‘Oh god I’m Sue Gray – don’t, I’m cringing’: comic Emma Sidi brings the embattled civil servant to the stage

When Emma Sidi was in year seven, a classmate predicted she would one day become a comedian. Her reaction was one of total horror. “I was like: no! I thought she was being really rude and saying I was like an old man. I thought: wow, I really am so ugly and uncool.”The Guardian’s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more.Twenty-one years later, on an unseasonably warm September afternoon, Sidi can appreciate the prescient compliment. She did become a comedian, and has spent the past decade refining her own gratifyingly flamboyant character comedy while making scene-stealing appearances in a slew of great British sitcoms (Starstruck, Ghosts, Black Ops, Stath Lets Flats, W1A, Pls Like). Even so, the 33-year-old does understand where her former self was coming from: there were vanishingly few comic female role models around in the early 2000s, and it’s not difficult to imagine why a preteen girl might…