David O'Doherty: Diving On The Grenade

Sunday Herald

David O’Doherty returns to Scotland this week for the first time since winning the if.comedy award at the Edinburgh Fringe. The 32-year-old, keyboard-toting comedian and children’s author can also be seen but not heard in his brother Mark’s forthcoming A Film With Me In It alongside Dylan Moran. He is currently compiling a collection of dubious facts about pandas.

What have you been up to since winning the award?

I’ve been encouraging people to make up facts in my Wikipedia entry.

You’re just back from performing in Canada. How was that?

I learned that if I’m a slightly unconventional stand-up here, in North America I’m like a Czech mime from the 1960s.

Tell me three panda facts.

In the black and white era, pandas were often given background roles in major motion pictures. There are 36 pandas in Casablanca. Unfortunately, the advent of colour signalled the end of this work. But with a keen eye, you can still spot six pandas in Gone with the Wind playing confederate soldiers. There’s one peeping out from under the stairs during the ‘Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn’ speech.

The average person encounters 0.3 pandas in their lifetime.

Owing to a bureaucratic mix up in registration by naturalist Dr Joseph Banks in 1831, the panda was classified not as a mammal but as a nut. This is why Adolf Hitler, who was vegetarian, would eat panda meat once a year on German Workers Day.

Your current show, Let’s Comedy, is partially about hype. Has winning the award changed you?

This is my Dive on the Grenade tour. Some people will come because of the hype and not everyone will like it. I was stared at in Sheffield. Hopefully though, those who like it will tell their friends. Fundamentally, nothing has changed. It’s not like I’ve started travelling around on a sequeway shouting at the homeless.

Have you cashed your giant winner’s cheque, as you tried to do when you won the So You Think You’re Funny competition in 1999?

Someone told me, probably Dylan Moran, that it was legal tender. So I took it to the bank and handed them their entertainment highlight of their year. I still maintain that cheque was cashable. But I don’t know how to find out for sure without looking a fool.

Will you be recording this show for release?

I’m going to record it in my sitting room with the dining room double doors open. I want to try and keep the laughter to a minimum. The problem with CDs and DVDs is that there are always loads of cutaways to audience cheering, which really isn’t necessary when you’re sitting listening at home.

You’re a self-described ‘flaneur’. Which is your favourite city to go ‘flaneuring’ in?

I like New York and Edinburgh. But Dublin is the best because all my friends are there. I’m not sure Dublin is such a great city but it’s impossible to distinguish it from the cronies I’ve hung out with since I was 15. And I do like to wander. I’m trying to bring ‘flaneuring’ back. I think that technically it’s to do with the Impressionists in Paris. But for me it implies having a cane and swinging it around your finger as you walk, Charlie Chaplin-style. No? Well, certainly a top hat.

In A Film With Me In It, did your brother not trust you to deliver any lines?

Well, the reason he cast me is because the character is his brother and called David. Though I’m not quadriplegic and don’t have a brain injury. It’s really Dylan and Mark’s film, they’re super-funny together. It doesn’t have that grim, Commitments-style view of Dublin from a million movies. As Mark said: ‘I wanted to write a Dublin film where at no point does a horse step out of a lift’.

Is there any sibling rivalry between you?

No, he’s a useful tool. Ha, ha, ha, he’s such a tool! I’m a terrible judge of whether things are funny. I’ll think something is hilarious as I’m falling asleep and then get up on stage the next night and say it to zero reaction whatsoever. And my brother is the one person who can tell me ‘this is funny, write more about this’, or ‘this is not funny, for God’s sake stop talking about it’. Because he did stand-up for a while he’s a good judge of funniness.

In one of your children’s stories, Shelly the lobster dies for the sake of music. What cause would you die for?

I suppose the inspiration for that was my dad quitting his bank job in 1968 to become a jazz musician. Shelly, likewise, makes the ultimate sacrifice for his art. In stand-up too, it’s all about sticking to your guns. I’ve had a few ludicrous TV offers but haven’t done them because I don’t think ultimately they’d make me happy. The Apprentice with Pets was one. With regard to actually dying for something, perhaps winning the Tour de France and then dying if I could make that deal with the devil.

Finally, is it true that you’re inspired by the speeches of Winston Churchill?

Churchill is a strange figure if you’re Irish because he was quite racist towards us. But listening to some of those two minute radio broadcasts from World War II are remarkably stirring. I think this goes back to when I toured with Tommy Tiernan. He was always into using theatricality in his stand-up and would listen to speeches. I find ‘Peace in our Time’ incredibly emotive. I recommend it when you’re hungover because there’s no better way to wake yourself up than wanting to beat up Nazis.

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Paul Higgins: Guilt Edged Success

The Scotsman

“I trained at the Xaverian Fathers in Coatbridge,” Paul Higgins explains. “Wait. Did you mean the priesthood or acting?”

Good question. We’ve been discussing the 44-year-old actor’s playwriting debut, a dark comedy about a trainee priest losing his faith and returning from the seminary to find his Glaswegian family falling apart.

Nobody Will Ever Forgive Us is one of four pieces by new writers co-produced by the Traverse and National Theatre of Scotland for this month’s Traverse Debuts season. It reunites Higgins with the NTS’ director of new work John Tiffany, who directed him as the writer and sergeant, killed by a Iraqi suicide bomber, in the original production of the internationally acclaimed Black Watch.

We’re in a bar in Glasgow’s Merchant City. Higgins has the day off from filming Hope Springs for BBC Scotland, a comedy-drama about four female criminals hiding in a remote village. He plays the local policeman, caught in a love triangle between his fiancé, played by Ronni Ancona, and the gang’s leader, played by Alex Kingston. “It’s got scenery, romance, comedy, dismemberment and murder,” he says approvingly. “It’s very ambitious.”

Breaks like today will afford him the chance to watch Tiffany conduct rehearsals. “We’re quite different,” he explains, “and I hope we complement each other. John did an astonishing job with Black Watch.

“I never thought it would be the most successful show I’d ever been in. Quite the reverse. Cammy being carried around as he narrated the history of the regiment was always a disaster in rehearsals and I remember saying to Brian Ferguson, ‘when are they going to cut this?’ He felt the same way. And then we did it before an audience and they went wild. Actors can get very tied up in their own characters and John is quick to remind you what the audience is feeling.”

Raised in Wishaw by an atheist father and Catholic mother, Higgins left the priesthood at 17 when it was discovered he’d been seeing a girl. Yet Catholicism won’t leave him. He sees Nobody Will Ever Forgive Us as a portrayal of “a typical working-class British family. But obviously it’s Catholic all over, those notions of God and guilt”.

For viewers of the BBC’s The Thick Of It, he will always be Jamie, the psychotic lieutenant of Peter Capaldi’s fearsome spin doctor Malcolm Tucker in Armando Iannucci’s brilliant political satire. Like the man playing him, Jamie spent five years taking holy orders, but somewhere along the way he learned to fight by “Motherwell Rules”, which involves the insertion of a pint glass and two pool cues in opposing ends of some unfortunate’s body.

“That was a bit naughty,” he smiles wanly. “Jamie hadn’t trained to be a priest until Peter brought it up during an improvisation. So it’s a bit of a joke really that just ended up staying in.
“We never worked out their history. But I like to think they met on the Daily Record and when Malcolm got into government, he brought Jamie with him.”

With his intense blue eyes, you can imagine the zeal with which Higgins pursued his original vocation and why he sought “to be a missionary rather than a parish priest.

“I wanted to go out and save the world” he says evenly.

“When people discover I went to a seminary, they often ask me about abuse,” he explains. “But my experience was the exact opposite of that. Like Patrick says in the play, it’s the best thing that ever happened to me, certainly up to that point. I really didn’t want to leave and it had more to do with girls than it does for Patrick. But the doubts grew, like tectonic plates pushing against each other. Something had to give.”

