For this week’s “interviewing someone doing something cool in Brighton” [2] section of the Indie Brighton Listings, I interviewed Simon Topping, who runs Extra Topping Comedy.

I’ve known Simon a while now, and am a massive fan of both his character comedy and his ability to curate an ever-interesting lineup. 

I caught up with him in a pub in town, to mainline lime & soda and talk alternative comedy, his character creation Leslie Bloom3, and the dearth of mid-level professional gigs in the industry. 

Hi Simon! What made you come down to Brighton in the first place?

I’ve been in Brighton since 2001, 23 years.

I was in bands for years in my twenties and early thirties, and basically the band moved down together, minus the drummer, because drummers are always tricky. Basically all of us knew we were fed up with London.

They are tricky, aren’t they? That’s why my band doesn’t have one!

Drummers are usually in about twenty bands at a time. They spread themselves very thin.

They own a van.

They own a van. They’re very hard to pin down. But yeah, we gigged around Brighton, and it’s amazing how many venues have gone. 

I was gonna ask that – how has Brighton changed, in terms of creative places that you can perform, over the last 20-odd years?

It’s much smaller, as far as I’m aware. There are still places to play, though. It was really good seeing The Roebucks the other day4

It’s good to know that bands are out there, still gigging. 

When I first came there were lots of live music venues. Most of them have shut down or turned into pubs, or the function rooms have gone. One was briefly a hostel and then it turned into flats. So a lot of them have gone away. 

I don’t want to be hey, it was much better in the good old days…

You don’t want to be a Debbie Downer.

Yeah, exactly. But… 

It’s a bit like comedy, in that there’s lots of people who have just got up and started, not so much on the mid level. And the trouble is there’s no progression. 

What’s the next thing you do? In comedy, you do an open mic night, and then live at the Apollo. [laughs]

I don’t think anyone’s really made that step in one movement! Where are the venues that are semi-pro, or paying you to play? Rather than those awful nights that make you bring people.

Oh god yeah, bringer nights. Loads of them in London now. But yeah, I talk to comedians here, and other than the open mic nights, there’s nowhere really to go? 

There’s no structure to it I don’t think. Occasionally there’ll be somebody who breaks through. I suppose if you’re talking Brighton and comedy there’s the Komedia, and the Ironworks, the two places that have professional comedy on that’s below the level of theatres or stadiums. 

And those sorts of acts would play The Dome, right?

Yeah, they’ll do the Dome, Romesh Ranganathan would do three nights, say. 

The Komedia and Ironworks should be there to develop emerging talent, and I don’t know how much progression is available in those venues. I don’t see that much.

How did you move into comedy?

I did improv first. I did a course with The Maydays ages ago, and have performed a lot of improv over the years. Improv gets a bad rep, and I’m not saying it’s unjustified. [laughs] But, there is a lot of stuff in there. 

There is the trap of people performing for the sake of performing rather than for an audience, but there is good improv out there in Brighton and we have better infrastructure for improv. Though again, there’s the question of: “what’s the next level?”

And so from there you did stand-up?

I tried it for a bit, pre-pandemic. As myself. I found I was quite engaging as a storyteller, but I couldn’t push it to funny. They’d be engaged, but they wouldn’t be laughing.

And so after the pandemic, I thought, right, I’m gonna go into character comedy. And so I set up a night, for alternative comedy. 

Because there’s a lot of places to start for standup, in Brighton. And I wanted something that was a step up from absolute beginners, and I wanted to make that clear. I wanted to pay people. The gesture of paying people is that I know you’re beyond start-up.

People reading this might not know how unusual it is for comedy nights to pay their acts.

And as a performer, too; it’s surprising how many don’t pay.

In standup, when you come out of a course, they’ll say you’ve got to get five minutes ready, ten minutes ready, half an hour, then an hour. There’s a kind of culture set up as a standup which is saying, you could progress ten minutes and then go to a professional club. And I don’t know what kind of network of professional clubs we have any more in this country.

But as an alternative comedian, there’s nothing. The alternative structure is… chaos. [laughs]

A lot of people don’t book alt comedians on straight standup nights. I can understand that. Especially if you’re on a weekend slot and everyone is on stag and hen dos, they’re not going to get it. 

