The Cat Laughs Comedy Festival 2009

A selection of video interviews conducted at the Kilkenny comedy festival, plus footage from the comedians' football match.

Interviews with Rhod Gilbert, Reginald D Hunter, Sarah Millican, John Bishop, Alonzo Bodden, Eddie Bannon and Bruce Dessau can be found here
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Ross Noble: Like A Tiny, Simian Tommy Cooper Losing His Mind!

The List

Despite just losing his farm in Victoria, Australia to the recent bush fires and flying into the UK on the morning of this interview, Ross Noble maintains he’s completely primed for questioning.

‘Oh, wait, I’ve put too much pressure on meself,’ the Geordie comic suddenly falters. ‘I was about to say you’ve got me at my absolute peak. But if I don’t answer your questions like a young Peter Ustinov ... I’ve overdone it, haven’t I?’

Suffice to report, the 32-year-old ex-pat remains as eccentric, entertaining and endlessly digressing as ever, temporarily indulging my pseudo-diagnosis that his apparent boundless capacity for free association bollocks might relate to his dyslexia.

‘If someone wants to hook me up to some electrodes, lab monkey style, I’d be keen to find out,’ the ex-circus performer replies. ‘I can’t write fast enough to record anything, so I end up just leaping from subject to subject. I’ve always seen it as lack of organisation rather than a gift.’

He has however, just been gifted a new muse, his inspirational baby daughter.

‘Yeah, I’ve had this desire to put everything I see in my mouth,’ he reveals. ‘It’s quite weird because I’ve always had a childlike outlook on things. My old London house always looked like Tom Hank’s flat in Big.’

‘I love having a baby because I get to play with her all the time. I can’t wait until she’s a bit bigger and can join in. At the moment it’s just a lot of face pulling on my part.’

For his new show, Things, Noble commissioned Iron Maiden’s illustrator Derek Riggs to design a typically eye-catching poster, which in turn inspired his hydra-headed, tentacles creeping set. ‘I told him I wanted a big monster with a turtle’s body, wings and claws,’ he marvels ‘and for it to have four heads, all of ‘em mine, chasing me down the road’.

Irrespective of the inherent flakiness of Noble’s imagination, “people and things being fired out of cannons” and monkeys remain consistent preoccupations.

‘Monkeys always appear at some point, less because I’m into wildlife and more because I like Planet of the Apes” he admits. ‘For three or four weeks, whenever a monkey was ready to make an appearance I would restrain him. Then there’d be several people at the stage door afterwards angry that I hadn’t mentioned them. I don’t know how you win.’

Well, you can’t fight your primal instincts.

‘You nearly said you can’t fight monkeys,’ he enthuses. ‘They’re always going berserk, that’s the beauty of the monkey, very little middle ground. They’re either cheeky or ripping somebody’s face off.

'I’m a huge fan of animal attack shows. It’s one thing seeing a monkey attack somebody violently, quite another seeing it do it in a pink lame costume, a little fez or something. A tiny simian Tommy Cooper losing his mind!’

So what are his plans for the future?

‘Probably buying a new house to be honest because mine’s fucked. That would be top of the list, though at least I don’t have to worry about housework for now. I’m going back in June to do some sort of benefit. We lost our home but my family’s safe and I’ll do what needs to be done for the folks that weren’t so lucky.’

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Abie Philbin Bowman: Eco-Friendly Jihad

Metro (Ireland)

“The point of comedy and political comedy in particular is to air inconvenient truths. A political joke by definition is something that someone doesn’t want said or doesn’t want laughed at.”

As the creator of Jesus: The Guantanamo Years, for which he sported a crown of thorns and orange jump suit, Abie Philbin Bowman conceived the Messiah as a stand-up comedian returning for a comeback tour, detained at US immigration then dispatched to the infamous Cuban outpost as a bearded Palestinian with an unparalleled history of martyrdom. So he’s had plenty of opportunity to reflect upon comics’ role as agitators of free speech and the right to offend. Especially as his current show, Eco-Friendly Jihad, is even more controversial.

