Russell Kane speaks with Yahoo UK about his comedy beginnings and why he's facing cancel culture with tongue-in-cheek mockery.
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00:00 We live in a world where nothing has meaning,
00:02 and everything has nuance,
00:03 and yet black, white characters have gone overnight.
00:05 Those two things are opposite, toxic,
00:07 and they are our world.
00:09 - How did your love of history first begin,
00:17 but also what made you want to look back
00:19 at famous figures and their legacy with hindsight?
00:22 - So I like people and stories.
00:26 That's what I've got, I was already into that.
00:28 And when I started doing "Evil Genius",
00:29 it was just a case of learning each individual person
00:32 week on week, which was a pleasure.
00:33 I would just pick up the Gandhi biography,
00:35 watch the Richard Asimov movie,
00:37 and just, it was a pleasure.
00:39 So it's stories about people that I love.
00:42 It doesn't matter whether it's Boudicca
00:43 or Diego Maradona, two subjects,
00:45 both have been done for the Radio 4 series.
00:48 That's where the passion comes from.
00:50 - Yeah, I mean, I was gonna ask about, you know,
00:52 transferring this story from the radio to TV,
00:56 like how, could you talk me through the process
00:59 of adapting it and changing it and making it unique?
01:01 - It was just, it made it easier, to be honest.
01:04 I mean, it just does.
01:06 It's already a pleasure to do on Radio 4,
01:08 but once you say, okay, now people can see
01:10 what you're saying, and we give you permission
01:12 to use archive historical, you know,
01:15 path a footage, it just makes my life so much easier.
01:18 - You obviously approached each figure
01:20 with the intention of deciding whether they're evil
01:23 or they're genius.
01:24 And I wonder, why did you want to pick
01:25 such extreme conclusions to draw from?
01:28 - I mean, there's a relationship between
01:29 the type of thing we're consuming
01:31 and the evil acts the person have done.
01:33 And there's obviously a cutoff where we go, "Cancelled."
01:36 And then I thought, well, 'cause the main thing
01:38 people often say is, "Well, how can someone
01:39 just be evil or genius?
01:40 Everyone's a mixture of both."
01:42 Of course, that's why the show's one hour long
01:44 and not one minute long.
01:46 We get that richness of debate mixed in with belly laughs,
01:50 people going back and forth,
01:51 people feeling uncomfortable with the audience,
01:53 like, "Oh God, just shut up, Russell.
01:54 We're gonna get taken off air."
01:55 All of that, we get all of that.
01:56 But at the end, we get it reduced to a simplistic,
02:00 idiotic, binary evil or genius.
02:03 Why?
02:04 Well, I suggest you switch on Twitter
02:05 and learn about the 2023 you're living in
02:08 if you think that's not how we live.
02:10 We live in a world where nothing has meaning,
02:12 everything has nuance, and yet,
02:14 black, white, cancel, gone overnight.
02:15 Those two things are opposite, toxic,
02:18 and they are our world.
02:20 But as a commercially viable format, it's (beep) gold.
02:24 So that's what we're doing.
02:25 (upbeat music)
02:28 - When did you first realize comedy was your calling?
02:33 - Where I grew up in a council,
02:34 it's like, you weren't exposed to theater and books,
02:36 and, "Oh, I wonder if Russell will be good at violin.
02:38 Or maybe he's a theater kid."
02:40 You just went to school, then finished school,
02:43 then got a job.
02:44 Had my dad been into a comedy
02:47 that was actually made me laugh,
02:49 maybe I would have discovered it earlier.
02:51 But my dad liked, I did like, actually, that's not fair,
02:55 'cause Laurel & Hardy and Three Stooges make me laugh.
02:58 But I can't do slapstick.
03:00 I managed to get all the way up to 18
03:03 without even realizing stand-up comedy was a thing.
03:06 Some of my friends got tapes of Eddie Murphy
03:09 and told me about it,
03:10 but I just never got around to watching them.
03:13 And then I got to uni,
03:14 and went to the one uni in England
03:15 that didn't have a stand-up night.
03:17 So I got all the way to graduation
03:19 without ever having watched, seen,
03:22 or really been aware of comedy.
03:23 Was I the funniest person in my group,
03:25 always making people (beep) themselves laughing?
03:28 Yes, but so what?
03:29 Everyone's got someone like that in their group.
03:32 Started at the ad agency in a middle-class environment,
03:35 and comedy night was one of the things they did.
03:38 I was like, "Oh my God, I'm 25 at this point."
03:42 I phoned up the local comedy club and went,
03:44 "Can I go on and perform for free,
03:46 just to see what it feels like?"
03:47 Yeah, okay.
03:48 Was loads of space in August,
03:49 'cause the comedians were in Edinburgh.
03:51 What's Edinburgh?
03:51 Had never in my,
03:53 I thought that was ballet and opera.
03:56 I had no idea the Edinburgh Fringe.
03:57 I'd literally, I promise you,
03:59 I had never heard of it.
04:00 Went on, did this set,
04:02 and it was like,
04:03 "Oh, (beep) I'm wearing the wrong shoes my whole life.
