TED meets: Andrew Lawrence

Andrew Lawrence is one the country's leading stand up comedians with appearences on Live at the Apollo and Stand up for the week as well as primetime comedy shows on BBC Radio 4

Andrew is bringing his unique mix of whimsy and misanthrophy to Exeter's Barnfield Theatre, TED caught up with him ahaed of the show.

Andrew you’re playing at the Barnfield Theatre this Friday are you looking forward to the show?
Yeah whenever I’ve been down here in the past its always sold well with a good crowd, so yeah Exeter is a bit of a comedy town. This time of year it seems like there’s a lot of tours and shows going around so I’m just coming up to the busy time where comics are just going everywhere recently. Exeter is known as a bit of a comedy town so comics know they are going to get a good audience there.

How would you describe the show?
My show is often described as very dark in tone. But its very gag heavy and there’s a fair amount of interaction so if you like to get involved it will be great. The shows called ‘There Is No Escape’ which is kind of loosely based around the idea that we all get stuck in life. Maybe its work, or maybe it’s a relationship or a horrible situation  which you want to escape from because you  got a little fenced in and want to get away. 
But that’s really just a framework for the sort of comedy I usually do so they’ll be gags around it.

How has the tour been so far?
I started off with this show at the Edinburgh Fringe festival this august and have been touring it since September. I tend to stagger my tours a bit and stretch them out over almost a year  around 9 months.
The usual thing that comics do is go night after night, from one town to the next and cram their tour into 2 or 3 months. But this way you can go home and have a bit of a normal life. See friends and family be a little more domesticated. I’ve been doing stand up for 10 years now and while its easy to be on the road for seven nights a week when you’re just starting out  in your early 20s when everything’s quite exciting and you're travelling around on the circuit. But as you get a little older, the novelty wears off a little bit.

So is there anything you miss from the circuit gigs?
I miss the kind of camaraderie of doing that like waiting in the green room, travelling to the gigs together and sharing petrol money and so on.
But in terms of being on stage I much prefer doing my own tour you can go out and do your own show for a couple hours and just doing your own thing.  It gives you a lot more freedom to be experimental and do something more interesting. Because the audience are already sort of fans because they’ve come out to see you. It means you have a lot more scope to do different things that you can’t do with 20mins on stage in front of an audience who don’t necessarily know who you are and just there for a night out on town.

Do you have a bit fan following with the same people coming  back year on year?
Most of the audience is probably people who’ve seen me do something on the TV or from one of my  shows on Radio 4 and are aware of me through one of them and they wanted to come along and see me.
There’s much stuff on YouTube of me doing stand up now, that really helps and people get familiar with who I am through that. Other things like going up to Edinburgh and getting  reviews in the national press as well that can get people excited and make them come along as well. I’ve got to the point now that I’ve built up a bit a following. It’s nice to be able to go out and do a little tour and sell tickets on my own name.

You recently recorded your first full length tour recording which your selling independently on your website. Is this a route you want to carry on down?
I’m always trying to think of ways to bring and build the audience coming in on tour and make it available for a wider audience. With an audio recording people can share it with their friends. I think you have to be a very high level and be selling a phenomenal  amount of tickets before becoming a real mainstream commercial prospect for a company like universal  or channel 4. Beyond that you get some acts on perhaps slightly lower level recording their own shows and releasing it independently and getting their show out that way. Its something I hope to do more  in the future certainly.

Anything new in the works?
I’ve got something in the works with Radio 4 and we’ll see what happens with that, but it’ll be something different again if goes ahead.