Comedy writer for TV, radio, stage and print

I’ve been a comedy fan as long as I can remember. I had a Penguin joke book when I was five (a book of jokes published by Penguin, as opposed to a book of jokes about penguins) and did my first stand-up gig aged about nine in front of my school friends. I died hard. So hard. Undeterred, I became a comedy anorak. J.B. Morton, Spike Milligan, Viv Stanshell, Galton and Simpson, Python, Eric Chappell, Ronnie Barker, Perry and Croft, Curtis and Elton, Linehan and Matthews and Fry and Laurie all informed my teenage years. I had my first gag published in Private Eye when I was fourteen and in my early twenties, was lucky enough to join a local theatre company that encouraged nascent writers. Through an uneven mixture of luck, work, good-timing, bad-decisions and fate I’ve ended up doing the job I’ve always wanted. (Actually, I wanted to be the bass player in Talking Heads, Marillion or The Cure, but those jobs were taken).

The Nimmo Twins began life in 1996, when Owen Evans and Karl Minns along with Nigel Woolston, teamed up after working together in local theatre groups in Norwich.

Their first Edinburgh Festival show, 1997’s Posh Spice Nude! gained them four star reviews and lead to three appearances on BBC1’s The Stand Up Show, with Ardal O’Hanlon. The 1998 Edinburgh show, Charged and Sentenced, sold out its entire run at the Pleasance Theatre and was awarded five stars from The Scotsman and The Guardian, who added “The intelligence of this show’s writing ought to produce mass gory hari-kari amongst stand-up comedians”.

Karl and Owen became regulars on Radio 4’s Loose Ends, presented by the late great Ned Sherrin broadcasting live from Studio B13 at Broadcasting House. The boys also made appearances on Loose Ends from the Glastonbury Festival, Bristol Old Vic, Glasgow and Paris.

In 1999, The Nimmo Twins’ returned to Edinburgh with a new show and received another five-star review with The Scotsman calling it “anarchic, off-the-wall and eye-poppingly innovative”. The show’s success lead to a week-long residency in New York’s Soho Theatre, at the behest of NBC Television. In 2000, The Nimmo Twins starred in their first Radio Four series, The Nimmo Twins In…, which was recorded in front of audiences at both the Edinburgh Festival and the BBC Radio Theatre.