As a talk radio host on i105-107’s The Third i and self-confessed “hardcore political junkie” who recently sought the views of the Ku Klux Klan on Barack Obama’s presidency, Bowman has, coincidentally, been subjected to delays himself at American customs, endured a bomb hoax while appearing in Belfast and just generally riled conservative opinion. “I couldn’t believe it when the DUP criticised me for dressing in orange and talking about Jesus,” he admits. “It was such good publicity.”

Apparently, the show attracted its best response in Pakistan. “It was phenomenal,” enthuses the comedian, who is the son of political broadcaster John Bowman. “Whatever you say in London, Boston, Dublin or Edinburgh, you’re never going to be arrested for stand-up. But there I was talking about innocent people being locked away without trial just as they were banging up judges, lawyers and anyone speaking out against the government. What’s more, Jesus is a prophet in Islam, so to mock him is blasphemous. Thankfully, my premise is that he’s actually a lovely bloke, smart, charismatic and horrendously misunderstood by those fighting wars in his name.

“If I’d made jokes about Allah I would have had a frosty reception. But while I was mocking fundamentalism, I got the sense that they weren’t laughing at Christianity but drawing parallels. We’re in a unique position in Ireland to understand the Islamic experience, because we’ve also had extremely conservative religion until quite recently. We’ve had our entire culture labelled with the badge of terrorism because of a tiny few who most thought were violent thugs and extremists. And we understand the reality. In places like Belfast and Israel, people can be quite blasé in some ways about terrorism, they’re like ‘yeah, it happens but the chances of being killed are tiny’.”

Having completed a masters thesis on comedy as a weapon of non-violent struggle, Bowman namechecks Michael Moore, Mark Thomas and the late Nigerian writer Ken Saro-Wiwa as noteworthy exponents. But he believes the most successful have been the likes of Morgan Spurlock taking on McDonalds in the film Super Size Me and Stetson Kennedy, who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1940s and countered the group’s recruitment by relaying humiliating details of their rituals to writers of the Superman radio serials.

Although Jesus has invariably united audiences against the inhumanity of Guantanamo, Eco-Friendly Jihad is proving more divisive. Portraying an environmentalist who converts to al Qaeda, Bowman introduces the notion that carbon rapacious Western lifestyles are now the gravest threat to our existence and that their complete destruction is radical but necessary.
“The grim irony is that if bin Laden and the Taliban took over America tomorrow, they’d save half a million lives a year through banning alcohol and tobacco under Sharia law,” he points out. “ And if they wanted to kill as many as the tobacco industry does, they’d have to hijack 580 planes over 12 months.”

“There’s also a fundamental contradiction between the idea of making poverty history and halting climate change. Making poverty history is about transforming Africa into Sweden and stopping climate change is about transforming Europe into Afghanistan. We’ve all grown up with the belief that to be good people we should try to save lives, help others out of poverty and protect the planet. But we’ve gotten to a point now with 6.5billion on Earth where those things are actually mutually exclusive. So something has to give but nobody wants to talk about it. Which is precisely why it’s a great subject for comedy.

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Russell Brand: Scandalous

The Scotsman

Three months on from Sachsgate, it seems apparent that Jonathon Ross’ career has weathered the scandal, give or take a forthcoming £4.5million pay cut, while far from being neutered, Russell Brand is still defiantly performing off the leash.

The consistent tabloid fixture has always skilfully dissected his own press, with an ego-driven personality that he admits “doesn’t work without fame”. Unveiling his new live show in Glasgow next weekend, Brand will unashamedly make the incident in which he and Ross left their ill-fated message on Andrew Sachs’ answerphone its centrepiece, prancing and singing “I am the news, I am the news!” to ITV’s News At Ten theme.

Largely because of his actions though, television and radio comedy is now facing increased editorial oversight and press scrutiny, with the BBC, overwhelmingly the biggest producer of comedy in the UK, perceived as an increasingly unattractive place for talent to thrive. Just ask Carol Thatcher about her proposed revival of the Beeb’s Black and White Minstrel Show.

