My Comedy Career: Gareth Gwynn

You'll have seen and heard Gareth Gwynn's name at the end of many comedy programmes. Here he gives us insight into his various roles.

Tell us what you do in your job.

I'm a comedy writer, presenter and producer - and probably in that order, although it shifts about a bit. The ratios have certainly changed over time and I think we've all been required to become comedic Swiss-army-knives to some extent.

I've been fortunate to work on all kinds of shows. I've co-written sitcoms with Benjamin Partridge, Elis James, Sian Harries, Tudur Owen and John-Luke Roberts; I've script edited sketch shows; I've presented features for BBC Radio 4; I co-present the comedy history podcast I'm So Not Over It with Esyllt Sears; and I also work as a radio producer on documentaries such a Rik Mayall, Panglobal Phenomenon.

I like the variety and I think I'd be frustrated if I was made to stay in a single gear but, deep-down, I probably prefer the jobs where I don't need to fill-in too many forms.

Are there any misconceptions as to what you do?

Oh plenty, most notably what car insurance companies seem to think I'm going to be doing with my vehicle because I write sitcoms.

How did you first get involved in the comedy industry?

I started out on Bath University's student radio station, and won the Best Comedy award at the student radio awards which gave me the confidence to give comedy a go.

In my first year out of university I worked for a financial advisers in the day while doing a bit of stand-up at night as well as presenting shows on the Welsh radio stations Bridge FM and Afan FM. Through a BBC talent scheme, I secured a pilot on what was then BBC Radio 7 and around the same time I got a job at the very short lived and utterly chaotic XFM South Wales as Breakfast Show producer.

In 2009 I applied for the BBC Radio Comedy in-house writer job and I think the panel looked at my rather frenetic life which comprised 4am breakfast show starts, cover shifts on late-night phone-ins, a smattering of stand-up gigs and overnight M4 drives for London writers' rooms and thought "this man desperately needs some structure in his life".

What key skills do you need to be able to do your job well?

As a writer, if you can avoid being precious about your work, it's a huge help. This probably comes with experience and volume. I'm sure that the more you write, the more confident you are that it'll keep coming and you won't run-out of ideas - so when a producer has an issue with a page, you're happier to ditch it and try again, rather than fight and fight to hold on to something wonky.

What has been your biggest career achievement to date?

Honestly, it feels like a huge achievement to get anything made and I never take writing something for TV or radio for granted - but I am particularly proud of anything which makes it to a second or third series. With Sian Harries and Tudur Owen, I've co-written a few projects which have run to several series, and that always felt like a real vote of confidence.

Ankle Tag, which was a sitcom I co-wrote with Benjamin Partridge for BBC Radio 4, ran to three series - the third of which was, I think, one of the earliest things recorded remotely in lockdown. Our producer, Adnan Ahmed, did an incredible job. Too good, if anything, as everyone assumed we'd recorded it before March. It was pretty galling to read articles about other shows "coping" with lockdown recordings when Adnan and the production team had quietly pulled it off without anyone noticing!

I took an awful lot from that experience - In fact, I asked him what kit we were couriering to actors and bought exactly the same stuff for my own lockdown projects. Beyond the production issues, I learnt so much from writing Ankle Tag in terms of sitcom plotting, balancing A and B plots and, in Series 3, exactly how many extra words you need in a script to cover the fact you don't have a studio audience any more.

And what has been the biggest challenge/disappointment?

This is such a sad story that "disappointment" doesn't do it justice - but in 2019 John-Luke Roberts and I were lucky enough to work with The Goodies on a reunion special for Audible. It's still online but the whole exercise was meant to be a bit of a dry-run for what would have been a full series to mark 50 years of The Goodies. One of the last times I left the house pre-pandemic was to meet Luke and go through the notes we'd had from Graeme Garden and the producer, Barnaby Eaton-Jones, on some plot-outlines for the series.

In April 2020, Tim Brooke-Taylor died from Covid-19 which was absolutely devastating. Luke and I had worked with him before on our very silly TV sitcom Bull, in which he played a dancing egg shop owner, and he was always absolutely delightful company and such a lovely man. Obviously, there was no way the show could continue without Tim - and by this point an Audible show was the least of everyone's concerns. Barnaby Eaton-Jones actually wrote-up two of the plots as novellas, which you can still buy - and the money goes to a charity for which Tim was patron.

Talk us through a typical day.

Can I talk about last Thursday as it contained a bit of everything?

We kicked-off with a bit of podcast admin. I co-present the show I'm So Not Over It with the comedian Esyllt Sears which is so much fun to record. We put out a 20 minute episode every week covering a month in recent history, and there's always some research or editing to be done. I try to squidge the podcast work in before the day begins proper (with mixed success).

