Andrew Maxwell, Olga Koch, Sadia Azmat and more reflect on the return of audiences after a year away – plus offer up some new jokes!
It’s a feeling of pure joy. Over the last year and a half, I’ve recorded a lot of stuff in what I pretentiously call the studio at the end of the garden, but the fringe? I’ve spent a month every year for the past 21 years at the fringe. Weirdly, what I miss is the liminal time backstage with other comedians. Even if you absolutely storm a Zoom gig, with one click of a button you go from being on stage to instantly back in the hotel room. It’s very disconcerting. When the pandemic kicked in, I was in the middle of a tour of Ireland. At the end of 2019 I did I’m a Celebrity, and the show was called Reality – it was a bit of a play on that. I was going to take it to the fringe in 2020, but obviously it got parked. In the meantime, I carried on writing. So the show is now an amalgam of two years of material. Does it mention Covid? I’ll always point out an elephant in the room. I won’t necessarily discuss the trunk of the elephant for a solid hour or what shade of grey it is, but I always mention the elephant.