Nina Conti: The Ventriloquist Who Found Her Voice

0:02This is a Global Player original podcast. When I found ventriloquism I thought, well this is, this is mine. Did mum and dad discourage you from going down this road? You might get more truth if you speak to the puppet actually. How quickly did things develop? The stage door at the Swan Theatre, there's suddenly the big fluffy dog and the teach yourself ventriloquism kit. He had the invitation to make me a ventriloquist.

0:36hello and welcome to full disclosure a podcast project conceived entirely to let me spend more time with interesting people than i'd ever get on the radio um nina conti welcome thank you hello it's lovely to see you um we we couldn't decide whether you would come unaccompanied or not we were we were on tenterhooks i'm glad you've come unaccompanied unless you are you Unless you're hiding something. Well, no, I mean, my hand could come up like some sort of skeleton. Because, you know, it is supposed to be a searching but pleasant experience, full disclosure. Yes. I've listened to it and I find it to be so.

1:15All of those things. But, of course, with your puppets, they can be camouflaged sometimes. So I did wonder whether or not every time I asked you a vaguely searching question, someone else would answer it. Like I deflect. You might get more truth if you speak to the puppet, actually, because, yes, it's like the three. There's a fable, isn't there, of one lies and one doesn't. But actually it switches. The monkey and my characters do switch. The unlikely event that anyone listening to this isn't familiar with your work. I mean, we should stress that what you do is genuinely extraordinary. The combination of live improvisation with quite high-tech ventriloquism is you've invented an art form.

2:05You do something that nobody else does. I don't know if I could take credit for inventing something that no one else does. But I suppose I do it on the – oh, gosh, I'm trying to think of the word hoof. Is that what it is? is good on the hoof on the hop on the hoof but they both work couldn't work out what that's the thing i find most sort of pant wettingly funny is is the the speed with which you are putting words into people's mouth yes it's amazing when it takes me so long to remember one i mean if she went on stage we'd be in trouble but yeah it is it's a it's a skill of responding to what's there or what's suggested so i put masks on audience members for anyone who hasn't seen which I control the mouth of.

2:54And then I watch their body language and I try to make them say the stuff it looks like they might be thinking. So it's just very beady-eyed work, I think, what I'm doing to see what it looks like would make me laugh that they'd be saying. So I was watching a few prior to this and I did actually, because I watched it slightly differently from when I do as a normal punter, because I was trying to work out how you do it. And that was my breakthrough discovery is that you know that people are going to bend double with embarrassment or that there are things that we do, aren't there? There are physical reactions that we have to scenarios.

3:30And it's like, it's very chicken and egg. The gesture, the words, the words, the gesture, do the things like when the woman said, I'm pregnant, and you just, you know she's going to kind of, but just, it's absolute, it's a form of alchemy, I think. When it's going well, it must feel extraordinary. It does feel like cooking. it starts all igniting and when you're working with someone I get a bit sort of dizzy and heady with it too because it's kind of exciting and we're doing something that we don't know where it's going and you know we're both in a similar mind state I think me and the audience member and they've realised they've got quite a lot of power because they notice that something got a laugh and then they think okay that's my game if I do that then you know it'll work again so they sometimes repeat actions crikey pick it up quickly and there's jeopardy there as well because i feel fear watching it i mean there is an absolute sense of anything could happen yes i feel fear yes doing it yeah i'm not surprised yeah but they might be rubbish at it or they might just stand stock still i mean just and that's when you have to let go of your expectations because they never help you ever i mean in life i think that's key to have very like zero expectations of anything well you can never be disappointed.

4:47Well exactly but it's sort of slightly different from lowering your standards. Yes. But it's just not expecting anything so that because I might think that person looks like they'd be funny if they took a sort of hoity-toity attitude or something like that and then I'm forcing it and I haven't looked at them and I'm doing something else than what's in the room. So it's like a tuning in thing is what brings the spoils. But before we rewind to your early days was there a moment of breakthrough was there a moment where when you where you felt and thought on a stage that this if not entirely unprecedented then certainly rather special thing that you were doing was really really working I guess there were incremental breakthroughs and I sort of became interested in clowning at one point which is getting to be a bit of a boring word these days but um and a boring thing actually but i i um i did find that quite useful going on stage with nothing facing a group full of other clowning students who who would sort of i don't know waiting to see if you fail and having really very nothing i found that quite exciting it's like a real petri dish we just have nothing and then you realise that when you're honest that's what will get the laugh and if you bring your silly ideas of what you think will be funny eat God help you, it'll be grim.

