Sarah Kendall

After moving to London, Sarah Kendall's happy to be back in Aus, “I love it. We all arrived with coughs and colds and eczema patches, and since we've arrived the sunshine has been like swimming in the Black Sea. It's been like complete alleviation.” Kendall's new show Touchdown is based around her experience playing touch-football in a Newcastle under-14s side, but she assures audiences it's not just about footy: “The show is very much a rites of passage show. It's about the first time I fell in love and the first time I had a best friend. The first time I really got kicked in the teeth, the first time I felt like life was handing me some pretty heavy blows. So, it's not just about football, just in case anyone thinks; 'Oh good, 60 minutes of football.' No footy fanatics, please.”

The stories are taken from her hometown, Newcastle, which Kendall describes as “sprawling suburbia”. She admits there wasn't much to do growing up in the small town, which could have been beneficial to her career in comedy. “There wasn't much going on, which I think makes you entertain each other. As a result my peer group was really funny, I always had really funny friends, you do have to make your own amusement. We didn't have groovy galleries or big elaborate skate parks.”

But she never really considered that being a female comedian would be challenging until she'd already began: “I never really felt like, 'Oh this will be tough because I'm a woman.' You don't walk around viewing yourself as a woman, but one day it dawns on you that, 'Hang on there's a bit of sexism here.'” The male dominated comedy industry has been one of the things that's pushed her, and good friend Lucy Porter, to create Girl Riot, a feminist podcast. “We've had so many sessions just bitching and complaining about all the stuff that gets you down. And then we thought why not make it a podcast?”

The aim of the podcast is to find commonalities between women and of course to make it funny, trying to have a laugh. She says, “Not only are women hilarious, but women, and men, want to see woman in hosting roles, it's not a niche movement.”