BBC Online
28 August 2005

Danny Robbins interviews Jim Field Smith of the Dutch Elm Conservatoire as news of their Perrier Nomination is announced.

DANNY: Jim, how does it feel, pretty damn good I imagine?

JIM: It feels great. Shocked and delighted at the same time.

So did it just come as a massive surprise?

It literally came out of … not even out of left field. It came out of the stands somewhere, and sort of bounced off my helmet. So, yeah, total and utter shock.

So what’s happened since the announcement then? Have you suddenly had lots of people come out of the woodwork who haven’t been in touch for years and years saying “Can I come and see your show?”

I’ve had about 40 texts from numbers you don’t recognise any more. People who you delete: “Ah, I probably won’t speak to him again”. But it’s been fantastic, we’ve had some really nice messages from people actually. Mainly from other performers, being very supportive about it. Because obviously there’s the inevitable backlash as well in the press. Regardless of who’s been nominated, there’s always this huge uproar.

What, with people saying “Oh, I think it should have been someone else, I don’t think that would have been my choice”.

Yeah, exactly. I’ve had a lot of journalists saying to me this year, over the past couple of days, “Hmm, not many stand-ups in the line-up”. And I go “Well, there’s two. There’s Jason Manford and Chris Addison. So that’s two out of the five are stand-ups.” Which is actually about representative of the broad spread of stuff up here, to be honest.

I was talking to you the other day, and you were saying The Times and The Guardian had both been in touch, and they said they hadn’t even reviewed your show yet, and were suddenly panicking and going “Ooh, we should get in and see it”...

Yeah! This lady from the Guardian phoned me up and said “We’re a bit embarrassed because obviously we didn’t come to review your show”. And I said “Yeah, I know you didn’t”. And they said “Let’s start at the beginning: um, where are you all from?”. And I said “This is going to take a very long time, and it’s 4:55 and I’ve got to be on stage in 5 minutes!"

Did they get on to what your favourite colour was at any point?

No, they didn’t! And The Times, who didn’t review us, rushed out a review yesterday – a two-star review. Which was really, really nice of them.

They’re such lovely people, reviewers, aren’t they? How important is the winning to you? Is the nomination the important thing?

It’s the nomination - because we weren’t even thinking about it, and the nomination came out of nowhere. That in itself is such a huge thing for us. I mean, if we win, it’ll be nice. To be honest with you, I don’t think we’re going to, but the nomination’s fantastic.

I think you should come up with some tactics to win – like in the Big Brother house when Derek, or Nasty Nick, had tactics. I think you should work out ways to undermine the other nominees.

Justin Edwards [Jeremy Lion] had quite a good idea, that he should just come and be in our show and that would change the odds slightly. And if we can get Laura [Solon] to be in it as well, then … I think everyone’s a winner though, aren’t they Danny?

No! There can be only one, as they say in Highlander. There’s five of you, you could take most of the other Perrier nominees, I reckon.

Is there actually going to be a fight? I haven’t heard how it works. Is there going to be a fight?

I’ve heard that it’s sort of Oriental mad kung-fu moves.

It’s like one of those Challenge TV shows?

Yeah, it’s a bit like Bruce Lee meets Peter Sellers. There’s a whole sort of Cato thing going on.

Well in that case then, we’re definitely going to win the Perrier Award 2005.

Because you’re hard. OK, cheers Jim, and good luck.

Thanks very much.

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