by James Corden
‘I know you’ve done lots of different stuff already,’ he said, ‘but what do you really want to do? Where do you want your career to go?’
I had to think about that. Nobody had ever asked me as directly. ‘I don’t really know,’ I said. ‘I suppose comedy is something I’d like to do more of. I want to do something that people are going to remember.’
He was nodding. ‘I heard Ruth wrote an episode of Fat Friends. Why don’t you take a leaf out of her book and have a go at something yourself?’
He was totally right. Ruth was writing an episode and there was nothing, nothing at all, to stop me thinking about doing something off my own bat.
‘The thing is,’ Rob went on, ‘you can’t just sit around thinking that you want to be part of British comedy. You have to be part of it. Take David,’ he said, pointing to Walliams, who was wandering up the track behind us. ‘He’s writing his own sketch show with Matt Lucas. They came up with an idea, put together a treatment and now they’re making it for the BBC.’
Little Britain was about to hit our screens, the series that would catapult David and Matt into the stratosphere. Steve Coogan had created Alan Partridge and Rob had built his career with Marion and Geoff. He was right. British comedy wasn’t going to come calling for me. If I wanted in, I would have to gatecrash the party.
CHAPTER 13
BEST MUSICAL ACCOMPANIMENT:
‘Ready to Start’ by Arcade Fire
BEST FILM TO WATCH ALONGSIDE:
The Other Guys
BEST ENJOYED WITH:
Yorkshire pudding
SO WITH THE idea of doing my own stuff firmly planted, I returned to Leeds to film the new series of Fat Friends. I was buzzing after those weeks on the ship. Who wouldn’t be after having the chance to meet your heroes and go to a lap-dancing club with them? And after that great, inspiring chat with Rob, I was looking at the future in an ultra-positive light. I’d never felt so energised. The realisation that I didn’t have to wait for parts completely changed the way I thought about work. I started actively looking for stories and dreaming up ideas for shows. No matter where I went, I would see something that intrigued me – I’d catch an interesting-looking character in a shop or waiting at a bus stop, or in a café or on the train platform, and start thinking about what kind of life they led, how you could make a character out of them. I tried to take in as much as I could of the world around me and then write it all down in a journal I always carried around. It’s a tried-and-tested method; who was I to muck around with it?
I suppose things began to take some proper shape when Shelley invited me to a family wedding down on Barry Island. I’d never been to that area of South Wales before and I fell in love with it. We were invited to just the evening reception rather than the whole ceremony, so we spent the day walking along the beach and soaking up that special kind of atmosphere you only get from a British seaside town. You know what I mean – Skegness, Cromer, Eastbourne, all those old Victorian holiday destinations: there’s something unique about them. They have a kind of era-defying Britishness that you don’t find anywhere else: donkey rides, teeth-breaking rock, windbreakers all down the beach. They make me feel incredibly nostalgic for my childhood. I love those towns out of season too. They become so bleak so quickly, all shut up and empty, forgotten until the next time.
We went to the evening do as arranged, and Shelley spent some time catching up with a few friends she hadn’t seen in a while. Rather than crowd her, I sat myself down at a table on my own. I wasn’t fed up or bored or anything; in fact I was just the opposite. I was more than happy to sit there quietly and take it all in. Weddings are strange occasions, aren’t they? I mean, the way two groups of people who don’t know each are thrown together, forced to get along, and by the end of the night hopefully they’re all doing the conga. That or a fight’s broken out.
The party was in a hall that once upon a time had been partitioned into two rooms. The parquet dance floor and mobile disco were at one end and all the tables and chairs where we sat down to eat were at the other. The place was alive – people drinking and dancing and drinking and milling around and laughing and drinking.
Every now and then I’d pick up the odd word, or a line or two here and there, that would make me chuckle. This was a real wedding, where lots of very different people had come together (and got drunk) for a single day that would never be repeated. Sitting there, with my attention switching from one group to the next, it occurred to me that I’d never, ever seen a proper wedding on a TV show. You know, normally TV weddings are heated, theatrical affairs – say where someone busts in halfway through to stop it going ahead – and there’s all this dramatic tension that doesn’t exist in real life. In my experience, 99 per cent of weddings go off without a fight or a massive family fallout.