I ask how he summoned the necessary fury for lines written by The Thick Of It’s ‘swearing consultant’ Ian Martin, as in one notorious scene, when Jamie’s fondness for Al Jolson is unwisely mocked and met with a tsunami of foul, four-letter abuse.

“I’m afraid that terrible rage comes easy to me,” he laughs. “They say I was smiling as I said it. I couldn’t care about Al Jolson, but in that moment I cared deeply about him.”

He reprises his role as Jamie in In The Loop, the big screen, transatlantic adaptation of the series out in cinemas next May, starring James Gandolfini, Tom Hollander and Steve Coogan alongside members of the original cast. In one instance of pique, Jamie reportedly “kicks a very large fax machine to pieces”.

“I have a speech, I don’t know if it’s still in, about the film There Will Be Blood. Jamie’s really disappointed because there’s ‘no fucking blood’ in it.”

As Black Watch’s sergeant, he sang from the hymn sheet, addressing his soldiers’ grumbles with an unequivocal “it’s our turn tay be in the shite”. And in In The Loop, Jamie is likewise just following orders.

“Our job is to sell whatever the Prime Minister wants us to sell,” he explains. “If Jamie was asked to be anti-war, he would be rabidly anti-war, whatever’s required. So long as it’s rabid. The line is that this unnamed other country is a real and immediate threat to ours and documents are manipulated to back that up. Things that don’t back it up are left out. That appears pretty much what actually went on.”

Having been in Black Watch though, which was directly based on squaddies’ testimony, the actor could never be so uncritical as his onscreen realpolitk Rottweiler.

“I’m hesitant to say this because of how it would look out of context, but it made me believe in national service for everybody,” he says. “If the children of the English middle-class had been going abroad to die, I don’t believe we’d ever have gone. I never thought I would think that. I don’t believe in national service to knock sense into young people, but if you’re going to have an army it should be representative of the country. There shouldn’t be any cannon fodder.”

Nobody Will Ever Forgive Us echoes this sense of limited opportunities for the working-class.

“I started writing it about five years ago,” he recalls. “I’d been talking to somebody about my dad and the extraordinary way that he spoke, very elliptical and with rhetorical questions. When he wanted to he had a fantastic vocabulary. I just started to try and write him really.

“He was the age I am now and must have been horribly frustrated. He quoted poetry a lot, as he does in the play. In another generation he would have been another person. But as it was he was an alcoholic labourer.”

Despite an increased number of stage appearances in Scotland recently, as a young Prospero in the 2006 production of The Tempest at the Tron and in the NTS production of David Grieg’s Damascus at the Traverse in 2007, Higgins has lived in London for more than 25 years after graduating from the Central School of Speech and Drama. He met his wife, former Coronation Street actor Amelia Bullmore in a 1992 production of A View from the Bridge in Manchester.

“That was very, very tricky,” he recalls. “I’d already fallen for her by then. But I couldn’t tell her because we were playing lovers and I thought if I asked her out and she said ‘no’, it would fuck it up completely. So I was torn between declaring myself and just getting on with the play.”

He feigns regret that their two daughters wish to follow their career path. But he hopes “to help them do whatever they want and not be prescriptive.

“Besides, where people start out in life is not necessarily where they end up.”

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Alan Carr - People imagine me forever taking private jets to Elton John’s tiara balls!

Sunday Herald

Alan Carr’s advice for underwhelming young stand-ups: steal the reviews of a more popular act. The camp comedian was struggling to sell his show at the 2003 Edinburgh Fringe and resorted to “unconventional methods” to fix the problem.

“I photocopied a headline from a review of Jimmy Carr’s show – ‘This Carr is the Rolls Royce of comedy’ – and pasted it on my own poster” he reveals in his autobiography, Look Who It Is! “He was furious (quite understandably) and was seen in the Pleasance Courtyard yanking them off my posters in a rage.”

Recalling the incident now, Carr is suitably contrite. But you suspect a part of him still admires his own barefaced larceny.

“Oh I know, but I’m not too proud about that,” the 32-year-old says. “I bumped into Jimmy the other day and he said how he’d enjoyed listening to the audiobook. He can laugh about it now.”

Carr and his co-host Justin Lee Collins inherited The Friday Night Project, now The Sunday Night Project from his namesake, Rob Rouse and Sharon Horgan, turning an ailing, tacky, post-pub celebrity chat and entertainment show into a successful one. Currently hosting the quiz show Celebrity Ding Dong, which pits the likes of Coronation Street cast members against their Eastenders counterparts, Carr currently rivals his pre-Carrsor for sheer ubiquity on Channel 4, joking about the “family business” after signing a reported £3million exclusive contract with the broadcaster.

You might think that such duplicitous marketing and shrewd negotiating skills would stand Carr in good stead when he tries to impress Sir Alan Sugar in Comic Relief’s forthcoming Celebrity Apprentice.

Yet he maintains that he has “no business acumen at all” and reckons that the experience will be a steep learning curve.

“The people on The Apprentice are so hilarious. ‘I will tread on whoever it takes to get ahead and give 110%’. I find that fascinating. How on earth do you get like that?”

A former toilet attendant and gearbox degreaser, Carr’s book relates his awkward teenage years and a series of mundane jobs before, during and since the drama graduate left Middlesex University. He was working in a call centre till the day before he departed for the Edinburgh Fringe in 2001 and won the BBC New Comedy Award. From a long line of footballers, the eldest son of ex-Northampton Town manager Graham Carr’s stand-up typically focuses on the down-to-earth and everyday, (albeit delivered in his inimitably shrill voice), in contrast to the glamorous circles he’s assumed to move in.

“My comedy is essentially me just taking as I find,” he explains. “I’m thinking of going on tour next year and I’m writing at the moment. It’s hard though, because you don’t want to come across as ‘ooh, I was in the west wing with Clara my maid’, but you don’t want to be patronising by talking about 100 teabags for £1 in Kwiksave either. What makes it worse is that people imagine me forever taking private jets to Elton John’s tiara balls.”

It was during his time as the audience warm-up for Friday Night with Jonathan Ross that he first saw the glitz of showbusiness dissolving before his eyes.

“I was meeting all these amazing people: Cameron Diaz, Justin Timberlake, Jane Fonda, Paul Newman,” he recalls. “But it was a bit depressing really because you see them without their make-up, asking where the toilet is and moodily kicking off. Mind you, I met Grace Jones recently at the Q Awards and she was like stars should be, otherworldly. I’d been told by someone that she lived in Northampton, so I asked her about it and she simply said ‘What is Northampton?’

“These days, you see stars in magazines with their wardrobe malfunctions and stepping in dog’s mess, they’re just the same as everyone else.”

Carr’s debut DVD, Tooth Fairy, sold over 500,000 copies and he’s hoping his autobiography proves just as popular this festive season. Alongside Ding Dong and a new series of the Sunday Night Project starting in December, he’s also More magazine’s celebrity interviewer and is currently narrating Alan Carr’s Comedy Outings on Radio 2.

Comedy has afforded the dentally distinctive presenter “far more opportunities than I’d have got if I’d stuck to acting” and he recently made his movie debut in the upcoming Nativity, alongside Pam Ferris, Martin Freeman and Ashley Jensen. He plays a bitchy theatre critic, helping him to exorcise his Edinburgh Fringe memories of awards judges dozing on his front row and “cookery writers” damning him with one-star reviews.

“It was great because I get sent scripts all the time, but they’re all like ‘ooh, hello boys! Ooh, look at her roots,” he squawks. “This one was improvised so I could do my own lines. They’ll probably cut me out now but I enjoyed it.”

There’s his much-anticipated chatshow to come too.

“I opened the News of the World and it said I’m going to ask the things that Jonathan Ross and Graham Norton are too scared to,” he marvels. “And I’m thinking ‘God, what are they too scared to talk about?’

