Jake Farrell on his debut show, Sky

Jake Farrell began his comedy career in 2014 at the age of 22, a graduate of the prestigious Soho Theatre course. His Edinburgh Fringe debut was originally planned for 2020, but the pandemic scuppered that chance. He's now set to finally deliver his hour-long solo show this August...

What is your show about?

Sky is my debut show and it's about moving back to Stevenage during the pandemic and what's happened in the last 18 months and the huge effect that it had on my life.

Hopefully it's about love, commitment, and family but there are also quite a few mentions of rats.

Sky references a part of the move that made it horrible and stressful. Instead of getting the suburban idyll we got a weird mix between an episode of Malcolm In The Middle and a David Lynch film... which wasn't great in terms of my actual life, but hopefully makes for funny stand-up comedy.

Tell us a little about Stevenage...

Stevenage is the world's first new town and was founded in the aftermath of the second world war to house people bombed out of their homes by the Nazis. It's got all these lovely features based on the best town planning principles that the world had to offer at the time - we've got a full cycle network that covers the whole town, like they have in Amsterdam.

It's generally a safe and decent place to live that's been a bit fucked over because it was built by an interventionist government that envisaged a very different future to the one we actually got - so it's a bit "out of time". Charles Dickens once said that "nothing happens in Stevenage except nothingness itself" but then that prick lived in Broadstairs for ages so he should know.

What made you want to go into comedy?

Lee Evans. I watched one of his DVDs with my sister and cousins when I was about 10 and we lost our minds. I had no frame of reference for how someone could turn recognisable observations into something that funny. I still think about his bit about putting bags over racehorse's head to convince them that they are going on holiday in Barbados rather than running in the Grand National.

What's the most hilarious fact you know?

There are now over 1 million free speech podcasts run by divorced men in the UK alone.

What do you have planned for the future?

I want Sky to just be a really good show and then I'll see what happens. The only thing I'm doing apart from that is starting a TikTok account called "Funny Things Brits Say". So far, I've got the following video titles: "POV: You're on a date with Prince Andrew", "People from Tiverton be like..." and "When that MFing Fish and Chips just hit different ?". If anyone else wants to write for the account, please just give me a shout.