Chi With A C has one joke, a face that will not react, and she holds it longer than most performers would dare. The sitcom built around it is funny and thin; the next test is whether she can write for people who move.
Fi1m perspective
The face does not move. In Things You Should Have Done (2024) Chi With A C is told her parents are dead and looks mildly inconvenienced; told she must learn to drive, she takes it as an imposition of roughly the same order. She delivers every line in the same flat monotone, as if reading out a notice somebody else has written, and the editor, Gareth McEwen, leaves each one hanging a beat before cutting away. The gap is where the laugh is. It is a narrow instrument and she knows exactly how to play it, and she is aware of how it reads: “I often look depressed when I’m not.”
She learned it in front of a webcam. From 2017 she was uploading sketches and parodies from Margate under the Chi With A C name: a video of her opening her GCSE results, full-episode send-ups of Friends, then lockdown sketches and impressions that found a larger audience during the pandemic. Small acting parts followed in 2022, Kelly in Big Boys and Amber in Sneakerhead, and by 2023 she was developing a sitcom of her own, which she created, co-wrote with Nathan Foad and leads. A second series arrived in 2026 and a third has been commissioned. In between she wrote for Cunk on Life (2024).
We laughed out loud in the first episode, more than once, and felt faintly ashamed of it afterwards, because what we were laughing at was a girl declining to grieve. That is the series' trick and also its limit. Chi can write a gag and she can sustain a character; what she has not yet shown is that she can build a story around either. The episodes play as strings of sketches, and the grief they reach for at the end of each one has not been paid for by anything in the middle. It is Selin Hizli's Karen who makes the deaths register, with a brisk, wounded patience the script seldom bothers with, and the show improves whenever Jamie Bisping's Lucas speaks to Chi as if she were a person. Jack Clough directs it still and bright and lets nobody move faster than she does, which is the correct choice. The second series loosens the list that gave the first its shape, and we are not sure that helps a writer who already struggles to make an episode go anywhere.
The deadpan will carry her a long way, and it has already carried her from a bedroom in Margate to a third series. What it cannot do on its own is make us care what happens to the woman wearing it, and sooner or later a sitcom has to. We would watch her try.
Biography
Lucia Keskin, also known as Chi With A C, is an English comedian, actress and writer. Born on 9 February 2001 in Margate, Kent, she began posting comedy sketches and parody videos on YouTube in 2017 under the name Chi With A C.
Keskin created, wrote and stars as Chi in the BBC Three sitcom Things You Should Have Done (2024–), which follows a stay-at-home daughter forced to become independent after her parents' deaths. She has also appeared in series including Big Boys (2022) as Kelly and Sneakerhead (2022). For her work on Things You Should Have Done, she won the British Academy Television Craft Award for Best Emerging Talent: Fiction in 2025.
