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Manwatching: a secret female playwright’s liberating look at sex

January 6, 2017TheGuardian

The author of a hit show about desire explains why she’s staying anonymous – and why her play is only performed by male comedians

You’ve written a hit play, it’s been programmed for a run at the Royal Court – and you can’t take a shred of credit for it? You’d forgive the anonymous writer of Manwatching for feeling some frustration – but there’s little in evidence. “I keep telling the friends who know it’s me [and who are sworn to secrecy] that everyone should do a piece anonymously once in their lives. It’s tremendously liberating.”

Of course the part of me that would like to boast is frustrated

Laugh? I nearly died: how an aneurysm led Scott Gibson to standup

January 4, 2017TheGuardian

After undergoing brain surgery, call-centre worker Scott Gibson quit his job to have a crack at comedy – and ended up storming Edinburgh

Eight years ago, while returning home from a stag do in Blackpool, Scott Gibson began getting headaches that were so excruciating he rang the NHS’s 24-hour helpline and then had a stroke while on the phone. They sent an ambulance, but he turned it away and simply took to his bed instead – for four days. As he lay there, one thought kept going through his head: “I must be OK because I’m young and healthy.” Finally, he tried to head back to work, only to find himself going blind in one eye. Somehow he made it to hospital, where doctors diagnosed an aneurysm an inch-and-a-half deep behind his right ear. He needed major brain surgery, they said. The operation took seven hours.

After Gibson pulled through, he was determined to live life to the full – to live the life he’d always dreamed of, in fact. “I always wanted to be a storyteller,” says Gibson. “And, from day one, I knew this would be the first story I’d tell.” So, as a lifelong comedy lover, the Glaswegian embarked on a college standup course and was soon gigging regularly. In 2012, he took redundancy – £632 – from the call centre where he worked to focus fully on his new career.

At no point did I think: ‘I’m going to win an award with my debut show’

Move over Mrs Brown: comedians prefer Alan Partridge and Fawlty Towers

January 4, 2017TheGuardian

Gold TV has polled the professionals about their favourite comedy. But even the funniest of the funny can’t easily be reduced to scenes and one-liners

Surveys of Britain’s favourite comedy – and indeed, Britain’s favourite anything – are 10 a penny; the more so in our click-bait era. The Radio Times ran one last August, which found Mrs Brown’s Boys to be the nation’s best-loved sitcom of the century so far. Now here comes another from the TV channel Gold, in which “comics reveal their favourite British TV comedy moments and characters” of all time. What’s new is that this is a poll of professional comedians, and so more insightful, we assume, than those vox-pop efforts elsewhere. And so it is, to the degree that the sophisticate’s bete noire Mrs Brown’s Boys doesn’t get a sniff of glory. But beyond that, not so much.

The headline winners here are firmly from the drawer marked “usual suspects”, as Fawlty Towers is named best sitcom, and Alan Partridge the favourite male comic character. “Don’t mention the war!” features in the top three best-loved scenes, a category that includes – look away now, Stewart Lee – Del Boy falling through the bar in Only Fools and Horses. The best one-liners in UK sitcom history are “Don’t tell him, Pike” from Dad’s Army and “A pint? Why that’s very nearly an armful!” from The Blood Donor episode of Hancock’s Half Hour. (Given how closely these results mirror conventional wisdom since the days of shillings and pence, we probably didn’t need professional comedians to tell us that.)

Optimism v pessimism in 2017: the comedian and the psychologist debate

January 2, 2017TheGuardian

Liam Williams quit standup fearing his pessimism about the state of the planet was making audiences worryingly apathetic. But is a sunny outlook really any healthier? We sat him down for a session with psychotherapist Philippa Perry

More uplifting culture for 2017

One day last year, Liam Williams locked himself out and tried to climb in through his bedroom window. “I’d done it before very skilfully when drunk,” he says, “but this time I was hungover, so I guess I had that reduced inhibition, but not that derring-do – you know, the reckless optimism of a drunkard.” It didn’t end well. “It was only the first storey but I didn’t have any shoes on and it was quite a high window. I fell and broke my heels. It really hurt.”

The comedian is telling this story to psychotherapist Philippa Perry and me as we meet in a London cafe to consider the merits of optimism and pessimism. Is pessimism necessarily bad for you? What health benefits come with being optimistic? Does being optimistic help you in relationships? Does being pessimistic make you pragmatic about a prospective lover’s shortcomings? If you’re as bleakly pessimistic as Eeyore, can you change? If you’re as misguidedly optimistic as Mr Micawber, can you get a firmer grip on reality? More troublingly, what looks like pessimism to one can seem like optimism to another. Consider Williams’s attempted break-in. Perry suggests that his climb was optimistic. Liam worries it was doomed by pessimism. “It comes under the heading of risk-taking,” says Perry. “Optimists are more likely to take risks – they think they can drive into that gap in traffic or climb through windows.” She pauses before adding: “That’s not necessarily a good thing.”

