by Rob Brydon
I’d imagine myself on television, being interviewed on Parkinson, coming out at the top of the steps, strolling down with confidence as the crowd cheered and Michael stood waiting, arms outstretched and smiling.
‘It’s been a remarkable journey, hasn’t it? Tell me about your roots …’
He would quiz me about my incredible rise from voice-over artist to beloved actor and comedian, expressing amazed admiration that I’d been able to make the leap from the one world to the other. Sometimes it would be a one-on-one interview, sometimes I would be the final guest in a line-up that would include perhaps Steve Martin, Paul Simon and James Taylor, who would all at some point interrupt Michael’s flow to offer up their own praise. After twenty minutes or so I would drift off to sleep perfectly content. It was, I suppose, a form of positive visualization – and, given that some years later I went on to descend the steps for real, it could be considered to have been very effective and successful (although the reality, as is often the case, was not quite as sweet as the fantasy).
It was 2002; I was a couple of years into my eventual success and had finally been asked to appear on Parkinson. I’d already appeared on a few other chat shows and been interviewed by a generous handful of journalists and presenters, yet none of them came close to the excitement of appearing on the show that I’d watched for as long as I could remember. While waiting in my dressing room before the recording, there was a knock on the door and in walked Michael Parkinson himself, to welcome me to the show and to generally wish me well. He mentioned what he might cover in the interview: how the Celts could be prone to depression, and that he’d heard I did an impression of Anthony Hopkins which he might ask me to do. With that, he was gone. To say that I was nervous about appearing on the show was an understatement. I had a real fear that I would bomb – that I would die on the show – although whenever I’d have these thoughts, I’d reassure myself that I was being silly and that while I might not storm it, there was no real chance that I’d die. The worst that could happen, I reasoned, was that I’d be OK, nothing special.
Waiting in the wings, I was sitting with fellow guest Timothy Spall while Chris Tarrant was already out in front of the audience being interviewed. Soon I was standing at the top of a rickety stairway waiting for my introduction, heart pounding in time with Bryan Ferry who was singing his latest song, unseen, just feet away. Peter Sellers, Morecambe and Wise, Kenneth Williams and Richard Burton had all made this same entrance; had they felt as nervous as this? Suddenly it was time to make my move, I stepped forward into the lights as the band played loudly to my left, and I descended the stairs (trying desperately hard to look relaxed while battling the thought that I might well slip and slide my way to the bottom). I remember walking across to Michael Parkinson with my arm outstretched, we shook hands and I sat down, still trying to affect the air of a very relaxed man.
He spoke.
I stared.
Rabbits and headlights sprang to mind.
The thing about appearing on Parkinson is that it’s not like watching it at home. While this is of course true of every interview programme, it is especially true here due to the frankly iconic nature of the show. Firstly there was the proximity to Mr Parkinson; I remember very quickly noticing how close we were to each other, our knees practically touching. Then there was the fact that, when looking at Michael, he didn’t appear to be sitting on the set; the chairs were angled in such a way that it looked as if he was sitting in front of an inky blackness that stretched off into the distance. On top of this, there was the sound of the audience – or, rather, the lack of any sound from the audience. They were so quiet, so reverential; it was quite unnerving.
Michael began by saying something or other – I don’t remember what, and I certainly can’t bring myself to watch the video recording I have of the show. I answered. It was evident that most of the audience had no idea who I was and weren’t overburdened with curiosity. After a couple of minutes, Michael said something about the gloomy nature of the Welsh. Ah! I thought. This is my cue to do the Hopkins impression. And so I answered that, in my opinion, we could indeed be a little gloomy but I bet there was one Welshman who wasn’t that gloomy right now, what with his success and all – Anthony Hopkins! I then began to do my impression.
