As Anne Edmonds signs on to host Ten’s upcoming Talkin’ About Your Gen, proud partner Lloyd Langford is by her side to cheer her on – and share a laugh or two.
When Anne Edmonds was around the same age as her daughter, Gwen, who turns four in October, she asked her parents for a microphone. A born performer, Anne carried a microphone and a little beatbox with her everywhere she went, putting on impromptu performances for her family at any given opportunity.
“It was often broken,” she says today, as she and her partner, fellow comedian Lloyd Langford, sit down to chat with The Weekly. “It never made sense. I’d be plugging it in, and it wouldn’t work. It’s only now, as a parent, that I realise it wasn’t broken at all.”
At this, the pair laugh, giving each other the knowing look of those who’ve discovered plenty of things about their parents’ hidden tactics in the process of raising their own child.
Gwen, they add, has definitely inherited the performing gene. It could be handy, Lloyd jokes, given the duo often hit the comedy circuit together as a double act.
“We just need Gwen to work on her opening act, and we could be a travelling vaudeville family,” adds Anne. “She is really funny; she gets genuine laughs. She does little performances where we have to sit and watch along with 20 toys all lined up. And she has different characters. She did a Swedish lady for a while. And there’s a man called Trevor with a moustache. We are role-playing from morning to dusk in our house.”
A late bloomer
Anne came to comedy relatively late, at the age of 28. She grew up, she says, “in a very Catholic, Australian, suburban, middle-class family with two parents and a brother and a sister,” in Melbourne’s Strathmore.
Her dad, Joe, was a solicitor, her mum, Catherine, a teacher. Joe was very involved with the community – and remained so until he died in 2023. “Once he chained himself to a tree in Parkville and got arrested,” she laughs. “It was a 100-year-old tree that was there before the roads. The council was pulling it down to put in a new lane, so he tied himself to it with a whole lot of other senior citizens.
“Mum was like, ‘I don’t know what he’s doing, but take this Thermos and packed lunch to him down there.’ Mum’s very funny. She always had a running commentary – still does – on people, which is hilarious. I’d say a lot of my comedy comes down the line from her.”
Anne, the “classic middle child”, thought she’d follow in her mum’s teaching footsteps. Instead, after studying arts at university and then doing a postgrad in community development, she began working in mental health, devising programs for government organisations as well as non-profit organisation Beyond Blue.
She’d moved to the country by this time, she says, accompanying an ex-partner whose own job necessitated the relocation. She’d later move to Darwin, and it was there that she met Anna Daniels, who worked for the ABC. Anna asked Anne if she’d be keen to start making some sketch comedy in her after-work hours.
“The ABC – crazily in hindsight – gave us some money to make some very rudimentary sketches that we wrote,” she says of her career pivot at the age of 29. “We used their news camera crew to film them. And that was my first dabble in comedy.”
In her 20s, she’d often performed music at open mic nights. She’d also joined a community choir. But it was writing the material as well as performing it that proved to be her lightbulb moment.
“Suddenly, I went, working in offices is sort of wrong somehow. I’d always had these performative urges, but comedy was finally the way I could do it all.”
The instinct to switch paths was spot on. In 2009, she was a Melbourne Comedy Festival RAW Comedy National finalist. This was the first of a slew of award nominations and wins, both peer and audience voted.
She toured the country doing stand-up, in addition to creating memorable TV characters on comedy series, including Upper Middle Bogan and It’s A Date. Then she created and starred in her own show, The Edge of the Bush, for the ABC in 2017. Add in a standout turn in Get Krack!n not long after, and Anne had well and truly broken through beyond the comedy circuit.
Perfect match
In 2016, she met Lloyd when both were booked for the Melbourne International Comedy Festival Roadshow. The Welsh comedian had blazed a trail in the UK and was starting to find new audiences on this side of the pond.
The chemistry on that first day was, says Anne, non-existent.
“There was another British laddie kind of guy on the bill who I’d been on tour with for two weeks, and I was getting pretty sick of him,” she recalls of her state of mind when she first met the man who would become the father of her child.
“We dropped him at the airport and picked up Lloyd. I heard Lloyd’s accent and went, ‘Oh, here comes another one.’ I wasn’t interested in any engagement at all.”
Lloyd, however, had other ideas.
“I remember being attracted to Anne when we first met,” he smiles. “But I had to work.”
That work paid off. Soon, they were sneaking off for secret dates, keen to keep their burgeoning relationship hidden from their tour mates.
