A Quote by Alice Lowe

'Sightseers' started off as a character comedy double act. — © Alice Lowe
'Sightseers' started off as a character comedy double act.
I never wanted to be a model. I never wanted to be a serious actress. I started off doing comedy. I did a stand-up comedy camp at the Laugh Factory, and I started out on Nickelodeon.
When I first started doing my comedy act, I just desperately needed material. So I took literally everything I knew how to do on stage with me, which was juggling, magic and banjo and my little comedy routines. I always felt the audience sorta tolerated the serious musical parts while I was doing my comedy.
Comedy is all about the character. When you're too focused on the gags, the character suffers, and you don't get the laugh. Comedy has to come from the character.
Over the years, I managed to develop this comedy career, went from opening act to headliner at comedy clubs, to playing concert halls, and had an off-Broadway show with 'Sleepwalk With Me.'
I always wanted to be an actor. I did drama at Manchester University and then had a stand-up comedy double act with a guy called Bruce MacKinnon.
I started doing comedy just as myself, because I thought, "This is what's expected, you're meant to tell stories and do observations." And then I started to realize that I wanted to mix it up a bit, so I started to doing songs, and I had a little keyboard onstage and would bring in little props. Then I thought about the idea of talking about a character and becoming the character onstage. So, it sort of morphed into being stand-up that was more character based, and I found that's the stuff I got the better reaction from and was more exciting for me.
One secret of leadership is that the mind of a leader never turns off. Leaders even when they are sightseers or spectators, are active; not passive observers.
I don't know how you can do comedy once every two weeks. Ever since I started, if I'm off for three days, I got to learn how to do comedy again.
They say Ant and Dec are a double act, but they are just presenters. They read off an Autocue and they don't do gags, so that doesn't count.
There are different types of double act: the classic dumb-and-dumber, like Morecambe and Wise; the good cop/bad cop, where one's a bit spiky and the other's daft. Sue Perkins and I take what we might call the Ant and Dec approach: the double act came out of our friendship.
I didn't want to do comedy again. It is way harder when you are doing comedy. You can't just concentrate on the character and the plot. In comedy, the writers, instead of obsessing about character and plot, obsess about the jokes.
When I first got to the NFL, I didn't see no double coverage at all. I was getting single coverage. I was killing it. Then they were, 'all right, this guy can play and we have to double this guy.' Since probably like the 11th or 12th game my rookie year, I started to get double-teamed.
I think 'Sightseers' was a bit of an epiphany, a massive learning curve, and it gave me loads of confidence to go out there, and also to create a female character which is completely unexpected and defies convention.
Comedy really is my bread and butter, even when I'm doing a serious character, with the exception of Outcast. I have found very little humor in this character. Most of the time, what I do, somewhere there is comedy in it.
I don't wear a mask, I don't have a suit. It's not some CG double or a stunt double. The suffering the character [Doctor Strange ] goes through is immense!
I'm not sure what my material would have been if I'd have started earlier. I probably would have started with 'Damsels in Distress' kinds of films because that's the kind of comedy I was writing in college. So I didn't really have any life experience to work off of.
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