by Matt Lucas
My next Hollywood role was in Bridesmaids – another surprise smasheroonie. Having been a big fan of Freaks and Geeks, it was a thrill to be working with its creator Paul Feig, who was directing. The producer was Judd Apatow, responsible for launching the film careers of a generation of comedians.
I met with Paul in LA while on a brief publicity junket for Alice in Wonderland. Paul knows more about British comedy than most British people I’ve met. I was flattered by his knowledge of and enthusiasm for my and David’s work. He was keen for me to be in the movie and I was keen too, though I was about to film Come Fly with Me back in the UK and the two shoots were scheduled for the same time.
I spoke with David and it was agreed that I could go to LA to film Bridesmaids, as long as I was away for no longer than a week. On my return I would head straight into rehearsals for Come Fly with Me. So Bridesmaids is the thing I am best known for in America and yet I was only on it for three and a half days.
Playing my sister was Rebel Wilson. Although we’d never met before, we instantly became bosom buddies, confidantes and – eventually – real-life roommates. I was blown away by Rebel’s confidence on camera. She owned every scene she was in. Away from the cameras she was down-to-earth and unassuming. It felt like I’d known her my whole life.
I was surprised by the amount of improvisation we did. A lot of the lines were made up as the cameras rolled. Kristen Wiig – the star of the movie and one of the writers – was very generous in allowing us to do our own thing. I love her performance in the movie. The aeroplane scene is a masterclass.
My third American film – and my first lead role – was Jonas Åkerlund’s quirky black comedy Small Apartments. I played Franklin Franklin, an oddball who may or may not have killed his landlord. As a Brit playing an American in an American film, I did as much work as I could on the accent. I had a dialect coach who I worked with every day for two weeks before the shoot and who joined me on set, sharing my trailer. I also made the decision to stay in dialect for most of the time, starting from when I left the house each morning until the moment the First AD yelled ‘That’s a wrap’ each night. That meant, much to their amusement, that whenever my mum or my friends or my British agent phoned me, I would talk to them in my best Southern Californian drawl. To clarify, I stayed in dialect but not in character. I am not insane.
Despite being a low-budget indie movie, the cast was a veritable clang-a-thon of classy actors – Billy Crystal, James Marsden, Rosie Perez, James Caan, Juno Temple and more. Also appearing was Drago himself, the action hero Dolph Lundgren. Never in my life did I ever think I would be present to hear the two words ‘Action, Dolph!’
Johnny Knoxville also appeared. I love Jackass and was delighted to find out that Johnny is the most charming, self-effacing guy you could meet. Like me, he was used to doing much lighter stuff. The pair of us – both out of our comfort zones – bonded and remain friends.
Although it was not a huge blockbuster, Small Apartments has become a late-night cult favourite and also garnered some acclaim on its release from the critics. Despite my worst fears, not one of the American reviewers made any comment at all about my accent, which either means it was so good they didn’t notice or so bad they didn’t actually realise it was supposed to be American in the first place.
Back in the world of television I made a series in 2014 for the BBC called Pompidou.
Ah, dear Pompy.
When I was setting up my new company John Stanley Productions, named after my late father, Ashley Blaker re-introduced me to Julian Dutton, who I’d been on the bill with a few times on the comedy circuit in the early nineties. Julian wanted to make a silent sketch show. The three of us worked together to create a bunch of characters and premises, but one of them – Pompidou – soon felt more complete and inspired than the others, so we ditched them and made the show just about him.
Pompidou was a doddering old aristocrat who had fallen on hard times. He’d been forced to move out of his crumbling stately pile and into a run-down caravan. His efforts to get rich quick again – or rather, just keep his head above water – formed the basis of the show.
Some episodes involved some of Julian and Ashley’s work, others I wrote alone. Also – Dennis Waterman-style – I wrote the feemtoon. All of the music, in fact. And co-directed. I took on a lot, maybe too much.