“I don’t know why we felt like we had to make it a secret thing,” Anne laughs, adding that they were pretty obvious with their subterfuge in hindsight. “But that’s how it was initially. And then the tour ended, and I was staying here [in Australia] and Lloyd was going back to his life and career in the UK.”
Fortunately, each had gigs on opposite sides of the globe that would see their romance continue.
“I’d do the Edinburgh Fringe or he’d be here,” she says. “That went on for a while, and then I said, ‘We either need to do something or give it a miss’. So Lloyd came over here for a trial.”
They’d planned to do a six-month stint here before doing the second half of the year in the UK. But COVID hit and – just like everyone around the globe – they were trapped. And as entertainers, they were also out of work.
Putting down roots
Like many performers who are constantly on the road, Anne hadn’t given much thought to making a permanent abode.“I was living in a one-bedroom apartment where you had to go through the bedroom to get to the toilet – that kind of set-up,” she says. “And suddenly we were there for what felt like forever. So we had to get along pretty quickly!”
“It was the first time since I’d been doing comedy where I didn’t have to do any work,” Lloyd says of the sudden standstill. “I loved it.”
They became pregnant with Gwen, their adored daughter, arriving on the very last day of the Melbourne lockdowns, in October 2021.
It was a rude awakening. “That first stage of being a parent of a newborn – oh boy,” Anne chuckles. “That’s tough. That’s when your relationship comes under the microscope a bit. When you’re up at 3am. A cousin of mine says that nothing’s admissible after midnight with a newborn.
“It’s a roller-coaster, but obviously, you are spurred on by the love of this little person. And then we do love each other a lot, too.”
It’s given them both a new appreciation for each other and the qualities they bring to their relationship.
Lloyd, says Anne, spends hours with Gwen creating characters she’ll later role-play for the duo. “He’s a wonderfully patient father. Lloyd is very reliable, calm and loving. And I think that’s a good counterpoint to my … how would you describe it? Not erratic, that sounds like I’m crazy. But maybe spontaneous.”
“Anne’s very talented in terms of singing and music, which I’m not at all,” says Lloyd of his favourite aspect of watching mother and daughter together. “They were playing music together yesterday, Anne with an electric keyboard and improvising a song while Gwen was banging a drum. I was in the kitchen, and Gwen was like, ‘Come, Dad and listen to our new song.’ That was so heartwarming to me.”
The parenting load, they say, is pretty much 50/50 or as close to it as they can manage. Doing comedy shows in the evenings isn’t ideal for a world that is built for nine-to-five, but they stagger their workloads so that when one is totally booked, the other has some time off to do the lion’s share.
Of course, they also do plenty of projects together – from tours to appearances on Ten panel shows, including Have You Been Paying Attention? and Taskmaster Australia. For this and other things, they are quick to add that it would be impossible without the help of a wonderful nanny named Emma, who allows them to do their best for their careers as well as their daughter.
Raising a new generation
At the time of writing, Anne is the one with the busy load. She has taken on the hosting role of the latest iteration of Talkin’ ‘Bout Your Gen. The comedy game show format (then called Talkin’ ‘Bout Your Generation) was first helmed by Shaun Micallef on Ten from 2009-2012 and then at Nine from 2018-19. The name and host changes aren’t the only mix-up for the format as it returns to screens. This time, it’s nixing the Boomer category for a younger generation.
Dave Hughes will captain the Generation X team, Tommy Little, Gen Y (Millennials), and Anisa Nandaula heads up the team for Gen Z (Zoomers).
Being a host rather than part of a panel has been an adjustment, Anne admits. “Normally I’m on the other side making mischief,” she says. “Now it’s my responsibility to keep the show moving along when the comedians are having fun. I can see how I could have been a schoolteacher!”
Picture: Dylan Coker / ITV
At 45 and 42 respectively, Anne and Lloyd are technically in different generations (Anne scrapes into Gen X while Lloyd is an early Millennial), but they don’t feel there’s a divide when it comes to their attitudes.
They are also, they acknowledge, united in having a daughter in the newly anointed Generation Alpha.“Obviously, they’ve got climate change hanging over their head and social media, which we didn’t have growing up,” says Anne of what’s ahead.
“I’m certainly grateful for the new [social media] laws coming in. Gwen’s only three, so hopefully by the time she’s a teenager, there has been a shift there.”
Talkin’ ’Bout Your Gen is coming soon to 10 and 10 Play.
This article originally appeared in the October 2025 issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly. Subscribe so you never miss an issue.
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