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The comedian, writer and actor sits down with Hadley Stewart as he makes his debut at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival with his stand-up show, Prize Hog.
Dom McGovern is recalling his first memory of seeing a photo of a man’s chiselled torso and abs in the underwear section of John Lewis in Kingston, a town in south-west London. It’s something that the comedian, writer and actor brings up as we discuss an important theme in his one-man show, Prize Hog, which will be on stage at this summer’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Body image is just one topic he is seeking to unpick through humour – religion, social media, mental health and just generally being a gay man are all set to be dissected in the Scottish capital.
As McGovern joins the video call for our interview one morning in July, he has just donned a bright orange fleece and is zipping it up to his chin. I’ve woken up with a scratchy throat and the weather feels like it’s turning. “I’m surprisingly cold for the first time in two months,” remarks McGovern, as I mention this to him. Is this momentary pause in London’s heatwave somehow a sign for McGovern’s Edinburgh show, I ponder, thinking of the cool breeze that often blows north of the border. Either way, we agree that some respite from the heat is welcome. But the weather isn’t the main thing that is playing on McGovern’s mind when he thinks about his Fringe debut show, “There is the worry that just no one will see it.”
Prize Hog is inspired by the messages about appearance, desirability and self-worth that McGovern and our generation grew up with. Whilst the show is indeed a comedy, it delves into the negative impact of this social conditioning and how this was further exacerbated by some of McGovern’s experiences within the gay community. There is, as he describes to me, an unquestionable emphasis on appearance and desirability amongst gay men.
“As a gay man or a queer man, you’re both the object and objectifier when it comes to the male gaze,” argues McGovern. “You’re both looking and you’re aware of what you’re attracted to.” He believes that this messaging about what is deemed as attractive, stems from those early childhood memories in the men’s underwear section of John Lewis. “That feeds into your perception of what you’re supposed to look like.”
He tells me that he’s had this conversation with other gay men, who also describe having somewhat of a sexual awakening in the men’s underwear aisle. I remember mine, I tell McGovern, was in Harvey Nichols in Manchester. “Very chic,” he quips, cocking his head. “But when you see that… You’re like, okay, that’s doing something for me. And then there’s a subconscious thing when you’re thinking that this is what I’ve got to look like.”
For McGovern, the pressures to look a certain way impacted heavily on his mental health. He subsequently developed bulimia (or bulimia nervosa), a type of eating disorder. People with the condition find themselves caught in a cycle of eating large quantities of food, and then trying to compensate for that overeating by vomiting, taking laxatives or diuretics, fasting, or exercising excessively.
McGovern tells me that it was important for him to speak about his eating disorder in Prize Hog. “An eating disorder isn’t something that goes away,” he explains when I ask him about the decision to open up about his experiences in the show. “It’s not like going to a laptop repair shop. You don’t go to group therapy and then by the end of it, you’re fixed. An eating disorder is as much like an addiction as it is an illness.” He says that bulimia is something that he is learning to live with today. “You kind of take steps to try and measure it, and work on it for the rest of your life,” he continues. “And hopefully it doesn’t play such a big role in it.”
One of those steps was attending group therapy. As he describes in his show, when McGovern arrived at the first session, he discovered that he was the only man in his eating disorder therapy group. What does McGovern think that says about the intersection between gender and eating disorders? “I think it says a lot about how aware men are that what they’re experiencing are eating disorder symptoms, and how able men feel to go and talk to someone professional about it,” he replies. As a gay man, McGovern says, he thought that he would be exempt from that, adding that he considers himself to be slightly separate from the issues affecting men’s mental health.
“I would think, ‘Oh, but I’m not like other men’,” he continues. “But you are still socialised as a man, and your ability to talk about your emotions and the reasons for your way of thinking are still shaped by your childhood being raised as a boy.”
Whilst I have never attended group therapy myself, I suggest to McGovern that this must have been a challenging step for him to take. Was he at all put off by being the only man in his therapy group, I ask. “I’m in a lot of social situations where I’m the only man there, and there are a lot of girls there, or a lot of women even,” he says. “It’s like when you’re a teenage gay boy and you have your first group of friends, where you’re hanging out with the girls rather than just the boys.”
Yet unlike on the school playground, McGovern was now conscious of the different societal pressures that were intertwined with gender amongst those in his therapy group. “I was just aware that what had shaped my thinking, and the pressures of my body, were different,” he explains. “The reasons for me being there were certainly different.”
As for the specific pressures affecting gay men’s perception of their bodies, McGovern believes social media looms large. “The algorithm,” he replies when I ask him about this. “You open Instagram and it’s like it knows that you’re gay.” McGovern says that no matter how hard he tries to avoid them, accounts that promote a certain image of queer men populate his social media feed. “I’ll get a targeted video to join this gay running club, and it’s like 150 Adonises running down the South Bank at 6 o’clock on a Saturday morning,” he says.
