Chattin’ Shit

Hugo and Seapa host a celebrity chat show that treats its own format as a running joke. The interview is in there somewhere, but it tends to surface only after a round of teasing. A beard with a 'tiny tash' gets examined for its hidden backstory. Hair being grown out for a new show turns into the setup for a story from a bar. Someone's eyes are declared green, not hazel, with total conviction. Some episodes open with a mock-official disclaimer admitting the conversation was recorded in lockdown and may sound dated, then shrugging that it is simply vintage. That self-mocking opener is a fair guide to everything after it. The talk is quick and overlapping, full of little affirmations and callbacks, and digressions are allowed to become the main event. Underneath the messing about, guests get room to tell real stories. Ocean Wisdom talks about being born in Camden, moving to Brighton with his mum, and the point where he put on a beat and simply rapped in his actual voice. Some of his earliest lyrics ended up in 'Walking', and one host cannot resist checking that this is the track delivered faster than Eminem's 'Rap God'. Charlie Cooper describes writing a handful of characters based on people from town and school, recording voices on a little tape recorder, and putting scenes on YouTube when hardly anyone was watching. He is candid that the early material was not funny yet, only a glimmer of something. A host cuts in to ask how anyone even knows how to write a script, which is exactly the kind of question the show favours: blunt, curious and slightly sideways. Clara Amfo recalls turning herself into an office assistant, minding the boss's diary, and finding a place that felt like family, where people she grew up listening to came in to record their shows. A host chips in with a memory of EZ turning round, giving them all five and leaving. With Tim Key, the chat turns to Edinburgh, the slow build of an audience from making things year after year, and a baffled aside about why a writer would need to be from Cambridge. Mistakes stay in and get owned. At the end of one episode a host comes back to confess he confused a Britney Spears track with a Christina Aguilera one, adding that he is not even into Christina Aguilera. A bonus episode about climate and cutting emissions, made with Virgin Media O2, turns to why people trust figures they relate to over experts they know nothing about. Throughout, the warmth never tips into fawning; guests are teased, agreed with and egged on rather than grilled. What a listener gets is the feeling of sitting in on two friends who happen to have a well-known guest along.