Alan Davies & Jenny Eclair join Sheridan Smith to host Whatsonstage.com Awards

We’re delighted to announce that much-loved comics Alan Davies and Jenny Eclair will join Sheridan Smith in hosting the 2012 Whatsonstage.com Awards Concert, which takes place this Sunday (19 February) at the West End’s Prince of Wales Theatre.
Smith has been a long-time supporter and friend of Whatsonstage.com and the Awards, and is returning to hosting duties for a fourth time. In 2008, she hosted the inaugural Awards Concert with James Corden (one of this year’s nominees for One Man, Two Guvnors) at the Lyric Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, and the following year, reunited with Corden when the event moved to the Prince of Wales. In 2011, she teamed up, to equally memorable effect, with Christopher Biggins and Miranda Hart.

Smith has also performed twice at the the Awards Launch Party, when she was appearing in Little Shop of Horrors and Legally Blonde, and has featured three times on the Awards shortlists. She won last year’s Whatsonstage.com Award for Best Actress in a Musical for Legally Blonde and is nominated this year for Best Supporting Actress in a Play for Trevor Nunn’s production of Terence Rattigan’s wartime drama Flare Path at the Theatre Royal Haymarket.

While Smith is an old hand at the “Wossies” (or should that be the “Woscars”?), she’s joined by two pairs of new hands this year in Davies and Eclair.

Alan Davies is already used to co-starring with Smith having appeared with her in the BAFTA-winning Jonathan Creek, in which he played the title role. His many other credits include The Alan Davies Show on radio; Bob and Rose, A Many Splintered Thing, Lewis and The Brief on television; and Auntie and Me in the West End. He’s also a permanent panellist on the brain-expanding Stephen Fry quiz show QI.

According to her own bio, Jenny Eclair has been a stand-up comic “for donkeys’ years”. She was the first woman to win the Perrier Prize at the Edinburgh Festival and “hasn’t stopped banging on about it since”. We’re happy to let her bang on about that and whatever else she likes, including her two novels, her input into both Loose Women and Grumpy Old Women, or her West End credits including Steaming, Mum’s the Word and The Vagina Monologues.

In short, we’ve got a trio of embarrassingly talented individuals overseeing proceedings!

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