Last week, Becky Fury organised a celebratory ‘living wake’ – a ‘woke wake’ – for her ‘mentor’ British Alternative Comedy pioneer Tony Allen. He is still alive. 

Among the many performers were Attila The Stockbroker, Bob Boyton, Ivor Dembina, Jonny Fluffypunk, John Hegley, Mark ‘Mr Nasty’ Kelly, Simon Munnery and Alexei Sayle with a bar tab donation by Ben Elton. 

Becky told me the venue almost had as many acts paying tribute to Tony Allen as there were seats.

Ironically, the one person who did NOT tell a story about Tony on the night was Becky – because, she says, “I was massively over-stretched organising it”.

What she would have said was: 

“Tony was basically my Dad for a few years and ‘adopted’ me when I was fucked-up and precariously housed and nearly got addicted to heroin. As well as imparting a lot of wisdom to me, mainly through the medium of us dressing as clowns and dicking about, he gave me a much more productive addiction and form of self harm to indulge in than heroin: Stand-Up Comedy…”

Tonight, she opens her latest comedy show – IDENTITY – It runs every night for the whole duration of this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe. 

I asked her about it.

JOHN: Your show is called IDENTITY…

BECKY: Well, obviously I’ve got lots of very fashionable identities. I’m brown and bi-sexual and non-binary and I’m all of these things and I have an outsider status and they’re all fashionable. So I could do a very fashionable show about those things, but I thought I’d celebrate something unfashionable instead. I thought I’d do it about being British. It’s about putting the -ish into British. It’s about British identity.

And it’s about MY identity and why my British identity has caused me… Well, it has also got the sort of edge you have to have in Edinburgh Fringe shows. It has caused me problems. Oh, poor me!

JOHN: This happens about 40 minutes in to the show?

(BECKY & JOHN LAUGH)

…the ‘Dead Dad’ spot where an Edinburgh Fringe comedy audience starts to flag and the performer pulls the rug from under them by suddenly bringing in a serious story about a dead dad or some other unexpected tragedy…

BECKY: (LAUGHING) Well, it IS about dead relatives. Not a dead dad, though.

JOHN: So, last week you had a wake for a comic with cancer who is not yet dead and now your new Edinburgh show this week has death in it.

BECKY: (LAUGHING) You told me there’s even death in the Barbie movie this week.

JOHN: Becky and Barbie – harbingers of death.

BECKY: (LAUGHING) It’s definitely a theme.

JOHN: Your show is about British identity. There must be stuff about racial prejudice in it.

BECKY: No. I don’t want to do all that.

JOHN: You must have had it, though.

BECKY: No. 

JOHN: Because you went to a posh school?

BECKY: And also because I grew up in South London – in Brixton! – and people don’t do that sort of thing down there.

JOHN: You’re too white in Brixton.

BECKY: Exactly. I grew up very multi-cultural, so I never really had that experience. There’s a story in the show about my ‘revelation’ that I wasn’t white. It basically involved me looking in the Sun newspaper and figuring out that their women had pink nipples and mine were brown.

JOHN: Can I mention that, given it’s a part of the show?

BECKY: Yeah. I haven’t told you the rest of the story.

JOHN: Someone I know in London has recently moved from Leytonstone, which is very very multicultural, to Upton Park…

BECKY: West Ham… 

JOHN: Yes. When I went there for the first time, I thought it was going to be full of dodgy white skinheads but it wasn’t at all. It’s Indian sub-continent with a smattering of blacks. 

BECKY: That’s interesting: that there are lots of Indians there now. Because my nan is from there. There’s a picture of her with the FA Cup from 1975, because she helped win it!

JOHN: I don’t remember seeing her in the team.

BECKY: She was making the sandwiches. She was the tea lady at West Ham football club when they were a proper family. She used to make the sandwiches for the team in her kitchen in Dagenham.

JOHN: The sandwiches must have been a bit stiff and curly by the time they got to West Ham.

BECKY: No!… She was my British nan: Violet Fury. 

JOHN: Even after all these years of knowing you, I can barely cope with ‘Fury’ being a real name not a stage name.

BECKY: Well it is. And if you had a woman with a name like Violet Fury making your sandwiches, you couldn’t help but win the FA Cup.

JOHN: You have done previews of the IDENTITY show?

BECKY: Yes, at the Morecambe Festival and the Barrow Festival. 

JOHN: Barrow?

BECKY: You’ve been to Barrow?

JOHN: Sadly, I have been to Barrow-in-Furness and Lima in Peru.

BECKY: What’s the connection?

JOHN: Both are shit-holes. Or they were back in the 1980s.

BECKY: I had to try to rescue someone from Lima once. He got stuck there in Lima Prison for five years: drug dealing.

JOHN: That must have been even worse than just living in Lima normally. I went to Barrow-in-Furness to research a blind man who wanted to parachute jump. Truly. That’s what Barrow does to you. 

You should take all your comedy shows to Lima. They need a good laugh there.

BECKY: But back to my new Edinburgh show… IDENTITY, 7.30 every night – Laughing Horse @ Bar 50.

JOHN: Well plugged. That’s enough. I have to transcribe this…