Interview: Sara Pascoe on female instincts, healthy sperm and her latest show

Smart, funny and full of ideas — Sara Pascoe is at the forefront of London’s new wave of comedy. She talks to Bruce Dessau about female instincts, healthy sperm and her latest show
Woman of substance: Sara Pascoe describes herself as "a feminist but not an activist"
Bruce Dessau4 July 2014

Even off-stage, comedian Sara Pascoe knows how to focus attention. We are sitting in her publicist’s garden on a sunny afternoon and she is describing her latest show, Sara Pascoe vs History. “It’s very spermy,” she announces, which is tantalising in anyone’s book.

I need to know more about this straight away. “Well, part of it is about the theory of sperm selection. There is the post-Victorian idea that men are programmed to find lots of women attractive to perpetuate their genetic code and women are programmed to keep one man. But there is also a theory that in ancient times women would have had sex with a lot of men in one evening and the healthiest sperm was the one that got to the egg. There are different kinds of sperm ... even kamikaze sperm with short tails who don’t know what their purpose is.”

The smart, funny, slightly intense 33-year-old is full of the facts she has plucked from a book called Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá for the show she is trying out in London before going to the Edinburgh Fringe next month. She says it’s the conflict between monogamy and fidelity that fascinates her. “My show examines how we are affected by the past and our parents. Human beings are in a battle between what society tells us we should be doing and our instincts. That’s why we hate ourselves.”

It sounds like she hasn’t abandoned her successful blend of philosophy and sardonic humour in this new material, which, from past experience, should be very entertaining. It may be her fifth solo outing but the buzz around the show and Pascoe’s burgeoning TV career point to this being her year. Brace yourself, Edinburgh. Here comes a star.

Her face will already be familiar from BBC’s Twenty Twelve and W1A, in which she played one of the airheads from the PR agency, Perfect Curve. Last month she appeared for the first time on Mock the Week, a beneficiary of the recent policy to include a woman on every BBC panel show. She went down well, especially for her sarcastic suggestion that we should “make Page 3 like jury duty — every woman over 18 has to do it”.

Good PR: Pascoe (second from right) as a flaky brand consultant in the BBC’s W1A (Pic: BBC/Jack Barnes)

She is very much at the forefront of an exciting group of London-based comedians making inroads into the mainstream with a different, distinctive style of humour. They treat comedy as an art form rather than a branch of showbusiness, yet they are now being embraced by the world of entertainment.

Along with Pascoe, a number of them — Aisling Bea, Bridget Christie, Joe Wilkinson and Tom Rosenthal — are due to appear on this summer’s Saturday night revival of Celebrity Squares on ITV, hosted by Warwick Davis.

Just as the alternative comedy of the Eighties came out of Soho’s Comedy Store, this lot are from London’s comedy fringes, the smaller clubs, such as the Invisible Dot in King’s Cross. “The Invisible Dot uses the term ‘the new wave’ and I guess that’s what we are,” says Pascoe, who also includes Nick Helm, Josie Long and Luisa Omielan in this movement of “post-alternative comedians”.

She thinks hard and tries to describe what makes them different from the besuited gag merchants who have dominated television and filled arenas in recent years: “We are slightly surreal, slightly politicised. We can be autobiographical but we have a warmer heart. It’s not just about set-ups and punchlines, there are ideas going on.”

Being asked to do Mock the Week was thrilling, she says, but filming was stressful and the three-hour recording tougher than any live stand-up show. “At a gig I’m nervous beforehand but once I get my first laugh I relax and it’s enjoyable. With Mock the Week I was at a high anxiety level for the entire show. I was so scared of not doing my preparation justice. And there was also a voice in my head going, ‘Come on, you’re doing this for the girls’. I wanted to hold my own.”

She did that all right but, as women on TV sometimes find, the response wasn’t 100 per cent positive. There was the odd troll who hurled abuse — one tweet read “I hope you are infertile” — but a lot of new fans went online to say they would buy tickets for her tour.

She shrugs off the insults and is more interested in discussing women’s place in society than women in comedy. She describes herself as “a feminist but not an activist”. Her show does not just look at historical female behaviour, she ties it into behaviour today. “I want to talk about how we get to a society where Miley Cyrus or Blurred Lines happens. We want to protect young women but I want to propose the idea that Cyrus might enjoy what she is doing. I don’t want to live in a culture where women’s two sexual options are consent or not. Female sexuality is its own thing.”

Pascoe, who was born in Dagenham, did not set out to be a comedian. After leaving the University of Sussex with a degree in English, she had hoped to act. “I wanted to do Chekhov and write plays like Sarah Kane. I wanted to win an Oscar.” But work was hard to come by. Times were so hard that she voluntarily declared herself bankrupt. She tried jokes and was hooked: “It’s addictive. People who do stand-up have this strange mix of compulsion and masochism — look at the way Eddie Izzard did all those marathons.”

It took a while for her to find her own voice. I remember seeing her in 2009 and thinking she owed too much to Russell Brand’s taboo-busting honesty. “I think I was more of a Noel Fielding tribute act,” she corrects me. Brand is a touchy subject. She admires his comedy but has misgivings about his sexual politics (“I think he is a despicable man”).

Shortly after that she hit her stride. She has always used autobiographical material and in Sara Pascoe vs History she touches on her relationship with her parents. Her father, Derek, was a musician in the band Flintlock, contemporaries of the Bay City Rollers in the Seventies, who briefly had their own ITV series but no big hits. Her parents separated when she was young and afterwards she had a very unconventional upbringing — “which is great for writing comedy. We had no rules. We were allowed to be adults from the start. I chose my own clothes from the age of 18 months.”

Pascoe used to live with comedian Cariad Lloyd but recently moved to a flat in Lewisham with her boyfriend, John Robins, who is also a stand-up making a name for himself. They could even become the first couple to be nominated for the prestigious Foster’s Edinburgh Comedy Award in the same year. Do they advise each other? “No. When we do a preview together he goes to have a drink when I’m on.” Would they ever do a double act? “I doubt it. We’ve still got lots to say separately,” she smiles. No one should doubt her on that.

Sara Pascoe’s Edinburgh preview dates in London are at The Grove, W6 on July 13 (020 8748 2966, groverestaurants.co.uk); The Crown, SE3, on July 16 (020 8852 0326, crowncomedy.co.uk); The Good Ship, NW6, on July 24 (07949 008253, thegoodship.co.uk); and BAC, SW11, on July 28 & 29 (020 7223 2223, bac.org.uk). Further dates at sarapascoe.com

Five more Edinburgh shows to see in London

Tony Law
Madcap comic whose jokes seems to get stronger as his beard gets longer.
BAC, SW11, July 21 (020 7223 2223, bac.org.uk)

Nish Kumar
Pithy portraits of Anglo-Asian life at this new venue which also has some wonderful exhibits.
Museum of Comedy, WC1, July 16 (020 7534 1744, museumofcomedy.com)

Suzi Ruffell
Fast-rising comic with a neat line in self-mocking personal patter.
Red Imp Comedy, E17, July 8 (020 8509 3880, redimpcomedy.com)

Bec Hill
Adelaide-born pun-obsessive presents her new mix of jokes and visual gags.
Aces & Eights, NW5, July 21 (020 7485 4033, acesandeightssaloonbar.com)

Liam Williams
Dour northern storyteller whose gags are as dry as a bone.
Invisible Dot, N1, July 7 (0870 264 3333, theinvisibledot.com)

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