My performance was inspired to some extent by Sir Bernard Chumley, but there were echoes of Jon Pertwee as Worzel Gummidge in there and – in the way Pompidou spoke gibberish – Pingu.
The magnificent Alex Macqueen – who I had appeared with in The Wind in the Willows and Kröd Mändoon – came onboard as Hove, Pompidou’s long-suffering butler. Completing the trio was Marion, Pompidou’s elegant Afghan hound.
I wish I could tell you that Pompidou ran for series after series and was loved all around the world, but, with a few exceptions, it was dismissed by the critics and left audiences – who were used to my more adult comedy – baffled. It was, however, adored by kids. And that’s good enough for me.
Of all the shows I’ve done, Pompidou is by far my favourite. It’s a very different type of programme – innocent, ambitious, anarchic – and it takes you an episode or two to get into it, but I really think it’s worth the investment.
I harbour genuine ambitions of making a second series or maybe even a film one day. If I never get the opportunity to do so, then I remain both philosophical and thankful, because there are not many people who get to write and star in their own TV series. I’ve been lucky enough to have done quite a few.
Pompidou was the best.
W – What are the Scores, George Dawes?
I’ve talked about some of the highs and lows of my life in comedy, but before we say goodbye I want to go back to where – in some ways – that comedy journey really began.
In 1995 I heard a whisper from our mutual friend Dorian Crook that Vic and Bob were turning their one-off quiz show Shooting Stars into a full series. They had recorded an episode in 1993 as part of a special ‘At Home with Vic & Bob’ night on BBC Two, welcoming them to the channel and introducing them to new viewers who might not yet be familiar with their work.
It was Reeves and Mortimer’s take on a panel game show, but the questions were usually ridiculous, designed either to trip up the guests, or bring out a different side to them or just to mystify them. Vic and Bob delighted in selecting an unlikely mix of celebrities to compete, often a mélange of traditional showbiz types, daytime TV stars and the coolest indie singers.
As in their previous work, there were several motifs and running jokes. Questions for one round appeared on a giant bird – ‘The Dove from Above’ – which guests were asked to beckon down. Another round involved panellists having to guess which song Vic was singing, though his renditions – in the style of a hammered club singer – were joyously incoherent. The final game saw one of the winning team involved in a physical challenge – for instance, how long could a guest stay inside a barrel while Vic and Bob bashed it repeatedly, or how many tomatoes could someone lob at a giant moving photo of Judy Finnigan.
Jonathan Ross and Danny Baker had been team captains in the original show. Ulrika Jonsson, the TV-AM weather-girl-turned-presenter of ITV’s Gladiators – who had been one of the guests in the pilot – had now been promoted to team captain. The other team captain was to be Mark Lamarr, a spiky, bequiffed stand-up who had co-hosted The Word on Channel 4. I had never met either of them, but Mark’s reputation as a fearless compère preceded him.
I’ve mentioned already that I appeared in a few sketches in the second series of The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer the year before. My favourite had been a Masterchef parody that saw Vic flying about the studio on wires as Loyd Grossman with an enormous, bulbous papier-mâché forehead that was glued on and was so heavy that someone had to hold his head up between takes. Bob’s make-up was also extraordinary. He had a tiny nose stuck on about halfway down his real nose, and then the tip of his real nose was obscured by a mous
tache. I played Quentin Mint, a sozzled toff in a top hat. Quentin proudly lifted the silver cloche to reveal his dish – a man’s arse. David Walliams turned up shaken for our usual writing session a few days after the sketch had screened, saying it had given him a terrible nightmare.
During the series recordings I got to know Vic a bit better. While Bob was street-smart about the industry, knew much about the workings of television and would later direct shows, Vic – or Jim, as I was allowed to call him – had a quieter, more childlike quality to him. Away from the set I would sometimes stay at his home in Kent and learned that, while he and Bob might well have been the greatest comics of their era, Jim was far more interested in art, music and animals. He was a warm, generous host and I loved spending time with him. It felt like a real escape from the pressures of university and the circuit.
