Yardsticks For Failure, with Ivo Graham (Part One)
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Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti, and I'm joined today by head of programming, Conor Boyle. Conor, what do we have coming up on today's episode? Well, today, Mia, we have comedian and comedy writer Ivo Graham. Many of you may have seen him on the very popular TV series Taskmaster, and he joined us in conversation with his best friend and fellow comedian, Alfie Brown, to discuss Yardsticks for Failure, which is his latest show.

sort of comedy slash memoir book. And I think our audience will really enjoy it. Definitely. And he was live at the Kiln Theatre this May. That's right. Yes. So it was the Kiln Theatre in Kilburn. He showed up on a line bike with a shredder in the front pouch, which he said fell off during his journey. You may hear that later in the episode. I won't spoil it for you, but it made for quite a scene on the night.

Well, I look forward to that one. So without further ado, let's join our host Alfie Brown with more.

Hi, thank you very much. My name's Alfie Brown. I'm a stand-up comedian and therefore a colleague of Ivo's. And indeed, since I think early 2009, a friend. We did a show called The Lunchtime Club together at the Edinburgh Festival. It was on at 12.30, not 1.15 like he says in this book incorrectly. LAUGHTER

Maybe for the paperback, that can be amended. We very quickly became very close friends amongst a larger group of us with Joe Lycett, David Morgan, Ben Partridge, Ivor Graham and myself. We had a great month, but Ivor and I bonded very quickly as people do. Around his, at that time, 18-year-old posh age,

when it gets to a certain level can become something of a speech impediment. And his pronunciation of the word "house" in a routine about the Anne Frank Heiss, as he called it then, became a bit of a running joke for us. And even to this day, in our mid to late 30s respectively, we can greet each other excitedly by saying, "There's a mice, lice, arind this heiss."

Which is a good bit of fun, I think you can agree.

I think this event was organized, if you haven't read the book yet, which you won't, some of you have it on your lap, well done for being a patron of the arts, you'll be across the idea that Ivo is perhaps something of a chaotic individual, organizing his own book launch only a week prior to the book launch, and indeed sending me a copy yesterday. So I finished reading it as the Uber driver who, brackets, wouldn't stop farting.

pulled into this wonderful kiln theatre. So if I feel or seem to you to be a tiny bit chaotic, then it's only in keeping with the spirit intended with which this book was written. Ladies and gentlemen, will you please welcome one of my best friends and the author of this wonderful book, Ivo Graham. There you are. Hello, everybody. Thank you for coming out to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet.

Yes. I couldn't decide what to wear, so I thought I'd just wear what's on the cover. I imagine I'm not the first person on book launch day to have made that decision, but of course I regret it. Have you mislaid...

You've mislaid the shoes. No, they've been replaced by these lovely new orange numbers, but you're right, it's not a perfect recreation, so it's even more pointless than it was before. But one of my earliest memories of hanging out with you at Edinburgh in 2009 was because our show started between 12:30 and 1:15 on what was occasionally a nice, bright Scottish summer. I would like to wear shorts on stage, because that's what I'd be wearing, "Ite and a Bite."

And you told me quite deliberately and very caringly, as a sort of already quite an older brother figure, that you thought that was unprofessional. Yes, I did have something of a gripe about your shorts on stage attire. But you've got such gorgeous legs.

that I've softened to it in my older age and actually think more and more I realize how much attire and branding is part of one's success in this game.

That's true too, but let's focus on the lovely legs. Yeah, sure, sure, sure. Lust always triumphs over logic in the end. You've got some lovely quotes from some friends here. Thank you very much. A hilarious and unique shambles, not an hilarious, which is a shame from Josh Widdicombe. To be fair, I'll have to take the bullet on that one. I literally just wrote that quote. LAUGHTER

He was circling around it. All of those words had been in previous drafts. Hilarious, unique, shambles. That's how you get a quote out of Josh Widdicombe. Okay. Well, that's perfect.

