The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Peddling patter:
Dundee Rep Theatre, January 25
“Everything’s so miserable at the moment,” says comedian Aidan Goatley, which is an unusual opener for a man trying to pitch a show called Happy Britain, “and I don’t even want to mention the ‘B’ word. I had the idea for this show in Worthing, which is a town with the appeal of a house with a fridge sitting outside.”
Poor Worthing. If Goatley were to give the place a town motto, he says it would be “It Should Be Lovely”.
“Everybody seemed really miserable,” he says, “but I do like a natter, so I got chatting to a woman called Shirley and she told me she really loved it. ‘What do you like about it?’, I asked. She told me she loved to go and get chips and mushy peas and sit on the pier – I went and did it myself, and it was beautiful.”
This got Goatley thinking that even the supposedly off-the-beaten-track parts of the country must have something special about them which everyone should know about.
“I realised there are 105 counties in the UK, so what if I went to the Google Map centre of each of them, found the nearest person I could find and asked what makes them happy. And that’s what I’ve been doing.”
Presented by the Sweet Lates series at Dundee Rep, this will be the first official performance of Happy Britain by London-raised, Brighton-based Goatley, who acted on his ambition to get into comedy a decade ago when his wife suggested he go on a comedy course run by a local woman called Jill Edwards; her past clients include everyone from Jimmy Carr to Sarah Millican and Romesh Ranganathan.
Previously, Goatley’s show about his father, 10 Films with My Dad, was enough of a hit that it took him around the world.
Produced in conjunction with CALM, the Campaign Against Living Miserably, the show is cheerfully described by Goatley as “a really stupid idea that’s bloody complicated to work out”.
He’s getting there, though, with nearly 50 counties visited – he intends for this version of the show to be “Happy Britain Part 1”, with the rest of them viewed as he travels, and then when he takes the show to Edinburgh in August, all 105 counties will play a part in “Happy Britain Part 2”.
“I won’t say it’s a midlife crisis, but if it is, it’s a really positive adventure,” he laughs. “There are lots of lovely stories out there. In Portsmouth I found myself in a gay men’s sauna, and I don’t think I was the first middle-aged white man who had ever gone in there in search of happiness.
“Although I was fairly sure that everyone in there knew exactly what made them happy.
“It’s a positive show,” he continues. “It’s not political or heart-breaking or serious. It’s just an attempt to prove that there is fun and beauty in the UK, to counter all the negativity we hear.”