The improv show Whose Line Is It Anyway? has scarcely been off-air since it began on Channel 4 in 1988 after a brief radio stint. Now, a select few players are returning for a live reunion show at the London Palladium. The US comic Greg Proops, who resembles a bespectacled, rockabilly Max Headroom, is one of them. Proops first appeared on the show in 1989. “I was four years old,” he deadpans.

He is talking to me from New York, where he is on tour mixing standup gigs with recordings of his lively podcast The Smartest Man in the World (so-named because a friend told him he always came across like a know-it-all). After becoming a full-time Whose Liner in the early 1990s, Proops moved to London and stayed with the show until the bitter end in 1999. Then he joined the US incarnation that is still running. “We used to laugh every year and say, ‘Surely we’re not coming back again.’ Now we don’t laugh any more.”



Among those joining the 56-year-old Proops on stage in London will be the sardonic host Clive Anderson, the genial Canadian Colin Mochrie and the vivacious Josie Lawrence, who were in the unofficial reunion What Does the Title Matter Anyway? at Edinburgh two years ago, as well as the first official one last year at the Adelphi. Proops says the players are more comfortable with one another than ever, though he reserves a special fondness for Lawrence. “Josie is constantly surprising. She’s daffy. I know I can make a weird offer and she’ll take it up. And we have the sexual tension that crowds really want. If there’s any point at which one of us can hit on the other, we do it. The pervier, the better. We were on top of each other all last summer during the show.”

Proops estimates that he plays several hundred live gigs a year, while his colleagues are all in various improv groups. “If anything, it’s Clive who’s the dead weight, as usual.” Ah, yes. The famed, and only possibly feigned, animosity between the brashly American Proops, with his exaggeratedly whiny sing-song voice, and Anderson, the bumptious prig, was one of the wicked delights of the original. How real was it?

“We do get along,” he confesses. “Although Clive is quite annoying. He’ll say something that irks me so much that I have to put him down, then he can’t shut up – he can’t not have the last word. If he doesn’t have the last word he loses his mind. He’ll bring up things like, ‘Oh, America didn’t join the war until 1941’. Real salient points, you know? Sometimes you can’t help wondering what decade or century he’s living in.”

‘We were on top of each other all last summer during the show’ … Josie Lawrence, Greg Proops, Brad Sherwood and Colin Mochrie in Whose Line Is It Anyway? at the Adelphi theatre

Proops’s introduction to improv came at the age of 19. “There was an improv group in the canteen at college and I thought: ‘I can do that.’ I went along to their next show and made sure I sat in the front so I’d get picked to take part.” Comics often say that the first rule of improv is not to close down anyone else’s ideas – to adopt a “yes, and …” philosophy – but Proops insists rules are there to be broken. “Colin might say ‘Oh my God, here come a herd of stampeding rhinoceroses!’ Then I’ll say, ‘Those aren’t rhinoceroses! You’re hallucinating again. They’re tiny hamsters wearing little horns.’ And he just has to go with that.”

Clive Anderson is quite annoying. He’ll say something that irks me so much that I have to put him down

While he is over here with Whose Line…, he will also be recording his podcast, when fans can expect, he tells me, extemporaneous riffing on everything from Jeremy Corbyn and Sadiq Khan to whatever Proops and his wife happen to have been doing on their travels. But if there’s one thing he has learned in 25 years of standup here, it’s that brown-nosing Brits is a waste of time. “British audiences have high expectations. You can’t skate and spritz, and you can’t schmooze them too hard. They don’t like sentimentality. There’s none of this ‘Oh I love being here’ jazz, because no one cares if you love being there. They want the punchline and then they want to move on.”

Sounds like a tough crowd. Nothing that happens on stage, though, seems to faze Proops. “I can’t wait to get out there. It’s the one time I’m confident. In real life I’m afraid of a lot of things: I’m afraid to talk to my agent, I’m afraid to go to a meeting. I have insecurities but they all disappear when I’m on stage. You’re ultimately responsible for yourself up there and that’s the part I like. Whether you live or die is down to you.”