0:00

Hello, Stu here. Just popping in before the show starts

0:02

to let you know that my comedy special I Need

0:04

You Alive is now available at

0:06

StuartGoldsmith.com There's a link

0:08

there where you can watch it on a breathtaking array

0:11

of places for the rest of the month including

0:13

the 800 pound guerrilla website Amazon Prime

0:16

in the UK and US Xbox, God

0:18

knows how they do that, as well as loads of other links

0:20

to catch it on audio Go to StuartGoldsmith.com

0:23

and watch this show that I am staggeringly

0:25

proud of and do watch it if you can because

0:28

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1:17

Hello and welcome to the show I'm Stuart Goldsmith

1:20

This is the Comedians Comedian podcast

1:22

and today I am delighted to welcome

1:24

back to the show Nish Kumar Who

1:26

has a stand-up special streaming

1:28

now on Sky On Demand and

1:30

Now TV for those in the UK and Ireland

1:33

I'm not entirely clear on whether

1:35

that whole sentence is for those in the UK and

1:37

Ireland But you are certainly if

1:39

you're in those places Or presumably if you have

1:41

access to a VPN of any kind you can access Nish's

1:45

stand-up special streaming now on

1:47

Sky On Demand and Now TV. In

1:49

this episode which is lovely, Nish

1:51

came to my house and we hung out in my kitchen

1:53

and We reminisced about

1:56

living together and the Phantom

1:58

Pooper. More on that later We

2:00

do a bit of a post-mortem on the MASH report,

2:03

and we talk about the MASH report's phenomenal

2:06

rise through digital content and

2:08

the role that Nish played in that, and we talk

2:10

about how things ended with that

2:12

show. We

2:15

get really into some deeply

2:17

inside comedy baseball. You can't say

2:19

inside comedy baseball, that completely destroys the analogy.

2:22

But nonetheless, we get deeply into how to make serious

2:24

things funny. Now, this episode was recorded before

2:26

the Edinburgh Festival, so I was still

2:29

grappling with the vagaries

2:29

of making the climate crisis funny,

2:32

or at least my dread of the climate crisis

2:34

funny. So we'll talk a little bit about that

2:36

and about politics as well, which is much more Nish's

2:38

stock in trade. We talk about how to bebiglify

2:41

a show. That sentence will be

2:43

meaningless unless you've been paying close attention.

2:46

And we also talk about Frankensteining a show

2:48

together through audio recordings

2:50

of whips. Fascinating stuff there. Also,

2:53

there's extras. We've got tons of extras for you. 25 minutes

2:55

or so all about the rollercoaster journey of

2:57

creating a standup show in the UK from

3:00

the secret Welsh festival right through to the marathon

3:02

of the fringe. We'll talk a little bit about Nish's

3:04

therapy. I'm hesitant to use the word

3:06

journey, but journey. And talk a bit

3:08

more about the Mash report and some other

3:10

bits and bobs as well. All of those extras available

3:13

exclusively to members of the Insiders Club, which

3:15

you too can be a member of by going to comedianscomedia.com

3:18

slash insiders and signing up with

3:20

a minimum donation of two pounds a month. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

3:23

So that's that. Here comes Nish. Here

3:25

he is now, in fact.

3:28

Pretend that we're back in the flat in London

3:30

where we last podcasted together when

3:32

you appeared on episode 101. Was

3:35

that episode 101? Over 320 episodes ago. My

3:39

God. It's got to be seven years, right? We

3:42

were in the flat in London.

3:44

Uh, I... So it was... I'm working

3:46

it out on the Bootloss's birthday because

3:48

he's seven. So I definitely

3:51

at the point of his birth... It was maybe eight years ago. It

3:54

was eight and a half years ago because I

3:56

think it would have been in

3:58

late 2001. 2014 because

4:01

we moved into that flat in Sort

4:06

of October 2014 and I immediately

4:09

I went to India for a month Yes,

4:11

like to do those Melbourne gigs Yes Then I came

4:13

back and actually moved and then you Had

4:16

to do that we you had to come and all

4:18

my stuff was in storage and you drove your car

4:20

around I remember we had to put my whole all

4:22

of my belongings in your car. I remember

4:25

and drive it round from a storage

4:28

Unit in somewhere in West London some of the key

4:30

things I remember of that flat the

4:33

Richard Herring incident notwithstanding Yes, which

4:35

is nothing to do that And of course I sourced listener

4:37

questions and of course a lot of them were like so

4:39

who really did shit in Richard Herring's go I could

4:41

was it I thought we I nearly said I thought

4:43

we we didn't do anything on a stress that we know We

4:46

did not someone egged him

4:48

and then someone else who did his shit in his car Was that no

4:50

someone did a shit he because we took he

4:52

and I he always talks about it with me when I'm on his

4:54

podcast But he I think

4:57

it was a point I can't remember

4:59

though it either like trying to sell the

5:01

house or something But they were getting it ready

5:03

and then he walked out one day there was someone

5:06

in chat outside his house Well

5:09

that definitely wasn't us either we're responsible for

5:11

neither eggs nor human excrement Yeah, but

5:13

um, so that was that was then

5:15

and the other thing I remember particularly I remember two two

5:18

key core memories for me

5:20

other than the fantastic amount of hand

5:22

wash you used to get yeah And

5:25

you shower at night and not in the morning that's correct

5:28

Yes, but I get the argument for it now at

5:30

the time I think you were the first person I've ever lived with who did

5:32

that and I was very strange when I went

5:34

around there more Recently,

5:36

which still would have been a very long time long time ago.

5:38

Yeah, there was a Post-it

5:41

note by the door telling

5:43

me the stuff I had to take to be JJ Yes,

5:46

and that had not been moved in over five

5:48

years or four years or whatever it was just

5:50

awful There's a photograph of you and your wife

5:53

That is

5:56

taken in that living room

5:58

when we were living together in it that

6:00

Amy, my partner, must have taken

6:03

on, I don't know what, she must have had a disposable account, maybe

6:05

she just printed out some photos, but she

6:07

always says it, it's still, it's in our house, it's

6:09

framed in our house,

6:10

and it, I think it, Amy always

6:12

says it looks like a picture of someone

6:14

you lived with at university in 2002, like,

6:17

I don't know why the photo looks

6:20

like, I think it's just because the house,

6:22

I kept the house like a student house. It

6:25

felt like a student house, and it marked

6:27

for me, the other big, big memory of that time is

6:29

leaving it, and I think I've said this on the pod before,

6:32

driving away with my wife-to-be

6:35

pregnant in my car, with

6:37

all my stuff in the back of it, waving goodbye

6:39

to you, A Caster,

6:41

and some other young people that

6:43

were there on our steps, and thinking

6:45

I was like, oh, I'm waving goodbye to my 13th, with

6:48

my wife in London, and going off, I felt like the Beverly Hilton,

6:50

he's like, with my stuff strapped to go to the Southwest. So,

6:54

that was eight and a half years ago, Nish, what's been going

6:56

on? I

6:58

guess it's been so long, I thought, we

7:01

did like an insider Zoom thing during the pandemic,

7:03

so we had a bit of a catch-up then, but it's been so

7:05

long, like you weren't doing mash then, were

7:07

you? No, I wasn't, I

7:10

think, so I think at that point,

7:13

I had done Edinburgh, I'd

7:15

literally just come back from India, I

7:18

think, if we recorded it in late 2014, which

7:20

I think we did, I'd just come back from doing some gigs in India,

7:23

and I think I was about to

7:25

go and support, no, in fact, I definitely 100%

7:28

know, I was gonna, I supported

7:30

Milton on tour the next year in 2015,

7:32

and then was gonna do, did

7:35

my Edinburgh show, and then did a tour after that,

7:37

but I had

7:39

done like little bits of TV maybe

7:41

at that point, but not a huge amount,

7:44

and, but I was, I

7:47

was like gigging a lot,

7:49

you know, like I had a kind of like

7:52

flashback to that point when

7:54

I did sort of, I did a, what

7:56

we call a double up,

7:58

where I did two gigs. in one

8:00

night in London and I was

8:03

exhausted. I'm

8:06

knackered from doing that

8:08

and then I sort of remembered that in 2014

8:11

and 15 I used to do that every night

8:13

pretty much. That was pretty much what the

8:18

bulk of my life was, was like doing

8:20

weekend plug gigs and then

8:22

running around London doing circuit

8:24

gigs. Even now when I'm in

8:27

a pub in Soho, there would

8:29

be this moment where I sort of sit down.

8:31

I've never taken LSD and I suspect

8:34

at this point I never will. When I read into it, Paul

8:36

McCartney describes an acid flashback. I

8:38

feel that that is how I experience it. When I sit in

8:40

a pub in London, there'll just be a moment where I go, I

8:42

did a gig here. I can feel

8:45

the ghosts of a gig that I did in those.

8:47

But yeah, so that's what I was doing in 2014. I was doing

8:49

stand-up. I was doing

8:52

tour support with Milton and I was

8:54

going to do, I think we had sort of started

8:56

having the idea that I was going to do

8:59

Edinburgh in 2015 in the summer and then do a tour off the back

9:01

of that

9:03

and I was going to go and do the New

9:05

Zealand Comedy Festival for the first time in 2015. For

9:10

you to reminisce on a period of like regular

9:12

two or two, sometimes maybe three years a night,

9:15

like to us in a British

9:17

sphere, a British comedy circuit, that feels like

9:20

pounding the streets man, literally. Whereas

9:22

weirdly, like I know that you have worked in America,

9:24

you have a relationship, you've broken some ground in America.

9:27

Compared to the way people

9:29

work over there,

9:31

that still feels like only two gigs a night. Oh

9:33

yeah, New York particularly,

9:35

you can just sort of run

9:38

around the city doing five,

9:40

six gigs a night. You know, if I speak to Ronnie

9:43

Cheng, it's mainly for him to

9:46

abuse me and say he hopes Britain collapses

9:48

in an inferno of its

9:50

own making. Which came true. Ronnie

9:52

Cheng bought some sort of weird cursed doll in

9:58

a shop in the mid 2000s and his...

9:59

only wish was to destroy the UK and

10:02

we are living in the consequences of Cheng's

10:04

gambit. But

10:06

he will often be doing five or six gigs a night.

10:10

But yeah, in that period, I felt

10:12

like I was gigging a lot and

10:15

I was having a great

10:16

time. Until August 2013, I

10:18

was still doing office jobs. I

10:25

still had... So you were in

10:27

the first flash of... I was in the first flash of... Oh shit,

10:29

my first time, yeah. I don't have another... I

10:32

remember

10:33

Edinburgh 2013 to... My

10:36

life still is

10:38

built in Edinburgh at Cycles. So

10:41

in Edinburgh 2013 to 2014,

10:45

I remember at one point I was living with Ed

10:47

Gamble and Gamble was like, I

10:49

can't believe it man.

10:51

We're both comedians. We live

10:53

together. That's how you got me. We don't have any other

10:55

jobs and all we do is do stand-up

10:57

comedy. This is sort

10:59

of as good as it gets.

11:01

And yeah, so then when

11:04

we lived together in Shepherd's Bush for that year, I was in

11:07

the first

11:09

flash of the enthusiasm that

11:11

I don't have to... I'd get up some mornings

11:14

and go, I have to go to work. This

11:16

is unbelievable. And

11:18

you sort of run around

11:21

London doing gigs and then meet somebody

11:25

who was doing... Acast has done three gigs.

11:28

You've managed to do three gigs, none with each other.

11:30

And then you meet and have a drink at 11 in the

11:32

night. And

11:34

it was a very good time.

11:37

What would you warn young Mish

11:39

about from the perspective of

11:41

someone who has just lived through the last

11:44

eight and a half years? I

11:46

mean,

11:51

I'd sort of say maybe

11:53

drink a little bit less. Maybe

11:55

start exercising now and

11:58

not try and... for a run,

12:01

you'd go for the odd surprisingly long involved run. I'd go for the

12:03

surprisingly long involved run. That would basically,

12:05

the reason it was long and involved is I'd stop for ice

12:07

cream halfway through. I think,

12:09

go for the actually finish your run

12:11

and don't stop for an ice cream and

12:14

sort out your mental health. Oh,

12:17

and also, bet on Lester winning the Premier

12:19

League because the odds I would have got in 2014, that's

12:22

like the sports almanac in Back to the Future 2.

12:25

Yes, I mean I don't know, as you know, I don't know anything

12:27

about football, but I don't

12:29

think that was a disingenuous laugh because I understood the

12:31

preface. I could have very quickly retconned what the fuck you were

12:33

talking about. Oh, I guess something good happened

12:35

to them. Good, okay. So,

12:39

with regard to, before we move on from the mash,

12:42

there's loads to talk about in the mash. You

12:47

had already been quite a provocative

12:49

stand-up. Like not a provocative in a, like you

12:52

had an identity

12:54

as a stand-up. You're a left-wing

12:56

stand-up. You're making fun of Tories.

12:59

You're making fun of political arguments. You know,

13:01

you were developing at that time and even more so developed

13:03

now, and the special is testament to

13:05

that, that brilliant way that you

13:08

have of being really goofy about, and

13:11

we talked about this many years ago, but being

13:13

really goofy about really heavy subjects. And

13:15

that's, we'll talk about the sort of techniques

13:18

involved in that maybe in a moment. But

13:20

you were kind of set up as a

13:22

sort of adversarial comic.

