From Twitch streams to audiobook recordings, performers across the arts have had to find new ways to create – and new career avenues for the future
Hobart, Tasmania
Continue reading...Category Archives: Comedy
Alan Partridge on his new podcast: ‘This is the real, raw, be-cardiganed me’
He’s back – sporting a post-lockdown haircut and hosting a new podcast. Britain’s No 1 raconteur talks about his new hat, driving a Vauxhall, and why Boris Johnson looks like the evil rabbit in Watership Down
Turn right out of Norwich railway station, take the number 12 bus, change at Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, ride eight stops on the number 4 towards Swanton Morley, walk 1.1 miles, and you can’t help but spot the twin louvred conical towers of the oasthouse that Alan Partridge calls home. It is from this very oasthouse that Partridge – raconteur, national treasure, wit – broadcasts his brand new podcast, From the Oasthouse: The Alan Partridge Podcast, and to which Partridge has invited the Guardian.
Partridge bounds out to greet me in what appears to be an effusive show of hospitality. He offers a handshake before snapping it back into a more pandemic-appropriate wave. “I am so fine with social distancing,” he says. “Remember, I work in television where you’re forever mauled, hugged and leant on by over-pally floor managers or cackling makeup ladies. Now I can say, ‘Get your hands off me!’ without appearing in any way rude.”
Continue reading...Maisie Williams: ‘The people at the top of TV don’t want equality’
As the Game of Thrones star returns to screens in Sky’s Two Weeks to Live, she talks on-set scrapes, off-screen battles, and how the television industry could up its game overnight
When Maisie Williams was shooting a fight scene in her latest TV project, Two Weeks to Live, she took a blow to the head. “I got hit a couple of times with a glass bottle,” she says, matter-of-factly over the phone. I can’t see her face but I can almost hear her smiling, a faint giggle detectable between sentences. “I also kicked my co-star in the chin and made his mouth bleed. Other than that, it was pretty scrape-free.”
A kick in the face and multiple rounds of bottling might sound like the opposite of “scrape-free”, but perhaps it is for an actor such as Williams, best known for her role as Arya Stark in Game of Thrones. As the noblewoman turned assassin, Williams’s fight scenes included some of the show’s most pivotal, such as the one in the bloody, battle-filled penultimate episode, The Long Night, which Williams trained for a year to film.
Continue reading...Danbury, Connecticut will name sewage plant after John Oliver
- British-born comic abused city in recent segment on juries
- Mayor says plant is ‘full of crap just like you, John’
Officials in Danbury, Connecticut, say they will name their sewage plant after the comedian John Oliver, in retaliation for an expletive-filled rant about the city on his HBO show.
Related: John Oliver: US is 'making a mockery of the phrase a jury of your peers'
Continue reading...Alan Davies: ‘I’ve become a huge enemy of silence and secrecy’
The comedian and actor has written a raw and compelling book about his early life, including the abuse he suffered from his father
Your memoir details personal experiences you have never talked about in public before. This includes the sexual abuse you suffered as a child, at the hands of your father, after your mother’s death from leukaemia. Why write about these experiences now?
I kept feeling their presence in their absence from so many parts of my life. I didn’t have the courage, strength or fortitude to confront them. They were never in my comedy. I’d always been focused to get to the next milestone, the next show, the next fringe. I’d also already written a memoir [2010’s Teenage Revolution: Growing Up in the 80s] but all the things that mattered were missing.
In 2016, you started a part-time MA in creative writing at Goldsmiths University. Was that to help tell this story?
I wanted to get this material out of myself, but I was writing about my life in the third person at first, workshopping it as short stories. Then, towards the end of the first year, I wrote something for an assessment, which became a chapter in the book, relatively unchanged [a chapter called Hands, which details the first incident of sexual abuse Davies suffered, at the age of “eight or nine”]. The assessment just had my student number on it, so it felt safe to write it. The tutor feedback was anonymous, too. It allowed me to present a version of myself where nothing was concealed from view.
‘I’ve had men rub their genitals against me’: female comedians on extreme sexism in standup
For years, sexual predators have infested the live comedy scene. But female comedians are demanding action. Is this British standup’s #MeToo moment?
‘If this was a normal office where, on your first day, someone higher up than you goes: ‘Here’s a list of guys in the office who might rape you,’ you would go straight to HR. But there’s no HR – there’s nowhere we can go to say this is happening,” says Laura Duddy, who started out in standup comedy last year.
“For new comics, it’s normal that a more established comic will give them a list of open-mic gigs to try,” says Ellie Calnan, who began standup 18 months ago. “Whereas for women, it’s: ‘Here’s the people and gigs to avoid.’”
Continue reading...So Ellen DeGeneres is not as nice as we thought? She’s been saying that all along
Staff on DeGeneres’s talkshow have denounced its ‘toxic’ environment. The host may not be to blame, but she has always been spikier than her public image
What on earth is going on with Ellen DeGeneres?