“I get criticised for being camp. But television is camp. Someone coming down the stairs, pretending that you’re in their living room and saying ‘hello, welcome to my show’? It’s awful, fake, but it’s putting on a show. I really think that camp works well on telly.”

Nevertheless, if fame turns fickle and he finds himself with “my jewellery range out”, “appearing at 1am on QVC”, his next book will “be rather more gossipy”.

“I’ll do a hatchet job, expose how television really works! All the lovely people and all those who’ve really annoyed me. It’ll be a good, old-fashioned slag off!” Read more!

Rhys Darby: Flying Solo

The Scotsman

“It was like I’d finally met my maker,” enthuses Rhys Darby of meeting Jim Carrey, speaking with a degree of awe he might otherwise reserve for a UFO sighting, explaining how the two slapsticking, physical comedians bonded over their intention to buy jetpacks.

“$100,000 is nothing to him of course,” the 34-year-old Aucklander laughs, “but I might need to make more movies”.

As a sound effects specialist, impersonations of jetpacks have been a fixture in Darby’s repertoire since childhood, along with robots, dinosaurs and an entire menagerie of mythical creatures.

“I’m just a big kid really and I’ve always been interested in monsters and the paranormal, stories of Bigfoot and aliens,” he says. “The last three years I’ve been really busy, so any time off I’ve spent with my two-year-old son. Or on the computer looking up giant squids.”

Darby is flying into the UK next week, by conventional means disappointingly, for two dates to promote his debut stand-up DVD Imagine That! It includes a typically energetic portrayal of the comic’s childhood and stint in the New Zealand army, which he was encouraged to join by his mother.

“I’d been in the army cadets and I suppose she thought I’d always been quite physical,” he says. “I was good for morale in the platoon, I made people laugh but I had absolutely no sense of direction. After three years I was brought into the office and told ‘perhaps you should go to university ...’”

Darby’s cartoonish stand-up, in which he chiefly recalls his younger, foolish self indulging in escapist tomfoolery, seems a world away from the role that is currently turning him into a star, that of the strait-laced, ineffectual band manager Murray Hewitt in cult sitcom Flight of the Conchords.

Tellingly though, when Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie recruited their fellow Kiwi to play Brian, Murray’s prototype in the BBC radio series that preceded the Conchords’ New York-based television show, they rejected the five silly voices Darby offered them in favour of his own.

Moreover, the adolescent fantasising the comedian presents in his stand-up would undoubtedly resonate with Murray, a frustrated deputy cultural attaché in the New Zealand consulate who dreams of managing a successful rock band and witnessing a “leggy blonde” sweep by on a photocopier.

“I was always a kid with a big imagination” Darby recalls. “I used to put on plays on the back lawn for my mother, who halfway through would disappear. I’d be so into it, that at the end I’d go ‘ta-da!’ and there was nobody there. So that kid in my stand-up might be a lonely guy, but I think he’s happy. The truth is, I also had a lot of friends at school and was popular.”

Indeed, his wife Rosie calls him the most confident person she knows, yet “without being arrogant about it”.

“I believed from the beginning that I would end up in movies but that I wouldn’t go down the drama school route,” he says. “So I just put my blinkers on and did comedy. New Zealanders are quite inward people. It’s not a Kiwi trait to be really proud of yourself, that’s an American thing. But for some reason, I’ve always had it. I’m embarrassed by my confidence.”

Starring Clement and McKenzie as struggling musicians, the cast of the Emmy-nominated Conchords, which has screened on BBC Four in the UK, exist in a strange parallel universe to their characters in the show.

Within the world of the comedy, the few songs that the band actually perform – those that aren’t in their heads – are unremittingly awful and their “fanbase” consists of a solitary stalker, Mel, played by if.comedy nominee Kristen Schaal. In reality though, the Conchords’ latest album made number three on the US billboard charts and they have legions of ardent followers, the ‘Flight Attendants’.

“We’ve had to cordon off certain streets for filming,” Darby says of production of the eagerly anticipated second series, which Clement and McKenzie have suggested will be the last. “The fans find out where we’re doing it and invariably you hear girls yelling things out.” He himself recently portrayed an obsessive fan in a Nike commercial with Roger Federer, breaking into the Swiss tennis star’s home and engaging in a racket duel that recalled the Cato scenes in The Pink Panther.

As a certifiable loser in a culture that champions achievement, the popular, sometimes overshadowing appeal of the Conchords’ manager has undoubtedly been the unlikeliest aspect of the band’s US success, with fans asking after Murray at the duo’s live performances and the character winning New Zealander of the Year in 2007.

“I guess it’s because he’s loveable and he’s got a big heart” Darby reasons modestly. “There’s a couple of guys in a rock ‘n’ roll band and he wants a piece. I think people can see themselves in that, wanting to be connected to a cool group but not really having any idea.”

Conchords was Darby’s screen acting debut. His follow-up is playing Carrey’s boss in the movie Yes Man, out December and adapted from Dundonian author and TV presenter Danny Wallace’s comic memoir of saying “yes” to everything.

The film’s director Peyton Reed “loved Murray and wanted me to do a reading for this role” Darby relates. “It was one of those occasions when I was meeting some very well-known people and they were more excited to meet me than I was of them. I was really thrown by that.

“It’s totally different to the book. Obviously, they’ve created my character to make it bigger. Norman is a little bit more flamboyant than Murray, likes to hold these fancy dress parties and he’s a bit more of a nerd, but he still has that enduring decency. It was good for me with it being my first movie, because if the character had been really different to what I’d just done, I’d probably have shat myself.

He maintains that Carrey was a “really supportive” presence on set, but he still had to occasionally raise his game.

“Sometimes Jim would improvise a really big physical scene that wasn’t in the script,” he says. “I wouldn’t be working that day and I’d get a call from the director. ‘You’ve got to come in, Jim’s done something hilarious and he’s done it through the window to you! You’ve got to respond to it, do something similar back!’ I almost felt like Jim was setting a test for me to say ‘how funny can you be motherf*cker?’”

In May, Darby appears in Richard Curtis’ The Boat That Rocked, set in 1996 and loosely based on the pirate station Radio Caroline, alongside Kenneth Branagh, Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Bill Nighy. Fortunately for a fledgling actor in such distinguished company, he was once again asked to play to his strengths.

“Angus is a pretty out there guy, not the most popular on the boat because he’s into folk, but a nutty DJ who likes doing character voices,” he explains. “People at that time like Kenny Everett were using a lot of sound effects and he was fun to play because Richard let us improvise too. It was scary to ask him but I think he took a real liking to me and let me improvise quite a bit. And it was great to mess around with someone who isn’t loveable for a change.”

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Rise of the Underdog!

Fest Magazine (written as Benjamin Edwards)

Stand-up comedy is one of the few vocations where failure is no impediment to success. It’s a quirk that the following gamma males offer thanks for on an almost nightly basis, and never more so than during the Edinburgh Fringe, when hour-long shows encourage them to admit their deepest flaws, fading dreams and relationship woes to roomfuls of strangers.

“Well, we all like a bit of schadenfreude don’t we?” reckons Rhod Gilbert, who will be recalling the near-breakdown he suffered encountering The Award-Winning Mince Pie.

“Comedy needs a victim and with me, the victim has always been myself, I’ve rarely done jokes at anyone else’s expense. My character is a buffoon who misinterprets everything and tends to react almost violently in a completely inappropriate manner.

“When I started out, whenever I told audiences I was Welsh I would get all those sheep noises. So I found it natural to play on the back foot, as if the crowd had me pinned in the corner and I was a kid lashing out at all these bullies around me. I still feel like that.”

In America, the dominant tradition has been for stand-ups to assume superiority over the audience, ‘playing high-status’, as exemplified by the Def Jam school of comedy. Taking its inspiration from hip-hop, its worst exponents of all races tend to establish their pre-eminence with stereotypical digs at other ethnic groups, genders and sexualities.