13:25

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So when, and that's

13:27

part of why you got it. Did I ever tell you this? I auditioned

13:30

for the Mash host. Did you really? Yes, I think,

13:32

it like, it came to me as if in a dream five

13:35

years ago I suddenly went, oh God, it was a shopping center

13:37

in Bayswater? Yes, yes, that's

13:39

exactly right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I

13:41

was, they were right not to give me the gig, but

13:43

I think they were seeing lots of people. I didn't know that. Yeah.

13:46

And it was like, oh, I'm not, this is not my bag

13:48

at all. I just, I've never mentioned that. It was really

13:50

weird to think of like... That's so mad.

13:52

But it was also, it was the sort of thing that would

13:55

have seemed like a fever dream, because the

13:57

production company that made it initially, it then

13:59

moved... within a kind of umbrella

14:01

company, it moved from one production company to another.

14:03

But the first production company that made it, made

14:06

it in a shopping center, offices

14:09

were in a shopping center in Bayswater. And

14:11

so you'd go into this genuine

14:15

shopping center. And this is a prank, I've been

14:17

sent to a shopping center.

14:18

And then you'd get the escalator up. And

14:21

it's where Sunday Brunch used to be, which is this

14:24

kind of magazine format show. But because

14:26

Sunday Brunch is like one of the like- That's

14:28

why it was in that set. That's why it was in that set, yeah,

14:30

yeah. So the Sunday Brunch is

14:32

like, it's a big

14:34

like talk show in the UK and it does shift

14:36

tickets and it was really good for PR. So

14:38

you often get very incongruously famous people

14:41

in there. And I've been on Sunday Brunch once with Jada

14:43

Pinkett Smith. And the thought that Jada

14:45

Pinkett Smith had to see a weird

14:47

shopping center, she must've thought

14:49

she'd been kidnapped. Like it's

14:51

so weird. But yeah, the offices were in

14:54

that weird shopping center. So

14:56

when you went for that, like I suppose the point

14:58

I'm making is, part of why you no doubt

15:00

got the gig was because you had

15:02

the bite and the kind of, it was a satirical

15:04

show. And I'm sure the fact that

15:06

you got the gig helped it become the

15:08

thing that no one quite knew. To me, it

15:10

was a new show. Yeah, well, yes. And

15:13

like, the decision to go, let's go with Nish

15:15

as the host. Yeah. Steered it in a particular

15:17

direction, I'm sure. Well,

15:18

so in 2015 in Edinburgh, I'd

15:22

done a kind of, like I'd sort

15:24

of, I'd always wanted to do political

15:26

comedy, but I hadn't worked out how

15:28

to do it. And I think in retrospect,

15:31

it was because I needed to learn the mechanics of

15:33

joke writing. And the way

15:35

to do that is to, the way

15:37

I was able to do that was just to be completely

15:39

experiential and tell stories for my

15:41

life and learn how to make those stories

15:44

funny and learn the mechanics of how

15:46

to write a joke. And then in 2000, the

15:48

big thing that happened is

15:51

probably just after we recorded that podcast,

15:54

I auditioned for and got the

15:56

hosting job of News Jack, which is the

15:58

only submission show on BBC.

15:59

a BBC digital radio channel.

16:02

Yes. So that means anyone could submit sketches and

16:04

they'd be a host and the host every

16:06

week would do a topical monologue.

16:08

I totally forgot about that of course. That,

16:11

my mum is always like

16:13

you never talk about News Jack but News

16:15

Jack is actually the reason you do all this stuff. Yes.

16:17

Because he gave you authority

16:19

and agency and you get to do a

16:21

monologue like you're opening your late night show. And

16:24

also got me into

16:26

the mechanics of writing jokes about the news every

16:28

week and every week you have to turn over a new monologue

16:31

and also there would be sketches

16:33

and my only job as a host really broadly

16:35

because I was

16:37

and remain a terrible actor and

16:40

like as in I can play myself a

16:43

bit but

16:44

obviously when

16:46

sketches come in you have to do like voices and impressions

16:48

and I couldn't do any of that stuff. So my main job

16:51

was to like

16:53

you know like I can sell a joke

16:55

so as long as there was a line that didn't have any sort

16:58

of accent on it I could do that line

17:00

in the sketch but my main job was to introduce every

17:02

sketch with a joke and because often the sketches

17:04

were about news stories you I was writing

17:06

one line as about the news and I was also

17:09

and I was learning how to work with other people.

17:12

One of those people was Tom Needon who I've been working with since

17:14

I was 20 so that

17:16

wasn't really a challenge. Never stop having to

17:19

learn how to work with Tom Needon. That's

17:21

funnier if you know how to work with Tom

17:23

Needon.

17:23

You know how incredibly sweet and nuts

17:25

and easy to work with Tom Needon. Yeah

17:28

and it was sort of there and you know

17:31

the producer Matt Strong and I worked

17:33

really well together. What does that mean when a

17:35

producer, what does that mean to you when a producer

17:37

is really good to work with? What is that? It's

17:41

somebody that can give you somebody

17:43

that can tell you something is not funny

17:46

without making you feel bad about it. That's

17:48

the most important thing. The most important

17:51

thing that they can do is give

17:54

you honest feedback that

17:56

makes you want to go back and rewrite

17:58

something rather than give up. It

18:02

is such a difficult

18:05

and specific tone that a producer

18:07

has to hit but the tone they have to hit

18:09

is this is not good enough but I believe

18:12

you have the ability to do better. It's

18:15

absolutely crucial. So I

18:18

was doing this show and part

18:20

of the thing that I had got the show from

18:22

was

18:22

a stand-up routine that I wrote

18:25

about Monopoly that was about left

18:27

wing and right wing and it also had a bit

18:29

about left wing and right wing comedy and

18:32

I'd written that as stand-up and

18:34

I think I'd done it on a different Radio 4 show

18:36

and that was the thing that got me the news jerk job basically.

18:39

And so then by the time I went

18:41

to Edinburgh in 2015 I had

18:44

written pretty much a sort of political

18:46

stand-up show. It

18:49

was sometimes like loosely political and

18:51

sometimes it was like culturally political.

18:52

There's a long routine about having a

18:55

you know what a black James Bond

18:57

means which was so it was like a loosely political

18:59

thing but then

19:02

and then in 2016 I went back and did a completely

19:05

political show that ended

19:07

with a routine about me talking

19:09

about something that like being racially abused the night

19:11

of the Brexit vote and so it was

19:14

the whole show kind of

19:15

built up to that story

19:18

and so I had and

19:20

then I got a Radio 4 show I did two series

19:22

of it that was a political comedy show that

19:24

Matt and I did with Tom Nienan and Chyna

19:27

all these people I've worked with and Sarah Campbell

19:29

all these people and so when they

19:31

started talking about the

19:34

BBC then put out this edict that they sort

19:36

of did once a year for a few

19:38

years where they said we want to do a British SNL

19:42

and I didn't really think anything of

19:44

it because they did it every year nothing

19:46

ever of it and then after

19:48

they think they've done it in Edinburgh 2016

19:51

maybe and then in kind of late

19:54

2016 early 2017 I got

19:56

contacted by my agent

19:59

about coming in toward this to host this thing.

20:02

And

20:03

my agent said,

20:06

you should go and audition for the host job

20:09

and fingers crossed that will land your role as

20:11

a correspondent when they inevitably find

20:13

the more famous person who they, and

20:16

they did want a real like

20:18

big name, but they all said no,

20:21

because they all had their own shows. So,

20:27

no, but none of them wanted to do it. So

20:29

in the end, we were in this situation where,

20:32

and the producers of the mash always maintained that they wanted

20:34

me, but the channel wanted

20:36

someone more famous, but then it got to a

20:38

point where everybody decided, oh,

20:42

there's no one else. And

20:45

so then I, my audition tape,

20:48

they thought was good enough that

20:50

they just were like, well, we have to just let him host the pilot

20:52

because we can't find anybody else. It was

20:54

a show that was sort of watched by

20:57

however, like maybe

21:00

a million people or something, which

21:02

is really good. It was like the viewing figures were

21:04

really good, but you certainly didn't think it was like

21:07

anything that was gonna, but anyway, so we did these

21:09

four episodes in the summer and then we came back

21:11

and did six episodes in January, 2018. And

21:15

that is when

21:16

that's when- Was it like a front runner for taking

21:18

bits of telly and putting them on YouTube? How was

21:21

it, were people already doing that? Because I feel like

21:23

that was one of the first things I noticed, where

21:25

someone went, oh, telly's different now. Telly

21:27

generates stuff for YouTube. Certainly

21:30

people were doing it. Cause that's how like

21:32

John Oliver's show had gotten, had

21:34

suddenly gone global. And

21:37

when I was watching the daily show, you used to have

21:39

to like track down weird streams

21:42

of it. It was like something you had to really seek out.

21:45

And, but then certainly by 2017, 18, television

21:49

commissioners were looking for things that would have

21:51

some kind of online, that would generate

21:53

online engagement. And one of the things that the BBC

21:55

wanted the show to do

21:57

was, you know, generate online.

21:59

stuff and also engage a younger audience,

22:02

which the show did. They managed to think the

22:04

production company commissioned research, they say, I don't know

22:07

what algorithms

22:09

they're using to generate this, but apparently our viewers

22:11

were statistically much younger

22:13

than most of the BBC two shows were attracting. And

22:15

certainly it created a lot of online

22:18

noise. So just

22:20

a couple of things from that series, the sexual harassment

22:22

thing that Rachel Paris did and then

22:24

a sort of drawing of Piers Morgan and

22:26

Donald Trump generated huge amounts

22:29

of sort of online traffic

22:31

and

22:32

chaos. And do you think the

22:35

people responsible either for producing

22:37

that show or the people who chose which

22:39

clips to use? I don't know whether the producers

22:41

of the Mash Report were going,

22:43

that's the clip, let's use that, or whether it's like

22:45

a third party. I don't know about that. But

22:47

like one of the things I think is like, I

22:50

feel like I've noticed this quite late and I feel like

22:52

I'm an idiot for not noticing it sooner. All of my

22:54

clips online that have done really good numbers, all my

22:56

Instagram clips and stuff are where people,

22:59

not all of them, but a lot of them are where people have argued. So

23:01

that engagement, you know, all people

23:04

are talking about this. And when do people talk

23:06

about stuff when they want to correct someone, when they want to disagree

23:08

with them? So I wonder whether

23:10

you felt there was a sort of guiding hand

23:13

that was in the BBC maybe that was going,

23:16

oh, that one has gone down really well online

23:19

and we've got loads of engagement and suddenly all these young

23:21

people are watching the BBC. Would anyone like

23:23

to like, I'm just wondering about

23:25

the kind of the

23:27

dynamic, the sort of the loop of

23:29

we say something that pisses people off,

23:32

you know, twice, but they get pissed off and

23:34

they engage with it and they walk it up. And then

23:36

does someone along the way go, oh,

23:38

it'd be good to lean into that because we'd get more of

23:40

it. And if Nisha ends up getting death threats,

23:42

well, no,

23:43

because I can see how externally it would seem

23:45

like that. But having been inside

23:48

that, I can tell you there was not enough. There

23:51

was no planning because there just isn't enough

23:53

time because when you do like a week to week

23:55

topic, we would do six weeks. I mean, bear in mind,

23:57

you know, some of the American shows are on four days a

23:59

week.

23:59

40 weeks a year, you know, I have no

24:02

idea how they do that I guess the

24:04

reality is the money is different. So

24:06

the volumes of staff are bigger So you have bigger

24:08

teams working on it But the amount of people that will

24:10

work on the mass report by the end of every series

24:13

Everyone would genuinely

24:16

look like if you just saw us in the street, you'd

24:18

be like Oh, why is that marathon runner wearing

24:20

a full suit? Someone put a foil blanket over

24:22

them because we'd all just be like just like

24:24

red in the face and why die? Because

24:26

we were so knackered from it. And so there wasn't

24:29

really any time to think

24:29

what is gonna generate like

24:32

clicks not you writing it, but

24:34

I just wonder whether

24:36

There's a shadowy department in the BBC

24:39

thinking or someone someone

24:41

at some level had gone This is

24:44

we well know because we actually got the

24:46

we had the right to pick the clips and actually

24:49

Producers the show picked what went online and

24:51

actually amazingly they they

24:53

picked they wanted the sexual harassment clip to

24:56

go up and Someone

24:58

in the lake online department was like people don't watch

25:01

clips. They're over two minutes No one watches clips over

25:03

two minutes and we were all like that's bollocks man Yeah,

25:05

someone just what we all just watched John Oliver do

25:07

a 25 minute lecture

25:10

about some obscure piece of you know

25:13

Some states rights dispute in America, like it's

25:15

you know, it's such a False

25:18

economy that the idea that people don't watch longer clips So

25:21

the producers of the match had to fight to get

25:23

that clip put up in its entirety Someone

25:25

actually did an edit of it from the online department

25:27

that made it look like we were pro sexual harassment

25:29

like it was Unbelievable. It was absolutely

25:32

incredible and later on Later

25:35

on we tried to contact the same person like

25:38

six months later when we were doing another series of the

25:40

mash and that person was

25:43

not present because they were away collecting an award

25:45

for the sexual harassment So

25:49

No, we yeah, we

25:52

the production team really pushed to have that clip online

25:54

and

25:56

It you know that those couple

25:58

of clips are what sort of put

25:59

the show on the map. And

26:02

did you have a sense while that was going

26:04

on? From the outside

26:06

it looks like there must have been a bit of a build

26:09

up, a bit of burgeoning awareness that, oh

26:11

wow, it's not just the Daily Mail, it's thousands

26:14

of people on YouTube comments and whatever like

26:16

this, it's kind of gathering momentum

26:18

in a way that bodes well for all of your artistic

26:20

futures but also comes at a price.

