Ivo Graham disarmingly describes himself as a “young posh comedian whose shows are plummy-voiced navel-gazing”, but is too modest to mention that he recently made an impressive debut on Have I Got News For You, was the youngest ever winner of the So You Think You’re Funny competition in 2009, and that his latest show The Game of Life was nominated for the prestigious Edinburgh Comedy Award in 2019.

But he says there has been no grand plan for his career – “I take it as it comes” – but given his past shows’ content, it was perhaps inevitable that the new one would be about becoming a father for the first time. As the 28-year-old wryly points out: “My previous shows have had a trajectory of how my domestic and romantic life have evolved: not having a girlfriend/having a girlfriend/we’ve moved in together/we’re thinking about having a baby. Thankfully we were lucky enough to have a baby [his daughter was born in early 2019] and this show followed.

“I was lucky that early on I tapped into a style of comedy describing what was going on in my life, and was able to find funny things to say about it. The Game of Life is about new parenthood and the life changes associated with it – a little bit of the mental process, the admin, and quite a lot of tangents.”

With typical self-deprecation, he explains: “My comedy comes from real life – with some exaggerated or conflated stories, admittedly – because I don’t have the imagination to write fictional characters, as I have found in my pretty disastrous ventures into scriptwriting.”

He says his comedy has been “finding a way to talk about the more relatable stuff as a way to offset the more privileged aspects of my life, which I took a little longer to work out how to do.” By privileged, he means that he was educated at Eton and Oxford. He weighs up the pros and cons of having gone to the school that has, with the election of Boris Johnson, provided 20 UK prime ministers.

“It’s given me a USP to play with and develop,” Graham says. “It was something I relished early on [he started performing stand-up aged 18] because it was a caricature that I could play with, with jokes about bullying, sexual tension or funny uniforms.

“Now that’s expanded to talking about the wider emotional and societal ramifications of going to that school. You know that you are operating in every sphere on a bedrock of good fortune – the education you have had, the contacts you have made, the inbuilt confidence. That’s why I find people complaining about privilege being a hindrance so distasteful because of course it helps.”

Does he feel he is expected to apologise for where he was educated? “It’s a bad time because the political situation is toxic, and a lot of the hot topics over the past few years have been to do with elites and the widening gaps in society.

“So yes, I feel a certain pressure to show at the very least I am aware of the negative feeling towards Eton and those who represent it.”

He doesn’t think he would ever become a political comic, though. “I’m a coward and a compromiser so I’ve never set out to write a political show because it would have to have a political conclusion. I’d much rather have a political tangent in the show.”

And there’s a delicious political tangent in The Game of Life, as Graham describes a bizarre meeting with the Prime Minister’s brother Jo, at – of all places – a boules tournament. A gift to a comic, surely?

“Well you say that, but it was quite late in the process of writing the show that I realised that this story would be in it. Then it occurred to me that it would fit into my awkward Eton shtick, and now it’s a bit of the show I love performing.”

While Graham has a loyal audience from his 10 years at the Edinburgh Fringe, he has also gained fans from the regular appearances he made on fellow comic Josh Widdicombe’s podcast and more latterly on Fighting Talk on BBC Radio 5 Live.

“I love sport and I think I talk a good game [on Fighting Talk],” he says, “and some fans come to the show on the back of that. I’ve recently started doing more Radio 4 stuff, too; I don’t know what the metrics are of who is in my audiences, but I’d love to see them.”

Graham is a Swindon Town supporter and he plans to see his team play if he can while on the road. “But it’s not always possible because of the tour schedule and baby-minding duties,” he says. Although if Swindon aren’t playing anywhere near a tour date, he would be quite happy to turn up to what he calls “random outings to watch a match, as I’m slowly working my way through the 92 clubs in the English Football and Premier Leagues. New grounds always feel like an adventure”.

His family – Graham is the eldest of three – appear quite a lot in his shows, albeit “in slightly blurred versions” of themselves. But, ever the polite young man, he says: “I wouldn’t want to reveal confidences. I suppose as one digs deeper into family life and relationships and how parenthood may put strain them, you have to be careful.

“My dad was a little bit disconcerted by my using his name in one routine. It’s stayed with me and if I’ve been tempted to do it again in a whimsical moment on stage, then I’m aware it can be a slippery slope.”

Mention of his dad prompts the question of why Graham was born in Tokyo, and he explains his father was working there in insurance, in risk assessment. He says drily: “My career is a risk he is still assessing.” One assumes not for much longer.

Ivo Graham: The Game of Life is at The Lowry, Salford Quays on 27 May 2020. See website for full tour details.

