Alistair McGowan

Non-comedy TV and film credits may be found here:
Alistair McGowan on IMDb

Born

Tuesday 24th November 1964 (60 years-old)

Nationality

English

Alongside a distinguished career in the West End (in plays such as Art, Cabaret, The Mikado, and Little Shop of Horrors, for which he was nominated for a Laurence Olivier Award),

In 2012, McGowan wrote and hosted the comedy sports show You Cannot Be Serious, broadcast on ITV[c]. Here McGowan mixed the funniest and most bizarre clips from that week's sporting news, providing impressions of famous figures such as Louie Spence and Roy Hodgson. Later he appeared on the Scottish comedy sketch show Only An Excuse? from 1996 to 1998, as well as his own sporting impressions show on [c]BBC Radio 5 Live, entitled The Game's Up.

McGowan is a keen football fan and supports Leeds United (and once even claiming that he studied at Leeds University partly because of its promixity to Elland Road) and Coventry City, whose stadium was close to the house in which he lived during his late teens. This interest led to a book that he wrote with former comedy and one-time romantic partner Ronni Ancona, entitled A Matter Of Life And Death Or How To Wean Your Man Off Football.

Born in Evesham, Worcestershire, McGowan was educated at Simon de Montfort Middle School, Evesham (where he took lead roles in school plays), Evesham High School, the University of Leeds (BA English), and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

McGowan's earliest experiences in comedy came with providing voices for some characters in the ITV political comedy show Spitting Image. Some of the sporting impressions here were showcased on the BBC Two football magazine programme Sick As A Parrot. Soon after, he replaced Stephen Tompkinson as Spock in the Tim Firth comedy drama All Quiet On The Preston Front, and starred in the first series of the long-running comedy impressions show Dead Ringers.

McGowan is best known for collaborating with Jan Ravens and Ronni Ancona on the BBC One impressions show The Big Impression (2000-2004), formerly known as Alistair McGowan's Big Impression for its first three series. McGowan and Ancona would impersonate personalities from the worlds of entertainment, sport, and politics, the most popular and recurring figures being David Beckham, Gary Lineker, Tony Blair, Terry Wogan, and Ross Geller (the character from NBC sitcom Friends).

McGowan's own play, Timing (2012), was nominated for Best New Comedy at the whatsonstage.com awards. In 2013 he toured the UK with live show Not Just A Pretty Voice, and also performed with Eddie Izzard in the first ever stand-up show by two English comics performed totally in French.

From 2009 to 2013 he starred in BBC Radio 4 sitcom ElvenQuest, a show bout a fantasy novelist who is whisked away to a parallel universe.

Although by this point the pair were no longer in a relationship, in 2018 McGowan and Ancona began working with each other once more on the Sky One sketch show The Week That Wasn't, a show that involved rejoicing topical video clips from the political and cultural worlds.

Alongside these interests in comedy and the theatre, McGowan has also maintained a keen passion for music. In 2014 he narrated, in the guise of Erik Satie, one of his idols a concert of surrealist ballet music from 1920s Paris, broadcast on BBC Radio 3. In 2016 he took a live comedy show to Edinburgh entitled Erik Satie's - Faction. In 2017 he also released a debut album on Sony Classical.

McGowan is a keen environmentalist, a patron of the urban tree-planting charity Trees for Cities and an ambassador to WWF-UK.

BAFTA Television Awards 2003

Best Comedy (Winner)

National Television Awards, The 2003

Comedy Performer (Nominee)

National Television Awards, The 2002

Comedy Performer (Nominee)

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