When Emma Sidi was in year seven, a classmate predicted she would one day become a comedian. Her reaction was one of total horror. “I was like: no! I thought she was being really rude and saying I was like an old man. I thought: wow, I really am so ugly and uncool.”
Twenty-one years later, on an unseasonably warm September afternoon, Sidi can appreciate the prescient compliment. She did become a comedian, and has spent the past decade refining her own gratifyingly flamboyant character comedy while making scene-stealing appearances in a slew of great British sitcoms (Starstruck, Ghosts, Black Ops, Stath Lets Flats, W1A, Pls Like). Even so, the 33-year-old does understand where her former self was coming from: there were vanishingly few comic female role models around in the early 2000s, and it’s not difficult to imagine why a preteen girl might have feared she was being likened to a sweaty middle-aged man ranting into a microphone.
Fittingly, the comedy Sidi has become known for is a far cry from testosterone-fuelled turn-of-the-millennium fare. In fact, it’s a far cry from anything else full stop. The comedian’s bonkers new show sees her embody Sue Gray – one-time Partygate inquiry boss turned Keir Starmer’s chief of staff – in flagrantly inaccurate style. Her Sue is gobby, resolutely lowbrow and emotionally chaotic, preoccupied less with politics and more with office gossip and boys she fancies (namely Rishi Sunak and Starmer himself).
Presumably, this is nothing like the real Sue – but the joke partly relies on the fact that the adviser’s actual personality is shrouded in mystery. Sidi decided to start impersonating Gray on a whim one evening in late 2021, having read that morning about her takeover of the Partygate investigation. At that time, Gray’s abrupt rise to household name status was a punchline in itself: an early gag that has remained in the show has her feeling sheepish about her sudden ubiquity (“Oh God, I’m Sue Gray – don’t, I’m cringing!”) Yet despite being a continual fixture in the headlines ever since, Gray has managed to remain a ridiculously enigmatic figure – she has barely ever appeared on television, and even her date of birth has been kept out of the public domain.
Sidi deliberately did no extra research on Gray in order to ensure she remained the blankest of canvases. Instead, she merges the basic facts of her governmental job with a banal yet melodramatic conversational style she associates with the time she spent working on the Bobbi Brown counter at the Guildford branch of House of Fraser in her teens. There, the chat was “never-ending, trivial yet of the greatest importance. The stakes are so high, but you’re talking about nothing.”
Yet earlier this month, those basic facts changed dramatically; a couple of weeks after our conversation, Gray quit the role that made her the most powerful woman in government, claiming in her resignation statement that rumours about her conduct meant she “risked becoming a distraction”. When I spoke to Sidi the following day, she seemed sanguine about the fact she would have to change the overarching narrative of her show, “I think this might make an even better ending, it’s almost Icarus-like” - while also being grateful Gray hadn’t engaged in the kind of public mea culpa (“a big speech in the rose garden”) that would give audiences a clear sense of her real character. Better still, the reasons for her ousting – at least at the time of writing – are mercifully unclear: Sidi knows the mystery will allow her some creative leeway when discussing the cause of Gray’s downfall. (“Who knows babes?! I knew it was too good to be true”, her Sue ad libs down the phone at me.) The show is not – as you may have grasped by now – a work of weighty political satire. Yet its creator says Gray’s resignation does neatly sum up its most serious point: that this country is far more interested in “silly systems” and “playing around with people in this little doll’s house of government” than actual policy.
In general, however, Sidi’s Sue Gray is a work of glorious inanity, peppered with millennial-baiting anachronisms: at one point Sue reminisces about 00s indie band the Wombats playing her university freshers’ week. This is Sidi’s own self seeping through. Despite her being a character comedian - her other outlandish creations include a ridiculously melodramatic telenovela star -, all of Sidi’s alter egos contain at least a little bit of her real personality: in her view, the “best comedy is authentic to the person writing or doing it. I think Alan Partridge is the best example of that. Alan Partridge is not Steve Coogan at all, but it doesn’t take much to realise that a lot of it is Steve…” she says, failing to suppress her laughter. (She would know; she performed - brilliantly - alongside Coogan in the 2022 Partridge stage show Stratagem, and the pair will be reunited in the cast of upcoming Thatcher drama Brian and Margaret.)