26:23

Yeah, I don't think I had spotted that

26:25

because I don't think I would have been as terribly

26:29

worried about everything going wrong as I am. Yeah, well

26:31

no, and also just like I think, you

26:33

know, when you're doing those things,

26:36

they've turned over so quick, there's

26:39

no time to really reflect

26:41

on anything as it's happening because honestly,

26:44

all you think about

26:46

is what are we going to do next week? Literally

26:48

all you think about with those shows. So you're

26:50

kind of aware of like, oh my god, you

26:53

know, like the Daily Mail is like writing

26:56

articles about us and the Telegraph is writing articles about

26:58

us and also Madonna is sharing clips

27:00

from the show and, you know, Sarah

27:03

Silverman and Paul Feager talking about,

27:05

you know, which obviously to

27:07

British people because of our constant sense of cultural inferiority

27:09

to America made us feel very wonderful about

27:11

ourselves but it's,

27:13

you know, none of that really filters

27:16

through as it's happening because it's

27:18

happening, all you're thinking is we have to do another

27:20

show,

27:21

what are we going to put in the show? So tell

27:23

me about that, tell me about, because

27:25

I imagine it, I sort of visualise it like South Park,

27:28

like, well, another one coming up, bang, three days to

27:30

air, what did you divine

27:34

as a team with the most successful strategies

27:36

for getting stuff in? When you get to, right,

27:39

bang, we've done one, zero, we've got nothing, or

27:41

is it like, are you ever at

27:43

zero? Do you think, oh, we'll have six ideas, we'll

27:45

put two of them three weeks from now and we'll say that one. So there

27:47

were lots of elements of the show that

27:50

you try and plan in advance,

27:52

like you try and sort of, like the sexual harassment clip,

27:54

we met in the kind of

27:56

week before the production and we sort of

27:58

raised the question, what are we going to do? Rachel came

28:00

in and we talked through an idea with

28:02

some of the writers about what we could do.

28:06

And so there was some elements of the show

28:08

that we could plan in advance,

28:10

but the two, I

28:13

would do a bit at the top of the show in front

28:15

of the screen that we would call a mini log and then I

28:17

would do a monologue later on in the show sat at the

28:19

desk about a subject. And because

28:21

those required quite minimal production,

28:24

those were the bits that we were like, that has

28:26

to be up to the minute. Because

28:29

it's just me talking, we have to leave

28:31

that as late as possible to make it as topical

28:33

as possible. So what we would do is work on the

28:36

lake, we would pick like a subject

28:38

from the week's news and then

28:40

we

28:40

would go, okay, that's

28:42

going to be our monologue. And then we would leave the mini log until

28:44

very, very late, you know, and there were times

28:47

on that show where

28:49

Tom Neenan was the kind of co-head writer and

28:51

he would be on the studio

28:53

floor just rewriting stuff. And

28:56

there were points in the show where I would just say, you

28:59

know, like, by the

29:01

time I'd been working with Tom and Sarah, like

29:04

the more I worked with all that group of people, more

29:07

that they would literally just able to write things in my voice

29:09

without me ever having to check them. And so there

29:11

would just be a point sometimes in the recording where I'd just say

29:13

to Tom, just put it in the autoking,

29:16

just put it in the autoking and I will,

29:18

and I'll just, and I'll go for it. And

29:21

you know, we would try and keep

29:23

that as late as possible because it was

29:26

the easiest bit of the show to rewrite

29:28

and

29:29

rework. And

29:31

you know, like it

29:34

was, it was fun. Like the actual

29:36

process of doing the show was fun. Like

29:39

I had a good time with it

29:41

because people would often say it's stressful

29:43

and you're like, by the end of the day, you're

29:45

making a comedy show.

29:46

You know, and especially when you're making a comedy show about the news,

29:49

you should constantly, because

29:52

you are reviewing to some extent, serious

29:54

things that are happening, you should constantly

29:56

live with a sense of perspective about what

29:58

you're doing because you're not

29:59

looking at things that are seriously happening and some

30:02

people that are doing amazing things to avert those

30:04

potentially terrible things happening

30:06

and so you should have a real healthy

30:08

sense of respect for the people that are doing that and

30:12

you then you realize well and all we're

30:14

doing is just tagging a joke on the end of a news

30:17

story. So this show I'm doing at the moment

30:19

spoilers my Edinburgh show it's a climate

30:21

comedy show and I've noticed I

30:23

found myself writing sort of two distinct

30:25

types of jokes or bits or whatever there

30:28

are somewhere

30:30

it's fact about the climate joke

30:32

on the end yeah and there are bits you know there's

30:34

a thing I'm horrified by I want to express

30:37

and here's a joke on the end such that I get away with mentioning

30:39

it and there are other bits which are like oh

30:42

this section is about

30:44

that it's like yeah or dread or whatever

30:47

the thing is runs through it it's kind

30:49

of it's made of that and it's funny yeah

30:51

did you do you have similar

30:53

ways of kind of slicing

30:56

the different types of jokes you would come up with is there was

30:58

one preferable or was there always a mix or that kind

31:00

of no it was it was always a mix

31:03

because you're trying to do what

31:05

you're trying to do is advance like the argument

31:07

that you're trying to make and then that has to culminate

31:09

in a kind of comedic out because as a comedy show

31:12

you can't just go and in the end of the day the

31:14

news is bad

31:15

and now to commercial like you

31:17

can't obviously as a BBC as well would have

31:20

been nonsense but

31:22

so the first thing you think of is what is the big

31:24

comedy out of this what's the ending

31:26

going to be so once you've got the structure

31:28

you go and what is the joke that we leave the audience

31:30

on you go okay once you've got that then you go

31:33

through and just start going

31:36

line by line how can we put a joke

31:38

into here and you

31:40

at that point will consider any type

31:42

of joke you will consider anything

31:45

you you know and also because we would use photoshops

31:47

and stuff you would think oh if we can think of like an image-based

31:49

thing that gives a kind of tone

31:52

tonal shift and if we could like

31:54

make a sort of

31:56

like if we could make anything very

31:59

quickly how would

32:01

that work? You know, we once, can't

32:04

remember, we managed, we did something, I

32:06

honestly can't remember the full details of this,

32:09

but somehow we managed to like

32:11

edit a thing with David, we

32:13

tried to get someone to do, someone did an impression of David

32:16

Attenborough talking about immigration

32:18

to make people feel okay about it. I think

32:20

that is the root of it, I genuinely can't remember.

32:23

But you would think about

32:25

what is a kind of big comedy out for this. You've

32:28

got your, these are your points that

32:30

you're trying to make.

32:31

This is the flow of your argument.

32:33

The next stage you think is what is the big joke that's

32:35

gonna land this? And

32:37

then from there, you get

32:39

into, and you know,

32:41

like everybody was very good at going, we need

32:43

to just stay on this, because the actual joke

32:46

writing, the kind of what is the fun, that's

32:48

the fun bit of the writing process. The

32:51

bit that was hard was what is the argument

32:53

and what is the big comedy ending of

32:55

this set piece.

32:58

And that was always how we worked the monologues. The

33:01

shorter order topical things that

33:03

we would put in around the show and the bit at

33:05

the very top of the show that would often be the most topical.

33:07

That was stuff where we would, you know, you're

33:10

just looking for a one-liner on it. And, but

33:12

I didn't, I never

33:15

really grew up with the tradition of

33:17

the

33:18

perspective-less monologue. I

33:21

always think about, there's

33:23

an episode of The Simpsons where the DJ

33:25

robots have a thing and the guy, they press

33:27

a button and the automated

33:31

DJ voice says, those guys in Congress

33:33

did it again.

33:34

How do they do it? They're so crazy. And one of the

33:36

DJs goes, how does he know? And I

33:39

was never really interested in, I

33:41

didn't really,

33:42

like, nothing appealed to me

33:44

about the tradition of just doing, you know,

33:48

like one-liners that were just like, well, the news

33:50

is crazy. It was always, you

33:54

know, it has to, there

33:56

has to be some point of view to this. Otherwise,

33:59

why?

33:59

would you watch this show? You can

34:02

get

34:03

just one-liners about the news on Twitter or anywhere.

34:05

There has to be like a perspective

34:08

and that was what I always drive home. I didn't really

34:10

have to drive it home because that was the common thread to

34:12

everyone who works on the show. It was like can we get

34:14

some one-liners in. Also with the nature

34:17

of that show, I think the show

34:19

was a kind of,

34:21

people thought of it as a kind of daily show clone,

34:23

which we even sort of thought of it as a kind of a daily

34:26

show clone, but it was sort of half the daily

34:28

show and half SNL. I liked

34:30

the process of making the show. I

34:32

love all those people, so I

34:35

loved spending time with them and

34:38

so it wasn't,

34:41

it was tiring

34:42

because you know it's a, the money

34:45

just isn't there you know British television to make

34:47

that kind of show. So everybody's kind of doing one

34:49

and a half jobs and that's why

34:51

it was tiring, but the actual process of making

34:53

it I enjoyed

34:55

and so I kind of dealt with it because

34:57

I liked being around all those people. I don't

35:00

think that I would have been able to do the show

35:02

with a different group of people.

35:05

I know how it all came to an end

35:08

and the journey through that and I noticed

35:11

you sent me, you kindly sent me some audio

35:13

of some preview material and when I finished

35:15

listening to it there's a little bit before the recording cuts

35:18

off where you go backstage and someone says oh

35:20

Nish, love the stuff. Hey tell me what happened to the Mash Report?

35:22

I thought you must get that all the time.

35:26

I heard the question and I turned it off

35:28

because I thought oh this bit Nish doesn't know he sent me.

35:31

But I did think you must get that all the time because

35:33

the Mash Report was so big. And

35:35

in a weird way like I think of stuff

35:37

from my childhood I think of someone like Mark Thomas

35:40

in the Mark Thomas comedy product and the effect

35:42

that had on my politicization

35:45

as a teenager, as a comic and sort of thinking

35:47

yes one of the reasons I can never vote Tory in a million

35:49

years, it's just not

35:51

on my radar to do so in part

35:53

because of some of the cultural impact

35:56

of things like Mark Thomas and I think Mash Report is

35:58

probably that thing for a whole

35:59

generation of people, not my generation,

36:02

I'm too old. But there

36:04

will be people asking you about The Mash Report for the rest of your

36:06

life, I would think. Yeah.

36:08

I don't think I have a perspective on... I

36:10

think I spent so much time thinking about people

36:17

hating the show. I don't think I've really

36:20

registered that people liked it. Yeah, that's

36:23

so sad. Which is weird.

36:25

Which is weird. We were just laughing

36:28

our

36:28

asses off. Yeah.

36:33

People just pitching

36:35

awful, unacceptable

36:38

jokes. The

36:40

stuff that was being said in the writer's room. So

36:43

my fond memories of that show... So it's not

36:45

like I have only negative memories

36:47

of the show. My fond memories

36:49

of the show are

36:52

like losing my mind laughing at something one

36:54

of them said. Rachel Parris being mean to

36:56

me is one of the things that makes me laugh

36:59

most. Rachel Parris just

37:02

smiling at you and calling you a cunt is

37:04

the most

37:05

fun thing. It's such a fun

37:08

thing to do and

37:11

be a part of. So my fond memories

37:13

of the show are really connected

37:16

to the process of making it and the people that I made

37:18

it with. But I don't think I have a perspective

37:20

that people enjoyed the show. Yeah, because no one was

37:22

writing long angry jokes in support of

37:24

it. No one was sending

37:28

you... I imagine anything like the volume of

37:30

emails going, Jesus fucking christ, it's just

37:32

so great. It's just so great. It's really nailing

37:35

all your topics.

37:35

But yeah. I'm gonna

37:38

come round your house and protect you. Yeah,

37:42

so I guess I don't really have a perspective on it. I mean,

37:45

I must understand that it happened because, you know,

37:49

it's not as quick as this. But I woke up one

37:51

day and I was doing a stand up show in a fucking theatre.

37:54

So like people must have liked it because

37:56

that wasn't happening before before

37:59

the mash.

37:59

Was there a moment where you first got

38:02

your sales figures through from your tour

38:04

producer when you went, oh fucking hell?

38:06

Was there a moment? What was that moment?

38:09

Like the tour that I did in 2018, I did like, so I toured in 2016 and had

38:11

a lovely time and

38:16

did like a, you know, was

38:18

sometimes selling 50 tickets then

38:20

in like, you know, in obviously in

38:22

the

38:23

Bristol, the city of, you know,

38:26

left wing malcontents selling 200

38:28

seats and you know, like

38:31

in London and Brighton in Manchester, you know, I

38:33

would sell 200 to between 200 and 500

38:35

tickets and you'd be like, this is unbelievable.

38:38

And then that was 2016. Then in 2018,

38:41

you know, we did like, I did like a sort

38:43

of tour of venues of that size and they all sold

38:45

out. And so my tour promoters were like,

38:48

and we're going to put a theater tour in 2019.

38:52

And you know, I think

38:54

probably the clearest indication

38:56

of it was what I

38:58

did a show in 2019 in the

39:00

Hackney empire. So one of the, I released two

39:03

albums and one of them is 2016, the end of that tour

39:05

that I

39:08

recorded in a theater in London. And the other

39:10

one is the end of the 2019 tour

39:12

in the Hackney empire and the Hackney empire.

39:15

It's like 1200 seats and

39:17

it's the first place I ever saw live comedy.

39:19

I went to see the goodness gracious me live show there in 1999

39:23

with my parents, brother, and

39:25

like my cousins and my uncle and

39:27

like, you know, goodness gracious me was like live

39:29

was like,

39:31

you know, it was like

39:33

white people going to see Mumford and Sons.

