New 'Impressions' show

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Debra is a dead ringer for comedy
October 27, 2009
thisishullandeastriding.co.uk

AS A 13-year-old, Debra Stephenson wowed Hull audiences with her uncanny knack of mimicking celebrities. With her mum Deborah making the costumes and her dad Ricky managing and helping write her scripts, it proved a successful and popular team. But at the end of her teenage years, Debra turned to acting and has since carved out a successful career with roles in Bad Girls and Coronation Street, as well releasing a CD and fitness DVD.

However, Debra, 37, will return to her roots, by starring alongside Jon Culshaw for BBC One's The Impression Show With Culshaw And Stephenson, which starts on Saturday at 9.45pm. The Hull-born star said: "I started impressions as a little girl in Hull. I was always quite shy at school, but outside I was an impressionist. I got into it through my dad. He would write and coach me, while my mum would make costumes. Although it would be hard travelling all over to perform, it was fun. It got to the stage though where there wasn't much happening for impressionists, so I decided to go to drama school and from there got the roles on Coronation Street and Bad Girls. Going back to impressions, it feels like I've gone the full circle. Travelling all over the country when I was younger doing impressions feels really worthwhile."

Debra's involvement in the latest show came about when she met Jon Culshaw at Comic Relief Does Fame Academy in 2005. Backstage they did impressions together and discussed working together in the future. Although Debra thought nothing of it, she received a call from his management when she finished on Coronation Street about two years ago.

Unlike her teenage years, when one of Debra's most popular impressions was former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, now she takes on the likes of Cheryl Cole, Anne Robinson and even Ant and Dec. She said: "It was quite daunting working with Jon and whether or not I would meet his expectations. He is the daddy of impressions. It has all been good fun, although I've had to put in quite a lot of work. I've had to catch up watching TV. I look after my two kids, Zoe, two, Max, six, so all they would recognise is Marge Simpson. I think one of the most difficult acts to learn was Davina McCall. She doesn't have a particularly strong accent and has a fairly regular presenting voice. She has a vocal quality like mine, so it is more about her mannerisms. We're not cruel to anyone, though. I'm looking forward to seeing it on TV."

There will be eight episodes of the 30-minute shows.

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I saw a trailer for this last night and it looked pretty much like an updated Dead Ringers, but that would only be a bad thing if they kept it going too long,,,

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I would like this more if it didn't have Jon Culshaw in it. Props for some of the public impressions skits he's done but only his Ozzy is convincing. I really don't rate him against Rory Bremner and even Kevin Bishop. He's got a long way on the back of his co-stars!

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I got a bit bored with him always doing the 'Arsimus Maximus' character or whatever it was, but I thought his Tom Baker and George Bush were pretty good.

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Jon Culshaw on The Impressions Show
Ahead of his new BBC series, Jon Culshaw tells Andrew Pettie the secrets of his uncanny impressions
By Andrew Pettie
28 Oct 2009

Bruce Forsyth is sitting in a cramped Portakabin surrounded by celebrity body parts. Behind him, a battered cardboard box holds Angelina Jolie’s nose, Gok Wan’s chin and Ross Kemp’s forehead. Pinned to a cork noticeboard, and so unmistakeable it doesn’t require a label, is Brian Blessed’s beard. Forsyth, resplendent beneath his own preposterous syrup, is busy smoothing his moustache. “It feels like a moth’s landed on my top lip,” he says, arching a suggestive eyebrow. “Mmm… yeesss. Bruucie.”

However, it’s not just the wig that’s a fake. On closer inspection, the man in the make-up artist’s chair isn’t Bruce Forsyth at all. It’s the chameleonic comedian Jon Culshaw, preparing to film a sketch for his new BBC One series, The Impressions Show.

In the 1980s and 90s impressionists were predominantly vocal performers. Mike Yarwood and Rory Bremner would often stand in front of a microphone, dressed as themselves, and whiz through a whole series of impressions in a single skit. These days, partly thanks to advances in make-up and prosthetics, audiences’ expectations are higher. It’s not enough for Culshaw to sound like Bruce Forsyth. Now the Spitting Image alumnus and Dead Ringers star must truly inhabit the role. Sometimes, Culshaw says, even he finds these metamorphoses alarming.

