Dan Antopolski, comedian
I am a stand-up comedian, living in Walthamstow, East London, but am originally from Stroud in Gloucestershire.
I have been performing comedy regularly since January 2010, but my comedy career began in an irregular fashion in April 2005 when I did my first gig at Havant Arts Centre, aged 20. Over the next three years, I amassed a measly 35 gigs with varying levels of success before running out of money; I put comedy on hold after I started a new job as a reporter for a local paper in 2008. Just over a year later, while the country was still in the thick of the recession, I thought it would be wise to quit my job and move to London to get back into comedy. It didn’t quite work out that smoothly, but I managed to make the move in January 2010 and have performed more than 450 gigs since living in the capital.
I was part of the Snigger Happy showcase shows at Brighton 2010, 2011 and 2012. I performed about 25 gigs in the two weeks I was there for my first ever Edinburgh Fringe in 2010. In August 2011, I returned to the ‘burgh in a two-hander show for the whole month with my good friend Paul Langton. In 2012, I was back with Love and Langton’s Dirty Laundry. This year, I have split from Langton and will be doing a two-hander show with Simon Lilley entitled ‘Love and Lilley’s Fear and Loathing’.
I have written for the Guardian (albeit two things on computer games) and something I wrote on an anonymous questionnaire made it into Richard Herring’s Talking Cock book.
As for TV. Well, where do I start? I appeared in an eight second clip on BBC Points West’s comedy competition in 2007 that I couldn’t actually enter and I was in a crowd shot at the Big Breakfast’s Eggs on Legs tour in Bristol in 1995, where I was also shouted at by a producer for climbing on the back of a lorry. Oh, that’s it… If you can track down footage of either, I will be very impressed and may call you a liar.