- 21 -
I need pants. I’ve needed pants for some time but now it’s getting critical. A lot of them are ‘rogue’ pairs now – basically just waistbands with some cloth hanging down, not really doing whatever pants are supposed to do that justifies not washing trousers nearly as often, and also increasing the likelihood of a penis or bollock becoming noticeable in a trousers-down scenario.
When I say ‘trousers-down scenario’, I’m less worried about a sexual one (where the visibility of penis or testicles is probably on the agenda anyway – though it’s embarrassing to be clothed in rags) than about costume fittings or changes while filming. When you’re making a sketch show, you’re forever being helped from one awkward outfit into the next, and the good people who are there to deal with hooks, zips and buttons shouldn’t have to avert their eyes to avoid a genital glimpse. In so many areas of my work, all my clothes are provided apart from pants, and yet it seems that even maintaining a supply of those is beyond me.
My collection of pants is now about fifty per cent rogue, and almost all of the ‘good’ pants, ones for special occasions or stressful days when you want to feel that everything is in order, are deteriorating into ‘okay’ pairs, while most of those are wearing down towards ‘rogue’. There’s sort of a tipping point: when you’ve only got three or four pairs you’re properly happy with left, they get worn and washed so much that the rate of their decline is vastly increased.
There’s an obvious solution to this problem, so I turn left off Wigmore Street, down Orchard Street, towards it: Marks and Spencer. One of the two big ones on Oxford Street. I know it’s a cliché that everyone gets their pants from Marks and Spencer but, as far as I’m concerned, it’s also a fact. I don’t know if they do good or bad pants, as I have never compared them to those available anywhere else and think that it would be a vanity to do so – although I do have one pair from John Lewis which I was given by a costume lady after a sketch involving my getting doused in fake cream had put my own pair beyond use.
I hadn’t known John Lewis did pants and I’m confused by the fact that they do. Where’s the market? I would have thought that the kind of middle English conventional attitude, expecting quality but shunning showiness, that is the hallmark of a John Lewis customer would lead inexorably to buying pants at Marks. Marks and Spencer’s is the John Lewis equivalent for pants. But those who shun the Marks-pants-buying societal rule are surely unlikely to seek their alternative at the High Street’s other citadel of conventionality? That would be like a rebellious son of a Baptist minister running away to join the Methodists. Anyway, I find the waistband on my John Lewis pants slightly annoying and frankly consider that to be the least inconvenience I deserve for owning them.
Am I really going to be able to buy pants? Marks looks quite busy. Maybe that’s good – I’ll blend in with the crowd. But what if I get recognised, while I’m holding pants? I’d be terribly self-conscious. I’d look all embarrassed, which would make things worse. People might laugh, because I’m a comedian – I’d be a comedian holding pants, which must be hard-wired into the British psyche as a scenario in which laughter is expected. But that would be being laughed at, having accidentally elicited a laugh, one I wasn’t in control of. What if someone asks for a photo? I couldn’t say no – but there I’d be, holding my pants. It would be up on Twitter in seconds – me all embarrassed, my choice of underwear being analysed by well-meaning thousands. ‘Pants’ would instantly be the first word that came up after my name when you typed it into Google.
I should have bought them on the internet, but that relies on being able to hear my doorbell, which I can’t. That’s because doorbells all need batteries these days rather than being wired into the mains. And, unlike smoke alarms, the new doorbells don’t start making warning beeps when they’re running out of power. To be fair, that would be confusing because you’d keep thinking someone was at the door. As it is, my flatmate and I just assumed nobody ever came to see us any more, until we realised the batteries had run out and, so far, we’ve failed to replace them. So buying pants on the internet would mean in effect sending money to some strangers for some pants to be moved from their warehouse to the Post Office one, while my scrotum continues to abrade its way through to the inner corduroy.