39:35

Like it was like a sort of like, it was a community

39:38

trip that everyone made. It

39:43

really was like, genuinely, you'd see like

39:45

four generations of South Asian

39:47

families in the audience. And

39:50

it was the first time I ever saw live comedy. And

39:52

I remember doing a show in

39:54

Hackney

39:56

and my parents were there and my brother was

39:58

there. And I remember that was

39:59

when I remember thinking, oh,

40:01

that's amazing.

40:04

That's really amazing. Like,

40:08

this is literally where, probably

40:10

on some level, even though I've been 13 or 14, but

40:13

probably I sort of sat in

40:15

the audience

40:17

at that show and some part of my brain was like, you've

40:20

got to do this. You've got

40:22

to do this with your life. Even though I didn't really know it

40:24

at the time, some part of my

40:26

brain must have been like,

40:28

this is what you have

40:30

to try and do

40:31

with your life.

40:33

When you sold out the Hackney empire,

40:36

did you think at the time of

40:38

young niches in the audience being

40:41

similarly turned on? Like, did you, or

40:43

like, because partly

40:46

what you do has a kind of rallying

40:48

element. And you said in that clip you sent me

40:51

of some of the new stuff. I don't know if it's Ad lib,

40:53

what you said before about there's a strong possibility

40:55

now that all of your gigs, it turns into a rally. There

40:58

are people really, there are people heckling you

41:00

because they agree with you so hard and

41:02

they want you to know, and they're like, you've got my vote.

41:04

You're like, shut up, I'm busy doing this show. These

41:07

are the people that Ellis James has referred to

41:08

as my braying disciples. Yeah.

41:14

So there is, there's that quality

41:17

to it. That Hackney empire one, did

41:19

you start to feel or do you feel a kind

41:22

of responsibility because people

41:24

are,

41:26

I'm not going to use the word pilgrimage, but

41:28

people are, people are, you know, their hopes are recreating

41:30

around something. It's not simply, you know, if

41:32

I go see John Mulaney, I'm going to go, oh, this,

41:34

I'm going to go, this is, this is great. This speaks

41:37

to me, love this guy. But I'm not

41:39

going to go, and I want to take action

41:41

as a result of it.

41:42

Yeah, I don't, I don't know if I

41:44

think about that. I do definitely

41:46

think, because there was a point in that

41:48

show where I would, it

41:51

wasn't something that I planned to do, but

41:54

there was some like, there was some like fruity

41:56

material in that show. I can't remember what

41:58

this, there was like a couple of jokes that were. like pretty,

42:01

like I don't work blue, a huge

42:03

amount. But

42:06

there was some like, you know, there was some pretty fruity

42:09

bits to that show. And what I

42:11

had to do when I started touring it was

42:13

engage the child in the, there would always

42:16

be a couple of children in the room. And I don't

42:18

know whether that was a, that was sort of the consequence

42:21

of kids watching The Mash Report online, which

42:23

is a big thing. And also I did- Is your mum touring

42:25

local schools to bring children in? So you clean up

42:27

that? Yeah, I think so, I guess so. But

42:30

also I did Taskmaster. Of course,

42:32

of course. Back when doing Taskmaster actually meant something.

42:34

Sure, well

42:34

mate, I did the first two ever- You did the

42:37

original. The original task, the only Taskmaster,

42:39

some would say, yeah, sure. You did the proper one. And

42:43

I think Taskmaster obviously

42:45

brings families to the show. And

42:49

the problem was never the kid, because

42:51

the 14 year old, and I never worried

42:54

about it, because like people would sometimes say, oh my God, there

42:56

was like a 13 year old in there. Was that distracting

42:58

for you? And I was like, no, because I was the 13 year old who

43:01

went to watch Goodness, Greatness, Me, Love. And your

43:03

answer is, it's distracting for you, the

43:04

person you said so. Yeah, it's distracting for you. And also, yeah,

43:07

so I had to develop a bit of material, basically to

43:09

make the rest of the audience okay. Especially

43:11

because that year I was doing a work in progress show in

43:14

the monkey barrel in Edinburgh, a perfect

43:16

stand up comedy room. And, but

43:18

the audience can see each other. So the audience would be

43:21

looking at this kid, but

43:23

I never had any worries about it. Because like when I was 15

43:25

and 16, my uncle used to sneak me

43:27

into comedy club. I say sneak, basically

43:29

people on the door just didn't give a shit. Like I

43:32

distinctly remember my uncle, like once

43:34

some

43:34

guy saying to my uncle, like is he 18? And I go, yeah,

43:37

and the guy going, whatever. Like they were not checking.

43:41

I used to go

43:42

to Ivo Dembina's club in

43:45

Hampstead, in the Washington when I was- Kids

43:47

comedian Ivo Dembina. Yeah, kids comedian, yeah, exactly,

43:49

so funny. But yeah, I used to go to, I don't

43:51

think I've ever, I've played football with Ivo every week. I

43:53

don't think I've ever told him this. But he used

43:55

to run that club in the Washington in Hampstead. And

43:58

my uncle, my cousins used to live around.

43:59

And so they used to sneak me

44:02

in

44:02

to watch stand-up comedy and I've

44:05

been a little kid in a comedy

44:07

room Yeah, so I'm never worried about the kid

44:09

because I was like I know you I don't but

44:12

the rest of you The audience

44:15

is looking at the kid and going And

44:18

you're like this fucking kid knows more of what

44:20

I've done than you And

44:22

sometimes the parents and like there was a point

44:25

at the start of that show where I'd come out and be like There's

44:27

fucking gum this that and the other and obviously

44:29

like swearing and all this kind of stuff and

44:31

the kid would obviously

44:32

But the 14 year old is sat in a room

44:35

and an adult is saying cunt It's

44:37

the happiest they ever are in their lives, but

44:39

the parents would often be like oh We

44:42

didn't sign up for this So I had to develop a bit material

44:44

where we're trying to interact with a child in the

44:46

room to kind of diffuse the tension

44:48

In it so I was always cognizant

44:51

and like every show there would be like a 13

44:53

or 14 year old in every show

44:58

So this is Nish comedian and great

45:00

friend and certainly my friend and it's a joy

45:02

to talk to him And you mustn't miss his

45:04

special. It's called your power your control It

45:07

is his first stand-up special and it's streaming

45:09

now on Sky TV and

45:12

now TV and it aired a few A

45:14

few when did it air like for a

45:17

while in a time you hear this probably about 10 days

45:19

ago Sorry Nish. Sorry Nish fans.

45:21

This was supposed to be time to coincide with it But

45:24

because we videoed the whole of this

45:26

interview in a thing Which is very new for

45:28

me and the role of producer Nathan is being

45:30

played by producer Callum for this episode

45:32

because he very Kindly put the

45:35

put all the video together You can find that by

45:37

following the link in the show notes And so if you prefer

45:40

to enjoy this episode of the podcast in video

45:42

form you can now do that and you can see Nish

45:45

and I good foring throughout one

45:47

another's company and more coming up

45:49

soon from Nish in this episode Remember

45:52

you can now listen.

45:54

I'm gonna at some point do a big I'm

45:56

just I've tripped myself up by wondering

45:58

whether I should do the big fringe debrief

46:00

now. I probably should leave it a bit because as

46:02

it is I drove home from Edinburgh yesterday

46:05

it was 330 miles and it took 10 hours so I'm not best

46:09

placed to do a big roundup. I'll do either a special

46:12

episode or do some good post-ampling

46:14

sometime soon

46:16

but it's something

46:19

that for all the floors in that festival it makes

46:21

me it just gives me cause to reflect on how

46:23

someone in Nish's position was able to

46:26

use that festival and the circuit and

46:28

just leap from strength to strength.

46:30

It's been a great joy being his

46:32

friend and seeing the moves

46:34

he made, the decisions he made, his

46:37

sort of... he's really... I mean

46:39

I talk a lot on the show about kind of work

46:41

ethic and Nish has loads of that but

46:44

also I think he's just very smart

46:46

about the decisions

46:46

he makes and he gets

46:48

the best

46:51

out of himself. He really pushes himself

46:54

and he's really

46:56

like he really has a cause and an agenda

46:59

and I think that that does feel

47:01

to me like it's something that can really

47:03

sustain one through some of the harder bits of stand-up

47:06

comedy. So more from Nish in

47:08

just a second. You can find everything

47:10

you need about this podcast at comedianscomedian.com.

47:13

Comedianscomedian.com slash insiders if you wish to

47:16

download the extras of this episode and hundreds

47:18

of hours of other extras from previous episodes

47:21

and of course you can go to stewartgoldsmith.com

47:24

to... well you can just sort of go

47:26

and look at that.

47:29

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47:32

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gonna be great.

48:02

Why don't you go and look at that? Let's

48:04

get back to Nish. I

48:07

do think I have a responsibility. I

48:08

have a strong responsibility in that room.

48:11

People have paid 20 quid,

48:13

sometimes 25 quid,

48:15

and you have a responsibility to do

48:17

a really fucking good show. That's

48:20

the responsibility that I always feel. When

48:22

you start doing... When people

48:25

start paying... You know, when you do a club

48:27

night and there's four comedians on, you don't

48:29

feel the burden of responsibility because you go,

48:31

at the end of the day, they're going to get someone

48:34

good. If you go to

48:36

a stand-up night and you don't like... It's very

48:38

rare that you could go to a stand-up comedy night

48:40

and like no one on the bill and there's nothing

48:42

for you. The responsibility

48:45

is

48:45

spread across a group of comedians. I understand

48:47

that, but again, I think you answered

48:50

the question first about children and swearing

48:52

and now about money. I mean specifically

48:54

the people for whom... And in that clip of the new

48:57

stuff, there is... It's a joke,

48:59

but there is a truth to it. There is a rally. People

49:01

are letting off steam. We've had 13 years of the Tories

49:03

and you're coming out and calling them cunts and people are going, yes,

49:06

testify. They really care.

49:08

It's a pressure release

49:11

and they're like, God, yeah, these are people who aren't necessarily...

49:13

Some of them are overtly political in their lives

49:15

and some of them... There is a whole ecosystem

49:18

of politicization there to give you the degrees.

49:21

I'm just interested in whether

49:23

to you it's like

49:24

that's a byproduct of me

49:26

saying what I want to say or whether you

49:29

recognize that what you are saying feeds

49:31

into that and has an effect on people. I think

49:33

that both of those things are true. I think

49:36

when I'm writing a show and trying to get it together, I think

49:39

my responsibility is to do a great show and the byproduct

49:42

sometimes is that people come and they feel that they've had

49:44

their views aired in the company

49:46

of... And also like,

49:49

yeah, I feel that there's a responsibility to

49:51

do a good show and the byproduct sometimes

49:53

is that people feel that they connected with it

49:55

politically. In terms of the last

49:57

13 years and especially the last few years... doing

50:00

shows, you know, like, and

50:04

the feeling in the room sometimes

50:07

of like a valve

50:09

being released. That's

50:12

not something I feel responsible

50:14

for, that's something I sort of feel part

50:17

of. Like I, so

50:19

people will come see me do some

50:22

of the shows where I'm like shouting the whole time and

50:24

they're like,

50:25

do you find that tiring? And I always

50:27

say, no, I don't because you all are

50:29

as angry as I am. The audience

50:31

is angry as me. We're all furious. And

50:34

I get to do

50:36

the thing that we all want to do, which is just

50:38

scream

50:39

what the fuck over and over again. And

50:41

so like, I have felt certainly,

50:44

but I don't feel responsible for that. I sort

50:46

of feel part of that because that's

50:48

partly,

50:50

that's not me doing that. That's

50:52

the room, all of us collectively in the room

50:55

participating in it.

50:56

Like I'm not, because

50:59

it's a byproduct of something that I'm trying to do, what

51:01

I'm trying to do is just write really like the funny,

51:03

like a funniest show that I can possibly write.

51:06

And the byproduct is this like feeling of,

51:09

you know, relief.

51:13

But I'm, I am also relieved

51:17

in that way. I'm a participant in it rather

51:19

than an instigator of it, in my head. Like

51:21

I feel

51:23

the shows are cathartic for me.

51:26

And I hope they're cathartic for the audience. That's

51:29

really interesting. I'm specifically

51:32

because I'm doing a show at the moment, which

51:34

is different to any other show I've done. Those ones were

51:36

all about kind of like, I'm struggling with this here. Yeah,

51:38

come and see me struggle with this. Perhaps you are as well

51:40

fine. Yeah, this one is so overtly,

51:43

holy shit, the climate in a really

51:45

terrible state. Yeah. And if

51:47

you say so, you feel like a bit of a ranting weirdo,

51:50

shut up and down the country for the last year

51:52

and a half. Well, I've been trying to make it work to an

51:54

audience that weren't expecting to hear about

51:56

it. I'm really

51:59

when I watched your special. two days ago I watched

52:01

that kind of advanced copy which looks great Paul's

52:03

set fantastic that image.

52:06

Let me tell you something Stuart

52:09

Law's and Al Clayton are very good at their jobs.

52:12

Very very good at their jobs. The

52:15

turtle canyon who made all of the Acaster

52:17

specials. They're

52:19

just very good they know exactly what

52:21

they're doing and

52:23

you know you sort of like

52:26

you give them kind of half an idea

52:28

of like I want to do something maybe with like the

52:31

sort of British flag is something

52:35

has happened to it and it's distressed and then

52:37

what comes back is the set of the set of the show

52:40

looks like the flag has exploded

52:42

behind me. It's great.

