ritish comedy has needed a shot of irreverence and clever writing in its arm for a few years now. These two cheeky chappies, Dustin Demri-Burns and Seb Cardinal, have won a British Comedy Award and been nominated for a BAFTA for two hilarious series of their sketch show. At their heart, Cardinal Burns are creative, intelligent and downright anarchic, and their light touch with social issues hits the funny bone every time. They play so many wonderful and memorable characters that I recently had a 30 minute conversation with some friends on who our favourites were; I can’t remember the last time I did that with a show. Get introduced to Yumi, Rachel and Olivia, hopeless reality show characters, find out how Banksy really gets his art on, and enjoy the spoken word, middle-class urban musings of Switch. Dustin and Seb bring their live show to Epic in October.
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the list goes on and on!
Your show feels quite improvised at times. Are your scripts locked down or do you change quite a bit whilst you’re filming? Te scripts are all locked down and then when it comes to filming we'll usually do one or two takes sticking to the scripts and then if we have time we'll do a few where we improvise around them. You can often come up with the funniest stuff by accident on the day.
Have you had many screaming lady fans after you? Not nearly enough.
What do think of the state of TV comedy at present? I think that it’s about time you two came along and put the edge back into things. As always, there's good and bad. At the moment we've both enjoyed Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, and Te Trip is also brilliant.
Do you know what Actual Banksy thinks of your Banksy? We know that he saw our first Banksy sketch as he sent us a cheeky email making a joke that he preferred shopping at B&Q to Homebase. We haven't heard from him since. He's probably sick to death of us.
I like how you play on reality shows, lad culture, performance poets, office-based flirting, etc. Tey’re all things we can relate to. Do you think it’s important for your viewers to be able to empathise with the characters, or those associated with the characters? It is important but we try not to be too conscious of writing for an audience. We start by writing characters and situations that we find funny, and then later we'll be more objective and question how relatable the characters and situations are. Te most satisfying is when an idea feels like it's tapping into something.
How did you guys find each other? We met as film students in Edinburgh and clicked pretty quickly. We realised we had incredibly similar backgrounds (our dads are both French and our mums are from Essex). We spent a large amount of time impersonating lectures and creating odd characters together.
What is Cardinal Burns all about, for the poor souls who have yet to see it? Cardinal Burns is a sketch show where we play all the characters. We like to think it's silly and clever in equal parts, and hopefully very funny. To get a taste of what we do, put 'fiery hawk' into Youtube.
Did you feel quite able to do what you wanted when you first started being on the telly, or did you have to edit a lot? We were pretty much left to get on with it. Shane Allen who was then the comedy commissioner for Channel 4 put a lot of trust in us and wasn't afraid of us doing risky and more bizarre material. Tere were sketches that didn't make the final edit but that was mostly because for one reason or another they didn't quite work rather then they were too edgy for the TV show.
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What are your favourite characters from the show? Yumi is definitely one of our favourites. We also love playing Phil and Jase the camp paranormal investigators, Hashtag and Bukake, the two Turkish crime fighting mini cab drivers. And Banksy.
I hear you’re developing a sitcom? It's in the early stages so we can't reveal anything at the moment. It's quite a departure, as we'll just be playing two characters rather than 30. We're very excited about it.
What comedians have inspired you, now and when you were first starting out? Woody Allen, Tina Fey, Steve Martin, Julia Davis, League of Gentlemen, Te Fast Show, Will Ferrell, Steve Coogan, Ben Stiller, Sacha Baron Cohen…
What would you like to achieve with Cardinal Burns? Is there a gameplan? We're excited about making a sitcom that hopefully will feel fresh and original, and then our dream would be to start making films.
How similar are your live shows to your TV show? What can we expect from seeing you in Norwich? Our live show is a mixture of characters from the TV series and new characters we've written for the live show. We just finished a run at Soho Teatre in London and it's been getting a great response. It's a very fun live experience. We worked hard to make sure it wasn't a case of us just wheeling on characters from the TV series and that everything in the show works in its own right. People have been saying their faces ache with laughter, which is the best compliment we could ask for.
Lizz Page MORE INFORMATION
Cardinal Burns bring their live show to Epic Studios on 16th October. Tickets and further details from
www.epicstudiosnorwich.com.
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