Fifteen years into a career of joking, what’s the biggest joke of all? To still be doing it, according to the sketch group (or should that be “funny trio”?) Sheeps, who are reuniting this summer – with their first new show since 2018 – just because the idea makes them giggle. “All of our contemporaries stopped doing it,” says Daran “Jonno” Johnson. “The finances just don’t work, particularly when you’re pushing 40.”
“But it’s an apt joke for Sheeps,” deadpans Liam Williams, “that we’re the ones still ploughing on. It’s like we won the Royal Rumble [a last-man-standing wrestling contest] of sketch comedy.”
“And we’re like: what’s the prize?”, laughs Johnson, joining in on the joke. “And the prize is: just keep doing it!”
We’re sat in the sun outside a London pub, reviewing the career of arguably the best sketch group of their generation – whose work, as clever as it is silly, forever stakes out new forms for sketch and circuitous ways to find the funny. Their career began as fresh-faced Footlights graduates (I bring to the interview my review of their 2011 fringe debut, replete with boyish publicity shot) who Frank Skinner earmarked for stardom. “He gave us such high expectations,” says Williams. “He took us to one side after our first show and said ‘just prepare yourself …’”
For what? For a series of terrific shows that bred cult-hero status among Edinburgh fringe audiences? Check. But not all their dreams have been realised. “There’s a handful of fringe shows each year that are a complete runaway train of massive success,” says Al Roberts, wistfully. “I’ve always wanted to be in one.” (“Do you think we ever were?” asks Williams. “No,” comes Roberts’ blunt response.) Nor did the longed-for TV vehicle ever get out of first gear. And so they are now borne, like Fitzgerald’s boats against the current, ceaselessly back to Edinburgh – not for the money, no longer for the career development, but because “these are my two best friends”, says Johnson, “the people who make me laugh the most. And it’s the most fun thing to do with our summer.”
As for proper, grownup success – well, they found that elsewhere. Williams became, briefly, a fantastic standup himself, then the creator of BBC comedies Ladhood and Pls Like, and now a novelist. Johnson writes TV shows, including the Brussels-set EU comedy Parlement. Roberts performs in most of the best sitcoms you’ve recently watched, notably Stath Lets Flats, Man Like Mobeen and Feel Good. That allows them to treat the fringe perhaps as it should be treated, not as a sharp-elbowed trade fair hatching tomorrow’s Richard Gadds and Phoebe Waller-Bridges, but as a carnival of creativity, where great shows are performed that will live for ever in audiences’ memories.
“If you’re putting together a show with a goal beyond making people laugh,” says Johnson, “you’ll make a worse show.” Way back when, they performed with one eye on TV commissioners. It worked, to a point: the trio spent two years hatching a telly project with input from comedy legend (and “one of our heroes”) Chris Morris. How I wish that collaboration had borne fruit! But it didn’t. Now, Edinburgh is a refuge from that kind of corporate development inertia. “Every other job, there’s compromise, there’s notes coming in,” says Roberts. “But here we have complete freedom. We write something, and it can be in the show that evening.” Adds Johnson: “Sheeps is a break from lengthy meetings about whether a character should fart then fall over, or fall over then fart.”
(“Which did you go for?”, asks Williams. “Two farts,” responds Johnson. “I went for the fart sandwich.”)
They wouldn’t have careers at all without the fringe, they admit. For much of their lifespan, Edinburgh gave Sheeps a purpose and platform they otherwise lacked. “We barely had any life outside of the fringe, as an act,” says Williams. “I feel like I structured my life around quitting jobs to go to Edinburgh.” Their maiden fringe appearance was the very archetype of an unglamorous origin story. It was in a bar next to Waverley station, “at three in the afternoon,” says Johnson, “and there was an average of two people in the audience.” “Most of whom,” says Williams, “didn’t know there was going to be a show.”