At 10am I called the stand-up comedian Juliette Burton, who is marking ten years of appearing at the Gilded Balloon in Edinburgh with a best-of show. She has 7 hour-long shows to get through, covering a wide range of styles and subject matter, so I'm helping her select the best bits and turn it into a coherent hour. I've known Juliette since 2018, so a lot of this material I never saw first time round, but it has been fun to try and piece it together. So we spent two hours that morning making an old bit sound more like a new bit.

Then I went to the pharmacist to pick up my blood pressure tablets because that's a thing now.

After lunch, I got on with working on my own stand-up material. This is fairly new for me but I'm developing a live show about my great-grandfather who was a seafarer, farmer and poet. His poems are a really funny record of the Gower Peninsula between the wars, and I'm doing a work-in-progress show about him in the Camden Fringe at the end of July (Ooh, do come! It's going to be great).

It's been years since I've done stand-up properly so 2025 has been about doing as many gigs as I possibly can to work-up the material and become comfortable on-stage again. I've really enjoyed the process so far - considerably more than I ever did in my post-university go at stand-up! It's in Aces and Eights on the 28-30 July at 6.30pm.

That done, I darted into town to the Museum of Comedy to watch a preview of Juliette's show, where I hid in the back and made notes (which I still need to send her! Good reminder!) - before taking part in Bec Hill's Pick'N'Mix show. It's such a great format in which the names of routines are written on post-its on-stage and the audience shouts-out for what bit they want to hear next. It means acts can trial new material and get audience feedback, so very useful and really good fun. It ended with the other acts encouraging me to buy a doormat as a prop. To find out why, you'll have to come to Camden!

Full disclosure, that was a particularly intense day. Sometimes it's a lot more laptop/email based (Friday) or ends with me going to see Sparks in the Hammersmith Apollo (Wednesday).

How, if at all, do you aim for a good work-life balance?

I absolutely love you included "if at all" in this question!

It can be tricky when deadlines land all at once - especially if you're working for different companies. Things can pile-up a bit. I do try and keep weekends free (or at least one day of a weekend free). Also, I think it helps to have a partner or housemate who keeps slightly more regular hours, so you don't lose track on what's normal - But then if their job goes through some sort of once-in-a-generation upheaval, suddenly you're both eating toast in the kitchen at 3am and all bets are off.

Tell us a trick/secret/resource that you use to make your job quicker/easier.

I've spoken to others about this but when you're balancing writing/performing with a day job, a sympathetic and encouraging boss or company is a godsend! Someone happy for you to move shifts for gigs and opportunities is so useful. When I worked for a financial advisors in mid-Wales, they let me shove my hours around so I could get a bus to Bridgend and pre-record a weekend radio show once a week! With hindsight, that is absolutely wild.

Similarly, if you can have a regular writing or presenting gig that keeps things ticking over, hang onto that for as long as you possibly can. I've been really lucky to have had a few of those. I had a weekly music show on BBC Radio Wales for a number of years, which was such good fun. And for about two years, I also wrote jokes every day for the XFM London Breakfast show. I'd finish a normal day's writing on something and then spend the journey home with the Metro or Evening Standard on my lap, writing lines for Jon Holmes to use in the morning.

They were bringing in a very predictable sum of money, which you rarely have as a freelancer, and it takes the pressure off a bit. It means, if you need to spend a week or two working up a pitch or writing a spec-script unpaid, you can do so without that immediate worry of how you're paying the bills. And also, if you have spent all day stuck on a single page plot point, switching to write ten one liners is a breath of fresh air!

If you could change one thing about the comedy industry, what would it be?

That we all have one government-issued cover-story for what we do for a living when we have to talk to taxi drivers and hairdressers. I presume MI6 have some great ones going spare that don't immediately lead to the question "so, what do you think of woke?"

What tips would you give for anyone looking to work in your area of the industry?

I think with all these things the best way to get good at something is to get out there and do it - so in the case of writing, getting your work in front of producers is key. I'd always suggest people keep an eye on the various BBC shows which accept unsolicited material, like DMs Are Open.

I worked on that show's predecessor, Newsjack, and so many of the people who sent in sketches now work on some of the biggest shows on TV and radio. Sitcoms are so expensive and slots are so hard to come by, I think building a track-record you can stick on a CV and email to an agent/producer is vital and that's such a good way to do it. So get involved with those open-door shows, and I guarantee you'll learn so much by doing so.

Also, be nice, watch and listen to a lot of comedy and remember, some insurance companies don't actually require you to state an occupation - so that's quite handy.

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Gareth Gwynn performs Cyril at the Camden Fringe on 28-30 July. Tickets

You can listen to I'm So Not Over It wherever you get your podcasts.