Viva Brighton Issue #58 December 2017

COMEDY
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Chris Green: Tina C
Happy birthday Jesus!
“It’s the smile,” Chris Green
says. “As I’m getting ready, I
do that hugely confident smile
into the mirror and I’m there
– I’m Tina.” The performer
is talking about Tina C, the
all-American country singer
with the big hair and even
bigger mouth.
Tina, who burst onto the music
scene with the unforgettable
album No D*ck is as Hard
as My Life, is one of Green’s
most enduring characters. She
was ‘born’ some 20 years ago
when Green, then a researcher
for a UK music TV channel, travelled to Nashville
and fell in love with country music. “I began
listening to a lot of female singer-songwriters and
it seemed obvious to do a fake version of that.
Tina was everything I wasn’t at the time. She had
huge self-belief – her worldview was 100 per cent
correct in her opinion. To be able to stride out on
stage with her confidence was very seductive.”
She’s not his only character – Brighton audiences
will also be familiar with aging music hall veteran
and ‘artificial hip hop’ pioneer Ida Barr – but she
is the one he returns to most. “Sometimes I feel
closer to her and understand her more than the
others. It depends what’s going on in the world. A
while ago I wasn’t very interested in doing Tina
any more and then 9/11 happened and I knew immediately
what she would think about it and how
it would allow me to talk about my own views.”
Tina has always been a political animal; in 2007
she attempted to solve Australia’s Aboriginal
tensions in her Adelaide Cabaret Festival show
Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word, while her BBC
Radio 4 series, Tina C, from
Middle America to the Middle
East, saw her take on another
thorny issue with a megawatt
smile and unwavering confidence.
Now, Green reveals,
she will be making her second
presidential bid (the last was in
2008) and challenging Trump
in 2020.
Green struggled with the idea
for some time: “A year ago I
thought there was nothing to
say about American politics - it
was too extreme. I felt it had
gone beyond parody. Sometimes
you can make things ‘safe’ by joking about
them, but Trump is not funny. He’s scary. Now I
feel I’ve got my head around what I want to say
and I know how I want to do it.”
That’s next year’s show, however. In the meantime,
he’s back at Komedia with Tina’s Christmas show
Happy Birthday Jesus! a celebration of two famously
schmaltzy traditions. “There’s such a great canon of
country Christmas songs because Christmas is all
about hokey things – family, love, tradition – and
so is country. From about October onwards I play
mainly Christmas albums – I love The One and Only
Wynonna Judd Christmas Album and Mary J Blige’s A
Very Mary Christmas – and get a bit tearful.”
I wonder if Tina is someone he would consider
spending Christmas with? “Ha ha!,” he splutters.
“I’m not even sure we’d be friends. Tina would
think I was irrelevant and wonder why she was
being introduced to me, and I would just be starstruck.
It wouldn’t be a very equal relationship.”
Nione Meakin
Komedia, 11th & 12th December, 8pm, £15
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