These days, Rosie Holt finds it hard to travel light. She’s only popping to Liverpool for a couple of days, she tells me, self-consciously wheeling a suitcase into a moodily lit King’s Cross coffee shop, but even that’s too long to be without her phone stand and microphone. Such is the heavy burden of the social media comedy star.
Holt shot to fame four years ago with her eerily convincing parodies of condescending Tory MPs shamelessly defending the government’s latest disaster, and smug rightwing commentators frothing about the issues of the day. She specialises in the kind of furiously topical satire that can date within hours – meaning that when inspiration strikes, she has to film her next video there and then.
This was the mode Holt honed in lockdown, when she spent her days holed up in her parents’ spare room, turning the breakfast news agenda into skits that were Twitter-ready by teatime. The first – a perfect, punchline-stuffed sketch in which a woman argues against the toppling of slave trader statues and in favour of Nazi memorabilia – won half a million views in four hours; a bit of a surprise considering Holt had a modest 3,000 followers on Twitter, now X, at the time (she now has more than 300,000).
The skit’s virality stemmed in part from its plausibility: Holt’s patronising smile, insidious sheen of reasonableness and jolly hockey sticks persona – and the fact that the pandemic had made DIY webcam footage a normal part of genuine TV broadcasts – left this pastiche close to the real thing. The uncanniness continued: soon she was editing herself into pre-existing real TV interviews as Tory MP “Rosie Holt”, a bracingly out-of-touch politician whose unwavering commitment to the party line results in a stream of intelligence-insulting nonsense.
Holt doesn’t post as frequently any more, partly because of the decline of Twitter/X (“I got disheartened – it’d been such a perfect platform and then suddenly after Elon Musk the engagement wasn’t as large”), but mainly because her online success has resulted in scores of real-world commitments. In July, her first book, Why We Were Right, will be published. It’s a heavily ironic “catalogue of Conservative successes” (“Why we were right to party through lockdown; Why we were right to get Brexit done”) written in character as her namesake MP. But before that, she is embarking on her biggest tour to date, bringing her internet characters to the stage in That’s Politainment!.
Initially, the 38-year-old was “really nervous” about how her MP character would translate to a live setting. Her online videos soared, she thinks, because they were “so grounded in reality”, whereas the live version “is obviously an artifice. But I started doing the MP at comedy club nights and it went down really well.” She found plenty of real-life inspiration for that, too: “There are so many funny examples of politicians trying to communicate to the public.”
Unlike some of the content creators who went viral during the pandemic, Holt is well placed to channel her social media hype into live comedy: she was an overnight success 15 years in the making. As a teenager growing up in Somerset, she dreamed of becoming an actor, and won a place at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. Afterwards, however, she struggled to get auditions – eventually landing her first job in a touring production of Wuthering Heights by gatecrashing one. Yet that wasn’t a springboard to success. “After that, everyone was going: ‘Why don’t you just gatecrash another audition?’ I was like, ‘I can’t do that all the time!’”
In her 20s, Holt lived with the comedian Harriet Kemsley, and a lack of acting work led her to start doing standup too, extracting observational comedy from her stalled career (mostly “depressing and dull” temp jobs) and her unsatisfactory love life. Yet by the time the pandemic began, she was ready to quit. “When I started standup, it felt cathartic because you say something you’re worried about, and the whole audience laughs and you go: I’m not alone!” Soon, though, mining jokes from her disappointing life was “just making me feel horrible”, says Holt. “It felt like a big act of self-harm.”
With her career and love life both in a better place (she’s currently in a relationship with the comedian Stewart Lee, whose gig in Liverpool is the reason for her trip), Holt says she’s a “much happier person now”.
Yet there is one thing she established during her standup era that she still treasures: her creative independence. It’s in ready supply in That’s Politainment!, in which Holt embodies three characters. Alongside Rosie Holt MP – clad in a terrible Liz Truss-style cobalt-blue suit – we have rightwing talkshow host Harriet Langley-Swindon, who also hosts Holt’s podcast, NonCensored, which she describes as a “complete rip-off of GB News” (a major inspiration for Langley-Swindon is Julia Hartley-Brewer, whose “bulldozer effect” approach to interviewing Holt finds “kind of fascinating”).
Finally, there is yet another Rosie Holt. This one is “a leftwing comedian who’s trying to appease the BBC” by offering more “balanced” versions of her political gags. The character is informed by the experiences of her peers, including one who was told their material about immigration was “too imbalanced” for a Radio 4 comedy show. That character doesn’t appear online – is it harder to do leftwing parody on the internet? Holt insists she has done “confused leftwing characters” on social media before, poking fun at the censoriousness of internet communities where people are terrified of saying the wrong thing. “But it’s less where my focus is because there’s obviously so much material with our politicians.”
However, her days of bounteous batshit political content could be numbered. How is Holt feeling about the forthcoming general election, which may spell the end of the Conservatives’ reign? “It’s terrible because you’re going: I really want Labour to get in, but how is this going to affect my career?” she laughs.
“It’s something I’ve thought about a lot. I think part of the reason I was able to do very well is there was a real appetite for satire because people were so frustrated with this government. And I can imagine if Labour get in people might go: ‘Oh, come on – it’s such a relief.’ Will they want the government to have a chance before we start sticking needles in them?”
Holt is well aware that her satire can be provocative in some quarters. While the majority of encounters with the public are straightforward, some make Holt “weirdly paranoid. If you’re getting glared at, or a waitress is funny with you, you think: oh God, is that because … ? There are people who think I’m a real MP, but there are also lots of people who just hate me: they think my comedy’s shit, or I’m not leftwing enough.” She admits to being reticent in relation to her own views because “I’m so worried about whether I’m right”. One of the most satisfying things about Holt’s parodies is the gotchas that arise almost unintentionally: when people are too quick to condemn her Tory MP, they expose the self-promotional virtue-signalling that exists across the political spectrum.
With a hint of mischief, Holt remembers the time that “a Labour MP quote-tweeted one of my videos and said: ‘This woman is appalling, she should stop inside’. I tweeted back: ‘How do I even know you’re a real MP? I’ve never seen you around parliament.’”
Rosie Holt: That’s Politainment! is touring from 11 April to 31 May; tour starts Didcot.
