Tracey Ullman Discusses Her Variety Show

HARI SREENIVASAN: Right. So you’ve got season three coming. It’s a sketch show. If someone has not watched season one or two, what are these about?

TRACEY ULLMAN, COMEDIAN: My first shows originate in England. I was asked by the BBC after 30 years would I like to do a television show in England. I think my goodness I didn’t think I was on the radar of the BBC anymore. And the BBC was now run by a woman, Charlotte Moore, who is doing an incredible job and the executive of comedy department was Myfanwy Moore. And when I had been at the BBC 30 years ago, it was five men in bowties talking about the wall.

SREENIVASAN: Benny Hill?

ULLMAN: That was ITV.

SREENIVASAN: Sorry.

ULLMAN: Yes. Well, girls running around in bikinis. It was pretty bad. I started the show three years ago and I thought, wow, England is now this buzzing global hub, multinational melting pots are going here, the food is great now and we want to take on this country again and all the things. But kept international and could sell it to HBO. And then we entered Brexit and everything changed and the psychology changed and then that became interesting. So this is my third year. The first two was sort of flow and I would do like one of the characters (INAUDIBLE) is portraying Angela Merkel, the German chancellor and I couldn’t really do sketches about her, shoot them in September and put them out in January because so much has happened. So this season, we filmed some things earlier and hoped they would remain pertinent. And then two days before transmission or a day before transmission, we’d run in and we have a standing set for 10 Downing Street. So I could be panicking about Brexit. And it was lovely. It was exciting. So I didn’t mind if the professor did not like because the new cycle is so fast.

SREENIVASAN: Right. Let’s take a look at a clip from Angela Merkel. You’re playing Angela Merkel here.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We will train you. I have to take you through some everyday situations and all you must do is not always the eyes. Begin. The phone rings, you pick it up. You hear a teenage boy whose voice is breaking. You realize it is Theresa May. Try harder. You’re a chancellor, not a gift.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes. All righty.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SREENIVASAN: OK. First of all, can we say amazing work on the makeup? The idea is uncanny how good these folks are able to make you look. How long does that take?

ULLMAN: Not long. Because we’re on a television show and if any makeup takes more than an hour and a half, I just can’t do it. It never gets through my days. So we have a genius makeup artist called Floris Schuller a Dutch sculptor and he gives me — it’s brilliant. It’s sort of made with gelatin now. Years ago, I still work with latex masks. It was like talking through a kitchen sponge. Two men put them on in the morning. It doesn’t take more than an hour and a half. And then I am Angela Merkel for I don’t know how long and maybe through lunchtime is when we’ll change but I have to be quick. That keeps the spontaneity and the energy going. But I am Angela Merkel for hours and I talk to people —

SREENIVASAN: You stay in character?

ULLMAN: Yes, yes, absolutely. Yes. My lovely guru who I imagine. all my charters of politicians are off duty. I don’t want to see the (INAUDIBLE) because it’s how they are behind the scenes that interest me.

SREENIVASAN: So how do you model the mannerisms? What do you study about someone to make it convincing? Teach me if I want to figure out how to imitate someone. Is it their walk? Is it —

ULLMAN: Yes. Her walk is both — particularly her shoulders and she moves her arms but only from here. So only from here. And it was another Bush, I think George W. hugged her from behind years ago, Angela Merkel. She went — it was like a physical reaction. She’s the only girl in the room, you know, and you’ve got Berlusconi in there and all the guys. The hope for her is secretly she’s very, very sexy, so she’s a sex bomb, sex bomb, giving off the sex mask. I admire her enormously and I hope she knows I exist.

SREENIVASAN: What is it about politics that you find intriguing enough to put the time and effort into these characters?

ULLMAN: Well, I try and cover a broad spectrum of society in the shows I’m doing. I found that women politicians like Angela Merkel, like Theresa May, I’m similar age to them. I look for the empathy and the poignancy and sadness in people too. So I mean Theresa May is having a horrible time. She’s got to handle Brexit. I think as a fair weather prime minister, she probably would have had a nice run but these eating school boards have messed it all up. And now I’ve got to fix what the boys have messed up, Phillip. That’s how I see it.

SREENIVASAN: Yes. There’s a clip from Brexit and people jumping ships. Let’s take a look.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Are you a Ramoner (ph) who’s scared about life after Brexit? Wouldn’t you be forced to keep hours at passport control while the rest of the EU walks by laughing at you? Well, you should be you big British aegis. But don’t worry, Paddy Passports can help. The deadline for Brexit is fast approaching. So join the 160,000 Brits who have already applied for an Irish passport, presumably one that says “I’m still European so don’t [bleep] hate me.” Our dedicated team will troll through your ancestry and find some kind of Irish relative who qualifies you. Sure, everyone is a bit Irish, aren’t we?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Paddy Passports help me remember that my own mother was from Dublin. The next time you see me playing Mrs. Brown, it will be the [bleep] other one.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SREENIVASAN: Actually, that’s just one of my favorite characters. What about the relationship that you portray between Theresa May and Donald Trump?