The others are a bit more authentic, but there's obviously a degree of pragmatism to it when you're rustling up your quotes on submission day. Did Frankie Boyle say, I've got nothing but love for Ivo Graham, and you went, Mr? No, he said that. He said, I've got nothing but love for Mr Ivo Graham on Taskmaster for a laugh. You know, I don't think it was... It was not intended to be then quoted sincerely. He gave his permission, but it was quite sort of a, you know, just stop texting kind of permission. LAUGHTER

Yes. Well, no doubt he had more cruel jokes about 16-year-old swimmers to write. That's just a joke. I like him. Yes. I don't. Well, he's... Yes. LAUGHTER

I'm very grateful to him for what a sweet paternal figure he was on the show. I did mean to ask you before we did this. If you're looking for it, there is actually a little reference to specifically that joke in the book. So I haven't let him off the hook completely. Well, there are lots of Easter eggs in there that I appreciate. It's absolute paradise of Easter eggs.

But obviously chocolate will make you sick if you have too much of it, and I'm a bit worried that that's going to be sort of the general reaction. Well, no, I enjoyed it, and I tell you what the... I don't know whether this makes me an especially bad choice for the role of talking to you about the book or an especially good choice, but I've never seen Taskmaster.

That's actually quite a useful, because the first chapter is all about Taskmaster and arguably it shouldn't be the first chapter and arguably it shouldn't be the longest chapter. Yes. But you also do sort of assume that is a big part. I mean, I am chasing it and you've talked about sort of cynical branding already. I'm wearing now and on the cover of the book

what I wore on Taskmaster. Yeah. Because I'm aware that it's been two years and four series since my series, and the book was delayed, and I'm slipping out of people's rearview mirrors. So I do need to sort of shout, I was on Taskmaster a bit more loudly than I might have done in 2023. But I think what...

I only am aware of your experience on Taskmaster by speaking to you about it in the rooftop smoking area of a central London casino. Yes. And indeed being your flatmate in Edinburgh for the past Lord knows how many years. You have to adjust for COVID. Yes. Five fringes, one night at the Hippodrome. Those are the stats. But always lead with the Hippodrome.

- What, well it's just, something struck me about the, when you were talking on the rooftop in the smoking area of the Hippodrome was that, it was actually the one in Leicester Square, not the Hippodrome, we couldn't get in 'cause we were too drunk.

Empire casinos. It was Empire Casino, yes. I couldn't see my girlfriend already scowling. Well, it's quite a dense... I don't think you are trying to throw me under the bus with so many of my family. But they must be... Hammered in the smoking area of a casino. I can't remember which because it could have been either and we were too drunk. It's certainly dense as a sort of accusation-heavy sentence. Yeah.

Yes, but they know I'm your bad influence. I'm average shock comic Alfie Brown. Yeah. Remember who called me that, your extended family. No. But it was one of them. I think a bit like Josh's quote on the cover, that's a mélange. I don't think anyone has ever said that you're an average shock comic. I think the word shock has come up for sure because lots of extended family members came to see my first two Edinburgh shows because they were quite confused by what Hugh and Emma's son was doing. Yes. And what I was doing was...

doing quite sort of polite but quite awkward comedy and then you would come on and say some pretty top shelf stuff and not all of my godparents could handle it. Let's talk about Taskmaster for God's sake.

The stories that you tell of your... There's quite a lot of this book that made me hyperventilate for various reasons, be they... Let's get laughter on the table as one of the options immediately. There's a lot of laughter. It really keeps pace quite remarkably, whether you're talking about grief or Taskmaster, the two ends of the written word entertainment spectrum. LAUGHTER

Taskmaster, do you think it helped you find a part of yourself as a comedian that wasn't there, that you didn't have access to previously? No, I don't. I've got others then, don't worry. I've got others in there. No, I'm thinking about it. I appreciate the question, but I think...

I think it made me aware that I'd passed the point of no return for resolving any of my major character flaws because they'd now been laid quite bare for ten weeks. So it was like, this is the personality now. Everyone knows.

Well, yeah, that's sort of what I mean. If you resolve to your personality, then I think that is a sense of falling into a line of comfort with something that you are that you perhaps didn't have. You make references in those chapters to embracing the kind of chaos that you create and having it become a feature and a benefit, not something.

not a flaw. And did Taskmaster in some way help you discover that this chaos, I mean, the show Taskmaster is about biting off more than you can chew. And you are a man of large mouthfuls. Yeah. So was it not a good marriage in that respect, do you not think? Yeah. Yeah, I think...

