by Rob Brydon
Far worse.
As quickly as possible, and making eye contact with no one, I made my way towards the exit, consoled by the thought that at least there was no one in the audience who knew me.
‘Hiya, Rob!’
Shit. It was Bleddyn, from Cardiff. What the hell was he doing here?
He had worked on Except for Viewers in England with Ruth and me; he’d been a runner and had, in my opinion, a complete disregard for the unwritten rules of status on such an enterprise. I had been a runner myself, in 1989, on a BBC Wales television show, The BBC Guide to Alcohol. The job had involved coming up to London and loitering backstage at Top of the Pops, grabbing the acts and persuading them to do brief interviews with our presenter, Gaz Top. At that time it was an exciting gig for me, as it meant a visit to the very famous set at TV Centre where I noted, like many before me and with clunking predictability, how much bigger it appeared on television. In my increasingly infrequent diary I went on to observe:
I saw Dave Lee Travis, who by the way was carrying a portable phone, as was anyone who was anyone.
These fantastical glimpses of the future – or ‘portable phones’, as I felt they were destined to be called – obviously hadn’t reached Cardiff at this point.
I digress … The runner, with the best will in the world, inhabits the very bottom of the bottom of the food chain. He or she runs, fetches, carries, makes tea, takes tea, fetches tea and then carries tea. They do, up to a point, whatever is asked of them. Many of them go on to occupy positions of power further down the road, but when they run they just run. The good ones are always helpful, polite and above all enthusiastic. The very good ones will always do a little more than is asked of them, cleverly making themselves indispensable in the process.
Bleddyn – that’s not his real name (after all, I don’t know what he’s doing now, he might have befriended a very good lawyer and consider my version of events to differ significantly from his own) – was not that sort of runner. He was the sort that quietly chipped away at the fragile veneer of my confidence during rehearsal, with the odd sigh here, a raised eyebrow there. At one point during the production, I made the mistake of asking him what he thought of the show we were making. It was my own fault; I was fishing for compliments.
He didn’t bite. Or, rather, he did. He said it wasn’t really his kind of thing, he preferred stuff like Blackadder. Well, so did I! That’s what we were trying to do, stuff that might be as good as Blackadder ; we weren’t deliberately setting out to make something bad. There was sympathy in his voice too – he was speaking from a position of comedic superiority. One could be forgiven for thinking he’d actually made Rowan Atkinson and Co.’s masterpiece, not merely joined the rest of us in watching it.
Anyway, here he was in bloody Greenwich, on the one night that I happened to get up on the stage and suffer a ritual disembowelment. As I approached him, his face twisted into a sympathetic smile that took Schadenfreude to new heights
‘Hiya, Rob! A baptism of fire, eh?’
Bastard.
Five minutes later, I was in the car driving home. Oh my God, I was low. I was devastated. I was traumatized, and I was depressed. By now I was making a very comfortable living with the voice-overs, but on that long drive home I convinced myself that I would never earn another penny through performing, through art, through any branch of show business. I told myself that it would be best to spend none of the money I had saved up; there would be no more coming in. I had been a fool to think that I could be a comedian, an actor, a writer, a voice-over artist, indeed any of the above. I was humiliated and defeated. I really cannot convey to you how desperately low I felt on the drive home.
It was all over. I was bereft.
The morning after has a wonderful way of making what happened the night before seem not so bad; except for when you’ve done something absolutely appalling the night before, in which case the cold light of day just makes things worse. In this instance, it was the former. I resolved to one day return to Up the Creek, be hoisted shoulder-high at the end of my act and then carried through the streets of Greenwich on a triumphant parade of celebration and affirmation, banners twirling and party poppers popping, as those small unfurling paper trumpets are blown hither and yon with gay abandon. And I did. Nearly.
I went back, some months later, more scared than before (if such a state were possible) and proceeded to perform five minutes of material to general disinterest and perhaps the odd lone chuckle. You’d be hard pushed to describe me as a success. But, in my mind, the absence of sheep noises was akin to being presented with an Academy Award.
My ill-concealed glee on leaving the stage must have perplexed anyone watching, leaving them with the impression that I’d somehow set myself spectacularly low standards and then shocked myself at being able to rise to them.
17
My period on the London comedy circuit was mercifully brief. After the first competition gig in Hanwell, I’d come off the stage and been taken aback to be handed a business card by an agent, Paul Duddridge. I wrongly assumed that this happened at every gig and therefore waited a while before calling him, to see who else had been dazzled by my obvious potential. No one had.
A fellow Welshman, Paul saw something in me that others had missed, and he began to arrange a few gigs for me. I played mostly at Ha Bloody Ha in West London, a few times at the Chuckle Club in the West End, and at various Jongleurs outlets. I never made it to the Comedy Store, although I often meet people now who swear they saw me there. At most of these gigs I would go out feeling underprepared. I was lacking in material, and relying on tricks – the impressions and the big finish with the Tom Jones song, which by now was getting longer and longer. Occasionally I would go off script and chat with the audience; these moments would always harvest the biggest laughs, and a feeling began to grow in the back of my mind that this was where I was at my best. Paul would come to the gigs and we would analyse how they’d gone, both agreeing that if I could tap into the kind of humour I produced around friends, when I was just messing about, then we might be on to something. In other words, be myself. It was easier said than done.
