Russell Kane

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Russell Kane: a comedian with gaping flaws
It takes a certain type of brain to mix material about your racist dad with mock- Shakesperian verse, but that’s what you can expect from Russell Kane. Gavin Allen talks to the stand-up star
Jan 24 2009
Gavin Allen,
Western Mail

THERE are always stories – some apocryphal and some not – about people seeing big-name acts in tiny venues before they were famous: Kings Of Leon playing Cardiff Barfly, Duffy at Clwb Ifor Bach, Michael Jackson at Wrexham Central Station. There’s no such thing as a guarantee, but if I were a betting man, I would happily put a tenner on Russell Kane’s gig on the little Level 3 stage of St David’s Hall, Cardiff, next month turning out to be one of those gigs. Kane, 29, is headed for big things.

He has already made waves on the stand-up circuit, snagged a week in the coveted presenting slot on Big Brother’s Big Mouth, been featured on the BBC’s Live At The Apollo, been handed a free role wandering around America for a series by Channel Five, as well as fronting two series of Radio 2’s Out To Lunch and hosting his own show on Q Radio.

He has even – get this – performed his own comedy verse at Stratford-Upon-Avon with the Royal Shakespeare Company, a talent he had just reprised when he answered the phone. “I’m at Talksport and I’ve just been reading blank verse for Hawksbee and Jacobs, which I’m told was a first,” says the Essex lad. “They were talking about kebabs and asked me for some kind of amusing kebab-related anecdote. There is a mention of a kebab in my poem The Lamentable Tragedy Of Yates Wine Lodge, so I read it for them.”

He begins reciting the opening couplets down the phone but his very amusing mock-Shakespearian text is beyond my shorthand capabilities. He stops only to assert his intention to do more with the RSC when he finishes his new piece, Two Princesses Of Greggs. And a sitcom. And some TV ideas. After a 36-date stand-up tour. Kane wriggles with creative energy, churning out material that switches between everyday observations and hi-fallutin’ literary references.

“I read a lot between the ages of 18 and 19, the years when I shouldn’t have been reading it because I was deep in the throes of teenage rebellion with drugs and dropping out, and that’s a strange cocktail to pour onto your brain,” he says. “I don’t want to sound egotistical but I have a Rain Man thing going on with comedy lines and when I realised that, I just wanted to get my head down and work really hard at it, which I do. You have to approach it honestly, like the job it is, so I just get my head down and I won’t take my foot off the gas. I even give myself a lunch hour.”

Kane brings the fruits of his labour to the little Level 3 stage at St David’s Hall in Cardiff on February 2 with his current show Gaping Flaws, a celebration of the British trust of flaws over perfection. It’s a great time to see Kane, before his talents take him beyond such confines for good.

“The good thing is that Russell Howard has done similar stuff as me but two or three years before me,” says Kane, who has twice been nominated for the coveted if.comedy award. “Whenever I have something new to do, like Live At The Apollo, I’m straight on the phone to him saying, ‘What should I expect?’.”

What Kane should expect is to play in much bigger venues than this very soon, although he says he isn’t in it for the fame. “I get off more on the creative process than I do from being the Torso Of The Week in Heat magazine, which I haven’t as yet,” he says. “But I am working on it.”

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Relative Values: Russell Kane and his mother
Russell Kane, 33, the award-winning stand-up comedian and presenter, and his mother, Juliet, 55, a cleaner
Interviews by Danny Scott
Sunday Times

JULIET: Russell gets bored very easily. When he was little he couldn’t wait to get to school. He wanted to be out there, making his mark on the world. When I took him on his first day, all the other kids were crying and holding on to their mothers, but Russell just said: “Bye, Mum. I’ll see you later.” I think he was relieved to finally have an outlet for all his energy.

Motherhood was very important to me, so I always took jobs that allowed me to work around Russell and his younger brother. I was able to watch them grow up, and even at an early age I could see that Russell seemed to be tremendously focused. He was always making up stories and games, but they wouldn’t be the usual kids’ stories and games. They were incredibly complex and full of interesting ideas. He would fill exercise book after exercise book with his stories.