As a parallel, consider Richard Pryor’s influence on Eddie Murphy. Murphy’s stand-up appropriated all of Pryor’s swagger yet none of his vulnerability, the acknowledged weakness of a heart-attack suffering, junkie womaniser. There’s no question as to whose stand-up is aging better, with much of Murphy’s live work from the 1980s now looking unpalatably homophobic.

In the UK, our national flair for self-deprecation confuses status positions. Comics like Jimmy Carr and Simon Evans look down upon their audience from impeccable middle-class perspectives, yet remain tongue-in-cheek enough to generally escape disapproval, with both acknowledging their physical peculiarities as a way of ingratiating themselves.

Miles Jupp abandoned his Laird of the Manor character to perform as himself and now interacts far more easily with an audience. Interestingly, the likes of Daniel Kitson, Josie Long, Russell Howard, Alun Cochrane and David O’Doherty employ hip-hop bragging and mannerisms to varying degrees of irony.

Messing about with power relations was integral to We Are Klang!’s success.

“We always wanted to be the three biggest idiots in the room,” Steve Hall explains. “It was almost an attempt to dispense with status games, because whichever one of us was ‘winning’ at any point, we were still the three biggest losers. Once everyone bought into that, huge amounts of fun would follow because we were prepared to do anything.”

By his own admission Klang’s “least memorable member”, Hall takes being a joke’s butt literally and is best known for his yapping bare backside during the sketch troupe’s 2006 if.comedy-nominated run. His debut solo show, Vice-Captain Loser, derives its title from an insult the 14-year-old Hall once received from his father, no doubt spurring Hall towards whoring his “slight, unremarkable” body for more Klang stage time.

“We work on a bartering system” he explains. “I get to smuggle in my jokes and show my commitment by being the one who’s prepared to humiliate himself the most. It’s more subversive if the quiet one you haven’t necessarily noticed suddenly reappears as a talking arse. Though, I’ve occasionally met audience members who haven’t understood it was my arse that was speaking.”

Both if.comedy award winners, long-time UK-based foreigners Brendon Burns and Phil Nichol, are extrovert performers whose triumphant shows revealed them at their most pathetic.

“It’s certainly strange in Edinburgh,” says Stephen Grant, who split from his wife recently and lost his top ranking on Google to an American namesake who succeeded in murdering his, “because you need to downplay the fact that there is a big room full of people who’ve only come to see you, by absolutely not coming out and blurting ‘fuck, I must be brilliant me!’”

Grant maintains “there are more runners-up in the world than winners” and that with Second he’s “appealing to a larger demographic”, trying to prove that “second is the new first” and that “in an increasingly winning obsessed society, under a Labour government that seems, bizarrely, to have created more class divisions than ever, ultimately the person who strives hard and nearly does well, yet doesn’t quite make it, has the best stories.

“Laughing is a defence mechanism, just as for some people it’s getting angry or wasted and for some comedians it’s all three. Usually, comedy is a fairly cooperative industry and it’s only in new act competitions and Edinburgh where the need for other comics to perform badly rears its ugly head.”

Luke Toulson embodies such sentiments in There Are So Many Things That I Can’t Do. A 2005 Perrier best newcomer nominee with sketch partner Stephen Harvey, the dyslexic former supply teacher earned mixed reviews for the pair’s 2006 offering, subsequently lost his agent and his fiancée and believes that the nomination “snared us with too much attention before we’d really had time to develop”. He’s since re-emerged as a solo stand-up, winning the Hackney Empire New Act Award, and as Captain DJ on Cbeebies Space Pirates, failing to impress his son, who prefers Angelina Ballerina.

Nevertheless, Toulson’s niche television stardom and semi-pathetic state of affairs have been catnip to young single mums, a trend Gilbert recognises and identifies as the “mothering instinct.

“It’s definitely to do with vulnerability up there. I’m not a sexy comedian, I’m the type you want to mother. But I do feel vulnerable on stage, so it’s natural to play that angle for me.”

Not A Lover, Not A Fighter is the first solo show from Gilbert’s countryman and flatmate Lloyd Langford, who reckons that many comedians’ insecurities emanate simply from “losing thousands of pounds performing at the Fringe”.

A melancholic blues fan, the 24-year-old Welshman enjoys “a bit of fragility with my comedy” and feels that stand-ups are inherently outsiders. He only recently began performing material on sex, acknowledging that “you get comics with braggadocio or machismo, whereas all I’m saying is that I’m a bit useless”. He makes a point of mentioning he has a girlfriend in his set, but to no avail with female admirers. “Yeah, it happens” he admits.

“When I first started performing,” concludes Hall, “I thought I’d love to be this Bill Hicks dark poet, as many misguided young comics do. It took my fiancé to make me understand that my vulnerable side was what she liked about me, rather than me being Mr Edgy. So I started working on it aggressively to make her fancy me more.

“She then said that I was going too far and looking like a charity case, walking onstage and saying ‘Hello! I’m the biggest loser that’s ever lived!’” Read more!

Andrew Lawrence - It’s an embarrassing, self-indulgent, pathetic job

The Scotsman

The night before I meet Andrew Lawrence, I watch him perform as part of The Dark Show at the Kilkenny Comedy Festival. He’s been coerced by other acts and audience expectations into delivering his most depraved material, ridiculing his girlfriend, brutally threatening his family and eliciting laughter simply by mentioning Joseph Fritzel.

It’s a superb showcase of his ‘greatest hits’. It is also a decidedly niche performance unlikely to appear on Live At The Apollo anytime soon. “I guess that dark stuff comes easiest to me and when I started out it was that material I was mostly doing,” reflects a comedian whose previous Fringe shows have been called How To Butcher Your Loved Ones and Social Leprosy For Beginners And Improvers.

“Some of it was a bit harsh though, a little Jim Jeffries. All that anti-girlfriend stuff I don’t tend to do anymore. My parents aren’t all that bothered. As long as I’m paying my bills and have enough money to keep my mind, body and soul together, they don’t mind. But if they were coming to a gig, there’s specific material I wouldn’t do. The way Adam [Hills] introduced me made it quite difficult to be honest. I had to play the weird freak. But nowadays it’s much more toned down and I’m very much more myself.”

Sitting opposite me with a cup of tea, his red hair recently cropped short and wearing a smart but staid jacket, the slight, thoughtful Lawrence looks every inch the librarian he once was. His stage persona is becoming a truer reflection of his real self, less of the growling, homicidal misfit denouncing his parents and an unfeeling world. This interview is one of the first he’s conducted out of “character” and so there will be no berating “the Edinburgh C***s Festival” and the if.comedy panel for overlooking him (he has been nominated twice, for best newcomer in 2006 and for the main prize in 2007). Only those cold, black eyes of a shark behind his spectacles, occasionally underscored by a mischievous grin, suggest a serial killer manqué.

I delicately phrase a question about his features. “I played up to looking odd earlier in my career,” he admits. “But I reckon I look pretty normal and it baffles me that journalists write so much about my physical appearance. Then again, I talk about it in my act and make a lot more of it than there actually is. It’s very easy to make people see things if you come on and say ‘I’ve got a creepy face’. There’s a very small percentage of comedians who are attractive enough to go on stage, say that and have the audience dispute it.”

He’s intrigued by comparisons to the late television comedian Charlie Drake, “because I’ve never watched him, though he looks like one of my uncles, so maybe there is a facial resemblance” and frustrated by those with Michael Crawford, to the point where “I have to acknowledge that I sound like him at the start of my set because I’ve had so many people shouting out ‘Frank Spencer!’ Obviously, your voice sounds different in your own head, but even speaking in mine is a curiosity for some people.”

Born in Croydon, the 28-year-old comic was an intensely focused cross country runner in his youth. He would train six days a week, two hours a day, and regularly attended the Fringe while studying English at St Andrews University. He also taught himself to play guitar, and his twisted songs won him the BBC new act award in 2003.

