Jason Manford keeps three or four family holidays with strict device rules
jason manford says three or four family holidays a year are non-negotiable, and the phones stay packed away when he goes. At 44, he is balancing stand-up, TV hosting, acting and musical theatre around six children, so the trips have become his fixed family time.
“It’s the fair deal. I’m not going to be there for every school run, for every teatime or to read stories every night, but what we will have is three or four great holidays a year, and make the most of it,” he said. That trade-off is the clearest window into how he manages a workload that keeps moving between the road and the stage.
Manchester Opera House in June
June brings another shift in that schedule, with Manford due in a musical at Manchester Opera House after his tour finished and he had a couple of weeks off. He said, “This is my job, so I’ll just find time. The tour’s just finished so I’ve got a couple of weeks off now before the musical kicks in, and then I’ll have the summer off with the kids, and we’ll be off to Menorca, probably for a week somewhere with some friends, and then we do quite a bit here in the UK as well.”
That kind of calendar explains why the holiday rules sound so firm. When work is split across stand-up comedy tours, TV hosting, acting and musical theatre, the holidays are one of the few stretches where the family gets all of him at once, without a laptop open beside him.
Phones away, Uno on
“But I’m really strict about being on holiday – phones are away, laptops are away, and we play a lot of games – there’s a lot of Uno going on,” he said. He also said he has “never been a kids’ club parent,” preferring a padel court, a walk or a swim to keep his children occupied.
The details fit a family with children aged between eight and nearly 17, where the older ones are deciding whether they still come along. Manford said the family has four children from his first marriage and two from his second, and the mix appears to be shaping trips that need enough structure for younger children and enough freedom for the older ones.
Menorca and Europe plans
“We do Portugal, we do Thailand, we do weekend trips. I love going around Europe – Scandinavia – Oslo and Copenhagen,” he said. He added that the family drives through Europe and comes back through Spain and France, while his sons like theme parks and recently went to one in Germany.
Those trips sit alongside bigger journeys the family has already taken: the west coast of America, Mexico this summer, the Caribbean a couple of years ago, and New Zealand for two weeks. Barbados and the Maldives were earlier stops, and Australia remains on his list, ideally paired with a stand-up comedy tour and a few days off in between gigs.
