About The Catherine Tate Show

But who is she?
A graduate of the Central School of Speech and Drama and Royal National Theatre, London-born Catherine Tate spent a year with the Royal Shakespeare Company before turning her hand to stand-up comedy. She appeared in the Channel 4 sketch show Barking, That Peter Kay Thing and The Harry Hill Show before becoming part of Lee Mack's Perrier-nominated New Bits show at Edinburgh in 2000. She returned to the festival the following year with her own, one-woman show.

Wait, I recognise that face...
And it's highly likely that you have seen her around. Other than the above programmes, Catherine Tate made her mark with a number of supporting roles in comedies such as the televisual version of the satirical website TVGoHome, as well as Big Train, which featured, among others, the ridiculously talented Simon Pegg. After being spotting by a casting director at Edinburgh, Tate was offered the role of Angela in the Dawn French vehicle Wild West, which brought her before a wider audience.

Stand up route to telly
It was her time on the stand-up circuit for the past five years that earned Catherine a place on our screens, ever since she decided to stop hanging around waiting for call-backs on bit parts in The Bill and to start creating her own routines. "I knew I had this talent for comedy," she once commented, "but I wasn't getting the parts. Then I saw that lots of stand-ups were getting picked, so I thought, 'I can do that'," Her stand-up material quickly evolved into sketch-based character comedy, making for a smooth transfer to TV.

Playing in a man's world
It is a cliché of comedy that Stand Up is not a woman's game. The circuit is littered with funny-men, but it seems you can count the names of the leading female comedians on one hand: French and Saunders, Jo Brand, Victoria Wood, Jenny Eclair. Catherine gives us her view: "maybe it's a question of ego. It's such a presumptuous thing, stand-up? It's saying, not only do I want you to look at me, I want you to listen. And laugh. I don't know how many women comics go out and say, 'I'm going to play Wembley.' A lot of men would like to. I enjoyed my years on the circuit, but I always preferred writing characters to listening to the sound of my own voice every night."

Break from tradition
Although she has proved herself as a comedian and performer, if she's followed her family's typical line of employment, she certainly wouldn't have wound up on our TV screens, as she comes from a long line of...florists! Talking about her mum with great warmth: "she's got a flower shop in London, as did my grandmother, and her mother before. When I went to drama school, she said, 'When are you going to have time to run the shop?'" Fortunately for us, that time will probably never come...