Steen Raskopoulos Made A Cultural Faux Pas About Himself In The UK

Steen Raskopoulos is playing Sydney's Comedy Store, and you'd be well advised to get a ticket because it might be a while before the promising young comic will be back. On the back of a swag of honours including nominations for Best Newcomer at festivals in Edinburgh, Melbourne and Sydney (which he won), Raskopoulos — the younger brother of Jordan from musical comedy three-piece Axis Of Awesome — will soon be upping stakes and following in the footsteps of fellow Aussie comics Tim Minchin and Adam Hills, using Ol' Blighty as a launchpad for worldwide fame. Or that's the plan, anyway.

"I never thought the UK would be a place I'd want to go," admits the comic, just back from a blinding run at London's Soho Theatre. "I went to Edinburgh Fringe last year and I went pretty well, and everything started pretty quickly, which I'm extremely grateful for. I have an agent who looks after me, and some of the people I get to work with are just mind-boggling."

One of Raskopoulos' recent gigs was filming a sitcom for the BBC, Top Coppers, set to hit UK screens next month. "There's nothing like it on TV at the moment. It's a cross between Police Squad and Starsky And Hutch with a really cool vibe of a '70s cop show. It's set in a fictional city called Justice City, and we were allowed to play whatever we wanted to be. The captain of the police squad is an American character, my partner John Kearns played English, I played Australian — it's peppered throughout with a lot of different accents and ethnicities and a lot of multiculturalism."

Recently nominated for the Barry Award in Melbourne, Raskopoulos is presenting his third solo sketch show, Character Assassin. "If you've seen my shows before there's a bit of audience participation but everything is done with love and joy. I'd never get anyone up on stage to do something I personally wouldn't feel comfortable doing. It's high-energy, character driven, and there's room for quite a bit of improv."

However, on the set of Top Coppers, Raskopoulos learned that quickfire improv overseas can get you into a spot of bother because of slight cultural differences. "I had a bit of a faux pas. Over here, obviously, 'wog' is a term for Lebanese, Greek, Italian. I consider myself a wog, I'm half Greek and I grew up on Nick Giannopoulos and The Wog Boy. There's a scene in Wog Boy where Nick is getting teased at school because he's got cheese and olives and salami and cold cuts on his plate, and I said a similar line to Donovan Blackwood, who plays the chief and is a black English fellow, about 'Oh, typical wog lunch,' you know, just quoting the movie — and that's how I got to learn that 'wog' over there means something completely different. It was the first week of filming and not everyone was that familiar with me, so I think they all thought I was just a massive racist. Which I have to clarify that I'm not!"