Helen Keen

Helen Keen interview

Helen Keen is ready to go mainstream, as she returns to Radio 4 with more funny, yet factual, stories of unsung pioneers and oddballs (sometimes both), in a new show which shows us how science and technology could help solve our Big Problems.

Radio Times review

As the title promises, these sessions from Edinburgh's Stand Comedy Club are the opposite of ordinary television comedy: rough around the edges, whimsical, occasionally controversial. This instalment is especially refreshing because it boasts an all-female line-up. Familiar faces Bridget Christie and Josie Long are joined by Maeve Higgins who has novel ideas about exercise, Helen Keen on modern relationships and self-professed "geek songstress" Helen Arney performing a surreal ode to the sun. Christie fans should tune in purely for her energetic tirade about Stirling Moss.

Radio Times review

If humanity is to survive then we must become a multi-planet species and spread out like a male passenger on the tube seat of the cosmos. With this advice delivered, Helen Keen takes us on an entirely fact-based but very funny journey through the possibilities of travelling to and living on Mars.

Keen strikes the perfect balance between presenting potentially dull facts and keeping the comic pace going, mainly thanks to the sci-fi-blockbuster-voiceover-style commentary from Peter Serafinowicz.

This week's new live comedy

Previews of Romesh Ranganathan, Ian Cognito and Helen Keen.

Helen Keen interview

Helen Keen is a comedian whose material fuses space, science, sci-fi and little-known, weird facts. She presents It Is Rocket Science on Radio 4 and won the Channel 4 New Comedy Writing Award in 2005. She will be appearing at the Edinburgh Fringe later this year with her stand-up show Helen Keen: Robot Woman of Tomorrow.

This despite our sometimes eccentric attempts to send messages to anyone in the great beyond who might take note; or were the wee green men put off by the fact that the woman depicted on NASA's distantly voyaging Pioneer spacecraft lacks genitalia?

Such is the gleefully irreverent speculation in a new series of It Is Rocket Science, Radio 4's less than respectful look at science and space travel. The lugubrious tones of Peter Serafinowicz evoke "the vast vat of vastness" that is outer space, while the chirpy Helen Keen reviews attempts made to contact alien life, including a proposal to burn giant parallelograms into the Sahara.

An interview with Helen Keen

Helen Keen is a comedian who's comic sensibilities tend to lean towards the unusual, compared to the average stand up at least (unless you happened to be at one of Robin Ince's gigs - where she would fit right in).

Interview with Helen Keen

We speak to comedian and writer Helen Keen about her BBC Radio 4 series, It Is Rocket Science...

And yet more standups in It Is Rocket Science, a pithy, sweet programme about space presented by comedian Helen Keen, adapted from her 2008 Edinburgh show. This is an example of the recent trend among the geekier of standups to show the world that, you know, learning stuff is cool, as long as we keep shovelling in the gags. And it does its job well, with a joke-stuffed script, plus the extremely funny Peter Serafinowicz, providing the Voice Of Space. The Voice insists on referring to "The Ooooniverse". I laughed!