Sam Fox, the ex-page-three girl who had entered A Song for Europe, and darts champion Eric Bristow also played along for a little bit of money and TV exposure. The Sky at Night astronomer Patrick Moore did not.
The producers of The Sunday Show had decided that the portly xylophone-playing scientist was going to embarrass himself by saying something laughable about alien life forms. A list of ‘funny’ questions was drawn up, and I was dispatched to meet him.
‘So what will alien life forms look like, Pat?’ I asked as the cameras rolled.
‘Don’t call me Pat. My name is Patrick or Mr Moore.’
‘Sorry, Pat. So what will alien life forms look like?’
‘The idea of little green men from Mars is likely to be wildly off the mark.’
‘Thanks, Pat. So what kind of clothes will they wear?’
He snatched my question cards and read through them at speed.
‘No, no, no, no. Not answering that. Not answering that. No, no, no.’
He tore up the cards and threw them over his shoulder. ‘NEXT!’
‘You didn’t need to do that, Pat.’
‘RIGHT! THIS INTERVIEW IS OVER!’
Patrick Moore pulled off his microphone and, walking out the door, turned to the producer and shouted, ‘DON’T LET THAT GOON NEAR ANYONE ELSE!’
I was embarrassed. Even though I do not share his anti-immigration views, I had always liked watching Patrick Moore on television, and now he thought I was a goon, whatever that was.
The Sunday Show ran my three interviews over the last three weeks of the show. By that time Dennis Pennis had firmly and rightfully established himself as the show’s star. So I was surplus to requirements and wasn’t asked back for the next series.
Soon I was back writing with Matt, this time for our first Edinburgh show. The process wasn’t easy. Writing never is. Coming up with ideas for our pet project Sunday Club was a literal walk in the park, but the Edinburgh show was really going to happen, and soon. The first difficulty was that Matt did not want to start work until three in the afternoon.
‘I have gigs in the evening, and it takes me a long time to wind down after all the adrenalin,’ he said.
Still three seemed very late, and often I would get a call at 2 p.m., ‘Can you make it three thirty?’ or sometimes even, ‘Is four OK?’
More troubling was that Matt was infinitely more interested in coming up with material for his character Sir Bernard Chumley, rather than any of mine. Both these issues would remain problems throughout our working relationship.
Theatre producer Andre Petjinski’s company promoted us, though he once saw our show and hated it so much he wouldn’t even talk to us afterwards, which I found hugely insulting. The slot we were given was at midnight at the Assembly Rooms, in a room called the Wildman that sat around a hundred people.
A number of previews were booked in, the first of which was at the Jackson’s Lane Community Centre in Highgate. Rehearsals were difficult, as we didn’t have a director so were directing each other, which was uneasy. In addition, despite Matt being only twenty-one at the time, he liked to rehearse sitting down. Being brilliant came naturally to him, and he was quite happy for a rehearsal to be little more than a read of the script. However, I always had to work much harder to try and keep up with him, and my way of doing things was to plan meticulously and rehearse again and again and again until it was right.
In our naivety, the hour of comedy we had devised was needlessly complex with hundreds of sound cues, lighting changes, costumes and props, which made the technical rehearsal quite tortuous and the show prone to problems.
For the first night at Jackson’s Lane Community Centre we had sold three tickets. It was a miracle that we had sold that many, even though the theatre sat around 200. However, five minutes before showtime the box office received a call.
‘There are four people who want to come and see you but are just watching EastEnders and would like to catch the end of it,’ said the box office manager. ‘They asked if you would mind starting five minutes late.’
Matt and I looked at each other.
‘We’d be delighted,’ I said.
Our audience had doubled.
For some reason the show was called ‘Sir Bernard Chumley is Dead … and Friends’, and the poster featured me in my pants reclining behind Matt as Sir Bernard. It opened with me walking on as a stage manager called Tony Rogers. (This was the name of a friend of my mum and dad and somehow the ordinariness of it amused me.) I entered from the back of the theatre and denounced the performance that the audience was about to see, then, emboldened, Tony started telling his own jokes. Mostly these were incredibly sexist, so he would finish these with the line ‘Nice one, lads – sorry, women.’
