The famous comedian who spent years hiding the fact he wasn’t Welsh

David Owens

It’s August, 2004.

Two Welsh comedians have joined forces to perform at the Edinburgh Fringe festival.

The then aspiring young comics – Rhod Gilbert and Mark Watson – are using their Welsh status to market their joint show Stereocomics, a pun derived from the name of Welsh music legends Stereophonics.

The world’s biggest comedy festival is a breeding ground for the future stars of comedy – and both these nascent stars have a buzz about them as they take their first tentative steps in an unforgiving industry with their show in the basement of The Tron pub in the Scottish capital.

The fringe festival is a competitive environment with each performer hoping for the sorts of positive reviews from tastemakers which can propel their career.

While Rhod Gilbert uses his Carmarthen roots for inspiration in his set, Mark Watson is more generalised in his approach towards his Welsh upbringing – and with good reason.

He isn’t actually Welsh.

Fast forward 20 years and Watson is now a well-know comedian, author and producer, who was actually born in Bristol, to a Welsh mother and an English father.

However, he started his comedy career using a Welsh accent – sometimes going to great lengths to disguise the fact he wasn’t actually Welsh.

This piece of comedy trivia has once again raised its head after it was revealed Charlotte, a contestant on the latest series of The Traitors which returned to TV screens this month, is using a fake Welsh accent in the show.

Mark Watson in 2008 pic.twitter.com/39eeWxy5XO

— Owen Lloyd Richards (@OwenRichards91) January 2, 2025

Watson has spoken about how he adopted the accent when he started stand-up comedy saying that it made him “more comfortable to be talking in a voice that I didn’t quite recognise as my own”.

He dropped the accent as his career took off and he became a regular on TV shows such as Mock The Week and Live At The Apollo.

However, he revisited the subject when he appeared on the Ricky Gervais podcast, revealing the lengths he went to pretending to be Welsh, maintaining his fake accent even when in cars with other comics.

“People did genuinely believe I was Welsh,” he recalled. “Having Welsh parents, it wasn’t a huge character, it was a believable voice.

“So I’d be getting a lift back with someone and they’d be like, ‘have you lived in Wales all your life?’ (In Welsh accent) I’d go ‘yes, years now, it’s nice to come to London’. It’s one of those things everyone knows, the bigger the lie you tell, the more you have to embellish it.

“When I started it, I was only doing five minutes in pubs, like you do when you start. But then I started to be successful and was known as ‘that Welsh guy’. So then it was too late. It was a classic Mrs Doubtfire thing. You don’t expect it to work. But once it is working you go ‘shit’. I was basically dressed as a woman. But Welsh.”

Same t-shirt – different accents!

Watson spoke about how the lie started to catch up with him. “Firstly, I got invited to this dinner for young Welsh achievers,” he remembered. “I wanted to go because at that point I was earning no money. So if I could get dinner out of it, I was like “alright!”

He explained how Welsh gigs were particularly tricky. “Because I had family in Wales I could bluff up to a point but when it’s a different language it’s time to put your hands up in the air really. Also, I was starting to be invited on to radio shows like Loose Ends, BBC chat shows, so then I was like, ‘I’m going to have a whole conversation in a fake accent’. If real Welsh people had seen through it, I would have dropped it faster.

“But yeah, people never challenged me on it and it was getting to the stage where I was described as ‘Welsh comedian’. Meeting real Welsh comedians, I was starting to feel that I was stealing a living from them.”

He retells the story of an occasion when he and Rhod Gilbert first appeared in a new act competition together, and Gilbert said to him: ‘Oh, it’s a nightmare, there’s two of us Welsh, so whoever goes on first, they’ll get all the Welsh jokes.’ Things like that made me feel really bad. I started to feel like I was blacking up in a less controversial way.”

It got so bad for Watson, especially speaking to the audience after Welsh gigs, that he established a cover story about coming from Bridgend, where he’d spent some of his childhood.

“At the time I had a whole fake CV’ he recalled “But I remember one time a guy called my bluff. He said ‘do you still go to O’Neill’s?’ And I was like, ‘yeah, yeah, sometimes’. And he said, ‘that’s funny, it burned down’. I was like, ‘I’m leaving right now’.

He added: “It was becoming more and more stressful. I was having to learn more and more fake biographical facts to sustain it. I’d never planned it to be a lifelong thing because when you start in stand-up you’ve got no idea if it’ll work out. I was starting to do longer and longer shows, getting on TV more.”

Understandably, he slowly dropped the accent, eventually jettisoning it altogether.

“It was a far more exhausting effort to keep it going than I ever imagined,” he said. “The stupid thing was, I wasn’t even that different from my real voice.”