Vic and Bob told me that they wanted me to be a regular in Shooting Stars. I was to be the scorekeeper, who they’d come to at the end of each round. I assumed I would be doing it as Sir Bernard, but they told me they wanted to call me George Dawes and that I would be dressed as a baby. At just twenty-one, I still had a fanciful notion that it was only a matter of time before the RSC were going to snap me up – and I didn’t much fancy wearing a nappy every week on national television. Instead I suggested a blue romper suit. It came and it was pink. That’s compromise, I suppose.
As a kid I had tried my hand at a couple of musical instruments. At seven I’d had piano lessons with Vivienne, who lived in the house opposite. I would go to see her on a Saturday morning and was given a little Bontempi organ for my birthday to practise on, but rarely did, and found reading music tricky, preferring to play by ear. I wanted to pass all the grades but I didn’t want to put in the work. Also I was bothered by the fact that my lesson coincided with the weekly broadcast of the anarchic TV show Tiswas, which everyone would talk about at school. One Saturday morning, I came downstairs ready for my lesson and my parents told me they had cancelled it – and all future lessons – because I hadn’t been practising. I was really disappointed, not just because I wasn’t going to be able to play the piano like my friend Jeremy, but because it was my own fault. Looking back, it’s one of my greatest regrets.
My brother learned the trumpet, briefly, and then the trumpet was passed to me and I had a few lessons, lugging the case on a little trolley up the road to primary school, but – despite puffing my cheeks and pursing my lips beautifully – I found it hard to actually make the noise you’re supposed to make, so that was over pretty quickly too.
My friend Mark Weston had a drum kit and whenever I went to his house he’d let me play on it, showing me how to hold the sticks, where to hit the skins, and teaching me various different drumbeats. At secondary school I took up lessons and really enjoyed them, partly because my instructor, a Geordie called Jim Beryl, was smart and funny and felt like a friend as much as a teacher, and partly because the lessons were scheduled during the school day. Sometimes, in the middle of Double Chemistry, I would put my hand up – ‘Sorry, sir, I’ve got my drum lesson’ – and the teacher would be obliged to release me. As I left the room smiling, I felt the glares of my jealous classmates burn into me like CIF3.
See what I did there? I used a chemistry metaphor. Obviously that will be the only chemistry metaphor in this book. I was dreadful at chemistry. In my final exam I achieved a mark of 14 per cent. I was actually furious – not because I’d failed but because I’d had a bet with Howard that I would score fewer marks than he had done in his final exam. He got 12 per cent. I was aiming for 10 per cent. I had started cracking gags on the paper. Here’s one that I remember …
Q – Give an example of how kerotene is used in industry.
A – No idea. In fact I’ve not heard of kerotene before but I do know that it’s used as an example in this exam paper. Will that do?
Objectively I should have scored lower than Howard, but whoever was marking the paper had started awarding me points based on how funny he thought my answers were. When I got my paper back, I was so disappointed at scoring higher than my brother that I complained to the teacher, who wasn’t amused and gave me a detention. Thoroughly deserved.
Aaaaanyway, I was no Roger Taylor, but Grandma Margot bought me a drum kit for my bar mitzvah and I continued to play. I must have mentioned it to Vic and Bob at some point, because they decided it might be nice for me to be seated at a drum kit on Shooting Stars.
We rehearsed the first episode in London, with the drum kit set up, and I met Ulrika and Mark for the first time. Members of the crew stood in for the guests. At the end of each round Vic and Bob would throw to me for the scores. I discovered then that I wasn’t going to be given lines to say by Vic and Bob. I was to figure that stuff out for myself. I wasn’t really sure how to broach it. I tried to be a bit dry and witty, but I sounded like I was doing a third-rate impression of the then-ubiquitous Angus Deayton.
Also, because of space restrictions, I was going to be in another studio entirely, watching on monitors. The camera was going to come to me and I would then appear on a screen – but then it was decided close to recording that there was just enough room for me in the studio with the others after all.
