...as Family Tree is dumped

Nina Conti is making a new film – about becoming a 'giggle doctor' – as she revealed that the BBC Two comedy series Family Tree will not be returning.

The ventriloquist told Chortle that a second season of the show, directed by Christopher Guest and starring Chris O'Dowd, ‘is not happening, I heard that a few weeks ago'.

But her next project involves cheering up children in hospitals across the south of England and shooting a documentary about the experience to air on the BBC next year.

Conti, who is working under the title Dr Doolally, was told that her puppets 'wouldn't really be welcome' on the wards because 'they're unhygienic and there are latex allergies to worry about’.

Provisionally titled Clowning Around, the 60-minute feature, directed by Conti and made by her company Pika Productions, will be her third shown on the BBC.

It follows last year's alternative therapies travelogue Nina & Monkey’s Search For Enlightenment and the Bafta-nominated Her Master's Voice, which followed her trip to America to lay to rest the ventriloquist puppets left to her by her late mentor and partner Ken Campbell.

This latest film is 'two concurrent stories' she explains. 'One is me trying to find my clown and going to every clown course on this godforsaken Earth, whilst also learning how to do it in hospitals, a quite different art from what we generally think of as clowning.'

Although popularised by the 1998 Robin Williams film depicting the life of clown doctor Patch Adams, the Giggle Doctors scheme was conceived by Swiss brothers André and Jan Poulie and introduced to the UK in 1994 at Great Ormond Street Hospital. Today, 19 hospitals are visited as part of the project run by the Theodora Children’s Trust, designed to alleviate children's fears during their treatment and the sadness of being away from family and friends.

Conti – who was yesterday nominated for a British Comedy Award –  passed an audition to become a Giggle Doctor but she's still 'not even a junior clown at the moment, I'm an assistant. I'm just walking around with an expert, it's a really intensive training process.

'The people that do it are fantastic, hugely inspiring people. They make the kids laugh and do funny stuff but they're not squirting flowers and don't have painted faces. They're very sensitive, very good at reading a situation and very funny on a one-to one basis, offering the child a space to play and a different kind of kinship from what they're getting from anyone else in the hospital, lifting them out of their predicament.

'It's so successful and so overwhelmingly exciting. The kids are transformed and the parents are so grateful because no-one's playing, everyone's been so worried about blood tests or whatever else.'

Being unable to rely upon her puppets prompted Conti to contemplate quitting the scheme. But she said: 'I've started having glimpses that I can do it.

'I'm used to performing to big audiences, in high-pressure gigs but the first time I went out into the ward, all dressed up silly, I felt like a fraud. I felt like I didn't know anything and hadn't got a clue. I just wanted the ground to swallow me up.'

After suffering personal distress during the making of Her Master's Voice, she was concerned that 'the danger of making a film like this is that it sounds like it's going to be too weepy and emotional. But so far it hasn't felt that way, and I'm the worst weeper of them all. It's so fascinating to take comedy to this really rarefied atmosphere where it's working frontline, in a way.'

With at least another year of training left, she anticipates being a giggle doctor 'forever, I can just tell that I'm never going to stop doing it'.

But Conti says she 'isn't interested in writing grow-up shows as a clown, not yet' and confirmed that she won't be dropping the puppets 'because I find it easier to express myself with them.

However she said that the principles of clowning are infiltrating her work, and she may be collaborating with Phil Burgers, aka Edinburgh Comedy Award-winner Dr Brown, on her next live show – although it is unlikely to be performed at the 2014 Edinburgh Fringe.

‘My next show will have new characters but probably also lots of audience participation, quite high risk,’ she said. 'The more clown courses I do, the more fascinated I become by it. [Burgers' course] was amazing, I loved it. Horrifying, brutal but just so funny. It's really improved my normal stage act, making me feel excited when things go wrong, in a way that makes it kind of impossible to go wrong.'

Before that, she wants to make a documentary about 'someone other than me, I just haven't got the guts to ask anyone yet'.

And earlier this week, she shot the pilot for another BBC production, the gameshow Speak For Yourself, in which her puppets Monkey and Granny quiz couples about their lives and 'really put them through the mill.

'It's bonkers, absolutely mental, in a way that primetime telly's not used to being' she says.

– by Jay Richardson

Published: 4 Dec 2013