Samantha Hannah… A bad day in Australia and a trans-world romance

Next Up – it’s Samantha Hannah’s lockdown special show

Samantha Hannah got in touch with me in July to plug her newly online NextUp Comedy show – How To Find Happiness in a Year – it’s her 2019 Edinburgh Fringe show shot in her living room at home during the UK Coronavirus Lockdown with her partner as the sole member of the audience. NextUp had been going to film it on stage in front of a live audience until COVID-19 intervened.

But, when they saw her living room version, they snapped it up.

Hello. I thought. That’s interesting.

And also Samantha comes from Perth in Scotland. My mother was born in a village just outside Perth.

That’s interesting, I thought.

We met on 30th July in a pretty much deserted Covent Garden Piazza.

It was very interesting.

Three problems.

I have been lazy.

Lockdown Lethargy hit me.

And her back-story is so interesting, she is not getting much of a plug for her NextUp show here…

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Samantha in a deserted Covent Garden…

SAMANTHA: I performed on the UK comedy circuit for about two years, about six nights a week. Then I gave up in 2009 for about seven years. Didn’t do any stand-up.

JOHN: You had always fancied being a stand-up?

SAMANTHA: Well, I studied Performing Arts at university then went more down a directing route – youth theatre, helping adults with learning difficulties… 

JOHN: Adults with learning difficulties? The comedy circuit…

SAMANTHA: (LAUGHS) No!

When I moved to London, I didn’t have the connections to do the work I’d done in Scotland, so I auditioned for A Christmas Carol at the Lion & Unicorn Theatre in Kentish Town and did that for several weeks, but I always loved writing comedy sketches. I was writing them and putting them on the British Comedy Guide forum… Someone saw one of the sketches online and asked to film it.

The sketch never got filmed, but the director of A Christmas Carol asked: “Who was that guy you were meeting?” 

“Oh,” I said, “he does comedy.”

“You do comedy? Why don’t you put on a show here for the next six weeks after this run finishes?”

“…a space to do whatever I wanted…”

So I was basically given a space above the theatre to do whatever I wanted… I got a few people together and put on a show that was about 3½ hours long with so many acts and so many intervals and Aaron Barschak did like a full hour of stand-up at the very end.

It was a most bizarre experience but, because I did it for about six weeks, I met lots of actors. I wanted to take the show to the Edinburgh Fringe, but everyone dropped out, so then I did a stand-up course to meet other people to write and perform with.

Then I realised: Oh! You can just do it on your own! You don’t have to rely on anybody and people won’t drop out!

That’s basically how I got into comedy.

JOHN: But then, after two years, you gave up for seven years. Why?

SAMANTHA: I think I just got burnt out by the circuit. I was doing some 20-minuters and getting paid, but I wasn’t enjoying it and didn’t know why I was doing it. It just wasn’t giving me any joy.

And also I met someone who was also in the industry – never do that. He was a promoter.

I gave up comedy; we broke up; my brother passed away and I just went travelling. I went to Australia for a year. I worked in ski-fields in the middle of nowhere, worked at Madame Tussauds in Sydney, making wax hands…

A very hand-some figure at Madame Tussaud’s in Sydney

JOHN: What qualifications do you need to make wax hands?

SAMANTHA: I have no idea. It was one of the hardest jobs I’ve had. I was just doing what came along. I worked on a cattle farm in Queensland…

JOHN: You rode horses?

SAMANTHA: I was given a horse by the owners and they said: “We trust this horse with our 3-year-old, so you will be fine.” 

One day I was mustering cattle and the horse was getting really unhappy. At one point, we went over mud and the horse really didn’t like it, started bucking and threw me off. I landed on my head on a rock – luckily I had a helmet on. The helmet got dented and, obviously, I was quite dazed and confused.

All the farmers around were saying: “You’ve gotta get back on the horse and teach it a lesson!”

But I couldn’t, so one of the other farmers, she jumped on the back of the horse and rode it off and gave it a telling-off.

Later that same day, we had to go into the bull pen, sorting out the cows and bulls…

Samantha’s animal encounters were unlike this (Photo: David Clode via UnSplash)

JOHN: This sounds like a bad idea.

SAMANTHA: I was told: “You’re alright. The bulls are not going to go for you. You’re fine.”

But this one bull just locked eyes on me and started charging towards me.

You know about ‘fight or flight’?

I did nothing. I was just staring at it and the farmer was looking at me like: Why is this girl not doing anything? And, at the last moment, as it got to me, it suddenly swerved out of the way. So it was fine.

