Nina Conti appears convinced that her puppets are real. Freddy Gray investigates

Isn’t Nina Conti too good-looking to be a ventriloquist? One thinks of blokes in working-men’s clubs with frazzled hair, not Nina with her smiling face and big brown eyes. It’s hard not to look at her, which must be a professional disadvantage: isn’t the audience meant to watch the puppet?

I want to put this technical question to Nina, but worry that it might sound creepy. Instead, feebly, I ask if she believes reports that ventriloquism is making a comeback. ‘I’m not sure I really buy into that,’ she says, with a kind and apologetic shrug. But the art of talking through a puppet does seem to be enjoying a renaissance. There are hugely successful American acts, such as Jeff Dunham and David Strassman, and Nina herself is a rising star. I’ve even read about it on the BBC website, I insist. ‘I suppose a revival is due,’ she says. ‘The thing about ventriloquism is that people associate it with the Eighties.’ I think of Keith Harris in a leather jacket with Orville the Duck. ‘But people have always liked puppets — they think that puppets are cool.’

Puppets don’t come much cooler than Monkey, Nina’s main sidekick, a cynical primate who sounds like Sean Connery. But more of him later. How did Nina Conti, who admits to having been ‘a shy, slightly spoilt only child’ — she’s the daughter of the actor Tom Conti — end up as a ventriloquist? The man responsible was the late Ken Campbell, a playwright and acting specialist. He had developed an interest in ventriloquism while writing a play about the history of comedy. He gave Nina, then an aspiring 25-year-old actress, a teach-yourself-ventriloquism kit as a present. ‘It came with this awful wooden mannequin that looked quite scary,’ she recalls. ‘I was flummoxed. I had never seen any ventriloquism, but, like most people, I had it in my head that I didn’t like it.’ But she didn’t want to offend Campbell, and so — ‘as evidence that I had at least tried’ — she made a video of herself. ‘Watching it, I thought, “Hang on, that really looks like two people talking.” I was instantly excited,’ she says.

She’d always liked doing voices. As a girl, she would record mock radio shows with her friends in her bedroom. ‘Just silly voices, that sort of thing.’ And in the first part of her career she did character voices for the Royal Shakespeare Company. ‘I suppose I’ve never been that interested in myself as me,’ she reflects. ‘So ventriloquism was really the perfect job.’

Anyone who has seen Nina perform — you can watch videos of her on the internet — would agree that she has indeed found her métier. Her shows are technically brilliant — and funny. In her hands, the puppets come alive. There’s Granny, a mischievous old girl who keeps saying she doesn’t want to be a burden, and an amusing Owl who writes poetry. But the grumpy Monkey is the real star. He moans that ventriloquism is ‘a dead art’. ‘I think you schould do schtand-up comedy on your own,’ he tells Nina. ‘I think it would be tragically hilarioush.’

Nina says that much of her act is improvised. But she must have to practise. Does she sit in a room with her imaginary characters talking to herself? ‘Yes, I do, for hours,’ she replies. ‘I have an office with about 50 puppets hanging from the walls.’

Even so, ventriloquism must be immensely difficult. There are six letters of the alphabet — m, b, p, v, w and f —- which are impossible to pronounce without moving one’s lips. ‘You can find ways around that,’ says Nina. One trick is to make a joke of it. ‘You said margles, you meant to say marbles,’ says Nina to Monkey in one sketch. ‘Schtop pretending it’sh not your fault!’ shouts Monkey back.

The biggest challenge, she says, is not keeping her lips still, but learning to ‘act natural when you have your listening face on. You have to not pre-empt your reactions so it always looks as if you don’t know what your character is going to say.’

Quite often, though, Nina really doesn’t know what her characters are going to say: ‘The puppets say things that I would never dream of saying.’ She describes ventriloquism as ‘a sort of licensed Tourette’s’. ‘The puppets have direct access to the uncensored mind,’ she explains. ‘They say the first thing that comes into their head, whereas most humans say the second thing. It is a wonderfully, totally irresponsible art.’

The funniest part is watching Nina trying to cope when the puppet says something awful. Monkey, in particular, is incorrigible. He can be fatist, racist and he regularly calls Nina ‘whore’ on stage. ‘I am genuinely shocked by some of the stuff he comes out with,’ she says, before adding, ‘but I didn’t say the things, of course. He said them.’

Here, maybe, lies the key to her comic success. She seems to have convinced even herself that her characters are real. She talks about them as if they were autonomous individuals. ‘When I am short of ideas, I ask Monkey,’ she says, or ‘I find it very funny when Monkey gets all serious.’

It can be unnerving. When I ask her to ‘do Monkey’, she looks shy and pained. ‘Oh, no, I can’t,’ she says, putting her head in her hands. ‘He’s not here.’ Then, from somewhere in the depths of her oesophagus, Monkey’s voice comes rumbling out. ‘You’re schhtuck here, Nina, aren’t ch’you?’ he says. ‘You gonna talk into thish man’sh microphone or what?’ Nina stops, looks up and smiles. ‘That was Monkey.’

Nina admits that the voices can get the better of her. ‘A few nights ago,’ she says, ‘I was trying to book a hotel room and I decided to do it as my Granny character. The woman on the phone couldn’t hear what I was saying, so I put the Granny puppet’s mouth closer to the receiver and said, “Can you hear me now, dearie?” It’s at moments like that that I stop myself and think, can this be normal?’

Nina Conti’s Talk to the Hand is at Edinburgh’s Pleasance King Dome from 5 to 30 August.