Cariad and Friends

Last year, character comedian Cariad Lloyd kicked off her debut at the Fringe with no agent, no producer and a press release written by a friend who happened to work in PR. By her own admission, she had no idea what was going on. Last year, character comedian Cariad Lloyd capped off her debut at the Fringe with a Best Newcomer nomination and another friend roped in to control the audiences maxing the capacity of the Voodoo Rooms.  

"I owe PBH so much and the Free Fringe is a wonderful, brilliant thing," the 29 year-old  says, dwarfed by a pint of cranberry and lemonade (she's tiny), "but I was running that room myself. I had no changing rooms. People on the staircase would think something arty was happening when I was actually just trying to get my jumper off."

This year's The Freewheelin' Cariad Lloyd allows for more privacy in terms of jumper removal, and she's also armed with an agent, a producer, a director and some new, and returning, characters. "It's been tough deciding who stays and who goes," she says, having had to chop an hour's worth of imaginary friends to fit her show into its allocated timeslot. And when I say friends, I mean friends; she talks about them as if they were living, breathing pals, as liable to make her laugh as piss her off. 

It's difficult, then, when one doesn't make the Edinburgh cut. 'Marleine Deitrich: Head of the PTA' wouldn't do what Cariad wanted: "It was so frustrating. She just wouldn't stop singing." and 'Helena Susan Bonham Carter' (a superhero defending Primrose Hill) met a fair amount of audience confusion. "I wore a long black wig and danced while shouting H-S-B-C. People really did wonder what the fuck I was doing." Audience confusion doesn't always equal ruthless culling, though.

"The first time I did 'Jacques' [a French parkour enthusiast from last year's show] everyone was like 'what the hell is happening?!' I was climbing all over a sofa, jumping on windowsills and, while people were laughing, I felt they were more..." she leans forward and adopts a concerned parent expression, "are you alright, dear?"

You do have to be cruel to be kind, especially when you're the sort of comic who tends to stretch an audience with fairly niche references. 'Mrs Lynch', David Lynch's mother, never stuck due to taking this alienation a step too far; anyone who didn't have an encyclopedic knowledge of David Lynch's back catalogue were left a little confused in previews. "I love her a lot but I just kept hitting a wall," she says, "I thought David Lynch was popular, but my director [Ben Wilson from Idiots of Ants] thought there were a lot of obscure references in there anyway, so maybe one should have a rest." 

With each character lasting fifteen or so minutes, she's sandwiched the more left-field between the more accessible; 'Moominmama: Swedish Detective' requires knowledge of popular 90s kids' cartoon The Moomins and you might not understand 'Joey Bechamel' if you've never seen a Zooey Deschanel film. But 'Cockney Sam', returning from last year, has always gone down well, once she'd convinced early preview audiences (and herself) that, yes, she was an East London gentleman with psychopathic tendencies. "Nobody got it at first but they liked the idea, which was why I kept on with him," she says, "I loved 'Cockney Sam' last year but sometimes, with the others, I'll completely fall out of love, then after a while will remember what I liked so much about them in the first place," She likes "falling back in love" with her characters, "when you see a friend too much they do your head in, but after a break you'll go for coffee, have a lovely chat and realise how great they are."

Talking of friends, it was one of her actual, tangible ones that first got her into comedy. She went to university with standup Sara Pascoe and they lived together in their early twenties, trying to make it as actors in London. It was a 10-week improv course at City Lit that really sparked things off. "I always made up shit as a child, I went in there and was like 'Oh my God. There's other people who do this weird stuff! And the do it on stage! And they get paid!' It blew my world." It wasn't until the summer of 2010, when all her friends took shows to Edinburgh, that she started taking things seriously. "I think I was waiting for someone to say 'OK you've got enough material now. You're reasonably well known' before I went up."

Now she realises it's quite often the other way around. "I was scared for so long. People would tell me I should take up a show and I was like 'What the fuck are you talking about?! Are you serious?!' Then it dawned on me: just do it anyway." This year she's taking it three times as seriously; improvising Jane Austen novels with improv group Austentatious at the Free Fringe; working on David Shore's improvised chat show Monkey Toast at the Pleasance and, of course, her flagship hour. "This time last year I was still working at a college 9-5, gigging in the evening." She finishes the pint of cranberry and lemonade and whispers conspiratorially, as her PR goes outside to take a call: "It's all still very new, I still don't really know what's going on... I just want to keep doing stuff that makes me laugh."