6:21There was a more sort of obvious thing was I had that mask I had my first ventriloquist mask and I employed a mate to pretend they were an audience member and I said I'd make them dance and then they did a sort of reluctant dance And it was pretty funny. So I kept that in and I kept that one time he couldn't come. And I had that bit in the show and I thought I should risk it as someone really. And it was it was actually about 50 times funnier. And I was on had to be on my toes and it wasn't cheating. I mean, I look back on that thing. That's so naff. That's just cheating. And it's not fun. So so I never really look back.

7:04But I kept the risk small, just little, little bits, and then grow, grow, grow, and then eventually I just ended up doing an entire show with no script, which makes me very happy. Yes, I can imagine. Because I don't like writing.

7:20Right, let's back up. You are obviously the daughter of Tom Conti and Kara Wilson, something which, I mean, from what I've read about you, you've always had quite a difficult relationship, not with them, but with the fact of their fame. It's interesting, isn't it? Yes. Isn't that what comes across with a little cursory research? I think before Nepo Baby, how dare you say cursory, by the way? Oh, well, maybe not. For weeks. No, no, I'm sorry. I just didn't want to presume that you'd been trawling. Before Nepo baby was even a thing, you were worried that that was how you would be perceived. Nepo, finding Nepo.

7:59I call it Nepo. Nepo, sorry. No, Nepo's fine. I was very worried about that. Yes, it didn't have a word. But, well, I suppose, yeah, it did have a word. It was nepotism. But I didn't like it. I didn't want to be accused of it. I was really anxious. And I, I mean, but I didn't have the chutzpah to change my name and drive to just go at it. Did you think about that? I thought, well, if you don't like this, that's what you have to do. Yeah, yeah. But that felt weird to go as someone else with a different name. I mean, it's going to emerge like line two of that story, isn't it? Line one is I changed my name.

8:44Line two, she's Tom Conti's daughter. why she called herself blanking salt and I told her if I'm really honest I probably wanted the help yes of course it's a hard business to crack into and I thought well any help I can get I hadn't gone to drama school because my dad had told me not to and then and they'd also, my parents suggested you know it was a good idea to get a degree which you can't help but take a little vote of no confidence something to fall back on Yeah. A safety net. So I thought, all right, okay, well, it's not going to be easy then. And then I went and studied philosophy for a while, which was very entertaining, but doesn't lead directly to anything at all, except an existential crisis.

9:26Yes. And then I got an agent that my dad helped me get. So there's the nepotistic advantage. Well, it can get you to the threshold of a doorway, but it can't get you a residence in the room. It did not get me a job. No. I failed to get a job for years. And then I put a show on a little pub theater. And then I started to work on jobs that were, you know, I had other jobs. I had temping jobs and stuff. And I would just do sort of the free stuff. But it was really interesting stuff. It was Ken Campbell. And that's kind of like the drama school I went to with this maverick director. And that then gave me the confidence to sort of build my own thing.

10:15And then when I found ventriloquism, I thought, well, this is mine. This is not my dad's. This is totally mine. And I really held on to it with all I had, thinking this is a unique thing for me. Was it always obvious that you were going to be a performer? Not because of who your parents were, but because of who you were as a child? Well, I was putting on shows from a very young age, like parties and things like that. I was putting on shows. I put the twits on at my parents' party in the garden. I remember thinking during it, this isn't very good. I should have worked a bit harder on this. But you had an appreciative audience, at least.

10:59Well, they were attentive. I mean, God, they must have been indulgent. It wasn't good. Anyway, no, I had been putting on little shows and everything, but I was also very shy. Yeah, I thought so. So I think I... You're not a show-off. No, it wasn't a show-off. I was definitely very shy and still am, really. And so I needed to do my shows. I had to control the conditions in order to let myself out. And that's probably how you end up being a comedian. I mean, I think it's not uncommon. but now I so now I do a show where I do all the voices and I have total control which must have been you know in some way an antidote to being the quietest person in the room were you quiet at school pretty quiet I had a little posse to the side of the main people who seemed like the stars of the year you know the confident ones I was like slightly to the left of that and and what was the what role did the did the fame at home play in that i mean did people treat you different i mean it must be weird because your dad in particular is one of those actors who everybody feels that they own a piece of you know he's one of those actors with a with an easy familiarity and a niceness in in his sort of essence that makes people think they know him when they don't it must be weird really well don't you think so or not i don't know if i don't think so but I'm I'm sort of surprised a bit I suppose and a lot of people don't know who he is young people but everyone when you were at school would have known I guess they did know I guess they did know and there were some perks to that in some ways yeah he also was away a lot you know while I was growing up so he wasn't like pick up all the time and he did drive a Rolls Royce and dropped me off sometimes.

12:59It's just way too close to my friends and I always found that very devastating. Embarrassing. Embarrassing. Drop me at the corner. Don't be ridiculous. No, my friend's dad was a Rolls Royce dealer. Right. And he was absolutely adamant that you can't drop me off outside school. Right. Because you'd be pilloried for it. You know, ridiculous. Yes, absolutely. It's ridiculous. fabulous um but home was i presume quite a i mean a salon style i mean there'd be lots of actors and directors coming and going or not yeah there was yeah there was and my parents have both come from quite prim upbringings in scotland and they went a long way against that and it was much more um liberal and everything and there were lots of people around and yeah it It also looked like fun, the best fun, you know.

13:50One night John Candy came over with, I think he maybe shared an agent with my dad. So my dad's agent and him were over for dinner. And that was the most riotous night I can remember of my life. And he was playing with napkins and going, Whoa, body rabbit! He gave me$50, God knows why. He was just like on fire. The guy was on fire, funny, drank a whole bottle of whiskey and he was on fire and like that's intoxicating and of course you want to join that world of course you do you want that fun all the time and um so yeah it was just too inviting and so i was sort of pretending a little bit that i might want to do something serious and i did a mini pupillage and law and but it was grim i was like no i want the fun stuff so university was always just treading water it was treading water and keeping mum and dad happy it was treading water my best friend went to drama school right and i drove back from norwich where i was at university most weekends and hung out with her friends right that's where you kind of wanted to be yeah but weren't yeah and and did mum and dad put obstacles more obstacles in did they discourage you from going down this road no they didn't and i think that they had to be a little bit careful of knocking my confidence if i was going to go into it so they weren't they were encouraging but actually they did transmit whether or not they meant to they transmitted some serious concern reluctance a degree of deep concern because they kind of want you to be happy and they want you to be successful and it's not a profession in which either thing is easily achievable regardless of who you are no and it's terribly dependent on other people being an actor being a ventriloquist you do get a wonderful amount of self-control and independence yes of what's happening on stage you do but you can't control whether or not there's anybody in the audience but if you make it funny it does get noticed because you start little open mic nights and it's not hard to get those you know it's easier to control

16:12I suppose your school was a relatively straightforward affair, you're clearly bright teachers liked you, thought you could quite bright, it wasn't very straightforward I was very unhappy when I first went to both the schools I went to at the beginning it took a very long time, I think I shut down completely in primary school actually really yeah yeah you had attachment issues with seriously yeah i didn't know what had happened just this minute you were taken out of this home environment yeah you suffered so much time with my mom we were really best friends and then suddenly i and i looked at the other kids like this is not like this is almost a different species i don't know what i'm doing with this these things yeah i'm not one of them i felt like I don't know how to do this.

16:57And they're all getting on with it, and I don't know what this is. And I think I would just sort of sit and wait for the day to be over. Isn't that weird? So I don't know what that is now. Maybe I'd have something diagnosed now. I don't know. I don't think so. I was just really, it was like everything I liked was gone. And I was in a place that was noisy and scary. and a long day. Did it slowly dissipate, that feeling? Yeah, I managed to make a friend in the third year. It was there. Gosh. Yeah, and then it all was fine. And by the time you got to secondary school, you knew who you were? By the time I went to secondary school, it was a setback.

17:43It was back to, oh God, I'm back to this. I'm back to the person who's just waiting for the day to end. and then I made a friend. You need one, don't you? You just need one and then you're okay. But if you don't have one, God, it's a long day. And the fact that you're not speaking makes it difficult to start. Did adults not notice? They did and they were sort of, they liked me, they were encouraging me. I was, you know, I was like a good student. I wasn't misbehaving or anything. I think they wanted to help me out my shell. Yeah, but that's all they thought it was. It sounds a bit deeper than just someone who was shy.

