Viv Groskop
Fiona Adams speaks to one of the one of the leading journalists of her generation about her gig at the Royal Oak in Teddington this Friday
Researching writer and broadcaster Viv Groskop is enough to give most journalists an inferiority complex. Having studied Russian and French at Oxford (graduating with first-class honours), she landed her first job at Esquire, moved on to the Express and currently writes for The Guardian, Observer and Mail on Sunday amongst others.
She has interviewed countless subjects, some in their native language, including the widow of murdered secret service officer Alexander Litvinenko; she is Books Editor for Red Magazine and Contributing Editor to Russian Vogue; she dissects the papers for Sky News; and she is a regular on Radio 4’s Any Questions.
Now the human literary dynamo has turned stand-up comedian too. I am meeting her to find out about this new career strand – painstakingly earned with 100 gigs in 100 days – and the newly published diary of her experiences, I Laughed, I Cried.
Given that she was a finalist at the 2012 Funny Women Awards, it’s likely that she’s a wow
at comedy too.
Viv bustles into Teddington’s Park Hotel in headscarf, curlers (“Sorry about these, I’m having my picture taken later”) and sequin cardie. Within five minutes of sitting down, she is interviewing me.
We establish a common study of Russian (I won’t reveal my degree results here), a few shared acquaintances and the fact that we live just streets apart in Teddington. Then I remember that I haven’t just come for a cuppa and a nice chat, and that I am, in fact, supposed to be the one doing the interviewing.
The obvious question, of course, is why a seemingly sane, intelligent woman should choose to put herself on stage, night after night, in front of an unpredictable – and possibly drunk – audience, risking humiliation and shame.
“This is the question everyone asks, how and why do stand-up comedy? It’s most people’s worst nightmare!” admits Viv. “A bit like doing a monologue in a play, but where every line has to make people laugh, and you don’t know who’s going to be in the room, what stage of inebriation they’re going to be in or how hostile they’re going to be.
You can see into the whites of people’s eyes!”
Er, yes, that’s certainly enough to put me off. But not Viv, apparently.
“For me it started as a midlife crisis, like you might take up pilates… but I thought I’ll try this as I’ve always wanted to do this ever since I was a little girl and at that point I had no ambitions of going anywhere with it.
“I did a stand-up course and took workshops, and there’d be all these kids with Mr Whippy hair and drainpipes just wanting to be stand-ups and I thought they were crazy.
“But the more I did it, the more I wanted to see if I really could. I woke up one day and thought: ‘Right, I’ll do 100 gigs and decide if it’s what I want to do.’”
A century of gigs, it transpires, is the benchmark for experience in comedy land. Without this baptism of fire, you’re not taken seriously as a stand-up.
Organizing 100 gigs, however, is no easy task – especially if they are to take place on 100 consecutive days. Throw into the mix a day job, three children (one a baby of 12 months) and a husband who’s not wild about stand-up, and you have a career and life catastrophe waiting to erupt.
“I couldn’t have done it all without my husband’s help. He is amazing and I think it’s been very frightening for him, this whole experience,” reflects Viv. “Finding gigs is quite stressful, but as long as you have no standards whatsoever about what you’re prepared to take, you can get lots of stage time!”
In the book, Viv charts her experiences during the early, “pond life” stage of
her career, in which Croydon, verily, provided the rock bottom venue. There were the Sheffield mother and baby gigs, where she struggled to be heard above the din; the “tumbleweed and silence” gigs where no one laughed; the soul-destroying gigs with 10 comics and an audience of one (“some of these gigs were not gigs at all!”). And then there was the trauma at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern in Kennington, one of Viv’s favourite venues, where she suddenly “forgot everything, including my own name”.
“It’s a diary of 100 nights, mostly, but woven all around it is the story of how you get to a point in your life when you realize that you haven’t done what you wanted to do with your life and what happens then.”
It’s certainly a challenging way of discovering what you want to do in your life, and incredibly, it was horrors such as those listed above that convinced Viv that she
truly was following her passion.
“Freezing at the Tavern was very sobering, it was
one of the worst ‘stage deaths’ I’ve ever had, but it made me decide that I was really committed to it. Everyone thinks comedy is really great fun, and it is, but you shouldn’t do it if you’re not enjoying it and it takes an awful lot of work to get to a good standard.
“A lot of the comics who’ve read my book, like Mark Watson and Sharon Horgan, said I was mad – ‘how could I do it?’ – but I love being on stage.
I love it more than anything. I wish I hated it because it’s ruined my life!”
she laughs. “I would love to do the 100 nights again, but my husband would probably divorce me!”
Happily though, the stand-up continues – often four or five times a week – which “is a lot more manageable”, and Viv also hosts comedy club nights once a month for The Dead Parrot Society, at the Royal Oak in Teddington High Street.
This year, she is also appearing at the Edinburgh Festival, where her shows will include Upstairs Downton: an improvised costume drama in which she and her co-stars take storyline advice from the audience and recreate spoof scenes from Downton Abbey.
As the author of a Guardian blog about Downton, where she regularly expresses exasperation at the series’ plot and storylines, this is really up Viv’s own comedy street, but has she, I wonder, ever told a joke in Russian?
“Last year I did a comedy duo with Avril Poole, who acts with me in Upstairs Downton. I was Russian and she was my translator. I would speak in Russian and then she translated it however she wished. It was a bit mad though,
so we stopped.”
Viv Groskop, mad? Never. Or nikagda, as they say in Moscow.
- Viv hosts The Dead Parrot Society at the Royal Oak, Teddington on July 12. Tickets £10; thedeadparrotsociety.co.uk
- I Laughed, I Cried (£11.99) is published by Orion