Bennett Arron

"I finished, and I walked off to two hand claps - my parents - and I thought, oh well there's no point in me doing stand up, because it obviously hasn't worked."

Bennett's first taste of stand-up comedy was at his parents' synagogue in Wales, in between speeches given by a holocaust survivor and the Chief Rabbi. Having moved to London, he'd been invited back to talk about what he had been doing in London. It didn't go well. He thought to himself, "I can't imagine a gig ever being as bad as that," and so decided to give himself three gigs to decide whether it was the right career choice for him. "The first one I did was the Kings Head and then I did another two, and my fourth gig was at Jongleurs, my fifth one was at the Comedy Store and they'd all gone quite well. And then that was it." Bennett had managed to find a path into stand-up which hadn't involved the open spot circuit. "Harry Hill was very good to me when I first started. He came up to me and said 'I really like what you do, I think it's very very funny, I will mention you to my agent.' I thought that was very nice, but I didn't think he would. And then the next day I got a call from his agent and got booked in to quite a few gigs."

Shortly after taking his first steps into stand-up, Bennett was spotted by the BBC New Comedy Awards people, "they had come along to see someone else and I was doing a short spot in the gig, and they came up to me after the gig and said they'd like to put me through to the heats." Bennett went on to win his heat, get himself into the final and was placed joint runner-up with Peter Kay. "And what's happened to him now?" jokes Bennett.

Growing up, Bennett used to love Morcambe and Wise, Tommy Cooper and The Goodies but none of them had a direct influence on his comedy. "I can't really think of anybody that I ever saw and went, 'yeah, I'd like to be like that,' because I never really wanted to do stand up. Of course, I've influenced a lot myself!" The people that Bennett can watch over and over again are Harry Hill, Lee Mack, Adam Bloom, Michael Legge - "although I've got to say that." There is no-one on the circuit that he particularly dislikes but if any of the afore-mentioned are on the same bill as Bennett, he will stick around to see them even though he has seen them numerous times. "These are people that write very well."

Before launching himself into stand-up, Bennett had always been a writer for as long as he could remember. "In school I was only ever interested in English. I'd always wanted to write comedy sketches, I always had loads of them. In drama school we'd put on little sketch evenings and I'd always write them. Even in school, you know when you have that end of term party thing, I'd be the person who would write it all." From there, Bennett got a place in drama school and once he completed his time there, decided to pursue his love of comedy writing and started sending sketches out. One recipient of these sketches was a guy who had dealings with a German company who were on the lookout for British writers and so Bennett was commissioned to write for these foreign companies.

"When I was in Spain, the place where I was had channels from all around Europe and I suddenly saw one of my sketches on this German channel, translated in to German, which was odd." He then shamelessly went on to write for Hale and Pace, which Bennett insists, was only because it paid well. On a trip from Dubai to Bahrain, Bennett was required to fill in an immigration form and so under occupation, put 'writer' but this was misconstrued as meaning journalist and Bennett was taken into a room with two armed guards. A third armed guard entered the room. "He sat down opposite me and then eventually he said to me, 'So, you're a writer?' I said 'yes.' He said, 'You've come over here to report on us?' I said, 'No, I'm not a journalist, I'm a TV writer' and he said 'so, you're doing news for TV'. I said, 'no I write for television, I write comedy'. I don't think they were interested in what I had to say, and there was a bit of a language thing. Fortunately, because I was doing gigs, I had my CV with me because I was doing interviews and stuff, so I said 'look, this is what I do', and he went 'Oh! Hale and Pace!' So, three months they locked me up for."

"We talked about getting married and realised that wouldn't work. We've done quite a lot together so I'm teaching Michael quite a lot about comedy."

The comedy circuit in Bennett's home country of Wales is small and on the verge of getting even smaller. Bennett recently returned to perform in a pre-St. David's day gig along with four or five other Welsh comedians. "There was only myself and Noel James that were sort of known. I don't think there are as many Welsh comedians as Scottish or Irish and I've just been told that another club has closed down unfortunately." This lack of talent being nurtured in Wales is likely a result of the lack of comedy clubs and therefore the lack of open spots available and with a lack of new talent there is less demand for comedy clubs to open. It's a vicious circle. "There are a lot of more mainstream Welsh comedians around and I've got friends who still do the mainstream circuit and the cruises and the working men's clubs - what's left of them - but I don't know of any body else on the circuit at the moment." Bennett was recently on the same bill as Lee Evans during some of his pre-UK tour warm up shows at the Glee club in Cardiff. "That was great. I was a little bit apprehensive because I thought, they haven't come to see me, and maybe because I was on before him they're not going to even want to listen. But it was really nice. And he did very well. I think he learnt a lot from me," he sniggers.

Besides Hale and Pace, more recent and credible writing projects include 'The Real McCoy' and the '11 O'clock Show'. Bennett was also called in to script edit Davina McCall's sitcom 'Sam's Game' for ITV1 - a job he landed following his success of winning the TAPS award for comedy writing which was attended by a number of people in the industry. Bennett is currently awaiting news of what is to become of an autobiographical sitcom he has written and submitted to the BBC through Hartswood which also came off the back of the award. "I don't know where I got the idea from, it's about a Welsh guy from a small village in South Wales who comes to live in London. It just came to me." When Bennett was selected for the TAPS award they let him perform the lead which is against usual practice as they don't usually let the writers perform, but as he had trained as an actor and really wanted to do it, they let him. "I enjoy writing the most but I like the fact that I can write something and then go on stage and see an immediate reaction to it, but I'm enjoying both."

"We have written a scene, if it ever gets made, where these two characters end up in a jacuzzi full of naked women, just because we can."

Bennett has also found time to write another sitcom, set in a hospital, with friend and comedian Michael Legge. They performed together on the same bill during the 1999 Edinburgh Festival and decided they wanted to do something together. "We talked about getting married and realised that wouldn't work. We've done quite a lot together so I'm teaching Michael quite a lot about comedy," jokes Bennett. The sitcom is set in a hospital and is billed as a cross between Casualty and a comedy. When they eventually got together to write, they came up with a sitcom pilot and sent it to a couple of production companies. Again, Hartswood showed interest, took an option on it and sold the development idea to the BBC. "The BBC gave us money to write two more episodes and a couple of outlines, and we are just waiting to hear if they are going to say, 'yes, go ahead and do it,' or 'no we've changed our minds and we hate it', or 'here's some money anyway.' They might ask us to write a couple more episodes, or they might make a pilot for the series, they might go ahead and make the series, or they might just say 'we've changed our minds and we hate you.'" Of course Bennett and Michael have written parts for themselves, not the main parts but tiny back ground characters which will appear in each episode. "We have written a scene, if it ever gets made, where these two characters end up in a jacuzzi full of naked women, just because we can. Maybe it'll be a dream sequence, we don't know yet."

And as if all that wasn't enough to keep Bennett out of trouble, he is also writing a film, a book and a comedy drama. "The film and the book haven't been commissioned or anything, I've just been doing them in my spare time, when I get the chance…like about 3 o'clock in the morning. In between gigging." In the future Bennett would like for people to go to a comedy gig to see him rather than for people to go to a gig and Bennett happen to be on the bill. "That would be nice if people were coming along just because I was on." Obviously he is hoping that at least one of the sitcoms will get picked up on and for Bennett to play a part in it. "That way, I can encompass stand up, acting and writing. That's ideally where I'd like to see things going. If not, a lottery win."

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