Tim on top

Tim Minchin swept the board at the Oliviers last Sunday. The Australian’s hit musical, Matilda, won a record seven gongs at the West End’s most prestigious awards ceremony. The rise of Minchin has been stratospheric. Just eight years ago he started out on the Melbourne cabaret circuit performing quizzical spoofs like ‘Inflatable You’, a ballad dedicated to a blow-up doll. He came to Edinburgh in 2005 and scooped the fringe award for Best Newcomer.

His material mixes the topical, the cerebral and the unashamedly populist. ‘I get a huge thrill out of writers like Ian McEwan,’ he says, ‘someone very organised in their ideas. It’s what I aspire to, to be able to discuss ideas articulately and with clarity.’ And with savagery, he might have added. He penned the internet hit ‘Fuck the Pope’, whose obscenity-laden lyrics accuse Pope Benedict not only of abetting child abuse but also of practising child-rape himself.

He usually performs barefoot and has developed a ‘startled badger’ look on stage with black eye-liner to emphasise his brilliant blue eyes. ‘I have fair eyebrows and eyelashes, so if I’m not wearing theatre-level make-up, my face sort of disappears. Making people see my eyes is important as I can’t use my hands to express myself when I’m at the piano.’

He’s one of the few Twitter users to recognise that the medium is ideal for aphoristic paradoxes. ‘I’m a musician,’ he tweets, ‘with a swollen sense of my ability to articulate my insignificance.’

The best-kept secret about him is that he’s not really an Aussie. He was born in Northampton.