An Interview with Nish Kumar

By Anna Pile

What year did you graduate and what college were you in? 

I graduated in 2007 and I was at Grey College. 

So you lived up the hill?

Yeah, yeah. I don’t remember doing any exercise voluntarily – I was late for everything, so I just spent three years power walking up and down hills. I was probably in the best shape of my life. Not even particularly through any genetics, just from the hill. At one point I lived up the crazy hill behind the viaduct. There’s an insane hill right behind the viaduct that has a handrail on it in case bodies give out halfway up. 

What does it feel like to be back in Durham? Is there anything in particular you wanted to visit while here?

We used to walk that route down by the river where you can go around the back of Prebends Bridge and then walk down the river and have that great view of the cathedral. It’s my favourite bit of the city, and I walked it today while listening to Kid A by Radiohead, and I could, like psychosomatically, I could feel the weight of a 2005 iPod and a packet of cigarettes in my pocket, even though I haven’t smoked in well over a decade. 

“I went to the Freshers Fair when I arrived here, and there was the [Durham] Revue stand. And I suddenly realised, oh, there’s a thing here like The [Cambridge] Footlights, maybe I’ll join that.”

When you came to Durham, did you know that you wanted to be a comedian? Was there any part of Durham that fostered a love for comedy? 

I really loved comedy and I wanted to be a comedian, but I don’t really come from any kind of show-business family, and so I don’t think I’d ever really connected the dots. Then I went to the Freshers Fair when I arrived here, and there was the [Durham] Revue stand. And I suddenly realised, oh, there’s a thing here like The [Cambridge] Footlights, maybe I’ll join that. Then I auditioned – didn’t get in, but was sought out by one of the guys who said I should audition next year, and so then I joined from my second year onwards. In my third year Ed Gamble and Tom Neenan, who I was in the Revue with, set up a stand-up night in a bar that doesn’t exist anymore that was just off North Road called Fish Tank. And so I did stand up there for the first time almost twenty years ago to the day today. 

Are there any specific moments you can think about that you look back on fondly?

My whole experience with the Revue was amazing. I remember the first show we did was in the basement of the student union, and then we obviously did loads of shows in the Assembly Rooms and loved that. I love the Assembly Rooms, I had a great time there. I remember the third show we used to write a week after exams, and I have a lot of fond memories in the first year of just us finishing our exams and then spending twelve hours a day in a rehearsal room trying to put an hour of sketch comedy together. I spent a lot of time drinking Guinness in a bar called the Hog’s Head, that doesn’t exist anymore I don’t think, with Ed Gamble. And you could smoke indoors at that time as well, so I just sort of stank of fags and Guinness for two years. 

“My whole experience with the Revue was amazing.”

How was the Durham student comedy scene when you were there? Was it just the Revue?

So it was the Revue and then a sketch group called WitTank, that was another bunch of people we knew from Durham, and there was a stand-up night which was called Cool Fun, and was on at the Fish Tank, and that was where lots of people would do gigs. There was definitely an audience for it because our shows would always be really full. One of the weird things about doing student comedy is that you do comedy in your university town so the gigs are all full, and it sets you up for a difficult decade of doing much less full rooms when you start doing professional gigs. 

But yeah, I have nothing but good memories of doing those shows in The Assembly Rooms. We did three shows a year (one each term) and the second term would be for DUC, the charity commission, and it would be us and the Footlights and the Oxford Revue, and then we’d have a little network going in Edinburgh of all the student revue shows. Largely because we’d get to Edinburgh and realize nobody else respected us apart from other university sketch comedy groups, so it kind of forced a friendship. There were lots of fun people around at that time doing sketch comedy stuff, The Inbetweeners for example.

We also have a Durham Taskmaster, a show you’re very familiar with, so it’s cool to look back and see the evolution of Durham’s performance and comedy scene and see the influence of all the alumni. 

I think that’s why we were able to get such a good audience all the time, because there wasn’t a lot of it. And also, The Revue did not really have a reputation, and that really helped us because we were friends with everyone at Oxford and Cambridge, and we’d go up to Edinburgh and they would get reviews that said stuff like, ‘I thought this was going to be Stephen Fry’, you know, people have no concept of the idea that you’ve never seen any of these people, you’re just holding a bunch of children to the standard of Blackadder. All our reviews would basically be, ‘We thought this was going to be shit and it wasn’t. 4 stars.’, and that genuinely was how we would get reviewed for two years. There wasn’t as much of an organised scene and it kind of built out from there. 

