It’s the morning after a gig the night before, and Alison Spittle is on cloud nine. The Westmeath comedian performed to a packed house in The Yard, Manchester, the evening prior and she’s grabbing a coffee and enjoying the sights and sounds of the city before heading back to her home in London.
“At this stage I’m walking on air to have gigs booked in,” she says, speaking by phone from a café in the city. “You’re driving up for five hours to do 20 minutes — and it’s worth it. I’m half-vaccinated now and I’m booked in to do a tour of Ireland… actually, I’m getting emotional now thinking I’ll get to see my mam.”
Like most comedians, Spittle missed the cut and thrust of stand-up during lockdown. She filled her time with a podcast, a Twitter watchalong event and a film project, but nothing compared to the adrenaline rush of live performance and the buzz of audience interaction.
Making people laugh is what she does for a living, and as our conversation segues into obscure analogies, droll observations and running gags, it becomes clear that she’s been deprived of this particular outlet for far too long.
We’re chatting ahead of the release of the film Bicycle Thieves: Pumped Up — an absurd action-comedy about a pizza-delivery girl, Mags (Roxanna Nic Liam), who’s dealing with the unholy trinity of a tricky landlord, a hard-nosed boss and local bike thieves.
Spittle plays Mags’s boss, a pizza chef called Bev, who barks out orders from her van with a lugubrious expression and a 20-a-day rasp. She says she drew inspiration for the role from her own short-lived career in the fast-food industry. “I used to work in a chipper van outside a nightclub in Meath,” she laughs. “It’s like Vietnam — I still get flashbacks to the noise and the smells of being in that van at 4am. The drunker the person got, the more sauce they wanted, which I think is the same in life, generally.”
Bicycle Thieves was shot in just 20 days, with a shoestring budget, a skeleton crew and a lot of favours. Director Conor O’Toole brought together some of Ireland’s funniest women for cameo appearances, including Tara Flynn, Aoife Dooley, Julie Jay and Spittle, who he has been friends with for years.
But this is Nic Liam’s film, as Spittle puts it. “She’s just the hardest-working, funniest actress — seriously, I’m in awe of her. She’s the main character and everybody is supporting her.”
It was great fun to work with old friends, Spittle says, but the project was tinged with sadness too. “A whole generation of my pals have gone to Glasgow and gone elsewhere, so the film is kind of a goodbye as well to my friendships and stuff. I miss Dublin but most of my friends have moved and that makes me miss it less and less.”
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Like Bicycle Thieves’ central character, Spittle’s friends were pushed out of the Dublin rental market due to rising prices. Spittle, who moved to Camden, London, in late 2018, had a similar experience — but she has seen another side to the Dublin housing crisis too.
“I had this landlord, Philip, who didn’t see the property as a thing he needed to extract as much money as possible from. It was €300 a month, all bills included, and he never raised my rent. If he didn’t exist, I don’t think I’d be doing comedy.
“But then, didn’t I move out like a big eejit, thinking, ‘I’m going to move in with my boyfriend into our own flat.’ You kind of get used to getting a letter in the door every couple of months telling you how much rent they could be getting for this house.
“Dublin can’t sustain that kind of demand for what it is,” she adds. “I love Dublin but it’s like the prettiest girl in the village.”
Alison Spittle in the new Irish movie Bicycle Thieves: Pumped Up
London has led Spittle to more opportunities, bigger audiences and, more recently, a BBC Sounds podcast, Wheel of Misfortune, with fellow comedian Fern Brady. “We get listeners to send in voice notes on their embarrassing stories and we talk about them. It’s a bit like Liveline, if you’d ring up and say, ‘Joe, I can’t believe it, I pissed myself on the bus.’”
If the podcast introduced her to wider UK audiences, her other lockdown project, the hugely successful #CovideoParty, kept her firmly rooted in Ireland. The hashtag, which trended throughout lockdown, encouraged Twitter users to watch and tweet about movies, and helped to keep spirits raised during a particularly dark time.
“I found that people were buying cereals that they enjoyed when they were kids during the lockdown because it felt like a comfort — and it’s similar with film,” she says. “So the films [we chose] had to be nostalgic, like Coco Pops on celluloid.”
Spittle says she’s now well settled into London life, but the move wasn’t too much of a culture shock. She was born in London and lived in Dresden, Germany, before her family moved to Westmeath when she was seven. “I was a little bookworm,” she says of her school days. “I used to read encyclopaedias and all that kind of stuff. I was obsessed with the concept of death as well… I never wanted to die.
