by Rob Brydon
We went to Pinewood Studios and shot five beautifully lit commercials in four days under the direction of the big ad director of the day, Nick Lewin (I think he’d done one for Flake that had performed very well). Steve and I couldn’t have been more excited. We took photos of ourselves standing outside the dressing-room doors that had our names written on them – this had never happened before – and talked of how the money would help us both out of a financial crisis. The ads were good too. Steve played a lumbering buffoon and I was his small, smart friend who at the end of every commercial took a bite from a pristine new bar of Toffee Crisp. Mmm, tasty. In reality there would be a chap just out of shot on his hands and knees, holding a bucket into which I’d spit my mouthful of chocolate as soon as I heard, ‘Cut!’
We left Pinewood on a high and waited for the ads to air and the repeat fees to roll in. It never happened. For reasons that remain unclear the ads never aired and the money, beyond the daily session fee, stayed put. Was it my skin? I don’t think so; I saw the ads, and they were so beautifully lit that I could have advertised soap. Hey ho. As Les would say in Human Remains many years later, ‘Onwards and upwards …’
Having heard Colin’s harsh but fair appraisal of my complexion, I assumed that I would soon be out of the running for the movie show, so I was very surprised when I was then asked to shoot a pilot for Xposure a week later. The pilot went well, and soon the job was mine.
It was – on paper, at least – an excellent job. The show was a magazine format devoted to the week’s new releases and was presented from a different location each week. There was no film reviewing, which I wouldn’t have been comfortable with. My role was just telling the viewers what was coming out, and often getting to interview the stars. My co-presenter, Nadia, and I travelled the world; we shot in New York for the opening of Home Alone 2, in Los Angeles to cover the build-up to the Oscars and witness the filming of the opening to Stallone’s Demolition Man, as well as flying to Berlin and Cannes for their respective film festivals. It was fun.
Travelling the world with Xposure.
I met Quentin Tarantino at a film festival in Nottingham; after the interview we talked about Elvis. I interviewed Andie MacDowell while she was in London promoting Groundhog Day. If you ever see the footage, someone should have told me to keep my mouth shut. (I’m almost drooling – I look like a lascivious wolf from a Tex Avery cartoon.) I flew to Morocco to watch Robin Williams filming Being Human and got to meet him, briefly. It was on this trip, actually, that I realized this wasn’t what I wanted to be doing. Robin was brought over to meet me and the small crew we’d assembled for the trip, and I was introduced to him as ‘the guy who’s making the documentary’.
Eurgh! That’s not me, I’m not a journalist! I’m one of your sort – I want to do what you do.
I was getting the urge to perform more and more. Meeting all these actors and visiting their film sets was great. It was exciting. But I was always there on the wrong side of the equation, and it became increasingly frustrating. The team was splendid, though, and I got on particularly well with the producer, Colin Burrows, a thoroughly good bloke who remains a friend to this day.
We had a little thing we’d do whenever he’d come over to me and ask if he could have a word.
I’d always reply in a Dudley Moore posh voice, ‘Is it bad news, sir?’
How we’d laugh.
Then, one day, he wandered over and it was indeed bad news. There was a new big cheese at Sky and, just as had happened at Radio Wales a few years earlier, I didn’t cut the mustard. So I was out.
I always remember Colin’s face as he said, ‘And you’ve just bought the flat …’
Oh dear. This was a considerable blow and served as something of a wake-up call. I made a decision to turn down any presenting work and just concentrate on acting and comedy. If I was ever going to get anywhere as an actor and a comedian, I would have to stop all the presenting and focus on what I really wanted to do. To make money in the short term I started to search for voice-over work.
One day, I was walking back from lunch with Jerry and told him that I wanted to do comedy.
He replied, ‘We all want to do comedy.’
I decided there and then to leave him.
