May I Have Your Attention Please?

by James Corden

  When the night came around, it was tremendously exciting. I was flying. It started off with Ruth and me walking down the red carpet and all the fans screaming our names, which was a very weird experience. Then, when we got inside, I was sitting behind Piers Morgan, who I didn’t know at the time but who I’d always liked – his books are great – and I kept leaning forward, tapping him on the shoulder and saying, ‘This is huge, Piers. This is bigger than all of us. Tonight. Tonight is huge.’ Piers and his lovely partner (now wife), Celia, kept looking round. I’m sure they were both thinking, Who the hell is this guy?

  The ceremony started and quickly came to the award for Comedy Performance. I was up against three incredible actors in Peter Capaldi, David Mitchell and Stephen Merchant, so I never, even for a second, contemplated winning. Simon Pegg was giving out the award. (Simon’s one of my heroes. Everything he’s done, the choices he’s made and the paths he’s taken. He’s someone I really look up to.) He read out the nominees and then they played the clips. (Mine finished with a shot of my bare bum, which made Piers turn round to me and say, ‘Now that’s huge!’) As Simon said the words ‘And the BAFTA goes to …’ I was getting ready to clap the winner up onto the stage. And then … I heard my name. Simon had just said my name! I sat there in such a state of shock.

  I was sitting next to Rob Brydon, who had his hand on my arm, and I vaguely remember him telling me that I’d done it. Suddenly, I was on my feet and hugging Ruth, and then I was making my way up to the stage to collect the award. I was trying to keep my nerve. I was about to receive a BAFTA! Even now I can’t quite get my head around the fact that it actually happened.

  I think my speech was good. It went exactly how I hoped an acceptance speech might go, when I was dreaming of giving speeches back when I was a kid. I thanked my mum and dad, I thanked my sisters, and then I thanked Ruth, for not only being a brilliant actress and writer, but also being the best friend I could wish for. I said that I was sharing the award with her, and I meant every single word. There’d be nothing without Ruth, and I really do think of that award as half hers and half mine.

  It was everything I’d wanted to say. Normally, when you win, you go out the side of the stage and they take you round to the press room where you do a short interview and they take a few pictures. But when I came off, they ushered me straight back to my seat. That got me suspicious. Why were they rushing me back? Unless, unless … No, it couldn’t be, could it? It wasn’t possible. The competition was too strong, surely. Wasn’t it?

  Sitting down, I remember my palms were tingling. I waited nervously until it came to the Audience Award. I can still hear them announcing it. ‘The Audience Award for Television Programme of the Year goes to –’ and I’m thinking, Britain’s Got Talent or Strictly or The Apprentice or any other show that isn’t – ‘Gavin & Stacey.’

  I clean jumped out of my seat. I hugged Ruth and Rob and Joanna. None of us could believe it. We’d won. We’d won a second BAFTA.

  What happened next … No, I’ll rephrase that: what I did next I will regret as long as I live. We walked up to collect the award and, as we got on stage, I opened my gob. Instead of being gracious, or delighting in the fact that we’d won a second BAFTA, I asked a question. Remember when I said that I wasn’t going to dwell over the fact we hadn’t been nominated in the ‘Comedy’ category? Well … here’s how my question went: ‘How can what is apparently the best comedy performance and the television programme of the year not even be nominated as a comedy?’

  Instead of applause or nods of agreement, I was met with silence, shock and disbelief. Now, of course, I can see why and how it must have looked – ungracious, ungrateful and brattish. Rather than using my speech to thank everyone who’d helped on the show, I’d ruined the moment and belittled myself in the process. I was so full of myself, so much in the bubble of my own importance, that I thought I could stand up there and ask why our show hadn’t been nominated for Best Comedy. The two awards had given me this huge sense of entitlement and I’d acted like a fool. But more than that, I’d taken the gun that a lot of people already had pointed at me and loaded it. Who on earth did I think I was? Two amazing prizes, and yet there I was, apparently demanding another one.

