Most people will have come to Isy via her role as Dobby in Peep Show or hopefully from her longer established stand up career. But with music, theatre, radio, podcasting, writing, film, TV and now her first book all under her belt as well, she really is a candidate for the title of latter day renaissance girl.
Using The Actual One, her autobiographical, debut as the touchstone for her talk, she guides us through the trials and tribulations of trying not to become too much of an adult too quickly, of realising that all of her friends are buying “properties” rather than renting houses and of looking for “the actual one”…or at least one who doesn’t use moisturiser! Her style is as conversational and pub-chatty as you would expect it to be, a wonderful flow of anecdotes and insights into her twenties, of a normal girl doing the normal things but with a hindsight vision that manages to exact every ounce of humour out of such everydayness.
Topics range from her Slovenian room mate’s Nietzschean declarations such as “We All Die Alone” to the fact that she could never date a man who didn’t know the difference between ‘your’ and ‘you’re,’ strange and banal hometown letters from her mother and why she thought building a 5ft papier-mâché penguin, called Roy incidentally, could save an ailing relationship.
There is something about her that reminds me of Victoria Wood, the same glorification of the minutiae of everyday life, the same easy and wonderfully insightful way of looking at the world without ever trying to be clever just for the sake of being clever and being all the cleverer for it. And for that reason you can see why she has, over the last ten years become so popular with fans of humour in all the media and entertainment forms she somehow manages to juggle.
The Q&A that followed seems to turn into a double act, with festival organiser Matt Holland seemingly becoming the double entendre feeding straight man for her and our amusement, which just somehow managed to underline what an easy going and utterly hilarious experience this was.