When we got back to the farm that day, the mum took my dented helmet and was going to separate the sun visor from it… But, as she took it apart, she saw that, inside the helmet was a redback nest with a redback in it – a very poisonous spider – the Australian black widow. If I had been bitten by the spider, I probably wouldn’t have known because I was so dazed by hitting my head on the rock.

JOHN: An eventful day…

SAMANTHA: And then, a couple of days later, an eastern brown – one of the deadliest snakes in the world – came into the house and got behind the TV set.

JOHN: I’ve never really fancied going to Australia. New Zealand, yes.

SAMANTHA: My mother and father came over to visit me in Australia and wanted to go to New Zealand, so we went there. After they left, I stayed on and worked there in Queenstown – another ski resort – and lived in Glenorchy with an old man and an unrelated 7-year-old child. We watched Lord of the Rings. Then I decided to move up to Wellington and to write a show about trying to find a husband in a year.

I posted a Tinder profile…

…and I started to say Yes to EVERYone who replied. 

JOHN: New Zealand is a relatively small country.

SAMANTHA: Several times I ran out of matches. You could only do 100 every 12 hours.

JOHN: How many did you do? 400?

SAMANTHA: Oh, there were more than that! I went on a few dates. A few nice guys. And then, the day I got to Wellington, I was getting a bit sick of it. But the next morning, when I woke up, I’d had a Match with someone called Toby…

He was a New Zealander in London, doing his own experiment, trying to understand the algorithms and he thought he probably wanted to move back to New Zealand. He had thought: I’ll set it to New Zealand and see what happens. So he set it to Wellington.

He was in London, really near to where I used to live. And I was in Wellington, literally one stop away from where he used to go to university.

Samantha’s pic on Tinder. She liked melons.

We started Messaging. He was a data scientist. I asked if he could do an analytics report to see if we were a good match. He put all our messages into Excel and looked for commonly-used words and sentiments. I was going to use the results as part of my show.

JOHN: Were you a good match?

SAMANTHA: We had our first phone call when I was quite drunk and, when I woke up the next day, didn’t really remember it but, because he had Uber Eats for Wellington, he used it to send me breakfast. And that was it. He was clearly the person for me. I met his parents before I met him.

Six weeks after the first message, I flew back to the UK to meet him. I arrived about 05.00am in the morning after a 38-hour flight… and he wasn’t there.

Then he turned up with a bottle of Copella apple juice in hand, because I had kept telling him how much I liked Copella apple juice. And we decided: “Right! Let’s go on our first date!”

JOHN: How did you decide what sort of date it would be?

SAMANTHA: It was six o’clock in the morning. I needed food and to go to sleep. But it was still a bit nerve-wracking. Imagine if you flew 12,000 miles to meet someone and…

Anyway, it was fine and we had a week together, then he went back to New Zealand for Christmas and I went up to Scotland.

In the New Year, we dithered a bit, because he was thinking about going back to New Zealand, But then he broke his leg in a ski-ing accident in France.

JOHN: You arranged this?

SAMANTHA: I wasn’t there! But, when he came back to the UK, he was very ill. He had picked up a bug. I was nursing him back to health and we just decided, because he couldn’t run away with a broken leg, we would go for it.

“…I only did it for four days in Maggie’s Chamber…”

JOHN: And you wrote the show…

SAMANTHA: Yes. How to Find a Husband in a Year at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2018. I only did it for four days in Maggie’s Chamber at 11.00am in the morning. I wasn’t even in the Fringe Programme. Then my second show, in 2019, was How To Find Happiness in a Year.

JOHN: Which is your NextUp show… But the Rule of Three. There has to be a third How To show…Were you preparing it as your 2020 Edinburgh show before coronavirus hit?

SAMANTHA: Yes: How To Win At Life.

JOHN: Edinburgh in 2021?

SAMANTHA: I hope so.

All’s Well That Ends Well… The happy couple – Samantha Hannah and Toby – at home in London

Comic Becky Fury wants to ‘go out with’ another comedian – against my advice

More Red Army Faction than Royal Air Force

“Fury is your real name?” I asked stand-up comic Becky Fury.

“Yes.”

“Middle name?”

“Anne.”

“So Rebecca Anne Fury? RAF. Like the Royal Air Force.”

“No,” she said. “Like the Red Army Faction.”

In August, Becky Fury won this year’s increasingly prestigious Malcolm Hardee Cunning Stunt Award. She had posted her Edinburgh Fringe show flyer on the dating site Tinder as a commendably lateral thinking way of increasing her audience numbers. She also printed on her flyer that she was a nominee for the ‘Last Minute Comedy Award’.

