Sketch group Metroland make their debut at the Edinburgh Fringe this year. Here Caden Elliott (CE), Jack Fairley (JF), Connor Lawson (CL) and Jack Robertson (JR) chat to Katerina Partolina Schwartz about Metroland and their experience of sketch and art in the UK.
What is the elevator pitch for your show?
JR: Our show is a tight-knit, surreal crossed with grounded reality feeling of fun and joy.
CE: A grassroots sketch comedy where we’ve not taken anything from the previous format of sketch and kind of found it ourselves. We built the show out of the love of making sketches where it’s a fresh or new perspective on the sketch show. I guess especially since seeing most of us are quite working class, it’s rooted very much in that identity.
How did the group start?
JR: I was towards the end of 2019; I started writing a few sketches that I. I’d planned to, because of the lack of acting work. I’d planned to shoot some sketches to try and stay fresh and just for something to do. And I reached out to Caden if he wanted to film because he was a director filmmaker and he was really into we were very much into the same thing in regard to comedy and we had a similar sense of humour. Then we brought in John Dole as another performer early door. Once we’d realised, after we released a couple of sketches on YouTube, tonally we were onto something that intrigued us, excited us and felt fresh. And it felt like we couldn’t avoid expanding it, to which I connected with Jack Fairley during one of the lockdowns; we went to school together and studied acting, and we always had a bond. In acting, I always thought we were great performance partners. We released sketches online for a few years, we had some viral hits, we had some great responses from industry people as well, I mean we started getting work outside of YouTube and just online stuff and Caden managed to attach himself as a writer, I managed to get some acting bits and so did John. And then eventually when we were deciding to take it to the Fringe, and sort of the next big stage of our expansion, we reached out to Connor who we met through networking events in Newcastle that were more sort of industry based. I myself was familiar with Connor with his work on Dumping Ground and we got on immediately, I think.
The sense of humour has connected all of us. I think the comedy we’re making isn’t that deep and it’s not that complex, but it just comes down to a sense of humour we’re all connected with, and I think once we realised we’re all on the same page, it comes together like a beautiful dance and we all enjoy dancing together. Right boys?
How has your experience with sketch comedy been shaped by the tradition in the UK?
JR: I think sketch comedy was really prevalent in the UK. I know when I was growing up my dad would show me Not The Nine O’Clock News, which had Rowan Atkinson before Mr Bean. They always had these sketches that felt like they were on the pulse of what was happening in the UK at the time, so it mixed in with original stand-alone ideas and they were able to relate them to what was happening in the world. It was really clever, I think the UK has definitely been at the forefront, for me, for some like big, big comedy and sketch comedy influences.
CE: What we’ve done is we’ve really took a lot of situations and characters that are really, really prevalent where we grew up. Almost like Limmy did with Limmy’s Show!, even though that was a TV show; it was very Glaswegian, it was unapologetically Glaswegian and it had a lot of things that if you were an outsider, if you were to commission it, you’d think they wouldn’t relate but they found this heartbeat, especially working-class sort of people, who I think probably consume more comedy than most demographics if I had to take a guess.
What has your experience of the art industry been like before and after you started this group?
JF: As mentioned from the start, sort of where we come from, the backgrounds that we all sort of have - without wanting to step on anything anyone’s done - it’s quite hard to figure out even just how to navigate that whole thing, whether that’s financially or whether that’s through an understanding of leaning on experience that we know, ether that’s family or people who may have done that. It’s just not really a done thing with our backgrounds I suppose. And so, from my perspective until joining Metroland, I just felt like I was reaching out for something that I may or may not get a sniff at, whether that’s being accepted and cast in a play or film or whatever. Until Metroland come along, not only are you doing it with your best friends, but you’re also doing it with collaborators who are all on the same wavelength. And this is really the first time doing the Edinburgh Fringe, even with the sketches that we’ve done online, we’ve put that out into the world and you kind of get a little feedback response, but until we started doing this live stuff and building towards this Edinburgh Fringe, it’s felt like now we’re actually on this ship and we’re able to navigate this current that we’re that for me as an individual, has not been able to understand for the last 10-15 years. So, we’re right at the beginning of that, I suppose.
CF: From my side of things, I joined Metroland really recently and something that I struggled with in the industry before joining Metroland was the freedom and acceptance side of the industry, again a little bit like what Jack touched on. Kind of not really understanding the industry whether that’s from background or whether that’s from the knowledge and the people that you talk to. I felt very suffocated and tunnel-visioned in what the industry was and what you had to do to meet criteria. And since joining Metroland, it’s kind of opened up a taller world of freedom. And the trust side of things for me is massive, having people who – like Jack said – we’re all in that same wavelength, to be able to connect with each other on that and everybody has this all this same consensus and understanding, it’s really important for me now to be able to create and make things that I want to make rather than being ‘for the industry.’ And we create things now where we know the industry will like it but also, it’s something we want to do too.
