With the Improv season about to recharge and start again at full throttle in London, we thought it was a perfect time to sit down with the head of Hoopla, Steve Roe to have an in depth conversation all about the world of improv.

In the next week we have an exclusive 3 part interview where we talk about lots of different things. In the final part we talk all things technology.

You write and film a lot of short films with the Hoopla filming team -tell us a little bit about this?

Ummmm. I have no idea what I’m doing but it’s fun.

What inspires each short film?

Something funny James Witt says or someone else in our team writing sessions. We just get a bunch of people together and each have a minute to say whatever we want and everyone scribbles down ideas. Once we’ve all done that we have a bunch of ideas written down.

We then go through our favourites and improvise around that idea, trying it a bunch of different ways, and record it on audio. The best of those we then write up as a sketch and then arrange to film it, and improvise around it again on the day.

What’s been your favourite one so far and why?

The DJ requests one, lots of people making odd requests to a DJ. I like it because it features my best mate as DJ and lots of other good friends improvising stuff. Also it went a bit viral in the DJ world and loads of real DJs found it really funny and that was a nice feeling as I felt like we made something nice for a bunch of good people.

Tell us about the writing process?

We don’t do much actual writing it’s all improvised into audio mic and only writing is at the end to write it up for filming.

Where do you gain inspiration from? 

It changes all the time but at the moment Broad City I think it’s really funny.

With the new site that allows you to do stand up virtually and improv troupes such as HumanMachine and Project2 delving into technology and virtual reality how do you think new technology and advancements in these areas are going to change or alter the improv scene? 

Ummmm, not really no. I think there will be a bit of the scene that does that but I don’t think it’s going to change the whole scene. I think people come into improv as an escape from computers and phones and facebook and ipads and stuff. I think the appeal of improv is that it’s real, human and present moment.

I’m even making less videos now as I liked making them but the shows are more important. I’d rather do one live show to 60 people than one video to 200,000 people. Improv is real people with real eye contact and real emotions right now, and that’s not going to get replaced by virtual reality. And if it does I’ll take Hoopla into some kind of woodland based stone age storytelling circle improv round the campfire where phones are buried on the way in.

Where do you see Hoopla in 5 years? 

Don’t know, I’m trying to work that out at the moment. We had a ten year plan and then got to the end of it but I hadn’t made any plan for afterwards, oops!

Is there any plans to expand to other areas of the UK? 

Another great question! God you’re good. Funnily enough we did expand round loads of the UK about six years ago. At one point we were running Hoopla workshops in Reading, Exeter, Oxford, Cambridge, Maidenhead and more. But them I got a bit burnt and decided to focus on London. But later on we might do more around UK again, but no plans for now.

Do you think there will be a time when there will be too many improv troupes? How far in the future do you think this will be?

Don’t know really. Depends how you define too many. If everyone in the UK was in an improv troupe? That would be pretty funny actually. Aunt Mary and Uncle Alan in their Avon County improv troupe.