I think most people hope, when buying pants, or condoms, pile cream or even loo roll, that they don’t bump into someone they know – some professional acquaintance in front of whom they want to come across well. If you’re on TV, the chances of a slightly mortifying encounter are massively increased, as anyone who recognises you is effectively just such an acquaintance, and the moment of your meeting will be all the more memorable if you’re doing something embarrassing (I imagine that’s why so many celebs get into scrapes with brothels – it’s so awkward trying to sign autographs when your cock’s in someone’s mouth). And in the camera-phone and internet age, everyone is equipped to record and broadcast the awkward moment in seconds, leaving an indelible, searchable record of the frail humanity of any poor sod with a DVD out. In self-pitying moods, I feel like the iPhone, Twitter, Facebook and the battery-operated doorbell are all conspiring to make this the worst time in history to become famous.
I don’t want to turn into someone who has ceased to live a normal life – who won’t take the Tube in a normal way, shop normally for pants, go and get a normal haircut, quite normally pay a hooker to fellate me – but I’m so self-conscious about it, maybe the battle is lost? It doesn’t count if I’m bloody-mindedly still getting the Tube as a sort of performance – I’ve only properly kept my feet on the ground if I find it a useful means of transport which I get on without thinking about it. ‘Without thinking about it’ is the key phrase. I hardly do anything without thinking about it.
I know I asked for this, though. At Cambridge, I almost literally asked for it. One of the things I wanted was to be famous. And I wasn’t ashamed to say it, which I am now ashamed to say. I must have sounded like a contestant on Britain’s Got Talent. I wanted to be a famous comedian and actor on TV, I said. And first I wanted to be famous within Cambridge, in that odd way a student can be. I was aware that the president of the Union Society, the Marlowe Society or the Amateur Dramatic Club, the editor of Varsity and the various student union officials all had status within the university – were talked about, envied and tipped for success. I wanted that, both because it appealed to my vanity and because such status seemed like the closest you could get to securing future employment – particularly if you’d utterly given up on getting a 2:1.
And the position I wanted more than any of those, the one that seemed to bring status, artistic acclaim and glorious if unnerving historical associations, was president of Footlights. My time at Cambridge, however academically disappointing, surely couldn’t be deemed a failure if I got myself onto the list of people who’d held that office.
It sounds like a feeble ambition to me now – largely because I’ve long since both realised it and realised that it didn’t matter. Anyway, there were only really two people who were considered for the job in my year: me and Matthew Holness. I think we were both deemed funny, but I was thought to be better at admin. I probably was better at admin, to be honest. So he was made vice-president.
When I say it didn’t matter, I don’t mean that Footlights didn’t matter. Doing shows, learning how to write sketches by trial and error, making friends of like mind – these things were all massively fun and hugely important to my future career. But it didn’t matter who was nominally in charge of the club. I think I had an inkling at the time that it wasn’t really as crucial as I felt it to be – but then I thought, and this reasoning still holds good: ‘Well, maybe it doesn’t make much difference, but it can’t hurt.’ And a certain amount of university-wide status definitely came with the job title and I’m afraid I liked that.
Here’s a moment that gives an insight into the darker parts of my soul. At the ADC Theatre, if you signed up on a list to tear audience tickets at the door, you could see the show for free. On one occasion in my third year, when I was a reasonably big cheese on the small cheeseboard of Cambridge drama, I was doing this job with Jon Taylor, an actor, writer and future coiner of the term ‘FRP’, who’d graduated the previous summer but had popped back for the weekend. It was the interval and we were standing in the bar in our theatre T-shirts drinking a couple of pints which, strictly speaking, we weren’t supposed to do on duty. But, you know, everyone did. We weren’t flying a fucking airliner.
Anyway, a stranger came up to me and said: ‘You’re not supposed to drink if you’re doing front of house, but maybe those rules don’t apply to you,’ and walked off. Jon was furious on my behalf.
‘It’s so unfair,’ he said. ‘I can’t stand the injustice of it. Why does he assume it’s favouritism? Everyone has a drink at the interval. I’m having one – but he didn’t know who I am so he didn’t criticise!’
My reaction was different. I was delighted.
‘But can’t you see how envious he was?’ I said. I was basking in the back-handed compliment that the insult ill concealed. This guy seemed to think everything was different for me – that I was privileged, a VIP, sailing unchallenged through the world. If enough people bitterly assumed that to be the case, it might become true. I liked the feeling of being lucky in a stranger’s eyes – my revenge for his unpleasantness was the resentment I suspected he felt.
