Katherine Ryan might be one of the best-known comedians in the country, but she recently faced the brutal response from an audience who refused to laugh at her jokes.
Best known for appearing on shows including 8 Out of 10 Cats, Never Mind the Buzzcocks, A League of Their Own, Mock the Week, Would I Lie to You?, QI and Have I Got News for You, the 40-year-old is now one of the stars of the new game show Silence is Golden.
The premise of the six-episode series is pretty simple. Hosted by Dermot O’Leary, each episode begins with broadcaster U&Dave giving the studio audience £250,000 to share between them.
All they need to do to keep it is to keep completely silent and not make a sound. That means no talking, no laughing and no gasping.
Standing between them and the prize money are comedians and team captains Katherine, Seann Walsh and Fatiha El-Ghorri, who help lead a group of acts to wage war on the audience. If they get the prize pot to £0, they get to give it to charity.
Their tactics are hilarious and sometimes completely underhanded, with one scene in the premiere episode leaving an audience member in shock as Katherine brings out her dog and sarcastically threatens to harm him if the woman doesn’t react.
Despite her best efforts, Katherine’s attempts to break the audience members was an uphill battle – and even impossible at times. She said it was brutal realising their pre-prepared material ‘wasn’t working’.
‘Anything you prepare for on this show doesn’t work, and we went into it thinking we are competent stand-up comedians,’ she said.
‘But when they weren’t reacting I was absolutely spiralling and that’s why we were just trying whatever we could.’
‘It’s really unnatural to have an audience who are stone faced…we were incredibly destabilised. We were doing and saying things that we wouldn’t normally say. We’re usually very prepared doing standup, but we could not prepare for this and had to be adaptable.’
However, she added: ‘I know that our job was to take the money but then I did see them really celebrating, which was nice. I felt like I worked for an insurance company, and I knew that I was on the side of evil.’
Meanwhile Seann explained: ‘Even though you’re aware that they are being paid £250,000 to not laugh at you, you think that might take off some of the sting when you’re there, and it doesn’t. They’re just staring at you and the money doesn’t matter. It feels as awful as it would if they weren’t being paid at all. Yeah, it’s absolutely horrific. But it’s great to watch the other comics struggle.’
Katherine and Seann also had to grapple with contradictory feelings of wanting to see the audience win some cash but also ensure they carried out their job to make them react and lose money.
‘These guys are under a lot of pressure because, you know, U have said to us at the start, we don’t have £250,000 pounds to give away. Like the channel’s going down if they failed,’ Dermot joked.
But with such a massive amount of money on the line, the audience members were incredibly determined and were not impressed if someone broke.
‘One thing that we didn’t expect going into the show was that they were going to start turning on each other, which is such a huge part of the show and that grew naturally,’ he laughed.
‘We thought that the interval was actually a chance for them to kind of relax and unwind and what we didn’t know is they were going to start turning on each other. And shouting! It’s a great piece of television.’
Throughout the process Dermot also gets the chance to try and bribe the audience members with money or prizes. If they speak, they can secure an individual prize, but doing so results in the group losing money.
‘You can see them just kind of going, “I’m just gonna go for myself”. So, I’d come on and go, “ok who wants to do xyz for 200 quid and one would be like ME!”. Then the rest would go “oh no that’s just cost us 10 grand” and this one guy is like, “I don’t care, I’ve got 200 quid”.’
Katherine went on to share that the ‘desperation’ on show in Silence is Golden also resulted in a ‘authentic’ series unlike any other game show seen before.
‘You get to see people’s natural reactions when it comes to greed and then when it comes to desperation, like everyone is at their most authentic because we don’t know what to do and we just have to win,’ she said.
‘So, it’s a real fight or flight series and then we were forced to throw the most unimaginable, surprising acts at the audience. It’s not like anything else you’ll see and is such a fun concept.’
Silence is Golden starts on Monday May 5 on U and U&Dave.
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