“The butterfly effect that seems to be happening across the media in Britain over this incident is unbelievable,” Ed Byrne remarked of Sachsgate on Radio 5 last week. Referring to a Radio 4 show he appeared on recently, the Irishman explained: “Just in the briefing beforehand – ‘you can't say this, you can’t say that, you can’t say the other.’ All because one overpaid man and one oversexed man say one thing that somebody let out on air. The ripple effect of it I’m stunned by.”

This is corroborated by other comedy writers I’ve spoken to. One with a string of television and radio credits, who wishes to remain anonymous, told me that “talking to other writers and producers since Sachsgate, there is a definite heightened awareness of going ‘too far’, especially in projects within the BBC. I was working on a TV sketch show and the creator told me that plans to make it a bit edgier might now be scrapped because of current public sensitivity.”

A second, working on a satirical comedy made by BBC Scotland, describes how “a lot of gags written by myself and other writers, after the Russell Brand thing, it’s almost like everything is being doubly scrutinised by the BBC. Any gag that might be slightly offensive is axed. It came across as ‘look, this is what you can actually write about’, which left us with the grand sum total of sod all. It really affected the quality of the show because we couldn’t slag anyone off.”

He refers to the issuing of a periodic “banned list” of subjects by the BBC. A spokesperson for the corporation denies that such a list exists, save for guidelines regarding highly restricted material concerned with matters of state security and what one BBC employee I spoke to intriguingly referred to as “the Royal Vault”, alongside material restricted because of complaints.

Producers at the independent production companies Angst and Hat Trick, creators of satirical BBC panel shows Mock the Week and Have I Got News For You respectively, maintain they are unaware of such a list and have never been subject to it.

Nevertheless, the following example predating Sachsgate reveals how the BBC will inhibit comedy for less noble reasons than protecting a 79-year-old actor's privacy. “In 2002, on a radio show I write for, people were writing a lot of gags about River City,” explains the Scottish writer.

“The BBC issued a directive saying don’t do jokes about River City for the next few weeks because it’s failing in the ratings and we don’t want to put the boot into our own show. Every so often they’ll issue a list of things they want you to steer clear of. Some weeks they’ll say, don’t do jokes about the Labour Party, the Lib Dems or the SNP for reasons of political bias. Sometimes it’s adhered to, other times there's a kind of two-fingered salute and the gags go in anyway.”

This would be amusing, were it not so completely dispiriting to see a national broadcaster, concerned about retaining its licence fee, beating itself up in endless self-recrimination. The unintended comedy highlight of last year came on Newsnight, during the sustained media witchhunt for further “offensive” programming. Presenter Emily Maitlis channelled Frankie Boyle on Mock the Week as she repeated a joke of his about the Queen, asking the BBC's director-general Mark Thompson “I am now so old my pussy is haunted. Is that editorially tasteful?”

Last week, Frank Skinner presented a Panorama investigation into television standards that disappointingly simplified the issue of offence by predominantly focusing upon swearing, effectively setting out to appease yet instead inviting accusations of “dumbing down”. As the comic Sean Lock lamented on a radio discussion of the programme, Skinner – who has experimented with removing some swearwords from his stand-up set – appeared to be endorsing comedy by focus group. Lock argued he would never reduce his expletive count on account of audience demand, only when he himself deemed it funnier.

Rather better was Sue Perkins’s Huw Weldon Lecture, Wit’s End: British Comedy at the Crossroads, broadcast a fortnight ago on BBC2. She argued that British comedy is at a crossroads. But then historically it has always been. To be ground-breakingly funny you often risk provoking offence and “if you tell comedy where to go, it won't be funny anymore”. The comedian did voice her concern about “retrospective outrage” of “comedy starting to accept and enshrine the idea that a viewer can complain about a programme they’re not familiar with”.

And like Skinner, she wondered if there couldn’t be some system of counter-complaint, whereby the mildly chuckling majority can register approval of a programme to Ofcom too. Or if the perennially affronted can’t be familiarised with their television’s off switch. Regardless, the BBC is promising a tougher review of editorial guidelines this spring. Prior to Sachsgate, Jana Bennett, the BBC’s Vision Director announced that there would be less swearing on its output in 2009.

