Is there anything connected to comedians that TV viewers wouldn’t watch these days? They go on holiday: we’ll watch. With their mums: we’ll watch that too. They’re on Question Time, they’re reviewing books, they’re having a coffee in a car: more comedians, please! No surprise, then, that a TV show now arrives promising us more up-close-and-personal time with the nation’s funny people – in the form of Backstage With Katherine Ryan, which takes the cameras behind-the-scenes of a series of gigs at Camden’s Roundhouse.
It’s a grabby concept, no question. Backstage at a comedy club is a place with a mystique all of its own, where (we imagine) comedians’ true selves are revealed, where their jokes are uncut, where an intense camaraderie reigns between people who do something for a living that terrifies the rest of us. When I spoke to the comic Sarah Kendall earlier this year, she hymned in hallowed terms this private comedians’ space, their antechamber to the stage. Years after largely quitting standup, “I still love sitting backstage with a bunch of comics and talking shit,” Kendall told me. “It’s my favourite place. If my ashes were going to be interred anywhere, it would be backstage at a comedy venue.”