Johnson: “And it was an inconvenience that there turned out to be.” Two barflies, both called Brian, commentated audibly on the show sketch by sketch. “And because there wasn’t a backstage, we’d put a bedsheet over our heads to indicate we were offstage.” And yet, by the last night, they’d assembled an audience of 35 (“which felt enormous”), among them many fellow comics who’d go on to form their peer group. “And there was a sense that, oh, some people do like it,” says Williams. “Not most, but some.”
So Sheeps came back, and back again – with 2014 show Wembley Previews, which featured one solitary sketch, performed and re-performed in a dizzying array of shapes; and with Sheeps Skewer the News (2015), a thrilling reinvention of topical satire. And they were part of an exciting generation of sketch groups, which included The Pin, Beasts, Toby, Late Night Gimp Fight, Beard and others. But Sheeps’ misfortune was to arrive at the party just as the lights were going out. Sketch, which had been represented every year on the prestigious Edinburgh comedy award shortlist between 2004 and 2009, was about to plunge out of fashion. Suddenly, the genre that gave us The Fast Show, The League of Gentlemen and Monty Python just couldn’t catch a break on TV, muscled out by cheaper standup and the advent of social media.
Which may be why Sheeps’ peers gave up the ghost – and Sheeps themselves began assuming every show would be their last. “Every time we did a show, even as early as 2016, it was seen as a reunion,” says Williams, “We’ve had about eight years of saying goodbye.” Their fellow sketch trio, another of those last-groups-standing, Tarot, have a running joke about how tragic it is to be performing sketch in their 30s. “More tragic for us,” says Williams, mournfully, “because we’re even older.”
Johnson: “I think I avoid using the word sketch now”.
Williams: “Oh really? What do you describe it as?”
Johnson: “I say I’m in a funny trio. ‘Oh he’s in a funny trio’.”
Williams: “A triple act?”
Sketch doesn’t deserve the stigma; it’s just comedy’s version of being in a band. A band that Williams is excited to get back together – even if it may be for the last time. The new show, says Williams, features “the best sketches [Roberts and Johnson] have ever written, and I can’t wait to perform them.” He promises an hour, entitled The Giggle Bunch (That’s Our Name for You), that will unite the many qualities Sheeps brought to the stage over the years. Says Roberts: “It has the most exposing personal stuff, and the most focused political stuff we’ve done. And there’s a meta dimension in there.”
Williams: “It’s also a little bit more of a lights-up, lights-down variety show.”
Johnson: “We were considering not speaking to the audience at all: ‘Let’s just do 15 sketches and that’s the show.’ We’ve gone away from that though, because we stumbled on something we do want to chat about in it.”
“When you’re as young as we were in that photo you just showed us,” says Williams, “you’ve got no authority. Whereas now there’s a sense of, ‘you must be good at this, because you’re so old …’ There’s more benefit of the doubt, and I’m keen to make the most of that.”
All three are satisfied that the new material nails that elusive Sheeps quality “where it’s not quite clear where the laugh’s coming from”, in Johnson’s words, “but we’re giggling at it regardless”. “We all have a commitment to wrongfooting the audience,” says Williams, “but then to reward that. Frustrate, then enjoy that frustration – and then pay it off.” “But then we can be aggressively traditional and old-fashioned suddenly,” says Johnson, prompting a groan of recognition from Roberts: “That song in 2012, Jesus! It was like something from Laurel and Hardy.”
And what if The Giggle Bunch attracts the (belated) attention of TV commissioners? Would Sheeps meet them for a cup of tea? “Are they paying for the tea?” asks Johnson, cautiously. That’s not, they clarify, remotely a motivation for this year’s fringe jaunt. It’s about their friendship, their laughs – and the audience’s – and the chance to spend another August in the only place to be if you care about great theatre and comedy. “Oh, and maybe finally we’ll make the perfect show, and our career will take off!” says Williams. “And then,” chimes in Johnson, “Frank Skinner will be like: ‘I told you!’”