Interview
- Paul Smith is a genuine comedy phenomenon. To be perfectly honest I’d never heard of him until he had a gig at the 4000-capacity Eventim Apollo in London. Not bad for the MC at Liverpool’s Hot Water Comedy Club, who rarely plays the capital and doesn’t have major publicity muscle behind him. The secret of Smith’s success, apart from the fact that he is a genial, instantly amiable traditional stand-up with a nice line in cheeky banter, seems to be his online presence.
Carl Barron is one of the most successful comedy performers in Australia. Barron’s unique storytelling style allows him to mine his own life and childhood for comic gems.
Nick Revell is a comic legend. He began selling jokes to radio and TV in the late 1970s and did his first stand-up gigs at the Comedy Store in 1980. Since then he has written and performed for stage, radio and TV. He’s written material for many other comedians, including Roy Hudd, Jasper Carrot, Dave Allen, Paul Merton and Miles Jupp and recently had a new series of his own for Radio 4, BrokenDreamCatcher.
What first appealed to you about Mum?
I thought it was great that it was a potential love story between two people in their late 50s. You don’t normally get to tell that story. Cathy and Michael are unglamorous and - not in a detrimental way - ordinary people beginning to find love again. I thought that would be lovely to watch.
Why did the first series strike such a chord with audiences?
What drew you (John Cleese) to make your first BBC sitcom since Fawlty Towers 44 years ago?
The producer Humphrey Barclay is an old friend of mine. We’ve known each other since 1961 when we were both in the Cambridge Footlights. He came to me and said he had found this great new script called Hold the Sunset by Charles McKeown and asked if I would be interested in doing it. I read it and loved it. It was the best script I’d read in a hundred years! So of course, I said yes immediately.
Channel 4 is screening Young Sheldon, The Big Bang Theory prequel which follows the life of a 9-year-old Sheldon Cooper as he struggles to be understood by his family, classmates and neighbours.
So Damned is back for series 2 and I understand that Al is going through something of a crisis?
Damned is back for series 2. Can you give us any hints as to what to expect?
I suppose I should say first of all that we’ve got a new character, who’s quite an annoying, know-it-all student called Mimi, who’s on work experience from her social work training. To some extent, she’s a kind of reminder to the time-servers that they’re not quite as great as they think they are. And they’re not quite as efficient, and they’re not quite as up-to-date with life as they thought they were.
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