Comedy

‘Now, this is a proper one. “Emily, we met on the Northern Line, we chatted, I’ve never laughed so much before. Desperate to see you again. Please get in touch, I look out for you every day.” That’s how they should be, sort of beautiful, desperate and bleak.’ Comedian and storyteller Terry Saunders is reading out entries from thelondonpaper’s ‘Lovestruck’ section as we hurtle along the Jubilee Line.

His new show ‘Missed Connections’ grew out of his own obsession with reading these small ads in which people try to find potential love from the briefest of lost moments. ‘When I started reading them it took me over a bit. I had to read them every day. I was fascinated by these little stories of chance encounters. Then I started looking for myself in them. I thought there must be someone, somewhere out there who’s noticed me. It changes the way you look at the world. You get on a bus and start wondering if other passengers are looking at you, connecting.’
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It was this idea of someone trying to discover themselves in the columns of the classifieds which was the starting point for his wonderful, sensitive comic tale of call-centre worker Ethel. She tries to find meaning in her life by endeavouring to match-make advertisers she thinks would make good couples. It is a heart-warming, yet deeply melancholy work of exquisite beauty.

Saunders creates entire worlds of whimsy that an audience falls into only to emerge, as if from a gorgeous dream, an hour or so later. His show is a hybrid of comedy, theatre and storytelling, which is hardly surprising as he didn’t actually set out to be a comedian in the first place.

‘I sort of fell into it accidentally. I really wanted to be a serious playwright,’ he says. ‘When I first moved to London I joined the Soho Theatre’s young writers group, but I knew from early on that I didn’t really fit in there. Once we were given ten minutes to write something about two people interacting in some forbidden way. When everyone else read out their pieces they were about rape, incest, fucking your parents and the like. I wrote something about a guy and a girl who couldn’t smoke in their flats and fell in love with each other while hanging out of their skylights having a fag.’

We are travelling on the tube trying to create one of those momentary rendezvous that we might be able to read about later. ‘We should go somewhere random, somewhere neither of us has been before,’ he had said when we headed underground. Hence the reason that we eventually exit the train to find ourselves in Dollis Hill. Looking round I begin to realise that there’s a reason I’ve never been to this part of town. There’s absolutely nothing fucking here.

‘I quite like it,’ Saunders says, looking round cheerily. ‘It’s quite desolate.’ We head for a local Thai café, which, it turns out, specialises in an excellent bubble and squeak, to continue our search for an unrequited moment of happenstance and to chat some more.

‘You have to look at the history of alternative comedy over the last 25 years,’ he says, by way of explanation of why he does what he does. ‘It started off to counter the crap mother-in-law gags. People did anything and everything. But gradually the whole thing has reverted back to what it started out trying to fight against. If you go to most big clubs now there’ll be someone doing dodgy old-fashioned jokes. Nothing in stand-up is new any more, everything has been done. Storytelling just feels freer and less false to me. I don’t even write punchlines. I like to believe what I’m hearing, when it transpires that all a comic’s been leading up to is a cheap laugh I often feel cheated.’

We read some more of the ads to get a better idea of what we’re looking for. Some are tender, others are just city boys hoping for a quick shag. One stands out as being particularly bizarre.

‘Gorgeous Cypriot man operated on Tuesday 7.30am. I was the nurse who got your details. Coffee?’ Now there’s a story. I ask Terry if he knows anyone who has actually got together from reading one of these.

‘No I don’t. Though it would be good if any of the Time Out readers could write in to say if they have, wouldn’t it? I once read one that was from a woman on the bus I travel on. She was looking for a guy in a hat. I got really angry because I could have been that man but she didn’t bother to write a more accurate description.’

The interview over, we part, our mission unsuccessful. Unless of course you were the girl who dropped her ice-cream wrapper on the escalator which was picked up by the man talking to the bearded, glasses-wearing comedian.

Terry Saunders’ ‘Missed Connections’ is on at the Hen and Chickens Theatre.