“I remember going up to Edinburgh the year before I did my first show, which was very musical and I had long, crazy hair,” he says, “seeing Tim Minchin performing his dark songs with his crazy hair and thinking ‘f***. I have to change my act’. He’s an amazing musician, so much better than I could ever be. You see people like that throughout your career, those who make you feel you’ve got to improve or change what you’re doing.

“Comedians who are great musicians make me feel like a fraud, though having said that, if you can write funny lyrics it’s about the comedy really so I might come back to it. But the guitar was a crutch and it was nice to get rid of it. After two or three years as a comic, you start doing what you want to do rather than what comes instinctively. I don’t know what the rate of progression is, but I feel that year on year I’m getting better and becoming more versatile.”

He increasingly strives to perform material “that hits home with everybody” and recalls a rude awakening he endured in 2005. It was only his second year of stand-up, and he was playing the late-night showcase Spank at the Underbelly, when an aggressive challenge to an audience member ended in an ungainly scuffle.

“I was still new, maybe only performing three nights a week,” he explains. “I was having a difficult time in my personal life and wasn’t focusing coolly. I’d been used to everyone going mental for me and went on doing very self-indulgent, esoteric, poetic stuff that only a few people were really going for. And then I just got mixed up with this guy who wrestled me to the floor. It was inexperience that made me get him up on stage, because you should never do that, especially with someone who’s quite angry and drunk in the dark. There was an article about it in The Times that poked fun at me a bit which was quite unpleasant.”

This was the same Spank run that saw Australian comic Steve Hughes heckle Lawrence to leave the stage and let him finish the show after the younger stand-up had overrun his 12 minute slot by half an hour – “You may want to close a set at 3am mate, but I don’t. F***ing get off!” – and the same Edinburgh he played Darren, the much-maligned offspring of Ian Boldsworth’s Yorkshire blowhard Ray Peacock, in Ray Peacock & Son. Ironically, the pair developed an intense mutual dislike during rehearsals, and as with his role of Marco, a Christian builder in the Johnny Vegas sitcom Ideal, he is refreshingly candid in describing these collaborations as “not my cup of tea”. Though Ideal “has a lot of people I really like and enjoy as comedians, and as a sitcom on BBC3, it could be a lot worse”.

You sense he places much greater trust in his own comedy instincts. A series of snarky, five-minute Radio 2 skits on the arts, hastily written and recorded in a week earlier this year, were born from working with a group of producers that had given him almost free reign with 20 weeks of podcasts to accompany the Channel 4 reality series Shipwrecked.
“Half an hour each week slagging off the contestants,” he recalls. “It was all improvising and there was so much to work with, just these horrendous people. I really enjoyed that.

“I’d love to do a television sitcom, not a traditional one, but a half hour with loads and loads of different characters. But I’d never be allowed, because you’re always beholden to meet producers halfway. Unless you do something great first.”

Expectations are high for his new Fringe show, an attack on society’s insatiable desire for self-improvement entitled Don’t Just Do Something, Sit There!, yet he seems inclined to confound them. “The material I’m doing this year is more along the lines of social commentary,” he explains. “About this strange idea that you can achieve anything you set your mind to if you work hard enough. Which is just not true. As human beings we attribute value to something in accordance with how rare it is. But by that reasoning and with six and a half billion of us on the planet we must consider ourselves to be pretty worthless. Trying to elevate ourselves above everyone else by striving to own the best home or looking the best is misdirected and extreme ambition that can’t really bring you purpose, value or any sense of happiness in life.”

He acknowledges the personal contradiction with a twist of the familiar self-loathing. “Certainly, like anyone I want to do something worthwhile with my existence. But it’s tricky with this job, because it’s an embarrassing, self-indulgent, pathetic job in a way.”



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Sarah Silverman: I Won't Defend My Jokes, It Never Ends Well

The Scotsman

When Sarah Silverman posed as a louche Amy Winehouse in Vanity Fair recently, few could have predicted that their kinship went beyond a glossy conglomeration of the world’s most controversial Jewish princesses.

But while Winehouse sparked widespread concern and incomprehension when a bizarre film she’d shot for her husband appeared on the internet featuring mice and Pete Doherty, Silverman was applauded for confessing to cheating on her boyfriend in “the bed, on the floor, on the towel by the door, in the tub, in the car, up against the minibar …”, in a song subsequently exposed to You Tube and an audience currently approaching 10million views.

Of course, Silverman and her accomplice Matt Damon were only joking that she was “f**king Matt Damon” for the benefit of her beau, late-night chat host Jimmy Kimmel, celebrating his fifth anniversary show. With the Hollywood star gamely and repeatedly reiterating that yes, Silverman was indeed “f**king Matt Damon”, Kimmel responded gallantly with his own video announcing that he was “f**king Ben Affleck”, featuring, among others, Affleck, Brad Pitt, Cameron Diaz, Robin Williams, Meat Loaf and Harrison Ford.

If, as widely predicted, “I’m F**king Matt Damon” wins an Emmy next month, it will be something of a bittersweet irony, as less than a week before this interview was conducted, publicists confirmed that Silverman and Kimmel had split. Rather poignantly too, this weekend finally brings a UK cinematic release for Silverman’s breakthrough 2005 concert film, Jesus Is Magic, which takes its title from Silverman’s line about their relationship: “If my boyfriend, who’s a Catholic, and I ever have a kid, we’ll just be honest with it. We’ll say that Mommy is one of God’s chosen people and Daddy believes that Jesus is magic!”

“I still do some of those routines,” admits Silverman, taking a break from filming her second series of The Sarah Silverman Programme, the first of which aired in the UK on the Paramount Comedy Channel. “And I’ll play some of the songs on the road because it’s fun to do them again live. It’s hard because I’m working on my TV show all the time, so I’m not doing enough stand-up to have the amount of new stuff I should have. But we wrap in a week and I’m going to New York to focus on stand-up again.”

The new series, which like Jesus Is Magic features Silverman’s sister Laura in a perennially subordinate role to her sibling’s self-obsession – “that’s really fun, she has a lot more funny stuff this year” – also includes familiar faces from British screens, including Mighty Boosh collaborators Rich Fulcher and Matt Berry, who play “a minister” and “a representative of the dictionary”, and former Dr Who Christopher Eccleston as Dr Laser Rage, the hero of a DVD box set purchased by Sarah’s gay neighbour Brian.

Silverman is hoping to perform a few stand-up dates in the UK this autumn. Previously, her only visit to these shores was for Amnesty International’s 2006 Secret Policeman’s Ball, “which was so fun and exciting, everyone was so nice and I had a blast. I was mostly impressed by the audience, so many standing and the show lasted five hours. I went on about four hours in and everyone was still into it.”

An attractive, slim brunette with a swanlike neck that she describes as “one of the best of my many good features”, the 37-year-old projects a narcissistic, naïve persona that frees her to express the most politically incorrect material, her wide-eyed bigotry pushed to ludicrous extremes. She begins the film promising a show about the Holocaust and AIDS, goes on to throw in a callously throwaway line about 9/11, then a love song comparing her affection to black guys calling each other “n*gger” before a couple of alternately laughing and stony-faced African-Americans, eventually ending up in her dressing room, alone with her reflection, which she begins to kiss ravenously. Endearingly, she won’t dismiss the thrill of being described as “the world’s hottest, most controversial comedian”.

“It’s subjective,” she maintains. “I want to always try to let that stuff make me feel good, but I would never want to get too attached to it. No-one is hot or the most controversial forever, both of those things have expiration dates. I Googled myself a couple weeks ago and saw ‘Top Nine People That Should Host Saturday Night Live ... Sarah Silverman ...’ I was so flattered, clicked on it and it said: ‘if Sarah Silverman hosted SNL I'd punch myself in the face.’ Served me right.”

