CityLife

Interview: Al Pitcher

Al Pitcher

AL Pitcher is feeling a little fuzzy - but he’s not showing it. He’s in London as we speak and will be in Newbury tonight - and last night’s gig was in Helsinki…

“Just literally got off the tube and I just had a 6am flight back with Nina Conti (comedy ventriloquist). Who was really great. We were both grumpy as **** though…”

But Pitcher certainly doesn’t sound grumpy now, enthusing as he is about his latest venture; the genius idea of taking pictures in the afternoons in the towns and cities where he is gigging, then in the evening taking them on stage and talking about them.

“Every comedian tries to do a bit of local. If you do that the crowd gives you bonus points because they go, ‘oh right this guy’s taking a bit of time here’. But if I’ve got the photo and say I’ve been wandering their streets for four hours, no one seems to walk away from the show going ‘oh that was ****’ - they at least go ‘well that was a good effort, wasn’t it?'”

'Unbelieveable'

Not that he needs to worry, as so far the show has travelled all around the world. He’s performed it in Sweden, elsewhere in Scandinavia (where the once London-based New Zealand comic now lives), the Edinburgh Fringe, Australia and India - which has been a gift in terms of comedy photos.

“I’ve got this habit now that every time I see something I must take a photo of it just in case on the way through I regret it thinking ‘oh I should have taken that’. [But in India] you’d miss one, then half an hour later you’d see something even more outrageous. You’d see a goat on top of a car or something like that and you’d think 'I’m never going to see that again' - and then you’d see a goat driving a car or something. Just unbelievable,” he laughs.

It’s a show format that suits Pitcher’s style. He’s been a fan of improvising (or perhaps that should read ‘being distracted’) in his stand up for a while, preferring it far more than scripted material.

“I suppose it’s that generation of myself, Jarred Christmas, Steve Williams, Russell Howard, all those kind of mates. Improvising was the real thing to do. Other comedians look at improvising and go ‘wow, I don’t know how you can do that’. They want to stay so scripted, but I think critically, people aren’t that bothered.”

It’s served him well too, since that first gig at a pub in Islington. “I turned up about four o’clock in the afternoon for the gig - and by eight o’clock I was so nervous I just sat in this little garden across from this pub just panicking. I got no laughs, I had this joke about the Corrs and how I wanted to have sex with Jen or something like that. Got no laughs - then I slipped off the stage, got a massive laugh and felt about nine foot tall. So that was the whole inspiration.”

Lingo

These days his comedy horizons have widened somewhat, splitting his time between Stockholm and London after he moved to Sweden last year (his wife, Anita, is Swedish). Though there’s a healthy English-speaking comedy circuit there, he’s made attempts to learn the lingo.

“The vocab of the Scandinavians is better than I speak. It’s just incredible, I try and speak Swedish to buy, say, a train ticket - and they’re like, ‘you need to stop, stop right there. You’re really killing my language’. I really love it when I meet Swedish people… Anita’s grandad speaks a little bit of English. Very, very little though. We can have moments where we’re just sat in a room together and we’ve got to kind of mime stuff. I like that.”

Meanwhile, he’s looking forward to a return visit to Mumbai as his presence there on the last trip caused a bit of a stir – at least for one young man. “We were in a car... pulled up at this venue and there was a guy waiting outside the gates. He sprinted up and was taking photos like paparazzi. I get out and he was going ‘Al Pitcher, Al Pitcher’! I’m like, all right mate?’ He said ‘I love you, I watch you on YouTube please, photo!’ And he was literally shaking.

"Then I said, ‘I hope you enjoy the show’ and he said, ‘oh no, I’m not going to watch it.”

Maybe he will, next time…

Al Pitcher’s Picture Show is at the Dancehouse on October 20 and Pyramid in Warrington on October 24.