  I regret it – I will always regret it – but it just summed up where my head had been for months. I’d lost all sense of the grounded person I thought I was. It’s only now, a couple of years down the line, that I can look back and see what a prat I was. Back then I honestly couldn’t see the problem everyone had with me asking the question. I wish I could tell you that this was a wake-up call for me, that I immediately saw what a fool I had become and set about righting my wrongs. I truly wish I could say that – I would’ve been so much happier had this been the case – but unfortunately I can’t.

  The truth is, my behaviour probably got worse. As 2008 wore on, it got so bad I was being rude to my agent, and I even started being rude to Ruth. If I was in company and the conversation wasn’t revolving around me, I would just switch off. I was the youngest person on the Guardian’s Media Power List, I had a new sketch show lined up, I had the lead in an upcoming film and, on top of that, I’d been asked to host the Brits with Mat and Kylie Minogue. I had everything I’d ever dreamt of and yet I was behaving like an oaf. Deep down, I was the unhappiest I think I’ve ever been.

  What happens to the dream part of a dream when it becomes a reality? What happens to the bit of you that had the capacity to dream the dream in the first place? Did all that hope, desire and ambition just sort of vanish? Did my ability to dream again vanish with it? I had no idea, but for me the dream had been exciting, tense, beguiling even and yet the reality just felt incredibly hollow. It seemed to me that all my life I’d been looking at these goalposts; they’d dominated the horizon for so long that I hadn’t been able to see beyond them. My dreams had come true. I’d kicked that goal, but when I ventured beyond the posts to retrieve the ball, not only could I not find it, it was foggy out there and I sort of lost my way.

  I was in a very bad place indeed. I had an entire sketch show to write but instead of knuckling down and really focusing on it, I put in probably a third as much work, effort and time as I should’ve done. I didn’t understand that with such incredible success under my belt already, the expectation would be so much greater and actually I needed all the help I could get. Once you’ve had success, you have to go to ground, dig really deep – deeper than you ever did before – because that’s the only chance you’ll have of beating or even emulating what you achieved the last time. I just assumed we could put a show together without too much thought and we’d be the toast of the town all over again.

  I truly believed in what Mat and I were trying to do. I do still believe that we could’ve been, or maybe one day still could be, a good double act. We certainly had the makings of one. But to form a double act, to stand up there with the greats, the thing you need most is time. Lots and lots of time. You need to find out what it is that makes you tick, what is unique about you as a duo, a twosome. If I could have my time again, then I would’ve liked Mat and I to try and find who we were together. Most great double acts have been together for years, experiencing triumph and disaster together, working comedy clubs night after night. Ours was a friendship where there were definitely sparks showing we could have the kind of chemistry to make something great together.

  Instead of testing the material unannounced at comedy clubs like we should’ve done, we took the show to a handful of student unions where our audiences were really only people who wanted to see a couple of blokes from off the telly. They loved it. We went down a storm, but it was no yardstick. I was complacent. I can’t speak for Mat, I only know how I was, and I was far more interested in how many girls I could get back to my hotel room than I was in making sure we had a show we could be proud of. Now, the thing is, obviously I’m writing all of this after the event, in hindsight. I’m trying my best to remember what it was like at the time and mostly I remember it feeling incr
edibly exciting.

  Lesbian Vampire Killers was directed by an incredibly bright and talented man called Phil Claydon, and he’d been trying to make it for so long. He was so passionate about the project that you couldn’t help but fall in love with him. The film had a budget of about £2 million so everyone felt fairly confident that it was going to do good business. Mat and I were now doing almost all of our work together for the next year or so. Not that either of us minded. I loved working with Mat. We were so incredibly close. We’d finish each other’s sentences and know exactly what the other was thinking almost all of the time. We had a confidence when we were together and a closeness that, looking back at now, may well have from time to time been seen as arrogance.

