as a problem with how comedy is covered rather than a verdict on the work.

A satirist without an easy target

The current show exists because Walker's own politics got complicated. Heroes and Villains could feed on what he has called the low-hanging fruit of 14 years of Conservative government. The End of the World According to Jonathan Pie cannot, because he voted Labour in 2024 and has to account for it. Interviews published on 26 and 28 September 2026 found him working through that in public: pessimistic about the durability of the present Labour leadership under Andy Burnham — "I think we're safe that Andy Burnham will last three months" — and openly alarmed by the alternative, saying of Nigel Farage that "there's a very good chance he could become our next prime minister" and that it "would be a disaster for this country".

The method behind the ranting is unglamorous and deliberate. Walker reads across the spectrum, from the Guardian to the Telegraph, and keeps up with the Economist and the Week, on the grounds that satire of an opposing view requires understanding it first. He treats the show as an engineering problem — "structure is everything when you're looking at writing what is essentially an hour and 20-minute monologue" — and builds it in three acts even when it plays as one continuous piece. What he says he wants is an audience entertained first and mildly challenged second, rather than one leaving with its existing opinions confirmed.

The 2026 tour

The tour opened on 20 September 2026 and runs to 29 November, taking in around 40 venues; Chortle's listing still showed more than twenty performances to come as the autumn leg began. Highlights of the back half include the Eventim Apollo in London on 30 and 31 October, Sheffield City Hall on 4 November, Connexin Live in Hull on 6 November, the Pavilion in Glasgow on 7 November, two nights at the M&S Bank Arena in Liverpool on 21 and 22 November and the Theatre Royal in Nottingham on 29 November. The official site lists Swansea, Cambridge, Cardiff, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Guildford and Liverpool as sold out, with several other dates marked as selling fast; a handful of shows, including Colchester, Edinburgh, Liverpool and Nottingham, start at 6pm rather than the usual evening slot.

The sales pitch is apocalyptic and not entirely a joke: the climate collapsing, artificial intelligence about to run and ruin daily life, and a third world war that feels possible, offered as a guide to surviving the lot. The verdict so far is one serious review. Steve Bennett saw the show at the Reading Hexagon on 4 October 2026 and gave it four stars, concluding: "Is it comedy? Not always — but often enough. More crucially, it seems important."