Hello. I'm Helen Keen. I
come from a small seaside town in East Yorkshire and I'm a writer and
stand-up comedian.
I started performing stand-up in 2004. In 2005 I was in the final of
the Funny Women competition. I went on to be a finalist in Hackney
Empire's New Act of the Year competition and was nominated for the
Leicester Mercury Comedian of the Year title.
I won the Channel 4 New Comedy Writing Award in 2005 with my writing
partner, Miriam Underhill
(Click
here to see more about our writing.)
My debut solo show, It
Is Rocket Science! (about the history and development of the space
rocket) won the Best Individual Comedy Performance Award at the 2008
Buxton Fringe Festival and was on at the Gilded Balloon during
the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, receiving universal praise
(that is to say 'no bad reviews at all'. Well, not that I
found, anyway....)
Click
here to see what people said about it!
The show has since
toured the country with performances at an extraordinary variety of
venues - from science festivals (York, Cambridge, Newcastle, Brighton),
to music festivals (Latitude, Standon Calling), and comedy festivals
(including a performance at the National Space Centre as part of the
Leicester Comedy Festival) and finally London's Science Museum (three
times - most recently in the Space Gallery itself as part of the Moon
Landing celebrations!)
I took my second show, "The Primitive Methodist Guide to Arctic
Survival" (about early Arctic exploration) to the 2009 Buxton Fringe
Festival, where it was nominated for the Best New Writing Award and
then to the Edinburgh Fringe, where it gained four 4-star reviews
(click
here to read them).
If you'd like to come and see me perform, then
please click here
for details of upcoming gigs.
