Lucia Keskin, AKA “Chi” Keskin – the 23-year-old writer and star of the BBC’s offbeat comedy Things You Should Have Done – has an unusual specialist skill. She is so deadpan she can make audiences furious. “I often look depressed when I’m not,” she says, in her apathetic style. She recalls her first ever live television appearance on Soccer AM with footballer Robbie Keane. “I was enjoying myself but people online were like ‘oh my God, who is this? I’ve seen more personality in dishwater.’
“I remember saying to my agent, ‘I can’t do this, everyone hates me.’ But then I watched the video back, and I look like I want to end it all,” she says. “So fair enough.”
In her six-part show, Keskin plays the deadpan and downbeat Chi (like Keskin herself, it’s short for Lucia, pronounced Lu-chi-a). Chi is unambitious; a self-proclaimed “stay at home daughter” who makes up for her lack of common sense with her love of baggy T-shirts. In the first minutes of the show, Chi is informed that both her parents have died in a car crash. “Let us know if there’s anyone we can call,” offers the policeman, to which she replies straightly: “Well I would say Mum and Dad usually but …”, her sentence trailing off into an uncomfortable silence. Awkward is the name of the game in Things You Should Have Done. In order to inherit the family home, Chi has to complete a list of adulting style tasks left by her parents – eg get a GCSE, learn to drive – often with absurd results. Chi’s haphazard attempt at driving results in her instructor being wrongly labelled a paedophile, getting a job sees her try to move into a retirement home. It’s dark, it’s sweet, it’s sad, and at points it’s surreal. In other words, it’s Lucia Keskin through and through.
To viewers who are seeing Keskin for the first time, it might seem a bit premature to be discussing signature style. Keskin’s only other acting credits amount to a few episodes of Big Boys (Channel 4), a role in the three-part Sneakerheads (Dave) and a cameo in Diane Morgan’s Mandy. But online, Keskin has been honing her craft for her hit YouTube, TikTok and social channels since she was 16.
“I hated school,” she says. “I had really bad depression so I avoided it at all costs. When it came to the week of my GCSEs, I went to see the Addams Family Musical every day. That was more important to me, I wanted to see Sam Womack as Morticia!”
Like Chi, Keskin grew up in coastal Kent (Margate), living until recently with her parents and never quite learning how to drive. She insists the similarities between the two Chis end there though. “I really didn’t want the character to have the same name,” says Keskin. “I knew it would draw comparisons. Though maybe you could say it’s an exaggerated version of some parts of me.”
Opening her GCSE results was one of Keskin’s first videos for her YouTube channel when was 16. “[The results] came out yesterday but I didn’t get them because I was asleep,” she recounts, the beginnings of her hapless comedy characters already emerging.
“That video was a slow burn,” she says. “Each year it picks up more people. I’m sure some people only know me from failing my GCSEs.”
It’s now been watched nearly a million times, and her channel has nearly half a million subscribers. But Keskin says she isn’t one of those who achieved viral fame, where one video went stratospheric and a new life followed. Rather, it has been a steady growth.
“I wasn’t making any money off of any of it for years,” she says. When she did finally get the numbers to start monetising content, she got props. “I bought wigs,” she says. “I bought a better camera, I bought a green screen. When I had to move out from my mum’s it was because my room was a bomb site of costumes and wigs. It was crazy. It was like a whole warehouse in one small room.”
A lot of Keskin’s content has riffed off zeitgeist pop culture, replete with celebrity impressions and surreal diversions. She’s made a parody of Coronation Street with a made-up toe mishap plotline called Coronation Feet, plus the delightfully named spoof “low budget Line of Duty”.
Some of it didn’t work: “I was doing all sorts of random things. I was dressing up as a potato and walking around my local shopping centre.”
But some did: “I recreated an entire episode of Friends. It took me ages,” she says. Keskin played every character, it’s nearly 20 minutes long, and has been seen nearly two million times.
“But it was during the lockdown that I started writing sketches.” She’d create skits about Poundland head office brainstorms (“You know how everything is a pound?” she says, playing a gormless employee, “Why don’t we just … slowly start adding in other prices?”) or make fun of social media (in one video she is seen crying into the camera about the speed toast pops up while making beans on toast). She’d imagine what beloved sitcoms would be like if they happened in the pandemic (Nessa from Gavin and Stacey is selling homemade vaccine); or play an old lady talking to her grandchild in 2071 (“We used to have a thing called outside,” she says. “Don’t worry it’s over now”).
It was around this time that her audience numbers exploded. There was something about Keskin’s observations of the quotidian that chimed with people’s shrunk and domestic worlds.
“Everyone was so on their phones, and had nothing to do,” Keskin says. “And it was weird because even though everyone else’s life had changed, mine hadn’t. I was always just at home. But it gave me more motivation to entertain people. People had nothing to do. So it was like, ‘well I’ve got nothing to do either’. I’ll do something.”
Soon enough, Keskin caught the eye of the comedy world, with endorsements from legends like Dawn French. She was signed by a top comedy talent agent, landed a meeting with the BBC – and the rest is history.
Talent that is discovered online is often derided – they can be called “influencers” rather than artists, their work seen as cheap clickbait. Sometimes this criticism is fair. But in Keskin we can see the benefits of the internet as a launchpad for careers. There’s something egalitarian about it too. Usually a new talent being launched with their own show will have come through university and then a theatre show (see Michaela Coel or Phoebe Waller-Bridge), or through a standup circuit that is dominated by the affluent. They aren’t usually young women from Kent, with a “G in RE” and whose craft has somehow blossomed even under the harsh conditions of social media. “Getting heckled on stage must be horrible,” she says. “But when you’re doing it online, you still get comments, you just get to keep them, they stay for ever.
“There’s definitely a stigma to doing online comedy. And I get it, I dislike the stereotypical influencer – the one where it’s all for show – too. It’s my worst nightmare to be called an influencer.”
Arguably, Things You Should Have Done showcases the best of Keskin’s creative journey. It includes surreal turns and bad wigs – at one point she plays John Humphrys hosting Mastermind where the special subject is grief – while showcasing her clear potential as a screenwriter with a knack for what audiences find funny and moving. Some of the best moments of the show are not performed by Keskin but by the others: Am I Being Unreasonable? star Selin Hizli playing Chi’s prickly Aunt Karen; Daniel Fearn as Karen’s browbeaten husband Dave; and Jamie Bisping as his teenage son Lucas, a simple soul with a puppy-like loyalty to Chi. Between all their high jinks is a family dealing with loss, sometimes unkindly to each other. This isn’t influencer content where the aim is to be likable or relatable.
“I think the more unlikable [the character], the better,” says Keskin. “Horrible people, stupid people are way more fun to write about.”
No wonder she names deadpan-master Diane Morgan and pitch-black comedy icon Julia Davis as two of her heroes.
“I look back at old stuff and I think, ‘how was I so cringe then’,” she says. “And it’s crazy because in four years’ time I’ll look back at now and think the same.” At 23, Keskin still has plenty of time to look back and cringe. And to take her deadpan to even more outrageous levels.
Things You Should Have Done is on iPlayer now.
