Comedy news: Matt Green: Distracted at Edinburgh Fringe

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Matt Green's show this year is all about distraction, but we managed to keep him focused on talking about it for a whole interview. Well, until we got distracted by asking about EastEnders and Darkplace. Sorry Matt.

Tell us a bit about the show.

It's called Too Much Information, and it's kind of about distraction, and being distracted from the things that are important. At the beginning of the year I was trying to write stuff that is more politically engaged, and talked about what is going on in the world, but I just found myself being constantly distracted by things.

That sort of became the theme of the show – I'm trying to talk about stuff but then I get distracted. It's a bit of a show of two halves.

Do you manage to do stuff on politics and the economy?

Yeah, there's a decent chunk of stuff on that in there. But it's now about talking about different ways of being distracted. It's quite a nice mix, and it's not a heavy show. 

So what distractions are we talking about?

Well, all the usual things like Twitter and Facebook and the internet, and I have a Kindle so I'm always distracted by books on it. So it's a lot about new technology. And it's kind of about always looking for the new and next thing rather than focusing on what I'm supposed to be doing at the time.

And the political stuff in there, what bent are we talking about?

There's a social side of saying that as a society we're very distracted from the important things. So celebrity culture, Olympics and the sponsorship of that, and how weird it is that we have McDonald's as the official restaurant. It's just extraordinary in so many ways. Like the fact it's called a restaurant for starters.

And there's things on the internet, and how Google and Facebook and other companies have personalised the internet around us so we live in a bubble of things we've looked at before.

So whereas before the internet was a huge source of information we could access at any time, we're slowly becoming more into our own little worlds. I think that's a really interesting thing to talk about because it's not happened fully yet.

What are you going to do if you see someone using your mobile in your show?

I do have a joke about that quite early in the show, actually. But I did have that the other night, the fact people are always trying to surreptitiously check their phones when they're having conversations.

And I was doing a preview a few nights ago and I saw a bloke ease his phone out of his pocket. But phones now are so bright that if you do it in the dark, it's really obvious. 

So the lesson is, if you want to read a phone in your show, just turn the brightness of the screen down.

Exactly. Do it so not everyone else can see it.

It's quite a serious agenda you're doing, where does the funny come in?

In all the cracks between the things. That people are developing these tools to do this – like the results you get on Google depend on what you've searched for before, things like that. The show's working well, people have come up after previews and said they've enjoyed the show but also that there's been things they didn't realise. That's a really nice thing to do. 

Doing bits on the internet is notoriously difficult to get right, is this a problem you've found?

I think you have to not get too specific. It's more a general piece on how people use the internet. If you talk about very specific programs like Twitter, realistically, not everyone is on it, even if it sometimes feels like they are.

Everyone knows what Google is and everyone has odd experiences, so you can use those big examples rather than the small ones and I think that works better. 

So, we wanted to ask you about a couple of things in your acting history. You were in EastEnders...

Yeah, I was a mortgage advisor with Pat Butcher. It was a sort of comedy role where I was much younger than her and she was having to be nice to me and trying to endear herself to me and it was going wrong.

It's so weird in something like EastEnders because it's such a factory. You go in, you're slotted in, and you leave. When you're doing something like a pilot for something, you might spend three or four hours on a scene. With EastEnders it's just, bang, it's done in an hour. 

And you were in Garth Marenghi's Darkplace too...

That's something people always pick up on. It's weird because at the time Channel 4 really buried it. I knew Richard and Matt from doing stuff with them in university. When they cast it they very much tried to get friends in because they couldn't pay very much.

We were very happy because we loved the idea. And I played one of the Scotsman, and I was a kitchen assistant to Stephen Merchant in his episode. Working with people like that was just fantastic.

Back to Edinburgh, is there much you're looking forward to seeing?

Last year I was doing a play too so I couldn't do much. But this year it would be good to see Richard Herring, Paul Sinha, Simon Munnery, I try to see their shows every year. I saw Holly Walsh's show in preview and that was really good. Tom Price too. 

Any post-Edinburgh plans?

More touring. This feels like a show that would really work on tour or back in London, but then again that depends on how it goes up there.

Lastly, sell your show in three lines.

It's a show about something but it also has loads of jokes and stories in it. It'll make you laugh and think and tell you things that you don't already know.

Visit Matt Green here or buy tickets to his Edinburgh show here.

http://www.mattgreen.org/

http://www.pleasance.co.uk/edinburgh/events/matt-green-too-much-information