I didn’t know the couple getting married; I didn’t know anyone at all actually. But I did know the girl was from Barry and the guy she was marrying was from Runcorn in Cheshire, so there were two different families and two different sets of friends from two very different parts of the UK, all thrown together in this room. That kind of dynamic got me thinking and I began to wonder whether a wedding like this could be a pretty nifty setting for a comedy.
Now I really started to look around and listen in. Two middle-aged men at the next table, one from Barry, the other from Runcorn, were chatting away, a couple of pints between them. They clearly didn’t know each other. I started eavesdropping and, at first, I thought they were talking about cars. You know, what they drive, what they’d like to drive, good motorway routes – it was a solid man chat. But the more I heard, I realised that they weren’t talking about the cars themselves; they were using them as metaphors to describe the kind of people they were, or at least the guy from Barry was:
‘The thing with me is,’ he was saying in his deep Welsh accent, ‘I’m a Mondeo. That’s what I am. I’m not a Ferrari. I’m not a Porsche. Of course, I’d love to be an Audi, but I’m not. I’m a Mondeo and that’s fine. I’m fine with that. That’s who I am, see. That’s who I am.’
With the kind of solemn, knowing nod you get in church, the man from Runcorn seemed to understand.
‘I’m better than a Vauxhall,’ Mondeo man went on, ‘or a Volkswagen.’
Now Runcorn man sat forward, his eyebrows arched. ‘So you think a Mondeo is better than a Volkswagen then, do you?’ he said.
‘Well, yeah,’ Mondeo man went on. ‘It’s better than a Polo, isn’t it, or a Golf? A Mondeo is better than a Golf.’
Runcorn man nodded. ‘Aye,’ he said, ‘fair enough. It’s better than a Polo or a Golf maybe. But it’s not better than a Passat, though, is it?’
‘No,’ Mondeo man admitted, ‘not a Passat. I’ll give you that. It’s not better than a Passat. But it’s better than a Golf, and a Mondeo is what I am. I’m right there in the middle, see. I’m a Mondeo man.’
I nearly broke out laughing and yet at the same time I could feel the hairs lifting on the back of my neck. This was great: this was real life in a way I understood it – a conversation about everything these two men actually were, told through Mondeos and Golfs. A wedding, I thought, a wedding. Nobody had written a wedding like this. The way the small sideline events unfold, the insignificant conversations, the nonsenses. Suddenly, I could visualise a whole set of sequences that were as crazy and hilarious as this one.
You know when you’ve had a good idea because it stays with you. We’ve all been there. You think of something, get really excited about it, then go to sleep that night and, when you wake up, you’re delighted to find that the idea still feels as good as when you first thought of it. And that idea of a wedding stayed with me for ages.
Back in Leeds for the Fat Friends shoot, there was this one evening where Ruth Jones and I were sitting on our own at the hotel bar. There were no other cast members there, which was actually quite rare. I started telling her about Mondeo man and Runcorn man, and all the other people I’d spotted at the wedding. She
got the characters immediately; they just clicked with her in the same way they’d clicked with me. Also, Ruth sort of knew them herself. I mean, she’s from Cardiff and she’d known lots of Mondeo men growing up; she’d met them at countless weddings herself.
Ruth and I are really like-minded in the way we see situations and think about scenarios and character. It’s hard to explain it exactly – there’s no real science to it – but there are certain people you get, and who get you. I’d felt it with Ruth since we’d first met, but sitting there in the bar, that connection between us developed into something really exciting.