What a little shit I was! I don’t feel like that any more. I’ve come to recognise that other people’s envy, and related anger, is a nasty thing – for them, but also for me. I don’t think it’s politic to come across as too much of a jammy sod. But I try to recapture that attitude occasionally, when I read hurtful internet comments, for example. In the aggression, the insults, the nastiness, there is envy for the job I’ve got and the life they assume I lead. Well, anyone who calls me a cunt without even having met me can wallow in that envy, as far as I’m concerned.
But a stranger’s envy wasn’t my only ill-gotten gain from meaningless office. I had my first experience of a groupie. It was after a Footlights performance; we were having a few drinks and a very attractive girl in a little black dress introduced herself, struck up a conversation and basically threw herself at me. I was quite drunk, she was very sexy and had kindly obviated the need for me to make any kind of approach to her (which, you’ll know by now, was not my style), and soon we were snogging outside, with my hand discovering the enormously exciting fact that she was actually wearing stockings and had no objection to my investigating that. I’m not sure which of my series of doomed infatuations was obsessing me at that point, but this was an extremely effective distraction.
I don’t remember much about that night – because I was drunk, not because it blurs in with the myriad of other, similar encounters. I remember going back to her room. I remember having to go off and perform a sketch in a late-night revue at the ADC. I stumbled onto the stage, just about spat my lines out, got the giggles, finished the sketch and then hurried back to her. And I remember, quite clearly, forming the impression early on in the evening that the main reason she’d been attracted to me was that I was president of Footlights. I was one of the ‘famous’ people in the university and, because of that, she liked the idea of having got off with me. And, do you know what? I didn’t mind that at all. I was turned on by it. That status was something I valued and was proud of, so it seemed reasonable, complimentary even, that someone else should value it in me. This office, this job title, was, to my mind, the closest I could get to a proof of achievement – to having something to show for a string of successful but fleeting attempts to amuse students. So, if she found that attractive, it was fine by me.
It all felt terribly exciting. The next day it all felt terribly terrible. I was consumed by embarrassment and guilt and I didn’t really know why. I somehow felt as though I’d taken advantage of her. I didn’t think that – I knew it had all been her idea, even if I hadn’t taken much persuading – but that’s how I felt. I also didn’t want to see her ever again and felt guilty about that. Half of my brain felt that she must now think I was loathsome or ridiculous; the other half was scared that she might now want to be my girlfriend, the thought of which utterly appalled me. Not because she wasn’t perfectly nice but, I suppose, because she wasn’t perfect – unlike whoever it was I was hung up on at that point. The thought of having been intimate with someone I didn’t really know and, in the cold light of day, wasn’t particularly keen on, was excruciating. And I knew I couldn’t explain that to her. Of course I was wrong in thinking I’d have to. But I couldn’t shake the horrible sensation of having been dishonest and unfair.
I’ve had a few one-night stands since – not many but a few – and I’ve always felt the same. I’ve always deeply regretted it but never been quite sure why. I don’t think I’ve ever been nasty or unfair – I think that in every case the encounter was embraced in a mutually casual spirit by both parties. And in every case I’ve thought in advance: ‘Why not? You’re single. This is what people do.’ And I’ve thought, while it was happening: ‘This is great.’ And then afterwards I’ve hated myself. Hated the thought that I’d behaved differently because I was drunk, hated the fake shared intimacy of sex with a stranger.
Still, I’ll never forget sliding my hand above her stocking – that was a good bit.
Back in my first year at Cambridge, I wasn’t yet president of Footlights; if women were going to let me touch their arses, it was down to my rugged good looks and smooth chat-up lines alone. So I had plenty of spare time for comedy. Unfortunately Footlights seemed to have had enough of me for the moment. After the pantomime, the next big Footlights show of the academic year is the Spring Revue in the middle of the Lent (spring) term. This is a sketch show made up of new material written by the cast, director and other prominent Footlighters. It usually has a cast of about eight, of whom five or six will go on to be in the May Week Revue, Footlights’ main show of the year which goes on national tour and to the Edinburgh Fringe.
