Interviews with figures from the worlds of film, TV and comedy, all originally conducted for EURadioNantes.
Richard meets Alice Lowe, co-writer and star of the British black comedy ‘Sightseers’.
[audio http://www.euradionantes.eu/uploads/media/default/0001/05/bd0ff801c41abd66f101bd61355581fda5f10c0f.mp3]The British sense of humour is widely appreciated, if not always understood, in France, and nothing says ‘so British’ like ‘serial slaughter on a caravan holiday’. That’s the subject of ‘Sightseers’, a blacker-than-black film comedy scripted by Alice Lowe and Steve Oram, who also star. Alice speaks to Richard O’Brien about sadness and violence as sources of comedy, and their place in the tradition of English humour. She also discusses the film’s sweeping shots of the beautiful Northern landscape, and the darkness its quaint and nostalgic locations inevitably contain.
Richard O’Brien meets Claire Allouche, from Les Feux Croisés, to discuss the Festival des 3 Continents, a yearly world cinema event in Nantes.
Grégoire Furrer has spent many years trying to make you laugh; not always in person, but through the comedy events he organises with his company, Productions Illimitées, and most notably at the Montreux Comedy Festival, which he founded in 1989. The recent Comedy International Conference in London raised a number of questions – are today’s young comedians truly international, and is it more important to have a humour which is grounded in the local than a humour which translates? Can the same joke be both? Grégoire shares his views on these questions, as well as on the relationship between TV fame and live stand-up performance, in an interview with Richard O’Brien.
‘Room at the Top’ is a 1950s British novel which has come to stand as a barometer for post-war social change; not least because it now seems considerably less radical than initial audiences assumed. Now Amanda Coe has adapted the story of selfish social climber Joe Lampton for a new generation, and her two-part BBC version is a period piece with a biting modern resonance. Here she speaks to Richard O’Brien about the novel’s individualistic and misogynistic ideology, and the challenges of adaptation.