Now the thing to remember is that, although I can be insecure and nervous about a myriad subjects, areas or aspects of myself, there is one topic on which I am quietly confident, and that’s my ability with voices. I’m not the best there is, but I’m pretty good and can hold my own in most circumstances That was the mindset with which I began to do Anthony Hopkins: I’m on safe ground here. My impression involved having him say words I’d heard him trot out many times in interviews regarding the fact that as a recovering alcoholic he no longer drank and didn’t take life seriously; he considered it to be ‘a game’. Added to this, I squinted into the distance and tugged at my right earlobe, both little physical quirks that I’d witnessed him exhibit on many occasions.
‘Well, I don’t drink any more, I don’t like to talk about it, very dull, very boring. It’s all a game really, isn’t it?’
Within the first few words I noticed that there was not the slightest, smallest, most imperceptible response from the audience. There was nothing at all, and it threw me slightly. What then unfolded can have taken no more than five or six seconds, yet it seemed at the time to last an appalling eternity. My thought processes went something along the lines of: They’re not laughing! They’re not even making a sound! This is awful, I’m dying, I’m dying on Parkinson, my worst fears are coming true! I scrambled around, searching for something to say that would redeem me and prompt the audience to laugh. Or, if not to laugh, then to cough or at least mutter, anything but the desert of silence I was currently stranded in.
It was at this point that I unexpectedly and inexplicably went into a very fleeting impersonation of Tom Jones, in particular his cough. This is the aspect of his voice that I’d seized on to some comic effect many times before – the loud throat clearing that accompanies almost every interview with The World’s Greatest Welshman. In and of itself it’s amusing enough, but it has no place midway through Anthony Hopkins. Unplanned, unexpected and unwanted.
‘Well, I don’t drink any more, I don’t like to talk about it, very dull, very boring. HARRUMPH!!!’
I don’t think I’ve ever been more shocked than I was at the arrival of an involuntary Tom Jones cough. I couldn’t believe I was getting it so wrong; I never messed up with voices; they were one hundred per cent safe ground for me. What are you doing?! You’re doing Tom Jones! Why? Why? Why? I stopped short of saying ‘Delilah’. Right, come on, keep it together, do something crowd-pleasing, finish with the sucking in of breath between the teeth that Hopkins does in The Silence of The Lambs, that little thing he does after mentioning how much he’d enjoy a fine Chianti. That’s bound to get a response. It seemed a good plan and so I began to suck the air between my teeth – or rather, I didn’t. For reasons I still don’t understand, I began to hiss. I hissed like a snake. More panic. What are you doing? You’re hissing like a snake! He doesn’t hiss like a snake! Why are you hissing like a snake?
Immediately post-hiss, my little impression was over – along, I feared, with my career. I spent the rest of the programme in a daze, smiling at Michael, laughing at Timothy Spall’s anecdotes, but all the time contemplating what had just happened.
If my imaginary bedtime Parkinson had been at all like the real thing, I’d have never got to sleep.
Meanwhile, in 1997, I had become a father again and was managing to provide for my expanding family quite comfortably, thanks to the voice work, but decent acting jobs were as elusive as ever. Then one day I was pottering about in my kitchen, making lunch, when the phone rang. It was a casting director I’d been bothering for some time, and my little heart leapt when she clearly used the word ‘film’ in association with the part she was about to describe. It then sank when she went on to preface the part with t
he word ‘nerdy’. I had developed an aversion to the word; it had begun to seem as if the only way I’d ever be considered for a role was if it contained an element of nerdiness. I had played a variation on the nerd theme in Cold Lazarus, Married for Life and Lord of Misrule, and had more or less had my fill. I was making enough money by now for a comfortable life and was of the opinion that another nerdy role would not be a great help in furthering my artistic cause and getting me closer to a part with some substance. When she went on to say that it wasn’t just a nerd per se, but a nerdy traffic warden, I was ready to say ‘thanks but no thanks’. What was the point of another tiny inconsequential part? I had begun to say, when people asked me about my latest small role, that it was so tiny a part, ‘a Labrador could play it’.