It’s the one night of the month you’ve got the babysitter in…

It’s a niche thing, but where do you have that progression? And that’s what Extra Topping’s for.

And what defines alternative comedy? If I tell someone outside my circle I’ve booked a clown, they’re gonna think Ronald McDonald or Coco…

It doesn’t mean that, but also it kind of does mean that, and that’s the trouble. 

If I say alternative comedy, if you’re over 40, oh alt comedy is Ben Elton and Alexi Sayle. Those kind of pioneering comics who were rebelling against the Bernard Mannings, the comedians from the 1970s. 

So to a lot of people alt comedy means left politics…

It’s your political stance rather than your style of comedy… so when people think alternative comedy, a lot are still thinking stand up.

I suppose the term is non-stand up rather than alt comedy. We say “award-winning comedy but it’s not standup”, and then we have a list of things. But whether that list of terms means anything to a punter I don’t know, and that’s the difficulty of promoting non-stand up. 

Also, you dont see sketch on TV any more. An older audience member will know The Fast Show…

…Goodness gracious me…

… the whole raft of 90s high profile sketch shows. But they might not understand how that works live.

I’m still figuring that out!

And if the performers are still figuring it out, then so are the audience. And the word clown, that triggers so many people saying “I’m not gonna see it, it’s a scary clown”. If you say physical comedy instead, some people worry “ooooh, is that too arty?”. 

So there’s all these genres we’ve got going on. And people can have an immediate reaction to, say, musical comedy – both good or bad, but I think they understand it.

What about character comedy?

I think people who are into Steve Coogan know it, he’s who’s probably the biggest character comedian. I’m not sure who there is now…

John Kearns?

For a general audience that’s too niche. We’ve had Elf Lyons on, from the clowning world, and she’s a clowning superstars. She’s one of the top 50 comedians of the 21st century list for the Independent. People I know in standup on the Brighton scene don’t know who she is. 

So that’s the disjunct between stand up comedy and the alternative world.

Let’s talk about some of the other acts you’ve had on at Extra Topping, like Julia Masli. She’s sort of broken through?

She’s clown-y too. She’s had great success, she’s been out in the States, she’s been in New York, here with more shows again at the Soho Theatre. 

I suppose people are looking for those names off the telly. Luckily over the past few years, if you’re looking on BBC3, in particular, we’ve had some acts who have been on the New Comedian Of The Year Award.

We’ve had Lachlan Werner, who’s a brilliant ventriloquist – not many of them left! He has a witch called Brew and has a wonderful show about his relationship with his witch. 

He was in the heats of the 2023 New Comedian of the Year. As was Lorna Treen, who’s a great character comedian who’s broken through over the past year, and has her own Radio 4 programme. Her partner, Johnathon Oldfield, he’s in the final this year.

We’ve had Mikey Bligh Smith, of The Lovely Boys, and Christian Brighty, a local Brighton character comedian. So a lot of these acts are on the up, but there’s no kind of structure for places for them to go, other than on the radio. 

Traditionally these people would be looking to do sketch…

Like a BBC sketch show?

Someone like Christian Brighty absolutely would have been, in the 1990s. And he’s got a radio four show now too.

Let’s get on to your own characters, as I had initially intended to interview you in character as Leslie – I’m glad I didn’t now! 

You do a few, but Leslie Bloom is perhaps your main one at the moment. She MCs Extra Topping and can be seen at other nights as a roving host for hire. 

Leslie Bloom is an absolute gift to me. I think she’s the very positive and most confident side of my personality, as well as a mish-mash of a lot of the women that I was brought up by or grew up with. 

She’s always gonna be top of the pile. I’ve also got a Tudor gentleman called Sir William De Wynter. I’ve also now got a character who plays the bass because I want to get into the Musical Comedy Awards again, essentially.

I’ve got a few characters popping around, but [Bloom] is the one that keeps popping up. She’s a perfect host, is the thing, and I’m hosting shows every month. 

I love the skill of hosting. I think a lot of comedians think oh that’s just something you do, that’s easy. But as you know, anyone who goes to grassroots comedy, or even a professional comedy night, the host can kill it or make it a wonderful evening. 

So without really thinking about it, I’ve been focused on being a host – or a hostess – as Leslie. 

She is a great host, and she utilises a lot of my improv skills.

And for the benefit of the tape, we need to make it clear that she is you.