Having been in Cinderella, I fell at the second hurdle – I wasn’t cast in the Spring Revue. This was the decision, and by ‘decision’ I mean fault, of Tristram Hunt, the director of the show and now MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central. I was incredibly disappointed and slightly bitter about this at the time, but it was a perfectly fair call. There were lots of funny people around, and it was unusual for a first-year to be in a Footlights revue (although of course Collie was, talented cow). So I have long since dropped any grievance I had against Tristram – and I’m a slow grievance dropper. He was a tremendously enthusiastic, energetic and irreverent influence on Footlights, certainly never pegged by me as a future TV historian, serious opinion former and democratic representative of the Midlands. But I will say that he passed up the opportunity to have my undying gratitude.
I had to make do with appearing in normal plays: in the Lent term, I played Dr Rance in What the Butler Saw and the Reverend Parris in The Crucible and even helped out as assistant stage manager for Into the Woods, which mainly involved pushing a wooden cow on and off stage (I am not referring to an inexpressive and truculent actress). Boring though that was, the excuse to hang around the theatre even more was irresistible.
But I was obsessed with Footlights and desperately wanted to break back in – and I knew the key to that was writing and performing my own material. I’d written some sketches at school – Leo, Harry, Daniel, Ed and I spent several months pretending we were going to do a sketch show, amassed reams of material, and then very sensibly decided to put on a production of Ten Times Table by Alan Ayckbourn instead. On closer inspection, the reams of material, certainly the ones I’d written, were unusable shit. My approach had been to take a potentially comic situation – say the boardroom of an old company – populate it with comic stereotypes and then make them converse for page after page. I must have been watching You Rang, M’Lud at the time. It was uncomfortably close to the technique I’d used to write that playscript fantasy epic in front of the TV as a child. The sketches were very long and had no point to them, no premise. Clearly I needed a completely different approach.
Though not a cast member, I was invited to help write for the Spring Revue. The Footlights writing system was straightforward and ruthlessly effective. The writing team would meet at eleven in the morning for a general chat about the sort of material that was needed. Then we would divide up into pairs who would go off for an hour or so, write a sketch or maybe even two, and return at an appointed time to read them out. This process would be repeated in the afternoon. If you do that for a couple of weeks, you’ll generate quite a large pile of material from which to construct a show.
This system may sound plodding and uncreative, but I am a big admirer of it (or should that be ‘so I’m a big admirer of it’?). In my experience, if you want to write comedy, you just have to get on with it. You have to crash through the invisible barrier caused by the combination of the vast sense of possibility – a sketch could be about anything, could be the wackiest, most surreal, yet most satirical, wide-ranging, specific, general, flippant, profound piece of material ever written – and the terrifying, narrowing, diminishing feeling caused by scratching the first inadequate words of it onto a sheet of A4. As soon as you start to write, you also start to close doors (metaphorical ones as well as the one to the shop where the sketch is inevitably set). The new sketch emerges and obviously isn’t the next ‘Parrot Sketch’ or ‘One Leg Too Few’ but just today’s effort, something that’ll do.
There’s no point in resisting that or being ashamed of it. Brilliance will strike you, if it ever does, as a complete surprise sailing out of the clear blue sky of competence. The key is to get stuff written down, and this Footlights system forces you to. It gives you a simple, achievable task – writing a sketch in an hour – and a friend to do it with. It doesn’t have to be funny, it just has to be written. You can write a funny one in the afternoon or the next day, you tell yourself – your task in any given moment is not to go back empty-handed. Great sketches come out of that approach, as well as unusable ones. But, most precious of all, it produces sketches that aren’t good enough but have the kernel of a good idea which someone else, later in the process, can often turn into something better. When that happens, you’re genuinely mobilising the creative power of a team.
