Month: May 2018

Hannah Croft and Fiona Pearce: Still Friends Above All

Published on by emmaclairesweeneyLeave a comment

Comedians Hannah Croft and Fiona Pearce became friends at school, followed each other to Oxford and then on to drama school before starting to write and perform sketch comedy together as  Croft & Pearce. Their synchronicity didn’t end here – they even became pregnant in the same week!

We asked Hannah and Fiona about their experiences of writing and female friendship.

Hannah Croft (front) and Fiona Pearce (back)

What were your first impressions of each other?

Hannah: We first met in sixth form when Fi joined my school. I remember seeing a geeky-looking new girl sitting alone in the common room and thinking ‘look at that friendless loser…I think I’ve found a kindred spirit!’

Fiona: Hannah didn’t seem to have many friends despite having been at the school for five years, which was ideal for me. I remember she was very colour co-ordinated – her top matched her necklace which matched her belt which matched her eye shadow – so my first impression of her was ‘purple’.

How did you come to write and perform comedy together?

Hannah: Having discovered this new friendship we clung to it with all our might and followed each other to Oxford and then on to drama school. It was when we were trying and failing to forge our careers as the greatest classical actresses of our generation that we took a step back and began to laugh at ourselves and at the world.

Fiona: I had some friends who were running a sketch comedy night in a basement below a pub on London’s Great Portland Street and they offered us a three-minute set, which we thought would be too short and ended up being around two and a half minutes too long.

Describe your co-writing process?

Hannah: It has chopped and changed over the years as we’ve found our feet, but on the whole we each allow ourselves to be inspired by the everyday and we each make notes separately of things that have made us laugh. Then we put our heads (and lists) together and start to develop the ideas.

Fiona: We tend to come to each other with what we think are completely amazing ideas, and then work them up together and gradually realise they’re flawed, and then very slowly make them better. We improve ideas and start writing from there, either in a room together (normally with tea, coffee and cake that Hannah has made) or over Skype.

Hannah: Our benchmark for a good idea is whether it makes us laugh or not. If it passes that test we deem it worthy of being tested out in front of an audience. You get very direct feedback in comedy, so we tend to let the audience be our script editors.

How do you manage the personal and professional aspects of your relationship?

Hannah: We’ve discovered over the years that our friendship is a very powerful procrastination tool and we tend to kick off each writing session chatting away as friends until we finally give into the inevitable and begin to work, work, work, usually hurrying to make up for lost time. We never learn. But I find it such a joy to have this great excuse to spend so much time hanging out with my best friend and I prize our relationship above all else.

Fiona: Yes, we are still friends above all, which makes it all so much more fun when things are going well, and so much more manageable when we encounter setbacks.

What have been the most significant changes in your writing friendship?

Hannah: We have gradually eased into becoming much more direct with each other as time has passed. In the early years we’d try to be very tactful with each other and humour (no pun intended) each other’s less promising ideas, whereas now, with evermore projects to juggle at the same time, we’ve become less pussyfooty.

Fiona: Yes, less pussy, more footy. At the same time we’ve become more relaxed and playful with our ideas and willing to try things out that we’re not sure will work, which comes from having lots of experience with different audiences on tour.

What are your hopes for your writing and performing careers, together and separately?

Hannah: We’d love to get ourselves on more comedy writing teams – even some in LA where they have comedy writers’ rooms…hell, why not put that out there! – and the big dream is to have our own show on TV.

Fiona: Everyone says it’s hard to get a show commissioned but we are still naive enough to believe in our dreams. It was a great experience to write our own series for BBC Radio 4 and we’d love to make something for TV. We’ve been lucky to be taken under the wing of some great comedy writers already and we’d love to work with other experienced comedy greats like Armando Iannucci and Tina Fey…Hell, why not put that out there!

Croft & Pearce won a 2014 Edinburgh Spirit of the Fringe Award and in 2015 they were a BBC Next Big Thing Act. Their episode of BBC Radio 4’s Sketchorama was nominated for Best Scripted Comedy at the BBC Audio Drama Awards and this led to the commission of their first solo sketch show for BBC Radio 4, The Croft & Pearce Show, which was broadcast in March 2016. Following a Total Sell-Out run at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2016, they launched a podcast with their hit characters June & Jean, and embarked on their second UK tour.

Croft and Pearce will be taking their new show, Double Take, up to the Edinburgh Fringe this year. You can find out more about their show here.