“I also had to compensate for having an English accent… I think I was an observer of stuff. It’s mad, you kind of look back at your life and think, ‘This is what made me me’… and it’s always the weirdest things that you hold on to…”
She pauses briefly as she considers this idea. “Getting rejected for the shift makes someone’s personality,” she concludes. “I was a big-time frigid as well when I was younger… I was a frigid but I was also a very sober friend. I just wanted to dance.”
Spittle went on to study media at Ballyfermot College of Further Education, before landing a work-experience placement in Athlone’s iRadio. There she met Bernard O’Shea and Keith Walsh, who encouraged her to take part in a stand-up comedy challenge live on air. “I didn’t know anything about stand-up except for seeing a Tommy Tiernan DVD at a house party, and I only did it because I wanted to meet your man off Naked Camera. But I had a massive adrenaline rush and I couldn’t be away from it then. Nothing lived up to it.”
A few years later she moved to Dublin, where she began performing at comedy clubs. Slots at musical festivals followed, including a strangely fortuitous performance involving a heckler at Forbidden Fruit in 2015.
“I felt I was kind of doing well [on stage] but this lad stood up and started miming that he wanted to ride me… a lot of people want to demean me by insinuating that I’m not worthy of being a receptacle for them,” she says.
“It was around the time that I used to get a lot of abuse on the street for being fat and wearing mad clothes and stuff. I saw red and I destroyed him. I can’t even remember half of the things I said. I remember people were chanting at him to ‘get out, get out, get out’ and he had to leave… I’ve never felt so powerful before.”
Her diatribe was entirely off the cuff but it made a big impact on anyone who witnessed it. She received dozens of messages of support the next day, and a few job offers too.
“A fella from RTÉ was in and he gave me a job on a hidden-camera show — it really did actually help my career,” she laughs.
The experience later formed part of a blistering essay she wrote about the street harassment she has dealt with since her teens. “Do you know what’s mad, I don’t really get street harassed anymore,” she says. “Is that because of lockdown? How can anyone street harass you when you’re at home for 12 hours a day? But I have got it less, and I think it’s because the article went so well. And I think I would definitely have a bit more confidence when I walk. I take a lot less shite.”
The same could be said about her approach to social media. “I have 80,000 accounts blocked on Twitter — more than the population of Sligo — from using three different block bots. People might think that’s extreme but I do it not to be mildly annoyed — life’s too short to be mildly annoyed,” she says.
“I don’t have a problem with freedom of speech or anything like that,” she adds. “I just don’t want to hear it… Say whatever you like but I’m putting in headphones and not listening.”
She’s also beginning to realise that Twitter isn’t necessarily the best space for sounding off. “I’ve expressed opinions — and I still have those opinions — but afterwards I’ve thought, ‘Why did you say that?’
“I found myself arguing with people I’d tolerate in a chipper, fellas that play club football or who’re interested in golf. I was thinking, ‘Would I argue with these lads in real life?’ Sometimes I look at an account and think, ‘I don’t even know you, Peadar. I don’t know why we’re arguing.’”
Does she worry about getting cancelled? “Oh yeah, all the time… you do have that fear but I’m just so small. Like people get cancelled in their villages the whole time if you’re caught having an affair or whatever… When you have about four friends geographically, it’s very easy to get cancelled.”
With 80,000 accounts blocked, Spittle has clearly experienced social media at its most toxic. But social media sites can also be platforms for moments of reckoning, as Twitter was in June 2020, when several women spoke out about sexual misconduct in the Irish comedy scene.
“It was something I was aware of, definitely,” says Spittle. “Coming up in comedy, you couldn’t not be aware of it. You’d hear whispers and stuff… ‘Don’t be in a room alone with that lad.’”
Many of her friends stopped doing comedy around the same time but Spittle, who is now involved with an organisation called Comedy Safety Standards (CSS), thinks the problem is far too complex for knee-jerk reactions.
“This is stuff that we don’t have real answers for. Anything where someone has a dream, and it’s a vocation, there are going to be terrible people taking advantage of that.”
She thinks the CSS course, run with the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, offers a practical solution, but she’s also wary of positioning herself as an activist or a spokesperson.
“I’m not the comedy police and there’s only so much I can give to that,” she says. “I don’t have all the answers and nobody is telling you what to do… I couldn’t tell you how to wipe your arse, never mind other stuff. I’m just a comedian.”