She wrote for the programme between 1993 and 1994 but was fired after one season, and for many in the UK, their introduction to her humour was the film The Aristocrats, where she accepted the challenge of trying to tell the most distasteful version of a vaudeville in-joke by claiming that she’d been raped by Joe Franklin, a veteran US showbiz turn. Franklin then threatened to sue, with the furore echoing her breakthrough appearance on the talk-show Late Night with Conan O’Brien, when her profile soared after a routine that turned on the word “chink”. She addresses that controversy in Jesus Is Magic¸ and if anything, exacerbates it.

“I try to make it a practice to never defend or try to explain my jokes,” she says. “It never ends well and definitely never ends funny. Sometimes people come up to me and say the most crude and disgusting things and I try to be gracious because I know they must think I like that stuff. To me there's a difference between surprising or honest or even graphic and just gross for gross’ sake – a very subtle, but very big difference. I'm not sure I’m smart enough to explain it, but like the hairy animal I am, I just feel it instinctively I guess.”

Ah yes, extraneous body hair. Silverman is blithely honest about her bodily functions and dysfunctions, confessing to bed-wetting till an advanced age and to being “extremely proud” that her ‘Poop Song’ is now hugely popular with kids. Her comedy career actually began in childhood under the tutelage of her social worker father.

“When I was three he taught me ‘bitch, bastard, damn, shit’” she recalls. “I would say it and grown-ups would die laughing and be so shocked. I saw then, at three, the positive reaction that came from that kind of verbal surprise and got addicted to that feeling. I just hope I find something funnier than poop before it all gets old. But does it ever get old?”

The youngest of four daughters, she looks up to a rabbi sister, “so good and loving and supportive, she loves me even though religion is not a part of my life, and I love her though religion is her life!”

Yet despite, or perhaps because of a teenage history of depression, she became a comic at 17, singing a song called ‘Mammaries’ in a restaurant. Her material “was about high school mostly, because I was in high school. It always seems to be about what’s mostly on my mind”. She dropped out of New York University at 19 and pursued stand-up in Greenwich Village. “When I was 19 I lost my virginity and my act became all about sex, then drugs and so on.”

Later, she started performing at the Boston Comedy Club, around the same time as Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle.

“I would see Chris Rock all the time and I learned something really important from him,” she explains. “He was different then, delivery-wise. He would go up, start his jokes and if the crowd was talking and unsettled he would just keep going. If the crowd missed a joke or two, he seemed fine with it, because eventually, the whole crowd would be silent, hanging on his every word. He made the audience come to him. So often in that situation your instinct is to talk over them to make them listen. He never stooped to that.”

Silverman has routinely stooped to bit-parts in movies, invariably playing the best friend or bitchy girlfriend in films like There’s Something About Mary and School Of Rock, but that’s all in the past now.

“I'm really only interested in playing someone who is three-dimensional,” she states. “I feel finished with the ‘bitch’ or ‘sassy friend’ that exists only to provide exposition for the main girl character. I don't care about the size of a role, I'm done playing the band-aid for shitty writing.”

Exclusively attracted to funny men, she believes that ultimately, her gift to the world is “either laughter or herpes. Hopefully the former.”


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Bethany Black: Engendering Laughs

The Scotsman

Abortion, suicide attempts and gender reassignment surgery – Bethany Black's debut Fringe show, Beth Becomes Her, rejects the comedy of shared experience and gratuitous "knob gags" for a detailed, funny and revealing hour about what happens when the penis itself is deemed surplus to requirements.

Undoubtedly the goth, lesbian, post-op transsexual comic to watch at this year's festival, the 29-year-old's life story will surely be one of Edinburgh's most talked-about.

"Some will certainly cross their legs," she surmises, reflecting my knee-jerk reaction to aspects of the operation. But this is no Jim Rose Circus freak-fest.

Rather, it's a compelling account of a rare experience told with candour, balancing dark self-mockery with life-affirming moments. Never more so than Black's botched attempts to kill herself, which are both ineptly hilarious and genuinely pathetic.

Chatting in a café close to her girlfriend's Manchester flat, Black is droll, open and surprisingly well-adjusted for somebody with a history of depression. Naturally slender, she once acquired five and a half stone in six months through binge eating and drinking.

Today though, she's tall, pale, clad almost exclusively in black and more delicately featured than her self-assessment of "lesbian Hitler impersonator" implies. Born Ben Horsley in Preston, she came out as a transsexual to her parents ten years ago and has received more or less wholehearted support from her family ever since, adopting the surname Black at comedian Nick Doody's suggestion.

"My mum's never seen me perform, but I've bought two tickets for my parents to see me in the final week," she says. "It's going to be the scariest performance I've ever given, because I talk about her a lot in the show."

From forever changing clothes in the dark to entering the Miss Gay UK contest, Black still gets stage fright but feels increasingly confident in herself. At last year's Fringe she joined a host of comics and fellow exhibitionists to caper nude before an audience of 800 in the Pleasance Grand, as they reprised the finale of Phil Nichol's 2006 if.comedy-winning show The Naked Racist.

Beth Becomes Her was effectively conceived in Edinburgh. A comedy geek since childhood, Black only began performing when she realised that, at 17, the BBC New Comedy winner Josie Long was younger than her. Starting as a rock club compere at 25, Black drove up to the Fringe in 2006 with Australian comic Steve Hughes. Sleeping on friends' floors, she worked as Matt Kirshen's sound technician and Paul Sinha's flyerer, before encountering stand-up and film director Paul Provenza.

The American had started working on his next project, on comedy's role in promoting free speech.

"He asked if I'd be willing to talk on camera and so we ended up at the Spiegeltent, filming for two hours," Black recalls. "I talked about what I do on stage now, except that I hadn't done it at that point, I hadn't started dealing with my personal stuff. Then two nights later at (late-night ensemble gig] Spank, my last night at the festival, I thought, I don't know why I can't tell these stories on stage. So I did."

Even so, it was her friend Jason Cook's acclaimed show My Confessions at last year's Fringe that persuaded Black to drop a contrived set about Dan Brown-style biblical coincidences, Nearly Jesus, in favour of something more personal. Her director, Michael J Dolan, advised her, "the things that really touch people's souls are the things you would never normally tell anyone."

She initially tried to write like Peter Kay, but "I can't do observational. My life experiences aren't the same as most people's." Yet she's acquiring a following, one more diverse than the usual comedy club crowd – attracting "anyone who's ever been an outsider".

"When I grew up there was no-one like me on television," she says. "The closest I've had is the audience on Jerry Springer, Jeremy Kyle or Trisha and those aren't good role models by any stretch of the imagination. Some people ask, 'Why do you need to talk about this?' But if I don't, who will? My girlfriend and I have occasionally been abused in the street but I'm not going back in the closet, because the more people see this type of thing, the more used to it they become. Acceptance is what this show is about".

Fate certainly seems to endorse her – Black's girlfriend, Rosanne, introduced herself after seeing Beth Becomes Her's first performance."Those were odd initial dates, because I couldn't tell her anything she didn't already know. But I've never met anyone who so completely shares my outlook and now it really brings the show full circle."

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World’s first treadmill dancing legal dispute

The Scotsman

Watching the current television advert for Berocca vitamin tablets, you could be forgiven for thinking, “hmm, dancing on running machines, that’s original”. Unless, of course, you are familiar with the music video for Here It Goes Again by American band Ok Go.

Released in September 2006 and viewed over 32million times on YouTube, it features all four members of the band. Dancing. On running machines.

Ok Go’s video won a Grammy and is an elaborately choreographed, fixed camera, single take masterpiece. The Berocca advert cuts between a vitamin tablet dissolving and people rising from tables to dance on running machines in a city centre. The songs are different. But in what may become the world’s first legal dispute over treadmill dancing, an issue of copyright infringement could be determined by comparison of the videos’ individual dance moves.

