The Art of Being Funny on Reality TV - An Interview with Ellie Taylor

The Art of Being Funny on Reality TV - An Interview with Ellie Taylor

08 September, 2011
by: Sjk

What if you were plucked from your 9-to-5 job to become a full-time comedian...whilst a TV crew filmed you? Sarah Kendell chats to Show Me the Funny's Ellie Taylor on the perks and pitfalls of reality TV comedy.

Five months ago, Ellie Taylor got to do what many of us only dream of – quit her corporate job for a full-time career in the arts. After a gruelling process of applications, auditions and workshops, the young corporate events manager-cum-stand-up got the call she’d been waiting for – she was through to the final 10 comedians for Show Me the Funny, a new talent show commissioned by ITV to find the nation’s next comedy superstar.

“It was all very down to the line,” Taylor recalls. “I ended up quitting work, and instead of giving five weeks’ notice, I gave just over a week – my boss was really great about it. I finished work on Friday and I started filming on the Sunday.”

For someone who had previously been performing comedy simply as an occasional hobby, Taylor’s decision was a particularly courageous one. A former drama student at York University, she drifted into temp work and events management after graduating and finding it wasn’t as easy to ‘get discovered’ as she’d hoped, until watching an old uni chum’s comedy gig inspired her to get into stand-up as an alternative to acting. “Seeing her do it, someone I’d acted with, I was like, ‘if she can do that, I can.’ I hadn’t really thought about it as a realistic thing to do, but I thought I’d have a crack.”

By early 2011, Taylor had advanced to the finals of several major comedy competitions and scored herself an agent, but she was still yet to be paid for a gig before she got selected for Show Me the Funny. Still, appearing on a dreaded reality TV show was something she gave a lot of thought to before committing. “You think, ‘Am I going to come across as a bitch, am I going to be completely dull?’: all the things you see other people portrayed as on those shows. But I’m not exactly a spring chicken any more, and I just thought, ‘If I’m going to get on with this, this is a really good springboard for me to do it on.’”

But as those of us in the creative professions know, it isn’t usually an easy journey to the top, and Taylor’s ‘launch-pad’ moment has had its ups and downs. At its culmination in a live final at the Hammersmith Apollo last month, much criticism was heaped on the comedy talent show, with the Guardian’s Stuart Heritage even going so far as to call it “an abject, miserable failure”. For TV critics, the main sticking point seemed to be the strange format of the show, which saw the contestants perform a series of seemingly pointless tasks like ‘be a supply teacher for a day’; while for those in the industry, the idea of a programme that claimed to be a vehicle for comedy newcomers, yet had a final two composed of comedians who were both already established names on the London circuit, seemed a bit redundant.

As one of the true amateurs on the show’s bill, though, Taylor says it was for the most part surprisingly easy to compete with these circuit regulars. “I thought there would be a big disparity between me and them, but because we always had to write new material, everyone was at the same level really. But as the weeks went on the nerves got to me more and more, and that was when I think their experience really carried them through, because they’re used to dealing with nerves on stage. They knew themselves on stage a lot better than I did.”

As for the contrived ‘tasks’, Taylor found some of them surprisingly helpful for the slew of new material she had to come up with for each week’s show, and admits she’s become something of a new material junkie in her first few weeks as a professional comedian. “The task where we had to be in a taxi, I had a chat with a guy and got a good thing from him. I was like, ‘I can use this, I can mould this into a joke.’ It’s funny, because now I’m doing this for a living, I find myself thinking about a lot of the big decisions coming up in my life in terms of, ‘That would make a bloody good joke.’”

Since being ousted from the show just before the live final, Taylor’s had some surprisingly sophisticated offers, proving it can sometimes be worthwhile to risk embarrassing yourself on national television. “I did an in-house script reading at the RSC in Stratford the other week with this amazing cast. It was all because someone’s dad who was doing the play had seen the show, and he remembered me acting at uni. To work with all these classical actors in the Swan was just amazing.” Perhaps for this aspiring actor, her days of ‘being discovered’ are not over just yet.

Ellie Taylor is at the Comedy Tree Putney on October 6.

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