‘No, thank you for talking to me,’ says a beaming Phil Ellis.
It’s impossible not to match Phil’s bounce in our interview, with his contagious grins and chortles. This energy – not to mention his natural funny bones – is what’s sailed him through 20 years of being the ultimate comedian’s comedian.
He’s won the awards, critical acclaim, and a stellar reputation as one of the nicest guys in comedy. It was only last year, backstage at a particularly laborious gig, that he got a call which changed his career forever.
Phil, 44, was gigging at a festival, where the audience was just a 10th of a 2000-person space. Ouch. Backstage, a fellow comedian asked him why he’s never been on Taskmaster.
‘I said, “Well there’s so many comedians, it’s a big queue isn’t it? They’re not going to get me on, no one knows who I am,”’ he remembers.
‘I went out to the tent, and there were 12 audience members. I was hosting it, so I was trying to get an atmosphere going. I asked the audience if they wanted to move forward, because they were all at the back. They went, “No, we’re alright,”’ Phil laughs. ‘There was a gap of like a mile.’
In his break from hosting, Phil pondered that after 20 years, he thought he might have moved past these experiences by now. Then his agent rang.
‘It was an invitation for Taskmaster,’ he says. ‘I couldn’t believe it, and you couldn’t tell anyone, so I just had to go back out and carry on. I couldn’t even tell the person who asked earlier why I wasn’t on it.’
Phil’s work and life changed in a few salient ways after his appearance in series 20 in September last year alongside SNL’s Ania Magliano, Maisie Adam, Reece Shearsmith, and Sanjeev Bhaskar.
‘Firstly, the gigs I get now, I’m not worried about what I’m turning up to. They are so well run and wonderful. It opened the door to those. But the main thing is I’ve always loved my shows, and been really proud of them, and I’ve just always wanted to show them to more people.’
Pre-Taskmaster, Phil would take a show to the Edinburgh Fringe, and successfully so: he’d always have bums on seats unless it was a bad show. (I’m told not to look into 2017).
But his shows’ lives would begin and end in Edinburgh. ‘I couldn’t tour it because I didn’t have an audience to tour it to,’ Phil says.
Fast forward 12 years from when Phil’s Fun and Gamez won the Edinburgh Comedy Awards’ Panel Prize in 2014, his current show Bath Mat is the subject of his first full national stand-up tour. Many dates in his run are already sold out.
‘I can actually go out and perform to like 500 people a night in some venues, which I’d never have dreamed of before, and they’re all for you, which I find insane,’ Phil says, having become used to rocking up in random towns to perform poorly paid gigs.
He continues: ‘It’s nice to be the comedians’ comedian. But you do also need to live.’
