Is performing for young audiences easier? Far from it say the comedians who do clubs at night and CBBC shows by day
What do standup comics do in the daytime? A glance at television schedules provides an answer: many hone their craft in the gaily coloured landscape of children’s comedy. The casts of some of these shows could fill an A-list festival for weeks. David Baddiel, Adam Riches and Meera Syal are among the comic performers on the long-running Horrible Histories, while James Acaster, Susan Calman, Romesh Ranganathan, Katherine Ryan and Phil Wang have all been contestants on the panel show The Dog Ate My Homework. The calibre of
comedy is so high that there’s never a temptation to shout: don’t give up the night job!
The presenter of the first six series of The Dog Ate My Homework was Iain Stirling, whose career began with a superhero-style division of
Labour. By day, he presented links between programmes on CBBC, with Hacker the dog as his sidekick; by night, he was on the standup circuit when his most devoted fans were tucked up in bed. “I was in my 20s,” he says, “and I sometimes felt like being a kids’ TV presenter made me less legitimate. You’re thinking, ‘I’m gonna be Bill Hicks and I’m gonna be Bill Hicks tomorrow!’ The next thing you know, you’re four years into presenting children’s television with a puppet dog and there’s a bit of you that goes, ‘I don’t really know how this happened.’”