INTERVIEW: Why comic copper Alfie Moore went from solving stickups to being a stand-up

Alfie Moore has a superpower, and he’s had it from a young age: he knows how to make people laugh even in stressful situations. It’s a skill that has held him in good stead throughout his life, and now it’s proving even more helpful as he’s switched from solving stickups to being a stand-up.

Alfie Moore is a familiar voice on the airwaves, thanks to nine series of the comedy police procedural show It’s A Fair Cop. It’s currently being broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Mondays at 6.30pm, and each episode explores a different theme related to policing, allowing audiences to gain a deeper understanding of the work officers undertake.

Later this month, he will be returning to Reading with his show A Face For Radio. And it’s a step up for him as he’s previously performed at South Street. This time, the laughing policeman’s gig will be in the Town Hall.

The back of the flyer for A Face For Radio features a very unflattering photo of the young Alfie Moore with a haircut created by his mother. Could that little boy, known for being the class clown, ever have imagined that the grown-up version would one day make people laugh for a living?

“No, it never occurred to me whatsoever,” Alfie says. “The good-looking kids, your pop kids, the sport kids, the clever kids, the naughty kids … they all got lots of attention. I wasn’t in any of those groups, and the only group left for me to get attention was to be the funny kid – the class clown.

“I was cheeky, but not too troublesome.”

It turns out to be the foundation for much of Alfie’s outlook on approaching life, as he says it stayed with him.

“I realised the benefits of how powerful comedy is as a form of communication and engagement,” he explains. “As a copper, when you’re dealing with a lot of stressful situations and trying to make connections with somebody, humour is a very useful tool.

“I guess I was developing it all those years in the police without realising there would be another career one day.”

And here’s a surprise: the boy in blue became the comedy copper completely out of the blue.

“I was dared to enter this random competition and that’s how I got going”, he recalls. “That first time I ever did a stand-up gig, I had no writing or performance background whatsoever. I just did it,” adding that there may have been the germ of an idea back when he gave his wedding speech, as two people came up to him afterwards and said it had been the funniest one they had ever heard.

“Maybe I parked that at the back of my mind?” he muses.

Not only did his comedy career come out of a spur-of-the-moment decision, it wasn’t something that the young master Moore anticipated: growing up in a working-class family from Sheffield, he says his career options were limited to steel and engineering or working in the coal mines.

“I’m from a long line of Alfie Moores who were all engineers in the steel works, all mechanical engineers. I wanted to do something different, but I hadn’t got the academic qualifications,” he says. “I said I wanted an outside job, and I remember the careers advisor looking at me like I was a bit crazy.

“He asked if I meant a building site like a labourer because that’s all I was qualified to do.”

Expressing a pressing desire to work in the outside air, Alfie got his wish granted and soon regretted it: he lasted four days mucking out on a pig farm before ending up as an apprentice in the steel mills.

“If you weren’t qualified and university wasn’t an option, then you were probably going into the steel works or down the pits,” he adds.

When a recession came he switched to policing, a career which saw him work in a range of roles, including the drugs squad, the public protection team, a friendly neighbourhood sergeant, and a detective sergeant specialising in domestic violence and vulnerable adults.

All of these experiences have helped him become a voice when it comes to raising awareness of topical policing issues for It’s A Fair Cop and, of course, his ever-popular comedy tours.

Which brings us back to his visit to Thames Valley Police territory on Friday, June 13.

His upgrade to Reading’s Concert Hall is, he admits, “very exciting”, while he praises South Street for being “a lovely little venue”.

“I love to go to new venues and people are recommending them to me all the time,” he says. “People are very friendly, they send me emails and ask if I’ve tried such-and-such a place – someone recommended Reading Town Hall, and I didn’t even know there was such a place to be honest. But I sent them (the Reading Arts team) an email and they were up for it.

“It’s a lovely room and I’m really looking forward to it.”

In his press release for the Reading date, he quips that “I know the town is famous for its ‘Three Bs’ industries: beer, bulbs and biscuits – and for me two out of three ain’t bad” – which B is he down on?

He laughs: “Nothing against bulbs, but I wouldn’t consume them myself.“I like to tell jokes, but they tend to be in a story. I’ll keep side-tracking and doing a routine about this, a routine about that, but my natural style is as a storyteller. This is a personal story about me. It’s got some police references, but it’s got some personal stuff about me, my journey and getting a bit older and how I feel about that.”

A Face For Radio has been performed for around two years now, and Alfie says that if audiences in Reading had seen an earlier performance they would find it has evolved as the show keeps getting updated.

“It will be constantly changing every week, and it looks like something different at the end,” he promises.

