Gabby Best

Written by: Si Hawkins
Published: Thursday 19th July 2018

Comedians are good people! There, we've said it. Yes, you hear stories, but just imagine how much money they must've raised for charity over the years, if you added it all together. It's a lot. Indeed, at the benefit show Gabby Best is MCing tomorrow night, they'll even be collecting cold, hard cans.

Canned Laughter, in Walthamstow, East London, is "a regular comedy night to raise funds - and cans - for the Eat Or Heat food bank in Waltham Forest," she says. "It's an amazing charity and the need will be even greater in the run up to the school holidays. Last week they received 20 new referrals in just one night."

More Eat Or Heat details here, while you can find out about Canned Laughter tickets at the bottom of the page. As for Best, you may well have seen her on TV in Top Coppers, Glitchy, Siblings, Lovesick and most recently Morgana Robinson's Summer for Sky, as written by Sharon Horgan, which won the BAFTA for best short in May.

Onstage she won the Funny Women competition in 2012 with her character Marijana, but has changed things up in recent years. So how would she describe her current style?

"I've been gigging as me for a little while now. I assumed I'd settle on some sort of persona but, disconcertingly, I've found I'm just being myself; makes it harder to describe, as it's not a conscious thing, but I suppose 'animated / scattershot.' I'm quite neurotic but I'm very upbeat about it. A lot of my stuff comes from observing strangers / situations and then worrying about them indefinitely."

And particularly at night, by the sound of it. "I've been working on a show about insomnia, which I'll be doing at Camden Fringe this year," she says. "It's the reason I feel like a ghost and look like a shoe, so it owes me a decent hour of stand-up at least."

Details of her Camden Fringe dates are down below, too. Now, back to early 2012... remember that, just before the Olympics, when the whole country seemed a happier, friendlier, place, where we'd all get along better and alleviate the very need for things like food banks, for good? Those were the days.

First gig?

At a cafe in Balham in spring 2012. It was a charity thing and I promised a mate who'd been egging me on that I'd do five minutes.

I remember making the sign of the cross before I went on and whispering something faintly desperate to Mary (as in the Mary, mother of God). I haven't been to church since I was 15 but nerves will do that to a Catholic, lapsed or otherwise.

I remember a high-pitched ringing in my ears... within a minute I was having the time of my life. Jayde Adams was on, my two mates Lizzie and Lena, who were in a double act at the time and it's the night I met my very good friend Jess Gunning - who is still one of the funniest people I know.

Favourite show, ever?

This changes all the time but I did a work in progress hour of my sleep show at the Bill Murray in August last year - and it was some of the best fun I've had on stage. That room is a bit magic.

Worst gig?

Edinburgh 2014. I got Labyrinthitis in the last week (no Bowie jokes, ta. Google it. It's horrific). It came on quite suddenly twenty minutes into my show, wherein I proceeded to black out and keel over, v e r y s l o w l y... I'd like it on record that I blacked out IN CHARACTER, because the show must go on... even when you have 2% vision and you can't feel your arms.

The audience patiently sat there as I audio-described my own faint in a Croatian accent. I possibly thought I was doing a Tommy Cooper - only it wasn't The Palladium, it was a tiny room on George Square with about 16 people in it.

As I started melting into the floor, I heard an old man ask, very sweetly, if I'd 'eaten today?' I reassured him (still in character) that I'd had muesli for breakfast and a sausage sandwich for lunch, before literally crawling off stage on my hands and knees.

The weirdest live experience?

I've performed at Latitude a couple of times. The first was great fun. The second, I played to precisely eleven people in a 400-capacity tent, with a broken mic. There was a bloke asleep with a poncho over his head and a mother and toddler singing softly to each other throughout. It was the stuff of stress-dreams.

Who's the most disagreeable person you've come across in the business?

Most people are good eggs. I hosted a dog show recently and there was a dachshund who did not take to me at all: that's probably the closest I've come to a professional disagreement. It took a very deliberate shit next to a discarded pain au raisin, while holding intense eye contact with me. We both knew who that shit was for.

Is there one routine/gag you loved, that audiences inexplicably didn't?

I once did an incredibly specific impression of a woman I used to work with, complete with blow by blow account of her being too posh to operate a (computer) mouse properly. It gave me a huge amount of joy, but absolutely no one else.

Do the gigging and acting ever clash, or does one thing help the other?

They work quite nicely together I think. I slip in and out of voices / little scenes in my comedy and my acting roles tend to be comic so it all sits together logically. Obviously I'd like to do a gravely serious drama one day... play a troubled barrister. Or a depressed flapper. Or Virginia Woolf.

The most memorable review, heckle or post-gig reaction?

I have this super power where I know what duvet cover a person has just by looking at them. Tried and tested over years. I'm almost unbeatable. I occasionally do it at gigs.

One time a bloke waited for me at the end to tell me I was blessed with powers beyond my understanding and that I must meet with 'his people' regularly to explore my psychic abilities. I never went, but his people meet in Sidcup, if anyone's interested.

How do you feel about where your career is at, right now?

I'm really enjoying the stand-up and I've got some lovely writing projects on the go, so it's all ticking along. Financially: I am in a real shit pit. Ooh boy.

Canned Laughter is at Centre17, Church Hill, Walthamstow, on Friday 20th July. Tickets are just a fiver - so long as you bring five items for the food bank, too. Info & Tickets

Gabby's new show 10,432 Sheep is at London's Bill Murray as part of the Camden Fringe on 22nd and 23rd August. Tickets