The best stuff generated by this system went into the show, but anything you wrote that was left over, you were free to use yourself – which meant you could audition it for a ‘smoker’. That’s the name Footlights gives its informal late-night performances. A contraction of ‘smoking concerts’, in the old days smokers were cabaret nights watched exclusively by cigar-smoking men in dinner jackets. By the early ’90s, they were under-rehearsed one-night-only comedy shows made up of songs, sketches, character monologues and stand-up, where smoking was no longer allowed but women were. They played to packed houses of drunken and easily-amused students.
The first big roar for a joke you’ve written yourself is the best laugh you’ll ever get in your life, the rest of which you spend trying to recapture it. It’s a transformative moment. You are redeemed from your own personal hell and launched into the firmament. There you are, a foolhardy unoriginal idiot who’s engineered a situation where hundreds of people are sitting looking at you, expecting you to say something so good that it will make them spontaneously and simultaneously emit noises of amusement. It felt doable before you wrote the sketch; it felt possible afterwards; in rehearsal there were moments when it felt likely. But in the two hours preceding the performance, it has gradually dawned on you that, of course, it’s impossible – particularly with the irredeemably unfunny piece of material you’ve perversely saddled yourself with. You’ve watched all the other acts, many of which have gone well, and thought of each of them: ‘Of course! That’s the sort of thing to do! A sketch using the word fuck, some stand-up about wanking, that mad thing about a man with a dog called Fisticuffs who keeps getting into scrapes.’ But not your thing – not your stupid, risky, obscure, uninventive piece of nothing.
And then it works! The joke works! They get it, they laugh loudly, you can feel their warmth, their appreciation. They like you – it’s like a Vitamin B shot of confidence to your whole system.
My first smoker sketch was about the Samaritans, I’m not particularly proud to say. There’ve been lots of sketches about the Samaritans so I wasn’t at any great risk of originality. Then again, in my defence, putting an organisation with associations of people in despair, who are possibly suicidal, into an overtly comic scenario is a pretty solid approach. You get the credit for being daring and edgy, in a context where you’re not in much danger of causing offence.
The sketch, which I’d written with a friend from college, Robin Koerner, opened in a risky way laugh-wise. A man (me) is on the phone (probably because the Alan Bennett sketch I’d read out to audition for the panto was on the phone and it had gone well, so I was trying to recapture that success) saying something like this:
MAN: (on phone, in a dry unconcerned way) Oh. Oh. Yes. Oh dear. Yes, I see. Oh dear. Well, yes, I should go ahead then. Yes, absolutely. I can see why you would. Yes, I completely understand your position. I’d do that, if I were you. Yes. All right then. Bye then. Bye bye.
He puts the phone down. It rings.
By this point, as comedy connoisseurs will realise, nothing funny has been said. To be honest, I think the man talking into the phone went on even longer than that but I can’t remember it. Anyway, there hasn’t been a joke. Maybe I’ve got a couple of warm titters of expectation, maybe not. The joke is coming up. Having told you the subject of the sketch, you’ve probably anticipated it. So I hope you can imagine my stress levels, my intense concern at this instant, as I sat under a bright light in front of a couple of hundred people, twenty seconds into my first ever performance of something I’d written. Suddenly there’s nowhere to hide – they either laugh at the next line or the sketch has been a disaster. There’ll be no redeeming it, no winning them round. It’s all or nothing. Not all sketches are all or nothing, you know. You can have material that slowly wins people round and doesn’t stand or fall on one surprising moment. And I knew it at the time. So why had I decided to debut with one that does? Because I am a stupid cunt, I thought in my whirring, self-loathing, idiot’s brain as I tried to time the next bit of the sketch:
He answers the phone.
MAN: Hello, Samaritans.
Massive laugh.
I know it’s not the best joke in the world, but it worked – I promise you it really worked. The satisfaction of having made an audience think backwards and laugh at the fact that the character had been casually advocating suicide was immense – of having taken a punt, reasoned that people might find something funny and been proved right. I can’t remember any of the jokes from the rest of the sketch but I’ll never forget that moment.
It was my laugh – I’d thought of the joke, I’d written it down, I’d learned it and I’d delivered it. This is just the best thing in the world, I thought. I want to do this again.