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Look who’s talking
Richard Osley catches up with ventriloquist Nina Conti as she gets
her act together for the Edinburgh Fringe
I MADE several mistakes the morning I met Nina Conti, the ventriloquist daughter of actor Tom. Whoops, there’s another one, mentioning the famous Dad in the first sentence before we’ve even got on to her own star quality.
She didn’t seem to mind – maybe she didn’t even notice – but I couldn’t help thinking that she left the coffee shop near her home in Belsize Village to resume preparations for next month’s Edinburgh Festival a little confused.
Then again, she seems to have a slightly confused expression most of the time, giggling, scrunching her hands through her hair as if the voices of her puppet characters are permanently buzzing around her head.
Her new hour-long show, with half a dozen new puppets, is currently being road tested at the Hen and Chickens Theatre in Highbury, adapted on the hoof depending on how loud the audience laughs. It’s a ‘work in progress’.
Mistake one: the monkey’s accent is
not Russian.
We met three years ago when she was pregnant and touring the pub comedy clubs with Monk, the obnoxious marble-eyed Monkey in tow. It was a funny show and the pair won awards together.
Then she cut back from the late-night circuit to care for baby Arthur. These days, she does better-paid, corporate jobs – the most recent was a hotel function populated by wealthy Russians, apparently enemies of President Putin – and only the odd beery venue.
“I miss the clubs,” she says. “I’m not being snobby not doing them but I’m not going to miss bedtime with my son for a £50 a night gig.”
I tell her that the monkey’s deep growl sounds Russian and perfect for an eastern European crowd.
“I’ve never had Russian before,” she puzzles. “Some say Scottish or Greek.”
You can’t help thinking of her father Tom Conti, a Scot who played a Greek in Shirley Valentine, more recently a parking rebel, an erstwhile Hampstead resident and now a roadie for his daughter.
“My Dad has been schlepping my stuff up the stairs at the Hen and Chickens,” she confirms.
Poor Tom. He thought she was going to be an actress.
Mistake two: Emu wasn’t a ventrloquist’s dummy.
So how can her new show be funny? Isn’t ventroliquism a forgotten art reserved for the likes of Keith Harris (Orville) and Rod Hull (Emu)?
“Emu wasn’t a ventrilquist’s dummy,” Nina corrects me. “He just had a knack of making people laugh by biting people but I don’t think he – it – had a voice. I think ventroliquism opens things up for you. You can give a voice to anything, to a truck, to any inanimate object. You can bring anything to life and it gives you freedom to do more things.”
She says she felt constrained when doing bits of television over the past three years because directors, unsurprisingly, kept telling her what to do.
“I like being able to stumble on jokes,” she says. “None of the show is scripted. I don’t sit down at a computer.”
It works. On her own, she gets to play with the monkey some more, do a sketch where she and a puppet play her own grandparents (bittersweet because in real life one of them is dead and the other is in a care home), and also introduce another, ruder creation which need not be discussed in a family newspaper.
Mistake three: Dawn French is funny after all.
She must be bored by the question, but can women be funny enough to compete with the endless stream of male stand-ups? I suggest well-known faces like Victoria Wood and Dawn French these days seem tired and short of new ideas.
“I actually think Dawn is funny,” she says. “She still does good stuff. I like Gina Yashere as well, her stand-up is really funny. Catherine Tate is great and Ronnie Ancona. They are women but when I say that I don’t feel like that I have a point to prove. It’s obvious that I’m a woman. I’m just trying to make people laugh.”
Mistake four: I ask about her naked photograph.
The flier for the new show is an American Beauty-style effort: she is naked, covered in rose petals and accompanied by her new stuffed toys.
Perhaps my earlier line of questioning (about women struggling in a man’s world and all that) was ill-thought. But what the hell is she up to here – using her Conti good looks to sell tickets?
“It is blatant and unashamed,” she says. “It wasn’t my idea. I thought there would be a few more petals. That’s all they could get for £4 at the Pound shop before they ran out. If people don’t like it, then I will show them my bum.”
Ok. We don’t like it.
“The monkey in the past has called me a tart or a slapper on stage,” she says. “Now I’m a wife and a mother I’m not sure that really works. He now tells me that I’m a sell out. The worst heckle I’ve had is probably: You’re shit. Imaginative. The monkey just looked at me and said: ‘He’s right.’ I think there is a lot of self-depreciation in stand-up.”
I possibly made my first mistake three years ago in forgetting that some emails are private. Nina and her husband Stan Stanley (his name is Andrew but everyone calls him Stan) sent out a group e-mail shortly after the birth of their son.
They were searching for a name for the boy. I put the request in the diary page of the New Journal without her spotting it. She laughed but I hoped she genuinely saw the funny side, that the whole of Camden was in on the name hunt.
“You think that when you see the baby’s face a name will come to you,” she says. “In the end we made up our minds in the short distance between the pay and display parking bay and the register office.”
It’s the kind of whirlwind that seems to be her life.
“He (Arthur) will probably look at his parents – we are both comedians – and think ‘who do you think you are?’ and do something completely different.” He will be following in his mother’s footsteps if he does.
So does Nina make any mistakes? “If something goes wrong then it becomes part of the show,” she says. “People are rooting for you. You just laugh your way through it.”
n Nina Conti tries out her new show Complete and Utter Conti at the Hen and Chickens Theatre in Highbury and Islington, 109 St Paul’s Road, N1, on June 20 and July 4. Edinburgh Pleasance Theatre August 1-27 |
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