“Because of the 6.00am starts it’s quite nice to sit in your make-up gown and nod off to sleep. But then, when you wake up, it’s like being Doctor Who: you’ve regenerated. You open your eyes to find that you’ve morphed into Gok Wan or Sir Alan Sugar. For a second or two, it’s rather pleasantly confusing.”

Culshaw, 41, and his co-star Debra Stephenson, 37, best known for straight acting roles in Bad Girls and Coronation Street, spend a lot of time in make-up. In the first episode of their new series they impersonate almost 30 characters. Culshaw’s star turns include “Britain’s most successful hedgehog”, Sir Alan Sugar, who gives Del and Rodney a boardroom ear-bashing for messing up the chandelier task and DCI Gene Hunt from Ashes to Ashes who knocks heads together in a Jane Austen period drama: “Who asked you, marzipan knickers?”

Stephenson’s trump card is a gaspingly overexcited Davina McCall but she also does Anne Robinson as a deliciously cruel police negotiator: [To a man on a ledge] “If you jumped, would you even know which way was down?”

Stephenson’s commitment to looking the part is even greater than Culshaw’s: during the series she impersonates Ant McPartlin of Ant and Dec, complete with chest-wig, and Top Gear’s Richard Hammond. “The first time I saw myself as Richard I completely freaked out,” she says. “It just wasn’t right.”

Despite this attention to visual detail, Culshaw and Stephenson still need to sound the part, too. And most of their impressions are so spot-on you could watch the sketches with your eyes closed and miss nothing. Both are obsessive in their research, studying YouTube clips of their subjects for hours. Culshaw then perfects his impressions by recording them. “It’s a bit like a language tape,” he says. “Listen and repeat.”

During this research, Culshaw has made an intriguing discovery: vocal neighbours. “If you make John Major’s voice a bit more camp you get Julian Clary. But if you make him more forceful you get Michael Caine. You can adapt some of the wigs in the same way. Tone down David Dickinson’s wig and you get Gordon Brown. Fluff up Ed Balls’s wig and you get Gary Barlow. Wig neighbours are a fascinating phenomenon.”

With its hair-raising hairpieces and unlikely set-ups, The Impressions Show is a traditional sketch show: fast, funny and over the top. But in the cinema, partly thanks to the mesmerising performances of Michael Sheen as Tony Blair in The Queen and as David Frost in Frost/Nixon, doing pitch-perfect impersonations is now a serious, actorly business and very much in vogue. Culshaw is excited by the possibilities.

“Sketch shows are about exaggeration and going for the gag,” he says. “To really soak into a character for an entire feature, that would be wonderful.”

This talk of Sheen’s movies gives Culshaw an idea. “Being a fan of Michael Sheen, I could really imagine him and me playing Morecambe and Wise in a film, with him as Eric Morecambe and me as Ernie Wise.” He turns back to the mirror and considers the transformation. Are Ernie Wise and Bruce Forsyth close wig neighbours?

The Impressions Show is on Saturday on BBC One at 9.45pm

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Debra Stephenson makes a good impression after swapping Corrie for comedy
Mar 9 2010
Lindsay Clydesdale
dailyrecord.co.uk

Debra Stephenson made her name playing hard-faced tough women on shows like Coronation Street and Bad Girls but her latest role as an impressionist showed she's game for a laugh. In comedy skits on The Impressions Show that sent up some of her showbiz pals, she made fun of celebrities including Davina McCall, Coleen Rooney and Cheryl Cole. Her comic skills were praised by TV critics but Debra, 37, is still waiting to find out what the subjects of her parodies make of it and admits it might lead to awkward moments on the red carpet next time she attends an awards ceremony.

"I've not heard of anyone reacting badly to it but maybe it's just too embarrassing for them to admit it," she said. "At the moment I'm not worrying." Her depiction of Davina McCall for the BBC series was praised as spot on with the Big Brother host shown as a combination of ticks, gurning and manic laughter. Fiona Bruce, the plummy presenter of The Antiques Roadshow, was reinvented as light-fingered, while footballer Wayne Rooney became a naughty puppy who was led about on a leash by his wife Coleen.

