Dr Olly Double, Reader in Drama, has been interviewed by the British Comedy Guide website.
The British Comedy Guide – BCG – is a fan-run website dedicated to the promotion and celebration of British comedy. It is the world’s most-visited website about British comedy.
The interview is entitled ‘1979 and All That: Back to the Future of Comedy after Coronavirus’, by Jay Richardson.
In the interview, Olly talks about how Coronavirus has impacted the comedy scene, and speculates how it can recover: ‘There’s a strong case for the government to put really, really well targeted money into making sure that we don’t lose the live scene,’ he explains ‘It’s important to recognise that those people who play the O2 wouldn’t have got to that point if they hadn’t started out learning to perform in smaller clubs.’
He also discusses his recent book Alternative Comedy: 1979 and the Reinvention of British Stand-Up (Bloomsbury, 2020), and the varied history of the alternative comedy scene. ‘That was another thing that surprised me,’ he reveals, ‘[t]he extent to which Covent Garden street performers were an important part of the growth of the scene, poetry, the extent to which a particular contingent of street-based acts from Brighton were important, those things were really interesting.’
To read the full interview, please see the webpage here:
www.comedy.co.uk/live/features/oliver-double-interview/