In the short term, broadcast comedy is undoubtedly still reeling from the furore and there is a grain of truth in Joan Rivers’s assertion to Skinner that television will always just be a “distillation” of live comedy. Watch Frankie Boyle or even a less savage comic like Jason Manford live, and they will gleefully inform you how that particular joke failed to survive the edit on Mock the Week or 8 Out of 10 Cats.

Yet comedy is all about surprise and invention, and one hopes the most accomplished writers and performers are forever finding ways to circumvent and subvert notions of taste and the status quo, while perhaps managing to entertain greater numbers of viewers and listeners without compromising their talent.

In America last week, The Late Show With David Letterman finally broadcast a Bill Hicks routine about abortion and religion that was controversially cut in 1993 – a mere 15 years after the comedian’s death. And give a little credit to Jo Brand. A recent appearance on Live At The Apollo, performing a gag about the BNP’s membership list leaking onto the internet, provoked outrage from the far-right party who claim it amounted to incitement to racial harassment.

And Russell Brand? Can you truly hate a scarcely repentant rascal who thanks his audience for “coming to see me in a medium where I still flourish”? “He’s a twat,” my anonymous Scottish comedy scribe rebuts.


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Edging Towards The Mainstream: Jesse Armstrong, Sam Bain and Simon Blackwell

Scotland on Sunday

They’ve co-written two of the most eagerly anticipated films of 2009, controversial, feature-length comedies about a phoney war and British suicide bombers. As the critically acclaimed writers behind political satire The Thick of It and cult sitcom Peep Show, they’ve pilloried foul-mouthed incompetency in Whitehall and elicited award-winning laughter from a man eating barbecued dog.

Yet chatting over a rather more palatable lunch in the smart, upstairs surroundings of a central London restaurant, Sam Bain, Jesse Armstrong and Simon Blackwell admit that they were “terrified” at the thought of 250 Glaswegians sitting stony-faced through recordings of The Old Guys, their new Friday night sitcom for BBC One. More intimidated even than meeting Sopranos star James Gandolfini.

“I was in awe,” admits Blackwell. “This great hairy man.”

“He’s not someone you meet and think ‘oh my God, you’re so not like your character’” Armstrong concurs.

In The Loop, starring Gandolfini, Tom Hollander and most of The Thick Of It cast premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Thursday. Directed by Armando Iannucci and scripted by the Glaswegian with Armstrong, Blackwell and Tony Roche, the cinematic spin-off focuses on politicians and bureaucrats in Britain and the US scrabbling around in the build-up to war, with petty rivalries and cynical career manoeuvring overshadowing an almost incidental conflict. Slated for release in the UK this spring, one critic has already announced that “it might even be the best British film of the year”.

As is their habit, the writers were on set throughout the shoot and former Labour researcher and New Statesman columnist Armstrong recalls struggling to focus as Peter Capaldi, playing temperamental spin doctor Malcolm Tucker and fellow Scot Paul Higgins as his psychotic lieutenant, prepared themselves in rooms either side of him.

“As he often does, Peter started singing Sinatra to himself,” he explains. “And Paul was repeating some of Simon’s lines which didn’t make it into the film: ‘I’ve got a puppy fucking machine, puppy fucking, puppy fucking ...’ Slightly distracting when you’re trying to come up with new material.”

Meanwhile, Four Lions, the working title for the jihadist comedy penned by Armstrong and Bain for Chris Morris begins production this summer for a cinematic release later in 2009.

The pair remain tight-lipped about the extent to which Morris – whose Brass Eye paedophile special caused such a tabloid furore in 2001 and who has spent three years interviewing terrorism experts, police, the secret services and imams as well as ordinary Muslims – has adapted their initial script, aside from enthusing that “his level of research was amazing” and “it’s incredibly exciting”. Blackwell though, who has seen a copy, purporting to show “the Dad’s Army side of terrorism”, describes it as “very funny. It hits precisely the right tone.”