52:44

White mic and cable. Well

52:47

this is easy there Acaster. Also what

52:49

the funniest thing about that is I can't remember why

52:51

I said it almost certainly I said this to my girlfriend because

52:54

of the withering tone contained within it.

52:57

She just said no one is going to notice this

52:59

but if you look at the set obviously the set

53:01

behind me that was for the

53:04

filming. That was built and

53:06

constructed for the like for

53:08

the process of filming it and

53:11

Paul Bertolotti helped put all that together

53:13

and he was my tour manager for a couple

53:14

of years and so it was like

53:16

nice to work with great to work with him as well but

53:19

Stuart and Al like they just know what they're doing but

53:22

for the tour shows I didn't have the set but what

53:24

I do have is a

53:26

maroon suit, a blue shirt,

53:29

everything on the stage is red white and blue but

53:31

the colors are either brighter or inverted

53:35

in some way so like instead of red it's a

53:37

kind of purpley maroon instead of the dark

53:39

blue it's a light blue and the white and

53:41

that's why that's why the mic and

53:43

the stand are white and the

53:44

stool is white so you the because

53:47

this show kind of is like

53:49

a it's like a sort of it's

53:51

sort of my attempt at a kind of it's

53:54

me desperately trying to do a Mike Babiglia show

53:56

but

53:56

sort of falling short because it's like a story

53:59

show but then it ends up being a thing

54:01

about like nationalism and

54:03

how I feel about that. And so because

54:05

of that, I thought, oh, that would be a nice thing.

54:07

And like, I was

54:10

like, no one is gonna notice that. But the

54:12

important thing is I noticed it. And

54:14

it was for me. And that's why I did

54:16

it.

54:17

When you're, so the point

54:19

we wanted to make about that, about

54:21

the show and about the, you're

54:25

talking and for,

54:28

like in terms of like the finished product, like I haven't

54:30

seen this, the stuff you're working up at the moment, is that's

54:32

kind of been worked on the moment. That as a finished product,

54:35

as the kind of the pinnacle of Nishi's

54:37

finished products,

54:39

you are managing to talk about really serious

54:41

stuff in a really goofy way that activates

54:44

and inspires people. And that's what I'm gonna do

54:46

with my thing that I'm doing at the moment, more

54:48

so than ever before. I feel like, oh, I'm

54:51

so glad I saw that because now I feel

54:53

like, oh, my stuff isn't goofy enough.

54:55

It's, you know, like- Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you know

54:57

who I got all that from. Go on. I've

54:59

got like, I mainly

55:02

got that stuff from like Chris

55:04

Rock, because Chris Rock is a like

55:06

squeaky voiced man of color who talks

55:09

about

55:09

the news, but has a kind of like, it's

55:11

a sort of shrill cartoonish guy. I mean, like,

55:14

I really liked Tambreen and I really liked the

55:16

way it was made. And I really liked the fact that deliberately,

55:19

you know, he doesn't have a mic cable and

55:22

he's not wearing the suit. And it's more of a

55:24

vulnerable special because it's a divorce material. And

55:27

also like the stage is not really big

55:29

enough for him to prowl in the way that he prowls the

55:31

stage. He looks like a cornered animal. Like

55:33

it looks, it makes him look more vulnerable.

55:36

But I grew up watching those 90s HBO

55:38

Chris Rock specials.

55:39

And you know, at the

55:41

end of the day, it's a man with a squeaky

55:43

voice talking about the news. So

55:46

there's a huge amount of that. And then there's a massive

55:49

amount of Bridget Christie. There's a huge

55:51

amount. And because a bit for

55:53

her,

55:54

what happened when I

55:57

was into a comedy career, I...

55:59

definitely felt

56:01

like I saw Bridget. You

56:03

know, there was a film that she

56:05

did in her 2014 show where

56:08

she talked about female

56:10

genital mutilation, you know, and it does not

56:12

get more serious, you know, as

56:14

a subject than that, but she somehow managed

56:17

to do it in a way that didn't undermine the seriousness

56:19

of what she was talking about. But Bridget

56:21

is also a clown, she's a goofball.

56:23

You know, if you talk to Bridget, she doesn't,

56:26

you know, she's

56:28

fun and she's silly and she's

56:31

not like, she's

56:34

a goofball.

56:35

It's not earnest. No.

56:38

That's the thing, and I'm finding myself, like

56:41

when it goes wrong, it's because it's become earnest.

56:43

Yeah. Because I'm trying to find the lightness

56:46

and the goofiness of it. I'm not watching your show

56:48

thinking I'm gonna be more like Nish. I'm watching it and going,

56:50

he's managing to sell the thing,

56:52

have fun, change people's

56:55

minds, or you know, or

56:57

celebrate people who already agree. Yeah.

56:59

And I really am aspiring to that

57:01

more than ever. And it's a case of how to find

57:04

that, how to find the clown. So my partner

57:06

Amy

57:07

said, you know, around 2014, 15, she started to say, you're

57:11

starting to be a bit more like you are off stage.

57:13

Like the closest version, like

57:15

there was a sort of version of me that existed in clips

57:20

and on stage a little bit that was like

57:22

this kind of serious version of me. And

57:24

then there was like the version of me that then

57:26

popped up in Taskmaster, which as Ed Gamble is fond

57:28

of saying, is the closest, that

57:30

is what you're like. You're a

57:32

man who like throws a fucking

57:35

coconut and then just runs around

57:37

screaming. Like you're an idiot. It's

57:40

like, you're the biggest idiot, I know. Yeah.

57:43

And so the like, for me, as

57:46

a standup, the growth

57:49

of my,

57:51

the gigs just started going better when I started closing

57:54

the gap between those two people, between the Lake,

57:59

Mash Report. sat in a suit

58:01

version of myself and then the

58:04

Taskmaster version of myself. For one of a

58:06

better term,

58:07

those two, when I started closing the gap and

58:09

incorporating both of those people,

58:12

you know, there's like, there's just

58:14

a bit in the show where I'm just like lying

58:16

on the floor and then I sort of sit up and

58:18

just have this like expression on my face. I look like

58:20

a cartoon frog and I

58:23

sent the still of it to a friend of mine and

58:26

she made

58:28

it to my friend Charlie and she's made it

58:31

one of her phone background images because she's

58:33

like, that's like so purely you. And

58:36

so that was, that was what

58:39

I was

58:39

trying to do, not trying

58:42

to do consciously, but that was why

58:44

I started having more fun on stage

58:47

and the gig started going better

58:49

because I sort of started to embrace

58:52

the idea and like I feel

58:54

like it was always something I wanted

58:57

to do

58:57

because of Chris Rock and it was something

59:00

that Bridget sort of gave me permission to

59:02

do, you know, and like

59:07

Bridget, Bridget has given me some like pretty critical

59:10

direct advice in my career, you know, like in

59:12

my 2016 show I was doing

59:14

the Brexit story about two thirds of the way in and she,

59:17

we did a preview together and she was like, why the hell

59:19

are you, that's the end of the show. No one cares

59:21

about anything else after you told that story. So,

59:23

and that's how she speaks to me.

59:26

But she

59:28

watching her I think gave me permission to kind of

59:31

go, oh I can still do serious

59:33

subjects but I can still be myself

59:35

whilst talking about it. There's no point in me trying to pretend

59:38

that I am Bill Hicks. You know, like Bill, it

59:40

makes sense for Bill Hicks or for

59:43

like Stuart Lee to be like, I'm a serious

59:45

guy because they are serious guys, they're serious

59:47

guys and they're, you know, and

59:49

then they kind of, the sort of clownier elements come

59:51

through in different ways but I'm like,

59:54

I'm like a, you know, like a

1:00:01

my mum always says I don't think children realize that

1:00:03

you're an adult they just look at you and they just think

1:00:06

that big child has got out of hand like

1:00:08

I don't think that my your children don't register

1:00:11

me as an adult they

1:00:15

just think why has that big child

1:00:17

got a beard? yeah sure and so

1:00:19

that's because you walk in the door and go but I

1:00:21

so I like to do that and I also

1:00:23

like to talk about corporation tax

1:00:26

and

1:00:30

I

1:00:32

think the slow journey

1:00:35

for me has been the realization that I can

1:00:37

do both of those things.

1:00:38

So what's the relationship between

1:00:41

the political thing the corporation tax

1:00:43

the buzz kid on the whatsapp kind of guy yeah yeah

1:00:45

yeah the big child that's a phrase

1:00:47

I use in the show that's not Stuart just really slamming

1:00:49

me it

1:00:52

is a phrase from the show which I'd noted down and

1:00:54

then you came here and mentioned you were a buzzkill

1:00:56

about something before we set up on which I guess very

1:00:58

funny you said it yourself you the relationship

1:01:00

yeah well during the pandemic my agent

1:01:03

said I have to stop talking to you on the phone because

1:01:05

she's like really fucking bumming me out because

1:01:08

I'm just calling everybody like he missed Cobra meetings

1:01:10

and now we're in this situation do we have nothing

1:01:12

about PPE where are the contracts go and she was

1:01:14

like I can you will do this by

1:01:16

email the political buzzkill

1:01:19

guy the big child yeah and and

1:01:22

I quote there is a darkness in the corner

1:01:24

of my being and I worry that one day the darkness

1:01:26

will engulf me in rage and shame what's

1:01:29

that triangle of those who are those

1:01:31

people to one another some yeah

1:01:33

that's I'm all of those people I'm the

1:01:35

big child I'm interested

1:01:37

in politics and

1:01:39

the mechanics of how we're governed and I

1:01:42

also worry that there is a some

1:01:44

sort of darkness

1:01:46

in the corner of my being

1:01:47

that is rattling

1:01:50

around in my mind for me that I

1:01:52

feel like one of my compulsions one of the

1:01:55

ambiguities and kind of let's not use the

1:01:57

word void but one of the disconnects if you will

1:01:59

before between the set of my different senses

1:02:02

of self is the idea that in comedy

1:02:04

there is no overreach, there's no legitimising

1:02:07

board, there's no... Yeah. Yeah,

1:02:09

but there's any collection of awards

1:02:12

judges somewhere, but that's not legitimacy, you

1:02:14

know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, there

1:02:16

isn't a boss, there isn't someone going, well done. Well done, you

1:02:18

did a job, you know. And for me, that's huge,

1:02:20

and I haven't really realised how huge it was that

1:02:22

I'm,

1:02:23

you know, lacking that. Yeah. I

1:02:26

suppose the, what's the question?

1:02:28

It's about the interplay

1:02:30

between the low self, that's it, the low

1:02:33

self opinion, the high self opinion, and

1:02:35

the fact that you are sent,

1:02:37

I mean, and in the show, a literal death

1:02:40

threat, but more commonly, Daily

1:02:42

Mail spreads, a kicking in

1:02:44

the press, a kicking on social media.

1:02:47

There are people backing up your low self

1:02:49

opinion, and their audience is backing up your high

1:02:51

self opinion and crying, laughing and telling you you're brilliant.

1:02:54

Yeah. And you're saying life to live, like,

1:02:56

how do you navigate that? How do you keep yourself

1:02:59

safe within that? Well, I think you have to, you

1:03:01

sort of have to realise that neither of those two

1:03:03

people is right. Like, the people who think,

1:03:06

the idea that you're the best person in the world is not Yeah,

1:03:10

no matter how many times I say it, I'm such

1:03:13

a great guy, yeah. No

1:03:15

matter how many times you say,

1:03:17

people say either of those things to you, neither of

1:03:19

them is correct. Yeah, like, so the show, that

1:03:21

was the hardest bit to get right.

1:03:24

The, because the show, the

1:03:26

reason that I said it was me trying to write Mike

1:03:28

Pribiglia's show is because, is specifically because

1:03:31

I,

1:03:32

I think I talked to him on

1:03:34

his pod, when I did his podcast, I talked to him

1:03:36

about, because the premise of that is that you

1:03:38

talk about material you're working on. And so I

1:03:40

talked about this thing, I was like, the spread roll happened to me. And

1:03:42

he was like, oh, that's the whole show. He was like, I would

1:03:44

make a whole show out of that.

1:03:47

And when I started doing it as new, when

1:03:50

I started putting the show together, I

1:03:52

was like, there's a

1:03:53

bit about the bread roll. And then,

1:03:56

and then I'll do a bunch of stand up at the end

1:03:59

about the new. And I

1:04:01

was fighting what the show

1:04:03

needed to be. Because

1:04:06

the truth is people are interested in the story.

1:04:08

And basically the bulk of the show is set over

1:04:11

about

1:04:12

a week. It's like I described

1:04:14

the events of somebody, a charity event

1:04:16

through a bread roll that landed near me and then it

1:04:18

became a news story. And

1:04:20

then the sort

1:04:22

of 24 hours after that I received

1:04:25

some death threats, one of which I read out on stage

1:04:27

and that left me with,

1:04:29

you know, I had to have a meeting with

1:04:32

the police and I had to have all this kind of,

1:04:34

you know, it was a weird and intense

1:04:36

time and then kind of over

1:04:38

the next year I

1:04:40

then, I didn't realise it was

1:04:42

made clear to me that I had post-traumatic stress disorder

1:04:45

from the experience of all

1:04:47

of the death threats. And so in the show I kind

1:04:49

of talk about the PTSD and then I

1:04:52

talk a little bit about why, you

1:04:54

know, the kind of phase of the journey I'm on of

1:04:56

discovering why my brain was vulnerable

1:04:59

to PTSD. Because some people

1:05:01

it's like a thing that happens out of the blue. For some people it's

1:05:03

because it activates certain things that already existed

1:05:06

within their patterns of thinking. So that's

1:05:08

kind of what the show was.

