Natasia Demetriou: On the Crest of a New Wave

Watching her sing a capella and don a polyester pizza costume—all within the first 15 minutes of her act—it's hard to imagine that Natasia Demetriou has seen so little of the spotlight of late. Since the formation of her sketch group Oyster Eyes in 2010, she seems to have spent as much time championing her friends' work as she has perfecting her own. But maybe that self-effacement is a reasonable reaction when The Invisible Dot's producers tout you and your social circle under the imposing label "The New Wave".

"I feel very lucky that there's a group of comedians who are coming up together at the same stage in their careers,” says Demetriou. “You've got Sheeps, Ellie White, my brother [Jamie Demetriou], Oscar [Jenkyn-Jones], Mae [Martin], Claudia [O'Doherty] – although she's been doing stuff for longer. We're really lucky that we have this shared sensibility, and we are genuinely very good friends. I think they're the funniest people in the world."

It's hard work to get her to sing her own praises. But with multiple appearances in Channel 4's Comedy Blaps shorts, a recent spot on Live At The Electric, some enviable TV writing credits and a BBC radio comedy in the works (a satirical internet roundup), a solo hour from Demetriou is long overdue.

“I'd been doing some work-in-progress stuff last year in Edinburgh, but that got a bit messed up because I love my brother too much!” she says. “He was having a really tough month with laryngitis. When it was all done I said 'right, I need to just book in a date and do a show, just to see if I can do it.'”

Brother Jamie’s three weeks in Scotland were indeed a trial by fire: a gauntlet of triumph and catastrophe that included the aforementioned laryngitis, laptop theft and the type of early mega-acclaim that must have been exhausting to live up to, all capped off with a surprising snub for the Best Newcomer shortlist. It's no surprise that, for his older sister, the first run-through of her solo debut was a daunting prospect. “I was totally silent for about three days in the run-up to the show. I just thought I was going to die,” she says, grinning with a shadow of that remembered terror. “But it was just the greatest crowd. So I thought, yeah, maybe I can keep doing this!”

Her audience that night was seated in the garage-sized space of The Invisible Dot, London’s cradle for the young, talented, and maybe-a-little-bit-accidentally hip. And among a set of up-and-comers as tight-knit as theirs (many of them studied together at Leeds University), Demetriou understands the importance of asserting her own identity. "In comedy you can get really bogged down and worried that something's been done before, and I just hope that I have a strong enough vision for my work to be distinct.”

“Distinct” is likely a given: in its earliest form, You’ll Never Have All Of Me looks like an hour of eclectic character pieces sprinkled with Demetriou’s own flavour of magnetic strangeness. It could be down to the fact that, rather than ape the usual suspects of alt comedy, she's made idols of acts you'd never think to identify as her influences – French and Saunders, Peter Kay, and one even less likely comedy troupe: “The Muppets were my and Jamie's thing! I honestly think Sesame Street gave us a sense of humor. We watched it religiously.”  

To Demetriou, any good performance is ever-evolving. “I've got a few shows coming up where I'll be making decisions about the characters,” she says. “If I get to Edinburgh and one of the characters isn't working out, then I want to be able to change things up. I don't want to be having that panic of, 'This is what my show is and I must do it like this every night no matter what!” she explains. “I feel like I just want the show to be so much fun. For both the audience and me.”