Emma McAlpine chats to the 2009 Edinburgh Best Newcomer winner about his second solo show, filming Pete and Dud: The Lost Sketches and taking on the Frank Chickens...
If there’s any downside to winning the Edinburgh ‘Best Newcomer’ Award, it’s probably the anxiety that succeeds it, to follow it up with another belting show and avoid being labelled as some sort of Chesney Hawkes of comedy. When I caught up with Jonny Sweet before his Fringe run it was clear this was a consequence he had been made fully aware of: “A lot of people keep telling me I'm under more pressure this year and it doesn’t really help!” He needn’t have worried. Garnering a majority of 4 star reviews so far, Let’s Just Have Some Fun (and Learn Something For Once) appears to have been, if anything, even more of a hit with the critics than last year.
In a similar style to his 2009 show Mostly About Arthur, Sweet plays a posh, buffoonish character giving a speech accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation. Last year, the subject was his dead brother Arthur, which caused some bewilderment to Sweet’s real, living brother:
“He was paranoid and hyper-sensitive about it for obvious reasons and made loads of enormous misinterpretations about the sub-textural meaning of certain bits. He was really sure that I had been bottling up emotions during our childhood and was finally releasing them in my Edinburgh show!”
This year he’s played it safe, using an inanimate object as the focus of the show. He describes it in a comically dry manner as: “another lecture, about the recently decommissioned naval frigate, the HMS Nottingham. It was decommissioned in February 2010 after many dutiful years of service and it’s the last boat ever to be named after Nottingham. ”
Sweet must have a soft spot for his hometown. He even wanted to call his sketch group ‘Nottingham Forest’. Instead they settled on “the worst name for a sketch group ever” - House of Windsor. Comprising of Sweet, and fellow Cambridge Footlighters Simon Bird and Joe Thomas, the group had two critically-acclaimed shows at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2007 and 2008, including the brilliant site-specific concept The Meeting. Although Sweet has since produced two solos shows, he’s still keen to continue working with Bird and Thomas and tells me “The main thing I want to do next is write a sitcom with Joe and Simon.”
Having seen him take on the almost scene-stealing role of Jared in Tom Basden’s comedy play (and Radio 4 series) Party earlier this year, I ask him if he got a taste for theatre: “I really liked the process of doing Party, it was a great bunch of people I worked with and very well-written but I don’t think my main talent is acting. You'll never find me on stage playing a Scottish person for example.”
“But you are very good in those pompous, slightly camp roles”, I tell him.
“Exactly, it's not really acting it's more...channelling my own personality”, he replies.
Whether or not Sweet is the most versatile of actors, he is certainly a natural comic. Self-deprecating in person and amusingly gauche in character, it’s hard not to giggle at practically everything that comes out of his mouth.
Recently, you might have spotted him on the recent Peter Cook and Dudley Moore tribute programme Pete and Dud: The Lost Sketches (BBC2). Starring household names like Angus Deayton, Adrian Edmondson and Jonathan Ross, it involved several comics (including relative newcomers Sweet and Nick Mohammed) re-creating the lost comedy footage that the BBC taped over years ago. In between sketches the group were filmed discussing the script, where Sweet remembers feeling distinctly out of his depth:
“Nick and I would go and hide in the toilets and crack up about how badly it was going and the fact that Alistair McGowan was talking about his sketches and we hadn't said anything for several hours! It was like being back at university in a class that you hadn’t read any of the work for and just nodding and umming.”
While the programme got predictably mixed reviews from critics dubbing it a pale imitation of the original, Sweet’s performance was praised by several publications with one declaring him the 'closest to catching the anarchic 1960s spirit that Pete and Dud encapsulated’. Sweet however wouldn’t be able to comment on any of his TV performances as he finds it “excruciating watching myself on screen.”
"So you never watched yourself playing David Cameron on When Boris Met Dave?”, I ask.
“Um, I delayed that for a month, and then fast-forwarded most of the bits I was in. It was too awful. I didn't finish it.”
Luckily for Sweet, he’s in the minority of people who don’t like watching him. His Fringe productions for the last several years have been a resounding success and something tells me he’ll have to get used to seeing himself on screen too. As a past Edinburgh Award winner, he’s even been automatically entered into the ‘Edinburgh Comedy God’ competition for past winners and nominees, which has seen a national campaign launched to get obscure 1984 nominees Frank Chickens to the top spot. Not surprisingly, Sweet is horrified to hear he’s a contender: “I’m definitely going to come last! But maybe, if we drum up a bit of support, the Frank Chickens and I could storm this.”
Jonny Sweet: Let's Just Have Some Fun (and Learn Something For Once) is at the Soho Theatre from Tuesday 11th-Saturday 22nd January.
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