Born in London in 1979, comedian, writer and actor Roisin Conaty won the best newcomer award at the 2010 Edinburgh fringe festival for her show Hero, Warrior, Fireman, Liar. Since then she has appeared as Jo, Greg Davies’s best friend, in Channel 4 comedy series Man Down. She created and stars in GameFace, a sitcom about a struggling actor named Marcella, which first aired on E4 in 2017. The second series is on Wednesdays at 10pm on Channel 4.
1. Podcast
Presenter Brett Goldstein interviews people about what films mean to them: it’s very personal, about when they first saw it, and how they felt at certain points of their life when they watched it. Some are really sad, some are really happy. I liked the episodes with Tom Basden, Aisling Bea, Suzi Ruffell: they all go off on different tangents. It’s very therapeutic – it’s something I can listen to when I need to chill out and not think about the world. It’s a unique way to discover a film: to hear what it means to someone rather than just the qualities of the film objectively.
2. Artist
He’s a phenomenal artist who I discovered on Instagram – I think someone like January Jones posted about him. It’s the first piece of work I’ve seen on Instagram of an artist where I thought: “I want to go to his gallery.” I spent a couple of hours scrolling through all his work. The first painting by him I saw was Underwater, Out of Space, which is incredible. The colours are impressionistic and quite playful. When I’m online and trying not just to read about the news, I’m trying to fill my brain with nice stuff and I find his art breathtaking and really moving.
3. Cafe
This coffee shop in Crouch End is a tiny little boxy place, but I love it: they have the music at the right level, they serve amazing coffee, the staff are lovely and do a really nice breakfast. And they have good, cosy seats – I think sometimes the nicer the coffee, the worse the seats. Coffee Circus is the perfect coffee shop for me: it’s rustic, unpretentious, community-minded. It’s the only place other than my house that I write. I wrote quite a lot of my series in there, talking to myself, so they probably think I’m mad.
4. Comedy
An incredible piece of standup. I saw it live, and now it’s on Netflix. It’s feisty and exciting and multilayered, not formulaic at all. It’s a celebration of being a single mum, and different family lifestyles. It’s about her trying to have a room in her house – the “glitter room” – just for her and her daughter. She has all these amazing, important ideas about feminism and women and ageing, but it’s not a polemic, it’s all hidden within the joke. There’s no one like Katherine Ryan: her voice is completely original, and she hasn’t got any received opinions – they’re all hers.
5. Film
You Were Never Really Here (Director: Lynne Ramsay, 2017)
I watched this again recently. Lynne Ramsay is one of the best directors in the world – she’s a visual poet. I’m a writer, so I always think: “You direct what’s on the script.” But so much of that film is silent. I was stunned – I find it really impressive when you’re telling a story without words. And all the shots move the story on. I went to a talk about the film and they said they made the music while they were doing the edit, so it’s all very intertwined. I couldn’t understand why she didn’t win best director at the Oscars.
6. App
This is basically an astrology app disguised as a kind of guru – it doesn’t use language like “Mercury retrograde” and so on. You put in your time of birth and some details, then you get updates: this is who you are, this is your destiny. My flatmate Caroline got me into it – she’s not even into astrology, but she was like: “It’s weird, it knows everything about you.” It’s accurate, well-written and quite addictive. It just feels like a mate popping up every couple of days going: “Today is the day when this is going to happen.”