Considering Sidi’s Sue Gray is the obliquest of parodies, it’s not a huge surprise to learn that some audience members haven’t immediately got the joke. During this year’s sell-out Edinburgh fringe run, there were a couple of confused Americans who enquired earnestly about the veracity of an anecdote about Gray visiting TK Maxx. Yet Sidi maintains that it is exceptionally difficult to mistake the show for serious biographical theatre: “There’s a bit about giving the former head of the Met Police, Cressida Dick, a tampon. There are a few milestones in it that go: this is clearly not real. Another one is when she’s attacked by an elf.” Sidi is about to take Sue on a UK tour, but recently she has been busy perfecting an even stranger role: as part of the current Taskmaster cohort, she’s appearing on TV as herself for the very first time. Sidi was delighted to be asked to appear on the programme, pushing aside any doubts by telling herself that “the worst that can happen is that you embarrass yourself, and I feel like I’ve done that before anyway”. While more established comedians are able to utilise their longstanding personas – for example, her cartoonishly glum fellow contestant Jack Dee – Sidi says she is playing the game as her unfiltered self, despite the fact that watching it back “borderline gives me the creeps”.
That said, Sidi’s most high-profile TV role to date is essentially her under a different name. In the BBC rom-sitcom Starstruck she co-stars as Kate, the highly strung, control-freaky best friend and flatmate of Rose Matafeo’s Jessie. The pair genuinely are best friends and Matafeo wrote the series while they were living together. When Sidi first saw the script – featuring a character who was at that point called Emma – “I was like: hmm, fair enough. Bit of an eye roll.” She views Kate as a distillation of herself at her “most annoying. Kate is like me if I was always on edge. I can be quite bossy.”
Starstruck is a rare example of a sitcom powered almost exclusively by women: the show is written mostly by Matafeo and fellow Kiwi Alice Snedden, and produced and directed largely by women, too. In the past decade, Sidi has noticed things improving gender-wise: “I feel like I do gigs all the time where you’re not the only woman, but that didn’t used to be the case”. One of the clearest signifiers of progress, she believes, is how outrageous rare cases of overt sexism now seem. “I worked with a director recently who called me a silly little actress,” she says, still radiating disbelief. “I was absolutely appalled and immediately complained to the producer. I think it’s a good sign that it in no way feels like the norm.” In the past, Sidi has spoken about her less-than-ideal experiences in the Cambridge Footlights, where she was patronised by male peers. Today, she’s keen to stress that she never felt the Footlights was institutionally sexist and that her negative experiences were down to the behaviour of two individual students.
It was Sidi’s dad – a former professional rugby player – who encouraged her to go to Cambridge. At that point, she was fixated on becoming an actor, having honed her performance chops in school. In fact, after hearing about her antics, her classmate’s fortune-telling powers seem decidedly less impressive. In primary school, at the height of Harry Potter mania, she staged a Quidditch scene in assembly and cast herself as the overblown commentator. Did it go down well? “To be honest, I think it killed!” A couple of years later she performed a selection of Victoria Wood sketches for her class. Inspired by Wood, she even wrote some sketches of her own and sent them to the BBC. “They either didn’t realise I was a child or they didn’t care. They sent me the most brutal feedback of all time,” she recalls. “They were like: the standard is awful, the formatting is so bad, the characterisation isn’t there, but to be fair this is a good premise. I was nine with tears in my eyes going: OK, brilliant!”
It was quite the baptism of fire, but Sidi has subsequently got used to disappointment: a few years ago she attempted to make a sketch show with Matafeo and Lolly Adefope but it never got picked up (“I’ve been through that process a lot and there’s no point being bitter”). Still, having lent her talents to so many other people’s passion projects, she is hoping one of her own will get made soon – specifically one idea “in the sitcom world. A little bit more authentic and grounded [than her live work] but still funny funny”.
If anyone can write a funny funny sitcom, it’s the woman who has wrung an hour of comedy from the fictional internal monologue of an inscrutable former civil servant. At the very least, you’d hope for a slightly less hostile response from the BBC comedy department this time round.
Emma Sidi is Sue Gray is touring to 29 November.
