Stand-up comic Phil Wang channels his British-Malaysian heritage into Netflix gold with new special Wang in There, Baby!

Phil Wang grew up to be a miracle worker.

“Stand-up is like alchemy”, he muses. “Turning nothing into something. There’s something mystifying about that. To stand on stage on your own and turn that nothing into a room of laughing people – I found that fascinating, so I thought I’d give it a go.”

“The first gig I ever did was at school in Bath”, he says, “when the drama teacher invited people to do five-minute open spots. Me and one other kid said yes. People were surprised, but I found I had the knack for performing. The jokes were mainly stolen from YouTube, but I had the ability to tell them, a sense of the rhythm, the intonation, the punctuation, the musicality of it.

“After that I started writing my own jokes and it went from there, so in a way I was good straight away – but only in that I could get up and say things. I also had this insatiable fascination for stand-up when I started watching the videos. I was thrilled and wondered if I could do it.”

Living in Bath meant a return home, at 16, Wang having emerged into the world in Stoke-on-Trent, from where his mother hailed, before leaving the city almost immediately for Kota Kinabalu, his Chinese-Malaysian father being a native of Sabah. “I spent three weeks in Stoke”, he says, “three glorious weeks, three unforgettable weeks – right after I was born.” Which suggests he never had the opportunity to follow football team Stoke City.

“I did actually”, says Wang, “at boarding school in Brunei in 2005 or so. There were lots of English expat kids there who had allegiances to towns I’d never heard of – like Hull. And I thought, ‘Whoa, I’ve got some connection to Stoke!’ So I got the kit and they won the championship [sic] – the year I finally began supporting them. I think they felt it.”