On a shooting day we would rehearse the show a couple of times – once without the team captains, and then again with them, though they wouldn’t hear the questions until the actual recording. In the minutes leading up to the show, as the audience filed in, I’d sit in the green room downstairs with the others, all dressed in their natty suits while I sported a giant onesie (long before Justin Bieber and Harry Styles made them fashionable, I might add), puffing on a Marlboro Light. As we waited in the wings to go on, Bob developed a ritual of coming over and telling me, ‘You look a twat, Matt,’ and we’d both laugh, though I think he laughed a little more than I did.
I’d watch the opening of the show from the side of the studio floor, nervous as hell, and then Vic and Bob would introduce me.
‘There’s someone missing, Vic. It’s the man with the scores, it’s Georgie Dawes!’
Vic and Bob would sing, ‘He’s a baby!’ over Led Zeppelin’s ‘Black Dog’ and I’d run on, waving manically at the camera before taking my seat at the drums.
The quiz would begin and I really wasn’t sure what to do when the camera came to me, other than give the scores, so I mainly just did my best ‘angry baby’ impression and shrieked. The audience was understandably uninterested in my contribution – and I don’t blame them. Everyone else on the show was funny – or at least famous. I was just a bald man shouting.
After three or four episodes of this I was desperate to expand my repertoire and make a bit more of an impact, but I was starting to realise that it was useless trying to prepare anything in advance. The show went off on such strange flights of fancy and I never had the slightest idea of the kind of exchange I would be following.
Also, I hadn’t really got a handle on who George Dawes was as a character. Jokes about just being a baby felt a bit one-note and weren’t really sustainable. Halfway through one of the tapings, having not yet received a laugh, I decided to be a bit bolder. I decided to just open my mouth and see what came out.
‘What are the scores, George Dawes?’
The camera came to me. Instead of just yelling or going straight to the scores as usual, I spoke quietly down the lens. ‘Soooo … you want to know the scores then, you fat cow?’
Now, this is, in and of itself, perhaps vaguely amusing. But it was greeted with hysteria from audience, guests, hosts and crew alike.
And I am quite sure it was greeted with that response because it seemed as if I was about to say ‘fat cunt’. That’s my reading of it.
Regardless, from that moment on, the audience was mine. Anything and everything I did was greeted with laughter.
As we did more shows I became more confident, though in that first series in particular some recordings were tougher than others – not just for me, but for everyone. It wasn’t like anything else on T
V and I think many members of the audience had arrived expecting to see something like Noel’s Telly Addicts.
One of the things that was unavoidable, but which would handicap me, I felt, was the fact that there were only five cameras on the floor – a close-up on either Vic or Bob, their two-shot, a camera on Ulrika’s team, another on Mark’s team and a big wide shot of the studio – which meant that I didn’t have my own camera, so whenever Vic and Bob threw to me, I had to wait for one of the cameras to turn around and find the right position. Then I would get a cue to speak. I would then wait for a runner wearing a headset to hurriedly write down the score – as dictated to them by someone in the gallery – and hold it up on a sheet of paper for me to read. Not wearing my glasses, I would squint to read it, and then I’d have to think of something funny to say. Whatever momentum there might have been had usually dissipated by then.
The recordings became more and more ambitious. There were stunts and special effects. Sometimes the director would decide it was easier to just record all of my direct pieces to camera in one block at the very end of the evening. The guests would often say goodbye to the audience and even Vic and Bob might wander off. Many of the crowd, having been sitting in the studio for several hours, without food or being allowed a toilet break, took this as their cue to leave. So the next time you’re watching one of those early episodes of Shooting Stars on Challenge, spare a thought for poor George, struggling through his bits in a rapidly emptying studio.
Despite being a bag of nerves most of the time, it was an amazing experience. I had the best seat in the house, watching Vic and Bob – my idols-turned-mentors – at their peak, up close, as they went from being cult comics to the biggest, most-loved double act on television. I especially loved watching them rehearse, as they built and modified their routines throughout the day.