1 Nicholas Pennell as Ariel
When I was 13, my high school took us on a trip to Stratford, Ontario, to see a matinee performance of The Tempest by William Shakespeare.
The theatre was packed with hundreds of students from schools across the province. Predictably, it was chaos: spitballs flew, notes were passed, friends giggled and poked each other, while exhausted teachers shushed and pleaded with the unruly hormonal teenagers.
Then, suddenly, everything changed.
Dramatically, Ariel descended from the heavens and hung suspended above us, white wings outstretched. The entire theatre fell silent.
Not just quiet—silent. Mystified, captivated, perhaps even a little afraid, we stared upward. You could hear a pin drop. Every eye was fixed on Nicholas Pennell as he commanded the space with a booming voice.
In that moment, I thought, I want to do that.
As a small-town Christian nerd with a speech impediment, I had never seen anything quite like it. For the first time, I’d seen the power of performance – the ability to hold hundreds of people in the palm of your hand, to transfix the room with nothing but presence and words. I wanted that superpower. I wanted to make people listen.
2 Speech Therapy Lessons
As a child, I lived with a speech impediment – a clinical stutter and a lisp that could become quite severe depending on my surroundings and level of comfort.
Speaking often felt emotionally fraught. I was bullied at school and teased by my older brothers, which only heightened my anxiety around speaking.
My parents were determined to help. They enrolled me in the free speech therapy sessions offered through my school, and every week my mother would take me after classes. Together, we sat with the speech therapist and worked through a series of games designed to build fluency.
One exercise has stayed with me for decades. Using a simple picture of a snake, I would repeat the phrase, “Sammy the Snake, Sammy the Snake,” over and over again. There were countless other exercises, but somehow Sammy is the one I never forgot.
Today, I am in my 40th year as a stand-up comedian and actor – speaking for a living. Looking back, I owe a small debt of gratitude to that cartoon snake. Thanks, Sammy!
3 Moving from Cumbernauld
Ask any Scot of a certain age, “What’s it called?” and the answer will come back instantly: “CUMBERNAULD!” That’s where I was born.
Cumbernauld has never been mistaken for a tourist destination. Its reputation as a bleak place to live and grow up is legendary. In Scotland, Cumbernauld isn’t just a town – it’s a punchline.
Sensing opportunity, my father, Iain, decided to move the family to Canada. Specifically, Pickering, Ontario, home to one of the largest nuclear power stations in the world.
Out of the frying pan and directly into the reactor core.
The move was supposed to offer a brighter future. Whether it had any lasting effect on me is difficult to say. Certainly nothing visible to the naked eye. No extra limbs, no supernatural abilities, no glow-in-the-dark skin.
At least, nothing I can show you.
4 Melbourne Comedy Festival
In 1987, I formed a musical comedy trio called Corky And The Juice Pigs. We were young, anarchic, and gloriously silly.
Our ambitions were modest, our judgement questionable, and our confidence completely unjustified.
Then, in 1990, armed with little more than youthful naivety, we looked at a globe and decided to travel to the furthest place we could find: Melbourne, Australia. As luck would have it, Melbourne was home to a fledgling event called the Melbourne International Comedy Festival, then only in its third year.
We arrived uninvited, unknown, and largely unprepared.
Against all odds, we did well. Well enough to become regular performers
on a television program called The Big Gig. What began as an impulsive decision made around a globe became a turning point in all of our lives. That single leap led to television appearances, lifelong friendships, marriages, international touring, and eventually the Edinburgh Festival.
Who decides to crash a comedy festival on the other side of the world?
We did.
5 My Brother’s Coma
I Idolised my older brother, Andrew. He was a Christian, a petrolhead, and the funniest person I knew. He loved music, impressions, and Saturday Night Live.
I would sit in stitches as he performed Eddie Murphy’s impression of Stevie Wonder, capturing every gesture, expression, and vocal nuance. To me, it was hilarious.
Then Andrew was involved in a serious car accident.
He suffered a traumatic brain injury and was placed in a coma in the ICU. The prognosis was uncertain. Our family was devastated, and I was heartbroken. The vibrant, funny brother I looked up to lay silent and unresponsive.
One of the doctors suggested something simple: play him music he loved. So we did.