Capital panto: Ricky Whittington surveys modern London’s malaises

December 30, 2016TheGuardian

A crack cast of millennial comics deliver social satire amid the poo jokes and spoof songs in an alt-panto created by Liam Williams and Daran Johnson

The “all-age family entertainment” of panto is being “doused with ill-disguised ordure,” protested one correspondent in the Guardian’s Letters page last week, in response to Michael Billington’s review of the London Palladium’s smutty Cinderella. Whatever would she make of Liam Williams and Daran Johnson’s Ricky Whittington and His Cat at the New Diorama: an alt-panto with poo jokes, crude social satire and featuring “fuck London!” as its most spirited refrain? It’s not for the kids, mind you: this Dick Whittington retread is aimed squarely at millennials and comedy fans, and – after two and a half hours of spoof fairytale and gentrification gags delivered by a crack cast of hip young comics – few will leave disappointed.

It’s great fun, in short. The animating idea – that the Dick Whittington story offers a bitterly ironic frame through which to view modern London’s various malaises – proves extremely fruitful, as Williams and Johnson’s show mocks the idea that the capital’s streets might be paved (for the newcomer at least) with anything other than exploitation, penury and angst. In King Rat, they find an easy metaphor for the kind of rapacious developer who wilfully degrades London’s housing stock, the easier to replace it with luxury flats when its occupiers are forced out. Whether, in real life, they do so by luring rats to their properties with cheese – well, you wouldn’t bet against it, would you?

Beyoncé to Black Mirror; the culture that defines 2016

December 30, 2016TheGuardian

How better to make sense of this turbulent year than through the art and literature it has produced? Our critics choose the works that sum up the last 12 months

If there is one film that holds a political key to understanding 2016, it is Ghostbusters: that funny, good-natured, easygoing female remake of the 1980s original. The movie, and the way it was received and viciously attacked online, told us something vital about the hive mind of the US’s reactionary right. It starred Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones. Wiig and McCarthy were already well known; McKinnon was the upcoming SNL superstar who was later in the year to become famous for her Hillary Clinton impersonation – but it was the African-American comic Jones who became the particular object of unpleasant abuse, reminiscent of #gamergate vitriol, naturally with a racist slant, though everyone was attacked, and all for daring to remake and allegedly “spoil” the original with a gender switch.

Comedy in 2017: Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle and the French Seinfeld

December 30, 2016TheGuardian

The next year promises a wealth of standup, from old favorites and much-buzzed newcomers, and small screen comedies to watch out for

Comedy is hard to predict – young stars arise from nowhere, old favorites fall from grace, and tastes change quicker than a six-second Vine (RIP). With that crucial caveat, here are few comedic things piquing our interest in the new year.

Whether you’re heading out to a show or curling with Netflix, there will be plenty of standup to see in 2017. After his sharp turn at the Oscars last year, Chris Rock is returning to his roots with his first standup tour in nearly a decade. That tour will eventually result in two Netflix specials for anyone who can’t catch him on the road.

Tristram Kenton’s stage photos of the year – in pictures

December 29, 2016TheGuardian

Tristram Kenton captures theatre, dance and comedy performances for the Guardian. Here are some of his best stage shots of 2016, from David Threlfall’s Don Quixote to Gemma Arterton’s Nell Gwynn

‘As long as there are hairbrushes, people will sing’ – the best of 2016’s webchats

December 29, 2016TheGuardian

Jon Bon Jovi’s key change killer, Gemma Arterton’s weep-off with Glenn Close, the weirdest thing that ever happened to Harry Shearer … here are the highlights of 2016’s culture webchats

Have you ever vomited while talking to somebody for a film? (asked by elalpineclub)

Jayde Adams: ‘Absolutely Fabulous hasn’t aged at all’

December 23, 2016TheGuardian

The standup and 2016 Edinburgh best newcomer nominee on what makes her laugh the most, from Brooklyn Nine-Nine to YouTubers

John Sizzle. He’s a drag queen I gig with and he owns a pub called The Glory in Dalston. He’s more than a drag queen. He’s a comedian, but like one who is undercover. He’s also on Netflix in a movie about east London drag queens called Dressed As A Girl.

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