Thanyia Moore shares reason for truncated Fringe run, reveals TV pilot
- Thanyia Moore has talked about miscarrying at last year's Edinburgh Fringe
- She has turned the traumatic experience into her 2023 show, August
- The stand-up is also piloting a television adaptation of her show Bully, about the shame of having been a school bully
Thanyia Moore has opened up about suffering a miscarriage at last year's Edinburgh Fringe and revealed that she is writing a television pilot about being a school bully.
The stand-up is previewing a show for touring next year about her pregnancy loss, August, which has already won the Comedy Breakthrough Award at this year's Vault Festival.
Speaking on the Always Be Comedy podcast with fellow comic James Gill and the You've Changed podcast with stand-up Kate Barron, Moore disclosed she miscarried on the third day of performing her debut show Just Be Funny, but was back on stage the following night.
She learned the miscarriage had been ectopic on the ninth day of her run and left the festival to be treated in London, before returning to Edinburgh to complete her remaining dates.
"It was a crazy time for me in Edinburgh last year ... it was all a bit of a rollercoaster" she told Gill. "The whole 30-day period was crazy. And the last thing I'm going to do is allow that to be a negative trauma in my body, I'm going to make that a fun thing. So I've taken it and made it absolutely hilarious.
"I told everyone online that I had pulled a muscle. But the show is really fun, I promise you. The show is not actually about a miscarriage, it's about the different ways people grieve and what we go through when we're grieving. It sounds heavy but it's really funny, I promise you."
Moore told Barron that the miscarriage was the second she'd experienced with the same partner and that she was "numb" walking around Edinburgh afterwards.
She explained to Gill that she had sought help from a therapist: "I'm a very literal person, I don't think you should be sad about things that you can't change. And it sounds horrible but I like that I have that.
"There's no point in me being sad about a baby I can't bring to fruition. It's gone, it's done. So now I sit back, I accept it and then I find a way to go forward ... to make it funny."
Meanwhile, the comic has also revealed that she is piloting a television adaptation of her live show show Bully, which she originally developed for the 2022 Fringe after several years of workshopping, but set aside in favour of Just Be Funny.
"I actually got a pilot commissioned" she told Jon Holmes on Radio 4 Extra's The Comedy Club. "It's about when I was a child, I was a bully and why and how it impacts my adult life."
Although she didn't mention the channel or production company she is developing the pilot for - Moore, whose acting roles include appearances in Sophie Willan's Alma's Not Normal, Katherine Ryan's The Duchess and Channel 4's upcoming comedy drama Queenie, and whose writing credits include Death To 2020 - said that further developing Bully was "wonderful", adding that she also wanted to make a podcast or radio series about the subject, "talking about being a bully when you were younger and what it means for you and how you go about navigating life today.
"What I found from doing the one hour comedy show was that loads of people who were little tyrants, there's still that stigma, they still carry that little bit of shame about it" she said.
"And it shouldn't be shame ... no seven-year-old wakes up trying to be Putin. They're angry and they don't know how to express their anger."