1:05:10

And then there would be some like stand up after

1:05:12

that. And

1:05:14

at a certain point I was like, why

1:05:17

am I fighting the like,

1:05:19

bebeaglier of this? And

1:05:22

so all I did was like take all of that

1:05:24

stand up and just redistribute it across the

1:05:26

main arc of the show. So it took all

1:05:29

these little bits of stuff. I'm

1:05:31

particularly focusing on Bebeaglier

1:05:33

at the moment, very excited about him coming to Edinburgh for the

1:05:35

first time. And so I've been watching a

1:05:37

lot of his specials, re-watching specials. And

1:05:39

I made a note about the bread roll show, bring

1:05:42

it which I couldn't remember the title of, putting all the stages

1:05:44

in the right order, racism, self-comedy career,

1:05:46

just want to make people happy, the charity gig, the

1:05:49

worst five gigs.

1:05:49

It is really bebeaglier-fied. And

1:05:52

there's even, there's a moment

1:05:54

which is your, I know I'm in the

1:05:56

future also, which is when you go,

1:05:58

what good does that react?

1:05:59

action, David. That's so, you've been

1:06:02

a bigly arrived, you've taken that, and rewritten

1:06:04

it as a totally different concept. I'm so

1:06:06

pleased to hear you talk about his influence on the show because

1:06:08

I'm like, that's pure babigs, man. It's

1:06:11

definitely a big thing. Obviously, for British

1:06:13

comedians as well, you're also talking about

1:06:15

like,

1:06:16

Kitson, and like,

1:06:19

not the story shows necessarily,

1:06:22

but the stand-up shows that are stand-up shows

1:06:24

that have a kind of central story through them, and

1:06:27

threading the story through

1:06:29

the, like, over

1:06:31

the kind of course of the show. You know, there's literally one

1:06:34

bit

1:06:34

in one of his old shows where he just does a whole

1:06:36

thing about like, how much he loves Chinese

1:06:39

food, and then he sort of says,

1:06:42

that's a set piece. What I've done there is a set

1:06:44

piece. Who says Kitson can't do quality

1:06:46

observation? No one. It's widely regarded as one

1:06:48

of my strengths. And like, so he basically

1:06:50

acknowledges all of the, because he's,

1:06:53

because he's been doing stand-up for too long and he's bored

1:06:55

with it, he feels the need to pull it

1:06:57

apart as it's happening. Yeah. So, thus

1:06:59

inspiring multiple generations of younger, less

1:07:02

informed, less talented people to constantly point

1:07:04

out when they're doing callbacks. Oh, listen,

1:07:08

let us all, let's all

1:07:10

just hold our hands up and say there were a lot of

1:07:12

comedians like Daniel who

1:07:15

like did self-referential stuff, who

1:07:17

birthed monsters, or pawling

1:07:19

monsters. Let's just say that Daniel has taken away as much

1:07:21

from the circus as he's putting.

1:07:25

But, but yeah,

1:07:26

you have to try and take

1:07:29

these floating bits of material, put

1:07:31

them back into the show and work out a reason why

1:07:33

the

1:07:35

national anthems are the end. Yes. And

1:07:37

so you have to then, because the, and,

1:07:40

and the way you're judging that on is like, it's the

1:07:42

biggest laugh

1:07:44

in the show or it's the, you've got it like, because

1:07:46

you could slice that in lots of ways. Like, what's the biggest

1:07:49

laugh? What's the narrative conclusion? What's

1:07:51

the

1:07:52

point where the momentum breaks? Yeah, there's

1:07:54

lots of and you've got to decide which one that is.

1:07:57

I guess if you've got one which is near as damn

1:07:59

it, all of them, you go.

1:07:59

Well that has to be the end. That's interesting you would say,

1:08:02

they don't want to hear anything else after that. Yeah. They're

1:08:04

done, you finish them off. Yeah, they're done. Like you can

1:08:07

hear in the recordings, I'm trying to talk, like

1:08:09

you know, because, and also with this show, I never built

1:08:11

a show like this before, because I've always been a gig in

1:08:13

comic, and I've always been trying to

1:08:15

turn over new stuff, and I've always been doing it in 20 minute

1:08:17

chunks. And you do a 10 minute chunk, a five minute chunk, a 20

1:08:19

minute chunk, and you go, well that's, I think I've probably

1:08:21

got the end, so now I've got, and then little

1:08:24

bits are falling into place. But obviously

1:08:26

with this one, there were no gigs. So

1:08:29

I was starting

1:08:29

this, I'd done two gigs

1:08:32

where I talked about the bread, where I just described

1:08:34

the incident of the bread roll, and

1:08:36

then pandemic.

1:08:39

And so I didn't really have any sense of what the show

1:08:41

was going to be. Also, so then in Edinburgh 2021,

1:08:44

they did that very, very heavily reduced

1:08:46

festival. Like the, and the

1:08:48

monkey barrel contacted me and said, they think,

1:08:50

you know, some of the regulations are going to ease, and

1:08:53

we're going to be able to do some socially distanced gigs. Would you

1:08:55

be interested? And I was

1:08:56

like, yeah, I mean,

1:08:58

yeah. Like if that's going

1:09:00

to happen 100%. And so they

1:09:02

were kind of like, okay, so we'll get everything ready, and if

1:09:04

it happens, it will do it. So

1:09:06

then, you know, I

1:09:08

don't think I ever thought in my life circumstances

1:09:12

would present themselves that

1:09:14

the first minister of Scotland was going to dictate

1:09:17

when my next show was going to happen. But

1:09:19

that's where we found ourselves in the pandemic.

1:09:22

And so Nicholas Sturgeon goes, Edinburgh can happen on these

1:09:24

bases, and then the monkey barrel's like,

1:09:26

okay, great,

1:09:27

we're doing it. where

1:09:30

you're like, I haven't actually thought what I was going to do.

1:09:32

I think I thought what I was going to do with

1:09:34

the hour. And

1:09:38

so then I was like, okay, I think probably the bread

1:09:40

roll stuff.

1:09:42

And I also, you

1:09:44

know, by that point, I'd been in therapy for a while.

1:09:46

I had a bit of distance from it.

1:09:48

And I felt like I think I can talk

1:09:50

about this on stage.

1:09:52

I think maybe it's interesting. But also there

1:09:55

was a part of me that was like, maybe none of this is interesting

1:09:57

anymore. I don't know whether, I

1:09:59

feel like this was.

1:09:59

common thing like when we all went back to gigging there was

1:10:02

a part of us that were like does anyone care about anything

1:10:04

anymore? Like is it all just irrelevant

1:10:07

because of this sort of you

1:10:09

know this massive collective trauma

1:10:12

that we all went through? Does anything

1:10:14

feel relevant? So I did do like

1:10:16

I started the shows with like a kind of COVID 15

1:10:20

minutes

1:10:21

um and then but

1:10:23

then I found like this works

1:10:26

like the bread roll show works and

1:10:28

then you sort of start to kind of go

1:10:32

you know I everything for

1:10:34

me is like it's all I can't

1:10:37

I nothing gets written down it's all these fucking

1:10:39

voice memos on my phone my phone is filled

1:10:41

with hundreds and hundreds

1:10:44

and hundreds of recordings

1:10:46

of me doing gigs of wildly varying

1:10:48

quality and you sort of have to sit there

1:10:51

and like work out why

1:10:53

this worked why did why did this not

1:10:55

work but

1:10:57

so very

1:11:00

quickly I was like the bread roll story

1:11:04

kind of wrote itself like just

1:11:06

the description of those events happened

1:11:09

very organically and

1:11:11

then I can't remember

1:11:14

why I kind of had this like vague

1:11:16

sense of a routine about national anthems so I was

1:11:18

like I'll do that and then there was the mental health

1:11:20

stuff and the mental health stuff was hard to write

1:11:22

because it was like

1:11:24

but I sort of knew it was going to be tough

1:11:26

going in

1:11:27

because James had had this experience

1:11:29

where he taught you know the cold lasagna show where

1:11:32

he had been talking about his mental health he was like people get fucking

1:11:34

sad when you talk about it and so I

1:11:36

knew that there were going to be points where people would

1:11:39

like and there were points where it was just like people

1:11:41

were just too bummed out about it and like

1:11:43

people were too bummed out on my behalf about

1:11:45

it and you have and then and from there it's

1:11:48

a balancing act of

1:11:51

how can I talk about this and honor

1:11:53

the like oh god this is such an no

1:11:56

no this is exactly this is exactly how I want to hear

1:11:58

because I make it I have been making people

1:12:00

sad with my climate stuff. How can I honor the emotional

1:12:02

truth of what I'm trying to say, but

1:12:05

also have it be a comedy show?

1:12:07

You know, like I,

1:12:12

one of my favorite pieces of comedy

1:12:15

is in the Mark Maron comedy album,

1:12:17

and this is the thing that gives it its name. There's

1:12:20

a bit in it where he says something and

1:12:23

someone in the audience goes, ah, and he says,

1:12:25

don't go, ah, this has to be funny.

1:12:28

And the album is called This Has To Be Funny. And

1:12:30

I think about, don't go, ah, this has to be funny

1:12:33

all the time. The cool thing about doing

1:12:36

stand-up and like doing it for longer

1:12:38

and longer is like you

1:12:40

sort of failure as part

1:12:42

of the process.

1:12:44

You, when you first start,

1:12:46

because people always ask you, God, it must be

1:12:48

terrible when it goes bad. It must be terrible when

1:12:51

it goes badly. Like you remember the

1:12:53

first time you died on stage? Like, do you remember that like

1:12:55

the first, like there's every comedian, you

1:12:57

say that too has like moments, the Courtyard

1:13:00

Theatre in Hereford, I can still feel

1:13:02

that death. That death echoes

1:13:05

through my life. Life altering. What's

1:13:08

that, what was the phrase? Where was that from? Someone

1:13:10

described it as like, I

1:13:13

experienced a comedy death

1:13:15

with life altering ramifications.

1:13:18

Oh, someone will email it and tell me. Yeah.

1:13:20

I mean, and like luckily, the fun

1:13:22

thing about the show is I get to set the like,

1:13:25

cause like I get to set the bread roll

1:13:27

gig in context because

1:13:30

people were often, because it got picked up

1:13:32

in the news, people fascinated by it and you're like,

1:13:35

like you talk to any comedian,

1:13:37

they have 10 worst gigs than this. This

1:13:39

is not even my worst gig. It's only my worst

1:13:41

gig because the newspapers wrote about it. But

1:13:44

like

1:13:45

if you've had to look and

1:13:47

see absolute disappointment

1:13:49

in Victoria Wood's eyes for an hour, nothing

1:13:52

is worse than that. Nothing

1:13:55

is worse than that. Can't imagine, can't imagine. Nothing

1:13:58

is worse than that. You know, I've been like. I had

1:14:00

to be escorted out of venues by

1:14:02

security staff because people wanted to beat me up.

1:14:04

You know, like... It's

1:14:06

so weird, isn't it, that the bread roll became the international

1:14:09

incident. Yeah. When, like,

1:14:11

as gigs go... Yeah, no, it was fine. You know,

1:14:13

it was a charity gig. It was

1:14:15

funny. Like, Tim

1:14:18

Key is a good person to talk to about it

1:14:20

because he was with me the whole day.

1:14:22

And so he was like... You know, he was

1:14:24

like, the mad thing about it was we were in the pub laughing

1:14:27

about the bread roll. We thought it was hilarious.

1:14:29

And then he said... I can't remember. There's

1:14:33

a very intrinsically Tim Key phrase

1:14:35

to it. But he says something like, you know... And

1:14:37

then The Telegraph published the article and

1:14:40

I'd say the atmosphere shifted. And

1:14:45

like, the show is sort of about that. Like,

1:14:47

it's sort of about how I bear no animosity to the audience

1:14:50

of that gig. It's more the, like,

1:14:52

quote, unquote, journalists who fucking wrote

1:14:54

stories about it though. But yeah, every comedian

1:14:56

has, like, a death that resounds through. And like,

1:14:58

there are so many gigs I can think of that

1:15:01

I didn't mention in the show that I still

1:15:03

can, like, bring me to a cold sweat. But

1:15:06

now,

1:15:07

when something fails, you're like, cool.

1:15:10

We got to change it.

1:15:11

Like, it's part of the, like, failure is

1:15:13

part of the process. When a tour show... Not

1:15:16

even if it doesn't go well, when it doesn't go as well as I

1:15:19

want it to. That was one of the things I learned from

1:15:21

being Milton's tour support is that,

1:15:23

like, you know, I'd sit backstage

1:15:25

at every night and be like, man, this guy's ripping it. And

1:15:27

sometimes you come off and go, wow, that was really hard. And

1:15:30

you'd be like, yeah,

1:15:31

what? But

1:15:33

you sort of realize that, like,

1:15:35

sometimes it's, you know, you

1:15:38

just, you

1:15:40

don't feel it or you feel like, you just feel sad

1:15:42

that you didn't give the audience what they wanted.

1:15:45

And that still hurts. But

1:15:48

when you're working on stuff,

1:15:50

you go, okay,

1:15:51

cool, that doesn't work. But what I don't know

1:15:53

is in the moment why it didn't work. I have Frankenstein

1:15:57

previews together that worked

1:15:59

into...

1:15:59

thing. I distinctly remember in 2016

1:16:02

I was working on

1:16:04

my show and then there was a point where

1:16:06

the first 20 minutes had just stopped working.