Kate, by email
Things are not well in Ellen land. Things have been worse, but let’s catch up on the current situation first.
Continue reading...Dan Aykroyd and John Landis: how we made The Blues Brothers
‘For some of the crew working nights on the film, cocaine was almost like coffee. I never liked it myself but I wasn’t going to police others’ behaviour’
My original script was called The Return of the Blues Brothers and had two movies in it. John Landis turned it into a manageable 150 pages. He was the keystone of the project – he pulled it all together.
Continue reading...‘Our collective imagination could die away’: Stewart Lee and Shirley Collins in conversation
Friends for almost 20 years, the comedian and Observer columnist and first lady of folk discuss life in lockdown, the future of the arts, and what their kids think of their music taste. Jude Rogers joins them
“I was all right until this week, but now I’ve started swearing at inanimate objects.” Stewart Lee – comedian on lockdown and heavily bearded columnist of this parish – is in his record-filled north London study, on Zoom, with one of his musical heroes. It’s not him who’s ranting, though. It’s Shirley Collins, the first lady of English folk music.
Collins has been home alone since early March, which is “a bit rubbish”, she says; after all, she had a busy summer ahead. Her new album, Heart’s Ease, comes out next week – she had a few festival dates planned – and it’s also her 85th birthday two days after we speak. Some morris dancers will be dancing down her road, though, she says. “Proper muscular stuff!”
Continue reading...Michaela Coel: ‘Like Arabella, I realised my life was about to change for ever’
The actor and writer mined her own dark experiences of assault and racism for the BBC hit drama I May Destroy You
Michaela Coel’s drama I May Destroy You has passed the point where we argue about whether it is a hit. The story of Arabella, a young London writer who’s drugged and raped, and embarks on a quest for justice and self-knowledge, has been a passport for millions of BBC viewers into a world of shifting boundaries around sexual consent, generational clashes, social media addiction and drugs.
Coel, 32, stars, writes and co-directs the drama, which has also launched on America’s HBO. The scrutiny means she’s been prodded to excavate her own past, after she was drugged and assaulted by an unknown assailant in her 20s. So, to Coel the same question that Arabella’s friend asks her on-screen character: why return to the worst of days with such punishing intensity?
Continue reading...Hollywood comedy legend Carl Reiner dies aged 98
Director of Steve Martin comedies The Jerk and The Man With Two Brains was also famed for his collaboration with Mel Brooks
- Hadley Freeman meets Reiner and Brooks, February 2020
- Peter Bradshaw on Carl Reiner
- A life in pictures
Carl Reiner, the veteran comic and film-maker renowned for his double act with Mel Brooks as well as directing a string of hit comedies including The Jerk and The Man With Two Brains, has died 98.
Variety confirmed the news, reporting that his publicist said he died of natural causes on Monday night at his home in Beverly Hills.
Continue reading...Harry Enfield says blacking up as Mandela was ‘so wrong it was right’
On Radio 4’s Today programme, the comedian justified decision to portray former South African president in blackface
Harry Enfield has defended the use of blackface on television in an interview broadcast on Radio 4’s Today programme. In conversation with host Nick Robinson and fellow guest Ava Vidal, the comedian aimed to justify his decision to portray Nelson Mandela, describing it as “so wrong that it was right”.
Enfield, known for playing characters including Loadsamoney and Kevin the Teenager on television, said he had also used makeup to play an Indian soldier in a BBC programme, a decision he also deemed appropriate.
Continue reading...‘The older I get, the less I fear’: meet the Italian Larry David
A decade after his two much-loved comedies about the vicissitudes of ageing, director Gianni Di Gregorio explains why, against his own expectations, he had to make another
In 2000, after a decade of caring for his ailing mother in her large flat in Rome, Gianni Di Gregorio wrote a comedy about a bloke called Gianni who looks after his 93-year-old mother in a large flat in Rome. No one was interested in the story, in which the unemployed bachelor ends up running around after a cohort of old ladies whose spirit and vigour remain undimmed despite various ailments. Everyone thought he was crazy: who would be interested in a funny film about four old women and a middle-aged bloke?
Related: Gianni Di Gregorio: The incidental director
Continue reading...Fred Willard, much-loved star of Best in Show and This is Spinal Tap, dies aged 86
Willard, whose career was reinvigorated by his work on the mockumentaries of Rob Reiner and Christopher Guest, was a beloved and ubiquitous presence in US comedy
Fred Willard, an actor whose career was dotted with innumerable indelible cameos playing genial buffoons in unfortunate roles of authority, has died aged 86.
The news was first broken by Jamie Lee Curtis, the wife of Christopher Guest, in whose mockumentaries – including Best in Show and A Mighty Wind – Willard won a new army of fans.
