Comedian Chris McCausland is the latest guest on Outsiding, hosted by Caitlin Moran and Adam Frost.
Chris talks about central heating; growing up in Liverpool; selling conkers at school; using AI; and his garden. working with Dianne Buswell; and disability representation and Access to Work.
He also spoke about his new tour, entitled Waffle: "And you know you have to put these you have to book these tours in so far in advance that it, new tour doesn't start until September, but it's on sale now. So the weird thing about comedy is that you book these things in before it exists, and then you put it on sale when it only partially exists. So if you think of something like Cats or The Bodyguard, it exists. It's a thing. And they book it in and then they just get a cast in to learn it. Whereas I have to put something on sale that doesn't actually exist. And then people go, ‘What's it about?’ And you go, ‘Give me a break.'"
Part of his success, of course, is due to Strictly: “So when, obviously when I did Strictly and the ticket sales went through the through the roof and so, you know, I’d have a night in a theatre and it got sold out, ‘do you want to add a matinee?’, matinees are a thing, so you go, ‘Yeah, let's do four o'clock.’ So you do four o'clock, they go, ‘It's sold out. Do you want to do one o'clock?’ And I was doing eight hours dancing a day when they were asking me this. So I was like, ‘Yeah, that sounds easy.’ You know, three, four and a half hours sat on a stool, that's nothing compared to eight hours of dancing. But it's a completely different type of exhaustion and mentally draining. So I did quite a lot of three a days and they were, you know, they were, they went well and they were good and they were they were fun but I think two is the sweet spot for the most in a day.”
In fact he nearly didn't do Strictly...“I said no, because I thought that if I did it and was unable to do it because of my eyesight or lack of eyesight, then that would be way more damaging, not only to me, but also the message it sends out, than trying and failing, you know? And loads of people try and fail, but there's a difference between trying and failing because you've got two left feet and trying and failing because you physically can't do it. Because you end up in a heap on the floor, missing a lift or whatever. So I really didn't understand what they were asking me to do. I went through this internal process. I said no like three times. And I kind of realised that if they did find somebody else whether it was, I don't know from whatever walk of life from Paralympics whatever, anywhere, that did it and didn't do it the way I thought it should be done I’d be furious.
I thought it needs to be done with kind of, you know, you need to make people forget as much as you way more than you remind them and you did it with levity and humour and it was kind of that moment of realisation and thinking well if I know how it should be done, so well…”
Outsiding is available on all podcast providers and YouTube.
Picture: Cold Glass Productions
