In the Bafta-winning Stath Lets Flats, Jamie Demetriou unleashed a trail of comedy carnage. Here, he talks to Alex Moshakis about body contortions, dealing with ‘feeling thick’ and finding inspiration in the chaotic antics of his Cypriot family
The comedian Jamie Demetriou was slumped in a chair, trying not to look. He was at a cast-and-crew screening of his new Netflix special, A Whole Lifetime with Jamie Demetriou, in which he takes viewers on an off-centre-sketch musical journey through life’s stages, from womb to grave. (The grave, in this case, is a hospital wheelie bin.) Earlier that day, Demetriou had arrived late for lunch – a nervous wreck, he’d been delayed by several visits to the toilet. And though audience members at the screening laughed cheerily in the right moments, Demetriou couldn’t bring himself to watch. “You know when a horse bolts?” he says, when we meet one mid-morning in an east London café. “Apparently it’s blind and deaf for the entire race. I kind of felt like that. Like, I didn’t hear or see anything.”
Demetriou is best known for writing and starring in Stath Lets Flats, the Bafta-winning Channel 4 sitcom, in which he plays the titular character, a dim-witted, almost likable lettings agent. Stath features several comic actors with whom Demetriou often works, including his sister, Natasia, or Tash, who is also a successful comedian. While making the series, Demetriou became “incredibly reliant on the relief of the ensemble,” he says, because then he “gets a rest from my own face when I’m in the edit”. The new special features several of the same actors, but here Demetriou stars prominently in every sketch – as a screen-addled teenager begrudgingly attempting sex, a best man getting it wrong, a pensioner witnessing the moment after his own death – and he seems apprehensive about the attention. At the screening he worried, “When is the lull going to kick in? And how painful is that going to be?” When I ask why he has been feeling this way, he says simply, “It’s 53 minutes of my head.” And then, tutting: “Like, this is hardcore my head.”
