Sisters are On Demand

Written by: Si Hawkins
Published: Tuesday 31st July 2018

The sketch duo have gone hi-tech...

One of the lovely things about lolling around the Latitude Festival every year is finding yourself with a gap between ringed-things, ducking into the cabaret tent for a sit down and chancing upon something you'd completely missed in the programme.

This year we did just that with the sketch duo Sisters, who were honing some enjoyably high-concept and tech-savvy stuff from their forthcoming Edinburgh Fringe show, On Demand, and crowd-pleasing with a few classics from last year's debut hour too.

And so, continuing the tech-happy theme, we sent them some questions via the wonders of electronic mail, and they replied. It's magic!

Writing your second Edinburgh hour, is it like the different second album: 'oh crap, we've used everything up...'?

We were fortunate in that we were decided on what the second show would be fairly in advance, but that doesn't mean we haven't been panicking sweatily about getting the new sketches up to a higher standard than last year.

You occasionally find yourself scrolling through old iPhone notes from 2010 shouting "there's GOT to be something in here" out loud to a full tube carriage.

I really enjoyed your Latitude set - so which sketches were from the new show?

Thank you, Si. Err... We're trying to think of ways to describe them without giving away the punchlines. The one with the watch is new. So's the one about the pill. This is quite a niche answer really because it relies on the reader seeing our Latitude set. Some sketches, like the Autotuned Doctor, we really couldn't wait to do at a festival on some nice big speakers to a baying festival crowd.

The new show is called On Demand - how does it work?

On Demand is the launch of our new service: Sisters On Demand, which puts the audience in control of what sketches they want to see and in what order. Because it turns out narrative pacing really isn't important.

We've built a whole interface that's as sexy as Netflix so the whole experience is visceral and interactive. You just select what you want to watch and we just bloody get on and perform it for you. We'll do whatever you want, please just engage with us. That's the future, baby.

Do the punters you pull up onstage ever get a bit too into it? Particularly at the Fringe - all those actors?

There have been a few cases where punters try to steer the sketch towards them looking like funny legends but it usually just makes things awkward. We usually make it so that, if we bring you onstage, minimal effort and creativity is required from you. One time a girl from the audience told Mark she hated him, which was more mean than funny but you couldn't help admire her bluntness.

Back when we did 40 minutes on the Free Fringe, we used to make an audience member read the speech asking people to put money in the bucket and one night this maverick went totally off-book and yelled 'DO NOT WANK IN THE BUCKET'. He got a HUGE laugh, but then got cocky and tried a bunch of other jokes which totally ran the momentum into the ground.

How was Latitude generally: did you see anything else, or head straight home to hone your Fringe set?

We had so much fun at Latitude - lovely bit of kit. The crowd were awesome. Particular highlights were Steen Raskopoulos, Bridget Christie, and Adam Buxton's DJ set, to a crowd bigger than Solange's.