So why then are they so concerned about The Old Guys? Especially as it stars sitcom veterans Roger Lloyd Pack (Trigger in Only Fools and Horses) and Clive Swift (Richard in Keeping Up Appearances) as Tom and Roy, growing old disgracefully while lusting after their neighbour Sally, played by Jane Asher. The IT Crowd’s Katherine Parkinson completes the cast as Tom’s daughter Amber.

“Having that citizen’s jury out there is scary,” says Armstrong of the trio’s first self-originated studio sitcom, recorded at BBC Scotland in Glasgow. “I’d be lying if I said I didn’t watch it and think, ‘bloody hell. Could this work without a laughter track? Could we be more subtle? But it’s the show we’ve always wanted to write.”

According to Bain, “with Peep Show, a sitcom only watched by a million or so people, we’re protected by a sort of layer of cool and the fact that visually, it’s shot in an interesting [point-of-view] way. With a more conventional show like The Old Guys, the audience have got to invest in the characters immediately. Even though there’s nothing stylistically radical about Frasier or Seinfeld, they feel sophisticated because the characters are interesting. That’s our aspiration too.”

Blackwell expands upon the potential pitfalls. “I’ve done a lot of gag and sketch writing in front of a live audience,” he explains. “But never a narrative. The temptation is to just fill it with as many jokes as possible because you want that constant laughter. The danger then is that it becomes like a stand-up routine and you don’t get a satisfying story.”

The trio first collaborated on a failed pilot for the late über-producer Harry Thompson, whose mantle for overseeing cutting-edge comedy at the BBC has arguably now passed to Iannucci. Blackwell, who was handed his first break on Iannucci’s Radio 4 show Weekending, went on to be a joke writer under Thompson’s tutelage on Have I Got News For You. After he’d worked with Armstrong on The Thick Of It, he and Bain, who met at Manchester University, enlisted Blackwell’s help when their workload became too onerous to complete all six episodes of Peep Show’s last series.

Easily inhabiting the self-absorbed mindset of dysfunctional flatmates Mark and Jeremy, played by David Mitchell and Robert Webb, he remains a useful ally explains Bain, because being Oxford-based, he “doesn’t understand London rates of pay”. Moreover, having introduced a gun and the spectre of male rape into their sitcom too, Armstrong is keen to stress that “Simon takes all the credit for that particular episode”.

Although The Old Guys was conceived without a specific channel in mind and actually pre-dates Peep Show, with Bain and Armstrong coming up with the idea in 1999, they acknowledge that Iannucci and The IT Crowd writer Graham Linehan put a “certain amount of friendly pressure” on them to try writing for a more mainstream audience.

“I genuinely don’t think we’ve made any concessions though,” Armstrong states.

“We took out some swearwords,” Bain interjects, “but that was because it sounded wrong in the actors’ voices.”

“It sounded like we were trying to get a laugh from making your granny say ‘fuck’” Armstrong concedes, before adding: “We never had a cast in mind though. But we did feel ‘wouldn’t it be fun to write for a generation with loads of brilliantly talented comic actors?’We reckoned that if we wrote for that age group, we might be able to punch above our weight, get somebody really amazing. And that’s how it turned out with Roger and Clive.”

Despite both Peep Show and The Old Guys having been provisionally titled All Day Breakfast at different times in their development and focusing upon the domestic setting of two bachelors, he reckons that the pairings “complement and rub up against each in other in different ways.”

“One of the fun things about writing comedy is that you can actually forget about their age to an extent,” Bain agrees, “You shouldn’t think ‘right, what would an old person do?’

“You’ll only end up writing all your jokes about colostomy bags,” Armstrong rejoins.

Nevertheless, despite a greater tendency towards farce than their Channel 4 sitcom, some storylines in The Old Guys, such as Tom contemplating visiting a prostitute or embarking upon a civil partnership of convenience with Roy seem exceptionally edgy for the BBC’s flagship channel. And one episode, involving the death of a supporting character, is remarkably dark.

