Comedians Mike Gunn & Sean Collins are playing The Junction on Friday, 23rd March. Ahead of the gig, our Cambridge 105 News Team member, Jade Clarke caught up with them:
Following their performances on Michael McIntyre’s comedy road show, Mike Gunn and Sean Collins have teamed up to travel across the UK with their very own tour ‘STILL ON THE ROADSHOW’. The tour showcases lengthened solo performances from each, catering for all tastes with the use of dark humour and storytelling humour also. Cambridge 105 was lucky enough to interview both Mike Gunn and Sean Collins on their upcoming tour and how they came to find that comedy was for them.
Mike Gunn told us how he had ended up with a severe drug problem when he was younger for most of his youth and as a result ended up in rehab to recover from this addiction. After his time in rehab he wanted to start a new life and one that he would benefit from. He looked around for jobs to see what he could do but was unable to find anything that was suitable for him. As Mike Gunn said ‘When they ask you on your CV what you have been doing the past ten years and you only have Heroine to write down then you aren’t going to get anywhere’. Mike ended up doing a taster course in Comedy as something to do to fill up his spare time, while on the course he began to really enjoy what he was doing and decided that this was what he wanted to carry on with. He was about 36 years old at the time and his interest was growing.
Mike watched people such as Lee Evans and Sean Lock perform at the Comedy Store for Comedy Central and thought that they were some of the funniest men he had seen perform; however, it was the worse acts that he watched perform that really influenced him in his work and what he wanted to do. He said that as he watched them and thought about how unfunny they were that he ‘knew he would never be as funny as the likes of Lee Evans but he hoped that he could be funnier than some of the others he watched’.
We asked mike what it was like the first time he set foot on stage doing the smaller gigs compared to now and if he still got nervous. He told us that the very first time he set foot on stage he was heckled by a 7 year old who was being walked through by his mother to go to the toilet. The 7 year old shouted out ‘your rubbish mate’ and Mike knew that he was. The smaller club gigs don’t make him nervous although he was nervous at the start when he was on Michael McIntyre’s show he ended up settling in and the nerves went.
Life on tour at the moment isn’t too bad for Mike as he is able to travel home each time if the gigs are under about three hours away, so he is able to stay with the family and still see his children. Mike has travelled to Australia and New Zealand to perform before and been away for up to three weeks at a time before so this tour is a lot easier to see the family and stay near home.
When asked what piece of advice he would give somebody else who is trying to make it in the same career Mike answered to ‘give up now!’ jokingly. He then carried on saying that the best advice he could give would be to ‘be yourself, don’t just copy somebody else. People will either like you or they won’t’.
Sean Collins however was about 25 years old when he decide that he wanted to go into this career path, he really enjoyed telling stories and making them funny. He had an inkling that was what he wanted to do and he proceeded further with his inkling to make a career out of what he enjoyed doing. In his words he had ‘caught the bug.
Sean Collins was influenced in his work by the likes of Bill Cosby and Richard Prior. He liked their way of telling stories and making things funnier. Sean preferred this humour to the usual gags made and wanted to work in a similar way, telling stories and making things funnier than an ordinary gag that most used.
When Sean first performed at smaller gigs he was nervous to start with. During his first performance he was asked to get off and his microphone was switched off. Things have got a lot easier for Sean now though that his confidence has grown, when performing on Michael McIntyre’s show he was still nervous however before he went on and he ended up throwing up before he went on stage.
Sean met Mike in 2003 in a green room before a performance and they hit it off from there. They became good friends and the idea of the tour was a mutual decision of theirs.
Regarding being away from home Sean said that he was so used to being on the road that he found being on tour reasonably easy to get used to. Similarly to Mike if the gig is around three hours away or so then he will always drive back home in order to see family and spend more time at home.
When asked what piece of advice Sean would give somebody else who is trying to make it in the same career he said that if they want to do It then they need to ‘love it and enjoy it’. He said that the process was a long process and you would need a lot of ‘determination’.