Interview: Olga Koch

It seems as if everyone – quite rightly – is talking about privilege in the arts right now. Everyone apart from those with privilege, that is. It’s hard admitting you have a rich or well-connected family without risking alienating your audience, unless you’re prepared to adopt a cartoonish persona to pre-empt their misgivings.

Step forward one of the smartest stand-ups in the UK right now, though. Naming her new Edinburgh Festival Fringe show Olga Koch Comes From Money is a typically gutsy move from the woman whose previous hours have tackled topics as complex as the birth of the Russian oligarchy and the nature of parasocial relationships (fake intimate relationships that people have on the internet with strangers).

“The first inklings of this show started when [fellow comic] Helen Bauer said that every year she wanted to see a performer do something they wouldn’t have been able to do a year ago,” says Koch. “It was such a clear way to set parameters for a challenge. It’s a question that’s always in my head: ‘Am I playing it safe? Is this a show I could’ve written a year or two ago? How am I challenging myself and giving an audience something they haven’t seen yet from me?’”

Although she’s always been open about who her father is (he made a lot of money in Russia in the 1990s and was briefly deputy prime minister under Boris Yeltsin, something she covered cleverly in her 2018 Fringe show, Fight), it might be new information to those who discovered her following her subsequent broadcasting success (such as Live at the Apollo and The Mash Report).

“The people from privileged backgrounds are sitting quietly because the system very much benefits them and they have no interest in acknowledging their privilege,” says Koch, who worked in tech for seven years. “I feel like it’s come to the boiling point around me and it’s time to address it, no matter how unlikeable that’ll make me look, because it’s an important conversation to have.”

Her forensic excavation will also go into what she refers to as “the illusion that talent exists in isolation”. In other words: “When you examine it, you realise that the thing that makes up your talent is your lived experiences, whether that’s having a private education and no student debt, or your genetics, and that all comes from privilege.”

She’ll also cover the reality that those with power in the arts - the tastemakers - come from privilege too, and their decisions will likely reflect their own lived experiences. Koch, as usual, is a busy woman. She’s working on her third series of OK Computer, her snappy BBC Radio 4 show that explores the world through the lens of computer science; for the first time it’ll be recorded during the Fringe.

She’s also taking ballroom lessons with her boyfriend, joking that it was time for them to up their wedding dancing game as so many of their friends are getting hitched. But would she apply those nascent skills to Strictly Come Dancing if they invited her? “It would never happen, but of course I would,” she laughs.

But her biggest forthcoming challenge is the PhD she’ll be starting at UCL in October. Her recent Masters, undertaken at the University of Oxford, was about parasocial relationships, and her next academic step will explore human-computer relationships, exploring the way digital products have a strategic in-built ability to enhance and boost both the sense of apparently authentic (but obviously fake) intimacy. We told you she was clever. But she’s also hilarious.

She says the informational value in her shows is almost like a crutch to her. “If you don’t find me funny or charming or interesting, you’ll at least leave here with a snippet you can share at your next dinner party,” she laughs.