18:22It sounds like there's something a bit more profound going on. I don't know. It was a bit chronic, actually, looking back. But then the fact that it didn't last, and then once you have a friend, you build, and then it was fine by the time I left both schools, yeah. So, I mean, school and then university. I didn't know you'd done a mini-pupillage. My cursory research didn't stretch to your flirtation with law. But what was the ambition then? Were you thinking, because you joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, and so you thought you were going to be and you wanted to be a straight actor. I really knew I didn't want to be a straight actor.

18:56So what are you doing then? What are you doing on this path? At the Royal Shakespeare Company, well, that was an audition and I did three roles and I had been working with Ken Campbell so I wore false teeth to one of them and, you know, I had like funny approaches to the thing. It was like how to game this audition and I managed to get in. But then as soon as I was in, I didn't really feel like I belonged because I'd been doing these sort of 24-hour plays with Ken. Yes. And then I felt like it was very, very straight. So there's a subversion that you're already drawn to. Somewhere that came in.

19:36A sense of subversive. I'm really glad I got that. I don't know where it came in. Yeah. and Ken Campbell was obviously the sort of deliverer of that experience, someone who you worked with and fell in love with and he's no longer with us but for people who are not aware of his he was never with us, he was somewhere else always wasn't he I mean he's an extraordinary figure in so many ways even if your encounter with him was purely professional it would have been deeply influential just just for what was it about him that was so out of the ordinary professionally about that thespianly it was really unpredictability that was so exciting because you couldn't possibly imagine what he was going to say his brain just worked differently and then you'd watch him direct people who seemed like a slightly a mediocre actor for example comes on and he would find something for them to do where suddenly everybody's doubled over laughing and he's found the thing for them um and it wasn't always nice the way he got there sometimes very cruel but always fascinating so i just thought that there's there's just so much going on there i need to be up close to that i need to get as much of that as possible because it's more interesting than anything i've seen when did you first come into his orbit um well whilst i was studying philosophy i i was really excited by philosophy actually i have to say it was a first class degree so you must have it was very interesting to me to think about things so profoundly that you kind of question everything um and he seemed to be doing that on stage so i went to see him at the national and he was doing something it was it was full of conspiracy theories and stuff and he was talking about seeking and supposing rather than just believing any old thing um so i had earmarked him as a goalpost of some kind and then when I heard through a friend that he was doing this play that anyone could be in all you had to do was show up um I went okay which was very brave and that was very brave for the kid you know at school who didn't speak to anybody yes but you had sensed or seen something that you hadn't seen before and you wanted a piece of it yeah and it felt kind you're desperate really because I wasn't getting into the profession normally.

22:07Nothing was happening. But you didn't want to, even as you tried to. Somewhere deep inside, you didn't actually want to go down the path that your father had gone down as an actor. You wanted to do something different, but you also wanted to be in that world where John Candy could be sitting at your dinner table and you could do something that made you feel fantastic. Yeah, I think I might have felt like a fraud as an actor probably i still would maybe i still would i don't know why there's a moment i got actor friends where and the two you can tell the difference between actors acting and that curious species of actor who aren't acting you know stanislavski about it or whatever but but you you would always have felt you were an actor acting unless you were doing this this kind of work with ken campbell and yeah i remember thinking because there was a script in some of the stuff with ken and i remember getting really playful with it one day and thinking oh i'm actually quite good but then i don't know it's not really welcome to be crazy.

23:19I don't know, that's not true. I felt shy as soon as I was in the straighter places and audition rooms. Wow. I don't know. A kiss of death to me they were, really. And then it's hard to leave your desperation outside and then that doesn't improve your performance. Maybe it does. I mean, Jim Carrey probably, you know, that was probably his fuel. So, I don't know why but the word lucky then is growing in my mind as i talked to you it's lucky that you discovered what you discovered yeah really lucky that something would fit all of these slightly well very conflicting impulses and sensibilities and you would find something and and develop something that fit that suits you so completely yeah i do actually really like the way things have turned out and i couldn't have found it without that luck it's true i mean i guess the fact that i took the chose to stick with the things um that i went into but it would be strange if i was just an actor oh god that would be strange and i was actually talking with my partner last night about pilots and things that didn't get picked up and i was thinking god what if it had who would i be now it would be so weird yeah the path not taken that was a parallel life a parallel universe when you're somebody completely different like a game i was i did a pilot for a game show did you with my masks and pilot went well i thought i thought this is for sure this is going to get commissioned yeah and then i went into itv sat with the head honcho who said so what do you what do you want to do like as if that pilot hadn't even been oh it didn't exist and i it was this weird meeting where I was thinking did you watch it or are you not even going to tell me no you're just going to say so like nothing happened so how are you anyway it was quite discombobulating at the time but I would be a game show host it's not very subversive it's not my bag yeah it would have been really weird it's a danger sometimes isn't there of rushing through whatever doors are open we're not stopping to wonder which doors you really really want to get through yeah yeah particularly in showbiz i have more failed pilots i like to say that the japanese air force in my uh on my cv but again most of them if they'd happened you'd think christ what would be going on now doing something that i love doing so i think that the the ventriloquism was ken into it before because he did this thing in kentucky and he came back with a puppet I just I mean it's a seminal moment in the in the origin story this isn't it I mean I think that's just his pranking mind and it's just him being deliberately obtuse and unpredictable like what's the naffest thing talking about ventriloquism like it's the highest art because at the time it was in the minds of people it's it's it's nookie bear and orville yeah really yeah it's tough stuff yeah And to say we're bringing it back, it's the best art form, it's the most powerful.