There were often references to noble intentions, but that was always the first half of a sentence, which was the second half was like, "Disastrous execution." And I think having abandoned quite quickly the idea of it going well from a points perspective, I was quite happy to lean into, I'm not claiming I did anything wrong deliberately, it was authentic failure,

I do quote arguably too many times in the book something Cousin Jasper says in Brideshead Revisited, which is that when he's advising Charles about going to university, he says, you want a first or a fourth time spent on a good second is time thrown away. And I do think on Taskmaster, as in Brideshead Revisited,

It's quite fun to come first or last. Yes. I think if you're measuring success of Taskmaster, you can either go by the winner or the one who has seen the greatest leap in tour sales that autumn. And I think I'd probably err on the side of being the latter as the thing that you'd want to be. I think you could probably be... You want to be an entertaining contestant. It's an entertainment show. Did the points...

But you are a competitive person in spirit, which is probably what made your authentic failure all the more entertaining. I didn't like the phrase authentic failure so much when it's coming back across the days. No. I think if you're going to write a book with the word failure featuring as one of the... Yeah, yeah. It's littered quite heavily in the text. And the title. Yeah, yeah, yeah. LAUGHTER

Just before I feel too bad about what I'm saying. No, no. I do regret that. Like, I haven't had an idea for a different title. I think that's when the regret will really ramp up, is when I think of what I would actually like it to have been called, whereas it's surviving in my head as a sort of placeholder at the moment. But arguably, you know, it is out today. But I just...

It's that anything is an easier narrative when you feel like you're in control of it. And there's just been quite a lot of quite understandable, simplified press releases saying, "Ivo's book about all his failures." I was like, "Oh, no." Because there are some nuggets of real pride in there too, but I just forgot to really mention them in any of the PR chats.

So it's being reported as quite a self-hating tome. Well, no, you say in the book, it's these kind of errors that I end up cherishing most dear. Yeah, I do think that sometimes. But then sometimes I have a sort of rare, like, error-free day. And I'm like, I don't mind this feeling either, actually. That's actually got quite a lot to recommend it as well. LAUGHTER

Yes, marvellous. What time... Do you really think I got the time of our show wrong? No, I don't think. 12.30. It was 12.30. It lasted for an hour and a half from 12.30 till 2 every day. And what are you going to do now? 12.30. Look at...

I've had this in my flat as a gift to you for so long, but I didn't consult it for literally checking when our show was for the book. Which doesn't matter, but it is quite mad to have that. That's us again. There we are. And then the following year, this was the really, these were the real dangerous brothers. Wow. So you'll notice a flaw. If Ivo, if you'd like to stand up for a second so everybody can see the flaw in that poster. Oh, yes. Oh, yeah, they did something quite clever, didn't they? Yeah.

My girlfriend took the photo and I asked her to make us the same height. Fantastic. I credited her, I put this photo on Instagram yesterday and I credited your girlfriend of... Ex-girlfriend. My current girlfriend as she likes to be known is in the front row. So if you could just make that differentiation. Um...

Do you think the tag will have been noted by her predecessor, though? Yes, but not sort of appreciated in any meaningful way. Great. The footnote is a common theme throughout the book, an idea that you've stolen from Stuart Lee. No. No. So that's a joke because he references in the book that there is... I don't obviously mean that. Footnotes are a very broad and wide...

widely used thing. Can I ask the audience, when you're reading a book with sort of an asterisk and then a little footnote at the bottom of the page, do you immediately go to the footnote or do you wait for a convenient moment to stop? So those who immediately read the footnote, raise your hand. Okay, that's so many of you. And those who will wait for a convenient moment and think, ooh, I'll read that in a moment. Yes, I think...

Ivor, who do you think is right? I reckon that it's possible to sort of, out of the corner of one's eye, have a glance at the length of the footnote and almost sort of make the decision based on that, really, because some of these ones really do dominate the page. But then some you can see that they're like an aside. Like some of them, it was a real wrestle whether to footnote them or bracket them. Mm-hmm.

