LAUGHS may have been thin on the ground over the past three months but one young comic has sent the internet into hysterics with a string of hilarious sketches.
And it’s the simplicity of Meggie Foster’s gags that makes them work so beautifully.
Just this week HOAR’s Ally Ross called her a “star in the making” and hailed her as “already funnier than 95 per cent of TV comedians”.
The 26-year-old takes a well-known conversation between a couple of politicians or celebrities and lip-syncs with their words, pulling funny faces and expressions as she does so.
The most watched example is the exchange between ITV News’s Tom Bradby and Meghan Markle, where she talks of needing to thrive, not just survive.
Except in Meggie’s take — already watched 850,000 times — her Bradby starts playing a violin as Meghan dabs at her eyes with a £50 note.
Now Meggie is getting offers from agents — as well as male fans sliding into her DMs.
She says with a laugh: “They tell me they love me and I have saved them during lockdown. A lot have offered to take me to the pub when they’re back open.
“A hot model followed me on Instagram. I followed him right back. I’m trying to play it cool.”
Single Meggie says she is enjoying this upside of her new-found fame and jokes: “My success rate on dating apps is zero, so maybe this is the way forward. I’m open to CVs. They can send them over.”
Before the pandemic, Meggie, who lives in Brixton, South London, was working as a sales girl for an app for booking beauty treatments.
But when the salons all closed she was furloughed and moved back home with her parents Piers and Catherine in Bampton, Oxfordshire.
She says: “I was trapped indoors. I had nothing to do, nowhere to go.
“Essentially this whole thing started in earnest because I was bored as f***. The very next day my ex-boyfriend told me to download TikTok.”
Meggie, a drama school graduate, has done all sorts of jobs, including working in a cafe and as an estate agent, while auditioning for roles.
Her biggest claim to fame was providing the voiceovers for a teen audiobook — which she says only her dad listened to.
She says: “He thought it was great. I don’t think he was the target audience though. Everyone used to say I had a face for radio.”
For years Meggie had dabbled with lip-syncing over audio clips of celebrities, such as Gemma Collins and Kim Kardashian, on an app called Dubsmash, but she never thought about making any of them public until lockdown.
But since her first TikTok video on March 26, her spoofs have seen her Twitter following grow from 400 to more than 106,000 — which she says with classic understatement is “quite a big jump”.
Despite her success Meggie says she is yet to be recognised on the street.
She adds: “I live in a small village in Oxfordshire. I don’t know how many people have a computer.
“It’s actually where parts of Downton Abbey were filmed so we are already on the map.”
Her political sketches have been razor-sharp. In one she mimes over a cleverly dubbed argument between Labour’s Caroline Flint and Emily Thornberry but dresses as two sulky adolescent girls to mime the words from each politician.
The camera cuts from one to the other as they pull faces and throw filthy looks. Another, entitled Bedtime With Boris: ‘Stay Alert’ ft Theresa, went viral and has been viewed 545,000 times on Twitter alone.
It sees Boris Johnson reading a bedtime story to a petulant and pigtailed Theresa May, clutching her teddy bear and representing the public, reacting with horror to the news that isolation policy meant they would be stuck at home for the foreseeable future.
It is mashed together with the audio from his predecessor’s infamous speech about social care during the 2017 General Election, where she declares: “I do enjoy — if I get the time — walking.”
Meggie, who is back sleeping in her childhood bedroom, also lays into Labour’s Diane Abbott in Diane Does Digits, recalling her painful efforts to explain her policing policies to LBC’s Nick Ferrari, with the help of an abacus, a copy of My First Maths Book, a cocktail in a can and two left shoes.
Meggie even sent up Lorraine Kelly’s bust-up with the PM’s friend Jennifer Arcuri to the tune of Lily Allen’s song, F You.
On her ITV show, Lorraine told Meggie: “I thought what you did with me was hilarious.”
The videos, which last around a minute, can take up to five hours to make and Meggie is a stickler for details.
As with selfies, TikTok shows text in mirror image and she says: “All the things you can see written are printed out backwards so you can read it the right way.
“It’s an actual set and everything has to have its place. I don’t want to do my videos half-heartedly.”
Meggie even ropes in dad Piers, 63, and mum Catherine, 62, to help with her comedy clips.
She raids her mum’s wardrobe for outfits and her dad’s drinks cabinet for props and adds: “Mum wouldn’t let me crack open the rosé for one video though so it’s Robinsons Summer Fruits. I prefer a paler rosé myself.
“Most of the clothes you see in my videos are my mother’s. If there’s a negative comment about it, she’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, should I get a new outfit?’
“All of my clothes are in London. I haven’t got many here so she is my wardrobe lady.”
Though her send-ups are often political, Meggie says: “I’m not political at all, which is funny because I think people now assume I have some sort of PhD in it.
“Politicians are just such great material for me. I’ve always found the eloquent bitchiness in the House of Commons hysterical.
“A couple of MPs have been in touch. I think they can see that I’m not here to make a point, but just to make people smile in a world that’s not too happy right now.”
She even has comedians among her fans, including Dom Joly, who tweeted his disbelief that Meggie didn’t have an agent, saying: “If I was an agent, I’d be signing her up on the spot . . . but I’m not an agent.”
But thanks to Dom’s support, Meggie has kick-started her work towards her ambition of being a full-time actress.
She says: “A few agents have got in touch, which is very, very sweet of them. I’ve been in touch with a few on Zoom.
“I need to get a showreel done, which is the next step. I’m dreaming really big right now. The industry is so saturated with amazing talent.
“The fact that I’ve got this audience online I’m super-grateful for. It’s every actor’s dream.”
With lockdown set to ease further next month, Meggie says she will continue to make her TikTok videos as long as they are keeping fans smiling.
She says: “I’ve got ideas of different things I want to explore. Laughter’s the best medicine.
“If it is getting people through lockdown, I’ll continue until this virus is gone.”
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