You can follow them on Twitter @croftandpearce

Pratibha Parmar and Alice Walker

Published on by Kathleen Dixon Donnelly3 Comments

In March, we announced that Something Rhymed would, for the first time, be open to submissions. It is a particular pleasure that the first profile post we received from our call for submissions came from former City University student Alice Fitzgerald. As she celebrates the publication of her debut novel, Her Mother’s Daughter, she wrote for Something Rhymed about the friendship of her literary heroines Pratibha Parmar and Alice Walker. 

We also spread the word that we were looking for people to help us out with the editorial and administrative side of things. It was wonderful to hear back from Kathleen Dixon Donnelly, who we knew of through her fascinating blog, Such Friends, which explores the early-twentieth century literary salons of the Irish Literary Renaissance, the Bloomsbury Group, the Americans in Paris, and the Algonquin Round Table. Our thanks to Kathleen for editing this post. 

If you would like to get more involved with Something Rhymed, please find further details here.

You might know Alice Walker as the author of groundbreaking novel, The Color Purple. This would make sense; it was off the back of this book that she made history as the first African-American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as the National Book Award, in 1983, gaining more fame when the novel was made into a film directed by Steven Spielberg in 1985. In fact, Walker is a prolific writer, having penned everything from poetry and essays to short fiction and novels.

Born in 1944, the eighth child to sharecropper parents in Georgia during a time of racial segregation, she is also an activist, best known for her work with civil rights, women’s equality and peace campaigns. She coined the term ‘womanism’ in 1979 to describe a black feminist or feminist of colour.

British filmmaker Pratibha Parmar, meanwhile, was born just over a decade later in Kenya to a family who had emigrated from India to East Africa during the period of the British Empire, and migrated again to England in a group that the British media then termed ‘East African Asians’. Hailing from a persecuted people who had travelled across three continents, Parmar’s work is embedded in political complexity, examining themes such as gender, identity, LGBT issues, race and feminism.

It was Walker’s political beliefs and prominent role as an activist that first brought her and Parmar together. Having written Possessing the Secret of Joy, a novel which touches on female genital mutilation, Walker hoped to make a film on this controversial practice of female circumcision. She wanted to put her words into something more visual and accessible, and Parmar was happy to make that a reality.

The 1994 documentary, Warrior Marks, went on to win awards, and ‘that harrowing journey both triggered and cemented our mutual respect and trust’, Parmar told E. Nina Rothe in 2013 of her relationship with Walker. The two women soon went on to co-publish the book, Warrior Marks: Female Genital Mutilation and the Sexual Blinding of Women.

Alice Walker (left) and Pratibha Parmar (right) by Shaheen Haq, the producer of Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth.

Their friendship now stretches over more than 25 years. Like most of us, they communicate over email. Parmar is now based in San Francisco and Walker has a house in Mexico. There have been more fruits of their friendship, too. In 2013, Parmar made a documentary film about Walker’s life. ‘Two exceptional women, talking about one exceptional woman’s life, with the help of a few really exceptional friends’, writes Rothe in her Huffington Post article.

Parmar’s love, respect and admiration for her friend are clear throughout the beautifully-shot documentary, called Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth, which is Parmar’s ‘contribution to filling this gaping abyss of on screen representations of women as history makers and shapers, women as public intellectuals and visionary leaders’.

As with any friendship that spans a length of time, one has seen the other change and grow. Speaking of Walker, Parmar told Bernard Boo in a 2013 interview on Way Too Indie, ‘She’s gone through so many different experiences over the last few decades that I’ve known her, I’ve seen her grow, I’ve seen her suffer, I’ve seen her speak out about things even when she knows it won’t make her popular with people. Through all of that, I would say that there is an essence that’s never changed. She has a very strong inner core and will that’s powered her through her life.’

There have been hard times, too; Warrior Marks earned them criticism for not being African women. But Walker had wise words for her friend. ‘Pratibha. Teflon,’ Walker told Parmar. ‘She said I had to develop a skin like Teflon. She’s had to have done that to survive’, explains the filmmaker.

HERMOTHERSDAUGHTERWritten by Alice Fitzgerald, whose debut novel Her Mother’s Daughter is out now with Allen & Unwin. You can follow her on Twitter @AliceFitzWrites. 

 

 

    Edited by Kathleen Dixon Donnelly, who posts at Such Friends, and is  currently          working on a book, ‘Such Friends’: A Scrapbook Almanac of Writers’ Salons,                 1897-1930.