Iain Stirling: ‘Comedy is like a hobby that puts food on the table’
With a voice that is instantly familiar to millions as the narrator of popular reality TV series Love Island, Scottish stand-up comedian, presenter and writer Iain Stirling is heading to Cambridge with his new show.
The show is called Relevant and it’s already been rather successful.
“This [present tour] is an extension,” reveals Iain, 37, speaking to the Cambridge Independent while taking a break from descaling his coffee machine.
He was due to leave for the Isle of Man the following day to kick off the new run of dates over there.
“So I did it all last year, it was really nice and I really enjoyed it – so that’s the reason for doing this extension. There’s a few cities and towns that I missed off the map so I thought let’s go back and do them.
“And it’s nice coming back with a show you’ve already written. It takes a lot of the pressure off, because you know you can still write new bits as things crop up.
“But you’ve got that core 80 minutes of a show that you know is funny and you enjoy performing. It’s a really nice position to find yourself in actually.”
He adds: “It never wears off how fortunate I am to do this show all over the world – I’ve taken it to LA and New York and stuff like that. So it’s cool, man, I’m a lucky boy.”
As well as Love Island, Iain also voices its spin-off series, Love Island USA, which became the number one reality series in the US across all streaming platforms.
Since debuting in the UK in 2015, Love Island has reached 36 million people, making it the biggest reality show of the past decade.
Further television appearances include Taskmaster, Failing Upwards, and the sitcom Buffering, which Iain co-created with Steve Bugeja.
Iain presents ITV2’s comedy entertainment programme, CelebAbility, as well as six series of the comedy panel show The Dog Ate My Homework for CBBC, which saw him win RTS Scotland’s On Screen Personality and the Children’s BAFTA Best Presenter Award.
He also hosts Murder They Wrote, a hit UK true-crime podcast, alongside Laura Whitmore, on BBC Sounds.
Despite all this, stand-up – which he has been doing for 15 years and started while still at university – is still his first love.
“Oh, 100 per cent,” states Iain emphatically. “I do it for a living and I’ve been doing it for a long, long time, but I still see it as like I would be doing it if I got paid or if I didn’t, if I was doing my own tours in rooms above a pub…
“It’s just like a really keen hobby that just happened to, very fortunately, put food on the table as well. I love it.”
Recalling how he first got started in stand-up, Iain says: “I’m from Edinburgh so I’ve always loved it, always loved stand-up, there’s the Edinburgh Fringe Festival – so I was always going to see shows when I was younger.
“I’m from a background that doesn’t conventionally have a space for the arts or anything; I’m from a working class background, like ‘get a trade, get a job’, that sort of thing, and I always thought theatre was this posh, foreign thing…
“And then when I saw people doing stand-up, I saw loads of people like me – on a stage performing works they’d created, and I really loved the idea.
“So it wasn’t so much one of those cases of… there’s a lot of people that are like, ‘Oh yeah, I was the funny guy at school and everyone said you should do stand-up’.
“It was more like ‘I love this’, and then it went from there. I was really fortunate, like six months into doing stand-up, I got a job presenting kids’ TV for CBBC.
“So that was just like this mad springboard that financially allowed me to do it, because obviously it’s hard for people from certain backgrounds to get into the arts.
“But having that job allowed me to move to London and get a flat and all that sort of stuff. Plus that sort of validation that maybe I might be alright at this actually.”
Iain is a fan of fellow stand-ups such as Tommy Tiernan, Daniel Kitson, Francesca Martinez, Shane Gillis, Bill Burr, Fin Taylor, Kevin Bridges, and Sean Lock.
He notes that his current show Relevant is about “becoming a dad for the first time, and how your standing in the world changes when that happens, and the role of being a man in the 21st century and how the younger guys fit into this world now”.
Iain continues: “It’s about identity; if you’ve ever gone through a break-up or changed jobs or got married or had kids, then your role within the world changes and it’s adjusting to what that role is.
“So it’s a bit about that, but mainly it acts just like a framework so that I can do just a fun show that people will enjoy.”
Iain Stirling is taking his stand-up show Relevant back on tour across the UK this spring, stopping off at Cambridge Junction (J2) on Saturday, 19 April.
Tickets, priced £26, are available from junction.co.uk. For more on Iain, go to iaindoesjokes.com.
