Double act turns 100

4:43pm Monday 7th July 2008

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Miriam Craig talks to musical comedy duo Kit and The Widow ahead of their performance at The Radlett Centre

Listening idly to Kit and The Widow's comedy songs, you might assume they were written in an earlier era.

But as soon as you tune into the lyrics, you're suddenly brought up short.

Topics addressed in Richard Sisson and Kit Hesketh-Harvey's songs include Andrew Lloyd Webber, Guantánamo Bay, dogging, landfill, Nigella Lawson's marriage to Charles Saatchi, and, Sisson says, "the recent crisis over Delia Smith".

Pianist Sisson and singer Hesketh-Harvey met at Cambridge University in 1975. Sisson's nickname "The Widow" originated during those university days, though now it is shrouded in carefully-maintained mystery. Hesketh-Harvey agrees it makes his comic partner sound faintly malevolent, "like a Spanish woman in a mantilla".

This seems to fit with their respective on-stage characters. Hesketh-Harvey says: "His is furtive, slightly sinister and very devious. Mine is flamboyant, out there and crushing, of him."

For a few years after graduating, Hesketh-Harvey made documentaries for the BBC while Sisson worked as a silver service waiter at Claridge's, serving meals to Indian prime minister Indira Ghandi and US president Richard Nixon.

But they teamed up as Kit and The Widow in 1983, and have performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival every year since 1984, with fans coming back to see them each year.

The pair have also performed in venues ranging from Southwark Cathedral and St James's Palace to Estepona, in Spain.

Both men also have other projects on the go; Hesketh-Harvey makes intermittent appearances on Radio 4's Just A Minute, and Sisson wrote the music for Alan Bennett's West End hit The History Boys.

Their latest show, 100 Not Out, is a celebration of the fact they have reached, and now exceeded, a combined age of 100 (51 each).

If their songs sound rather vintage, it may have something to do with their "retro childhoods".

Hesketh-Harvey says: "I was brought up in East Africa, he grew up in Singapore. It was the fag end of empire. So we were both slightly behind the times, removed from contemporary English culture. We were raised on the records our parents had out there, which in my case was Flanders and Swann and Noel Coward."

Other influences on their style are Danish-American humorist Victor Borge and satirical cabaret act Fascinating Aida.

The pair write their innuendo-laden songs together. Sisson says: "There's something about rhyming things that can lead people to expect one thing and then you give them another. And there's the juxtaposition of one type of music with a completely ridiculous idea. The trick is to include as much variety as you can in a programme."

Hesketh-Harvey agrees, adding: "Often the songs are very ephemeral, but if you can find something funny about humanity in general, then that's comic gold. If you can pinpoint some human foible there's no reason why the song shouldn't endure as much as Oscar Wilde."

100 Not Out is on at The Radlett Centre, in Aldenham Avenue, Radlett, on Wednesday, at 8pm. Tickets cost £16.50 (concessions £15.50) and are available from the box office on 01923 859291.