You have become a bit of a TV star in Russia. How did this happen?
It was pretty weird, actually. After I graduated from Cambridge, because apparently I don’t read the news, I decided to go to Moscow for a sort of gap year to improve my Russian and do something a bit different. I’d already been doing stand-up for about four years at this point and I kept doing it in English in Moscow to keep my hand in. Then, out of the blue after about six months, I was approached by some TV producers to take part in this televised stand-up competition – a bit like Last Comic Standing – and somehow ended up coming second and getting a place in the cast on StandUp, a bit like a Russian Live at the Apollo. This somehow snowballed into me spending three years there, touring all over the country, staying in some of the worst hotels I have ever seen and almost getting deported from Belarus.
