Cowards’ star is ready to brave Edinburgh Festival

2:49pm Thursday 7th August 2008

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COMEDIAN and writer Stefan Golaszewski who grew up in Waltham Forest and is currently starring in BBC sketch show Cowards talks to Claire Hack about the show, his career and a disastrous spell working in Hamleys toy shop.

This month, Stefan Golaszewski will be at the Edinburgh Fringe with a one-man show, set in Walthamstow, all about the pitfalls of falling in love as a teenager.

The play, entitled Stefan Golaszewski Speaks About A Girl He Once Loved, follows the story of a life-changing encounter with a girl in a pub when he was just 18.

“I grew up in Chingford and I’ve lived in Walthamstow and round there all my life,” he says.

“The play is called Stefan Golaszewski Speaks About A Girl He Once Loved and really, it’s just that.

“It’s not entirely true - otherwise, it would be a really boring play.

“I’ve added some things to make it a bit more interesting.”

The pub in question, Golaszewski says, is The Goose, next to Walthamstow Central Station, where he met the girl in question.

Now 27, it was this chance meeting that taught him some of his earliest lessons about love.

“It starts off being a silly story about a silly young bloke in a pub with his mates, who sees a girl he likes,” he says.

“But in the middle, it takes a sad twist.”

Without giving away too much of the plot, the “silly young bloke” finds out a secret about the girl he once loved which changes everything between them.

Studying English at Churchill College, Cambridge, where he was president of the Footlights, made him “useless for any other job” he says - and so comedy seemed a natural choice.

“I did it at university and then left and a few of us carried on doing it,” he says.

“It’s probably the desire not to get a real job - I’ve never really been good at any job I’ve done.

“I did work in Hamleys but I was absolutely useless - I once charged someone about 12 grand because I didn’t know how to work the tills properly.

“I didn’t make them pay, though.”

Now working on Cowards with the same group of people from his university days, Golaszewski has just finished making a new series for BBC 4 and is about to make a second series for Radio 4.

“The four of us usually work together,” he says.

“The show’s quite deadpan - it’s nothing like Little Britain and it’s different to most sketch comedy.

“It’s quite naturalistic and realistic - there are no catch phrases or big characters.”

His play, on the other hand, is performed completely solo, accompanied only by a neon sign announcing the name of the girl (“Betty”) and the voices of his friends in the pub.

“Performing is an enormous ego trip,” he says.

“It’s just you and a load of people - they listen to everything you say and laugh quite a lot as well.

“It’s literally just me speaking about a girl - I describe it to the audience in the present tense.”

And it’s not just the play that’s set in Waltham Forest.

“It’s where I’ve always been, so whenever I write things, they’re often set there, at least in my mind.

“In the play, there’s a reference to the lake in Highams Park and there’s a big bit that’s set at the dogs.”

Stefan Golaszewski Speaks About A Girl He Once Loved is at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival at the Pleasance Courtyard iin August. For more information visit myspace.com/thepopsocks