The Rachel Parris Songbook: Musical comedian coming to Leeds, Sheffield and Scarborough

She is coming to Leeds, Sheffield and Scarborough with The Rachel Parris Songbook – which she describes as “a best of” to “round up a 15 years of being in the game” – but a few years back released the memoir Advice from Strangers, following up in 2025 with a novel, Introducing Mrs Collins, based on the story of character Charlotte Lucas from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

That game has changed for comedians who use music in their acts, as classically-trained Parris – known for songs such as Hen Do On A Train and James Bond-style Girl with a Diamond Finger – does so often.

But she says: “I feel like even in those 15 years, what people want from musical comedy has changed a bit, and I'm trying to keep up with it. I feel like when I started, there was still a bit more room for what I do, which is me at the piano singing songs, which can seem quite old-fashioned,” she laughs. “And luckily, there's mostly enough people who still want that, but I've tried to keep up with it. I've worked with producers to create brilliant tracks to have a more varied sound and to create songs that are recognisable to people. I've got a sort of James Bond song, I've got RnB songs and pop songs and Disney songs. So I've tried to keep a lot of variety in the musical comedy that I do, but I feel like in the last few years, because of social media and how people get their comedy in a different way, comedians have responded to that. So now I feel like the job of musical comedian is maybe a little bit different than it used to be. Basically, I feel like being a producer is a lot more useful than being an instrumentalist.”

Parris, 42, who is married to fellow comedian Marcus Brigstocke and lives in Balham, south London, grew up in Leicester and started to play the piano when she was little and received a scholarship to study music at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, before developing her acting talent with a master's degree from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.

Playing piano, singing, arranging and composing were all part of her undergraduate degree and through acting she had a go at improvisational comedy with The Oxford Imps in her early 20s, which was her gateway into the world of stand-up.

For her own musical comedy, she says, “I had a frame of reference which was watching Victoria Wood on the TV as I was growing up.

“I had loads of songs, but I didn’t have loads of comedy songs at that point. But I thought, I think I can write comedy songs. I'm pretty sure. So I did.”

Still, she would never have guessed as a youngster that this would end up as her career. “I feel lucky I got to be in this world, really, because it certainly wouldn't have occurred to me to go into comedy, because I just had a very normal upbringing in the Midlands in Leicester. And by normal, I mean like most people, no one in my family or friends had ever met someone who performed for a living, who was a performer. Just wasn’t a thing. Didn't know any actors, didn't know any comedians or anything like that. Everyone just had proper jobs. So, in terms of wanting to be a comedian, I didn't think that was a job that you could have, or musician.”

She attended the independent Loughborough High School as a youngster, but she disagrees with the notion that comedy is populated only by the privileged.

“You look at comedy and the successful people in comedy, when people say it's just these posh, privileged people, there’s only Jack Whitehall.

“It’s not Katherine Ryan. It’s not Sara Pascoe. It’s not Kerry Godliman. It’s not Josh Widdicombe, I don’t think – I know he's got good ancestry, but I don’t think he grew up like that. It’s not Romesh Ranganathan. It’s not Rob Beckett. Who are you talking about? When people criticise the comedy industry for that, I'm like, maybe… but there's not many. And I think that’s good.”

People might know Parris best from BBC Two show The Mash Report, which started in 2017, and the channel Dave’s follow-up Late Night Mash, after her segments became very popular online.

Parris has built her own loyal audience, though, including fans of Austentatious, an improvised Jane Austen inspired story performed each week, which she co-founded in 2011.

And if anywhere suits Parris’s vaudevillian combination of music and comedy, it is venues like Leeds City Varieties, one of the country’s oldest surviving Victorian music halls. “Of the dates on the tour, City Varieties feels like a perfect place for a musical comedian,” she says. “Variety acts are such a big part of its history and you can feel it when you're there, it feels like this act suits this stage really well. I love it there. Since I’ve been touring venues of that size – because I used to tour obviously to much smaller arts venues and 50-seaters – but in terms of theatres, that’s the one I’ve most often gone to than any of the others, and I've always had a nice time there. So it's nice to get back.”​

The Rachel Parris Songbook comes to Leeds City Varieties on Thursday, November 5, The Steamworks in Sheffield on March 5, 2027, and Spa Centre in Scarborough on April 11, 2027. www.rachelparris.co.uk