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Interviews
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TV Baby - A Willingness to Risk and to Work Ged Quayle interviews Joanna Simmons and Freya Parker, founder memebrs of up-and-coming Liverpool theatre Company TV Baby. By Friday afternoon I've already seen TV Baby in their latest production, A Dissection of the Untimely Deaths of Two Unconnected Young People by the People Who Knew Them Least. Comfortable winner of the longest title of the year, it's also a funny, moving and hugely (overly in some respects) inventive show, and easily one of the best things I've seen on the Liverpool Unity stage this year. I'm keen to meet them. Joanna Simmons and Freya Parker are two of the three founder members of TV Baby. Both are final year students at Liverpool John Moores University. I ask how they first got together. "We met in the first year," says Joanna. "Freya, Jonathan (Jonathan May, the other founder member of TV Baby) and me were doing the theatre degree at John Moores together and we found we liked the same kind of theatre, after a while we thought well if we like watching it why not make it?" It may be a clichéd question, but I was curious to know where the idea for the show had come from. "We wanted to collect stories from the city." says Freya. "Liverpool has so many stories, and can be such a strange, really quite haunted place; we felt we wanted to make something out of Liverpool. We just wandered the streets, playing about with a video camera, collecting stories from everywhere" Joanna nods. "The boy's story came from a poster we saw on a lamppost, his family trying to find information about his death. We thought about the tragedy and the grief of that, how it affects people." "Yes," says Freya, "and the way other people react to grief and the media's relationship to personal tragedy. The boy died on Berry Street, only a short walk from where we studied. We might have drunk in the same pubs as him. I suppose that made us think about our own closeness to tragedy, our reaction to it, and how that reaction's shaped by news reporting." "The girl's story wasn't as personal," says Joanna. "There's a derelict street on the edge of the old docklands and we were walking down there one day and saw an open window, high up on a building. It occurred to us that if someone jumped out of it it could be days before anyone found her. And that's where the girl came from." Dissection is a hugely creative and exuberant show which played to enthusiastic audiences on its Liverpool debut. I wonder where TV Baby plan to take it next. "We definitely want to keep developing" says Freya. "The reaction we've had from everyone has been so positive, we want to keep the ball rolling and keep moving forward." "I feel we've gained a lot of confidence now," says Joanna. "We've proved to ourselves that we can create a show and, as Freya said, everyone's been so incredibly positive. I suppose our next step is to try to get help developing the show, talk to the Arts Council, try to take it to more venues. Lots of people have said we should take it to Edinburgh." They should: it's prime Fringe material and it would not surprise me in the least to see it win a First. "We've already attended symposiums led by Forced Entertainment," says Joanna, "and we've been given help by Frantic Assembly. It's always been important to us to look outside ourselves, for help and inspiration." So where do they see themselves in five years? "We'd like to be known and respected." Says Freya. "We'd like to have made shows that had people leaving the theatre thinking they'd had an experience." Judging by present evidence they will. It was a short interview; this is a busy time for the company, and they take their leave of me. I feel strangely inspired afterwards; TV Baby don't just have talent, they have the willingness to risk and to work that gives talent its point. Keep a look out for them; if there's any justice in the world TV Baby are going to be Big!
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