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Jonny Donahoe and Paddy Gervers - Jonny and the Baptists: The Happiness Index Interview

Following a highly praised fun at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Jonny & The Baptists are taking their poignant and hilarious production, The Happiness Index on a terrific UK tour! 

Photo by Matt Crockett

Blending mental health, politics, and personal tragedy The Happiness Index looks at the recent tumultuous years of UK Politics and the modern-day mental health support – or lack thereof – through musical comedy, sharp social commentary, and raw emotional honesty. 

Through their unique blend of wit and vulnerability, Jonny Donahoe (Every Brilliant Thing, Stop UKIP) and Paddy Gervers (Lefty Scum, Making Paddy Happy) reflect on how our mental wellbeing is shaped by the political and societal landscape.

Ahead of the tour we sat down with Jonny and Paddy to learn more.

What can you tell me about your latest show?
The Happiness Index is a very funny comedy-theatre show about how extremely depressed both of us have been over the last fifteen years; and most importantly about the positive and nourishing impact of our friendship and working together. It combines stand-up, storytelling, gig-theatre and songs and is our most honest and personal show to date.

Where did the inspiration for this show come from?
Many years ago when he was Prime Minister, shiny-faced austerity-millionaire David Cameron decided to start a “happiness index” questionnaire for all the people of Britain to fill out. His intention - hilariously - was to show us how happy he and his government had made us. The results were never actually published, from our perspective we can only assume he was too busy shutting hospitals and libraries, or f*cking that pig. Anyway, we’ve run with the idea and wanted to see just how happy everyone really is - or could be …

How did you approach the writing and development of the show?
We worked on this show with award-winning theatre maker and director James Rowland (Learning to Fly, Team Viking). We knew where we wanted to get to by the end of the show - and James suggested we write it by improvising the whole show over and over again. First in front of just James, then trying again in front of audiences and building and refining over many months without ever putting pen to paper. We only ever had a script written down once it was finished. It’s a terrifying process to begin with - but it allowed us to be brutally honest, vulnerable and genuine about a subject that meant so much to us

Having enjoyed a strong run at the Edinburgh Fringe, do you approach the show in the same way ahead re-performing it?
We’ve reworked it a little the last few weeks but it’s the same show from last year’s fringe!

Photo by Matt Crockett

How much of yourselves is reflected in the material you write?
We try to be really honest in this show - the good and the bad. We’re not shy of being critical of the political landscape of the last fifteen years, and so it’s important we’re as honest with ourselves too. 

How do you navigate making things like the political landscape into a comedy? 
Well - when we started writing this we were at the end of fourteen years of Tories in charge. Now we’re in the first year of a Labour government. We were previously in a situation where a group of deeply out-of-touch millionaires who did nothing for the working people of the country were in charge. Now we’ve got …. [checks notes] … wait, hang on. Now we’ve got … um, there must be something they’ve done that’s good? They’ve had eight months …  Ooh, Keir Starmer’s glasses are very nice. I’m sure he paid for them.

How do you mentally and physically prepare for a tour? 
We need to start doing this. Mentally and physically preparing. Pilates and yoghurt, that sort of thing. But we keep forgetting and we’re getting old. Paddy’s 34 and I’m (Jonny) nearly 30-11 now, so we MUST start looking after ourselves. OK, we’ll start after I finish this delicious bun.

You’ll also be presenting a work in progress show at certain venues, how valuable are doing these performances for honing the material? 
This is just vital for making new work, and a lot of fun for us (and the audiences) to see something new, raw and maybe weird. We’re doing these try-outs after the main show at Reading, Liverpool, Stirling, Clevedon, Oxford, Folkestone, Leicester and Norwich. And I think it’s safe to say these are the COOLEST places in the UK right now. If you live in one of those towns, you’re already a legend. So this is our chance to give you a real treat.

Where did your careers together begin? 
We’d love to say that we have some kind of astonishingly exciting backstory such as meeting during a car chase or perhaps some kind of sword fight, but we actually met at a wedding. Long story short, Paddy hates dancing but loves chairs, and Jonny loves dancing but requires small periods of rest - also in chairs - and we ended up sitting together and getting pissed. What began as a bit of a joke about starting a band and booking in some gigs very quickly became being booked for a Croatian festival (we think in error) and having to actually write a show and go and…well, do it. We got two gigs off the back of that and four gigs off the back of those, and fifteen years or so later we seem to still be arriving at theatres, doing shows and having a lovely old time. That’s the key to our work, and in particular this show - we rely entirely on each other to keep the other one going, and we both seem to be the one who thinks they’re getting away with it. We don’t think we can explain it any better than by saying come and see the show - it’s genuinely the best example of how we feel people hold each other above water.

How do you reflect on your careers to date?
It’s a bit like having a parrot on your shoulder, but both of us think we’re the pirate not the bird. A constant companionship through a pretty wild high-seas adventure consisting of fifteen years or so of wanting to explore tricky, interesting and relevant subject matter, and deciding to do that in a room full of wonderful strangers with the aim of making the choppy waters a little more bearable, clear and navigable. We’ve really overcommitted to this boat metaphor. In short, it turns out we’re both birds.

What pieces of theatre/have had a big impact on you?
The lovely thing about this question is the answer is pretty much endless. There is an astonishingly high level of exceptional creatives and pieces of art out there at the moment, striving to excel and entertain in the face of a difficult time. Just to name a few from the last couple of months: Benedict Lombe’s Shifters was a masterclass in storytelling and romance, Mark Thomas & Grace Petrie’s shows both continue to make huge waves in defiant political art, and I hear Jonny & The Baptists’ The Happiness Index is “boy howdy, fantastic!” (citation needed).

Photo by Matt Crockett

What gives you inspiration?
It’s hard to pinpoint what gives us those flashes of inspiration, but we can tell you that the prescription ADHD drug methylphenidate definitely helps you remember to write them down before you forget.

What do you hope an audience member takes away from seeing the show?
If they’re quick and crafty enough, they could probably get away with a chair? It would also be nice if they left with a feeling of hope, a sense of maybe having laughed at something they previously wouldn’t have known how to laugh about, perhaps got surprisingly emotional when they weren’t expecting to and simultaneously felt the joyous rush of experiencing live theatrical-musical-comedy - but those things are of course secondary to the chair thing. If you make it out with a chair, we feel you deserve the chair. If you don’t then never fear - we also have merch and you can really stock up on that sweet sweet merch.

You can find tickets and tour dates for The Happiness Index from https://www.jonnyandthebaptists.co.uk/live

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