If he had homework to do or was revising for exams, he’d give himself 15-minute coffee breaks. He’d time it exactly — as soon as his 15 minutes were over, he’d get straight back to work. We never had to force him to do his schoolwork. He wanted to learn; he wanted to do something with his time. He couldn’t just sit around watching TV. He was always leading, arranging things, happy to be the centre of attention.

I sometimes wonder where he gets that from. It must be that he was born with it, but I don’t think it’s from me, so I guess it must be from his father, my late husband, David [Grineau]. He ran his own sheet-metal business and he worked hard all his life. That was his mentality. Doesn’t matter where you come from or what your circumstances are, if you work hard you can make something of yourself. Work hard and earn your success.

Russell’s dad also did a bit of acting when he was younger, so maybe that’s where Russell got the idea to be on stage. He could be very funny, too, in his own way. Not that he and Russell had much in common. You wouldn’t look at them and think, “Ah, yes, Russell’s just like his dad,” like you can with some families. And they didn’t always… how can I put this? Let’s say that they didn’t always get on.

David died about five years ago — a heart attack. Russell was just a young man at the time, but he was fantastic. He coped so well. It all happened very suddenly, when we were on holiday in Cyprus, and Russell immediately got on a plane, came out to stay with me and started organising everything. He got on with it: “Mum, let’s do this. Have we done this? Do we need to get in touch with these people?”

I’m not saying that Russell has been the perfect son. God, he could be so naughty when he was younger — slamming doors, shouting. We had some terrible arguments. But he’s also someone you can always rely on. It doesn’t matter how bad the argument is or how many doors have been slammed; if you need Russell he will be there for you.

When it came to moving forward with my life, I knew Russell would support me. I decided to get out of north London, where I’d lived all my life, and move to Hertfordshire. I wanted to be closer to my brothers and sisters and I wanted a fresh start. Okay, Russell did pull my leg a bit when I started dating — and he still pulls my leg about my new partner — but as long as I’m happy, he’s happy. He always looks for the positives in a situation.

Russell certainly applied that approach to his comedy, and I think that’s why he’s done so well. He worked out what he needed to do, set himself goals. Even when he came to me and said he was giving up his day job, I knew he’d be all right. Everything in his life had been arranged to allow him to do what he needed to do.

It’s like he was ticking all the boxes. He’d been to uni and got a first-class English degree. He had a successful career as a copywriter. He started doing comedy gigs and began to make a name for himself. Then he took a 12-month break from work so he could do comedy full time. Everything was in place — if it didn’t work out, he was respected as a copywriter and knew that door was always open. He did come to me and ask for advice, but I don’t think he really needed it. I told him: “Yes, go for it.” But I knew he was going to do that anyway.

As a mother, you’re supposed to worry about your children, but I’ve never worried about Russell. Some people might say he has an old head on young shoulders, but those aren’t the right words. He’s not a boring grown-up. He doesn’t always do the sensible thing. The only way to describe him is “organised”. In his head, everything is sorted.

RUSSELL: I don’t know why, but Mum never takes credit for what she’s given me. That whole super-organisational, get-your-shit-together side of my life comes from her. Totally! Take an ordinary day: let’s say we’re meeting up in London. Every day of the week leading up to it she’ll call and check the details. What time are we meeting? Where are we meeting? On the day I get three more phone calls. We check the details again, the train times. She’ll want to know where we’re going, what we’re doing, will we be taking the Tube, will we get a bus, will we walk? She wants everything in triplicate.

She was exactly the same when I was at school: “What lessons have you got today? Will you need a spare top? It might rain later — take an umbrella.” I always — always — had the biggest bag in school. Full of all this stuff that my mum gave me to make sure I’d covered every possible eventuality. Remember those really long Head sports bags? Well, I had the biggest one you could get. And of course somebody had written “Dick” in front of the “Head” in large letters. The bag was so big that one day some kids actually emptied everything out of it and made me climb into it.