This focus on comedy had been growing for the past couple of years, in part through the variety of characters I was creating and performing on Rave, but also through the work I was doing in Bath with an improvisational comedy group I’d joined, More Fool Us. I had seen the group advertised in PCR, which was (and possibly still is) a round-up of castings and new projects in theatre, television and film which hopeful actors would subscribe to. PCR arrived through the post each week, and the lucky subscriber would then pester the various directors and producers mentioned within its pages for an audition. More Fool Us was the only time that my subscription bore any fruit, although I do remember reading one week that Richard Curtis had written a film and that it was to be called Four Weddings and a Funeral. I raised my eyebrows in despair at the British film industry, thinking that a film with such a title was most unlikely to be a hit.
The More Fool Us team, including Julia Davis and Ruth Jones.
This particular posting, however, talked of a new improvisational comedy group being set up in Bath and gave the phone number of a contact with whom to arrange an audition. Off I went to Bath, my audition went like a dream, and I was asked to join the group. It was run by Paul Z. Jackson, a former BBC Radio producer who had already worked with Caroline Aherne, Paul Merton and someone called Steve Coogan.
Paul’s idea was that we would train for a few months before any performances were embarked upon, learning the basics of improvisation and bonding as a team on the way. Paul taught me techniques that I still use today, the most basic of which can be summarized as ‘yes, and …’ Also known as ‘accept and build’, it boils down to responding positively to whatever has been said to you, before adding another piece of information to the mix.
For example, if a scene began with a teammate saying to me, ‘Ah, Doctor, I see you’ve brought your penguin with you today,’ I would agree and add a little something.
Possibly, though not necessarily, ‘That’s right, he’s an expert on all things to do with the throat, although he’s a little under the weather himself at the moment.’
Straight away we’re building the scene, as opposed to blocking each other.
‘Penguin? No, no, this is my briefcase. And I’m not a doctor, I’m a bus driver.’
Paul was also big on clarity, on little things that make a big difference, such as repeating the suggestions that came from audience members and always thanking them, which in turn made other members of the audience more inclined to offer suggestions. Having said that, the suggestions invariably revolved around toilets and sex. Perhaps it’s a British thing. When asked for a figure from history, you could be pretty sure it would be Henry VIII who would be offered; when looking for a location, it would inevitably be a toilet; and the household implement of choice was an egg whisk.
The weeks of workshop sessions that preceded the first performance were hugely enjoyable affairs; it was like going back to college. Working in radio and in local television for so long had given my professional life an almost journalistic feel at times, and this wasn’t what I was looking for. When I was a roving reporter on a magazine show in Wales I came into the office once and the team was cock-a-hoop about having just secured an interview with someone who was in the news at the time. I couldn’t share their excitement; it felt alien to me. I just wasn’t interested in people – at least, not in that way. I was very interested when it came to watching them, studying them and then using these observations to build up a character, but not in the way that they were, which was essentially a journalistic way.
When I was working on See You Sunday for BBC Wales, I did a piece in Tee Pee Valley, near Llandeilo where a community has grown up in the countryside, living in tepees. I went into one, talking to the camera and describing
my surroundings as I went. There was a row of cassettes on the floor and I began to focus on them, mocking the musical tastes of the tepee dweller. I thought it was quite funny.
The director called, ‘Cut!’ and suggested we try it again. ‘Maybe not so much on the cassettes this time.’
I wanted to scream. I was in the wrong place.
In the improv workshops I felt like I belonged; this is what I should be doing. It was a good feeling, but it also reinforced my belief that I’d taken a wrong turn in becoming so wrapped up in radio and television presenting. Paul had gathered a strong team of performers and we went on to play some great shows in Bristol, Bath and beyond. Amongst the founding members was the excellent Toby Longworth, who had been part of a double act, the Rubber Bishops, with a then unknown Bill Bailey, and who would go on to appear with me in Human Remains and Annually Retentive.
After a while, a couple of new girls joined the group. Julia Davis and Jane Roth worked as a double act, The Sisters of Percy. I straight away sensed a connection with Julia and loved the times we would play scenes together in the shows. It would be some years yet, though, before we would work together properly and eventually make Human Remains.
