The Peep Show star talks to Emma McAlpine about missing Edinburgh, finding her feet as a musical comic and what that crazy David Mitchell gets up to when he's not filming...
Isy Suttie may have missed out on the blood, sweat and tears of taking a show to the Edinburgh Fringe, but she’s certainly making up for it now. From Saturday, she will be embarking on a 47-date national tour and filming the seventh series of Peep Show alongside it. “Yeah, I’m going to be dead by Christmas!” she laughs. “But at least it won’t give me time to get nervous about my show.” Suttie has missed the last two Edinburgh Festivals due to filming the BAFTA-winning sitcom, in which she plays IT geek Dobby. “Is that a bit of a relief or do you actually quite miss it?” I ask her. “It’s both really. It’s like a relationship that you know you shouldn’t be in, like the one you might have at the age of 23. It’s horrible and you know they’re never going to ring you but you can’t quite stay away either! It’s a strange combination of relief and longing.”
Still, starring in one of the funniest British sitcoms on TV isn’t without its merits and Suttie, a fan of the show before she even got the audition, clearly loves being a part of it: “It’s like going back to a family now because I know everyone really well and we all hang out between takes. David (Mitchell) is very good at cryptic crosswords so he’s trying to teach me how to do them, but I’m abysmal!”
Suttie always intended to become an actress and trained at the Guildford School of Acting, but she got sidetracked by both the music and comedy circuits. “I think I lacked the confidence to go straight into a comedy club so I decided to do comedy songs in clubs that didn’t have that Saturday night stand-up club feel. I got nowhere though – my songs were always a bit odd and my voice wasn’t really good enough.”
When her open mic career failed to take off, she switched over to the comedy circuit, but rather than try out her “weird songs about Geri Haliwell’s dog and cooking Jamie Oliver” on comedy audiences, she decided to tackle her fear head-on instead:
“I did straight stand-up for a year because I didn’t want to rely on my songs. Looking back, that was stupid because that’s always been my shtick but I had to have that year trying to be a proper stand-up in order to realise that songs were the thing that that set me apart. I used to have some awful material about Big Brother, it was really bad! But that’s part of the process of discovering what you want to do.”
Now Suttie tends to combine quirky stand-up, characters and songs in her sets (her ‘Amy Winehouse down a well’ impression is particularly spectacular) and doesn’t feel any pressure to conform to her preconceived notion of a stand-up.
“I don’t think anymore that ‘I’m a comedian – therefore I must do jokes’. It was a great moment when I realised that it was alright to be different. When you find out who you are as a comic it’s almost more exciting than your early days in stand-up because you have a lot more freedom and your writing gets better. When you realise not everyone is going to like you, it’s quite liberating. It’s a bit like in life as well, when I was younger in my early 20s, I was always trying to do everything socially so I didn’t upset someone and now I’m 32 I can just say ‘I’m not going to that party, I want to watch TV’ and it’s ok, I haven’t done anything wrong!”
Having recently finished filming new BBC2 sitcom White’s with Alan Davies (“He plays a chef and it’s set in the kitchen of a posh hotel in Hertfordshire”), Suttie is now ready to go into full tour mode, taking her hit 2007 musical story, Love Lost in the British Retail Industry, across the UK.“I really wanted to tour and as I haven’t written a show for two years, so I thought I’d do Love Lost and keep it quite loose. I’ll be putting new stuff in on the night, talking to the audience and having a bit of fun.” And keep a lookout for Amy Winehouse – Suttie plans to keep her in the show: “I should really drop her because I’ve been do her for so long but in a tough room, it always loosens the crowd up. As long as she doesn’t die I can keep on doing it!”
We’ll cross our fingers for you Isy...
Londoners can catch Isy Suttie performing new material on love at the Soho Theatre from Monday 20th-Saturday 25th September, featuring diary extracts, characters and songs.
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