Sketch and ting
Susan has made stuff with Charlie. They met while working with comedy sketch group, The Unexpected Items, who shot to a bit of fame with their 'Gap Yah' sketch. Charlie was directing them at the time when they asked Susan if she knew anyone who would get them a) out of debt and b) to Edinburgh. So Susan produced them for a couple of years and they did two Edinburgh festivals, toured higher education establishments, played Glastonbury, Latitude and other comedy festivals as well as typical London comedy joints. They laughed a lot. Especially the time in the lighting box during a show at Karen Koren's Gilded Balloon where Charlie told Susan she smelled like death (they later found out she had stepped in pre-show Scottish dog excrement). The show wasn't shit, but the shit was funny. Susan got the name 'SuHu' from The Items (perhaps more specifically from T-Dubz - cheers, Tom).
She has always been interested in the intersection of comedy, performance, accent and identity (once writing a thesis called Not Quite White, so you get the idea). Drawn together by a mutual respect and attraction to Otherness, they set out to explore a shared love of language and laughter, mashing up cultures as they went. They like to call it 'Questioning Comedy'. Why not?
How To Kiss was the first piece they made in January 2011. Conceived at a sweaty wrap party at the Wyndhams Theatre in December 2010 and shot in the conservatory of the Assamese parents of an old, gold school friend of Susan's, the idea grew from a conversation where Susan asked Charlie for his professional opinion on the ethics of metadata when populating YouTube videos i.e. can you put 'hot naked butts' in the data for an online ad for a garden centre in order to attract more views. Being a man of integrity yet working for the BBC in digital media at the time, Charles said it wasn't the done thing and proceeded to inform Susan that people in India were more likely to enter 'how to kiss' in a search engine than they were anything porn related. And so with their natural predispositions to on-screen presenting, coupled with their knowledge of India's overpopulation, they called in the help of Charles' Hindi speaking friends, Daniel Mudford's camera and editing skills, and the voiceover talent of one of Susan's exes (she still thinks it sounds like he's trying to be quiet in the next room to his sleeping wife and kids - ah the wonder of remote working and WAV recorders) and decided that How-To videos were the way forward...
How To Kiss was the first piece they made in January 2011. Conceived at a sweaty wrap party at the Wyndhams Theatre in December 2010 and shot in the conservatory of the Assamese parents of an old, gold school friend of Susan's, the idea grew from a conversation where Susan asked Charlie for his professional opinion on the ethics of metadata when populating YouTube videos i.e. can you put 'hot naked butts' in the data for an online ad for a garden centre in order to attract more views. Being a man of integrity yet working for the BBC in digital media at the time, Charles said it wasn't the done thing and proceeded to inform Susan that people in India were more likely to enter 'how to kiss' in a search engine than they were anything porn related. And so with their natural predispositions to on-screen presenting, coupled with their knowledge of India's overpopulation, they called in the help of Charles' Hindi speaking friends, Daniel Mudford's camera and editing skills, and the voiceover talent of one of Susan's exes (she still thinks it sounds like he's trying to be quiet in the next room to his sleeping wife and kids - ah the wonder of remote working and WAV recorders) and decided that How-To videos were the way forward...
Like a lot of unwanted pregnancies, How To Get His Attention was conceived on Valentine's Day. It came about at a time when they both wanted to speak Japanese involving a domestic situation, which in turn coincided with Andy Gray getting fired from Sky Sports, Susan wanting to do Manga poses in the shop window of DFS, Torres leaving Liverpool for Chelsea, and Charlie wanting to eat a whole load of Chipsticks. It was all so obvious when you think, looking back about it.
How To Parent happened I think because they wanted to do something with no dialogue, to keep people guessing as to their real accents. Man, people sure were fooled, huh. Also, I think Charlie wanted to do something where he looked relatively normal so that his Mum's Chiswick friends would say he looked handsome, but I could be wrong there. Charles suggested that they 'have' a baby in this piece portraying familial bliss and Susan wondered why they couldn't cast an overweight 48 year old as the baby (she had seen the film Suture in 1996, so that was an influencing factor). This piece features an appearance by Matthew Lyons, who Susan met while working on the Fimbles in 2003, as well a cameo showcasing the inimitable acting stylings of Stephen Campbell.
Apparently, they had had enough of the How-To videos by now and next went on to produce The Wrong Type, featuring the camera work of Cheryl Duncan and Stuart Learmonth and the editing skills of Alex Weeks.
This sketch came about when it became obvious that they were really suited to being detectives (in production meetings Charlie would do most of the talking but every so often Susan would come up with a couple of words that would indicate she had in fact been listening all along). In conjunction with this, Charlie had an inexplicable desire to chase and arrest Brown & Corley, the double act that feature with them in this piece. Around the same time, Susan told Charles that she wanted to do something font-orientated that was also connected with the boys in blue, as she recalled a five hour graphic design lecture she had once sat in in Paris, where they kept banging on about the police, when it was only when she got back to her apartement that she looked it up in the dictionary and discovered that the French for 'font' is 'police'.
About the same time, Charlie and Susan appeared as police officers in a Bill Bailey sketch in which they had to arrest him for playing his horns in the street, so they already had the costumes on a week's hire from Angels and had to get the wear out of them, obvs. Then Charles came up with the marvellous idea of the wedding invitations thing and they all went into a car park beneath the BBC and did a bit of running...
This sketch came about when it became obvious that they were really suited to being detectives (in production meetings Charlie would do most of the talking but every so often Susan would come up with a couple of words that would indicate she had in fact been listening all along). In conjunction with this, Charlie had an inexplicable desire to chase and arrest Brown & Corley, the double act that feature with them in this piece. Around the same time, Susan told Charles that she wanted to do something font-orientated that was also connected with the boys in blue, as she recalled a five hour graphic design lecture she had once sat in in Paris, where they kept banging on about the police, when it was only when she got back to her apartement that she looked it up in the dictionary and discovered that the French for 'font' is 'police'.
About the same time, Charlie and Susan appeared as police officers in a Bill Bailey sketch in which they had to arrest him for playing his horns in the street, so they already had the costumes on a week's hire from Angels and had to get the wear out of them, obvs. Then Charles came up with the marvellous idea of the wedding invitations thing and they all went into a car park beneath the BBC and did a bit of running...
In August 2011 they visited a gay club in Edinburgh. You know the type - where your feet stick to the floor and the clientele look like melty sailors. Charlie and Susan took it in turns to get down with a brother on the dance floor and luckily Charles had brought along his handy HD Flip camera. It seemed like the done thing to do to insert the footage into a period drama style piece and so - with the aid of the one like Dan Johnson on camera and edit suite - Lady Chatterley's Brother was born.