It must have been the fact that it was a film rather than something for TV that stopped me from making an excuse and hanging up. Instead, I thanked her for thinking of me and took down the details. The film was called Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels; I was to go to Ealing Studios and meet the director, a man named Guy Ritchie. I already knew the famous Ealing Studios from watching numerous documentaries on Peter Sellers and seeing footage of him filming I’m All Right Jack there. I pictured the place in my mind; it was a very distinctive building on the North Circular. Whenever I passed it in the car, I would point out to whoever cared to listen that this was where the great Ealing Comedies had been shot, and that we were driving past a site of great cultural importance.
On the day of the meeting I set off in good time, full of the ridiculous hope that I might be edging my way into films. I turned the car off the North Circular and into the studio compound, looking for a reception area. I was surprised that there appeared to be no security to speak of, or indeed any of the paraphernalia usually associated with film studios. Where were the sound stages, the golf buggies, the people carrying huge pieces of scenery past old rotting props? As I drove around a little more, it became apparent that I had in fact come to a block of flats whose only connection with the celebrated Ealing Studios was that they vaguely resembled the location I’d seen on the Peter Sellers documentary.
I arrived for my meeting with Guy Ritchie half an hour late, and more than a little flustered. But he was very relaxed and, after the usual pleasantries, almost apologetically asked me to read some lines for the part. It was chillingly reminiscent of my casting for First Knight, once again reading a tiny bit of script, once again playing a man being assaulted – although this time I was only knocked out, not shot with a crossbow. It’s also worth saying in First Villager’s defence that he wasn’t at all nerdy; he was, after all, just trying to protect his family from evil Ben Cross (worried, perhaps, that he might be forced to sit with his wife and children watching Chariots of Fire again and again, while Ben loomed at their shoulder monitoring their reactions).
I read the part – it basically consisted of, ‘You can’t park here … Argh!’
Guy said, in effect, ‘Sorry about that, of course you can do it,’ and then told me when the filming would be.
Directors often do this during an audition. Sometimes it means you’ve got the part, and this was how I interpreted it. He looked at my CV, saw that I had appeared in First Knight and asked me how I’d found the experience. For reasons best known to someone smarter than me, I began to tell him (with no small amount of detail) the story of my little chat with Hunt Lowry, how I’d refused to do the extra filming that had been asked of me, and how it had all ended a little unpleasantly. I had almost reached the conclusion of my tale before realizing that it probably didn’t show me in the best light for potential employers. I could feel my grip being prised open by my own idiocy and the part slipping out of my hands – but short of saying that I’d entirely made up the last five minutes of our chat, there was nothing I could do. We shook hands and I left. What an idiot.
A couple of weeks went by … and I heard nothing. Then a month or so …
I became convinced that it was my retelling of my ‘Bad Employee of the Month’ tale that had cost me the part. Then one day, some months later, the same casting director called once more and said the part was mine; it had been mine all along, but the film had lost its funding not long after my casting, hence the delay.
We were back on. Cock-a-doodle-do!
The night before the filming of my first scene, I received a call from the production team. My first instinct was to expect the news that my line had been cut, and did I still want to play a nerdy mute traffic warden? I was wrong, they were actually calling to tell me there was a chance I might be stood down tomorrow as one of the stars of the film, Vinnie Jones, had been arrested for allegedly threatening a neighbour with a shotgun (‘We’ve all done it …’) and so the schedule might have to be rearranged to accommodate his enforced absence. Ten minutes later, there was another call – this time to say that all was well and we were going ahead as planned.
I arrived at the unit base late the next morning; it was almost midday, they weren’t ready for me, and so I was told to wait on the lunch bus. I grabbed some food and sat down. There was a Daily Mirror on the seat next to me and I flicked through it, arriving after a few pages at their report on Vinnie’s altercation the previous day. As I read, I felt someone sitting down opposite me at the other side of the table. I looked up from a picture of Vinnie Jones, over the top of the paper, and there he was, in the flesh, sitting opposite me. I looked straight back down at the paper. It was not unlike the moment in so many films when the fugitive is making his escape across country and manages to get on to the safety of a train, only for a fellow passenger to spot his picture in a paper and raise the alarm. (I didn’t raise any alarms.)