I lost afternoons to those decisions. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Or dashes. I've never really understood which... And a big dasher on a WhatsApp message.

Yes, I suppose so. Most of my effort on WhatsApp is going into italicising and emboldening things at the moment, actually. It's a great bit of technology and encrypted available. Oh, and strikethrough. Yes. You can have a bit of fun with pretending you meant to say something, but then you still say it. Because...

Because of the time frame that I had to read this book, I read... You got the PDF on Friday, to be fair. Yes, but I'm not doing that. LAUGHTER

I want a physical copy to read. And I read the book, and then when I was going from somewhere to somewhere else, I would put you in my ears at the point at which I'd left off, which was a fun thing to do to get both experiences. You read with a vivid and really excitable tone that is infectious and...

really beautiful and you only read some of the footnotes and I think those are probably the ones that you'd read immediately. Well, that was the decision I was making and then a few of the long ones went into sort of appendixes at the end of the audiobook because there was some

legal thing. But, and then some are just not in there. I obviously am very grateful if anyone would like to consume any of the book in any way at all. But I suppose if I was going for a more sort of self-confident approach, I would actually say that the book has got some fantastic sort of bits that aren't in the audiobook, and the audiobook's got some fantastic things that aren't in the book. So really it's a sort of both situation. LAUGHTER

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That's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of $45 for three-month plan equivalent to $15 per month required. New customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes if network's busy. Taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com. There's a bit in the audio book that I did manage to catch on the audio book whilst I was listening to it on a walk from one place to another. LAUGHTER

I was going to give my address away and then I thought, nobody cares and don't do it. Where you say, don't listen to it on double speed, which you said that in my ear because I was listening to it on double speed because of the time. So...

I do a bit of saying don't double speed and also get quite loud a couple of times. You do say please as well though, and they've mixed it very well. So the loudness isn't abrasive, don't worry. Well, no, it was meant to be abrasive because I was asking people not to listen to it to fall asleep to. I don't think there's any danger of that. I think there's enough... I would not... There's no... It's a very engaging audiobook.

It's not anything that you should fall asleep to. There's nothing about your tone that suggests drifting off. It's quite a manic audiobook. The average Edinburgh show that you would do at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe is about 9,000 words when written down. This would be, what, 90? That's almost exactly it, yes. It was a hard cut. What's the difference in the creative...

What do you think is closer to your optimum length for creation? What do you think you were able to get out of this that you're not able to get out of a show and vice versa? Which play to what strengths? I really went pretty mad on this one.

Yeah, once there was a room underneath my local Cafe Nero, the bunker, where that's where I wrote most of it. And the aim was always to get out of my flat and get to the bunker on writing days, lock my phone and do anywhere between sort of three and six hours in the bunker.

And then it would, by hours two or three, I'd really be writing so much of such sort of dubious quality, but with such an excitable sort of mania. And then obviously reading it back and being told that almost all of it had to be cut was hard because I associated it with a kind of...

like quite a soulful meditative, like I don't do many activities on my own for sort of three to six hours. And so they were quite like, I was really proud of those, but obviously they were quite sort of mad. And so we got it down from 110 to 100 quite easily. And then 100 to 90 was hard. And I was sending emails saying things like, just smaller font. And they were like, no, headline said, that's not the issue.

Do you have a similar problem with your Edinburgh hours, perhaps being Edinburgh hour and ten minutes? No. You find it easier to cut in that form? No, I just... They really tell you off if you don't leave the building in time. So actually the fear of that drives it. Often I've not really got to the end of the show, but then often the show is...

I haven't been hugely proud of all of my Edinburgh shows. Um, whereas this, because there was so many more people involved, I went over it again and again and again. And I really have that pride that comes from like knowing it inside out and a lot of stuff that you do at Edinburgh. Some of it I've been very proud of and it's been quite honed over months, but some of it has got a little bit of the train to Edinburgh about it. And, uh,

And this is... There's a bit... There's, you know, there's a couple of things in the book that I think, you know, the start of our 2009 show, I've looked that up too hurriedly. There is evidence of hurry in places. But...

