Interview
The last time I saw Tim Key he was onstage at the Old Vic in Art. The next time I will be seeing him is onscreen. Key plays Greg in E4’s new eight part comedy-drama Gap Year.
Charlie Baker is something of a lovely hybrid, an old school song and dance man plus a classic modern comedian. He is sharp and funny and loves jazz and you may have seen him recently as Harry Hill’s hunchback kitchen assistant in Sky 1’s Tea Time – he also played a wonderfully funny hunchback in Hill's West End X Factor Musical I Can't Sing. But let's not typecast him as fictional figures with bad posture, he also played Tim Reynolds in EastEnders.
Your new programme is How to Survive the End of the World. What’s the idea?
It’s basically a small terrified man and his (would you believe it) even smaller and sometimes more terrified wife making a list of the things that they’re scared might kill them, and then me going out and looking into them one by one, in the hope that I can come home and tell her “D’you know what, actually these are all irrational fears. We don’t need to worry about any of them, and we can get on with our lives as normal.
I've been a big fan of Alice Lowe since I first saw her at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in various Garth Marenghi shows at the turn of the century. In fact when historians talk about female winners of the Edinburgh Comedy Award they often overlook Lowe, who appeared in Marenghi's Perrier-winning show in 2001. Lowe went on to star in Marenghi's Darkplace on C4 and more recently made a bloody splash in the cinema in Sightseers.
Q: What is E4's Gap Year about?
TB: The show is about travel in essence, it’s about people escaping from something at home or people going out and hoping that by travelling and seeing the world they will learn something about themselves, they’ll improve their lives and find answers to some questions, or even find out what the questions that they should be asking are.
Please have a read of this interview with Rhys James. I think it gives you a real flavour of his sense of humour. He is smart and funny and has a way with words – check out his one-liners on Twitter too @rhysjamesy, if you don't believe me. And clearly he thinks too much about things sometimes.
What’s Uncle about?
Uncle is an unconventional family sitcom. The first series was about a suicidal, estranged uncle who gets reunited with his nephew. It was about how you had these two opposites – a nerdy and OCD child and a kind of slobby man-child – and they learned life lessons from each other. Though not necessarily good ones.
I don’t really know journalist Viv Groskop but I do know her writing. It is sharp, funny and well-observed. In recent years she has been developing another string to her bow, adding stand-up comedy to her CV. In fact she combined both areas in her enjoyable book about doing 100 gigs in 100 days. Vic Groskop plays the Edinburgh Fringe 2017.
Scott Gibson was a very popular winner of the lastminute.com Edinburgh Comedy Award Best Newcomer Prize this year. And not just because he is Scottish. Gibson is one of those annoyingly blessed people who can stand onstage and tell a gripping, compelling, funny story about themself as if they are chatting away to mates in the pub. Yet there is depth to his show Life After Death too. It's about mortality, masculinity and much more.
For those who missed series one of Chewing Gum, explain a little bit about the show.
The show is centred around a girl called Tracey Gordon, who lives in Tower Hamlets, and it’s about her upbringing, which is a very Pentecostal, evangelical life. She decides, at 24, that she wants to have a more normal life, so it’s about adolescence ten years too late. It explores friendship, sexuality, relationships, jobs, class, everything.
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