"We need a place to work on material, and the comedy clubs are filled with 12-year-olds," she said.
For the next six years he cut his teeth on his own and other people's revue material, and did standup comedy in clubs.
Shakespearean fraud can be good material for comedy, and "Fakes, Forgeries and Facsimiles," an exhibition that opens on Wednesday at the Folger Shakespeare Library here, shows it.
Most have big, honking targets on their backs, or, in the case of Bill Clinton, a massive nose on his face – ready material for cartoonists, journalists and comedy writers.
There's some insightful confessional standup here, even if – as his false prospectus implies – Brigstocke conceals it behind generic material about regional stereotypes and comedy foreign intonations.
Radio 7, which also launched in 2002 and plays archive drama and comedy material as well as some new children's programmes, is the more popular of the two stations, with 884,000 tuning in at the end of last year.
His creation boasted that his home town was Timperley, which featured in his short films and comedy material.
The question is what they'll be given to do going forward, beyond generic relationship material, domestic comedy and the occasional action set piece.
When O'Carroll reclaimed the material as comedy, and crossed the gender divide to play Agnes himself as a knockabout, potty-mouthed pantomime dame, he reached audiences of up to 12 million on BBC1.
He wrote an extraordinary amount of comedy material and had a genius for wordplay.