Tony then introduced Sir Bernard Chumley and we sang a medley of completely inappropriate songs together – inspired by Vic Reeves’s entrances on Big Night Out. Thereafter Sir Bernard hosted the hour, telling theatrical anecdotes and introducing me in various guises, from performance artist Simon Gieger to Bristol’s very own porn star Erik Estrada. On that first night in Jackson’s Lane Community Centre we even performed as gay Christian strip troupe Res-erection, though they only featured once. At the end of the show I appeared as the posh university-educated director Chris Neil (named after our agent at the time). I bemoaned the entire performance as a shambles, and we sang an a cappella version of Nik Kershaw’s ‘Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me’ to finish.
The audience’s expectations were low, and we met those expectations. However, Matt and I had at least performed an hour of comedy together, albeit an utterly shambolic one. More previews followed, one of which, it subsequently emerged, was attended by the League of Gentlemen’s Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith. Reece later told me, ‘We thought it was brilliant, and we thought we’d better get going with our own thing.’ That shocked me, as at the time I thought our show was a mess.
In early August 1995 we boarded the train for Edinburgh and watched the landscape out of the window grow harsher as we travelled northwards and anticipated our fate.
On the first night we had sold one ticket.
I thought it would be amusing to print ‘Free crèche’ on the posters – this was a show on at midnight after all. A disgruntled hard-faced Scottish woman pushing a buggy with a toddler inside confronted me outside the theatre.
‘It says, “Free crèche”!’
‘I know it does, madam, but it’s a joke.’
‘A joke! Why is that funny?’
‘Well, I, er, thought it might be, you know, as it’s on so late.’
‘I only chose this show as it had a free crèche. The wee bairn was looking forward to that.’
I peered down into the buggy. The child could not have been two. I wasn’t sure there was a huge amount of crushed anticipation.
‘I want my money back!’ she demanded.
‘Well, I am sure the box office can help you out there, madam.’
‘Fucking idiot,’ she added as she wheeled her long-suffering child out of the Assembly Rooms.
Our audience was now at zero.
The promoter hastily gave out some free tickets to people coming out of earlier shows in the Assembly Rooms and even people walking down the street. Soon zero turned to two, and two to four, and four to ten, and before long we had filled a few seats in our tiny theatre.
Midnight was late for a comedy show, even at the Edinburgh Festival, and the audience had mostly been drinking heavily all day. What was worse, the only way to the toilet was across the stage, so we were constantly interrupted by a parade of drunken men on their way to and from having a piss. Some even had to visit the conveniences more than once during the show. One particularly inebriated gentleman walked across the stage with only a few minutes of the performance left to go.
‘Look, it’s nearly finished. Can’t you wait?’ implored an irritated Matt, getting a laugh in the process.
‘No, I can’t,’ replied the man, also getting a laugh.
‘Good,’ said the man. ‘I don’t care. The show is shite anyway.’
‘Thank you for that wonderful review,’ I said. ‘Now please just go.’
He left, and Matt and I tried to carry on from where we had left off. After a minute or so we heard the door opening, and in disbelief saw the man trying to catch the last dying moments of the show.
‘I wasn’t joking!’ I said, and attempted to push him out of the theatre. Drunks can have a terrible strength, so Matt joined in and we physically threw him out into the corridor and shut the door behind him.
The audience cheered – they had never seen such anarchy.
On so late in a town awash with inebriates, Matt and I had no choice other than to adopt an aggressive performance style. It was the only way to survive.
One night the comedian Sean Lock came. There was a moment when I, as disgraced children’s entertainer Des Kaye, threw lollies into the audience. To capture the character’s mental state, I would throw the lollies harder and harder, and aim above the audience’s heads. By accident one hit Sean Lock on the forehead. Unsurprisingly he didn’t like it.
‘You could have blinded me,’ he complained afterwards.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It’s unbelievable; you could have had my eye out.’
So if you have ever wondered why Sean Lock is so frosty towards me on 8 Out of 10 Cats you have the answer.