The used-to-be Perrier Awards were sponsored this year by lastminute.com. So this claim was impressive and, on the night I saw her show, four Canadians had been lured in on the basis she was, they told me, “up for the big Edinburgh comedy award”. But Becky had, in fact, been nominated a while ago in a contest run by the small club based in Hitchin called Last Minute Comedy – totally unconnected to last minute.com. It was an admirably truthful yet misleading cunning stunt.

Becky with her increasingly prestigious Cunning Stunt Award

“So,” I said to her, “as a result of winning an increasingly Malcolm Hardee Comedy Award, you must now be inundated with phone calls from Los Angeles and Las Vegas?”

She laughed.

“When I started doing comedy,” she told me, “I met Tony Allen. And him and Malcolm Hardee never got on at all.”

“Because,” I asked, “they had different versions of how the phrase ‘alternative comedy’ was first coined?”

“Yes. So, since I got the Malcolm Hardee Award, Tony Allen ’s not speaking to me.”

“Why?” I asked. “It’s not your fault you got it.”

“I think he thinks I should have turned it down and maintained my… I think he’s feeling a bit unjustly forgotten.”

“Well, that’s true enough,” I said. “He may or may not have invented the phrase ‘alternative comedy’, but he was important in inventing the concept.”

“He was,” agreed Becky, “and I think Malcolm Hardee deserves credit for being an amazing, anarchic comedy promoter but also Tony didn’t really like Malcolm Hardee because he thinks that Malcolm sold out.”

“Idea was it should be a revolutionary force for social change”

“How did he sell out?”

“By not being completely pure and truthful to what Tony thought alternative comedy should be.”

“Which was?”

“That it should be political. His idea was it should be a revolutionary force for social change.”

“Whereas,” I agreed, “Malcolm thought it should be a load of bollocks – literally.”

“Yes,” laughed Becky. “Anarchic fun.”

“Where did you meet Tony Allen?” I asked.

“At an anarchist book fair and I went to one of his workshops at the beginning of my stand-up comedy career. He mentored me. He sort-of took me on as his sort-of daughter for quite a few years.”

“And didn’t take advantage?” I asked.

“No. He looked after me because I was not in a very good way. He was my surrogate dad figure and he played that role wonderfully. He was really good.”

“And eventually…?”

“Relationships and friendships,” said Becky, “run a course. I’m moving my boat up to near where he lives in Ladbroke Grove, so we will probably see more of each other again.”

“You live on a boat?”

Wanting a genuinely interesting alternative life

“It’s the freedom and, if you’re going to create interesting art, your art is your life, so it’s difficult to create genuinely interesting alternative work if you don’t live a genuinely interesting alternative life.”

“You want to be a free spirit,” I said.

“I want to be happy.”

“Are you?”

“I live on a boat and I work very little and I have a very nice life. I try not to hurt anybody or cause anyone any stress. People should be what they want to be. I am a free spirit. But why do I live on a boat? Because it’s cheaper. I used to live in a squat, but you can’t do that any more.”

“For how long?” I asked.

“Five years. It was very beautiful experience.”

“Just the one squat?”

“Lots of them. We had one in Shadwell that had a circus space in it. A trapeze. A yoga space. The council was going to give it to us, but we had to fill in loads of paperwork and we couldn’t be bothered. Now I think maybe it would have been worth the effort. The council actually offered us a £3 million property. I think it had been an old dairy. They owned it. They said: If you want to turn this into a housing co-op, fill in the correct paperwork and we’re open to the idea. Now it is a traffic wardens’ storage space.”

She was a nice middle class girl who went to a private school.

“Living in a squat,” I said, “suggests an urge to rebel.”

“I went to a private school and could see my life was too narrow and wasn’t interesting enough. I thought I needed to expand my horizons and my life experiences and go a bit crazy in order to create more interesting art. You don’t create interesting art if you’re a nice middle class girl who goes to a private school.”

“You occasionally,” I said, “lapse into poems on stage.”

“I am a poet. I don’t want to be a poet. But I do more paid poetry gigs than paid comedy gigs at the moment. I would like to think my life was poetry, hence the fact I live on a boat. Is that really pretentious?”

“Potentially in print it might be,” I said. “All sorts of things people say change their tone when they’re printed.”

“You lose the intonation,” said Becky.

“Yes,” I said. “How long have you been doing comedy?”