The filming was a lot of fun – if lying in the back of a transit van as it is towed around the East End and pretending to be beaten up is your idea of a lot of fun. Of the actors in the van, Dexter Fletcher and Jason Flemyng were especially friendly, always apologizing at the end of a take and checking that they hadn’t hit me for real.
I did two, maybe three, days on the film and then went back to my normal working life of voice-overs.
I had forgotten all about the film when, some months later, I began to notice it being talked about here and there. I had just come out of a voice-over, and was walking along Wardour Street one day, when I bumped into Stephen Moyer (who had played the lead in Lord of Misrule). He’d been in LA, where he had heard great things about Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. There was a buzz going around, people were talking about it, and apparently a special screening had been arranged for no less a Hollywood luminary than Tom Cruise. Even though my role in the film was tiny, I was excited to be part of something that was causing a stir in America.
I was invited to a cast and crew screening of the film, ahead of its official release. The screening was in the West End, just a stone’s throw from the Odeon Leicester Square where, a few years ago, I’d sunk down in my seat in horror at my First Knight performance. My nerdy traffic warden doesn’t appear for some time, but even through the long wait and the ever-present fear that I was about to be revealed as an actor out of his depth, I couldn’t help noticing that the film really was rather good. It was funny, stylish, slick and, perhaps most of all, it felt remarkably now.
As for myself, when I finally appeared, I thought I was OK, certainly not bad, and while Dustin Hoffman wouldn’t be losing any sleep I felt that I hadn’t let myself down – I’d improved, if only ever so slightly. Overall I just came away hugely impressed with the film and sure that it was going to be a hit. The distributor obviously thought so too. The subsequent advertising campaign was huge; the posters were everywhere.
When the film finally came out, it was to great acclaim. In those days I was a big film fan, that is to say, a fan of films and film-making – the excitement and glamour of the whole world – and I would read Empire magazine each month. They gave the film a glowing review; I bought a copy in a newsagent’s on the Upper Richmond Road in East Sheen and stood on the pavement to read it.
I was pleased enough with the review but absolutely flabbergasted to see that I’d been given a mention, something along the lines of ‘an extremely unlucky traffic warden, Robert Brydon’. I was amazed, and straight away began to wonder if I could use this to my advantage. I was in a hit film, a trendy, fashionable, ‘of the moment’, zeitgeist film; I must be able to hitch a ride on its back somehow.
I’d been toying for a while with the idea of putting together a showreel of characters I’d created myself, not just the tiny parts I’d been getting up to that point, and decided this would be the perfect time to do it. I’d write a script, then shoot the thing and, using the money that was flowing in from voice-overs, I’d pay to have it edited, dubbed and packaged.
In a shameless display of bandwagon-jumping, I called it Rob Brydon: An Extremely Unlucky Traffic Warden.
18
Earlier that year, we had been on holiday with friends to a beautiful old farmhouse in Tuscany. There was a pool, you could eat outside, and it was all on its own, surrounded by the most stunning countryside. It had been exceptionally hot and I’d taken to wearing a rather fetching bandana around my neck, to protect my skin from burning. As hard as it might be to believe, this bandana, worn at a jaunty, rakish angle, had given me a slightly camp appearance and so I began to mess about and build a character to go with the look.
Not sure where this is but apparently drinks are free and there’s enough fun and sunshine for everyone.
I named him Colin; he’d come to the farmhouse to get himself together after a difficult time in his romantic life. He spoke in a posh, clipped Welsh accent, the kind that pronounces the word ‘university’ as ‘eweniversity’. I’d loved this kind of voice for a long time but had never managed to do anything with it. The character would get lots of laughs around the dinner table and by the pool, so I decided to make the most of the incredible location and film a little video of Colin, just for fun. When it came to costume, I stripped down to my boxers, tucked them in so they resembled a posing pouch, and oiled my body until it glistened. The final touch was the bandanna. With the magnificent Tuscan hills rolling away behind me, I stood by the pool, glistening in the sun, and began to speak to the camera as though recording a video message for a dating agency website. The comedy was helped by the unplanned additions of an intermittently barking dog and a curious wasp, both of which caused Colin to lose his composure.