‘We were ahead of our time!’: Charly Clive and Ellen Robertson AKA sketch duo Britney on their new TV fame and word-of-mouth hits
With TV shows Rooster and Vladimir under their belts, the sketch stars and best friends since school have withstood tumours, nerdy perfectionism and US success. So why are they so eager to get back to the fringe?
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There has always been a lot of overlap in the lives of Charly Clive and Ellen Robertson. After bonding on a school trip 20 years ago, the pair have spent the past decade performing sketch comedy together and were flatmates for almost as long.
Recently, though, the similarities have bordered on the spooky. In December 2024, Clive was told she had been cast as Steve Carell’s professor daughter in the HBO campus comedy Rooster. Soon after, Robertson found out she was also getting a new superstar parent: she’d be playing Rachel Weisz’s lawyer daughter in Netflix’s Vladimir, another smart, funny show set at a US university. Both series debuted in March to enthusiastic reviews and viewing figures in the millions.
“It was bonkers,” says Robertson, who recalls the pair digesting the news of their coincidental castings on a rooftop over a bottle of wine. Clive, however, maintains she was “very unsurprised” they’d both managed to land such high-profile gigs after years of small TV roles and near-breakthroughs (Clive led the Channel 4 OCD drama Pure in 2019). “I thought it was pretty inevitable, genuinely.” Whenever Robertson fretted about their professional futures, Clive would assure her it was “happening, baby! Then, thank God, it did.”
Despite having significantly upped their respective profiles, Clive and Robertson, both 33, are not abandoning their lo-fi sketch roots. This year, under their joint moniker Britney, they’re taking a new show to the Edinburgh fringe (well, two actually: they’ll spend their lunchtimes acting in a Robertson-penned play called Jitters, in which Clive plays her comedy partner’s stepmum-to-be, and their evenings performing their latest sketch show Holy Mackerel!).
It’s June when we meet for lunch in an east London restaurant, but the duo are in no rush to prepare for the festival: I saw a preview of Holy Mackerel! in February and it was pretty much flawless. There’s clearly a level of nerdy perfectionism involved in a Britney production; Clive describes their shows as “meticulously prepared – so it’s even sadder when it’s not funny!”.
That won’t be an issue: Clive and Robertson have an incredible knack for finding hilarity in unexpected places. Their last Edinburgh show, 2022’s Friends and Nothing More, managed to extract an impressive number of laughs from a banal Stephen King quote. This time around, they’ve transformed an inadvertently weird headline from the Guardian’s TV section into one of the funniest sketches I’ve seen in years. I don’t want to give too much away, but the fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld and serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer both feature.
The pair clearly keep a lookout for jokes hidden in plain sight. “Do you know what’s funny about that menu?” Clive observes after we order. “It said: house trout. Like, house red, house white, house trout. That will be our new sketch – you can find inspiration anywhere!” Occasionally, however, the pair’s references can be a little too niche. They are considering dropping a sketch about B*Witched’s 1998 chart-topper C’est la Vie. Older audiences don’t get it, neither do younger ones: previewing it to a nonplussed gen Z crowd recently “was gutting”, says Robertson. Both agree that in an ideal world they’d perform solely to millennial women. The intended vibe of a Britney show is: “I don’t need to worry about the state of the world, I can sit down and be taken care of by two year-aboves, who are gonna be nice to us for one hour,” says Clive.
The pair first bonded at their Oxfordshire all-girls school in year nine, when they found themselves sitting together on a coach to the first world war battlefields of Ypres. They had never spoken before: Clive, who was bullied at school for “being gay” due to her cropped hairstyle (an attempt to get rid of recurring nits; she is straight), thought: “Ellen was very cool, she had really nice hair and boyfriends – which is so funny because she’s the gayest woman in town.”
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Robertson went on to Cambridge, where she performed with the Footlights, while Clive studied drama in New York. After graduating, they began entertaining the idea of taking a sketch show to the fringe. Then Clive was diagnosed with a brain tumour.
Robertson suggested they base the show on the diagnosis because Clive was “being so funny about it”, thinking it would also be a way to provide her friend with some positive memories of an awful year. “And I said: absolutely not,” says Clive. Eventually, shechanged her mind; the resulting show, titled Britney – also the nickname they’d given Clive’s tumour to give it a glamorous spin – was a word-of-mouth hit.
The following year, after initial surgery, Clive’s tumour began growing again, meaning that she needed radiotherapy. The pair decided it was a good excuse to revive Britney, the show (now also the name of their double act), “slightly more lucratively” in London. It won the attention of the BBC, which adapted it into a 2021 pilot co-starring My Parents Are Aliens’ Tony Gardner, an early champion of the Edinburgh show. Making the pilot was “the most fun I’ve ever had”, says Robertson. “We obviously really hoped they’d want it for a series. And then they didn’t.”
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The rejection was “tricky and strange”, partly because of the deeply personal subject matter and partly because of all the gruelling promotion they’d done. “We had interview after interview with someone saying: so just tell us again about the worst period of your life,” says Clive. Once they’d accepted it was going no further, “we were like OK. We did everything the way we wanted to do it. That goes to bed now.”
UK TV’s loss was ultimately the US’s gain. Why do they think so many British actors are landing the sorts of roles in the US that have eluded them here? “Americans seem more interested in us for whatever reason … are we cheaper?” wonders Robertson.
“Almost definitely – God, I’d do it for free. Don’t print that,” jokes Clive. Another possibility is the risk-averse nature of homegrown TV. While UK broadcasters are still trying to find the next Fleabag, in the US “they’re like: ‘How can we wow everybody again with something as successful as Fleabag, but that isn’t Fleabag?’” says Clive.
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Thanks to Vladimir and the already recommissioned Rooster – plus various other acting projects (Clive recently played Sally Phillips’s sister in Relics at the Lyric Hammersmith; Robertson will appear in Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9 at the National Theatre in London from November) – Britney is now more of a passion project than something the pair are relying on for a career breakthrough. They don’t covet online clout – in fact, they don’t share any sketches on social media: Robertson thinks pumping out skits for Instagram would feel like “drudgery”. They aren’t particularly bothered about critical success, either. Some comedians have told them a positive review in a broadsheet can inflate the average age of the crowd “by, like, 40 years” – a disaster for the B*Witched material.
Instead, they want to ensure Britney always feels like a treat. “Because it’s not the only thing we do, I think we’re allowed for it to be a really special thing for us,” says Clive.
“Working on a strange little hour of comedy is our dream,” agrees Robertson. Twenty years on, the unadulterated joy of those year nine lunch breaks is clearly still going strong.
Holy Mackerel! is at the Pleasance Courtyard, Edinburgh,to 21 August; Jitters is at Old Lab at Summerhall, 6 to 30 August.
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