The Big Interview: Lucy Beaumont

Sometimes accent is everything. Take Lucy Beaumont, for example.

A rising star of the comedy world, she hit the turbo boost button on her stand-up career when she won the BBC Radio 2 New Comedy Award at the end of last year and her success is at least in part down to that distinctive Hull twang.

The word “crow” is pronounced by Beaumont as “crer”. “Stone” is “stern” and “oh no” becomes “er ner”. So when she tells you that one day she was walking home and “a ‘crer’ landed on my head and then flew up to a fence, like it was using me as a stepping ‘stern’,” it’s pretty much impossible not to laugh along. She may be blessed with butter-wouldn’t-melt looks and more than happy to play up to the ditzy blonde stereotype, but her observations are whip smart.

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“I think people don’t think I’m very intelligent,” says Beaumont, sitting in Hull Truck theatre in her home town.

“It’s a character on stage, not really me. It’s like me I suppose, but a bit more naïve. Like me if I didn’t have any responsibilities.”

Despite her insistence that there exists this separation, it really is incredibly difficult to completely detach Beaumont the stage character from her real-life self.

Talking about her first day at Hull University, where she studied drama, she says: “I wanted to get out of Hull really and grow up, but I didn’t have any qualifications, I only had a BTEC, but the uni has to let somebody from Hull on to the course every year, so I was that person.

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“In my first lesson the teacher went round asking everyone about how history has affected theatre through the ages and he got on to Marxism.

“Everyone was saying all this intelligent stuff and when it got to me, I said, ‘The thing that nobody has mentioned yet is about Karl Marx’s brother, Groucho’.”

It’s an old joke, but Beaumont insists it’s true.

“I honestly thought they were brothers,” she says. “I think I got typecast from that moment on.”

Later on she tells a tale from her early days in acting.

“I was up for a tour with Northern Broadsides, but that fell through and I ended up cleaning at the university, in the drama department where I’d studied.

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“I didn’t tell them I had a degree because I didn’t think I’d get the job,” she says.

“I was walking home from work one day – it’s gonna sound like I’m making this up, but it’s all true. So I was walking home and a massive crow landed on my head and it like used me as a stepping stone. It landed on my head then it jumped onto a fence. I felt violated that a crow felt it could do that. I swear it’s true. I don’t think you can write stuff like this.”

The crow incident was something of an epiphany for Beaumont. She went home that day and started writing down the odd situations that happen to her.

The daughter of playwright Jill Adams, Beaumont is fiercely proud of her mother who she believes has been undervalued by British theatre and by her home town in particular.

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As a child, Beaumont attended drama classes where her natural gift for comedy was spotted and encouraged. After school came the drama degree at Hull University, but the natural talent failed to turn into regular work.

She was impressive in Hull Truck’s successful comedy Ladies Day, and toured with the show, but her 20s were spent doing all kinds of jobs to pay the bills.

“I was always told at TV auditions I was too expressive. I did a Crimewatch where I was raped in Rotherham. They asked if I could do a Rotherham accent and I said I could. But I couldn’t. I just sounded like I was from Hull. It ended up being like something from Benny Hill,” she says.

It was clear that acting was never going to provide a regular income.

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“I’ve done every job known to man. It was only five years ago that I could get sacked from one job and walk straight into another. All the jobs were working with the public, so I think that was a massive help in finding material.”

Part of why Beaumont was such a clear winner in the BBC Radio 2 New Comedy Awards, was her naive delivery of surreal material. More deadpan than Jack Dee, she tells a story as though she’s not quite in on the joke.

“I did a national tour of cheese,” she says. It takes a prompt to get a further explanation. “I had to give out 2,500 chunks of cheese a day in market car parks around the country, starting in Newcastle and working my way down. There was me and another girl, I was team manager, but it was only us two in the team. She was a ballerina and she despised me. When we got to Coventry we nearly had a punch up in the car park.

“She should have been the manager, ‘cos she could drive and I can’t. But they made me manager because I was a bit more interesting than she was. I can’t eat cheese to this day.”

It’s difficult to know what to say to this story.

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Beaumont is currently trying to wrap her head round the fact that with the BBC Radio 2 New Comedy Award, she has just won the same prize that helped launch the careers of Peter Kay, Rhod Gilbert, Lee Mack, Alan Carr and Russell Howard.

Part of the award involves Beaumont writing her own radio series and she is also developing TV ideas. It is a seriously impressive start, but what makes it all the more impressive is that she has come virtually out of nowhere. Although she had one or two theatre roles, and had plenty of stage time from her training when she was younger, stand-up wasn’t always an obvious calling.

When she entered her first competition, So You Think You’re Funny, she hadn’t even been to a comedy gig.

“Before I entered the competition, I thought I better practice, so I went to an open mic night,” she says. “The first round of So You Think You’re Funny was my second comedy gig I’d ever been to, the semi-finals my third and the finals my fourth. I didn’t know that isn’t what’s supposed to happen.”

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When she announced to friends and family that she was pursuing comedy as a career, they were concerned. Her mum was supportive, once she’d seen Beaumont perform, but everyone knew it was a risk - and it wasn’t a profession that Beaumont seemed ideally equipped for.

“I don’t really like staying up late. I get really tired. Sometimes if I do a gig and there’s a really good headline act, I’d like to stay, but I need to get to bed,” she says. “Also, I can’t drive. I always have to get trains, but I’ve got really good at getting cheap tickets. And learning how to hide on trains and only pay halfway to the destination. Sometimes I’d get on the train to London, but only buy a ticket as far as Doncaster and then pretend to fall asleep. If you don’t move or wake up, they don’t notice. But if you’re not tired, it’s really hard. It’s a bit like meditating, just sitting there really still and pretending to be asleep.”

Sleeping on trains gave Beaumont a story that she told in the final of the BBC Radio 2 Comedy Awards, that surely helped her clinch the title. She was on a train, asleep – actually asleep – and a gang of teenagers got on. When Beaumont woke up, she discovered one of them had stuck a Wagon Wheel to her forehead. A Wagon Wheel she initially mistook for something far more unpleasant. The killer punchline revealed a seriously impressive sense of timing and the entire set her leftfield view of the world.

“I was talking to my oldest friend about this and she said, ‘Do you know you’re not normal?’ and I was like, ‘Am I not?’ and she said, ‘No, you’re completely mad’ and I was like, ‘Are you joking’.” Trust me, it’s even funnier in Beaumont’s broad Hull twang.

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“She said, ‘Did you actually think you were normal?’ and I was like, ‘Yeah!’. I was honestly gutted. I thought I was normal. It was a bit of a weird feeling.”

Fortunately for the future of British stand-up, Beaumont is not normal. She’s extraordinary. Extraordinarily talented – an opinion shared by some of the UK’s leading stand-ups.

“Lee Mack said to me, ‘You’re gonna be good’ and he’s like a proper comedian,” says Beaumont, who still has the good grace to be excited by the opportunities ahead of her. “Rhod Gilbert took me aside after I won the award and he said ‘you’re gonna be good’.”

Rhod Gilbert and Lee Mack are sort of right in their appraisal. Lucy Beaumont isn’t “gonna be good”. She already is.

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