Cordelia Graham

About the show

My 5”3 father had a mantra: faint heart never f*cked a pig. Consequently, he did everything he ever wanted: he conjured millions of pounds from nothing, taught himself a load of institutional cultural capital and bull-shitted it enough to marry my mother. He built so much: several houses off one water-pipe (bad), the house I grew up in (good) and a 500 seat opera house with mock Palladian facade in the garden (true). He was short and neat, gnomic and witty. He never did anything he didn't want and ever since I can remember existing, I've wanted to be him.

At Easter this year, he died and now I’m left trying to live up to his mantra without taking it literally. Unlike him, I've built nothing physical: I’m a comedian, an English teacher in a local comprehensive and a former teenage champion of Ancient Greek reading competitions. But I’ve collected a motherload of funny stories about everyone I know and every important thing that’s ever happened to me. This is an hour of storytelling and stand-up about writing the eulogy for my father’s funeral and how I reconciled the identity of my father, my hero, with my own.