A source close to the band claims “there was extensive negotiation to use Ok Go” by the JWT advertising agency on behalf of Berocca’s manufacturer Bayer. But this “didn’t bear fruit” and JWT “had no authorisation” to reproduce the choreography. JWT and Bayer have thus far ignored all appeals for a statement.

With Ninjinskian timing, this Friday is World Intellectual Property Day. It is also less than a week since JK Rowling began a legal action in New York against the unofficial Harry Potter Lexicon, claiming that the “sloppy, lazy” encyclopaedia infringed copyright by taking material from her novels “wholesale” and that publication would “open the floodgates” for countless publishing rip-offs.

In March, an advert for the breakfast cereal Sugar Puffs angered fans of The Mighty Boosh when it seemed to show the Honey Monster “crimping” in the style of comedy duo Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding. A “crimp” is perhaps best (barely) understood as a staccato rap performed by a fashion victim and a jazz aficionado, or in extreme cases, with a mystical shaman and gorilla too.

The Boosh’s management company, PBJ, have issued a complaint to the Advertising Standards Agency and Barratt and Fielding performed a derogatory crimp at the Honey Monster’s expense on BBC 3’s recent Mighty Boosh Night.

Father Ted and The IT Crowd writer-director Graham Linehan empathises. He and Arthur Mathews, co-creators of the BBC sketch show Big Train, contemplated suing over adverts for Sony Playstation 2, which they felt infringed copyright of their most celebrated sketch, a spoof wildlife sequence showing jockeys in the African savannah being hunted by The Artist Formerly Known As Prince (that name itself part of an infamous intellectual property case). The Playstation commercials featured various ‘herds’ of jockeys, golfers and ventriloquist dummies in a safari setting.

“We were told it was a win-win situation for advertisers if you sue because it brings attention to them and their product,” Linehan explains. “And theirs was so badly done and unfunny we thought it wouldn’t be remembered.

“I’ve done a few ads myself, worked with some nice creatives and they always seemed original. But there are a lot who simply watch telly, go to art shows and write down things to steal.

“After I made Big Train, advertisers would ask if I wanted to direct an ad. I’d see their sketch and it would be very Big Train, so I would automatically say no. Then a few minutes later, they would phone back and ask for a tape of the show, so they could use it as a visual aid to rip me off!”

Under The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, the crucial judgement to be established is whether a “substantial part” of the original work has been reproduced.

In 1998, film director Medhi Norowzian launched an unsuccessful lawsuit against Guinness and the Irish advertising agency Arks over the commercial Anticipation, which featured actor Joe McKinney dancing in expectation of a pint to the tune of Guaglione by Perez Prado. Norowzian had previously submitted a showreel to Arks that included the short film Joy, which showed a man performing an exuberant dance on a rooftop. Arks submitted a script and storyboard based upon the film to Guinness and Norowzian was approached to direct. Unwilling to “commercialise” an existing idea, Norowzian refused and a new director was instructed to create something “with an atmosphere broadly similar to that portrayed in Joy”.

Norowzian lost his appeal against a High Court decision dismissing his copyright infringement claim, because the court decided that the film and not the dance was the original work and Anticipation’s jump cut editing made it substantially different to Joy.

“The important distinction,” explains Colin Hulme, a partner in the Intellectual Property and Technology team of law film Burness LLP, “is that copyright only protects the expression of the idea, not the idea itself. The courts don’t look at the quantity, the amount of work taken, but the quality of what’s taken. For example, the opening bars of a famous song might comprise a substantial part because they could be enough to identify the track.

“If a substantial part of the dance moves in a video were copied in another video that could well be copyright infringement. This was looked at in the Guinness advert and there was very close discussion of the similarity of the moves. But it was decided that what made it exciting was the chopping of the footage, the editing.”

Hulme stresses that this is “a very complex area of law, but it is fairly well settled.
“Difficulties arise because technology is changing and the law isn’t keeping up, especially in regulating the transfer of intellectual property over the internet.”

Most people have never heard of Joel Veitch. But there is a good chance you may know his work from television and viral advertising on the internet.

“Obviously, I didn’t invent singing animals, so it’s difficult to explain what makes my animations distinct,” the commercials director says of creations that include the singing kittens on the current Crusha milkshakes adverts and singing penguins for Switch/Maestro.

In January last year, Veitch reached a settlement with Coca-Cola after an advert appeared in Argentina that used his unsigned band 7 Seconds of Love’s song ‘Ninja’ and a video full of kittens. The band partially used the settlement to record their debut album, Dangerous, Dangerous, released this summer.

Veitch was once threatened with a lawsuit by Gullane Entertainment Inc. for uploading a parody of Thomas the Tank Engine to his website.

“That were actually very nice about it because it was horrible,” he recalls. “They sent me a letter saying ‘look, this is our intellectual property, it’s a children’s thing and we understand this is parody. But it’s really inappropriate so we want you to remove it’. Which was fair enough and I did.

“Interestingly, it was made before I started doing this professionally. A lot of artistic content on the Internet is non-commercially made, a million music tracks and photos used without permission, with no justification under IP law. But no-one worries about it because you’d be crazy to pursue it legally.

“The flip side is that while nothing exists in a creative vacuum, there’s been a perception that if something is on the internet it’s somehow in the public domain and you’ve relinquished your rights to it. The media always moves quicker than legislation.”

Proof of this comes in the form of 18-year-old Nick Haley, who created his own ‘touch’ advert for the Apple iPod and posted it on YouTube. Instead of suing the British student for infringing their intellectual property, publicity shrewd Apple bought the rights to his ad, (which, presumably, they already owned) and faithfully reshot it, broadcasting it on US television.

The internet is also a protest forum for artists who believe they’ve been plagiarised, with websites like youthoughtwewouldntnotice.com, “dedicated to pointing out those thing's [sic] that give you that feeling of 'haven't I seen that somewhere before?’"

“When you’re talking about individual artists up against multinational brands, it’s not a fair fight, the law is almost inaccessible,” claims Veitch. “In practice, it’s very much weighted for the benefit of those who can afford lawyers and risk going to court.

“But if you’re a popular artist, you can mobilise a groundswell of support in your favour via the Net in a way that you couldn’t before. It’s possible to stamp your feet and make enough noise to get attention.” Read more!

Kris Kristofferson and Roddy Hart

The Scotsman

Roddy Hart’s first studio album, Bookmarks, featured two tracks with country music legend Kris Kristofferson. The 28-year-old has been Kristofferson’s UK support act since 2004 when the veteran singer-songwriter performed his first acoustic concert in Glasgow while filming The Jacket with Keira Knightley and Adrien Brody.

Their latest tour begins in Aberdeen tomorrow and concludes at the Royal Albert Hall in London. Hart plays the Leonard Cohen International Festival in Edmonton in July and releases a new album this autumn.

Hart on Kristofferson

'At the South By Southwest Festival a few years ago, I found Kris playing a secret gig nearby and asked him if he would play Here Comes The Rainbow Again. Unbeknownst to me, it was also a favourite of Johnny Cash, who had just died. Obviously no-one in the building knew who I was, but when he said: “this is for Johnny Cash and Roddy Hart” it was a special moment. I had to check what I was drinking to make sure I’d heard right.

I think of how he landed a helicopter on Cash’s lawn to get his attention, then ended up singing with him and Cash recording his songs. In a way, I’ve landed a helicopter on his lawn, asking him to listen to my songs. That he was at Oxford, then became a janitor at Columbia Records, that he had such a varied career before establishing himself is such an inspiration.

I was starting out when I met him and he’s been there throughout my career. Those early gigs, the spectacle and the pressure, it was the first time I’d been in such a huge show with an established name so there were real nerves. He knew I was unsure how my songs would be received but he saw something in me that meant he didn’t discount me.

He does well in Scotland because of the folk tradition here. Folk is different to what we do, but it’s not that different. Bookmarks was definitely country influenced and I think Kris brought some of that, though I don’t think either of us would define ourselves as country. My next record is a bit rockier, pulling in influences like Springsteen and Tom Waits.