“We were slightly worried about whether the audience would feel they were allowed to laugh there,” admits Blackwell. “Thankfully, big relief laughs followed those early nervous chuckles. Hopefully, in every episode there are moments where you think ‘I wouldn’t expect this in a BBC studio sitcom’. Not because it’s gratuitously edgy but because it’s emotionally interesting.”

Producing the show is Absolutely alumni Jack Docherty.

“He’s a comedy hero of ours, through we’d never tell him,” grins Blackwell, noting that “there’s an awful lot of exciting comedy coming out of Scotland at the moment, it’s like Naked Video and Absolutely in the 80s.”

Early notices have compared The Old Guys unfavourably to another pair of incorrigible old rascals though.

“It was strange when we started production because there were pictures of Still Game everywhere,” recalls Armstrong. “I hope people can find a place in their heart for both shows because they’re very different. But when we told cab drivers in Glasgow, it was like ‘oh right, you’ve come up here to do Still Game. But we’ve already got Still Game, so fuck off!’”

Such frosty receptions should inspire their next projects. In addition to writing the sixth series of Peep Show this summer, Bain is working on a “relentless” one-act play “because he hates ice cream”, Blackwell has contributed to ITV’s forthcoming call centre comedy Mumbai Calling and Armstrong plans to write a film about Rupert Murdoch for Channel 4, recreating “events that haven’t happened yet at a future Murdoch family gathering. Perhaps I’ll have an idea what it’s like after I’ve not written it and the legal team have not okayed it.”

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Joe Rogan: Ultimate Fighting Comedian

Metro (Ireland)

Hard-hitting US comedian Joe Rogan holds a second black belt in tae kwon do and brown belt in Brazilian jujitsu. The Ultimate Fighting commentator discusses squaring up to Wesley Snipes, isolation tanks and performing during the Apocalypse.

Why do you think you’re perceived as a controversial comedian?

Not many comics are willing to go far out. When you start talking about dark areas like government corruption or the positive effects of psychedelic drugs, you risk offending your audience. And when you’re just starting out, other comedians won’t thank you for getting a crowd riled about abortion and genocide. Telling jokes about farts and getting drunk, you won’t develop a rabid following but you won’t start any fights.

Your new TV show, Game Show In My Head, sounds a bit like Jason Byrne’s Anonymous. How does it work?

It’s a really funny show man. The contestant has an earpiece in and they don’t know what they have to do until I tell them. One time, I sent a guy over to a camera crew and told him he’s a news reporter. Unfortunately, the story he’s reporting on, the witnesses have fled. So he has to find people that weren’t there and convince them to pretend they were part of it. Next, I tell him the event was ‘a UFO flew overhead, you were abducted and they performed tests on you’. He’s laughing and saying ‘how the hell?’ But he pulled it off almost immediately because people are willing to bare-faced lie with a camera in their face.

Apparently you’re planning an End of the World Show with the comic Doug Stanhope leading up to the arrival of December 21, 2012. How come?

It’s when the Mayan calendar ends and when many believe our human age will change. All the crazy events in our world, the Iraq War, the Internet and all our technological innovation, we’re moving towards some kind of huge event, perhaps a catastrophe, maybe the next level of evolution. Also, Terrence McKenna – a brilliant man, everything I know about psychedelic drugs I learned from him – developed a mathematical algorithm, the Timewave Zero-Novelty Theory, which holds that all human innovation is building towards ‘ultimate novelty’. Through this programme he independently predicted it would occur on the same date. So who knows? We plan to commemorate just in case.

Why do you enjoy Ultimate Fighting so much?

It’s the most visceral sport in the world, one that stretches back to ancient times. The human drama of a guy fighting for his life, fully committed in mind, flesh and will is hugely exciting to me.

What happened to your proposed fight with Wesley Snipes?

