Nominated for Best Show at the 2022 Edinburgh Comedy Awards, acclaimed comedian, Colin Hoult is currently on a national tour after a hugely successful run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival last summer.
Known best for his comic characters, including washed-up actress Anna Mann, and regular stints alongside Ricky Gervais in shows including After Life, Derek and Life’s Too Short, his new show ‘Colin’ sees him set aside his trademark characters to perform as himself for the first time.
The resulting show finds Colin exploring his relationship with his father (also named Colin) and his son, and how more than just a name can be handed down through a family.
How can Colin understand his repressed (but quite bonkers) parents and make sure his children are given more freedom to be themselves? On the flipside, how can he live up to his ‘proper bloke’ of a dad, who was such a natural leader with strong principles? And was his dad right to behave as he did, the ‘proper bloke’ who always asked ‘why can’t we be a normal family?’? Now with children of his own, Colin wants to leave the world better than he found it, and not repeat the complicated mistakes of the generations before him.
Colin also intersperses his stand-up with fleeting comic snapshots of his home life in deliriously funny act-outs.
From gorillas and Ouija boards to Christmas memories, Colin’s journey of self-discovery sees him explore his background, in his own unique way, as he looks back at his working-class roots and the importance of the name Colin: his rather drab birth right, and a handy shorthand for how literal the passing down of family problems can be.
Acknowledging that his bizarre family was clearly full of undiagnosed neurodiverse people Colin, who was diagnosed with ADHD two years ago, talks about how in his childhood, people weren’t labelled as neurodiverse or had proper diagnoses, but whispered about as people deemed simply ‘not right’ – and this progress made with proper diagnoses and sensitivity to difference is, at least, something to feel positive about.
Colin also tells us about the slightly dysfunctional Nottingham home that serves as much of the inspiration for his new show: “Its my first ever stand up show as myself. Its an observational journey through 1980s Nottingham, specifically my childhood. I become all my family members as I recreate the loopy world I came from and how that affects me now as a 45-year-old Dad. Also I explore why my late Dad ‘Big Col’ chose to call me by his own name. Its fun, warm, silly, authentic and honest, told with love, joy and understanding.”
The comic admits it was quite a challenge to move away from the safety of the characters he is best known for, but says it was a worthwhile experience: “I love a challenge. I never felt I could really be myself on stage – I never thought I was particularly interesting to be honest,” he explains. “But I’d always tinkered with the idea of telling old family stories which went down great when I did them. Finally a few things aligned – my ADHD diagnosis, becoming a father and getting encouragement from friends to pursue it as myself. I never wanted to get stuck being the one character forever and I felt the final chapter of Anna Mann seemed so complete I wanted to move on.”
Nonetheless, Colin admits the newfound personal honesty of the show was daunting initially: “It was terrifying at first to be honest,” he admits. “Its taken a while to find who I really am on stage. At first I tried to make it as unlike the characters as possible but eventually I came to accept they are aspects of me so I let them come out if they want to! But felt exposed and raw at first but gradually really wonderful to feel accepted as myself.”
At the heart of the new show is the home, and specifically the Nottingham home the comic grew up in: “I mean it was all I knew. I never understood there was an outside world really. I remember as a kid saying I was going to run away and the only place I could think of was Derby. I had no idea where that was either,” Colin recalls.
“[Nottingham] was an incredibly vibrant city with loads going on. I think its different now as lots of people have done well and put it on the map, but it always felt there was a lot of untapped artistic ability. I don’t feel personally like it ever had a strong identity in the same way as Liverpool or Newcastle and I think a lot of people were frustrated, not really knowing how to get out of their situation. But there was so much life and warmth and unexplored culture underneath it all.”
The comic admits he has taken some elements from his childhood home with him now he’s a fully fledged adult with kids and a home of his own to worry about: “My mum was always making up songs and weird jokes when we were kids. I’ve definitely passed that on. I feel like there was a lot of fear of doing something wrong or getting it wrong or being looked down on somehow that I try a lot to avoid passing on but its not easy,” he admits. “There’s a lot of pessimism and lack of confidence that can get stuck in your head when you’re not from money and security and I try not to pass that on. As I say in the show I try to say to my kids ‘if they can do it, you can do it’ because we learnt ‘if they can do it, we probably shouldn’t.’
“I think the most important thing I’ve tried to learn, which I really struggle to maintain, is just to breathe, slow down and think and don’t get sucked into panic and fear.”
As for lessons the comedian wants audiences to take away from the show: “I hope firstly they come away feeling like they’ve laughed themselves silly and had tons of fun. But alongside that I explore how much we didn’t understand back when I was growing up and how, to me, the beauty of understanding your own mind, especially if you are neurodiverse, is so important,” he says. “It helps to mean you aren’t left feeling lost and alone or like there’s something inherently wrong with you.”
Looking forward to Christmas, the comic has plenty to say about that in the new show, but rather than ruin the surprise, we should perhaps paraphrase one of his best-known characters, the has-been thespian Anna Mann, who noted in her own Christmas message a couple of years ago:
“As Lennon said ‘So this is Christmas. What have we done?’ It may have been Lennon, it may have been Lenin. I get them confused. Eitherway, they were both Beatles, if you know what I mean. I would like to frankly apologize for my generation. We had everything. We could buy houses, we had jobs, we had welfare, we had the National Health Service, and we squandered it all on TV and chicken nuggets. Goodbye my darlings. Merry Christmas.”
We promise the new show takes on a much more cheery tone, and it’s on tour nationwide until February 2025, check listings for details.
