Interview with This Glorious Monster

Interview with Martin Collins from This Glorious Monster.

CB: How long have you been gigging in comedy?

MC: We come from an acting and writing background really. So we started out writing and filming. Then moved to gigging about a year or so ago, which has been good fun. Our comedy can be a little twisted and we learnt quite quickly that doing the ‘club’ side of things could go one of two ways!

I remember doing our perverted driving instructor sketch at a gig in the outskirts of London and probably 90% of the room bloody hated it. Most of them were in their 50’s 60’s and had come out for a nice night out with their wife / husband. They didn’t particularly want to be seeing three large men pretending to be in a car, dry humping each other.

We did have a few people come up after saying how much they liked it. Although I do remember one lady in the beer garden saying. “I mean that was just wrong. Should have been ‘ere last week Sharon. Shan Ritchie was in”.

CB: How would you describe your comedy?

MC: Darkly twisted subhuman comedy. We get a lot of people saying it’s like League of Gentlemen, who we are massive fans of and obviously influenced by. I’d say where we differ is that we exist more within the real – it’s not influenced by horror etc, like a lot of their stuff is. It’s mainly based on true stories or weird situations people have been in. It’s those moments you can’t wait to tell your mates about. The weird the wonderful.

They’re characters that everyone kinda knows. Like the omnipresent ‘Ladies of HR’, who are constantly on the prowl with a new ‘office collection’ or ‘sponsored swim’.

CB: Did you always want to go into comedy?

MC: I (Martin Collins) started out in a band called Lo-ego (Wow thats a terrible name). But I remember seeing a video one day and realised I’d got too fat and bald for that, so I decided to do comedy. I started out in a comedy troupe called Broken Biscuits with the likes of Nick Helm and Spencer Jones. We did a cracking show called Big Babies for CBBC. Then we all went off in various directions.

That’s when I started writing a lot more. I also started doing an acting course and soon realised I wanted to do sketch again. This time it would instead be lead by acting and creating real characters.

I write all This Glorious Monster with Alex Finch, and after doing this acting course, I knew exactly who I wanted to work with. Daniel Hoffmann-Gill (who was actually the teacher) and Adam Loxley, a fellow student who I thought was brilliant.

I’m still chuffed that they agreed to give this a go. I wouldn’t change it for the world.

CB: How do you go about writing your material?

MC: As I mentioned before, our stuff is totally inspired by real life. The driving instructor who gets his pupil to scooch over to swap seats instead of getting out of the car and the inappropriate camping shop are both based on true stories.

Either that or we give a real situation a darker twist. These people are around us everyday. They’re normally the kings and queens of their own tiny universe. The ego’s, the hobbyists or the characters that live on the fringe of society.

It’s all out there. You’ve just got to see it.

CB: What do you find the most enjoyable and frustrating parts of the comedy circuit?

MC: We started falling in to the trap of writing just for live, trying to cater to crowds at the more ‘stand up circuit’ nights. This isn’t why we got in to comedy. We want people to enter our world and see things from our perspective.

We have done a fair few gigs now but we much prefer putting our own night – currently at the Comedy Pub in Leicester Square. Usually it’s a bi–monthly thing. (We have a gig on the 20th Oct followed by ‘A PERVERTS CHRISTMAS SPECIAL on the 8th Dec).

We’ve found this is the best way to show our sketches. People kinda know what they are letting themselves in for and we get to share the bill with acts that we love.

There’s some awesome people in comedy and some prize plonkers, but hey that exists in every walk of life.

CB: What’s your favourite type of audience to perform to?

MC: Saturday night at Butlins? Or drunk people. Although I guess they’re the same thing.

CB: What advice would you give to new acts thinking of starting out in comedy?

MC: Do it how you want to do it. Don’t always go for the cheap laughs – that will leave you hating your own stuff. Create a voice, an opinion or a place that your own comedy comes from. Find that, and the writing becomes so much easier.

For you it might be trotting around on stage wearing eye liner. For us it’s making audiences truly terrified that they may one day meet one of our Glorious Monster’s.

youtube.com/thisgloriousmonster