We started riffing, improvising, working out different characters, playing out little scenes. We got talking about two families at a fictional wedding: who they were and where they came from, who was marrying whom; who was the Mondeo and who was the Golf. Before we knew it, we came up with Barry Island and Billericay. We imagined their relatives and friends, old and young, their mannerisms, their accents, the way they spoke, the different phrases they might come out with. We decided the girl would be from Barry and the man from Billericay, and then we worked back to figure out who would be at the reception, why they’d be there, who’d arrived with whom and who was going to get off with whom. We improvised scene after scene, riffing back and forth in various characters: the drunk, the girl crying in the corner, the loudmouth and the overbearing uncle who can’t tell you enough about his latest gadget.
In this case it had to be the digital camera. At the wedding on Barry Island, Shelley’s uncle had sat me down and told me all about his new camera, as if he was the only man in the world to have owned one.
‘See this,’ he’d said, showing me the screen on the back. ‘There’s no film in there, no film at all. You just take a photo and if you don’t like it, you delete it. See? You just delete it. No need for a film at all. The film is the camera: it’s a chip, a microchip inside, and if you don’t like a picture, you just delete it.’
This was 2002! I already had a digital camera. My dad had a digital camera. Most people I knew had digital cameras. I even told Shelley’s uncle that I had one, but that didn’t stop him talking about it as if he’d lifted it from a NASA lab. Ruth and I named him Uncle Bryn.
The hours slipped by as we went from one scene to another, one character to the next. Later on, a bunch of office workers came into the bar for an away day or something, and we used them as substitutes for our wedding guests, picking out who was from Essex and who was from Barry Island. Then we got them involved a bit and got them laughing and joking around with us. The whole of it felt so natural and organic: pure, like the comedy I’d talked about with Rob back in Greece.
It was incredibly exciting. The original idea of the wedding had developed into something solid now, with depth and layers, and with Ruth’s involvement, the scope was endless; but we both knew that a few hours of improvisation did not a TV show make – we had to write it down. Thinking back on it, that afternoon was the only time Ruth and I were ever in the bar on our own. We were in the middle of filming the series and, like I said, there would normally be other members of the cast hanging around, having a drink and a chat. But that day it was only us. Had anyone come along, the flow might have been interrupted and, who knows, maybe the whole thing would have fizzled into nothing. But for whatever reason – fate, luck, coincidence; call it what you want – nobody did come, and we both left with the same belief that we had the beginnings of something special and the promise that we wouldn’t let it end there.
Timing. Most of what happens in life is timing: the fact that you leave work late and avoid a car accident, the way you bump into a particular person just when you need to, or take an important call at work when no one else is around. So much of life is about being in the right place at the right time. Had Mondeo man been down the other end of the room instead of on the table next to me, maybe none of what came after would ever have happened.
Even with all our enthusiasm, we never got round to putting anything down on paper over the remainder of the Fat Friends shoot. We were both very conscious of it, though, and both equally determined not to let it slide into being just another good idea that never went anywhere. On the last day of the shoot, we agreed that we’d think more about what it was we were trying to create – how it could work as a show, where the characters would go – and that we’d get together and get something down on paper.
After Fat Friends had finished shooting, I was out of work again and looking for my next gig. A few months before, I’d been having conversations with Jacquie about trying to get back into theatre. My only work on stage had been in the chorus of Martin Guerre and, though I was loving the television work and working with some real heroes of mine, I was becoming increasingly aware that my CV had a big hole in it: a proper play.
In theatreland, the difference in attitude towards doing a play and doing a musical is massive. Not everyone thinks it, but there’s an old prejudice that some people still cling on to that goes like this: proper actors do plays; ‘turns’ do musicals. A ‘turn’ is a performer who sings and dances, but isn’t seen as having the necessary depth to play the straighter, more challenging roles. (‘Turn’ comes from people calling such actors ‘twirly turns’.) It’s not something I agree with, not in the slightest: it’s just another form of snobbery. Why should an actor who’s giving a brilliant performance in a West End musical be held in any less regard than someone who’s working at the RSC? These preconceptions, and that desire to pigeonhole people, exist all over the place in the arts. I’ve known lots of people, important people, who make the assumption that, just because someone can do one thing well, that’s all they can and should do for the rest of their career. I wonder how many brilliant actors have never been able to show the world what they’re truly capable of because they’ve been dismissed as one thing or another.