Oh yes, I do refer to her in the third person, because she is her own character.

Lorna Treen never names any of her characters. Maybe she’s got a feeling that it’ll be all-encompassing if she names the characters, in the way Alan Partridge just takes over. Maybe when you name them they become too big? I like to name my characters.

How did you come up with Leslie Bloom? How did she emerge?

I was doing an improv bit where I’d create an exercise class with the group, and I’d do it as myself. So I’d come on with a bit of music, and I’d do moves suggested by the audience. And then after a while I realised I wasn’t the host in this exercise class, it was a character. It was somebody else that was doing it. And I realised: “this isn’t me. This is Leslie.”

And then for some reason I bought a velure tracksuit. And then that really matched. And my friend bought me a wig, and I thought: yeah, this is it. Initially Leslie wasn’t going to be a woman. But then it just seemed to fit.

There’s a lot of energy from my mum there. I’m from a single parent family and she brought us up, she was a very strong character, so there’s a lot there.

And then that’s slowly morphed into Leslie. She took over, essentially. 

I blacked out, and I woke up in the morning as Leslie… and I’m going, “what have you done, Leslie?”

The morning after a show?

Ha, yeah. But the thing is she’s so inclusive and lovely that she would have actually made my life better, rather than destroyed it. 

Aw, that’s lovely.

In fact I think she wakes up and goes, what have *you* done, Simon?

Yeah. You’re the one holding *her* back!

I really am.

Even doing stand up as “yourself” is a complicated thing, because it’s always an exaggerated version. Do you you think that’s a lot clearer through being a character?

I think so, for me. Some people can create a character as them, a heightened version of themselves. You pick a lane that you want to go to, like Jack Dee: miserable. 

But for me personally, I don’t want to share anything about my life with people. That’s what most comedians do, and I know they’re making a lot of it up and exaggerating it, but they’re pulling from the well of their own life. 

And I’m doing that, but as Leslie, so there’s a plausible deniability! 

Immersing yourself in a character has always been more appealing to me. Rather than just standing up there as myself going “guess what I did today! I bought some fruit! Wasn’t that exciting!”

That thing of mining one’s life for content, and then using that with whatever heightened version of yourself you’re doing, for some comedians I know that be quite exhausting.

They can be always on. Whereas for me, it’s Leslie. Leslie can draw from anywhere, and then just mushes it right up and it comes out as Leslie. 

Leslie always has a point of view on everything, whereas I am so on the fence with so many things.

I’m very “oh, I can see your point of view”, and a bit of a people pleaser, whereas Leslie is none of that. I could play that character as myself, but there’s more joy in being somebody else, for me.

Organically we’ve nearly got to the end, but let me know any other character comedians you like or inspired you?

I like, as my girlfriend says, the safe past. A lot of my entertainment choices… when I was a kid, a lot of the things I watched were films from the 1940s. I was a little old man. 

And I really loved Peter Sellers. Alastair Sim. [notices my blank expression] You don’t know who he is, do you? He was in Kind Hearts and Coronets.

Oh, that’s a great film! Was he the one that wasn’t Alec Guinness?

Oh no, that is Alec Guinness! Even I don’t know who Alastair Sim is apparently. So Sim was in St Trinians playing the headmistress. 

So I liked these archetype, character performers. And they were actors really. They were really comedians. People like David Niven or Cary Grant, really strong performances. 

My favourite films ever are things like Some Like It Hot, and The Apartment. Jack Lemmon, just a master actor. So maybe I will go and train as an actor!

And finally, when you’re looking for an act for Extra Topping, obviously we’re dancing around the definition of alternative, but what are you looking out for?

The key thing for me is silliness. I’m not into people being cool. We’ve had someone dressed up as Elvis eating an apple. But I am aware there’s an audience there and it’s for them. I don’t like edgy, aggressive  acts putting people off. I don’t mind people being challenged, but there’s a difference between challenge and aggression. I tend to steer away from that end of comedy really. 

Ultimately if someone is silly and is doing something different, then it’s probably for me. Oh, and if it makes me laugh! 

Extra Topping is on this Friday at The Yellow Book.

2) This might need a catchier title.

3) Often seen hosting Extra Topping, and sometimes beyond…

4) Great Brighton blues-indie band, worth checking out!