“Well, what happened with me was – I mean, it’s annoying that the thing that happened to me was like, fucking boring,” says Jamie Demetriou. “But basically…it was the Hackney Council cyberattack.” We’re sitting on a bench in an east London park so indistinct it has no name, there’s mud under our feet and the air is velvety with drizzle. You often wonder what it’s like to be “in a moment”: Jordan’s rising season in the NBA, Rooney’s Euro 2004, another analogy that isn’t just about sports. What does it look like when years of hard work, talent and potential suddenly align and bathe in golden light, when everyone recognizes your value, power and abilities, when you finally come out marshy water to “try” in the clean, fresh air to “succeed”. For Jamie Demetriou, it was like this: A raging pandemic meant he was locked indoors for most of his nine-week Hollywood breakthrough, everything he owned was in a pile of boxes. unmarked in a flat he thought he had already moved from, and a cyberattack across postcodes in east London had left him quite uncertain about his tax status.
“The sophisticated attack of October 11 [2020] left many systems unavailable for Council staff to provide essential services, with months of painstaking work to recover them safely,” it says on the Hackney Council website (“Did you know? no one is speaking about cyber attack to Hackney Council“The National Crime Agency is continuing to investigate the incident.” What does this mean? It means that in the winter of 2020, Jamie Demetriou was about to buy a house in Hackney, and was so confident this was going to happen—he was in his moment! He had just won three Baftas! He was about to go to Hollywood!—that he packed everything he owned into boxes and went to Los Angeles to film the after party, AppleTV+’s new 10-part murder mystery featuring every living comedian on the planet. And then – say it with me now – The Cyberattack On Hackney Council. No way to do that final land registry search. Everything fell apart. So Jamie Demetriou’s big Hollywood break moment to buy a house and finally become an adult was actually like “living in a suitcase in an LA Airbnb” and “not quite knowing which cardboard box had all the Baftas in it.” it’ (he still hasn’t unpacked them) “I had been alone for four weeks and I was looking at the barrel for five more weeks. I mean, I ate pizza on Christmas Day. And worst of all, it depresses me how many clothes I have in these boxes that I don’t seem to need.
All is well now, however. Everything is fine now. We should recap the career: Jamie Demetriou was born to an English mother and a Greek Cypriot father in Friern Barnet, London, at the very end of the 134 bus route. A childhood followed. After that, attending Bristol University gave him his first taste of the comedy scene, before taking Bristol Journals at the Edinburgh Fringe alongside the future Stath rents apartments collaborator Ellie White and facing more future Stath stars in the form of Al Roberts (“He was at Cambridge Footlights when I was in college, and he was like a rockstar to me”), The Pin’s Ben Ashenden and Alex Owen, and Daran Johnson (who, along with Roberts and The youth‘s Liam Williams, formed the sketch troupe Sheeps). “I basically know everyone I know from the Fringe, cringe as it is,” he says. Literally seconds later, we meet someone he knows, yes, from the Fringe. What followed were five uninterrupted years of brief appearances in every comedy series in the UK, as well as various TV episodes from Fringe-adjacent comedians: Tower., Friday night dinner, London Toast, Todd Margaret’s increasingly bad decisions, Love sick, please i like, Lolly Adefope’s Christmas, Tracey Ullman show, and a two-episode series as the memorably toothed “Bus Rodent” in Flea bag. In the background, Stath was fighting his way out: the character started life in 2013 as one of the E4s Comedy Blaps, and was in an endless cycle of development from then on (previous versions had Vasos running a combination chip shop/rental agency, where chips sold vastly more than flats, called “Flats and Chips”).
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