26:28And they did a thing at the National, the history of comedy, part one ventriloquism. I mean, as if it holds any place on the map. And if you said you were just doing this to be, you know, perverse, he would absolutely fight you down. Are you saying, you know, like you'd be in trouble for doubting him because then he would suddenly stand firmly on the ground of that underdog or whatever and fight to the death for it. I don't know. He was a guy who did things fully and he really didn't like half-arsed attempts at anything. But you still don't know whether he was entirely serious when he embraced ventriloquism.

27:08He became entirely serious. It's true. Especially when challenged. But the whole thing might have started off as a whim, a whimsical, funny idea. Funny idea. Yeah. Funny idea, but he would die for those. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, there's a lovely clip of him saying, I think anything that isn't funny is a travesty of life. He says it with such deathly anger. Venom. Yeah, venom. So what happened? I mean, how did... Have I got that right? He came back from Kentucky with a puppet? When did you first... Somewhat, yeah. When did you first insert your hand into a puppet? How did that come about? Well, I did it a few times in groups with him.

27:49he was holding sort of workshops and I had a troubled relationship with him because I couldn't do everything he wanted because it was too extreme and I had to separate a bit and that made him angry and it was a bit tough. So, but I didn't want to ever have an enemy in him, you know, so I kept in touch a bit and I went to these ventriloquist workshops. I thought they were really stupid. and I didn't like it but then I went to the Royal Shakespeare Company and I was doing a very normal job and I didn't have big parts, I had small parts and I really kind of missed him and I thought however weird it is I would rather that and at the time so I sort of opened the door to him again and then he asked me I mean it's a long story full story is that he said whilst you're doing this and you're cutting your teeth in the acting world i would like to write a book about acting i always have and if you could send me questions about acting that will inspire chapters and so and he provided me with postcards but there's a dress on them and uh i had an unsuccessful voice coaching lesson with sis berry who's very loud voice coach who said uh you know there are voices some I can listen to and the others I just shut off and you've got to make yours one I can listen to okay quite tough so I quoted that on this postcard and said what do I do and this book that he was purporting to write suddenly didn't exist anymore he had the invitation to make me a ventriloquist.

29:40And he went at it wholeheartedly. And at the stage door at the Swan Theatre, there's suddenly this big fluffy dog and a teach-yourself ventriloquism kit, which he bought in Kentucky, which was 30 booklets of how to learn ventriloquism. And it came with a sort of a lolly stick to hold your tongue down and a little mirror. And he said, this is the answer to your question. You will become a vocal acrobat. There will be nothing that you can do. You'll be doing all the things she can't teach you and you will know everything about the voice and this is what you have to do. It's actually amazing. And he was always amazing.

30:26That was just the kind of thing he did. He did it so fully. And so then I did remember my heart sinking yes i can imagine thinking oh god i wish i hadn't asked what about your book can't you just tell me some vocal warm-up

30:47and then and this is so good obviously this dog has cost you money and now i'm involved in this awful thing and i had to take a video of myself trying which i was sort of hoping would put him off yeah but the videos that i made with this puppet and some other puppets which i had around the house one of which was monkey right which would belong to an actor friend um they they were quite good i showed early promise in these videos and so it just like yeah it didn't stop absolutely extraordinary isn't it yeah it's funny what was the before we sort of develop that the evolution of the act further what was his I mean the possibility that it was all a wizard wheeze aside is it the fact that it allows an actor when he was doing workshops to shed inhibitions in a way that would be harder to do in other circumstances what is the role that the ventriloquism plays in the development of the actor or is that even a stupid question I don't think he cared about the acting part much.

