Cariad Lloyd seems to be constantly ahead of the curve in her career. She was improvising swoon-worthy Jane Austen stories set in the regency era far before Bridgerton came out, and hosted an award winning podcast on grief long before today’s influx of podcasts.

Interestingly, she did not study Drama at University, instead (like many a Cambridge thespian) doing English Literature at Sussex. I wonder why, and there is a simple answer: Sussex didn’t have a drama course. (Ring any bells?)

"We started out in an uncool medium and I’m inordinately proud of what we’ve achieved”

She tells me over zoom one afternoon that going to drama school just never seemed like an option for her. “I wanted to but I had no roadmap in my mind. I don’t have any family in the performing arts and I thought that was for other people, I had lots of friends going for Oxbridge, but for my school I wasn’t mega academic and English was the subject I was always good at.” She then met fellow comedian Sara Pascoe and was convinced into a career in the performing arts.

Despite leaving English behind, it’s funny that Cariad’s hit show has such a link to her degree. Austentatious, which comes to Cambridge on 26th November, is an improv show prompted by a random Austen-themed title from the audience (see: Everything Emma All At Once, North Banged Her Badly), performed as if it is a lost Austen novel that has been rediscovered. It began in 2012 in Edinburgh when it took the Fringe by storm, and has since become a West End institution.

That success was doubted from the beginning, Cariad tells me, as the stereotype around improv was that it was hit-or-miss whether it could work. “We wanted to prove to people that it’s not hit-or-miss when you’ve got people this good. We started out in an uncool medium, this type of show didn’t exist when I started, and I’m inordinately proud of what we’ve achieved.”

“What Bridgerton has done is remind people that [Austen] is cool”

When I first saw an ad for the show, I assumed it came in with the Bridgerton wave of regency drama, not knowing it had been around for so much longer. How does Cariad feel about the show? She loves it. We talk for about 5 minutes about how great it is: “What Bridgerton has done is remind people that [Austen] is cool.”

I ask what is it about Austen that people are still interested in. “I don’t think there’s many other authors that you could improv with because Jane is completely obsessed with characters, dynamics and dialogue, and those things transfer very easily to stage. Because she’s so obsessed with characters, it’s all about the dynamic of a group of people.”

We talk about this dynamic several times in the conversation, which Cariad says is the best thing about improv. It’s all about working together as a team, she says: “good improv should be ego-less”, where you’re constantly trying to storylines up for other people.

At the end of our conversation I ask her about Griefcast, her award-winning podcast where she speaks to people about their experiences with Grief. Having been on a break since February, I ask whether she has any plans to restart it, but she says she is fully committed to taking a break after releasing her book on grief earlier this year, You Are Not Alone. After doing 200 interviews in eight years she is in need of a rest, she says. She now has a new podcast, the Weirdos Book Club, with old University friend Pascoe.

I end the interview by saying I’ll see Cariad on stage in a month when Austentatious comes to the Corn Exchange, which she is excited by. It's a truth universally acknowledged that it is sure to be worth the trip.