I celebrated my twenty-fourth birthday in Edinburgh. Katy had bought me a Jean-Paul Gaultier skirt. It was a man’s skirt, long and black, and I wore it with a pink shirt and black tie. Not since the Hornby Mallard train set that my granddad had bought me in 1979 had I loved a present so much. I wore it that night, and as we walked the streets of Edinburgh to a party two rough-looking Scots youths confronted me.
‘Why are you wearing a skirt?’ demanded one.
‘Because I’ve got some imagination!’ I said, before flouncing off. I was quite lucky I wasn’t beaten up.
Another night, in an effort to help Matt come out, Katy and I took him to a gay club called CC Bloom’s. It was customary for Katy and I to go to gay clubs as we preferred the music and the people. Gay clubs always have a party atmosphere.
Everyone who knew Matt assumed he was gay. Not that he was camp; he isn’t really, and is actually a lot more blokey than me. However, as he never had a girlfriend or seemed to want one, it seemed a strong possibility that he was gay or at least confused about his sexuality. I never asked Matt if he was gay; I felt he would tell me if he wanted to, but one night Katy and I thought it might be enlightening for him to go to a gay club. This proved to be a mistake.
As Katy and I drank and danced with a roomful of gay Scots I could see Matt was not enjoying himself. He stood holding a bottle of beer, with his back firmly pressed against the wall.
‘Are you having a good time?’ I shouted in his ear hopefully.
‘I don’t like this,’ he muttered. ‘I don’t like this at all.’
‘Why don’t you come and dance?’
‘I’m going to leave.’
‘We’ve only been here ten minutes.’
‘I’m leaving now …’
‘We’ll come too.’
I found Katy and we walked in silence through the streets of Edinburgh to the flat we were sharing. Matt just wasn’t ready.
Over the three weeks the audience numbers for our show steadily grew. The word of mouth was good, and on the final Saturday night we sold out. Although we received some positive reviews, the show was too rude and anarchic to appeal to any TV executive. Except one. Myfanwy Moore. Yes, her again.
18
Mash ’n’ Peas
Myfanwy Moore, my official guardian angel, was now a producer with the Paramount TV channel. It was still the early days of Sky, and although Paramount only showed reruns of American sitcoms, it wanted to make its own programmes. Myfanwy asked Matt and I to put together a show called Spoofovision. This would be a dozen collections of original sketches, all spoofing television series. Largely though, we could do whatever we wanted. And did.
Edgar Wright (who would later direct Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz) had approached Matt at a gig one night. Edgar had seen him in Shooting Stars and wanted him to play a role in a low-budget film he had written called Crawl. He was only twenty but looked twelve, and already had made a film showing at a cinema in London, a western spoof called A Fistful of Fingers. One night I took Katy to see it, and I could see immediately that Edgar was someone who really understood the genre, knew comedy and could direct. In short, he was a child genius.
So when Myfanwy asked, ‘Who would you like to direct?’
I said, ‘Edgar Wright. You have to go and see his film. It’s not the best film ever made but you can see he is a giant talent.’ Never have I been surer of a friend’s future success than Edgar’s.
‘How would you feel about a gay man producing you?’ asked Myf.
Matt and I looked at each other, puzzled. We were sitting in a coffee shop in Soho, just down from the Paramount offices in Rathbone Place.
‘Well, we don’t mind,’ said Matt.
‘We don’t have to have someone gay,’ I added. ‘We don’t mind either way. Why?’
‘Well, I think you would be really good with a gay man producing you.’
It was if she was trying to force us or our work out of the closet.
A week later we met Johnathan Rawlinson, who took an instant dislike to us and us to him. Unfortunately he still became our producer, and contributed less than nothing. He acted as if he was our headmaster. When Matt and I mucked around on the walkie-talkies one day he said, ‘I am reporting you to your agent.’
We really had no idea what the show was going to be. All we knew was that we had to do spoofs. We invented two appallingly unfunny hosts called Mash ’n’ Peas.
‘I’m Danny Mash …’
‘And I’m Gareth Peas.’