  So we shot the film, the sketch show and the Christmas special and all the time, both together and apart, our profiles kept raising. The success of Gavin & Stacey had grown to such a point that the show had 7 million viewers on Christmas Eve. I had secured an American agent and just been offered my first part in a Hollywood film with Jack Black, so professionally things couldn’t have been better. In many respects, however, it felt so hollow. The better things got at work, the worse they became personally. I had once again been on and off in my relationship. I felt further and further away from my friends and family, and was still continuing to go out like my life depended on it. Christmas came and went and in January, Mat and I had a meeting where we were told that the Brit Awards, the sketch show and the film were all going to come out within the same month. We looked at each other, both of us thinking the same thing. I was the one to say it out loud. ‘God, we’re gonna be everywhere.’

  ‘I know,’ said one the sketch show or film promoters, ‘it’ll be great. There’s going to be a bus campaign for the sketch show and posters all over bus stops for the film. You’re not gonna be able to miss it.’ At that moment Mat and I weren’t feeling quite as excited; don’t get me wrong, we weren’t unexcited, but there was also trepidation on our part. All of them coming at once. It was all going to be a bit in your face. There was nothing we could do about it, though. We didn’t have the sort of power to be able to change it. We had no choice but to go with it.

  The Brit Awards came first. I’ve always loved the Brit Awards.

  Being such a fan of pop music, it was a must watch for me when I was at school, so to be asked to host it alongside Mat and Kylie Minogue was a dream come true. The best thing about hosting the Brits is that on the day of the awards there is a dress rehearsal in the afternoon where basically the whole of Earls Court is empty and these huge acts – U2, the Pet Shop Boys, Lady Gaga, Take That and plenty more – all come out and basically perform for the host, and the host alone. All day it felt like such a privilege. We did the show and thought it went well. People were coming up to us afterwards and saying it was great. Helen Terry, who had produced the awards for the past twenty years, pulled Mat and me aside and said that we shouldn’t be surprised if in the next day’s papers we were being called the greatest presenters ever. We went off and danced and drank well into the night. Mum and Dad came to the show and were crying throughout – it had been a momentous night.

  And then the next day arrived. No one could have predicted what the press response would be. The reviews were awful. We were called the worst hosts of all time. Mat and me – not Kylie, she didn’t really get mentioned, which was probably fair as she hadn’t written the script. No, it was Mat and me and this was strike number one. It was the first time I’d ever been on the end of criticism like that and it was strange. ‘Bring back Sam Fox and Mick Fleetwood’ was a popular remark. It didn’t bode well for the next two weeks, when the sketch show and film would both be coming out.

  A few months ago, I watched the Brits 2009 back again and I have to say that all of the criticism was absolutely right. Harsh in tone at times, but of course I’m going to think that. The truth is, I was bad, really bad. I’ve no idea what we were thinking. Some of the choices we made were disastrous. We were under the illusion that people cared that we were hosting the Brits, when the truth is the host should be almost invisible, just ushering the show from one performance to the next. You don’t need to be funny, it’s a music show. It’s the worst room you could ever play and the best thing to do is ignore the people who are there and play it all for the cameras. I was lucky enough to be asked back in 2011 and thankfully, I got good reviews second time around.

  The sketch show aired on Tuesday nights on BBC3 and had the most phenomenal ratings. It is still, as I write this, the highest debut comedy in the history of that channel. In fact more people watched the first series of Horne & Corden than ever watched series one of Gavin & Stacey. But none of that mattered, because when it came to reviews, we had the worst. Worse than I’ve ever read before. From broadsheet to tabloid it was open season. It was awful. ‘The worst show that’s ever been made,’ said one. ‘Puerile and disgusting,’ said another. It was endless. We were called homophobic and talentless, and from there, it just kept getting worse.

  The film then came out a week or so after and brought with it another round of awful coverage. The most embarrassing film since whatever the last awful film was seemed to be the gist of most of the write-ups. In three weeks, we’d seemingly gone from heroes to zeroes. It hurt. It really did. It was a huge wake-up call. The hardest part was that because the three things had come so quickly after each other, it led to profile pieces being written about us. Day after day, another thing would be written. I remember going to meet Mat one day and he was sat reading a piece in the Telegraph that said, ‘The backlash begins for the cocky princes of comedy.’ It went on to say that we were basically awful, our careers were finished, that I was arrogant and mentioned my BAFTA speech. Mark Lawson, a broadcaster and journalist whom I really respect, wrote a piece in the Guardian entitled ‘Catch a Falling Star. How can Mathew Horne and James Corden rescue their nosediving careers?’ He wrote about our overexposure and overconfidence and how we had had the worst reviews anyone had ever seen. This was probably the fifth or sixth of these articles that had been written in the few weeks since the film was released.

