“I don’t think you can define a geezer,” says Madeleine Brettingham, in reference to her father, the titular Legend of her debut stand-up hour. “You just know it when you see it… It’s kind of an 80s, 90s pub term, that’s how I think about it.” Growing up at that time, accompanying him around the various boozers of Bournemouth, on England’s South Coast, she was exposed to “a version of masculinity that’s maybe dying out, or just being questioned or changed.” One that “wasn’t going to talk about his feelings [but who] had a van and would sort your problem for you.” The show’s title also suggests that her debut is the legend, which is to say the tale, of how she came to be who she is today: the rare “female geezer”.
It’s a self-description she wears only half-seriously, acknowledging the privileges to which she’s been the beneficiary in the years since that don’t necessarily fit its working class etymology, but “a lot of my mannerisms are modelled on those early experiences of geezers,” says Brettingham, explaining why she sits with her legs spread wide apart. Regardless of her time at Cambridge University studying English, or the many years she has spent working as part of the London media, those early experiences of “what an adult is” were formative. And while she may have excelled in formal education, her comedy education came from late-night, post-watershed TV sessions with her father in front of his beloved Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Rik Mayall.
In her early 20s, she penned a winning sketch for a Radio 4 competition, which springboarded her into writing for the comedy stalwarts of British Noughties television: Harry Hill’s TV Burp, That Mitchell and Webb Look, Would I Lie to You?, and practically everything else. It’s a career that has allowed her to put to use her talent for writing in all sorts of voices, which she puts down to a background that enables her to find a point of connection across the social spectrum. But, a self-confessed cynic, it took a wake up call from her subconscious to make her take the stage. “I literally had a dream where Michael McIntyre appeared to me and told me to do stand-up. [Before it happened] I just thought, I don’t want to be one of those wankers who think they’d be really good at it. But [in stand-up] you’ve got to try to get out of your own way a little bit, and I think one of the things McIntyre symbolises is, he’s someone who enjoys being seen,” she says.
It came with the challenge of re-learning what worked for her own, authentic voice. Traditional writing stints would result in solid jokes, ones others could make work, “but when I said them, I realised, ah, that doesn’t work [for me], because the audience doesn’t see me the same way,” she says. Nowadays, she trusts her interior monologue, forged in a family where humour was currency, for routines that arrive wholesale and unlaboured while out in the street or on a bus.
And it’s these routines, specific and personal as they are, that seem to have connected. They have quickly seen her rise through the stand-up circuit, winning competitions like last year’s So You Think You’re Funny at the Gilded Balloon, who are funding her debut as a result. “[It’s been] the opposite of everything I thought would happen. I was expecting people to pelt me off stage with rotten tomatoes,” she says, opening a suitably Dickensian window into her mind. Presumably not the same one Michael McIntyre flew in through. Although, a midnight apparition telling you to change your cynical ways? I think I’ve read that one before.
Madeleine Brettingham: Legend, Gilded Balloon Teviot, 5-31 Aug (not 17), 20:20