Interview: Helen Arney

Bringing science to the masses and feeding insatiable curiosity as one third of comedy science group Festival Of The Spoken Nerd, comedian and songstress Helen Arney is back on the road again with a new FOSN show and book, fresh from their BBC Radio show and appearing on QI. Victoria Nangle finds out more.

Hi Helen, how are things today with you?
Not bad, we are three shows into our new tour of ‘You Can’t Polish A Nerd’ and all three nerds are still talking to each other. Just about.

What was the most recent thing that you learned that amazed you?
When plutonium, americium and curium were discovered, suggestions for their names included extremium, pandemonium and bastardium. I’m amazed that none of them were used.

Festival Of The Spoken Nerd are a treasure trove of mental stimuli. I find that the shows stretch my mental agility nicely. What great concepts and revelations will you be sharing in ‘You Can’t Polish A Nerd’?
Plenty! Matt uses mathematics and geometry to high-five himself in another dimension. Steve creates a genuinely profound visual way to understand the ungraspable concept of black holes and gravitational waves, using an electric drill, some rollerskates and a sheet of latex. Don’t ask why he had those things just lying around at home. And I have a very funny song about bananas.

Matt uses mathematics and geometry to high-five himself in another dimension

How do you gauge communicating quite complex ideas so that they are accessible to Joe Public’s scientific vocabulary?
Using the traditional staple of scientific research: trial and error. We’ve been previewing some of the material for this show over months, or sometimes even years, at our new material night ‘An Evening Of Unnecessary Detail’ and shows at the Underbelly Festival. It’s always the audiences themselves that decide whether a joke, a concept or a whole section lives on to appear in a tour show, or dies on the theatre floor that night. By the time we get to putting together a new full show, every bit has been roadtested on plenty of nerds and non-nerds – and each other, of course.

It was great seeing you cameo on QI. You seem perfect bedfellows with the QI Elves and the curiosity they culture. Will there be more collaborations in the future?
Absolutely! Where there is a will there is a way… we just need to find someone called Will to make that phrase really work…
How did you find creating an “experimental” BBC Radio 4 show went, when your live shows have a lot of impact visually?
It was really interesting, and by “interesting” we mean really hard. Again, we did a whole heap of preview shows for all sorts of audiences (both geek and lay) and discovered all sorts of new ways to get into the heads of listeners and work out how to get ideas stuck inside – and then keep them there. We’re really pleased with how the series came out, but the toughest bit of all was keeping it down to 13.5 minutes. It makes a 55 minute Edinburgh show seem like a gentle stroll when it’s compared to the compact sprint of a Radio Comedy quarter-hour.

The evenings are drawing in, the goose is getting fat… might we possibly hear golden tracks from your album ‘It’s Going To Be Awkward This Christmas’ during this tour?
Ooh, yes! One of the songs *almost* made it into the show, but as the tour ends in November I expect I’ll be doing at least one of them at Robin Ince’s new Nine Lessons And Carols shows at Conway Hall in December. Roll on the festivities!

A masterful Christmas present might be Festival of the Spoken Nerd’s new book, ‘The Element In The Room’. What was your favourite and what was the worst aspect of putting it together with Steve Mould?
Well, we thought doing the radio show wasn’t hard enough by making us re-calibrate our totally visual style for radio. So we did it all again but this time adapting our live, improvised style into black and white (and red) words that don’t have moving visuals, and are locked onto paper for all time. The worst bit was probably getting our 6-month old daughter to sleep and then sneaking upstairs to write until she woke again around 2am. The best bit was watching her get her little teeth into a copy. The first preview edition has some very unique bitemarks on it.

Festival Of The Spoken Nerd: You Can’t Polish A Nerd, The Old Market, Saturday 5 November 2017, 4.30pm & 8.30pm, £17.50/14, www.theoldmarket.com