So what did I get from my dad? Well, inadvertently, my dad is probably the reason I’m where I am. He’s the reason I’m doing stand-up. The reason The Sunday Times wants to talk to me. From what my mum says, Dad was great with me and my brother when we were little babies, but as soon as we started walking and talking and doing things he lost that ability to interact with us.

Dad was into all that alpha-male stuff. Very working-class, into body-building, never-read-a-book-in-my-life, been-there-done-it-all-done-it-better. “Been there, boy.” That was the stock phrase: been-there-comma-boy! Didn’t matter what you were doing or what you were interested in, he’d done it and he’d done it better. And, what’s more, he could tell you it was all going to turn out shit. But the thing about my dad was that he wasn’t doing this out of nastiness. It wasn’t some twisted, evil behaviour. He was just trying to tell it like it is — that life was hard and things might not work out as you planned. And he was trying to do me a favour by not cushioning the blow of this terrible news. Well, you know what? Sometimes, the blow does need a cushion.

As you can imagine, we didn’t always see eye-to-eye, but our flawed relationship gave me this intense desire to soak up everything that the world has to offer. Every time he said there was no point in reading a book, I would read it. Every time he said there was no point in trying something, I’d try it. I was like a sponge.

Obviously, he had no time for me going into comedy: “Been there, boy!” Believe it or not, Dad had done a bit of acting and been a Butlins Redcoat in the 1960s. “It’ll all go wrong, boy! It’ll all turn out shit, boy!” But that just made me try harder and harder.

Would you believe he died the same month that I did my first comedy gigs? Looking back, it must have been terrible for my mum. I’ve never realised that she was caught in the middle. I mean, God, at one point, it got so bad that I moved out and lived with Mum’s nan. It couldn’t have been easy. Maybe that’s why Mum doesn’t talk about it much. But out of that chaos — out of my mum’s organisational skills and the intensity of my dad — you get this. You get me.

Mum’s been through a lot these last few years — Dad dying, moving from London, starting a new life — but she’s as rugged and organised as ever. One day, she might be totally depressed, crying, lying on the floor in a pool of snot, but the next morning the survival instinct kicks in: “Right, let’s make a list. This is what we need to do.” She’s like the Duracell bunny. That’s how she gets through life’s shit.

Fortunately — or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it — Mum’s meerkat state of readiness has stayed with me my whole life. Everybody takes the piss out of me now because I carry a huge rucksack with me everywhere. Let’s see what I’ve got in here... Ideas book, spare-ideas book, in case I lose one, spare top in case it gets cold, umbrella. No matter what life throws at me, I’m prepared.

Russell Kane’s Gaping Flaws tour finishes in Edinburgh at the end of March. He lives in Southend-on-Sea. Juliet lives in Hertfordshire.

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I had no idea he was 33 - he looks about 18 in that first article!

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The importance of being Russell
02 March 2009
Bromleytimes.co.uk

A COMEDIAN who found his funny side in the same month his father died is due to appear at Ravensbourne College today (March 2). As part of his Gaping Flaws tour, comedian and writer Russell Kane is appearing in a one-off gig at the college in Walden Road, Chislehurst to poke fun at all things flawed in Britain. And the former Big Brother's Big Mouth presenter is quite used to exposing the flaws in his own family, with much of his set dedicated to ribbing his own 'emotionally illiterate' late father who he describes as "the silverback of all that is negative".

It was when his father died of a heart attack in 2003, that Kane started to find his feet as a funnyman. "Weirdly, he died in the same month that I got into comedy," said 33-year-old Kane. "I had done some comedy before he died but all I got from him was the usual scathing remarks: 'Yeah, I've done comedy, been there done that, I used to be a red coat in Butlins'." Laughing, he added: "He died quite suddenly of a heart attack, and I think it was almost as though I couldn't prove him wrong. It was like he was saying 'Oh he's doing well, I better pack it in then'.

