Stand-up and be counted

Coca-Cola executives should worry. Mark Thomas is gunning for them, with an exhibition about the company's past Nazi associations and a stage show about its dubious business practices.

The comedian already has many prominent scalps. His modus operandi, linking radical direct action with situationist stunts to deadly comic effect, has led to him being dubbed Britain's Michael Moore.

"I don't mind the comparison," says Thomas, 41, after a two-hour Coke-bashing gig in Southsea. "Moore has done some genius TV and some f***ing brilliant films - Roger and Me certainly influenced me. He's totally committed to what he does, and he's also a very nice man: he did some benefits for us in London for a court case."

The "us" refers to Thomas's team of sidekicks, who helped him harangue and humiliate the likes of Nicholas Soames, Jack Straw and Alastair Campbell on six series of Channel 4's Mark Thomas Comedy Product.

More recently, they helped him win a three-year campaign to prevent British involvement in building Turkey's Ilisu Dam, which would have devastated a Kurdish community.

The court case came about when Thomas and Co padlocked themselves to a minibus as part of an ongoing exposé of British arms trading. They were charged with offending the bus's "integrity", but all were acquitted. One of them, Thomas's anonymous best mate, aka "Sam", is with him in Southsea.

This gig in a sweaty, beery room is far removed from Michael Moore's recent triumphal tour of Cannes, but it is early days for Thomas's Coke campaign.

"I wanted to do something about globalisation," he says, "and I wanted to focus on something that is seen as reasonably benign, just a soft drink." He smiles, wickedly.

On stage, Thomas reveals how Coca-Cola opened a bottling plant in the Sudetenland shortly after Hitler annexed the Czech territory in 1938, how adverts of the time implicitly linked the soft drink's success to Nazi expansionism, and how Fanta was created by Coca-Cola Germany in 1942.

The Naziera advertising artwork has mysteriously vanished now, which led Thomas to co-curate an exhibition of imaginary Nazi Coke adverts by artists and keen amateurs (the show reopens at the Foundry in east London next Wednesday).

But it's not only wartime history that concerns Thomas. More recently, he claims, Coke sacked one employee for "libellously" drinking Pepsi on the job, and settled out of court with 1,500 black workers in Atlanta who accused the company of racism.

Coke India's water-intensive bottling plant in the drought region of Kerala has, as of today, been boycotted for 754 days by the local Adavasi, people. On 20 June, Thomas and Sam will fly to Colombia to investigate the deaths of eight union officials working for American Coke's partly-owned local subsidiary.

Thomas hints that he has Coke-bothering plans beyond this tour and the exhibition, although relations with C4 are currently "bitter" after it asked him to appear in a programme called Celebrity Guantanamo Bay.

"There is a tradition of pulpitting in my family," says Thomas, who lives in Clapham with his script editor wife, Jenny, and their two children. A great-grandfather was a Baptist minister, a grandfather a blackshirt, his father a builder and lay preacher, and his mother a midwife, all of whom doubtless contributed to his messianic Left-wing zeal.