ULLMAN: Well, she gets home with Facetime and have a talk with him and I think they’re standing by with a lot to discuss. I think that we’re all terribly puzzled by Trump at first, Merkel too but now they’re getting used to it and they’re figuring out how to play it. Macron’s figuring out how to play it. She isn’t going to be so offended when it is — well, she’s in great shape for somebody who’s at her 64 and a French grandmother, of course, I am. I play her in the first year. That was interesting to play Brigitte Macron.

SREENIVASAN: Is taking on the president of the United States too easy these days?

ULLMAN: Yes, it is too easy. It becomes habitual and I spend more time in London. I come here and it’s like people are under siege and obsessed. I get to break it up a little more by doing something varied on my show. By just Trump or just talking about Trump, I would go out of my mind.

SREENIVASAN: I hope you take this the right way but what’s the secret to staying in the business this long? I mean it’s remarkable. There’s not that many comedians, male or female that have had the rung that your career has had.

ULLMAN: Pretty great. I think I was married for 30 years to a producer. Sadly, my husband passed away five years ago and he taught me so much about controlling the rights in the shows, distribution and he really do the business stuff and let me do the creative stuff. And we worked together as sort of we thought in this desi lieu. I have big gaps between working, I’ve had to take time off for children and I’m not obsessed with working all the time. I just get to do what I want to do when I do it since I come up with — and I still do this multi- character thing. The credits on my show are me on my mother’s windowsill when I was six doing “The Tracey Ullman Show.” And I’m still doing it. In fact, I’ve made a bit of money out of it and I make a living out of it. But yes, longevity in the business.

SREENIVASAN: You said before that that window show for your mom started after your father had passed away that this was a way for you and her to deal with grief. Tell me about that.

ULLMAN: Well, we love to laugh at my family. We have a very down-to-earth sort of London working-class humor. Yes, it cheered her up, made her laugh but not just funny, just making fun of things, sad things. I used to impersonate the spinster that lived opposite us, Annie Cox, who never had gotten married because her fiance had been killed in the First World War and she wore rubber boots. And to be her, I could be her for my mom. You want to break their hearts, too, and impersonate everyone in my village. And, of course, it’s a way to deal with the sadness and grief and I’m doing it again really. My husband died five years ago. I came back to the BBC, did the show and I’m doing it all again as an adult woman.

SREENIVASAN: So who did you look up to? Who gave you some confidence to say “You go ahead, you keep doing this funny stuff”?

ULLMAN: There are always wonderful actors like Maggie Smith and Patricia Haze and Judy Dench but they were trained and they did Shakespeare. And, my lord, and I wasn’t that girl. I have this neither here nor there London accents. And I had seen Gilda Radner on television and bits of Carol Burnett isn’t so much about England. (INAUDIBLE) was around in the ’50s. I thought wow. We were a bit behind them all in England but then we’re caught up now. But I’ve always had this great admiration for the way that they could thrive on American television.

SREENIVASAN: Should there be anything that is off limits for comedy? We’re in a national conversation right now and what’s too far, whether it’s about political critique or whether it’s about political correctness.

ULLMAN: It only goes too far when it’s not based in good energy and observation, it becomes angry and partisan and just cruel, and then it’s not funny to me.

SREENIVASAN: Are you intentional or is it just to entertain when it comes to thinking about what it is that you’re writing? I mean at this point, if somebody looks at the sketch of Trump, clearly she’s part of the resistance, this is her way of pushing back.

ULLMAN: No, I don’t think people see me that way. I think I’ve been very fair. I mean I do a BBC one show right now that goes out prime time with all generations, all sorts of aged people watching it but I think we try and keep the show very fair because I said I’m sick of all that tribalism and you know.

SREENIVASAN: Can you really avoid it? Not that you have to be a member of it but —

ULLMAN: No.

SREENIVASAN: — when you look at Instagram or Twitter or whatever, maybe your people around you shield you from it but it is pretty bad.

ULLMAN: I did a sketch about that on one of the shows of my daughter. I don’t partake in Twitter. My daughter does. She shared with me some things that have been said about me online on Twitter for the show and some of them are obviously fantastic. “I’ve always loved her. She’s so much fun. She’s crazy like my cousin.” And then one man would consistently write things as severe as like “I hope she gets cancer tomorrow. I hate her. Why doesn’t she die of aids? I would have had sex with her in the ’80s and now she’s just” — and you go, whoa, that’s like it’s massively out of proportion so I wrote a sketch about that.

SREENIVASAN: You’d like to push that guy in the light.

ULLMAN: Yes, exactly. We wrote a sketch about going to find him and imagine if you looked at my face. What’s the matter with you? My daughter went, that’s a massive overreaction, which is what she would say in private. We had fun doing that and that was my take on that viciousness. It reminds me of school. There was always some kid that would sit in the bits and go, “Look at them, they’re fat and stupid.” And now they’ve got a voice. So we’ve always done it, it’s just a different form.