1:16:10

And so then I was

1:16:12

like I remember that that worked in Auckland.

1:16:14

So then I Frankenstein'd the

1:16:17

Auckland bit together with

1:16:19

one that I'd done in Kennington at James

1:16:22

Gill's Always Be Common gig which is also you know which

1:16:25

is my safe place on

1:16:27

stage. There's like a few Always

1:16:29

Be Comedy, the Bill Murray Comedy Club,

1:16:32

the Monkey Barrault. These are like my sort of safe,

1:16:35

up the creek on a Sunday these are my sort of safe

1:16:37

places. So

1:16:39

I sort of Frankenstein'd those two things together

1:16:42

and then also had to like cut, because that was

1:16:44

the preview that Bridget had said

1:16:46

you've got to take the middle of the show out and put it at the end.

1:16:49

So I then had to like I can't really

1:16:51

use Garageband but you sort of do the best

1:16:53

you can and you put together some version

1:16:56

of it and then you

1:16:58

sort of get, if you

1:17:00

have one preview that like where you get it

1:17:02

all together you then just

1:17:04

hold on to that like gold bust. And

1:17:07

then and I still even

1:17:09

when the tour starts I still keep

1:17:11

recording it. The point where I

1:17:15

forget to put the recorder on is the point

1:17:17

that I'm like I think we've got the show. Is

1:17:20

it ever annoying when you finish the tour and

1:17:22

then you're whizzing the material back up again

1:17:24

like playing with it ready you know like revising

1:17:27

it I suppose getting it ready to tape it and you discover

1:17:29

new jokes you could have been doing 200 dates ago?

1:17:32

Yes so fucking annoying. It

1:17:35

didn't really happen with this show in the

1:17:37

same way because I did it I was

1:17:39

revising it a lot on through

1:17:42

the tour

1:17:43

then I rewrote

1:17:45

it a bit to go and do in New

1:17:47

York LA and Montreal because again you

1:17:50

kind of go there's lots of like sort

1:17:52

of British

1:17:53

little British references that you think

1:17:56

either I've got to drop it or I've got to explain it

1:17:59

and so there's lots of

1:17:59

lots of stuff where I sort of

1:18:02

did stuff like that. And so,

1:18:04

and then after I recorded the

1:18:06

show, I then did it four

1:18:10

times in Australia. And

1:18:14

sort of,

1:18:15

with that, I was sort

1:18:18

of trying to remember the show when

1:18:20

I was on stage. So the gigs were really

1:18:23

fun and exciting,

1:18:25

but there wasn't really like the opportunity

1:18:27

to do anything new with it. And I think

1:18:29

partly probably on some subconscious level, I was like,

1:18:32

don't improve this. I

1:18:34

really hurt your feelings. But

1:18:37

the 2019

1:18:38

tour, like

1:18:42

I really love the album

1:18:44

recording. It's like, I'm

1:18:46

really like,

1:18:48

I'm really proud of it because it was the Hackney

1:18:50

Empire show, but

1:18:51

fuck me, that show was way

1:18:53

better

1:18:55

after I recorded it. It was way

1:18:57

better. I rewrote it again

1:18:59

to go and do in New York and LA. And

1:19:02

it was so much better. Like,

1:19:04

it was like incomparably better as

1:19:06

a,

1:19:11

like

1:19:13

as a live album, I

1:19:15

really am happy with the kind

1:19:18

of finished product. And it-

1:19:20

It's audio only. Yeah,

1:19:23

it's audio only. Yeah, so it's on whatever the like

1:19:25

Spotify and Apple music and all that stuff is. I

1:19:28

released it again, these things that I do purely

1:19:30

for my own satisfaction. The two albums

1:19:32

are named,

1:19:33

the dates of them, the track

1:19:36

titles are all the dates that they were recorded.

1:19:38

So that the second one, there's two,

1:19:41

one, one, there's a couple of bits from

1:19:43

the second show and those tracks are labeled

1:19:45

as such, but also the structure of the

1:19:47

naming is taken from Kendrick Lamar's untitled

1:19:50

unmastered mixtape, like the dating

1:19:52

and all that stuff. Again,

1:19:54

who is that for? Who

1:19:57

cares? I care. And it's purely

1:19:59

for my satisfaction. But,

1:20:02

you know, I did a lot of the editing of those late.

1:20:06

I had to re-listen to them

1:20:08

in the pandemic and I was just like, oh

1:20:11

man,

1:20:12

this show was

1:20:14

so much better when I rewrote.

1:20:17

I rewrote the whole thing, not

1:20:20

the whole thing. It wasn't the whole thing. It was

1:20:22

like, there was like, there was probably like

1:20:24

a couple of just like key routines

1:20:27

and like some of the ending that

1:20:30

I just got so much better after that recording.

1:20:33

And so there's always a part of you that thinks, oh,

1:20:35

for Christ, so that was good going into

1:20:37

this process because,

1:20:39

you know, there's a part of you that's thinking like,

1:20:42

don't make

1:20:45

sure that you've really written the fuck out

1:20:47

of this thing. And I also,

1:20:50

like there was gonna be a point where I was gonna record,

1:20:52

like try and film it. Cause I, you know,

1:20:55

we've sold it, which is very,

1:20:57

both

1:20:58

gratifying for me,

1:21:00

but mainly gratifying for my captain who

1:21:02

was like, this is a big hole you've

1:21:04

dug in your finances for

1:21:07

seemingly no return. Because

1:21:09

you paid all that. Yeah, because I paid for it myself. Tens

1:21:12

of thousands, I imagine. Yeah, cause I

1:21:14

also thought there's no point in doing

1:21:17

it. It's a really hard thing. Cause

1:21:19

it's like, you sort of,

1:21:22

you know, there's a part of you that's like, you

1:21:24

can't really say to people, like, film your pay

1:21:26

to film your own stuff. It costs so much money. Like

1:21:28

it costs so much fucking money. So for

1:21:31

me, I'd like

1:21:32

built this kind of,

1:21:34

I built in my head, I was like, I'm going to film

1:21:37

this show and I want to do it properly. So

1:21:39

I'm going to spend this amount of money. But luckily

1:21:42

we've very fortunately, well, I wouldn't

1:21:44

say fortunately due to the diligence and

1:21:46

hard work of my long suffering agent

1:21:48

who has the worst job in show business, we've sold

1:21:51

it and which is great.

1:21:52

And but because of,

1:21:55

you know, because I was sort of like,

1:21:57

I was really like, make sure that you've written.

1:22:00

the fuck out of this thing. So at one point we were going to film it in the middle

1:22:02

of the tour and then I

1:22:05

thought I remember

1:22:07

what happened with America last time. And

1:22:12

I'd make sure this is perfect before you tape it or

1:22:14

tape it and never breathe a word of it again. Yeah

1:22:17

exactly, yeah exactly. Well so with this

1:22:19

I let it all happen. I finished the tour, I did

1:22:22

New York and LA shows, I did Edinburgh

1:22:25

like a week long run in Edinburgh

1:22:27

and so I really like got

1:22:30

the show and like you know at

1:22:32

this point I have no perspective on the show because I've seen

1:22:34

it a hundred times and to the extent

1:22:36

that like I can't hear Al from

1:22:38

out saying

1:22:41

I'm not going to allow you to watch this again

1:22:43

because he was like you just keep these you

1:22:45

don't need to make these changes you don't you don't

1:22:48

need to make these changes.

1:22:50

But it's definitely like it's

1:22:53

a representation of the material that

1:22:55

I am

1:22:56

pleased with

1:22:58

and I think you sort

1:23:00

of it does

1:23:03

suck when you finish the show. And

1:23:05

so I did have these four Australian shows but

1:23:08

I think because there was such a there was a big like

1:23:10

a month long time lag and so

1:23:12

like the first night in Melbourne I was so nervous

1:23:15

because I was like I'm not going to be able to remember and then

1:23:17

when I did it it was I felt sort

1:23:19

of very you know

1:23:21

relieved about it and I did those four shows but

1:23:24

I was so focused on getting them

1:23:26

right that I think my head wasn't in a

1:23:28

position that it would have thought of like

1:23:30

too many new jokes because it was just like you

1:23:32

execute the thing. And I did the

1:23:35

last round like one of the studio rooms in the art class. I have

1:23:37

family in Sydney, I have these like two

1:23:39

cousins that have no respect for me that are

1:23:41

my sort of cousins slash godchildren

1:23:43

and they were there they never they never

1:23:45

noticed he would do stand up before so it was like it was

1:23:47

this very like it's

1:23:49

a lovely night for

1:23:52

me and my family and like my

1:23:54

uncle and aunt came to see the shows and like it

1:23:56

was a very meaningful thing for

1:23:58

me to finish the show in that.

1:23:59

circumstance and

1:24:03

but in that show I was back to being excited

1:24:05

about it because I hadn't said it for a while and

1:24:07

so I think I wasn't in a position

1:24:10

to make anything to improve

1:24:12

anything at that point but let me let

1:24:14

me just I'm just gonna cut straight to these we're

1:24:16

gonna do a couple of listener questions but we gotta do them very quickly

1:24:19

as any minute now my children are gonna arrive home and you're gonna

1:24:21

revert back into being a giant child speaking of quick

1:24:25

quick quick fire ish yeah yeah does

1:24:28

he is Graham Rayner does he get annoyed that he's seen

1:24:30

by many as simply a lefty comic when actually

1:24:32

he's so much more than that simply

1:24:36

I

1:24:39

guess so many people think you are nothing

1:24:42

but a left-wing problem is they

1:24:44

are not incorrect

1:24:47

it's hard for me to take it too personally

1:24:49

are there any comics out there this is Chris Bambra

1:24:52

are there any comics out there whose talent and craft you admire

1:24:54

but whose angle on the world you can't sympathize

1:24:56

with

1:24:59

yeah there's like a lot without naming

1:25:02

any of them is

1:25:04

there a way to like I don't want to put you on the spot I'm

1:25:06

gonna name any of them but like is there

1:25:09

any answer to that yes there are what

1:25:12

sorts of things like do you find yourself thinking

1:25:15

fuck they're brilliant I wish they weren't a dick do

1:25:17

you mean personally dick or like do you

1:25:19

mean the worldview that they're presenting on stage one find it

1:25:21

a horror and politically will be there are some people

1:25:24

whose

1:25:25

materialist they're always going to be

1:25:27

your the laughter response in your

1:25:30

body is faster than your brain can think and

1:25:32

so sometimes there are things that you laugh at that

1:25:34

are absolutely appalling yes but

1:25:37

because the joke was so well put together you

1:25:39

can't help but laugh

1:25:40

and then there's important at that moment not

1:25:42

to let them hoodwink you into thinking

1:25:45

that you've tacitly accepted yeah that's right

1:25:47

yeah yeah but then there are also some people

1:25:49

I think

1:25:50

sort of increasingly as the internet has kind

1:25:52

of ruined

1:25:53

people's brains and like again I don't

1:25:56

need to mention them by name some of them I mentioned by

1:25:58

name on stage before but there as the

1:25:59

internet has ruined people's brains, it's

1:26:02

not even just that you find that their

1:26:05

worldview is sort of like

1:26:07

abhorrent. It's starting to affect the

1:26:10

nature of the comedy because

1:26:13

when somebody says something

1:26:15

that's

1:26:16

sort of horrible but

1:26:18

you still trust that that person is a good...like

1:26:21

when you can feel that somebody is doing something as a character,

1:26:23

when a character is saying something, we can completely

1:26:26

engage with that. I can't...I'm

1:26:28

at any trial with the idea that people now can't

1:26:31

watch horrible people say horrible things to

1:26:33

each other, especially not when literally

1:26:35

every single one of us has just watched every minute of succession.

1:26:38

We can...we definitely can

1:26:40

watch and engage things that

1:26:43

have people in them that are presenting things that we don't

1:26:45

agree with but what

1:26:46

I...where

1:26:47

it falls down for me is

1:26:49

like when people start...

1:26:51

when I feel like there's a kind

1:26:53

of cruelty behind it because

1:26:56

I think the cruelty also like drags down

1:26:59

the quality of writing sometimes.

1:27:02

I don't know why...those two things shouldn't necessarily

1:27:04

go hand in hand but when I think of specific case

1:27:06

studies of the people that I'm talking about,

1:27:09

I've seen that with a kind of growing cruelty

1:27:11

they've also declined

1:27:14

as comedic craftspeople

1:27:17

and there's no reason why those two

1:27:19

things should coexist and I'm sure a clever person can

1:27:21

explain to me why I'm...why I mean that.

1:27:24

It's probably because they're like...a lot of them

1:27:26

have been made cruel by the information that

1:27:28

they're being exposed to on the internet and so

1:27:30

now what they're doing is engaging with

1:27:32

things in a very surface level way because

1:27:35

they're getting everything via Twitter and so their

1:27:37

stand-up is itself becoming a

1:27:40

series of regurgitated tweets

1:27:42

and so maybe

1:27:45

that's why the quality

1:27:48

is also declining. Thank

1:27:51

you Simon. Leslie thank you Danielle.

1:27:53

Francis I've heard a lot of comics on

1:27:55

the podcast say they went back on the circuit due to missing

1:27:58

it in the social aspect. So now

1:27:59

Now he's on TV and gone through the ranks as a comic. What's

1:28:02

his favourite type of venue to play? Does he miss club

1:28:04

comedy or prefer to tour? You

1:28:06

do both. I still do both. I mean, none

1:28:08

of us were able to go into clubs for ages.