What’s more, that infamous underwear section has a lot to answer for too. Are those early memories of underwear models something that he traces back to when exploring the origins of his eating disorder? “I think so,” he replies. “It’s definitely part of it.” McGovern describes his eating disorder as a series of unfortunate events. Putting the memory of being in John Lewis to one side, when he was a teenager he was quite ill over the summer holidays. When he came back to school, everyone remarked about how amazing he looked. “I was like, hang on, I’ve been throwing up constantly for two weeks. How does that work?” It’s this notion that he picks up even within the workplace, with McGovern giving the example of someone returning to work after being off sick with food poisoning and people commenting positively on how much weight they’ve lost as a result.
Alongside growing up with various external pressures about his appearance, McGovern also recalls a childhood spent watching ‘Live at the Apollo’ on BBC. It was, as he puts it, the only comedy he knew. Having graduated from Durham University with an English degree, he tried to make it as an actor, always putting himself forward for the comedic roles, before enrolling in the National Youth Theatre at the age of 21. It was here that someone suggested that he try comedy, although he admits that it wasn’t something that was on his radar. It was a move to Australia and a job at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival that saw McGovern being exposed to hours of stand-up comedy. In fact, he would later become a finalist in the festival’s RAW Comedy competition.
Upon his return to London, he decided to continue pursuing comedy and attended a stand-up course at Soho Theatre. “And then there was lockdown,” he laments. Like many, the pandemic pressed pause on McGovern’s creative career. He went back to comedy in 2022, with stints on the open mic circuit. “Travelling three hours to Margate to do five minutes of stand-up on a Tuesday evening to a bar with 12 people in it, and then going home,” recalls McGovern. He stuck with it, and his perseverance would see him performing at more and more clubs. “And here we are today, basically.”
Here McGovern is indeed. Alongside his stand-up work, McGovern is also the co-writer of Chicken Shop Date with Amelia Dimoldenberg, as well as being a BBC New Comedy Award nominee, and a runner up in the UK’s biggest comedy prize, the OnlyFans Creative Fund: Comedy Edition. And now making his debut at the world’s largest performing arts festival, no less. I’m curious about the name of his show, Prize Hog. Where does it come from? “It’s a show about feeling like the ugliest person at a party, but still the most beautiful girl in the room,” he explains. “It’s this sort of weird dichotomy in your brain of being like, God, I look so hideous and disgusting all the time, but that can’t be right. If I’m going to be a pig, I’m going to be an award-winning one.”
The prospect of performing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival is of course an exciting one, however, it is also something that requires a significant financial commitment from creatives. When I ask McGovern about the financial realities of being a comedian, he agrees that attending the Fringe as an artist is a costly exercise, given the venue, marketing and accommodation costs to take into consideration. “It’s unbelievably expensive,” he sighs, before telling me that a pint in the Scottish capital during the Fringe costs almost £7. Really? “Yeah! And an alcohol-free pint costs like a fiver. Why am I being punished for having a Guinness Zero?”
McGovern hopes to push his disbelief at the price of alcohol-free beer and the financial pressures of the show to the back of his mind when he gets up on stage in Edinburgh. “It’s a bit like he swan analogy,” he describes. “You’re having to get there and present an image of yourself as sort of gliding smoothly through the world, but really you’ve been sort of kicking furiously under the water for however many months.”
Such are the costs of attending the festival, McGovern moved back in with his parents and sub-let his room as a means of saving up money. He acknowledges that he is lucky to be able to do this, given that his parents live in London. “Well I say London, but it’s Zone 5,” he clarifies. Nonetheless, without this move his dream of performing at the Fringe would not have become a reality. “I wouldn’t be able to earn all my money from comedy at the moment and be paying for the Edinburgh Fringe and be able to afford my rent in east London,” explains McGovern. “So I’ve just had to sort of sack off living an independent life for the moment and be back with my parents.”
Moving back to his family home in Hounslow was soon followed by a redundancy from his full-time job in the charity sector. He appears to be taking this in his stride, however, pointing out that he is sadly not alone in facing redundancy in the current economic climate. When McGovern was starting out in comedy, he explains that he was working two jobs: a day job and an evening job. He simply wasn’t making enough money from one job to afford to live in London. Yet when his stand-up career began gaining traction, he had to give up his second job to free up his evenings for comedy.
It seems that comedy has unlocked something in McGovern. “Being a comedian is the first thing that I have found in my life that I really love working hard at,” he says. “I don’t think I was a particularly hardworking person until I found this thing that makes me want to work hard at it.”
As McGovern walks on stage at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival with a stand-up show that holds a mirror up to some of the internal demons that impacted his youth, what would he say to his younger self now? “No one is ever thinking about you as much as you’re thinking about yourself,” replies McGovern. “So you may as well harness that and do something that you want to be doing. Rather than hyperfixating, pontificating constantly, constantly searching for approval in everything that you’re doing… Just be and do stuff that makes you happy.”
Dom McGovern is a comedian, writer, actor from London. His show, Prize Hog, is on stage at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival until the end of August. Photography by Maisy Banks. Information and support about eating disorders is available here.