As I was notching up my modest tally of gigs, I came across a whole host of other comedians also trying to make their way up the ladder. As well as Catherine Tate, I played on bills with Al Murray, Sean Lock, Rich Hall and Mackenzie Crook in his guise of Charlie Cheese. You could never tell who would go on to break through and make it. There were many who stood out as being ones to watch, and it was certainly easy to tell who was going down best in the room that night. But that, in itself, was no indicator of future, wider success – or, to put it another way, who would end up on the telly. I saw acts absolutely own the room at Jongleurs, their audience crying with laughter, struggling to catch their breath, yet these same acts ten or twelve years down the line are still there, still storming it, still living the strangely antisocial late-night life of the circuit comedian.
It was one of the reasons I came to stand-up so late; I would peruse the listings in Time Out magazine and read of comedians described as ‘circuit veterans, guaranteed to raise the roof’ and ponder on why, if they were so hilarious, I’d never heard of them. It seemed there was an embarrassment of riches, and I had a great aversion to joining that embarrassment. A large part of it, I’m sure, was a fear of failure: if you don’t join in the game then you can be pretty sure that you won’t lose. So, when I did begin – ever so tentatively – to join the circuit, it was done almost as an experiment while at the same time answering a long-held desire to perform onstage as a stand-up.
One of the first things I noticed on entering the world of the stand-up comedian was the smoke. This was before the smoking ban, and clubs would exist in a positively Dickensian fug of cigarette and cigar smoke, which would catch at the back of my throat and make the impressions and singing especially difficult. It would get so bad that I would arrive at a club, let them know I was there, and then stand outside in the fresh air until it was
my turn. After a while you acclimatize to the smoke, and I got to the point where I didn’t notice it at all.
Mostly I would gig at the weekends, on Friday and Saturday nights. This wasn’t conducive to family life and, because of what I’ll politely describe as a ‘nervous stomach’, meant that I basically couldn’t eat anything after an early lunch on the Saturday. By the time I got to the venue on a Saturday night I’d be starving, my blood sugar levels low, and desperately wanting to eat something. I’d usually give in and have a Mars Bar, or similar, and this would be swiftly followed by an anxious trip to the toilet where the recently consumed chocolate bar would continue on its journey. It would have saved me some time to just buy the thing, take it to the loo, and flush it away unopened. As I did more gigs, I’d begin to feel an ever-so-slight lessening of the nerves and this would trick me into believing that I could maybe eat something before the show. Always a mistake.
The nervous stomach was one thing; the general feeling of impending doom was another. Again, it would start after lunch on the Saturday and slowly creep up, the fear that I might die onstage. What if they hate me? What if I don’t get any laughs? The act in those days was so flimsy, so reliant on a good crowd, a good ad-libbed line, so many variables beyond my control, that it was like starting afresh each time. As the afternoon progressed, I’d become more and more quiet and increasingly irritable. Lovely.
Then to the gig itself: you’re announced; you walk on to the stage. No one knows who you are, so there’s a period at the beginning of your spot where you can feel the crowd sizing you up. Hmm, what’s this one like? Is he any good? I’d always make a superhuman effort to appear calm and confident (it’s amazing how people are willing to accept the appearance of relaxation as genuine relaxation). It buys you some time. I would just act the part and wait until laughs came. Hopefully, the wait wouldn’t be too long, and then I’d be away.
I still fall back on this now when things don’t fly from the start; just try and look relaxed. Audiences can smell fear in a comic, if you let them, and the minute they do you’re in big danger of losing them. All audiences want to feel that the comedian is in charge and knows what he or she is doing; they want to feel that all they have to do is just sit back and enjoy the show. I’ve had numerous times onstage where a few lines haven’t gone as I’d hoped and I’m beginning to worry; I’ll try to slow things right down, smile a bit and look like I couldn’t be happier while inside my mind is turning over at a hundred miles an hour.
It changes once you build up your own audience; they’ve made the effort to buy the ticket months in advance and have been looking forward to coming to see you. It buys you time at the top of the show when you’re greeted with enthusiastic applause, a mini celebration. You’re the one thing that the whole audience has in common – their liking for you, the comedian. I say the whole audience, but it’s often painfully easy to spot the partners who’ve come because their wife/girlfriend is a fan, or there was a spare ticket going at work. I’ll scan the front rows: smiley face, smiley face, smiley face … scowl. You learn after a while to block those faces out, to pretend they’re not there; they get filed under the heading ‘You Can’t Please Everyone’. It takes a while to learn the discipline required to phase those faces out. I’ve known so many comedians who will fixate on the one bloke who’s not enjoying the show; I’ve done it myself.
During my West End run a couple of years ago, I was five minutes into the act when I noticed a man in the front row looking at his watch. He then turned to his wife and made a gesture as if to say, ‘At the first chance we get, we’ll go.’ The thing was, we just happened to catch each other’s eye – and he knew that I knew exactly what had just happened. I was furious. I felt embarrassed, insulted, angry. He looked mortified.
