A couple of years ago, Jamie Demetriou began getting a very strange response from the TV-watching public. “I had a lot of people asking me to open my mouth in the street,” says the comedian. “And it’s so difficult to make the connection. Because it’s not people going, ‘Are you in something?’ They just go, ‘Open your mouth.’ I’m like, ‘I don’t think I do that for strangers.’”
The cause – and the reason Google tends to autocomplete searches for Demetriou with the word “teeth” – was his scene-stealing turn in Fleabag. He played a character known only as Bus Rodent, a creepy love interest for Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s heroine and a role that required him to don a massive pair of fake incisors.
Even though the 30-year-old is still reeling from the show’s explosive popularity – “The scale is like One Direction, it’s mad” – if all goes to plan Bus Rodent will soon be superseded in the public consciousness. After five years of supplying his idiosyncratic and incredibly funny acting chops to Paddington 2, Sherlock Gnomes and a staggering number of British sitcoms, this week Demetriou debuts his own comedy vehicle.
Stath Lets Flats centres on Demetriou’s incompetent lettings agent and his colleagues at family firm Michael & Eagle. A wannabe wideboy, Stath is kitted out like a member of Blazin’ Squad at a wedding – slim-fitting suit, oversized diamante earring – while angling to take over from his soon-to-retire father.
At a time when the London property market is a joke in itself, playing an estate agent hasn’t given Demetriou a respect for the profession. “It’s basically pointing at stuff and saying what it is,” he says. “Stath doesn’t have to do anything to let the flats. People have to live in shit flats, they just have to, because of the price of flats.”
There’s something stubbornly English about Stath Lets Flats. “We wanted the whole thing to feel a bit grotty,” explains Demetriou. “‘Flat’ is an inherently British, mundane word – it’s onomatopoeia.” As his name and accent suggest, however, Stath has “a weird mixed identity ... he moved to England when he was about 12, and he was pinging between Greece and Cyprus as a kid.”
While Stath is the perfect vehicle for his creator’s comic ticks – awkward intonation and malapropisms slang and the mangling of old-fashioned sayings – he’s more than a funny foreign caricature. Demetriou also has that Greek Cypriot heritage. “It was part of my identity that I didn’t really know what to do with, because stereotypes about that culture weren’t reflective of who I was,” he explains. Making the show “has reattached me to that culture in quite a nice way”.
Stath’s eccentric father, Vasos (played by Christos Stergioglou of the cult film Dogtooth), is loosely based on Demetriou’s. The comic describes him as the “funniest singular thing in the world”, a man who went “on a march for Israeli women’s rights in France aged 67 because he met a guy in the gym who was really into it”. Demetriou is very proud of his father. “He moved to the UK when he was 13 with nothing, his dad just put him on a boat to send money back,” he says. “He didn’t have any shoes to begin with, and he worked himself up to be a top chef.”
Stath Lets Flats is a family affair in another sense: the hero’s sweetly idiotic sister Sophie is played by his real-life sibling, Natasia. She, Jamie and the comic actor Ellie White frequently collaborate with the sketch group Sheeps – AKA Liam Williams, Al Roberts and Daran Johnson.
In Williams’ YouTuber-parody Pls Like, Demetriou was pitch-perfect as wet-wipe-flogging grime MC Bombzy; in Stath Lets Flats, Roberts plays an extremely mild-mannered fellow lettings agent whom Stath worships. When, in 2016, the six created the wacky web series Year Friends, it cemented them as the thrilling alternative comedy gang of their day.
That said, these days, even the funniest young comics aren’t guaranteed TV stardom. Stath has taken six years to reach sitcom status. The character first appeared in 2013 as part of Channel 4’s online “comedy blaps”, where he caught the attention of Friday Night Dinner creator Robert Popper. “I remember him asking, ‘What do you want to make?’, and I was like, ‘I’d quite like to do something where I’m singing.’ It was over quite quickly after that.”
Since Popper co-wrote Stath Lets Flats, he clearly wasn’t too put off by Demetriou’s left-field suggestions – but the comic is relentlessly self-effacing. He’s recently worked with Julia Davis and guested on the new Alan Partridge series. “If you’re opposite them and they’re not going, ‘Who the fuck is this piece of shit?’, you’re like, oh my God!” he says.
Yet even with no comedy giants in the vicinity, the actor will find something to panic about. When we meet, his producer has just shown his children Stath Lets Flats and Demetriou frets that he has unintentionally created a character for pre-schoolers. “I worry that because Stath is such an asexual innocent, it really does appeal to five-year-olds,” he says, brow furrowed. “He says silly things like, ‘Oh my gilly goodness.’ Have I accidentally made a CBBC show? There’s a guy running around chasing a pigeon.”
With those anxieties just about quelled, he is now looking forward to showing the world the finished product. “The fact that I don’t think it’s diabolical is a huge achievement for me,” says Demetriou, who nowadays is starting to feel more secure in his insecurities. “I don’t want to get out of my anxiety, because everyone I see who is making stuff that I like is an absolute mess, and I don’t think there’s any coincidence.” If he’s right, there’s little doubt British comedy will benefit from Demetriou remaining a quivering wreck as long as he possibly can.
Stath Lets Flats is on Channel 4 on 27 June, 10pm.