Ruth Jones also joined the group; we were working on some radio ideas for BBC Wales at the time and I thought she’d enjoy the improv too. She took to it immediately. As well as being a splendid addition to the line-up, her arrival meant that I now had someone to share the journey to Bath with. We would drive along, singing all the way, usually to Barry Gibb and Barbra Streisand doing ‘Guilty’ and ‘What Kind of Fool’, harmonizing to our hearts’ content. I loved it. Fifteen years later, we were on Top of the Pops with Tom Jones and Robin Gibb, singing ‘Islands in the Stream’, written by the Bee Gees. Our long journeys up and down the M4 made that eventual collaboration for Comic Relief all the sweeter.
I stayed with the group for a few years, even after moving to London, but once the job on the movie show went away, money began to get tight and I decided I couldn’t afford the trips to Bath and so had to stop.
Once again, things were getting difficult financially. I had the odd bit of radio work in Wales and Martina had found a great nannying job with a lovely family in Barnes, but money was tight. For the first time in my life I had to look for a proper job. I scanned the Evening Standard and saw an ad for a position in telesales, based in Kensington. Dad was a salesman; I’m good with my voice. Maybe I’d be good at this.
Dressed in a suit and tie, I got the bus to Kensington High Street and went to the address given to me over the phone. I found myself in a holding room with a few other would-be telesellers and was given a form to fill in. I hated myself. It had come to this. I’d never had to fill in a form for a job before. I’d been on the radio, I’d been on the television! This was failure in a big way. Although I kept telling myself that it would just be a stopgap until something else came along, I still heard a nagging voice at the back of my head wondering whether this was it for me, if this was my future now. I filled in the form and came to the part where they asked if the applicant had any hobbies or pastimes. This was the worst bit; it felt like I was being patronized. I wrote ‘breeding rabbits’ as a way of laughing at the whole process, then handed in my form.
I was taken through to another office, where a rotund Liverpudlian in his mid-twenties asked me to take a seat and began to interview me. I’d never been interviewed for a job before; I’d never had to submit myself to this. I’d done auditions of course, and had undergone every humiliation known to man in the process, but this was different; this was so ordinary. But the man was very pleasant, very personable, and he seemed genuinely interested in helping me. I began to feel bad for despising him simply for what he represented, and so when he got to the part of the form detailing my hobbies I started to make up all sorts of rubbish about my love for rabbits, just so he wouldn’t realize I was lying to him.
‘So, you like rabbits, Robert?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘Go on …’
‘Well, what can I say?’
‘What is it about them that you like?’
‘Um, you know … their ears, their little fluffy tails.’
‘Their tails?’
‘Yes, their tails. Just the joy of keeping them, really.’
‘I see …’
‘And looking at their tails.’
This was first thing in the morning. After twenty minutes with the very nice man from Liverpool, it was decided that I had what it took to give telesales a try. I was taken through to a large room full of desks at which were seated the telesales staff, all chatting away to potential customers. On the wall was a big whiteboard on which were written in erasable marker pen the names of the current top sellers, along with the prizes up for grabs if sales targets were met. It was as if Mike Leigh had written Glengarry Glen Ross.
The whole room was geared around selling environmentally friendly industrial cleaning agents and each seller was given a list of contacts, or ‘leads’, and a script to follow once contact had been made. It went like this.
‘Hi, is that [insert name of lead]? Oh, hi there, I’m calling from [name of company selling environmentally friendly industrial cleaning agents] and I just want to say thanks for helping us out with the survey –’
‘What survey?’
‘That’s right. And I just wanted to let you –’
‘I’m sorry, what survey?’
‘Oh, the survey. We just had the results back and it makes pretty amazing reading –’
‘I don’t know about –’
At this point we were encouraged to have noticed something personal about the poor soul at the other end of the line and to comment on it, so as to make some kind of connection. I remember noticing that one of my leads had a German accent, and so I asked him where he was from. On hearing that he hailed from Düsseldorf, I professed delight at the mention of a town so dear to my own heart.