Stevie Wonder filled the hospital room, hour after hour. For weeks there was no response. Then one day, his head moved. A smile appeared. Slowly, impossibly, Andrew began to come back to us.
The first sign that he was truly returning was not a word but a gesture; his head started the Stevie Wonder wobble as his smile grew, all with the same joy and humour that had always defined him.
Somewhere in that miracle lived the voice of Stevie Wonder and the comedy of Eddie Murphy.
Ever since, I’ve believed that laughter and music can heal in ways we still don’t fully understand.
6 Taboo
Boy George wrote Taboo, a semi-autobiographical musical about London’s vibrant club scene.
When I was invited to audition for the role of Philip Sallon – the show’s narrator and legendary nightclub host – it became my first major break in the UK.
I got the part.
Taboo was my introduction to the West End and the first of many productions that would shape my career. Better still, Boy George himself played Leigh Bowery opposite my Philip Sallon, meaning I spent every night on stage with one of my musical heroes.
For the teenager who had grown up listening to Culture Club, it was surreal. The people I once admired from afar were suddenly colleagues and castmates.
Teenage Phil would have been amazed.
I was a working actor in the West End, sharing a stage with one of my idols. That felt like success.
7 Comedians Theatre Company
Quite a few years into my career, I found myself in the grip of a crisis of confidence. Unsure of my next step, I turned to my mother, Ethel, for advice.
“What do you want to be doing?” she asked.
“I want to focus on acting and start my own theatre company,” I replied.
She paused for a moment. “What’s stopping you?”
I didn’t have a good answer.
“What do you need to do?”
“Come up with a name and put on a play.”
Her response was simple: “Then just get on with it.”
So I did.
Together with Maggie Inchley, I founded Comedians Theatre Company. More than twenty years later, we’re still going strong, creating original work and collaborating with extraordinary artists, including Stewart Lee, Cal McCrystal, Helen Lederer, Mel Giedroyc, Aisling Bea, and the late Lionel Blair, among many others.
Sometimes the best career advice comes in six words: “Then just get on with it.”
8 The Clash
As a born-again Christian in the Brethren Assembly, we weren’t really supposed to listen to secular music. But my brother Andrew had found a workaround.
You’d take a Christian rock album –Phil Keaggy or Resurrection Band – out of the house, remove the record from its sleeve, and replace it with something like The Clash’s Black Market Clash. Then you’d smuggle it back in, slip it into the “safe” cover, and head upstairs.
Up in my room, I’d put on the headphones, drop the needle on Black Market Clash, and leave the Phil Keaggy sleeve casually visible on the side table as moral camouflage.
If my mother knocked to check I was OK, I’d give her a thumbs-up and call out, “Praise the Lord, mother!”
“My daddy was a bank robber …”
9 Therapy
One of the best things I’ve ever done was go to therapy.
I was in a bad way after the breakdown of my first marriage and the end of Corky And The Juice Pigs. I was bottoming out.
As a working-class kid, the idea of seeing a therapist felt like a luxury at best, and a joke at worst. It wasn’t something people like me did.
But I did it anyway.
My sessions with Alain gave me tools I didn’t know I needed. He helped me learn how to cope, how to steady myself, and how to place both my successes and failures in their proper context. Most importantly, he taught me how to compartmentalise – to stop everything collapsing into everything else.
Compartmentalise, Alain said and all I’ve been able to achieve is the “mental eyes”. Weak joke, I know.
10 Our Wedding
Our upcoming wedding will undoubtedly be the most significant event of our lives. At least, that’s what I’ve been told.
I was recently engaged to my wonderful partner, Chloe Summerskill, and she strongly encouraged me to include her name and this fact.
By “strongly encouraged,” I mean she made me write this.
Phil Nichol’s new stand-up show Aren’t We Lucky will be at the Gilded Balloon Teviot Lounge at 5.20pm all August and his Perrier award-winning show The Naked Racist will be at the Gilded Balloon Teviot Wine Bar at 9.45pm from August 5-18. He will also be appearing in 11 ½ Angry Men at the Pleasance EICC Pentland Theatre from August 5-22 at 2.30pm. For tickets go to www.edfringe.com
