Two Brilliant Careers, One Bottle of Wine: The Uncanny Rise of Britney
There’s a particular kind of champagne that tastes better when you’ve waited a decade for it. For Charly Clive and Ellen Robertson, that bottle was popped on a rooftop in December 2024, when the pair learned—within weeks of each other—that they’d both been cast in major television series. Clive would play Steve Carell’s daughter in HBO’s campus comedy *Rooster*; Robertson would play Rachel Weisz’s daughter in Netflix’s *Vladimir*. Two best friends, two superstar parents, two shows that would premiere to millions of viewers in March. “It was bonkers,” Robertson recalls, laughing over lunch in an east London restaurant. Clive, ever the optimist, simply shrugs: “I thought it was pretty inevitable, genuinely.”
That inevitability is the throughline of their story. Clive and Robertson met on a school trip twenty years ago, and have been inseparable ever since—flatmates for most of that time, creative partners for all of it. Their sketch duo, Britney, has been a cult favorite on the London comedy circuit for years, beloved for its surreal, deadpan takes on friendship, ambition, and the absurdity of being a woman in her thirties. They’ve had near-breakthroughs before: Clive led Channel 4’s OCD drama *Pure* in 2019, Robertson has written for stage and screen, and they’ve both collected small TV roles like souvenirs. But the double casting felt like a cosmic wink. “We’ve always said it would happen,” Clive says. “Whenever Ellen fretted, I’d tell her, ‘It’s happening, baby!’ And then, thank God, it did.”
What’s remarkable isn’t just that they’ve landed these roles—it’s that they’re not abandoning their lo-fi roots. This summer, Britney is taking not one but two shows to the Edinburgh Fringe. By day, they’ll perform *Jitters*, a play written by Robertson in which Clive plays her comedy partner’s stepmum-to-be. By night, they’ll do their signature sketch show, *Holy Mackerel!*. It’s a punishing schedule—two shows a day, every day for a month—but they insist it’s the only way to keep their creative spark alive. “The TV stuff is brilliant, but it’s not ours,” Robertson says. “Britney is ours. It’s where we get to be weird.”
That devotion to craft is something the luxury world understands intimately. The finest houses—whether in fashion, horology, or wine—are built on decades of patient, obsessive refinement. Clive and Robertson have spent twenty years honing their voice, rejecting shortcuts, and trusting that their particular brand of humor would find its audience. Their story is a reminder that true rarity isn’t just about scarcity; it’s about the depth of story behind the object. A vintage Bordeaux is prized not merely for its age but for the soil, the weather, the hands that tended it. Britney’s comedy is the same: it’s the product of two minds that have been in conversation for two decades, finishing each other’s sentences, pushing each other’s ideas into stranger, funnier places.
For collectors and connoisseurs, there’s a lesson in their trajectory. The market often rewards the loud, the flashy, the immediate—but the most enduring pieces are the ones that quietly accrue value over time. Clive and Robertson’s rise is a case study in that principle. They didn’t chase fame; they built a body of work, a live following, and a creative partnership that could withstand the inevitable disappointments. Now, with millions of viewers, they’re not just having their moment—they’re redefining what it means to arrive. They’ve done it on their own terms, with their own material, and with each other by their side.
As they prepare to take *Holy Mackerel!* to Edinburgh, there’s a sense that this is just the beginning. Clive and Robertson are already fielding offers for new projects, but they’re characteristically unbothered by the noise. “We’re just going to keep doing what we’ve always done,” Robertson says. “Making each other laugh.” And if that laughter now echoes through living rooms across the world, all the better. They’ve earned it—one sketch, one show, one rooftop toast at a time.