“About five years, but I was quite depressed when I first started. I suppose it was maybe a way of not killing myself. I was just going round doing open mic gigs as a way of keeping myself sane.”

“Surely a wrong choice of career in that case,” I suggested.

“Yes,” laughed Becky, “I don’t think you can say that about comedy: that it’s a way of keeping yourself sane.”

“I wasn’t happy and I was taking quite a lot of drugs”

“This was in your drug period?” I asked.

“Yes. I wasn’t very happy and I was taking quite a lot of drugs. So I was going around self-harming on the open mic circuit, doing lots of horrible gigs as an alternative to taking hard drugs and cutting myself.”

“Which you used to do?”

“No. All the cool kids cut themselves, but I’m quite lightweight when it comes to self-harm.”

“Just doing open mic gigs and going with unsuitable men?” I suggested.

“Yes. I need to find a comedian to go out with so I can re-sharpen my comic brain.”

“That’s a terrible idea,” I advised her. “Never go out with a comedian. They’re all mad.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Becky replied. “I don’t care how mad they are. It’s about my career development.”

“But you will also be competing against each other.”

“That’s fine. I will win.”

“Have you been out with a comic before?”

“He said it was not a good idea because he was too mental”

“Yes. Years ago. A long time ago.”

“How many comics?”

“Two. I was very young.”

“You told me earlier that, when you were about 19, you met (COMEDIAN 1) and he helped you.”

“He was a lovely man. He was about 40. He said I was too young for him to go out with. He said it was not a good idea because he was too mental.”

“Well,” I agreed, “he’s spot-on there.”

“He said: You don’t want to waste the best years of your life dealing with me.”

“That’s surprisingly sensible of him,” I told her.

“Exactly,” said Becky. “Isn’t that nice? So he just carried on being a lunatic and left me to get on with my own shit.”

“How did he help you?” I asked.

“By not going out with me.”

“Did he help you professionally?”

“No. Except maybe by not going out with me.”

“This is before you went to university,” I said. “You did drama at university, so you must have wanted to be an actress?”

“No. I’ve always been into comedy. When I first went to comedy clubs, I used to do a bit of chatting up the performers”.

“Only chatting up?”

“And sleeping with them occasionally. I was young.”

“And the attraction was?”

“I found out they were all completely mental”

“Women always sleep with comedians, don’t they? That’s one of the reasons why guys like doing comedy. Because it gets the girls. And it got me when I was young and impressionable and when I thought that, offstage, they were like they were onstage.”

“But then…” I prompted.

“Then I found out they were all completely mental.”

“How long did it take you to realise that?”

“Pretty quickly.”

“But, after that, you chose (COMEDIAN 1) despite the fact you knew they were all mental.”

“Well, I never really went out with him. I had a thing with him. And I had a thing with (COMEDIAN 2) and then I didn’t go out with any more comedians for ages. I decided I should probably go out with sensible people my own age instead. Well, I went with junkies. I wanted people more sensible and mentally stable than comedians, so I started going out with junkies.”

“A wise observation,” I laughed.

“But now,” Becky continued, “I do need to go out with a comedian again. I need to sharpen up my comedic abilities. That’s why I contacted you: so I can get hold of a comedian to shag. Basically, this is a personal ad.”

“How can they get in touch with you?” I asked.

“They can probably find my Edinburgh Fringe flyer on Tinder,” said Becky.

Delicious and dateless Nicole Harvey on taking a sex doll and whip to Brighton

Smiling Nicole Harvey + the Gorgeous Gavin

I met actress/writer/voice-over performer Nicole Harvey in the Soho Theatre Bar yesterday afternoon. She had a broad smile on her face and had just been to a sex shop in Goodge Street to buy an inflatable man.

“He’s called Gorgeous Gavin,” she told me.

Nicole’s show Delicious & Dateless is at the Brighton Fringe this weekend and next weekend.

“You did the same show at the Edinburgh Fringe last August,” I said. “At what point since then did you think: The one thing missing from this show is an inflatable doll with an inflatable penis?”

“I‘ve completely re-written the show,” Nicole told me. “In Edinburgh, the show was very much in development. It now has a very different beginning.”

“Gorgeous Gavin appears at the beginning of the show?” I asked. “How are you going to climax at the end?”

Nicole’s show, revised for Brighton Fringe

“Well, there are boots and whips that appear later,” she said.

“And you bought Gorgeous Gavin at a shop in Goodge Street?” I asked.

“There was also a Justin Bieber doll called Just-In Beaver,” said Nicole.

“Why did you go to that shop in particular?” I asked.

