As well as touring up and down the length and breadth of the country, she also runs weekly new material night, Old Rope, in London every week which has seen acts such as Ed Byrne, Reginald D Hunter and Jack Dee perform in a pub basement. With one Edinburgh show, Along Came A Spider, under her belt, she’s about to hit The Fringe again with her show, Dictators. So, Tiffany, how are you doing? I’m good, I’m good. Hello! You’re saying that like we’ve never seen each other all evening. I like that. I’ve been looking at your face in the gig! Ah, yeah. I’m wearing pajamas. They’re banned in China (where I’ve just come back from). You’re banned from wearing pajamas in public, so this is a protest I’m making. That goes against every kung-fu flick I’ve seen. Getting serious for a second now, how did you start off acting? Then it carried on from there when I realised that is the job that, as fantastic as it is, and I still do it, is a very reactive industry. So, you have to do something creative or pro-active if you don’t wanna lose your mind. How did you eventually get to stand-up? I started writing, and a lot of the acting parts I was getting were for comedy anyway. Then I started writing a pilot for a sitcom called Gaby And The Girls. We got £30,000 and we made it. That was probably six or seven years ago now. It was the first thing I’d ever written. People liked it and it didn’t get commissioned, but it gave me a taste for writing. From there I decided I was going to write some stand-up, but I started out doing characters. I did a character called Savannah Dior – Media Whore, who was like a WAG. That was before we knew just far the WAG thing would go. It’s called Dictators in the belief that we all have them in our lives, like right now, you’re mine? You’re dictating me, literally, on a dicta-phone! The question is who is yours, and I’m going to be looking at my top five. I’ve got some bad boys in there, like I’ve got Hitler, I’ve got Mugabe. I’ve got Mussolini, OK magazine and my mum. They’re the top five that I’m gonna be looking at. I have a little bit of an obsession with dark themes. I think we all do, actually, as much as whether we want to admit it or not. Also a lot of dictators went out with actresses. There’s quite a link there. Then I expanded it to make more of a universal thing about dictators. And I just spent a month in China, so I’ve got a lot to say about that. This is your second full-length show. Were there any lessons you took from your first? Mentioning no names… [Laughs] They take things so literally. I had one where someone accused me of name-dropping when I mentioned Atomic Kitten, Calum Best and someone else. All these excruciatingly bad attempts at name-dropping when I was being deeply sarcastic about it. How is it performing at the festival in comparison to the circuit? An hour is a different beast compared to a club show. You go to a club and you do 20 minutes, you sort of bash it out and make it very gag, gag, gag. You do an hour, it’s boring, nothing more boring than just doing jokes for an hour unless there’s some kind of story arc or narrative or even a theme. Even just the pitch and tone of your voice over an hour, if it’s the same, it can become incredibly boring. So, you have to put other things in there to spice it up, which is where the acting comes in, to give it more of a rounded storytelling. Personally, that’s what I like to see in Edinburgh shows. Finally, who should come and check you out? Sometimes you’re surprised by the people who come and really get it. So, I would say anyone who is interested in history, is interested in the weird, is interested in the slightly dark and is interested in me! Cos there’s some shit that’s going on in my life that’s pretty fucking amazing that’s made it into the show! Thanks for talking, Tiffany!