‘I don’t believe it! I spent my honeymoon there!’
I know. It’s appalling, isn’t it?
From here the script took us through to enthusing about the product and how, by ordering now, the customer/victim/new best friend could benefit from a fantastic deal etc., etc. All the time I was talking on the phone, if I got past the first paragraph without the lead hanging up, a supervisor would notice my progress and wander over to listen in and make encouraging faces and hand gestures. The aim was to get an order number – that was the Holy Grail. Once it had been obtained, the call could end and the triumphant salesperson got to ring a bell that would be heard by all the other salespeople. A little moment in the sun.
I managed one bell ring before coming over all peculiar. I suppose it was a panic attack of sorts, but after spending much of the day trying to force people into buying something they didn’t need I suddenly felt quite peculiar, stood up from my desk, walked out of the room, down the stairs and out of the building. Standing in the bright sunlight on Kensington High Street, I reached something of a nadir. I really couldn’t believe that things had come to this. I went to Barnes to see Martina, still feeling shaken up by the whole thing. I sat in the garden of the house where she was working, and played with Fraser and Will, the two little boys in her care. It helped to calm me down and wash away the day.
That night, back at the flat, I had an epiphany of sorts. It sounds stupid, but it was this. I can do funny voices. Probably nobody else in the telesales office could do them. I can do something that most people can’t; it’s crazy to be trying for a telesales job when I can do something that pays good money – if I could just get an ‘in’. I decided that the following morning I would go all out to get voice work. I would call every contact I knew, and see what I could get; there must be something.
And I would try again to get a voice agent.
It took me a long time to get an agent, but I still managed to find some bookings as a voice artist – thanks largely to my old college friend John Golley, who was now a promo producer at recen
tly set-up Sky rival, British Satellite Broadcasting (BSB). I called him that evening, after I’d got home, and told him about my experience and how bad I’d felt at hoodwinking Helmut with my bogus honeymoon. He arranged some sessions almost immediately and also secured me an introduction for some continuity work at the station.
The continuity announcing on BSB was not the same as continuity announcing at BBC Wales, where the incumbent was responsible not only for making the announcements, but also ‘driving’ the fairly complicated desk, resulting in a job somewhere between a DJ and an astronaut. At BSB, everything was new and computerized; all that was required of the failed actor sitting behind the microphone in the windowless room was to lean forward in his or her chair every half an hour and say, ‘And now on BSB … it’s Mrs Pepperpot.’ The shifts were eight hours long and dull beyond belief. But (and it was a big but) they were well paid – especially the evening shifts, which also came with a chauffeur-driven car to take you home. It was no wonder that the station didn’t survive when it was throwing its money around in this manner. I had been there for a short while, working the odd shift on a freelance basis, when I was offered a six-month contract. Although I didn’t want to be working as a continuity announcer – it was most definitely a step backwards – we desperately needed the money, and so I intended to accept the offer and sign the contract, which arrived in the post one Saturday morning.
As I opened the envelope, on the radio the newsreader was telling the nation the breaking news – that Rupert Murdoch’s Sky television was to merge with BSB. ‘Merge’ was a rather soft, fluffy and altogether too friendly word for what was about to happen to BSB – it was really only a merger in the sense that Germany once merged with Poland. I realized it was highly unlikely that my soon-to-be-accepted post would survive this ‘merger’ and, as I did so, the phone rang. It was my soon-to-be boss at BSB, asking if I’d heard the news and explaining that there was obviously no longer any point in signing the contract, given what was going to happen to the company. Perhaps it was my recent experience with the telesales, but I’m afraid I didn’t hesitate to lie straight back down the phone, saying that I’d already signed the contract and popped it in the post. I might even have asked him where he was calling from and then claimed to be unusually fond of it.