Producer admits that stand-ups need to fit into a pigeonhole

Some comedians don’t make it to TV because they don’t have the right kind of audience, a leading producer had admitted.

Emily Hudd – whose company Rumpus Media makes Romesh Ranganathan’s travel shows and Joe Lycetts’s Got Your Back (pictured) – says she often sees talented stand-ups who ‘don’t quite fit’ into a broadcaster’s mould.

Speaking at the Edinburgh TV Festival, she said: ‘When you look at stand-ups, you ask: who are their audience and where would they sit on TV?

‘There’s a gap between BBC Three and E4 and the grown-up channels and there are some great people who don’t quite fit in that current landscape. Where do you take them?’

She said that they started working with Ranganathan because he was just starting to break through as they were establishing their company.

‘We saw a Romesh for the first time in Edinburgh years ago in a shipping container,’ she said. ‘We thought, we’re a small company and asked: who is on the cusp of fame and who will have a meeting with us?’

She said his first show, Asian Provocateur, ‘started as a much more funny proposition because he was a comedian’.

But she said: ‘In the past five years, as we’ve got more confident, we’ve got to more serious subjects. We’ve covered genocide  – and we never thought we’d go there when we started.’

On the same panel, David Brindley, the BBC’s head of factual entertainment commissioning, said shows worked best when they were funny, ‘married with purpose and heart’ and based on a genuine passion of the on-screen talent.

And he said that comedy was a way of bringing serious issues to a wider audience citing Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing. ‘You don’t see men of that age talking about friendship and mortality on TV,’ he said.

Brindley also spoke of how the show came about the pair started fishing together off-screen after both suffered serious heart problems.

‘Paul was worried Bob was becoming reclusive [after his operation] so invited him fishing. Then they came to us and said, "we talk about nothing and think you ought to make a TV programme about it".’

The did, and it now attracts audiences of 2million.

Published: 22 Aug 2019