‘Determined cheerfulness is something I happen to do very well,” says Rachel Parris. If you’ve seen her live musical comedy shows, you won’t need telling: they present Parris as a wholesome West End Wendy forever on the verge of a nervous breakdown, performing songs that put a brave face on a chaotic life (The Gym Song) or – like her terrific X Factor spoof I’m Amazing – clothe sharp satire in faux-positivity.
No one who saw her excellent but unheralded stage shows ever doubted Parris’s talent, but it’s a big surprise that she’s now found her mainstream niche in political satire. Her whip-smart work on the BBC show The Mash Report has been adored – and deplored – by tens of millions, and she’s become one of the most prominent political comics in the UK and beyond.
On the one hand, it’s a classic rags-to-riches story, from an act whose spring tour – tickets hitherto hard to shift – ended up playing to packed houses. On the other, Parris makes no bones about how unsettling the past few months have been. Judging by the number of times she says she doesn’t know if she’s allowed to answer my questions, she’s still adjusting to life under a new kind of scrutiny.
The 34-year-old feels misrepresented by the widely told story of her breakout success. In February, her weekly Mash Report slot mocked Piers Morgan’s ITV interview/love-in with the US president, replete with a graphic of the former’s tongue up the latter’s backside. It made a very big splash: “There was a lot of excitement and fury,” says Parris, euphemistically (I think she means hostility and hysteria), “directed at my door. And now everyone’s like, oh it was that item that blew everything up with The Mash Report. But it wasn’t. It was the sexual harassment one.” This was a heavily sardonic tutorial in How Not to Sexually Harass Someone that Parris co-wrote and performed (with host Nish Kumar as her stooge) two weeks before.
That episode, she recalls, aired without fuss. But her life changed when the BBC tweeted her clip from it the following Monday morning. “Within three hours it had millions of views,” says Parris. “My phone was going ding ding ding ding. It all happened so quickly.” In both the harassment and the Trump/Morgan segments – and in later ones exploring the phenomenon of the public apology, say, or Jacob Rees-Mogg – Parris mixed scorn and butter-wouldn’t-melt good cheer into a highly potent satirical cocktail. Even in the first series, she says, “the joke was to have me reading out egregiously offensive or stupid social media output, and staying very upbeat while I did so”.
Her success as a satirist has surprised her, too – although she insists on the small-p political content of her prior work, and its consistency with her Mash Report material. “Yes it’s about Jacob Rees-Mogg, but it’s also about how that affects feminism, women’s rights. For me, there’s always got to be a personal or social angle.”
She’s delighted, meanwhile, to have shaken off the musical comedy label, which sees her patronised by fellow comics and has, Parris argues, kept her off panel shows. “Over the years, producers have said, ‘what would Rachel do on it? There isn’t a slot to do one of her songs.’ And it’s like: ‘No, I talk as well!’” No such problem any more: it’s amazing what a reported 26m online views can do. “Now, instead of having to fight to get in the audition room, people are – for the moment – coming and asking me if I want to be on.”
That’s “a dream come true”, she says: her appearance on QI in particular. But she’s not abandoning live performance – with her colleagues in the Regency-era improv format Austentatious, resident monthly in the West End. Nor in her solo shows: she’s now cooking up a “greatest hits plus bits of The Mash Report” package to take on the road in autumn. It’s designed to break new fans in gently to what she’s been doing on stage for years. Otherwise, she says – drawing on recent experience – “the initial reaction is ‘why is Rachel Parris who does political satire trying to sing and play? Has she lost her mind?’”
And then? Well, Parris is hoping for some calm after the storm (“I think things are going back to normal now …”), but by no means a return to obscurity. Her first half of 2018 “has changed the whole concept of a career path”, she says, “because what would have seemed like a pipe dream now seems possible”. Alongside the autumn tour, there’s series three of The Mash Report, due later this year. Beyond that, she nurses an ambition to emulate Tim Minchin’s transformation from comedian to musical-theatre maestro – and dreams of writing her own sitcom or Victoria Wood-style solo TV show. “Which all my instincts tell me is not going to happen,” says Parris, modest to a fault. “But after the year I’ve had, it now seems like – well, who knows?”