I do think Ed Gamble deserves a lot of credit because he had more of an idea about the concept that this was a job that you could do. He was way more engaged in the professionalised side of comedy than any of the rest of us were. The rest of us were just berks really, but it’s creating this very fruitful pipeline, like me and Ed, obviously Tom Neenan, who’s the head writer on The Mash Report, Jess Sharp was in The Revue the year after us and now she’s created a show for Netflix with Will Forte. And then, obviously, Stevie Martin, and Tessa Coates (her Amazon show with Hannah Waddingham was just on the summer), Liz Kingsman (who did a one woman show and then was in fucking F1 with Brad Pitt), Ambika Mod, who was in One Day, she was also during Revue. There’s so many people in Durham when you’re looking into it that really did set the foundation for how popular performances are at Durham now. 

“I do think Ed Gamble deserves a lot of credit because he had more of an idea about the concept that this was a job that you could do. He was way more engaged in the professionalised side of comedy than any of the rest of us were.”

What about Durham itself? Has it changed much?

Obviously I left 19 years ago and that whole north side of the river down by the station is obviously unrecognisable because there was no Odeon, the whole river walk. The hotel that we’re staying in was not there when I was here. But the actual old town… The shops are different, but the buildings are exactly the same because it’s a UNESCO world heritage site. You really can’t do much to that medieval town. So like the middle of Durham kind of looks exactly the fucking same as it did 20 years ago, which is really crazy. 

As someone who lived in the castle for my first year, it was a crazy experience to see the castle every time I came home, it never got old.

I got forcibly removed from that castle. We got asked to do the castle ball in 2007 in my final year. We were doing stand up and they had set a time limit, but we just decided to not respect that, so there was security staff running around, chasing us around the castle. I made my way up onto the roof of the castle and I was literally running along the turret at the top when I got rugby tackled by a security guard and forcibly removed. 

Well, I’m sure that isn’t something you would advise to students… 

No, I wouldn’t advise that. I can’t advise that to the student body. 

But is there anything else you would advise to current Durham students who want to pursue something on the stage?

Well this is an amazing time of your life to do it because there is infrastructure accessible to you. And it’s getting increasingly tricky to pursue all of these things because of the startup costs, but university is a sort of protected time. The thing that I always say to people is that your degree is only one component. Unless you become an academic, and a couple of my friends have become academics and it was really important that they pursued their degree aggressively, your degree is only one part of what you do at university. If you’re even vaguely interested in it, give it a go, because it truly does not matter if you’re terrible. I cannot tell you how important and liberating that is, because there’s no consequences to it. When there’s no consequences to it, you have total freedom. And when you have total freedom, you can do whatever you want. 

There’s also just something really nice about a densely populated, small university town, because there’s loads of people who want to be in the audience and people who want to make stuff and make stuff with you, so it’s a really, really incredible opportunity that you have when you’re here. 

I know you’re on tour at the moment, are there any future stops or different projects that you want to promote? 

I’m just touring all the time, but I’m very happy to be back in Durham. I had a great time here and it opened up so much to me. Like, I had no concept that this was a job you could do. And I met some of my best friends here – I was best man at Ed and Tom’s weddings – so it means a lot to me personally. I don’t know if I’d be doing this career without the opportunities that were open to me at Durham. Things are much more difficult for students now than they were twenty years ago, just because the various issues that you’re all going to face when you graduate because of the socioeconomic situation that you’re walking into, which was bad for us, because we essentially graduated into 2008. I mean, we essentially walked into financial Armageddon and we thought that was as bad as it was going to get, and it’s since gotten worse somehow. So it’s really difficult, but what university does for you is it creates a space in your life for you to be able to breathe and experiment and try things out, and that is a really magical thing that’s worth preserving. 

“Infrastructure and the inaccessibility of infrastructure is why the arts are becoming more of a playground for the children of the already wealthy.”

I get really uncomfortable when I hear people talk about how less people need to go to university, because my instinctive response to that is: who is going to not go to university when you start cutting numbers? Because it isn’t gonna be Tarquin the fucking fourth whose dad is the Earl of Gloucester or some shit. It’s not. It’s gonna be working class and lower-middle class kids that get boxed out of it. The dumbass posh kids, some of whom will be reading this and working on the Palatinate, are not going to be boxed out of higher education. And part of the reason I’m very passionate about that is university creates a period in your life where you could experiment, especially in the arts, and you could do something interesting because you have accessible infrastructure. Infrastructure and the inaccessibility of infrastructure is why the arts are becoming more of a playground for the children of the already wealthy. 

I’m also really happy that Durham has changed in a lot of ways as a university, because when I was here, and this is absolutely true, I got headhunted to run the Durham University Labour Party because someone overheard me saying something left-wing in a bar. So I think the student body has changed a lot in that period of time. And when I came here in 2022, there was a pride flag flying over the castle with a trans arrow and I was very moved by it – it’s nice to be reminded that things can change for the better sometimes, and I’m really happy to be back.

Image Credit: Matt Stronge