Whatever students get up to on their gap years, it’s safe to say “become a regular guest on the Russian equivalent of Live At The Apollo” isn’t often high on the agenda.
Yet that’s exactly what Milo Edwards did.
The former Cambridge Footlight was spotted performing stand-up in an expats’ bar by Russian TV producers who spoke no English but still liked what they saw – and set the 26-year-old on the road to TV stardom.
The story forms the spine of his hour-long show – Pindos – which wowed critics at Edinburgh last year, and which he’s bringing to Liverpool’s Hot Water Comedy Club on Friday night.
If you’re thinking Vladimir Putin’s Russia seems like a difficult place for a stand-up comedian to speak truth to power, you’d be right – but Milo managed it, to an extent.
“It’s a dangerous place to be a political activist for sure,” he said. “But I think comedians, rightly or wrongly, the Russian government has decided aren’t really a threat.
“If you’re doing live work, you can pretty much say whatever you want. But the TV is incredibly heavily censored. Any politics jokes you make, unless they’re very benign, won’t go through.
“But the interesting thing is you never know how much of that censorship is top-down governmental censorship and how much of it is self-preservation from the TV stations.”
While material that mocks Putin’s macho cult of personality may not go down well, Milo says the main focus in Russia is on criticism of social conservatism.
He said: “They were incredibly tight about, for example, if you had anything that kind of came across as a bit too socially liberal or a bit too permissive of alternative lifestyles.
“It’s all about him (Putin) projecting this image of old-school masculinity, which very much feeds into the sort of the domestic politics which he practises.
“The overarching theme is that Europe and especially the US are these lost civilisations where men aren’t men any more. Putin is providing this kind of idealised image of what the Russian man is like, and it’s incredibly toxic.”
Back in the UK, Milo is best-known as part of the line-up of Trashfuture, a strident and acerbic podcast which pokes vicious fun at the politicians, institutions and businesses which dominate our landscape.
In these challenging times for the political left, he recognises comedy can play a key role in galvanising and rallying opposition to Johnson, Trump and the rest.
“I try not to get an overinflated sense of comedians’ purpose in society,” he said. “At the end of the day, comedians don’t really influence policy.
“But the role of comedy is to give comfort to the uncomfortable.
“And hopefully, through the fairly banal enterprise of entertainment, you can at least bring a little bit of enjoyment to the unending hell that is modern Britain.”
Pindos is at the Hot Water Comedy Club on Friday, January 17. Doors open at 6pm and the show starts at 7pm – tickets are £9 from https://www.hotwatercomedy.co.uk/event/6927/