  The truth is – and it’s taken a while for me to realise this – that the reviewers and other journalists writing these things were right. Unkind at points? Sure. Enjoying our fall from grace a little too much? Absolutely. But most of all, they were right. The Brits, the sketch show and the film. Not one of those things was good enough. There were moments in the sketch show I’m proud of, and the character of Xander I still like very much. The British Olympic team sketches are good as well, but that’s not enough. The show lacked vision; it lacked heart and soul. Mostly, though, it wasn’t funny enough.

  It’s difficult writing this. I could go the other way and defend the show, talk about the great ratings, and how when I meet the people who were the target audience for the show, they all tell me they enjoyed it. And I’m pleased they did. Truly. But ultimately, deep down, I know that all of those reviews were right, and worse than that, I know that I was to blame. The person I had become wasn’t the person I had wanted to be. I had drifted so far from my close friends and family that I didn’t really know how to pick up the phone and talk to them any more. I was lost and I needed to find myself again.

  I thought it would blow over quicker than it did, but it seemed to go on and on. The easiest thing to do in these circumstances is not to read any of the papers, but there was so much being written, so consistently, that if I tried to ignore them, it wouldn’t be long before someone would come to me and say, ‘That piece in the such-and-such newspaper is horrible. Just ignore it. Tomorrow’s fish and chip paper.’ All I’d want to do is say, ‘I’m trying to ignore it. I didn’t even know it existed, but now I do. Thank you.’

  It was a testing time, to put it mildly. I was now back in my on-and-off relationship with Sheridan and was only staying at the flat in Beaconsfield very occasionally. It was as if walking back in through the front door of that flat reminded me of a time when I was a different per
son, someone I’d drifted from somehow. I would go back every now and then to sort out my post or wash some clothes. One day, when I was sitting in the kitchen going through a mound of bills and bank statements, I found a postcard with a beautiful picture of an old seat on the front. On the back was written, ‘I’m sorry to read that you’ve been going through a tough time. I’ve no advice other than to say, “Screw ‘em.” It’s always stood me in good stead. All my love, Alan Bennett.’ I sat staring at it and was so touched that he’d bothered to do such a thing. And over the next couple of weeks he wasn’t the only one. Lots of people called and sent messages telling me to keep some perspective on this. Piers Morgan, despite what he’d have you believe, is an incredibly nice guy. He sent me texts with wonderful nuggets of wisdom from his days on Fleet Street. He told me I was due a kicking, that this was how the press roundabout worked. He called me a few days later to talk the whole thing over. He is just generally a great bloke.

  So I became totally focused on the third series of Gavin & Stacey. Ruth and I had to make the best series we ever had. The show had become bigger than we’d ever dreamt possible and the reviews for the sketch show had told us that the knives would be out again if series three wasn’t up to scratch. My agent and I agreed that I shouldn’t be on television for a while, so we said no to any offers that were coming in. However, there was one TV appearance I just couldn’t say no to and that I was very passionate about: Comic Relief.

  For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved Comic Relief. I’d been involved in some small way ever since I was a kid. Red Nose days were always a laugh at school – you’d be allowed to wear your home clothes and there was inevitably some kind of mad fundraising event that involved getting wet or really messy. There was one time when my band Twice Shy charged a pound a head for a lunchtime concert, with all the money going to Comic Relief (that was the most we ever made from a gig, and we didn’t even get to keep it), and I vividly remember sitting with my mum and being incredibly moved by watching a Billy Connolly appeal film back when I was around ten. It had always been something I’d hoped to be a part of one day.