Martin Bearne has had a lot on his plate – he’s been busy rehearsing his Fringe show and locating his escaped pet rat.
When we speak via a Zoom call, Biscuit is safely back in her cage but by all accounts it has been a fraught 24 hours.
“My girlfriend used to be a vet and so she was really helpful with what to do,” says Martin.
“She was calming me down, saying ‘she’ll come out, don’t fret, don’t panic’.
As well as escape artist Biscuit, Martin also has Ethel and Ritchie.
“They are such intelligent animals, so innocent and thoughtful and funny,” he says.
“They have their own little personalities.”
The Fringe
Now that his rat situation is firmly under control, I ask him what it’s like to perform at the Fringe.
“I always compare it to being in a boy band,” he says.
“There’s so much intensity for so long and you’re in all these different places every day and you’re performing, and when it’s over in September, you feel like you’ve just left Take That and you’ve got nothing.
“You’re Howard Donald or something, although he’s doing very well now if you know what I mean.
“It’s a bit of a blur, you look back on it and you think ‘I don’t remember much from this’.
“The day-to-day is meeting people and you see all of your mates as well that you haven’t seen, from gigs. It’s a mix of everything I would say.”
His show, Broken Funnies, is an hour of comedy theatre with the tag line: “A comedian walks into a therapist’s office…”
After performing Broken Funnies at the Fringe in 2019, he has developed it further with the help of renowned comedy director Viv Gee.
“Viv has been great,” says Martin. “She’s been helping me slow down, find the right pauses, rework certain scenes.
“It’s a mix of sketch, a bit of stand-up, it’s also very one-man show-y.
Mental health
“A lot of it is me talking to my therapist and the whole thing is I’m trying to make my therapist laugh and she’s not giving anything away.
“I’m a big advocate of mental health, I think everyone should go to therapy.
“When I first went to therapy it was just me trying to make this person laugh, see if they liked me kind of thing, so that’s kind of what the show’s about.”
Martin, 36, is originally from Ellon, Aberdeenshire, and has three Fringe shows and two Scottish Comedian of the Year Finals under his belt as well as television and radio credits including BBC Scotland’s The Comedy Underground and BBC Radio Scotland’s The Good, The Bad and The Unexpected with Mark Nelson.
Therapist-style, I ask him about his childhood.
“I was quite shy but I had this love of drama and acting and I always wanted to be an actor,” he says.
“When I was a kid I would just do it by myself, I would make these little videos.
“Then when I was 13 in secondary school I had to be Bottom from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and I came out and acted really nervous.
“The place erupted and I thought ‘ooh I like this, this is quite nice, that feeling of getting the first laugh’.
“My school was a bit weird because I’m dyslexic. I remember saying to a teacher that I wanted to be a film director and he said ‘well maybe you could work in a shop’.
“It’s funny now, but it was quite devastating at the time, there was a sort of ‘well, he’s clearly got learning problems, let’s not let him get his expectations too high’.
Stand-up
“It affects my confidence even to this day. I think that’s why I got into stand-up because I wanted to prove myself.”
Isn’t doing stand-up terrifying? I say to Martin.
“It was; I always tell people I was in college years ago and I was very shy and socially awkward and I started to make jokes about it and that kind of put people at ease.
“I remember one time I was speaking to this girl and I was so awkward and I said something and it came out wrong, like it sounded like I was angry.
“After that I started developing more of a sense of humour about myself and I thought, ‘I’m going to try stand-up’.”
Martin studied acting and performing in college in Aberdeen in 2004 and then in Fife.
“They were the best years of my life,” he muses.
“I’d just come out of Ellon Academy and I was very awkward and then at college you meet people who are like you and you kind of find your own voice.”
Having found that voice, Martin will be appearing at the Edinburgh Fringe at Venue 16, Greenside @ Riddles Court most days from August 15 at 2.55pm.
Conversation