Vladimir Rayevsky

Rayevsky spent close to two decades in Russian television before he stood on a comedy stage. Born in Sverdlovsk in 1985, he began as a correspondent on the Yekaterinburg programme Morning Express, moved to Moscow in 2008, produced for NTV's Profession, Reporter alongside Andrey Loshak, and edited documentaries for Leonid Parfyonov. As a host he made the daily conversation show Over Lunch for Moskva 24 and then more than two hundred short documentary films under the title Made in Moscow, later renamed Rayevsky's Moscow, on subjects running from Malevich's Black Square to the city's sausage. He has twice been awarded the TEFI prize, and he co-presented Scientific Stand Up on the Kultura channel, which is where the two halves of his working life first met.

He left Russia in February 2022 and settled in Britain the year after. His Russian-language stand-up show, The Realm That Never Smiled, applies the research habits of the documentary job to comedy, using the czarist, Soviet and Putin periods to get Russian-speaking audiences laughing at their own history. He also leads gallery tours at Tate Modern on the Russian avant-garde.