He changed his mind. It was ridiculous but I thought it would be fun. ‘What? Snipes wants a fight?’ If you’re sparring in a gym and punches are pulled because you’re a famous actor you have a distorted perception of your abilities. I’ve fought hundreds of karate and tae kwon do tournaments. I’ve kickboxed and I do jujitsu. I’m pretty good. If I didn’t do jujitsu for two years and let him train constantly, I’d still choke the hell out of him. His ego was writing cheques his body couldn’t cash.

Why do you own an isolation tank?

For self-analysis. It was designed by John Lilly, a pioneer in inter-species communication who developed it to communicate with dolphins. He figured it out while on acid. The water is heated to the same temperature as your skin and you’re in total silence and darkness. It feels like your brain is untethered from your body and you begin looking at life more objectively. There’s some pretty deep places I reach, which, if they were in pill form, the government would try to ban.

You're known for confronting comedians who steal jokes. How big a problem is gag-theft?

It’s a real problem. Club owners let these vampires suck from other artists because they just want the money. This one famous actor-comic, the reason he can become his characters in movies so easily is because he’s an emotional mess, he needs constant attention. He even steals from people who are his best friends! He was the first comic I ever heard of, where, if he was in the room, other comedians wouldn’t perform. Here’s a guy who was super-famous, but because there was no Internet back in the 80s to expose him, if he did your joke on TV, it became his joke. I’m sure he lives in hell though, like anybody on ego drugs like cocaine. If he ever got in my isolation tank he would lose his mind and jump out screaming.


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Armando Iannucci: Skin Deep

The Herald


In a high-security Californian laboratory, men and women of disconcertingly uniform appearance sing beneath a giant pink vat, the looming vessel filled to the brim with surgically removed body parts. This is “man’s highest creation” maintains Armando Iannucci.“The coming together of music, theatre, design, people and coughing.” This is opera.

The Glaswegian writer and producer of such acclaimed comedy creations as Alan Partridge, The Day Today and The Thick Of It, is at Leeds Grand Theatre to see final rehearsals of Skin Deep, a satirical operetta on cosmetic surgery for which he has penned his first libretto. Composed by David Sawer and directed by Richard Jones, the Opera North production opens this Friday, six days before Iannucci’s In The Loop, his debut feature film and cinematic “cousin” to The Thick Of It premieres at the Sundance Festival.

“Putting right what nature got wrong”, Skin Deep has been painstakingly pieced together over five years. Chatting in a rehearsal space adjacent to the theatre, Iannucci can’t disguise his pleasure at finally seeing his work unveiled.

“It’s only now I’m seeing it assembled,” the still-impish 44-year-old enthuses. “I’ve been used to hearing it played on the piano and with everyone singing sitting around on plastic chairs. Only now I’m seeing the costumes and set designs, so I’m beginning to get even more excited.”

Featuring the Dance of the Seven Bandages and the Ballet of Transplant Organs, Skin Deep is the tale of Dr Needlemeier, whose anti-aging elixir, composed of his patients’ boiled off-cuts, requires one more vital ingredient: essence of Hollywood star. After the world’s most famous actor, Luke Pollock, leaves Needlemeier’s alpine clinic “only half the man he was”, scandal breaks and the Swiss doctor flees to America.

Traditionally, opera runneth over with passionate tributes to captivating youth and beauty, though demands for vocal power and range have invariably led to the casting of older, bulkier singers than the plots might seem to suggest. Iannucci has exploited this incongruity before, in a sketch for the 2001 Channel 4 series The Armando Iannucci Shows, in which he imagined attending Ibiza Uncovered: The Opera.

“Richard was watching it at home and thought ‘God, I’ve done productions like that’” Iannucci chuckles. “So he got in touch. We had similar thoughts about what we wanted to do with the story, so the idea came together quickly.”

Since Skin Deep was conceived, the growing popularity of gastric bands, botox and other cosmetic procedures has seen reality threaten to outstrip satire.

“People no longer hide their work, they flaunt it, because it’s about wanting to live the life of a celebrity,” Iannucci sighs. “Parents give 18-year-old daughters cosmetic enhancements for their birthdays.”

