Kerry Godliman is going back on the road with a new show entitled Bandwidth. Godliman is a much-loved observational comedian with a keen eye for life’s everyday niggles and absurdities. She has appeared on multiple panel shows, as well as Live at the Apollo and was a winner of Taskmaster.
She is also a familiar face for her acting work, most notably on After Life with Ricky Gervais. She has starred in numerous TV dramas including Trigger Point and Whitstable Pearl and recently finished filming for the eagerly anticipated sequel to This Is Spinal Tap.
When not onscreen or in front of an audience, she co-hosts the podcast Memory Lane with Jen Brister, in which guests bring in old photos and talk about them.
So your new tour is called Bandwidth. I guess it’s about trying to fit everything into your life…
I think I’m entering what is known among the middle-aged as the ‘f**k it’ years. And realising that I’m running out of bandwidth to hold everything and actually feeling quite liberated by letting a lot of it go.
I can’t retain much more data. I can’t remember everyone’s name. I can’t remember to do all the domestic tasks. I struggle to keep up with the news. I can’t remember significant memories from my youth. I depend on my phone to be my memory bank. It’s got everything on it. It feels like a lot of my opinions, identity and memories are on some sort of digital cloud.
In case you’ve forgotten, you’ve got two children…
Yes, I do remember that. Parenting is still a significant part of my life, I talk about that in the show. When I started in comedy I didn’t have kids. Then I did stand up on being pregnant, the baby years, the toddler years, the school years, and now we’re doing the teenage years. It’s kind of like the next instalment of the sitcom in my head.
You seem to be working harder than ever now?
I don’t know if it’s harder, it might be nicer stuff. I think there’s a kind of nice thing that can happen if you have a bit of profile maybe, that you do have more choice. And also my kids are a bit older, so they don’t need me in the same way.
How do you manage to find the time to juggle acting and a stand-up tour.
It sort of all slots together. I did some TV and film this year and then I made time to work on this show. As well as do some batch cooking, a bit of gardening, and walk the dog. You know, life. I’m lucky enough to have had the time write a show. It helps with creative stuff if you’re not so busy your feet aren’t touching the floor. You need a bit of space to come up with ideas.
So, what else does the show cover?
All sorts. Teenagers. Generational stuff. Emotions of varying kinds. Perimenopause and getting HRT on the black market. Robots. Bras. Dormice. Loosing things, finding things. Set lists always sound bit like an eclectic jumble. But it all comes together in the show.
Although people might know you from your acting, it’s stand-up, being what you’ve called “a professional show-off”, that’s your first love…
It’s lovely to do stand-up comedy and I’m always glad to go back to it. It feels like I’m carrying on a conversation with the audience from where I left off in my last tour. Though the audience don’t get to say much. It’s a conversation with me doing most of the talking.
Did you want to act or do stand-up first?
I wanted to be an actor and I went to drama school, but I’d always loved stand-up, I just didn’t really know how you did it. It just didn’t seem like a proper job. After I left college, I did bits a bobs of TV and theatre, but all along there was this bubbling interest in stand-up. So, I did a short comedy course, partly for fun, but maybe a little bit with a view to doing it. And the more I did that course the more I realised that I wasn’t completely intimidated by it. I thought, ‘I think I can do this.’ And I started gigging on the open mic circuit.
When you were starting out, who were your comedy heroes, your comedy influences?
People like Billy Connolly and Victoria Wood. I was taken to see them when I was a kid. I remember seeing Billy Connolly at Hammersmith Odeon. I’d watch all the great sitcoms of the day growing up. Later when I started going out drinking, I’d go to live gigs in west London. I remember going to the Viaduct in Hanwell to see stand-up in the 1990s. But I can’t remember who I saw back then though…as I mentioned I can’t seem to remember that far back.
You have these two distinct sides to your work, from Live at the Apollo to playing a detective in Whitstable Pearl. How would you describe what you do?
I’m a stand-up comedian and an actor. That’s the best way to describe it. I’ve got two jobs. They are both in performance, but they are quite different. In this tour show I haven’t really mentioned my acting work. It just feels like a separate part of my life.
A lot of comedians act, but unusually you often do straight drama, even thrillers like Trigger Point. How did it happen?
I haven’t really engineered it that way. I loved doing all kinds of different things over the years. I’ve just been lucky enough to get cast in some dramas more recently. It’s been a chance to get my teeth into slightly meatier stuff. I guess the reason was because of working with Ricky Gervais in Derek and After Life. Even though those are sitcoms, I had some pretty dramatic stories too. Especially with After Life, my character held the more weighty, emotional stuff.
But you are very much getting back to onscreen laughs with the Spinal Tap sequel…
You can’t get much more comedy than that. That came about because I worked with Christopher Guest (who plays Nigel Tufnell) on his film Mascots in 2016. That was a fantastic experience. It was all improvised, which is a really fun way to build a character. You go into scenes half knowing what’s going to happen, but not really knowing how you’re going to get there.
Is it a nice and juicy part?
It’s a character called Hope Faith. She’s the daughter of the band’s late manager and I inherit their contract. We filmed it in New Orleans, the cast are all amazing, all the original band members and some exciting cameos too. But until I watch the edit, I don’t really know what scenes will be in the final movie.
Did you ever consider relocating to America?
I briefly considered it when I shot Mascots, I was in Los Angeles. I had a few meetings. They love having meetings there. It was interesting, there was a moment where I felt I could lean into that and really give it a go. But the truth is that requires so much application and I’d be starting again. I’m didn’t fancy being a newbie in Hollywood, in my forties, dragging my family over there, hawking for work in America when I had built a career in this country that I was happy with. But one of those meetings did land me a part in the thriller Treadstone. I was killed by being strangled with a seat belt. Very dramatic death scene.
I can’t go without asking you about knickers, a subject you discuss in Bandwidth….
Every chapter of my life has got some sort of knicker problem. The latest is that now I live with older kids it’s less easy to identify whose knickers are whose. Seems like knickers are the gift that keeps on giving for me and comedy.
Kerry Godliman’s Bandwidth tour starts at the Lighthouse Theatre in Poole on March 5. For full dates and tickets click here:
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