04:06 These are so, these are the shoes I'm,"
04:09 I couldn't believe it.
04:11 Then of course, it was just so quick.
04:14 I won all the competitions,
04:15 and by the time I was 30,
04:18 I was looking at giving up the dream career.
04:20 I'm a kid from a council estate,
04:21 working as a copywriter in an ad agency.
04:23 I'm like, "I'm gonna give up the dream career,
04:24 and I'm gonna go for it."
04:26 Then I won the biggest award you can win,
04:28 Edinburgh, the Perrier Award,
04:29 it used to be called,
04:30 Edinburgh Comedy Award.
04:31 Flew to Australia, won their biggest one,
04:33 same year, never been done in history,
04:35 and then that's it, my career was born.
04:37 Obviously my career's like that, like everyone's.
04:39 One minute you're hot, one minute you're not,
04:41 one minute you're too busy,
04:41 one minute you're busy enough,
04:42 but I've always had an amazing life from that point.
04:46 (upbeat music)
04:48 - What were the movies that you loved growing up,
04:50 and do you remember your first cinema trip?
04:52 - First cinema trip would be one of the Star Wars ones,
04:57 maybe the last one, Return of the Jedi.
04:59 I was a bit young for the first couple,
05:01 and I was just able to be taken slightly underage
05:03 for the third one.
05:05 Going with my great grandma,
05:07 very, very strong memory.
05:08 I've got good memory, I remember,
05:10 like I can remember being in the cot and stuff,
05:12 like my memory goes quite far back
05:13 to about 18 months old, two years.
05:16 And we'd made a deal on the bus there
05:18 that we would both pretend to be American
05:20 and see how many people we could fool.
05:22 And I remember the meal afterwards,
05:23 I can remember the cafe,
05:24 I remember the feeling of watching the film,
05:25 I remember everything about it, it was amazing.
05:28 And then once I got to about 14 or 15,
05:31 and we got hold of an illicit copy,
05:33 and it's still my favorite film, Alien, the first one.
05:37 Obviously by then the film was old,
05:39 it was 10, 15 years old, but I just, I loved it.
05:44 I just think it's the best horror film ever made,
05:47 better than Exorcist.
05:49 It's everything's in there about human existential fear.
05:53 The sci-fi holds up, it hasn't aged, the acting,
05:56 I just love it, I love it.
05:58 - Is there anyone in your life or career
06:03 that you would say had a defining influence on you
06:05 or any mentors that you had in your life?
06:07 - It's gotta be my dad, really, in my personal life,
06:13 who taught me how to do everything opposite to him.
06:15 I don't know if that was meant to be his lesson,
06:18 but hyper-masculine, knuckle-dragging, right wing,
06:21 down the gym, 3% body fat, weightlifting,
06:24 bouncer, lifeguard, scuba qualified metal worker.
06:28 And there's me reading and dancing.
06:31 It gave me something to react to,
06:33 but he's, I don't know a child
06:36 that felt more protected than me.
06:39 I just felt like no one could get in our house,
06:41 no one could hurt me.
06:42 My dad would kill them.
06:44 He was so strong and he worked so hard,
06:47 and he taught me about making money.
06:49 You put me in a desert,
06:50 I will start making money from selling sand.
06:52 I've always been the one in the group making money
06:55 based on what my dad taught me.
06:56 I don't rely on anyone.
06:57 In comedy, I suppose my first mentor
07:00 when I was still doing the day job was Lee Mack.
07:02 So my first manager said,
07:04 "Look, you can carry on working your day job,
07:07 but I need you to take a sabbatical
07:08 and support Lee Mack on tour."
07:10 And if you, I don't know what you know about comedy,
07:12 but going out as a support act
07:14 when all the audience have put their hands in their pockets
07:16 to see Lee Mack, it's an unforgiving 20 minutes.
07:20 And they've got to wait, they've got to sit through you,
07:21 and then they've got to have an interval.
07:22 So if it's an 8 p.m. show,
07:23 they ain't seen Lee Mack till 8.45 p.m.
07:25 So some people are going to be pissed off and disappointed.
07:28 They've never heard of you.
07:29 I look much younger than my age now.
07:31 You can imagine what I looked like when I was 28.
07:33 And no one wants to hear thoughts about the world
07:37 from a boy, they just won't take it.
07:39 So it really taught me to raise my game.
07:43 And watching Lee over and over again
07:46 for those three months,
07:47 something switched in me about how to do standup.
07:50 He never sat down and talked me through or guided me,
07:53 but just being on that tour,
07:55 sitting in the car with him, talking about the shows,
07:58 watching him, I never ever went back to the hotel.
08:00 I watched the show every minute, every night,
08:03 watching him do the same (beep)
08:05 same beat for beat to different audiences,
08:07 watching how he changed it.
08:08 And just, it was the final bit I needed
08:12 to bring my skill level where I could leave work
08:14 in 2006 forever.
08:16 What I think to be able to say,
08:18 I haven't worked since 2006.
08:19 This is not work, I'm doing my hobby.
08:22 (upbeat music)
08:24 (upbeat music)
08:27 (upbeat music)
08:29 (upbeat music)