But yeah, I'm really proud of how much there is in the book. I think it's dense with... It's not concise. And there could be some shorter sentences. We had a great debate with one of the publishers about what is the maximum amount of words in a short sentence. Do you want to just put a number on that quickly? The maximum amount of words in a short sentence...

So Holly from Primrose Hill Books.

From Primrose Hill. Yes, a big shout out to them. In the sort of jacket, it says, there are some short sentences in this book, comma, such as this one, full stop, and this one, full stop. No one's denying, and this one, full stop. But there was a lot of chat about whether there are some short sentences in this book, such as this one, full stop, whether that was itself a lie. LAUGHTER

Holly said if it's got a comma in it, it's not a short sentence. This was devastating news. It's certainly not a long sentence. I think readers of other books, do you want to know what they are? Look on your faces if you wanted to know what the... Give me another book. Another book? Any book? All of the books. No, longer sentences. A book that would make my sentences look more concise by comparison.

Ducks Newbury Port by Lucy Ellman. Not a big one for this crowd, that's fine. Does it exist? It sounded amazingly like just every word was being chosen in turn. No, no, no, no, no. It's a thousand pages long and every sentence starts the thing about or something like that. It's meant to be...

It's meant to evoke the process. You can go to that intelligence square for that. It's not important what fucking Dux Newbury reports about. Jesus, sorry. Sorry, I'm sorry. There's a chapter in which is a kind of a rattle bag of your various Edinburgh experiences from 2009 through to 2008.

Do you include 19 in that or do you cover that in a separate chapter? I think it goes to 2022 and then the book is notionally about the years and the Edinburgh is 2022 to 2024. Right, okay. So the Edinburgh whistle stop chapter is everything up to that. There's 2009, which was the year of your first solo show? That would have been 2013, wouldn't it? There's all of us, there's me and you, there's you and Liam Williams, which I was fairly jealous about. Yeah.

There's your year in Russia and there is your first Edinburgh show. Your first Edinburgh show, Binoculars, that was, I really enjoyed it. And I have a very sweet memory because there had always been this hesitation you had around

maybe how your family felt about you doing stand-up. And I remember very vividly and so sweetly your father speaking to me in the courtyard about how impressed he was, but almost kind of bewildered by how impressive he'd found it. And he was going, so amazing, there was a police siren, it went by and he just made a joke out of it, just off the top of his head, brilliant. And to see him sort of beam and...

monologue of me with such pride for you was uh a really a beautiful thing is that the point at which you felt like you were like being a comedian was no longer you taking a chance on something and something that you were committed to in perpetuity i think the police siren was that moment yeah okay yeah i couldn't believe how well i wove it in it was absolutely phenomenal

My first Edinburgh show was, there was some solid material in there, but it needed a little something more. Yeah. And for Dad to have been in on Siren Day. And of course you'd paid for that person to drive by at just the right time. Absolutely incredible. And your dad fell for it, hook, line and sinker. What a perfect fool. I'm afraid so. He's in the crowd. I hope you feel embarrassed. He's in the crowd.

They've been very supportive since the beginning. I'm very grateful for that. But 2013 was the first solo show, which is important. But also it was the first Edinburgh after finishing uni. So the first few years while at uni were, it's just a hobby, anything's a bonus. And then it's like, okay, you're living with your grandmother and you're doing Russian translation on the side to tide things over. And it's this now, is it?

And so it was quite... Any praise around that time was especially valid. I wonder how much money there is in the Russian translation game at the moment. Do you think there's more or less? That's an absolutely fantastic hypothetical question that I would simply love to explore later. OK. LAUGHTER

But I can tell you that my biography of the Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev in 2013 was very faithful to an unbelievably complimentary text. Like, I then read more about Nazarbayev and it was much, it was much worse. But I was translating a very pro-Nazarbayev text in my grandmother's house and it was, and like,

Because I was spending so much time doing it, and because it sort of linked me nostalgically to my Russian degree, I was kind of a massive fan. So I'm quite pleased that that sort of sideline didn't go any further than that, really. Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by Connor Boyle, and it was edited by Mark Roberts. For ad-free episodes and full-length recordings, why not consider becoming a member at intelligencesquared.com forward slash membership.

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