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Her new show is called Rose-Tinted, which suggests Angela Barnes is a glass-half-full kind of woman. Yet the stand-up, while being bright and cheery in person, admits to being a pessimist. “I come from a family of pessimists, so maybe it rubbed off,” she says with a laugh. “But yes, I get accused of being world weary and it’s a pretty fair assessment.”

The show’s theme came about, she says, after spending much of the past two years doing topical comedy shows – as presenter of Radio 4’s Newsjack and a regular on The News Quiz, as well as appearances on BBC1’s Mock the Week and Live at the Apollo.

“Doing those shows you have to be across the news and read a lot of newspapers. The last two years have been an exciting time politically but it does get you down, writing jokes every week about Donald Trump, Brexit and North Korea. For a lot of people 2016 was an awful year.

“Career wise, though, things took off for me in 2016, and I was being offered all this TV and radio work, so there was this strange disconnect between the personal and professional and I wanted to dig into that.”

But she makes no claims about solving the world’s woes. “I’m a clown. If you’re looking for me to present solutions you’ve made a terrible mistake. I can’t solve a Rubik’s Cube. I want my audience to go away thinking, ‘Thank God that’s not me’. By looking at my idiotic life you can feel better about yours.”

With her career bump came another level of fame. “I knew it would happen, and I knew social media stuff would happen – Twitter is just a human bin fire of negativity – and I would get horrible things [being said] if I dared to be a woman with an opinion on telly.

“I had a bit of a wobble and had to question if it was what I wanted. So, I wanted to do a show about the good stuff happening where I least tried to look on the brighter side because the world feels doomed at the moment to so many people. I wanted to look at whether I could put on my rose-tinted glasses and see it differently.”

Rose-Tinted also addresses the advent of the #MeToo movement in 2017, a response to the daily misogyny that women experience, and in the show Angela describes her own upsetting #MeToo moment on the Tube in London in 2016.

“I realised that all women have their own story, but it was #Me Too that that made us start talking about that stuff with our men,” Angela says. “My partner is one of the good guys – it hadn’t occurred to me that this stuff doesn’t happen in front of them, so they don’t witness it.

“I don’t beat my audience over the head with it, but telling my own experience is also about saying thank you to the good guys.”

The Tube experience and the murder of young Australian comic Eurydice Dixon when she walked home from a gig in Melbourne last year sparked a need to do something positive. So, Angela, together with fellow stand-ups Sameena Zehra and Pauline Eyre, set up the Home Safe Collective at the 2018 Edinburgh Fringe. She explains how it came about.

“A WhatsApp group of female comics started talking about what practical thing we could do. We set up a taxi account with a company that uses police-checked drivers and we got about £5,000 from donations, so any female comic could use the service if she didn’t want to walk home from a gig late at night and couldn’t afford the fare.”

The initiative was recognised with the prestigious Edinburgh Comedy Awards panel prize, which is worth £5,000. “It was such a wonderful surprise, and fantastic to receive it – and the prize means we can do Home Safe again this year without fund-raising,” the comic says.

Angela, who worked in health and social care for more than 10 years before she became a stand-up, says starting in comedy later than most means that – despite her natural pessimism – she really appreciates what she has. “I have the best job in the world because I know what it’s like to have a proper job, to commute during the rush hour, to work really hard to fill someone else’s pockets, to go through the daily slog.”

She adds that turning 40 has been liberating. “I’ve got less time to spend worrying about things I can’t control. I think when you’re younger you think you can take on the problems of the world. I used to have real problems with anxiety but now I think: if I can’t change it, I don’t worry about it.”

Writing Rose-Tinted has had an unexpected side effect, she says. “My partner is an ultra runner [running distances longer than a marathon] but I’ve always rejected any exercise. So, I thought I would try, and I started running, and found it was helping my state of mind.

“I sort of sneered at exercising before, but annoyingly it turns out that it really does raise your endorphin levels and makes you feel better, so I’m going to have to keep doing it.”

Angela often takes part in a ParkRun (which take place on Saturdays at 9am), so you may see her at your local event. “For a comic to achieve anything before 10 o’clock on a Saturday morning is amazing, and that feeling of having achieved something carries you through the weekend.

“Exercising won’t solve the world’s problems, but it clears your brain and allows you to see the roses growing through the s—.” And then she checks herself.

“It was a horrible discovery to make because I wanted to be able to justify being lazy for the rest of my life.”

Angela Barnes’s show Rose Tinted is touring the UK. It stops off at the Lowry, Salford Quays on Thursday, 20 June.

Read our interview with comedian Reginald D Hunter at The Lowry in June.

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