He remembers visiting Beverley Hills for a proposed US remake of The Thick Of It, where his hotel “backed onto a plastic surgery clinic. It had a passageway so that guests could be whisked away for their operation, then whisked back to their room to recuperate.

“It was all done quite surreptitiously. Except I was in the bar at 6pm, meeting someone for a drink, and standing there was a surgeon in his scrubs who’d clearly spent the day cracking people’s skulls open and slicing things off.”

A classical music fan since discovering Holst’s Planets at school, Iannucci gorged himself on the library collections at Hillhead, then Govan and became a passionate Wagnerite in his teens “as a reaction” against the Verdi, Puccini and Rossini beloved by his parents. A columnist for Gramophone magazine, he recently took up the piano and remains stuck at grade one, but can trace the effects of his musical exasperation back to his earliest radio work for BBC Scotland. Through 1998 on youth shows like No’ The Archie Macpherson Show and Bite The Wax, he developed the irreverent sound editing that became a hallmark of On The Hour, the landmark radio precursor to The Day Today responsible for launching his career and those of Chris Morris and Steve Coogan among others.

“That BBC Scotland stuff was a product of my frustration that I can’t play an instrument,” he explains. “I’m obsessed by music even though I can’t articulate it, I can’t demonstrate it audibly. Internally though, I like rhythms and pacing, so messing about with audio is probably the next best thing.

“This has given me the chance to mess about with rhythms again,” he says of Skin Deep’s rhyming verse. “Of course, I didn’t dictate what David was doing musically, but we sought a lot of long, languid lines because he wanted it to be quite a slow production. I wasn’t composing but I was dealing in something other than just the words, pointing towards where the music might be going.”

As arguably the UK’s most successful comedy producer of the last 20 years, Iannucci is accustomed to getting the last word but happily bowed to Sawer’s experience this time around.

“Mine is literally the first word,” he acknowledges. “I’m not precious about it, I told David to just chop away. I’ve been getting emails from him saying ‘we need three more lines, each of four syllables, rhyming with ‘ow!’’

Although a creative departure, fans will immediately recognise Iannucci’s hand in Skin Deep, not least in the character of the American news reporter, “a sort of cousin to Barbara Wintergreen” – the character Rebecca Front played in On The Hour and The Day Today – “with lots of puns and wordplay”.

Somewhat surprisingly, Iannucci, who is currently executive producing the BBC’s forthcoming Comedy Vehicle for Stewart Lee, co-creator of Jerry Springer: The Opera, which he downplays as “more of a musical really”, is only a recent convert to the art form, having remained stoically unmoved until he witnessed a Scottish Opera performance of La Traviata.

“I’d always thought opera was a bit mad,” he admits. “But that night, I just thought ‘ah, I see it now’. Live you get the full impact. It’s not just the music. It’s the staging, the acting, the costume, the words, the scenery, the whole ambition of it really.”

Having announced his ambivalence towards Mozart in a keynote speech to the Royal Philharmonic Society in 2006, he concedes that he and Sawer have sought inspiration in the composer’s comedies.

“Well, I’m sort of coming round to him,” he smiles. “The Magic Flute remains one of the most ridiculous things ever though. We also thought about things like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where you begin with very distinct sets of characters and then you mix them up, with mistaken identities and people dressing up. The earliest thought that occurred to me when we started talking about plastic surgery was the notion of face-swapping.”

Unlike breast enhancement, opera is still widely perceived as a pastime for the rich, a fact that roundly irritates him.

“Yes, the most expensive seats are expensive,” he states. “But people pay more to see a football match every fortnight or Coldplay at the O2. Companies like Opera North and the Almeida in London put a lot of effort into making sure it’s available for anyone who’s interested.”

Reflecting Scottish Opera’s forthcoming mini-season in Glasgow, which includes Death of a Scientist about government weapons expert Dr David Kelly, he dismisses the notion that opera cannot be topical.

“If you think about Mozart, Verdi, Puccini and Gilbert and Sullivan, they were all taking on contemporary political and social themes. I remember going to see John Adams’ Nixon in China and thinking this is what opera should be doing. We should be singing about the credit crunch.”


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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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