I wrote the song Home between those first shows I did with Kris in Glasgow and Edinburgh. Seeing him up there alone, singing some of his most famous songs, it stayed with me as I was writing. When I first played it he picked up on it immediately, mentioning lines he loved. He later told me he wished he’d written it. I was pleased, obviously, but back then I hadn’t realised how much it was a Kris Kristofferson song.

I sent him it to record for that reason. And My Greatest Success too because I had Eddi Reader on it. I think she’s the Scottish Emmylou Harris and I thought it would be interesting to combine their vocals. Kris’ voice has such gravitas. The moment he comes in during Home’s second verse, you just know straightaway that it’s him.

I’m not the best singer in the world but my voice is distinctive, you can tell it’s me singing. It’s the same with Kris and all those guys he’s associated with: Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, John Prine. None of them have a technically perfect voice. But they’re perfect because they’re distinctive.

He’s taught me that you need to be true to yourself as a songwriter, you don’t need to chase record deals, fads or trends. That’s how he’s lived his life and the career I have is in large part down to him, because he put a seal of approval on it.

A few years ago I was playing in New York and got a call from Sofia Coppolla’s casting director for Marie Antoinette. I was nervous, but I got down to the last two or three for a role that Keira Knightley’s then boyfriend Jamie Dornan got. I never saw myself as a count but I think he got to bed Kirsten Dunst, so I was definitely interested.

If I could grow a beard I would, but my moustache doesn’t meet the rest of it properly. It’s like Springsteen’s or Dylan’s in that respect, rubbish. Every man wants to grow a beard but not every man can. Kris is a real man though, a credit to beard wearers.'

Kris Kristofferson was born in Texas to a military family, excelling at sports before winning a Rhodes scholarship to study English at Oxford. He became a US Army helicopter pilot, then resigned to pursue songwriting, working a series of odd jobs before his songs started being recorded in the mid-sixties by the likes of Johnny Cash and Janis Joplin.

He released his first album, Kristofferson, in 1970 and made his film debut, Cisco Pike, with Dennis Hopper in 1972. The 71-year-old continues to make films and record, releasing This Old Road in 2006. He wants his epitaph to be Leonard Cohen’s: “like a bird on the wire, like a drunk in a midnight choir, I have tried in my way to be free.”

Kristofferson on Hart

'Celtic countries have always been good to me. The audiences, for some reason, seem suited to what I’m doing. I imagine that’s why I like Roddy’s music too.

The promoter for the first tour suggested him as support and gave me some of his songs. It’s the sort of music I like, but he was a little tentative about performing back then. He wasn’t sure he wanted to commit to it. I guess he had his degree as a lawyer. But I told him: ‘the world has enough lawyers. We need good songwriters.’

Roddy reminds me of myself because he’s so serious about music and primarily considers himself a writer. I reckon his name is appropriate because he’s got a lot of heart and so have his songs. But I think he’s got a better voice than me, I think he’s selling himself short there. My voice was so unusual that they didn’t want me to sing on my own demos when I first went to Nashville. Eventually I did though, because the publisher couldn’t afford anyone else to sing them!

I sang on Roddy’s songs because they have good melodies, simple as that. I particularly like Home and was pleased we did it live together the last time I was here. I hope we get to record again too because I think we harmonise well. If I’m still above ground that is. I’m getting pretty old.

It took a while for my career to take off. But there were people who helped me out, like Johnny Cash, who gave me the exposure I needed. I’ve always tried to do the same for writers I like, as I did with John Prine and Steve Goodman. I put them on my show at a New York club I was working and they got record deals out of it. I’m sure Roddy is going to be successful. He’s certainly got better in the years I’ve known him. My daughter, whose opinion I respect because she’s come to like Bob Dylan as much as I do, may well be his biggest fan.

When I first started performing at the Troubadour in Los Angeles, a woman who worked on The Johnny Cash Show in Nashville got me a gig opening for Linda Ronstadt. It went well, so they had us over for a week and a bunch of film people would hang out there. I’d never thought of acting but Harry Dean Stanton used to be there, singing Mexican songs, and he brought me my first script and helped me with the screentest. I didn’t even know he was an actor when I met him, he just hung out there and practically lived at Jack Nicholson’s.

If Roddy is lucky enough to be around film people, I’m sure he could do it too. I’ve seen the reaction he provokes, not just in my own family but with the kind of people I play for. I think he’s got the chance to do everything I did anyway. Could he use a beard to make him uglier? Sure, but I think his looks are something he’s got going for him.'

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Ian Cognito Live

Chortle

'That could be another club I’m banned from,’ Ian Cognito laments as he takes the Glasgow Stand’s stage for the third and possibly final time to close this ill-planned, chaotic yet captivating evening of comedy, music and semi-nude gymnastics.

For once, the temperamental cockney is only partially to blame, with his support act and backing band Skate Naked taking a substantial share of the credit for making this event what it was, a truly entertaining health and safety nightmare.

To begin, we get classic Cognito, 49 years old now, but with the Guinness and the devil still in him. An attractive female latecomer fails to escape his appreciation and he quickly establishes his aggressive rhythm of puncturing liberal sensibilities. Barking out his greatest hits – from taking the disabled to task for parking in ‘normal’ car park spaces to delivering an emotive entreaty on domestic violence, then suggesting Posh Spice deserves a slap – it’s deliciously nasty stuff and the crowd laps it up.

With his greying beard, the sheer violence of Cognito’s rant against the increasing number of blades on razors elevates his diatribe above the usual stock observations on this well-shorn topic, with a killer denunciation of Gillette’s ‘Best A Man Can Get’ slogan to round it off. Admonishing his kids, decrying a career that has never let him near television, veering between the self-pitying and the explosively defiant, there’s a Lear-like charisma to this menacing old bastard, even as he catches himself repeating material, snarling at the front row for noticing.

After a brief interval, it’s the turn of Skate Naked. Comedy works best in rooms with low ceilings, like the Stand. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for acrobatics. Street performers in G-strings, Pete Gazely and Paul Ackerman are best described as the Cesar Twins meets Jackass… with flaming torches and whips. Suffice to say, their failures are often more entertaining than their successes and there’s a grim fascination in wondering whether a man will indeed light his own pubic hair.

Successive handstand arrangements have the front rows steadily retreating and the club’s sound equipment buffeted. Then Gazely inflates a pink rubber glove to bursting on his head using nothing but his nostrils, as bizarre a sight as you might ever wish to see. His efforts to whip chopsticks and a lit cigarette from between Ackerman’s arse dissolve in calamitous farce, with the club’s security staff moving swiftly and angrily to extinguish the latter, but not before the whip brings a series of ominous looking cables down from the ceiling. Time for another interval and running repairs.

Reappearing as a three-piece band, Cognito leads on guitar and vocals, the rock ‘n’ roller he maintains he always wanted to be. Although there’s an element of self-indulgence here, Cognito has a decent, lusty voice and the songs’ sentiments don’t really differ from the stand-up interspersing them.

Kettledrum samples provide a calypso vibe to a track called Life, full of advice like ‘never French kiss a leper’, while among all the bluesy wails of self-regret and rails against the number of comics who’ve turned teetotal, one song stands out simply for its howled ‘Oh no! Oh fucking no! Oh no! Oh fucking no!’ refrain.

Oscar Wilde is evoked in the pursuit of a desperate bunk-up and the evening ends with a proper old knees-up, the audience chorusing along to the notion that ‘you can really get rich with a nice pair of tits’.

‘We’ve never done this show before and we may never do it again,’ Cognito admits afterwards, which would be a tremendous shame if true. There was a compelling anarchy to this show, harking back to an era when stand-up was less slick and less carefully stage-managed, and it’s to be hoped that Cognito and Skate Naked make good on their threat of taking this shambles to the Edinburgh Fringe.

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