A familiar face – and voice – on British TV and radio for many years, Simon Evans is coming to Cambridge next week with his latest show, Have We Met?.
The multi-talented comic also recently made the national news when he was refused permission to create a driveway at his own home in Hove – he subsequently branded the planning laws “a joke”.
Simon Evans. Picture: Steve Best
“Massive national story, yeah!,” laughs Simon, 59, speaking to the Cambridge Independent from said home.
“Well, you never know if it will help or hinder, but I thought it was worth a try. We’re pushing that one towards the secretary of state now. That is where that’s at, so we’ll see how that goes!”
Have We Met? has been called the final part of a trilogy, a trilogy which began with the shows Genius 2.0 and The Work of the Devil.
“I’ve billed it as that, although to be honest that’s a bit of a retrospective reframing,” explains Simon, a long-time favourite at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
“There was a sort of sequence of events which were triggered by the start of Genius.
“Genius was a show I did in 2017, and broadly speaking it was like an examination of genius and where genius comes from and what the nature of genius is and why it’s so often difficult to spot genius in your own lifetime.
“And then you look back and you go ‘Oh my God, the Renaissance was full of geniuses, but were they aware of that at the time?’
“And there were a lot of aspects to that that I kind of traced through, and some of them made it into the show and some of them didn’t.
“You do trial and error to see which parts the audience responds to and finds amusing, and they seemed to find it much funnier when I was attacking our present (as it was then) crop of senior politicians – people like Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn as lacking genius.
“Where are our political geniuses, why aren’t they coming through? We’re a big major economy, why are we being ruled by midwits?
“And that was very fruitful, comedically, whereas what I really hoped, which was to celebrate the genius of a Shakespeare or a Beethoven or a da Vinci, proved to be a little bit harder to get the comedy out of…
“One of the things that came out of it – and there was a lot of entanglements in this, and to some extent this is what I explore in the show Have We Met? – is an examination of the strange, random processes by which one person’s comedy, their comedy journey, their focus and so on evolves and how one show leads on to the next.”
The follow-up to Genius 2.0, The Work of the Devil (2019), came about after a DNA test led to a life-changing discovery for Simon.
“Work of the Devil was the next show which I did and that was about my discovery that I myself was the product of what looked alarmingly like a eugenics experiment,” he says.
“I learned that I’d been conceived in a fertility clinic in Central London in 1964; my father had been infertile, in fact, and after eight years of marriage they’d been unable to have a child so they decided to use artificial insemination.
“But what they didn’t know was that the sperm donor at the clinic, there was one man basically who was doing virtually everyone.
Simon Evans. Picture: Steve Best
“The husband of the woman who ran the clinic was getting almost all of their clients pregnant – somewhere between 85 and 90 per cent of them over a 23-year period.
“I’ve got hundreds and hundreds of half brothers and sisters and I had no idea about any of this until I took this test.
“This wasn’t within the show itself, this reflection, but it felt to some extent that I had completed my circuit, having started doing stand-up in 1996, having started doing international tours in 2011, 2012, for the first time – quite late to the touring game but comedy had itself sort of evolved over that time…
“It felt like the whole point of becoming a stand-up had been to discover this truth.”
Having completed this “circuit”, Simon was unsure where next to take his career.
“Do I go back out now at this point and start all over again – what fresh adventure can you take on at this stage?” he asks.
“Or is it just a question of quietly diminishing returns? And so to examine that, I took up a very famous poem by Tennyson called Ulysses.”
In the poem, the old Greek hero of the Iliad and the Odyssey is gazing out over the moaning deep and the twinkling rocks and wondering whether to seek a newer world.
“So it’s the end of a trilogy in that sense,” notes Simon, who has a regular column in Spiked Online, and has also had work published in The Critic, Unherd, Spectator Life and Quillette, among others, “but also, as I say, to some extent like a kind of recognition that it feels like there’s been the completion of an entire circuit.
“That makes it all sound quite ponderous and heavy, of course, but I quite like having these mock-heroic structures or propositions or frames to start with, and then you underpin it with the humiliating trivia of daily life and your own shortcomings by comparison.”
Away from the live arena, Simon can also be seen presenting Headliners on GB News, a channel that has drawn negative criticism from more mainstream comedians – such as those who tend to appear on programmes like Have I Got News for You.
“GB News is an interesting one; I don’t know where it’s perceived now,” observes Simon. “I think there was a point when it first came in when everyone expected it to be properly foaming at the mouth…
“And I hope anyone who’s actually watched it over the last three years – and certainly our show – will realise that Headliners is very genial, very open, very inclusive.
“We have right and left-wing comics on there, and funnily enough I think a couple of the left-wing comics are probably among the most articulate and able to state their position and defend their position and so on.
“To me, it’s a breath of fresh air because certainly with Have I Got News for You, which I’ve never been invited on incidentally in 30 years, the BBC complains ‘Well we would have more right-wing comedians but there just aren’t any’.
“Well there are; I go on [BBC Radio 4’s] The News Quiz quite often and seem to do OK…
“But the predominance of left-wing group-thinking consensus on that show [Have I Got News for You] makes it very difficult if you are a right-wing comic, someone like Geoff Norcott, for instance, who does get on there, to be more than a spanner-in-the-works.
“If the momentum is going, everyone’s laughing along to the proposition that the Tories are evil scum, and then Geoff comes in with ‘Oh, I think the Left are possibly evil scum as well’, everyone goes ‘Urgh’ – it’s like he’s just chucked a handful of sand in the gears…
“On Headliners, I think we manage to get comedy from both sides, and I’m really genuinely proud of that.”
Simon Evans. Picture: Steve Best
Simon will be bringing Have We Met? to the Cambridge Junction (J2) on Friday, 10 January. Tickets, priced £20, are available from junction.co.uk. For more on Simon, go to thesimonevans.com.