I decided to direct everything at him and, for the next twenty minutes, after every laugh I would look at him, stare him down as if to say, ‘See? They think I’m funny!’ He was looking more and more uncomfortable until suddenly (and imperceptibly, at first) he turned the tables on me. He began, rather cleverly, to laugh a little too much at the jokes. This unnerved me enormously; it really put me on the back foot. You won’t be surprised to hear that the couple did not return after the interval. I now wish I’d simply ignored him. What I did was futile; it’s just self-flagellation, and ultimately pointless. It’s also unfair on the rest of the audience, who are enjoying the show, as it gives the comedian a warped view of the crowd as a whole, which in turn impacts on how he relates to them.
If I’m giving the impression that I feel I can predict how an audience will behave, then I’m giving the wrong impression; an audience can so often surprise you. When you’re on tour and a rhythm is built up of good show after good show, it can be easy to become complacent. This is when the shock usually comes along. I remember walking out to an audience somewhere in the north of England with great confidence after a run of excellent shows in similar towns.
Within ten seconds, I knew tonight would be different.
It was as though they’d all had a little meeting before I came on, the conclusion of which was that they’d give me a chance but that each and every one of them should be on their guard and treat me with the greatest suspicion. Very weird. After a while, things settled and the show was fine. But that initial shock was disconcerting and only overcome through experience and being able to keep faith that they (the audience) would eventually come around if I just carried on and did what had worked every other night.
While slowly building up my experience as a stand-up, I was also picking up the odd television gig here and there, always in tiny roles that never seemed to make a difference to the overall picture as far my career was concerned.
I was in a couple of one-off films for Hat Trick Productions. The first, Eleven Men Against Eleven, starred James Bolam and was set in the world of football. I played a commentator, and we filmed on a hot summer’s day at The Den, home of Millwall FC. The only thing I remember from this job was my delight at watching James Bolam during the read-through; it was another of those moments when you get to work with someone you’ve grown up watching.
The next film was Lord of Misrule, starring Richard Wilson, in which I played a policeman. We filmed in the beautiful seaside town of Fowey, in Cornwall. My part involved no more than standing on a ferry boat as it crossed the river and asking Stephen Moyer, playing the lead in his pre-True Blood days, if the car belongs to him.
He then dives overboard and Prunella Scales steps out of the car and says, ‘Well, go after him then.’
It would be nice to report that Prunella and I sparked with the kind of brilliant onscreen chemistry she’d enjoyed with John Cleese in Fawlty Towers.
But, alas, all that happened was I replied, ‘You go after him, ma’am …’ and the scene ended.
As with James Bolam, it was great to work alongside Prunella and Richard Wilson but, beyond that, I knew it was unlikely to have any real impact on things. A couple of weeks after I’d returned from Cornwall, I received a call asking me to head back and reshoot the scene. Driving from the unit base to the location, I was sitting in the car with Jimmy Mulville, former comedian, star of Who Dares Wins and now head of Hat Trick Productions. Fishing for compliments, I cast my line and asked, in an admittedly light-hearted way, whether the scene was being reshot due to any shortcomings on my part.
‘Is it my fault?’
Without missing a beat, and slightly too chillingly for my liking, Jimmy replied, ‘If it was, you wouldn’t be here.’
I quickly put away my rod.
Perhaps I had expected a bit of unsolicited praise after my recent experience on Married for Life, the short-lived British remake of the hugely popular and long-running American series Married with Children. Our version starred Russ Abbot and was filmed up in Nottingham. I had a small part in one of the episodes as a co-worker at the shoe shop where Russ’s character is employed. I got on so well with the team that they wrote me into another episode, this time as a news
reader. The series also featured a little-known Hugh Bonneville and we would often all eat together at the hotel at the end of the day’s filming. At one of the meals we were joined by some of the executives from the television company. After dessert, with everyone chatting away ten to the dozen, Russ began to sing my praises to the executives, saying how funny he thought I was and that there was quite a buzz going around on the show about me. When they weren’t looking, he gave me a sly wink and a smile.
Later, when the executives had gone, he came over and, in conspiratorial tones, whispered, ‘That’s what you’ve got to do, get them talking about you.’
What a nice man.
As 1997 progressed, the television roles began to dry up again – as a result of my poor performances, I feared (with perhaps a little paranoia). I was getting by handsomely on the money coming in from voice-overs, and in the evenings I’d slip out and try my stand-up routines at tiny clubs.
Martina was pregnant again, although this time not in the presence of Sir John Gielgud, and as the summer came to an end she gave birth in September to a baby boy – my first son, Harry. Having had a girl when we’d suspected it would be a boy, we now had a boy when we were expecting a girl. We were both surprised and overjoyed at our beautiful new addition.
Hurrah!
A new member of the family meant more responsibility for me and, while money was no longer the problem it had once been, I still felt unfulfilled creatively and dreamed of wider success, the chance to create and act in something of substance. At night I would lie in bed wondering what more I could be doing. Why wasn’t I breaking through to where I wanted to be? The more I wondered, the more I’d stay awake, and so I developed a routine that would help me get off to sleep.