"I do wonder how they took that because it is a bit cheeky but in another way it's quite surreal, we're not really saying he's like a dog," said Debra. "Some of the writers think in really weird ways. Like Fiona Bruce, obviously she's not a thief but wouldn't it be funny if she was? "Apparently Davina was really into it, which I'm so pleased about. It was so much fun and I'm hoping that it's always going to be taken in the way that it's intended. With someone like Lorraine Kelly I hope she doesn't mind because they say imitation is the highest form of flattery and it's never done in a horrible way, always a nice way, even if sometimes it was a little bit cheeky."

Her impression of Lorraine was one of Debra's favourite characters as it meant she could slip into a Scottish accent. Her husband James Duffield is from Glasgow and his sexy voice was, she says, the reason they got together. "It's my favourite accent and I'm not just saying that. I really fell for James's accent," she said.

The couple met when James came to see her perform on stage at a Manchester comedy club and were friends for a few years before getting together at the Edinburgh Festival. "We met when I was 18 and got together when I was 20," said Debra, originally from Yorkshire. "We fell in love in the Greyfriars Bobby pub. I fell in love with the Scottish accent and the Scottish charm and you can probably guess we got drunk. That's where it started and I moved in with him in Glasgow really quickly but then I had to go away to drama school, so I was up and down to see him every week. I miss Glasgow and I get really sentimental about it, more than James does, but it's because that's where we were courting I guess, down Byres Road."

She and James, a painter and decorator, have now been married for 10 years and have two children, Max, seven, and Zoe, two. She added: "The kids don't have Scottish accents but James has taught Max to say 'heid' instead of 'head'."

Debra entered showbiz at an early age, making it to the final of BBC talent show Opportunity Knocks when she was just 14. Comedy was her first love and while still a teenager she combined touring stand-up gigs with voicing characters for Spitting Image. She sang with two pop groups and after graduating from drama school in Manchester, she worked on everything from CBBC's Friday Zone to dramas including Spooks and Midsomer Murders.

The role of psychotic inmate Shell Dockley in Bad Girls made her a household name and earned her several best actress nominations, while her move to Coronation Street brought her to an even bigger audience. Her character Frankie Baldwin was at the centre of a love triangle scandal that saw her bed a father and son. After three years on the soap, Debra scaled back her career to spend more time with her kids. But she did find time to add another string to her bow and make a best-selling exercise DVD. Keeping fit is another of her passions and after the family recently moved to a new home on the coast near Bournemouth, she's taken up running on the beach to stay in shape.

Despite her successful career, she remains a hands-on mum. "The truth is I don't work that much," she said. "I left Coronation Street so I could spend more time with the kids because it was difficult getting a work life balance. But it's such a big show that I suppose your profile stays high for quite a while. It was a similar thing with Bad Girls. Now I'm a bit part time with it so I still get to see my kids which is brilliant."

Her next project is encouraging children to enter a talent competition to appear in an advert for kids drink brand Fruit Shoot, and it's brought back happy memories of her own auditions as a child. "It really appealed to me because it's for kids to encourage them to try out lots of different skills, build up confidence and have a lot of fun," she said. "When I was a child I did singing and dancing and drama and impressions. I used to go to auditions, mainly for talent competitions like Opportunity Knocks. It was a brilliant experience for me and set me up for what I do now. Now I've got kids of my own they do all sorts of things. Little Max does piano, chess, tennis, football and glass painting. I've taken Zoe to ballet before and we're going to start that up again. The skills are usually quite sociable and it's good for them to go out to auditions where there are lots of other children."

She's covered a lot of ground in her career already but says she's still ambitious, adding: "It's not a hungry, ruthless kind of ambition but I'm still out for having fun and taking on things that are challenging and new. Acting and performing is part of who I am. I might have moved to the south coast but I'm not ready to retire just yet. At heart I'm the same kind of person I was when I was a child and I liked to do ballet, singing, drama and impressions; I still like to do it all now. That's why I'm behind this campaign to get kids to do the things they love doing and develop skills that they might even take through their life, just like I did."

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That's a surprise that she used to hang about Byres Road, that's just along the road from me here.

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Bollocks to the fiercely hungry twat!