"I only keep him on stage because he died, I wouldn't do it if he was still alive. Luckily enough it makes for a good career. That's terrible to admit isn't it? But when there's someone that you have that kind of relationship with its not that you needed them to die but their death has a weird kind of artistic release."

Despite dissecting his family life on stage, even in front of a celebrity audience at Live at the Apollo last year, the if.comedy Award nominee still gets the seal of approval from his mother. "She cries with laughter," he said. "It's because all the stories are true. Sometimes I might change it to bring out the more dramatic elements but each and every story happened."

But he knows how there is a fine line between laughter and scandal following the 'Manuelgate' saga last year involving his former fellow Radio 2 comedian Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross. On the furore surrounding the prank recorded on the answerphone of Andrew Sachs, which sparked 10,000 complaints to the BBC, Kane said: "I just knew it would make my life more difficult as I work for Radio 2 and now comedians, who are naughty, are being analysed. So all I thought about that was 'I can't say the word bum now'."

He added: "It has affected me from the basis of my creative writing because you have to think of every nuance and syntax of everything to get the best out of it, and now I have to be more careful. It is the editor's job to judge how the public react, I wouldn't have a clue myself. But its difficult. Sometimes you can say something not that funny - like someone's got a big bum - and people love it and then you say it to a different audience and they say 'how can you say something so misogynist!' Its not always clear where truth and reality lies."

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Russell Kane, comedian
'The biggest myth about comedy? That it's rock'n'roll. We're a lot of tea-drinking, driving-at-the-speed-limit bores'
Laura Barnett
guardian.co.uk,
7 June 2010

When did you first realise you were funny?
At secondary school, when I was 11 or 12. I realised I could get punched less by making people laugh.

Does standup comedy deserve its reputation for being macho?
Does it have that reputation? I suppose it comes from the fact that only in the last 20 or 30 years has it become an accepted mode of conduct for women to dominate a room of people. But it's changing; we're seeing more geeky, self-effacing, rambling comedy, which is much less thrusting and masculine.

Is comedy getting more offensive?
Offensive to whom? Fundamentalist Christians, or rightwing Daily Mail readers? It's all in the ear of the beholder. Anyway, I don't think there's anything wrong with being offended. It's a healthy, democratic reaction to certain information.

What advice would you give a young comedian?
Just do it hundreds or thousands of times. If it's still not going well, give up.

Do you suffer for your art?
Yes. I suffer from nerves, self-criticism, over-analysis and OCD.

What's the biggest myth about comedians?
That comedy's like rock'n'roll. We're really a bunch of tea-drinking, driving-home-at-the-speed-limit bores.

What's your favourite film?
Jean de Florette. Gérard Depardieu plays a hunchback who thinks he can solve all his problems through optimism – but the corrupt world gets in his way. Sometimes that's just how life is.

Which other artists do you admire?
Anthony Trollope, because he's brilliantly loquacious. Ian McEwan for his dark imagination. And Haruki Murakami, for his tiny, metaphysical nuggets of language.

What work of art would you most like to own?
Something by Paula Rego. Her paintings contain an implied current of creepiness.

Is there an art form you don't relate to?
Ballet. It's just people prancing around to music that I used to love but now hate, because it reminds me of that feeling of my buttocks going numb.

What one song would work as the soundtrack to your life?
The second movement of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, the "Allegretto". It has a scary energy that feels like it might bubble over at any moment, but ultimately resolves itself into beautiful music. That's the way I hope my life goes.


Born: Enfield, 1980.

Career: Won the Laughing Horse New Act of the Year award in 2004, and performs regularly at the Edinburgh Fringe. Also presents shows on TV and radio, including for Radio 2 and Q Radio.

High point: "Performing my own work, Fakespeare, at the RSC in 2008."

Low point: "A tour I did in 2005. I'd suddenly gone from little clubs to theatre-sized gigs, and I wasn't ready."