Angela Barnes: the salty standup mentored by 'Auntie' Sarah Millican

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/oct/06/angela-barnes-standup-comedy-edinburgh-sarah-millican

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As legacies go, launching your offspring’s comedy career is a pretty good one. When his daughter, Angela, was booking standups to play at the Funny Farm in Brighton, Derek Barnes knew that she really wanted to be performing herself. When he died in the summer of 2008, she finally gave it a go. After his death, she says: “Suddenly, the things that used to matter to me didn’t any more, and one of those things was what people thought of me. He died when he was 60, which is no age. And that was the catalyst. I just thought, life’s too short. So I signed up to a standup course.”

Six years later, Derek was at the heart of Angela Barnes’s debut standup show, You Can’t Take It With You, at the Edinburgh fringe this summer. “I didn’t want it to be a ‘dead dad’ show,” she says. “I really worried about that as that had become a bit of a trope in Edinburgh, but he had to be in it somehow.” Compared with, say, Richard Pryor and Russell Kane’s routines about their dead fathers, Barnes has an uncomplicated warmth in her act. But she doesn’t let the sincerity detract from the comedy – and the fact that her dad owned a sex shop in Great Yarmouth probably helped.

The salty, straight-talking comic, who comes from Maidstone, Kent, has spent the past year touring with Alan Carr, become a regular on Channel 4’s Stand Up for the Week and appeared on Radio 4’s The Now Show. This week, she will perform You Can’t Take It With You at the Soho theatre. Barnes is doing five nights at the venue’s Soho Upstairs stage, which the theatre describes as “a central London platform for anyone who has been tearing up the fringe”. Certainly, she was unlucky to not get a Foster’s best newcomer nomination for the show. With shades of Frank Skinner and Jo Brand, it’s an unapologetically big-hearted hour and her self-deprecating stories border on the confessional.

Before becoming a comic – a job for “misfits”, she says, not one for the cool kids – Barnes worked for over a decade in mental health and social care. For a short time she was booking comedy acts in Brighton as an extracurricular activity in her evenings. There she became friends with Josh Widdicombe, James Acaster and Nick Helm – then taking their first steps in comedy themselves. Such was her unfounded fear of what they would think of her going from booker to comedian, she would do open spots at any club around Brighton except her own, in order to get stage time without them seeing her. This comes as a surprise to hear – her onstage persona today is notable for its robustness, especially compared with other newbies.

If she does have any moments of weakness now, there’s always Auntie Sarah Millican to call upon. Millican has become something of a mentor to Barnes over the past few years, after they met when Barnes won the 2011 BBC new comedy award.

“There were people asking questions and taking pictures, I completely didn’t know what was going on,” she says, “but Sarah was there, and she took me to one side and said, ‘do you fancy going for a cup of tea?’ So we sat down and she said, it’s going to be a bit crazy for a while, here’s my number, give me a call any time you want to talk something through. It was pure Auntie Sarah, so lovely.

“Now any time something is happening we have a chat – like when I got on to Mock the Week. In fact she usually contacts me as I assume she’s really busy. She’s brilliant – some really successful people want to pull the ladder up behind them, but she is so encouraging.

“Funnily enough, after [the BBC final] I got one of my first reviews, and it said I was ‘like a Sarah Millican for the next generation’. But she’s only a year older than me. I think we’re in the same school year.”

One thing has eluded Barnes so far: a proper slot at the iconic Comedy Store. Don Ward, the brutally honest proprietor of the Store who still personally vets comics before offering 10- or 20-minute slots, has told Barnes that she doesn’t have what it takes. “I’ve done the Comedy Store TV show, I’ve done five-minute open spots on a Friday alongside people I’ve just been at Glee [in Birmingham] with, I’ve even been onstage at the Store at the same time as I’ve been on the telly [on Stand Up For the Week], but he still won’t give me anything more than a five,” says Barnes. “I’m just gonna have to wait till they want me instead of getting upset about it.”

What Barnes is acutely aware of is the sadness that comes with each landmark in her comedy career. “Every time something good happens it reminds me again that my dad’s not there. He’s never gonna see me do it. Like the night I won BBC, I got quite emotional as I didn’t expect it to happen in million years … I rang Mum straight away, but then I couldn’t ring him.”

• You Can’t Take It With you runs from 7 to 11 October. Box office: 020-7478 0100. Venue: Soho theatre, London