The Reading gig comes serendipitously when the new series of It’s A Fair Cop is airing on Radio 4, so audiences can whet their appetites by catching up on old episodes thanks to the BBC Sounds app or hear the latest on Mondays at 6.30pm.

Alfie Moore says the show follows very strongly in the BBC’s Reithian ethos of educating, entertaining, and informing.

“It’s absolutely my natural style,” he says. “I like factual stuff and finding the funny in real-life things.

“When I started, everyone thought It’s A Fair Cop would be a three-episode thing – including myself. So, to be carrying all this on 10 years later is a surprise to everybody really,” he says.

“But on that journey, what I found is my natural style allows me to cover all sorts of difficult and sometimes darker subjects, and it feels all right. At the end of the last series, we did a show about domestic violence which I know quite a bit about from my previous role. I’m sure people at Radio 4 were panicking and thinking we couldn’t do that.”

Looking back, he says some of the early shows were quite superficial in comparison, covering topics such as shoplifting. As the run has continued, that trust has grown with audiences and the BBC alike, meaning they felt he could tackle those tricky issues without being inappropriate.

“I’m one of those people who doesn’t think any subject is off limits. I do it respectfully and appropriately, and my natural style means I’ve built up trust with the audience,” he says.

“As you build that trust, you can keep taking it up a step. “We’ve also done some shows about mental health, about missing people and other really difficult subjects.”

Some of the people tuning in won’t just be interested in what goes on in a police station: they’re tuning in because they work in one. Does Alfie Moore feel some kind of responsibility towards his former colleagues?

“I guess I’m an advocate for policing,” he says. “I’m not an apologist for the police … I’ll be the first to find the humour, but I think the issue is the public doesn’t really understand the basics of policing. It’s a lack of information and knowledge about the role because we’re all full of Line of Duty and exciting cop shows that don’t really talk about the basics.

“Most people don’t know the difference between an arrest and a charge and they don’t know the process. All I do is explain the process and how difficult it is to go through, and how difficult real-time choices are.”

This in turn, can act as a pressure valve for those emergency services members listening in, as they can relate to it and let off some steam. It’s something Alfie is quite proud of, even though he didn’t know how it would go down with his bosses.

“I took a career break for five years, did the BBC thing and some live shows and then went back for two years to get back up to speed. I did it quietly, and bosses were fine with it. Ten years earlier, they wouldn’t have been, but I guess the bosses quite like the fact that It’s A Fair Cop engages people, and they need all the good PR they can get.

“It’s bizarre that when I was a copper, nobody was really interested in my views on policing, nobody was really interested in what I had to say. Now I can crack a joke and lots of bosses are very interested.”

But Alfie Moore’s success is also because he navigates deftly through the serious stuff with grace and wit. He says he does feel a responsibility to write gags that don’t punch down or stray into inappropriate territory.  

“I think speaking truth to power and satirising the establishment, whoever that may be, is a healthy reflection of society. Jokes on those lower down the table are not,” he says.

So why should people come and see A Face For Radio when it comes to Reading on Friday, June 13?

Alfie Moore doesn’t hesitate: “Laughter is important. Apart from flooding our system with endorphins or the scientific stuff, I think it’s good to get out. We live stressful lives these days, everything seems to be stressful so to just get out, switch off, sit down and laugh together in a group … it’s good for the soul.”

How can I get tickets to see Alfie Moore’s show in Reading Town Hall? 

Somewhere in a parallel universe, little Alfie’s natural comedic performance skills were recognised by his doting parents, who encouraged and developed his blossoming talent.

After several years as a stage school brat, Alfie’s angelic face was launched on stage and screen, and the rest is history.

Meanwhile, in this universe, Alfie Moore was told to stop messing about in class before being ‘encouraged’ into the grinding, grimy world of an apprenticeship in the Sheffield steelworks. When recession hit, he traded steel for copper by joining Humberside Police.

Thirty years of shift work, initially in the Sheffield steelworks and then as a copper on the beat (where he was punched in the face quite a lot), has left him with ‘a face for radio’.  A face not so much ‘lived in’ as inhabited by a settlement of squatters with little regard to property maintenance and repair.

In his 40s, a surprising career shift turned middle-aged Alfie from street cop to BBC radio star. But when TV fame beckoned, could he grasp it or was he past it?

A Face For Radio is coming to Reading Town Hall on Friday, May 13. Tickets cost £23.50, and are available from the Reading Arts box office by calling 0118 960 6060, or logging on to: https://whatsonreading.com/venues/town-hall/whats-on/alfie-moore-face-radio