32:01I think he liked to do stuff that no one else was doing. He was a truffle pig for lost art forms and eccentric and bold ideas. And so he was just giving himself a quest to bring lost art form back. And I mean, much like he wanted to give the world a language and studied pigeon for ages and made us all translate it into, translate my birth into pigeon and stuff like that. He would do things like that. So ventriloquism was just like, yeah, the thing of the time. And he did it a bit himself as well. It was terrible. So you were his vessel. Yeah. You were the vessel through which he would. I was the puppet, yeah.

32:46Oh, gosh. Probably. Yeah. In some ways. But I think it does help acting, actually. And he used to say in his show, he used to do an impression of all the great actors like Humphrey Burgart, a man of great stature and very little lip movement you know, if you watch it, if you keep your face still you have more power anyway no movement at all of the lips and you're really talking I don't know but yeah it was subversive it is a subversive art form it turns out, it isn't just a silly naughty jokes end of the pier stuff it's very subversive

33:33did you feel that early doors i mean because you move from ridiculousness to fascination i suspect quite quickly yeah yeah and then back in the day this there was no internet there was nothing you couldn't go on youtube and watch weird things and ken had a library full of weird things and he had videos of these old ventriloquists that you just could not see anywhere. And like Terry Rogers was one of them and she had a puppet. Terry had been born a man, I think, and had undergone the first sex change on the NHS apparently. Good Lord. And Terry had a male puppet that had incredibly deep male voice and she was just like pearls around her neck and like butter wouldn't melt.

34:20and there was a very old Athena documentary that Ken had somehow got a video of and she's putting her puppet away in the box and he's saying you'll never get away with this you'll never get and it was like so exciting it was really goose bumpy it was like oh there is something going on here there's something really interesting going on here and for the first time in your life you thought I can do I can actually do this I can do this real I can authentically do this. I won't be an actor acting or I will be me and I will be good. Finally, I've found something where I'm able to find things to say because I don't have to just be me saying all these things.

35:09I can have something demand them. I can have something ask me questions and demand my opinion. so I'm not arrogantly just going and spouting. And also I have something to fight against, you know. And so it was just like, oh, I could write actually with this pen. I could. It was a really nice unlocking moment. That's a good word, isn't it, unlocking? Because it's something that's been there all along but now got out. And I didn't know it was there all along either until I started to have a puppet and I started to think, oh, he could say this. and then I could see this. You described it as being like a secret passage, I think.

35:50Right. Because it's sort of a combination of armour and liberation. It's a freeing. It's a process of freeing. It was, yeah. Yeah, I'm very grateful for it. And then how quickly did things develop? I mean, when did you first do it in front of an audience?

36:09Well, I mean, it was baby steps initially because I thought, okay, I'm good at ventriloquism, but I need somebody to write me something which Ken did he wrote me a play and he wrote me like a half hour play about an actress becoming a ventriloquist and Ken was in the play he was the director off stage in the toilet throughout so I go around to his house and I'm like Ken and he's like oh in the lab and And so I have a conversation with him off stage and then he goes, go and get the, you know, open that box or whatever. And I start, oh yeah, that was it. I said, I've got an audition and I need to take a puppet.

36:56And he's like, well, go and get that one. And so then this sort of, I unfold all these boxes and talk to all these puppets. And by the end, I decide not to go to the audition because I'm not an actress. I'm a ventriloquist. Gosh. Yeah, that was the play. Where did you put that on? I did that at the Gate Theatre. and that felt like a seminal moment big moment yeah my mum cried because you were not an actress you were a ventriloquist my mum cried because she thought she's gonna be okay oh wow because she'd seen you do something special on the stage what a lovely thing that must have been yeah and and but again you know it's a however good you are at it it's quite an odd sell isn't it to then and I don't know, what do you do?

37:39Put your CV through Letterboxd? I mean, you develop another show and you take it. I made videos. Yes, of course. I started to make videos, and I gave them to people. I mean, they must have thought I was mad. I gave one to Paul Andrew Williams, who's the director now, because I knew him as a mate. I gave one to, I've forgotten his name right now, Bill Bailey. Yes. Dylan Moran. You know, that's so embarrassing. Why is that embarrassing? Well, these videos are just like me talking to a monkey in my flat. It's madness. It's not madness because you were obviously very good. But it's not the act of a shy young woman, is it?