“Because I had to take back the female doll I had bought – Lollipop Lolita.“

“Why did you have to take back Lollipop Lolita?”

“Because I don’t want to fuck her mouth and that’s what she is designed for.”

“Didn’t this strike you at the point you originally bought her?”

“I had just wanted her legs for my show. But her boobs were so huge she wasn’t going to work as a comedy prop – there was no way I could scrunge the boobs down. So I decided to buy Gorgeous Gavin instead.”

“Do you have a discount at this shop for bulk buying?” I asked.

Since Edinburgh last year, Nicole has had “a real eye-opener”

Nicole ignored the question and said: “Since doing my show in Edinburgh last year, I have had a complete eye-opener and, in one part of my new show, I am commenting on this cultural shift that we’re in.”

“Cultural shift?” I asked.

“The reason I don’t have a love life,” explained Nicole, “is because I refuse to get on Tinder. That is what everyone is doing. But it’s purely pictures. It is about as superficial as it can get.

“Everyone is glued to their phone. I’ve seen pictures of guys’ hard-ons on Twitter that even 12-year-olds can see – and messages saying: Hi, I need someone to suck me off at lunchtime; I don’t mind if it’s male or female. Message me. It seems that, in this reality today, no-one will actually talk to you. Certainly no-one chats you up.”

“Which reality?” I asked.

“Actual reality,” said Nicole, “as opposed to virtual reality.”

“No-one chats you up?” I asked.

“No. Not in the real world. But they’re quite happy to be totally up-front asking for sex online with someone they’ve never met. so the world’s gone mad.”

“Well,” I said, “the whole Sex Positive thing does seem to be just an excuse for random sex with strangers.”

Was the film a sexual game-changer?

“With Fifty Shades of Grey,” said Nicole, “not only am I not up-to-date with fashion because I won’t go on Tinder, but I now need to be up for a spanking with a stranger – or get good at whipping – just to keep up with the trend.”

“What sort of man are you after?” I asked.

“Someone kind. Someone funny. Someone who’s emotionally mature, with not too much baggage, who’s got his shit together.”

“Well, that rules out most comedians off-stage,” I said. “Did you get any reaction from your show in Edinburgh? Your posters were really saying; I want a date!”

“My audience was mainly women wanting to tell me their Tinder horror stories.”

“Tell me more about the man in the sex shop.”

“I said to him: Whatever’s kinky is not taboo. But what is taboo is loneliness.”

“Explain?” I said.

“We are not really shocked by kinkiness any more. We’ve seen god knows how many politicians with sex scandals and 50 Shades of Grey became a mainstream movie. Anything that was kinky doesn’t really seem to be taboo any more. but to need a doll because you’re lonely… Yes, there is online dating and Tinder and it’s oh-so-easy to meet up, but what we don’t have easily any more is intimacy.”

Nicole Harvey – waiting for her right cup of tea

“What type of intimacy?” I asked.

“Emotional.”

“You should get together with the man in the shop,” I suggested.

“I think he makes sex videos and wears a pig’s face.”

“Generally?” I asked.

“He used to be a singer and has a book coming out.”

“I feel a blog coming on. You’ll have to take me into the shop – Pimp a blogger. How do you know he wears a pig face?”

“There’s a back room.”

“Why were you in the back room?”

“Because I need a whip for the show as well.”

“Gorgeous Gavin, the inflatable man, was not enough for you?”

“No.”

“Did you buy a whip?”

“No. They were all a bit wonky.”

Crop expert Nicole Harvey aesthetically dislikes wonky whips

“Define a wonky whip,” I asked her. “It sounds to me like an ice cream.”

“It was the way the leather was platted. It wasn’t nice and straight.”

“So for you,” I said, “it’s not to do with sex or pain but the aesthetics?”

“Oh yeah. I’m probably just going to get a horsey one, a riding crop. I ride horses.”

“I was thinking more of Zorro,” I said.

“That’s more of a lion tamer’s whip.”

“You’re smirking again.”

“I am allowed to.”

“What else does the shop have?”

“There are dolls you can get that cost thousands and thousands of pounds because they’re made of silicon and have real hair. There was a TV documentary about it and a play I saw called Companion Piece.”

“So, you’ve researched it in depth?”

“I’ve just come across things.”

After a long, thoughtful pause, I asked: “I wonder how large the demand for sex dolls is.”

“I guess,” replied Nicole, “some men don’t want a woman to answer back. But, on the other hand, plastic dolls can’t cook.”

“Swings and roundabouts,” I said.