Continue reading...Jerry Stiller, star of Seinfeld and father of Ben, dies aged 92
Comedian who formed a popular duo with his wife, Anne Meara, has died of natural causes
The comedian Jerry Stiller has died at the age of 92. His death was announced on Monday on Twitter by the actor Ben Stiller, who called him “a great dad and grandfather, and the most dedicated husband”.
Jerry Stiller enjoyed a long career on stage and screen, often accompanied by his wife, Anne Meara, with whom he formed a popular comedy act. They met in 1953, married the following year and regularly teamed up for improv sketches, performing in Las Vegas nightclubs and on The Ed Sullivan Show and other TV programmes, often in character as the squabbling spouses Mary Elizabeth Doyle and Hershey Horowitz, playing upon their Irish Catholic and Jewish cultures. In 2010, they took their act online, performing from the front room of their New York apartment. Meara died in 2015.
Continue reading...People opened up because I’m the Beavis and Butt-head guy’: Mike Judge on his new funk direction
The writer-director’s comedies – from Office Space to Silicon Valley – always sum up the spirit of their times. So why has he made an LSD-soaked cartoon about George Clinton and Bootsy Collins?
Few writer-directors have been as consistent and ruthless at capturing the moment as Mike Judge, although he never actually intends to do so. “It’s always a shock when something comes out and it feels so relevant,” he says, in his laconic surfer-dude tone, talking to me by phone from his home in Los Angeles. “But I tend to look at stuff that feels as if it’s everywhere, but nobody’s talking about.”
Judge, 57, is so beady at spotting what’s everywhere, his shows themselves end up becoming ubiquitous, the thing everybody’s talking about. It is impossible to imagine 90s TV without his seminal hits, Beavis and Butt-Head and King of the Hill, the former satirising the worst of youth culture, the latter fondly depicting gentle American conservatism acclimatising itself to the Bill Clinton era.
Continue reading...Tommy Chong: ‘We were always high. That was the job’
How does half of stoner duo Cheech and Chong cope with coronavirus lockdown? Fine – thanks to drugs, his wife and the experience of nine months in prison for selling bong pipes
Tommy Chong has got the munchies. It’s early afternoon in locked-down LA, and last night he was on the pot cookies. “My wife, Shelby, just made a whole batch of them – oatmeal and maple syrup.” He stops to correct himself. “I put the pot in there, and of course I put too much in. Last night it got me almost comatose. Shelby got kinda mad at me. You know like when a kid gets so stoned all you do is sit there and grin.” Chong is 82 next month.
He sounds about four decades younger – his voice is deep, sexy, pulsing with life. Chong is one half of the most famous stoner comic partnership in history, Cheech and Chong. In the 1970s, they not only sold out their live shows, they topped the album charts and had huge box-office hits with movies such as Up in Smoke and Cheech and Chong’s Next Movie. The double-act were as radical as they were bonkers. And while the films were ostensibly about two aspiring rock stars in search of the next spliff, they introduced audiences to a downtown, multiracial Los Angeles rarely seen in movies.
Continue reading...Czech new wave director Ivan Passer dies aged 86
Passer was a key figure in the Czech new wave before moving to the US, where his best known film was the cult thriller Cutter’s Way
Ivan Passer, the film-maker who was a key figure in the Czech new wave and who went on to direct the thriller Cutter’s Way after emigrating to the US, has died aged 86. Variety reported that an associate of his family confirmed the news.
Passer, who was born in Prague in 1933, spent his career inextricably associated with, and to some extent overshadowed by, his friend and fellow Czech director Miloš Forman. The pair met as schoolboys and studied together at the Prague Film Academy; they both became part of a group of film-makers who took advantage of a slight weakening of the communist government’s iron grip in the late 50s and early 60s. “We were all united, one way or another, with desire to expose the regime on the screen,” Passer told the LA Times. “And we got away with it because the regime was melting.”
Continue reading...‘You can always laugh’: Angola’s new wave of standup comedians
In a country scarred by war, corruption and inequality, a vibrant comedy scene has emerged
A hot and humid Sunday night in Luanda. In a poor neighbourhood near the centre of the Angolan capital, bats wheel in the darkness and loud techno drowns out the traffic on the potholed road. A young crowd has packed into a cavernous and crumbling concrete church in search of comic, rather than spiritual, relief.
Many have come to see Artur Pop, a comedian from a tough nearby neighbourhood who draws his material from the lives of young people such as those who have paid 1,000 kwanza – £1.28 at black market exchange rates, or more than £1.55 at the official bank rate – for the evening’s entertainment.
Continue reading...Sir Jonathan Miller, writer and director, dies aged 85
Theatre director also had career in medicine and was member of Beyond the Fringe
Sir Jonathan Miller, the writer, theatre and opera director, and member of the Beyond the Fringe comedy team, has died at the age of 85.
In a statement his family said Miller died “peacefully at home following a long battle with Alzheimer’s”.
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