They were two desperately immature men who openly squabbled. Their catchphrase was ‘Get knockin’!’ and they introduced a series of thematically linked sketches. The themes included American sitcoms, the making of a boy-band documentary spoof and children’s TV.
Perversely minded, Matt and I wrote a spoof of Diff’rent Strokes called ‘I’m Black and my Dad’s in the Klan’. Matt appeared on his knees and in blackface, and I wore Klu Klux Klan robes and a hood. Fortunately for us and them, Paramount decided not to broadcast it. Ones that were shown included the ‘Take Hart’ sketch, in which Matt played the children’s artist Tony Hart, while I was his comedy sidekick Mr Bennet with a bucket on my foot, and our friend the always inventive comedy actor Paul Putner took the role of a beer-swilling Morph; and a spoof of Mariella Frostrup’s film review show with Matt as Mariella and featuring me as Cockney Film Star. With his leather jacket, glasses and lisp, Cockney Film Star later morphed into Lou Reed in Rock Profile and finally into Lou from Lou and Andy in Little Britain. The best sketch was a spoof of the American alien sitcom ALF entitled ‘There’s a Puppet in My House’. I played a man who unsurprisingly had a puppet in his house.
‘The boss is coming round for dinner tonight. I hope that pesky puppet doesn’t mess things up for me!’
Matt was the boss, and Jessica Stevenson played my wife.
When I asked, ‘Why are you twitching?’ she replied, ‘I’m playing her as if she had come back to the series after a really bad car crash.’
Genius.
However, even the best ones were more funny-peculiar than funny, and after our relationship with the producer went from bad to worse and lawyers wanted to change every word that we wrote for ‘legal reasons’, we started to resent doing them. It is hard to do a spoof without making a joke about someone.
Dominik Diamond had a live chat show on Paramount called Dom ’n’ Kirk’s Nite o’ Plenty, and Matt and I were booked to appear to promote Spoofovision. We waited backstage
in our Mash ’n’ Peas sweaters with the realization slowly dawning on us that we had no idea of what we were going to do. I was beginning to panic.
‘What shall we do on the show tonight?’
‘Don’t worry, Dave,’ said Matt. He always called me Dave though no one else did. ‘We’ll come out as Mash ’n’ Peas and sing a song.’
‘And then what?’
‘And then we’ll just see what happens.’
‘OK.’
It was to be the worst night of our careers.
Kirk wasn’t there for some reason, so co-hosting was the winner of Gladiators in 1994, Eunice Huthart. Dominik introduced us; we sang a deliberately annoying song, Gary Glitter’s ‘It’s Good to Be Back’, and repeated the lyric ‘Hello hello’ again and again and again.
Matt and I thought we would be so unfunny that we would be funny.
We were wrong.
Soon after we finished our song Dominik said something on screen to us that you must never say to comedians: ‘You’re not funny.’ It’s the worst insult imaginable.
While his statement was true, Matt and I decided, without exchanging a word, that we would get our revenge by ruining Dominik’s show. Which was live on TV, even if watched by only a few thousand people.
We answered every other question he asked with ‘Dunno.’ Then we suggested Diamond had been sacked as presenter from GamesMaster, which was grossly unfair as he had actually left the series for completely honourable reasons, in protest at the McDonald’s sponsorship of series three. Dominik was a highly principled man.
Needless to say, things took a turn for the worse from there on in. Matt and I repeatedly shouted the wrong answers in a telephone quiz, which managed to put off most of the callers. The times the callers answered correctly, Matt and I each had to throw a dart to give them a score. Neither of us tried to hit the board, and one of my darts narrowly missed Dominik’s head.
As the credits rolled I put my finger between the cheeks of Dominik’s bum. That I think was the final straw in a huge blazing pyre of final straws.
When the show finished Dominik’s face was white with fury. ‘I am going to fucking kill you!’ He wasn’t joking. I ran and hid in the toilets. Dominik followed me in and pounded on my cubicle door, shouting, ‘Come out of there, you cunt! I am going to smash your fucking face in. You cunt! You cunt!’
Camp David Page 14