Rose Matafeo: I died on my arse in front of Harry and Meghan

...and then got very, very drunk

comedy Rose Matafeo has revealed that she got ‘very, very drunk’ after ‘dying on her arse’ at the Royal Variety Performance.

The New Zealand comic said she felt her brand of comedy didn’t go down well in front of the show’s mainstream audience when she performed there in 2018 – although the TV footage shows her getting laughs.

Speaking on the Dish podcast out today she said: ‘I performed stand-up comedy in front of a, I'm gonna say, a sea of white haired people.

‘A gorgeous, gorgeous audience, expecting comedy, not expecting the sort of whimsical anti-comedy of myself.

‘I did really bad Christmas cracker jokes, which were intentionally bad. Many people came up to me afterwards going, "Stay at it", "Keep going, girl." So I think the irony of it really was lost.’

Hosted by Greg Davies, the show was performed in front of Harry and Meghan and Matafeo recalled meeting them in the line-up afterwards, saying: ‘She kind of glided over. It was almost like she was like on a hoverboard. She glided over like Mrs. Danvers, and she was like, "You must be so proud."

‘And I was like, "Of what? Of dying on my arse in front of fucking royals?" Yeah, I'll be writing home about that…’

She admitted she got so drunk afterwards and realised she had locked herself out of her flat, so called Nish Kumar, who she had lived with when she first moved to London, knowing he would still be up.

Matafeo recalled: ‘So that is why I went back to my old flat, knocked on his door and he let me in. Pretty drunk, actually. I was drunk. It would have been great if he was drunk. Nish took a picture of me in my sort of the outfit that I had on and just drinking a glass of water, feeling very embarrassed…’

She also spoke about winning the Edinburgh Comedy Award in 2018, and how it helped her get her TV romcom Starstruck off the ground.

She told hosts Nick Grimshaw and Angela Hartnet: ‘ It was very clear that I didn't know I was gonna win, didn't even comprehend that I could win, by firstly, the speech I made to accept the award, which was garbled.

‘I managed to thank the Prime Minister of New Zealand for some reason. And then just people I saw in the room.

‘But I think secondly is the fact that I called the show Horndog, I think reflects how few aspirations I had for that show to be the show that would be engraved on an award for the rest of my life.’

She said she spent some of her £10,000 prize on a chair and a frying pan.

Here's Matafeo's performance on the Royal Variety Show: