The comedian and writer on her fear of flying, Adrian Mole and sniffing her cats’ pawsBorn in Glasgow, Susan Calman, 44, was a lawyer before becoming a standup in 2006. She was in the Channel 4 sketch show, Blowout, which won a Scottish Bafta in 2007, …
Continue ReadingThe big-collared clown’s new touring show is a galloping riot of idiocy aimed at children – and they love it. Whether they learn anything is another matterComedy for kids is on the rise. Phil Ellis’s knockabout Funz and Gamez won an Edinburgh Comedy aw…
Continue ReadingThe standup continued his contentious comeback in Paris – presenting a dilemma for the woman asked to gig with himBeing asked to open for a famous comic is every struggling standup comedian’s dream. A chance to be seen, to get a foot in the door. But w…
Continue ReadingAfter a turn on stage as George III, the co-founder of the League is returning to horror to recreate Dracula for TV. What he finds ‘frightening and debilitating’ now, though, is leaving the EUMark Gatiss is recalling an early memory, rocking back and f…
Continue ReadingAfter a turn on stage as George III, the co-founder of the League is returning to horror to recreate Dracula for TV. What he finds ‘frightening and debilitating’ now, though, is leaving the EUMark Gatiss is recalling an early memory, rocking back and f…
Continue ReadingAfter a turn on stage as George III, the co-founder of the League is returning to horror to recreate Dracula for TV. What he finds ‘frightening and debilitating’ now, though, is leaving the EUMark Gatiss is recalling an early memory, rocking back and f…
Continue ReadingAfter her standup success and podcast about death, the comic’s next step was obvious: starring in a cancer-ward romcom
It wasn’t, I assume, the toughest decision in the history of casting. Who you gonna call, Finborough theatre, to star in your new play about a comedian and improviser grieving her dead sister and tending to her dying mum? A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Gynecologic Oncology Unit at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center of New York City (yup, that’s the title) could have been written for Cariad Lloyd: comic, improviser and creator of Griefcast, the award-winning podcast about death. Talk about typecasting. Getting to grips with the role of Karla was hard, says Lloyd, “because I had to keep reminding myself, OK, this is where she’s not me.”
In fact, the play is a 2016 off-Broadway success, whose writer, Halley Feiffer, is now working on a new Jim Carrey sitcom. Its maiden UK production coaxed Lloyd back to theatre after years in comedy, improv and, latterly, parenting. “I’d wanted to do a play again for ages,” she tells me over tea on the afternoon of Funny Thing’s opening night. “But initially, because of the baby” – her daughter is 22 months old – “I wanted to say no. Then I read the script and I was like, ‘Oh, it’s really funny. It was annoying, but the part was just really funny.”
A Funny Thing Happened… is at the Finborough theatre, London, until 27 October.
Continue ReadingSunderland Empire
Exhilarating new material joins favourite vintage sketches as Mark Gatiss, Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton bring their chilling creations to life again on tour
TV tie-in live tours aren’t always artistic successes. Sometimes, they’re more about nostalgia than comedy; sometimes it’s just a thousand people shouting out catchphrases. Neither applies in the case of this cracking League of Gentlemen stage outing, the group’s first for 12 years. Perhaps it’s because they clearly delineate old material, in the first half, and new, after the interval. Maybe it’s because (with Sherlock, Inside No 9, and all that) their careers beyond the League are flourishing; they’re doing this not because they need to, but because they want to. Mainly it’s because what’s on show is just brilliantly written and performed.
The first half couldn’t be simpler, as the performing trio – Mark Gatiss, Reece Shearsmith, Steve Pemberton – zip through a selection of their vintage sketches. There’s the Go Johnny Go Go Go card game with its impossible rules, the dating agency run by a woman who despises her clients, and Pamela Doove’s feral audition for an orange juice commercial. The feel is old-school: the performers wear tuxedos and there are blackouts between sketches. But the performances throb with life. There’s real hatred in Charlie and Stella’s bickering over Trivial Pursuit, real resentment when Olly Plimsolls rails against the theatre industry – and when Gatiss’s “Mordant Mick” leads us on a Royston Vasey terror tour, the twist generates real chills.
Continue ReadingThe character comic switches roles like a regenerating Time Lord in her new Edinburgh show, Faces of Grace – from a wannable Love Island contestant to a cat-loving loner
It became clear to Emma Sidi this year that her interpretive dance about NHS waiting times would have to go. The 27-year-old comic, who has been seen in W1A and the BBC3 vlogging satire Pls Like, performed the sketch in January as part of a work-in-progress show in a studio space in London; Michael McIntyre was hogging the larger room next door.
Many comedians destined for Edinburgh each August put in a solid 10 or 11 months of workshopping beforehand. Sidi knows the drill, having taken two acclaimed sets to the fringe. Character Breakdown, in 2015, saw her play six different roles, including a feminism professor whose lecture, delivered entirely in Spanish, was prone to stray from the topic. At one point, she relates the tale of being interrupted by Dobby the House Elf during some “solo masturbación.” Sidi’s 2016 show, Telenovela, ended with the audience building giant foil wings for her to fly away.
Continue ReadingThe comedian on intimacy, teenage shoplifting and why she hates music
Pascoe, 37, appeared in the BBC series Twenty Twelve and WIA. In 2016, she wrote Animal: The Autobiography Of A Female Body and toured her Animal show. She is now writing her second book, Sex Power Money. From 16 September, she will tour the UK with her hit show LadsLadsLads, inspired by her breakup with fellow comedian John Robins.
What is your earliest memory?
Being in a pram and having a tantrum. I was being pushed and the trees above me were all blurry because of the tears in my eyes.
Related: Paul Whitehouse: ‘Sneezing is an affront to mankind’
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