![]() At the same time, his stand-up was becoming increasingly acclaimed – he won the 2000 British Comedy Award for Best Live Comic and would later be included in Channel 4’s 100 Greatest Stand-Ups.įrom there it was a natural leap to 8 Out Of 10 Cats in 2005, where his regular role as team captain married the familiar glasses-waggling aesthetic of the traditional panel show with the unpredictability of 21st century comedy. The show’s merging of grey estate life with outlandish scenarios (Lock’s downbeat character Vince found himself destroying graveyards with stolen ploughs or accidentally revealing his secret history of swan murder) showcased Sean’s ability to remodel deadpan everyman humour for the Mighty Boosh era. Becoming a regular panellist on various radio comedy shows, Lock made the leap to TV when his own 1998 radio series 15 Minutes Of Misery – in which he’d eavesdrop on the comic antics of his neighbours in a south London tower block – was developed into the Radio 4 sitcom 15 Storeys High and then on to the BBC in 2002. One of his first was as a regular player in Rob Newman and David Baddiel’s Newman And Baddiel In Pieces series in 1993 as their support acts on the pair’s peak-era shows, he became one of the first comedians to perform at Wembley Arena while still a virtual unknown. He emerged from comedy’s boiler room over the course of the ‘90s, having previously worked various odd jobs from labouring to (he’d claim, at least) goat-herding in France – while making his name as a stand-up he contributed material to shows by Harry Hill, Bill Bailey and Lee Evans among others, and would make sporadic cameo appearances on TV and radio. The deep respect Sean commanded in the comedy field was the result of decades of background groundwork beneath the mainstream radar. ![]() ![]() His work straddled the observational and the fantastical with a rare seamlessness, his everyman persona belying the madcap comedy mind at work behind the specs. The inventive lengths that Sean would go to in order to turn a couple of minutes of casual quiz show air-filler into extended, unfettered odysseys of comedy gold spoke to the brilliance of this much-loved comedian, who died today age 58 following a long battle with cancer. Or a wicker basket containing what he’d modestly describe as “total comedy”. Few set-up lines have unleashed such wild comedic digressions as “Sean, have you got a mascot?” The fundamental genius of 8 Out Of 10 Cats Does Countdown was encapsulated in the next – utterly unpredictable – few minutes, as Sean Lock reached beneath the desk and let his imagination run riot.
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