Lost Features Thursday: Latitude's Tania Harrison, Two Pints' creator and much more...

Having relaunched a couple of weeks ago, we've been transferring our archive and digging out all sorts of unexpected comedy gold from our early days that we'd completely forgotten about.

 

We're giving it an airing, and have got some of our favourite fellow comedy site friends to dig theirs out too. 

 

They are the 'who needs Wikipedia, we've got the' British Comedy Guide; capital specialists London Is Funny; longform interview pros The Humourdor; and we also got Harry Deansway to nab us some features from the now sadly-defunct comedy magazine The Fix.

 

We'll be releasing them every day this week so check back for more...

 

 

 

 

 

Here at SSP we have tried to keep up with the industry folk, and Tania Harrison, the arts curator of Latitude festival, was one of the first that we spoke to when we started. It's quite remarkable how far the festival has gone since this interview in 2008, although the seeds for future development were clearly already being sown back then...

 

What Tania was doing when she found Ross Noble leading a crowd to a vegan stall: “I tried to get hold of my stage manager to ask ‘What’s happened?’ as obviously it is my job to solve problems and then I see this Pied Piper of comedy, with his long streaming hair behind him, leading a pack and shouting ‘sausage rolls’.”

 

Read: Latitude: Taking theatre to the festival

 

 

 

 

 

A nice chat with the first man of the Fast Show on how the show ended, and interestingly, how he sort of regrets not doing a fourth series. He also said he regrets going too far with the Smashey and Nicey stuff. An interesting take on the regrets that everyone has about their career trajectory, but that no-one seems to put in quite such a succinct way.

 

On the club circuit: “I love doing live stuff, but then again when I’ve done live stuff I’ve done it to an audience that’s been there to see our show and there’s a great atmosphere from the start. I’ve never had to go to say a working mans club in Barrow-in-Furness. I have no great desire to do that though. I guess I’m more a comic actor than a stand-up comedian.”

 

Read: Hot Line to the Whitehouse

 

Harry now runs Deansways in Bethnal Green and tweets over here.  

 

 

 

 

 

Ah, Two Pints, that wonderful emblem of stuffy old Auntie Beeb trying to get down with the kids through the medium of cock jokes. Its creator Susan Nickson – played in the photo in this link by Jessica Hynes – muses on the show as it hits ten series and she was off to America to try and make it work there. Guilty secret: I sometimes watched Two Pints. And laughed. 

 

As close to the mea culpa you're after and not going to get: “I was pretentious and arrogant (as one should rightly be at the start of their career) and couldn't understand why anyone could view an exact replica of my life as 'crude' - I was totes sophisticated after all. I drank Jacob's Creek.”

 

Read: Two Pints at 10

 

 

 

 

 

Paul Fleckney, editor of London Is Funny, says: Nothing unambiguous about McIntyre, who you can pretty crudely say is at the opposite end of the comedy spectrum to Lee. He is however another divisive figure and attracts a lot of vitriol, but I wanted to defend McIntyre, having seen his ability to absolutely slay a room in a way so few other comedians can.

 

Choiciest defence of Mr Roadshow: “Both pre- and post-fame – his big break came in 2008 – McIntyre has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to walk into a frosty room (as opposed to an arena) and take it by the scruff of the neck, by the time he's finished the audience is howling and you wonder why the others made such heavy work of it.”

 

Read: Michael McIntyre – the comedian that comedians love to hate

 

 

 

 

 

The Humourdor somewhat straightforwardly says: Dan Mintz is fucking awesome and a really nice guy!

 

Mintz on working on a series of short-lived cult shows: “It’s nice to have time between jobs to do standup and work on my own stuff. If someone offered me a job on a long-running show, I’m not saying I would have turned it down, but that’s all I would have been doing for the last five years.”

 

Read: Important things with Dan Mintz!

 

That's it for today, check in tomorrow for the last day...