1:28:10

And, you know, I did have a

1:28:13

night recently when I did always be

1:28:15

comedy where,

1:28:16

especially a lot of the time you end up just when

1:28:18

you, if you live in London and gig in London, a

1:28:20

lot of the time you arrive 10 minutes before you're on, you

1:28:23

do your set and you go home.

1:28:24

But I went and did always be comedy and

1:28:26

I stayed and watched the whole night and a bunch of my

1:28:28

friends were on and

1:28:31

I, you know, afterwards remember saying to me like, I

1:28:34

really love being a stand up comedian.

1:28:36

I really love it. And I really, you know,

1:28:39

there's definitely like a part of you. If

1:28:42

you were like me going

1:28:44

to like comedy clubs when you were 16, you

1:28:47

wanted to like

1:28:48

be the person who was like on the stage.

1:28:51

And then you also wanted to follow them off stage

1:28:53

so they could hang out with the other people who were on the stage.

1:28:55

And that, I remember having that feeling.

1:28:58

It's funny because I just remember it very distinctly

1:29:01

from like a couple of weeks ago when

1:29:03

I did a gig and like Camille

1:29:05

and Rose and, you know, were

1:29:08

on. And like, we, you know, we

1:29:10

just were like, let's make a night of it

1:29:12

and have dinner and then

1:29:14

do the gig and then go for a drink afterwards. And I

1:29:16

just sort of remember thinking like,

1:29:18

oh yeah, this is what I, in

1:29:20

the end, this is all what I've always wanted to be. On

1:29:22

the subject of other comedians, what's your favourite time

1:29:25

you've been thrown under the bus by Rosie Jones throwing

1:29:27

herself on the floor? Ask Stan Garrett.

1:29:30

What's your favourite? I mean,

1:29:33

let me

1:29:35

preface this by saying that I know how much of

1:29:37

a dick this whole anecdote makes me sound. I

1:29:40

know everything about how

1:29:42

unpleasant this whole story is. I was

1:29:44

going to a show business Halloween party and

1:29:48

at the show business Halloween party, I was going with

1:29:50

Jason Mantzoukis, who is a brilliant

1:29:53

comedic actor, a brilliant podcaster.

1:29:55

And he and I also seem

1:29:58

to have the same.

1:29:59

face like of all of the people that

1:30:02

people are like you look like XY and Z they normally mean

1:30:04

you are both Asian men yeah yeah I

1:30:06

cannot tell you yeah I don't look unlike

1:30:08

Jason Manzas at my

1:30:10

grandma's house two weeks ago and

1:30:13

I put the TV on and Brooklyn Nine-Nine was on and

1:30:15

my grandmother who's admittedly eyesight is not

1:30:17

as good as it used to be was like you didn't tell me you did this show

1:30:20

like truly she was like annoyed me she's like you

1:30:22

didn't tell me you were in the she's I don't know what this is

1:30:25

but she literally thought it was me

1:30:27

and so we went to an ala bean pie

1:30:29

dressed as each other and

1:30:31

as we walked in Rosie

1:30:33

Jones appeared as she does as

1:30:35

if conjured by some malevolent spirit and

1:30:38

she was dressed as Ronald McDonald

1:30:41

and she walked towards us and she I

1:30:43

knew what she was gonna do but in the moment

1:30:45

she looked and realized what was going

1:30:47

on she realized that I was there dressed

1:30:50

as Jason and Jason was there dressed as me and

1:30:52

she

1:30:52

went towards him and slowly

1:30:54

fell on the floor and shouted ninch-ninch and

1:30:58

so I got to see her

1:31:02

work that out and and I got to see

1:31:04

him go I understand what's

1:31:06

happened

1:31:06

you

1:31:11

know if you you

1:31:13

know if you you see Ronald

1:31:15

McDonald coming towards you and immediately

1:31:18

throwing themselves on the floor screaming what niche

1:31:20

dish why did you push a disabled girl it

1:31:23

shows it tells you something about Jason's

1:31:26

comedy brain I guess that he immediately

1:31:28

understood the circumstances that's

1:31:31

absolutely beautiful

1:31:33

final question we

1:31:36

know you we know you're pretty happy yeah we've

1:31:38

covered that in previous episode I imagine you're

1:31:40

happier now than you were there yeah Holly

1:31:43

Whitbread asks do you know you sound just like Chris

1:31:45

Barry I have had that absolutely

1:31:48

pointed out to me before I think Chris

1:31:50

Barry I think she means to troll you with this I think

1:31:52

she's aware of that well here's

1:31:54

the deal I mean I've never noticed but when

1:31:56

she said that I was like here's what you

1:31:59

do sound like

1:31:59

Here's what I would say about it. I

1:32:02

think it's unfortunate

1:32:03

now I think Chris

1:32:05

Barry maybe has some views that

1:32:08

don't align necessarily with my worldview

1:32:10

based on deathly put Yeah, based on some

1:32:12

things that I've recently read. I think it's possible

1:32:14

that Chris Barry and I have been

1:32:17

apart ideologically but

1:32:20

what I would say is telling

1:32:22

me when

1:32:23

I was Ten

1:32:25

years old I queued for

1:32:28

two and a half hours to meet Chris

1:32:30

Barry at the Wycke Center in Croydon because

1:32:32

I was such a massive red dwarf fan

1:32:35

and I Remember being

1:32:38

there with my friend and I said

1:32:40

to him we should do the Rimma salute when we get to the front

1:32:42

because they'll Think that's really funny And then we

1:32:44

watched two hours of people

1:32:47

doing the Rimma salute to an increasingly

1:32:49

depressed Chris Barry And I remember turned

1:32:51

to my friend again I don't think we should do the Rimma salute and

1:32:53

he was like no I didn't want to say anything, but I really

1:32:56

don't think we should do the Rimma salute

1:32:57

So I guess if you're telling me I sound like

1:32:59

Chris Barry That's a huge compliment to

1:33:01

the child me the adult me

1:33:03

now perhaps Is

1:33:06

not as happy I

1:33:10

had cause recently to show my

1:33:12

son the which started doing little clips

1:33:14

of things the French taunter Yeah, little bits

1:33:16

of Bob's we did go

1:33:19

to blue alert Are you sure sir it will

1:33:21

mean changing the bowl and to

1:33:23

see the joy on his face I

1:33:25

had to do a certain amount of establishing context

1:33:27

and why have you yeah and to see him get it and to

1:33:29

go Yeah, baby. That's funny all of

1:33:32

this to come that's funny. You could sort you sort

1:33:34

of and I can pretend it finished

1:33:36

after the fourth season He never know. I

1:33:39

Think it's I think there's something really funny

1:33:41

about like

1:33:43

Like identifying but

1:33:45

that's probably quite a big moment in your son's

1:33:47

life

1:33:48

because it's really activated like

1:33:50

understanding of

1:33:52

you know like

1:33:54

this there's sort of like

1:33:56

some kind of episodes of The Simpsons

1:34:00

that are so indelibly

1:34:03

marked in my brain that I think they kind of

1:34:05

kick started, a

1:34:08

bit of my brain came online that day. Like

1:34:11

when the, you know when like

1:34:14

Ultron is like, where am I? Well, I've just

1:34:16

woken up. Like there's some part of your son's brain

1:34:18

that like woke up. And

1:34:20

I- About a year ago we did, don't

1:34:22

look at me, I'm irrelevant from the young

1:34:25

ones. And he was saying it for a week. I

1:34:27

was just so like, there we go, here we go. We

1:34:31

recently did, because Gamble tweeted

1:34:33

it,

1:34:33

and it certainly reminded me of Rick

1:34:36

Mayall at the secret policeman's board doing, do

1:34:38

you love me? And we watched that, there

1:34:40

is a very fruity bit of language at the very end, which

1:34:42

I was completely lulled into a false sense of

1:34:44

security before. It's like all

1:34:46

those,

1:34:47

I think just, and I think rightly, we've

1:34:49

maybe got a bit more sophisticated in terms of demarcating

1:34:52

what is and isn't appropriate for kids. But like when you watch

1:34:54

most comedies from the 80s now, oh

1:34:56

yeah. There's bits of it where you're

1:34:58

like, whoa. A very different time.

1:35:01

You know what, there's so many tits. Yeah,

1:35:03

yeah, yeah, yeah. In movies that were like, like in Coming

1:35:06

to America. Yeah. You

1:35:08

never, you, like, like, I

1:35:10

watched that when I was a little kid, and I don't remember

1:35:13

the Royal Penises' cleave. Sure,

1:35:15

yeah,

1:35:16

yeah. Last one on the

1:35:18

subject of, I was gonna say on the subject of Ed

1:35:21

Gamble, but also on the subject of the Royal

1:35:23

Penis. Was the internet,

1:35:25

was Nishin and Edinburgh show, asks Matt Box,

1:35:27

called Super Fun Time, or

1:35:30

something like that, with Ed Gamble doing novelist character,

1:35:32

Selzdon Crump. Yep. Or am I going

1:35:34

mad? Novelist character, Selzdon Crump, it was

1:35:36

called Cool Fun. Cool Fun. And

1:35:38

we did it, it was a free friend show, we did it at the White Horse in 2008 and nine.

1:35:45

And so I'm

1:35:47

guessing if Ed was doing Selzdon

1:35:49

Crump, that was probably 2008.

1:35:54

What Ed doing Sel, when I saw the name, I thought I was

1:35:56

in the same room. It was a romantic novelist, it was

1:35:58

a romantic novelist character.

1:35:59

that by Ed's own admission was

1:36:02

a direct rip-off of Garth Meringue and Anna

1:36:04

Partridge. Yes, there we go, beautiful. But

1:36:06

if you... I think there's a

1:36:08

clip of him doing it because he did it in the Troll Student Final

1:36:10

and as we know, those clips aren't removable.

1:36:13

And so he... you will see him do it

1:36:15

and there's bits of it where he's... some

1:36:17

of the writing is so, so

1:36:19

brilliant. There's a bit in it where he said... where

1:36:22

he says... God, those

1:36:24

eyes were nice. Like someone had taken two

1:36:27

Caribbean rock pools and injected them directly

1:36:29

into her face. Ha ha ha ha ha

1:36:31

ha ha ha ha

1:36:32

ha! There's lots of, like... there's

1:36:35

lots of bits. I can still probably...

1:36:39

that... Gambler-Saelstrom crap, Daniel

1:36:41

Simonson set from 2010-11, I

1:36:43

can probably do a

1:36:45

chunk of those verbatim.

1:36:48

The...

1:36:50

you know... like, he

1:36:52

wouldn't bring an apple to an orchard, the egg customer

1:36:54

would do that. Bits of people stand

1:36:56

up that I saw so many times

1:36:59

that I can... and also, like, in the early years, there's

1:37:01

bits... because you did say gigs with people.

1:37:04

Suzy Ruffle hates me

1:37:06

because I can remember her first five

1:37:09

gigs and I can remember material

1:37:11

she does and occasionally I will bring

1:37:13

it up to her and she gets very angry. Ha

1:37:16

ha ha ha ha ha ha!

1:37:18

We're done. The kids at home, they snuck past

1:37:20

beautifully. I thought they were going to run in and interrupt

1:37:22

us, but let's wrap up there. Thanks,

1:37:24

man. Thanks, dude. Thank you. I don't

1:37:26

know how I do... I can't... I can't do a wrap-up,

1:37:29

because it's you. Thanks, my

1:37:31

friend, Nish Kumar. Thank you. So

1:37:34

that was Nish Kumar. Thank you so much

1:37:36

to Nish for being on the show, for returning

1:37:39

to the show. It's fabulous to have him back. I

1:37:42

will... In a post... I'll do a mini post-amble

1:37:44

on the fringe and I will just tell you some of the

1:37:46

people that we've got coming up and some of the

1:37:48

wonderful things I saw,

1:37:49

which will hopefully mean that some

1:37:52

people from those things are coming up

1:37:54

also. But thank you, Nish. Thank you so much. Thanks

1:37:56

to you for listening. Remember, you can see this episode...

1:38:00

extras but you can see the the

1:38:02

actual recording of this episode follow the

1:38:04

link in the show notes and when

1:38:06

we'll experiment with this really thank you to producer

1:38:09

Callum for taking care

1:38:12

of just literally like a hundred gigs

1:38:14

worth of videos as I am fistedly

1:38:16

work out how best to move forward shooting

1:38:19

the show it's something I obviously had the

1:38:22

idea for eight years ago hey I should

1:38:24

be videoing these oh sounds a bit like faff

1:38:26

I thought and now I've got an archive full of audio

1:38:29

which

1:38:29

has less

1:38:33

not value but less sort of functionality

1:38:35

so if you're a podcaster

1:38:38

and you're thinking should I get around to videoing these I think

1:38:40

you probably should so thanks once

1:38:42

again thanks Nish thanks to you for listening and sharing the show

1:38:45

thanks to Callum thank you to Susie Lewis

1:38:47

head logger lots of love to Moz

1:38:50

you've been listening to the comedians

1:38:52

comedian podcast with me Stuart Goldsmith

1:38:54

I never say that but now let's have a little post

1:38:56

Edin Brook post

1:39:02

but if you're not sticking around for that bye for now

1:39:05

so this is classic me I've decided that I wasn't

1:39:07

going to do this and now I'll slightly do it only because

1:39:10

I suddenly remembered a brilliant thing that

1:39:12

my brother said in the first week of the festival

1:39:14

I said where's my little list I kept a little

1:39:17

list of some of the absolutely great

1:39:20

stuff that I saw I saw more than the things

1:39:22

that just appear on this list but

1:39:25

I saw shows by and these are people who have

1:39:28

either agreed to do the pod who or who I'm

1:39:30

going to chase up some of the things

1:39:32