Homepage News Reviews - Acts - Shows - Screen - Radio - Books - Clubs Interviews Awards 2006 Edinburgh 2005 - Reviews - Blog - Previews Features Archive Awards 2005 Edinburgh 2004: - Previews - Shows - Diary Guestbook Forum © Emporium Of Mirth 2004 Editor: Lauren Murphy Reporters: Fiona Wilkie Natalie Joanne	Emporium of Mirth Gareth Tunley Chances are, you won’t have heard of this guy under his real name. Gareth Tunley is a character actor, and a very good one at that. His portrayal of crooked agent Sven Stacey is about to receive an Edinburgh outing at the 2004 festival. After reassuring him that his Edinburgh preview was fantastic, I ask if he’s looking forward to the festival. “I am pleased to be in Edinburgh. I’m doing this [Sven Stacey’s] show, and I’m doing something called Ealing Live! That’s in the final week. So yeah, I’m looking forward to it. It’s my, er...” he counts mentally. “...sixth Edinburgh? Something frightening. So I’m like an old vet, an old grizzled, gnarled old vet!” He couldn’t look less like that if he tried. I enquire as to whether he’s coveting any awards this year. “I’m looking to get all the awards that are going. I’m looking to win every award there is! Not only the Perrier but the Newcomer as well. Even though it’s my sixth Edinburgh, I’ll think they’ll make an exception for me. Yeah, they’ll probably have to invent a couple of awards just to cater for me. I’ve never won anything, on a serious note, so it would be nice to win something. I think the productions I’ve been in have got Fringe Firsts and stuff, but I don’t think I’ve ever been...oh no, I tell a lie, we got a BBC award, because I used to be in a double act called the Legendary Polowski, and we got an award for that. But we never saw any trophy, I want a trophy!” He decides he’d better justify himself. “No, that’s not really the aim, I’m just gonna go up and try not to lose too much money, try and have a good time and just try and get people in to see it. I don’t really have a massive career plan.” Lauren wonders how important Edinburgh as an event is to Gareth. “I think it’s important, but I think it’s important in a kind of low level way, coz it is really important, but nothing usually happens as a direct result of Edinburgh as far as I can see. Unless you win an award, which is obviously what I’m hoping. But even then, sometimes nothing happens to people straight away, but then some of them get a radio series or a TV series. If you look at some of the winners and nominees of the last few years it sometimes takes literally years for them to get anything on TV. For me, it’s just kind of... so many people become aware of you, or see you, or hear about you who wouldn’t have previously. You don’t really notice it happening. One month in Edinburgh is like eleven normal months, in a way. Coz everybody’s up there. You see people in Edinburgh five times who you wouldn’t see once in London. I know people always pretend that they’re not going up to network, but I plan to! I know a lot of people say this as well, but I just go out and enjoy myself.” What better philosophy could a comedian have? I ask Gareth how he became involved in Ealing Live!, a comedy event staged regularly by Ealing Studios. “I did the first one ever, and Rob Moore, the producer, had seen me and Phil [Brodie], my double act partner, doing our stuff, and-I dunno whether Rob will thank me for saying this, but I think he liked Phil and wasn’t sure about me. So I got in on the back of Phil. And since then, Phil’s gone on to do other things, more in the serious acting direction recently, and I’ve carried on. So I’ve sort of got in by the back door. But it’s been great.” He talks about Ealing Live! with an obvious passion. “It’s great... some things work, some things don’t, but it’s a great sort of stomping ground, and a great trying-out arena for experimenting, and it’s a really really supportive crowd. Sometimes, to a point, we can actually indulge ourselves a bit too much, but it’s better than your normal comedy crowd, where it’s kind of...” Gareth speaks in the demanding voice of the world’s scariest heckler, “’Make me laugh.’ It’s sort of the opposite of that.” Gareth goes on to enthuse about the surprising popularity of the event. “It’s a 150-seater room, and it’s often full. And if you get sixty or seventy people in, it’s doomed to be a disaster, and that would be like a major success for a lot of shows. So they frequently get in 100, 150 people. I don’t know where they come from! I really don’t, I don’t think they’re all local. So it’s got some sort of pull. And I think, genuinely, there is nothing quite like it around. There’s loads of clubs, and there’s loads of people doing all kinds of different things, and as a focus for character comedy, it’s more specific. It’s not really sketches, but character comedy nonetheless. Not stand-up.” This distinction reminds me of the observation made by many reporters at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe, that character comedy and sketch comedy seems to be taking over from stand-up on the circuit. Does Gareth agree? “I dunno, I think stand-up’s still pretty vibrant. Stand-up perhaps needs some new directions. I think there were break-throughs in the last ten years or so that perhaps there maybe hasn’t been in the last five years, in people’s style, delivery and content in stand-up. Although there’s probably something happening that I’m not aware of, you know, coz I don’t follow it closely enough. But character comedy is still fairly fresh. I mean, I know it’s been around since Dame Edna or whatever, but it’s still reasonably fresh, you feel like there’s uncharted territory there.” I suggest that maybe people don’t attempt to do it through fear of a negative reaction. “Yes, I think so. One of the main reasons is because it’s hard to do it in stand-up clubs, which is how Sven has evolved.” Indeed, Sven Stacey takes the concept of talking to an audience to another level that doesn’t seem to have been attempted in character comedy before... not for the whole show, at least. And the result is admirably coherent. “He’s a character who can hold his own in a stand-up club. He’s a character, but it’s not theatrical really. He’s essentially a guy who tells jokes, but they just happen to be, a) about a very specific subject, and b), he’s not aware, always, that he’s telling a joke. He thinks he’s being serious. That’s a kind of basic trait of character comedy. Which again, some audiences find a bit difficult if they’re just up for a beery night out. They don’t want irony, they want you to just tell them what you think, which is what stand-up is.” So, basically, I ask, are audiences less open to character comedy? “Yeah, I think so, but audiences are less open to pretty much anything, but you’ve gotta find a way of giving it to them anyway. It’s a strange thing, the intelligence of audiences... you over or underestimate it, and you’re in peril. You’ve just got to do what you think would be good, and then find a way of tailoring it for audiences. More subtle or complex ideas do struggle in comedy clubs, but if you take that too literally and start playing to the lowest common denominator, I think it’s pointless. And the next guy who comes on after you makes a joke about quantum physics, and you go, ‘oh, no, I could have tried that!’ I mean, some of the things people get away with... someone like Dan Antopolski does amazing, convoluted gags in pretty run-of-the-mill rough comedy clubs, and they love it. So it shows it can be done. I think that’s what’s interesting about comedy... it’s the most combative sort of entertainment I know, basically. Coz if you’re in a rock band, the crowd might shout and heckle, but you’ve got electric guitars, so you can carry on regardless. But in comedy, you’ve got this thing where they really will tell you if they don’t like it. So if you can get proper ideas across, or emotions or whatever, then you’re doing something right.” Lauren is keen to know more about Sven, in particular whether we will get to see more of his life. “I think you should, I think as the show develops in the next two or three weeks before Edinburgh, we’re gonna try and get a bit more back story in there. But the pressure of the gag- you’ve got to have a gag at the end of every sentence- is tricky. But yeah, I need to start trying to get across the back story. I know a lot about him, it’s just getting it across to the audience, and at the same time, making him funny.” I ask if Sven is based on anyone in particular, and Gareth looks at our Dictaphone, nodding violently. “No! He’s not based on anyone specific, but he is based on traits of various characters I’ve met in the business. But he’s not based on anyone I know. They tend to be people I’ve had encounters with and then never seen again. A bit like Sven! They’re just people who kind of disappeared through the back exit. But yeah, agents, managers, and various scheisters, and scam artists that sort of operate at their lower echelons... especially when you’re first coming into the business, you encounter these types. They make tragic figures themselves, they’re like bottom-feeders. The feed off the lower rungs of the industry. I think it’s quite revealing, coz the industry does have a seedy side to it, from top to bottom. It’s got an exploitative side. So to get all that paranoia, and bile and cynicism, and just put it into a character is quite a satisfactory thing to do I think. So I hope people respond to that. He’s the kind of character that can say all the stuff that I...” He hesitates, trying to be