ISY SUTTIE

FROM GEEK TO CHIC

what worked and what didn’t. It was a short step to trying it herself, particularly as she’d been writing comic songs since she was around twelve. “You do what’s natural to you. Songs were always going to form part of my act.”

She’s had her share of bad gigs (the very worse was in Edinburgh, where an audience member paid her £20 to leave the stage) and says the hardest thing is when you lose the audience’s interest. “They start chatting a bit, and it’s so infuriating. They feel sorry for you — and afterwards you try and work out where we missed a moment.” But comedy is her vocation, there haven’t been many nights like that, and she points out that women comics of her age have had it much easier than those a little bit older, people like Jo Brand who “had to fight hard to be heard.”

Suttie’s role in Peep Show endeared her to the show’s many fans, as Dobby, the “geeky IT whizz ” who won hearts on and off screen. Suttie loved playing her. “She’s feisty and indecisive quite geeky, not girly.” But working on Peep Show was “nerve-wracking”, not least because performers never knew if they’d be rebooked for another series.

Halfway through our interview (and just as the peppermint tea arrives at last) there’s a brief interruption as she greets Robert Popper, creator of the very Jewish Friday Night Dinner, yet another Channel Four hit comedy show. This reminds me of a conversation I’d had that week in which a (non-Jewish) writer assured me that Tamsin Greig (also not Jewish) was insufficiently convincing as the show’s Jewish mother, whereas I (Jewish) assured her that Greig was more convincingly Jewish than the actual Jewish performers. With this odd debate in my mind, I turn to Isy Suttie’s Jewish heritage.

She is 100 percent halachically Jewish through her mother’s mother, but raised outside the community and religion. “I wish I knew more about the Jewish religion,” she says. A few years ago she did a play at JW3, which she enjoyed and the centre’s CEO Raymond Simonsen assured her that she was one of us, telling her that she had to come back, which she’d love to do.

Her mother’s mother was called Edith Feest and came from north London. Suttie has a family tree which is “full of Jewish names, I just wish I knew more about the people. What did they do? And were they funny? In photos from the 19th century everyone looks so serious.”

It’s a fair bet that they were. Her parents were “like a double act” she says, and Edith was also funny. She used to write for The Woodworker magazine, a column entitled “The Woodwork’s wife” looking at what it was like to be married to someone engrossed in their hobby. I love the idea of humour being handed down through the female side of the family, like Judaism, and hope Suttie does more research and uncovers a bloodline of comedians. Daughter Beti isn’t even at school yet but, says her proud mother, “She’s funny and she knows it.”

As Elis James, Suttie’s partner, another comedian, is Welsh speaking, Suttie is learning the language to help bring Beti up as bilingual as is possible when you live in south London.

So, what next for Isy Suttie? “I like dabbling here and there,” she says, but admits that nowadays a project has to be really exciting for her to want to leave London and her daughter— Pin Cushion passed that test. “And I’d still really like to be in a Mike Leigh film.” Mike, if you’re reading this, what are you waiting for?

I wish I knew more about the Jewish religion