Opinion: On the Radio, No One Can Hear You Mime

I can vividly remember the exact moment I fell in love with comedy. For me, and I suspect for many comedians, that moment happened when I was watching someone else do it and I thought “wow, yeah, I reckon I’d like to do that.”

I was watching master mime Trygve Wakenshaw perform his first show Squidboy at Edinburgh in 2014. He was pretending to feed someone on the front row an entire sheep. I’d never seen anything like it – with no tool but his body, he conjured entire worlds imagined by the audience. It was observational comedy that let us do the observing. I’ve never looked back.

So how come I’m looking back now, in the form of a hot take / opinion piece?

Back in July, amidst all the outrage and terror of disappearing Fringe infrastructure, what felt like positive news floated to the surface. BBC Radio 4 would be broadcasting the Pleasance’s Nominees Gala, “a performance from all the nominees for the 2022 Edinburgh Comedy Awards” – i.e. the two biggest awards for comedy in the world – “giving listeners around the UK the chance to hear the cream of this year’s Edinburgh crop.”

There’s a word in that sentence that gives me the shivers, and it’s not cream.

“Hear.”

First, they came for the mime artists – and I did not speak out, because I was a mime artist.

Wait. Let’s cut the drama for a moment. Stand-up is undoubtedly the dominant form of comedy found at the Fringe, and elsewhere. Out of 1200+ comedy shows for sale on the Fringe website, around 700 shows self-identify as stand-up. But that means for just under half of the comedy shows at the Fringe, “stand-up” doesn’t quite describe what they do. It’s not an insignificant number.

For the first time last year, the BBC New Comedy Award accepted video entries, and it felt like a massive boost to everyone whose act can’t be transferred to an MP3 file. Before that, I remember character comedian David McIver entering as a joke with an audio-description of him removing incrementally smaller hats. It was a competition for stand-ups. If you did anything else, you didn’t qualify by implication.

But this year, I’m shortlisted for the BBC New Comedy Award, which is something that literally could never have happened till 2021. That’s because the competition has recognised that comedy can, sometimes, be a visual experience. And I worry that, as exciting as a Radio 4 showcase is, once again the implication is that the top tier of comedy is for stand-up only.

In my Fringe show, I have one joke in the show that has no visual element. One. I counted.

This isn’t about me – as far as I’m concerned, any excuse to think less about awards, the better. But I’m frustrated on behalf of the incredible physical/visual acts who have been making inspiring work for years, building reputations, and who deserve a chance at that kind of attention.

These are the people who inspire me and this year will provide that lightbulb moment for a whole new generation of performers. Acts like Tom Walker, who this year presents an hour-long mime ode to the javelin. Or Josh Glanc, who once created an entire show performed in nonsense. Or Julia Masli, presenting an epic clown odyssey of an immigrant in search of a hot dog. Or Sami Abu Wardeh, one of Chortle’s Ones To Watch for 2022 and whose sweaty antics have to be seen to be believed.

These are some of the most creative comedians on the international circuit, but when one of the prizes on the line is your comedy being heard on Radio 4, I can’t help but worry they will suffer for not being “radio-ready”. And why should they be? It’s not what they do. How would previously nominated and winning acts like Spencer Jones, Demi Lardner, Rob Kemp, Lucy Pearman and Natalie Palamides have fared without the visual element that makes their work so special?

I hate the idea of these acts, whose work I love so much, being forced to contort themselves into a format that doesn’t suit them, and being judged for not fitting the brief. I see it happen time and time again, and it breaks my heart.

There’s an assumption at work here about what kind of comedy has a future in the industry, but it doesn’t track with what actually makes a splash in Edinburgh. Audiences will continue to support the work they want to see at the Fringe, where weirdness thrives. We know that absurd, alternative work might not always win the gongs, but it’s what lives in the memory long after the last weirdo has hauled their props onto a train and away.