tactful. “...don’t think, but in my darkest moments perhaps kind of agree with.” So, blame the character for any complaints? “Absolutely, yeah, that’s the eternal get-out clause!” I wonder if Gareth has a particular character he likes to play, apart from Sven. “I liked a guy called Terrence in something called Diamond Heist that me and Phil did as the Legendary Polowski in Edinburgh 2001. He was just a monumentally thick character. Really easy for me to play. And Phil was so good at holding the crowd and keeping the energy going, all I had to do was kind of lob things in from the back of the stage occasionally. The occasional word.” I ask Gareth if he prefers to work alone or as part of a double act. “Well, I’ve only been doing stuff by myself now for a few months. So I’m enjoying it, but I’m still writing with Phil. And a lot of the stuff at Ealing Live! is crossovers with other people, so... I think it’s a struggle doing stuff on your own. It’s a struggle to write on your own. I kind of prefer working with other people, in a way.” I enquire if there are any other career paths apart from comedy that Gareth may have chosen. “Well, I came into comedy as an actor. I want to act and write. And make stuff. Like, theatre, films and stuff. It really is like I came into comedy because I couldn’t find any work as an actor. That really is the sad truth. I still don’t think of myself as someone who’s got a natural gift and I can make people laugh. But, you know, I can write stuff and perform stuff if it’s scripted, then perhaps improvise round it. It’s just something you can get up and do. Obviously, you’ve got to get a gig, but that’s actually fairly easy to get. Whereas theatre, you just have to wait around... it’s hard to get an audition for anything.” Lauren suggests Gareth may take any future opportunities to move away from comedy if acting jobs become more prevalent. “I think I’d move away if things kind of shifted in that direction, but I don’t think that’s gonna happen any time soon. Partly because all my contacts are in comedy, and partly because I am still enjoying it. But I think, I’ve been doing it so long now that if I wrote a book, or a play, or a movie, it would be formed in some way by what I’ve been doing over the last four or five years.” Since, for the time being at least, it seems Gareth is likely to stick with comedy, I ask him who his main comedic influences are. “People I’ve worked alongside are the main influences. Being in a double act has a big influence, and just seeing other comedians on the circuit. My big comedy heroes would be the kind of usual suspects of Hicks, and Pryor, and all those old greats, but I’m not really influenced, except in some very indirect way. And also, it’s very hard to be influenced by people who really are your heroes, because they’re so good that if you try and aspire to them too directly, you just end up looking like an idiot.” In that case, who’s the best person Gareth’s worked with? “I would say, Phil Brodie would be my biggest influence of sort of, style and attitude, and fearlessness of being on stage. But I still try and be influenced as much by things outside of comedy. I try and take ideas from whatever I’m reading at the time, or movies, rather than just looking within comedy.” Has Gareth got any future plans after the mad rush that is Edinburgh? “Er, I’m gonna be finding a way to pay the Edinburgh debt! I might be working in here...” He points towards the bar of the busy pub we’re in. “I don’t know, I’ve got a couple of little things lined up, but nothing major. Ealing Live! will start up again, and I’ll be doing lots of new stuff for that. Hopefully be doing the Edinburgh show in some form, somewhere in the country. Edinburgh’s strange, there’s the run-up to Edinburgh then suddenly it’s over, and you go, ‘oh, I’ve still got about a third of the year left’. But yeah, Ealing Live! will keep me busy. I’m gonna be on TV in a couple of places as well, I’m gonna be in the second series of Peep Show, on Channel 4...which is assuming I don’t get cut! And Everything I Know About Men which is a new Jessica Stevenson [of SPACED] sitcom.” Quite enough for a respectful comedian to keep his hand in. This seems a natural place to end, so Gareth leaves us, to buy some shoes in case anyone’s interested. And I run home to check the Edinburgh listings and find out the earliest time I can see Sven Stacey. If you’re going up to Edinburgh this year, I suggest you do the same. Quick Fire Questions Ones to Watch Apart from myself? Erm, Hopkins and Glover. They’re a charming double act, charming fellows. Ones to Avoid Hopkins and Glover. Best Venue At the moment, Ealing Studios staged live. Gareth was interviewed by Nat and Lauren, Summer 2004 RSS  Printable version	Visit our Siamese Twin Sister Site!