I was determined that I wasn’t going to be one of those guys who did the same thing over and over, and I knew a good way of ringing the changes was to land a part in a decent play at a respected London theatre. I just had to be patient. In the meantime I still had to earn a living, so I was out auditioning a fair bit, once or twice a week for various films and tasty parts on television. In fact, I had just been offered a guest lead in a BBC drama called Messiah, which was really exciting. Ken Stott was in it, and he’d done a lot of work I admired – Shallow Grave, Fever Pitch, Silent Witness – so I was really looking forward to working with him. But, only a week or so afterwards, Jacquie phoned to say that we might have to stall on it because I had an audition coming up at the National Theatre. She was going to send the script straight over.
To my mind, the National Theatre is the greatest theatre in the world. I can’t imagine there’s a single actor in this country who hasn’t dreamt of working there. All the greats have worked there at some point or other. What’s so special and unique about the National is that it’s home to three individual theatres: the Cottesloe, the Lyttelton and the Olivier. Each varies in size – the Olivier is the biggest and the Cottesloe the smallest – and each theatre houses two different productions that play in rep (which means that they alternate back and forth). With six different productions, all either rehearsing or performing at any one time, it means the whole place is constantly buzzing with an incredible creative energy. You feel it as you walk in through the foyer and you feel it even more when you go backstage.
As soon as I’d spoken to Jacquie, I started to daydream about what it would be like to work there, but I knew I had to be realistic. I’d auditioned there once before when I was about fourteen but, as you haven’t come across the chapter about my big break as a child working for Trevor Nunn, you’ll have worked out that I didn’t get the job. As I prepared to go for another audition now, Dad made doubly sure that I kept my feet on the ground: ‘James,’ he said, when I told him that evening about the possible job, ‘the part probably has one line said off stage and the rest of the time you’ll be standing at the back wearing a mask.’ Truth is, he might hav
e been right. I couldn’t get too excited before I’d read the script.
It arrived the next day and, as I opened the envelope, I needed both hands to pull out the giant stack of pages. It was the biggest script I’d ever seen: dense and heavy; literally hundreds and hundreds of pages full of dialogue. But there, on the front, were six words that any young actor (in fact, forget ‘young’ – just any actor) dreams of seeing: ‘A new play by Alan Bennett.’
I couldn’t believe it. Not just ‘a play’ by Alan Bennett, ‘a new play’. There must only have been a handful of people in the world who had read it, and I was soon to be one of them. I felt lucky to be holding it; it didn’t even register at that moment that I might have a shot of actually being in it. But first things first – I had to read it.
It was called The History Boys and was about eight young sixth-formers in the eighties being prepped and groomed to get into Oxford and Cambridge. Here’s a confession: I found it really hard to understand the first time I read it through. I got totally lost: there were references to Auden, a whole scene entirely in French and lots of details about historical events that I knew very little about. More than anything else, I found it frustrating, and I got annoyed at myself for not being more intelligent, for not working harder at school. At the end of it, I put the script down, clasped my hands behind my head and let out a long sigh. Oh well, I thought to myself. That was nice. Getting to read that. Shame I don’t understand a word of it.
The National was still, it seemed, a long way off. I relayed my frustration to Jacquie, but she brushed right over it and instead concentrated on which part I could play – got to love agents. But even though she was really upbeat, she was still unsure about where I might fit in. There was Dakin, the good-looking, cool kid; Posner, a young, effete Jewish boy who lusted after Dakin; Scripps, Dakin’s friend and the narrator for much of the play; and Rudge, the really athletic captain of the rugby team, who wasn’t the brightest. There were four other boys listed but, at that point, their parts weren’t properly defined: they had character names, but many of the lines were just written as Boy 1, Boy 2, etc.