Following their hugely successful Edinburgh Festival Fringe season and return to the prestigious Soho Theatre, award-winning sketch duo Grubby Little Mitts, Sullivan Brown and Rosie Nicholls, are back on the road with their ridiculously high-octane and seriously ambitious hour of eye-watering comedy.
The pair, whose YouTube channel No Rolls Barred has over 329,000 subscribers, will be traversing the perils of employment, friendship and love in this genre-bending sketch show.
Ahead of their opening show on Sunday in Glasgow, we caught up with the Brown and Nicholls – who answered our questions collectively – to find out more about Grubby Little Mitts, the show and the tour.
Q&A with Grubby Little Mitts (Sullivan Brown and Rosie Nicholls)
How did you come to create Grubby Little Mitts?
We started writing together in 2021 – Rosie tried to write a show for herself and kept imagining two voices. Silly! Sullivan begged her not to write him a part, saying “I don’t want to be financially and professionally bound to you” but Rosie decided it was best to continue her dream of working with one of the cuddliest actors in the biz by forcing him to co-write a show with her – and so Grubby Little Mitts was born.
What can you tell us about Hello, Hi?
We write very fast and we talk non-stop during our writing weekends – writing Hello Hi was no exception. The show is accidentally about the trials and tribulations of romantic relationships, but there’s also a sketch about a demon at the post office, anxiety dreams coming true and a lonely guy who just wants a similar friend. We have continued with our bright red aesthetic, and the finale has been called “disgusting and affronting” and “uproarious idiocy” – so there really is something for everyone.
What was the inspiration for the show?
We write about so many different things that there isn’t really one central inspiration, but compared to our first sketch show we knew we wanted it to be more ambitious, more gross, more fun, more unexpected and with fewer eyeballs rolling around on the floor. We wrote so much material for this that we had an entirely new show lying in wait, unused, which we took to Leicester Comedy Festival this February in a WIP script reading night. On Hello Hi, we worked again with our fave movement director Simon Maeder to create the opener and the closer, and we tried to create a consistent feel of the Grubbs vibe by working with our director Jon Gracey for a second time, so returning audiences would get a whole new show, but know they were watching a Grubbs show.
What’s it like to be taking the show on the road, including a stop at Glasgow Comedy Festival?
We love touring! It’s amazing to think people in all parts of the UK will come out to see us. Glasgow is the perfect place to kick things off – we had the biggest, baddest audience at Blackfriars last year and was probably the best show of our 2023 tour. This year, performing at Britannia Panopticon will be such a special moment for us – Sullivan has an ancestor who trod those boards in the music halls days of Glasgow! We can’t wait to do the final sketch in this historic venue!
Has the show changed from its run at Edinburgh Festival?
It will be slightly different in each venue due to size and shape and all that jazz – but the content of the show remains the same. Father Hen. Cat/Wife. Singing In The Rain. If you know…you know.
Grubby Little Mitts are heading off on a whistlestop tour of the UK from 24th March to 2nd April
