‘I’m sorry, Dominik!’
‘After all I’ve fucking done for you. CUNT!’
He had a point. Dominik had helped me over the years, and I had repaid him by sabotaging his chat show.
‘I am going to smash this fucking door down!’
Unseen by me, Dominik then pinned Matt to the wall by his throat and had to be pulled off by a security guard. He was angry at Matt, but he was a hundred times angrier at me. Matt escaped, and Dominik was pulled out of the toilet. Still inside the cubicle, I unlocked the door and sprinted out of the fire exit. I ran down Rathbone Place and hurled myself down the escalator of Tottenham Court Road Tube station still in my Mash sweatshirt. Looking behind me all the way, I jumped on the first train, sat down on the dusty seat and cried. I had ruined my first appearance on a chat show, and more importantly destroyed my friendship with Dominik. We would never speak again.
I’m still ashamed about what happened that night.
19
‘An anal misogynist cul-de-sac’
‘Lucas and Walliams have torn free of their satirical moorings and are skating headlong into an anal misogynist cul-de-sac’ was the respected comedy critic Ben Thompson’s review of our second Edinburgh show in 1996. I wasn’t sure what an anal misogynist cul-de-sac was, though I was pretty sure it was not somewhere you wanted to be skating headlong into. Ben had reviewed us really well the year before, so this felt like a huge step back. Being on at midnight had pushed us too far towards rude jokes, and we were turning into Derek and Clive before we had been through the warmer and funnier phase Pete and Dud had in their Not Only … But Also period.
Shooting Stars had just started on BBC2, and although not an instant hit, Matt’s turn as the score master George Dawes was enough to guarantee us selling some tickets. That year our production was called ‘Sir Bernard Chumley’s Gangshow’, and it had a vague Scouting theme. In Edinburgh I went to see a show that proved another epiphany. At first the poster had really put me off – three men in dinner suits, one with a dagger in his mouth. To me it looked like a magic act, and I hate magic. However, it was in fact one of the greatest sketch groups of all time, the League of Gentlemen.
Despite this being their first Edinburgh, their hour of comedy was infinitely more assured than ours. The simple presentation with a minimum of props and costumes combined with excellent writing and performances made for a masterful show. Like us the League went into dark areas of comedy, but unlike us they did it without being obscene. We had a piece in which Sir Bernard Chumley sang the word cunt repeatedly to the ‘Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy’ from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker. It never failed to elicit laughs, but it was juvenile. Their characters and ideas were much more grown-up, and crucially they were performing sketches.
Considering Matt and I later became famous for a sketch series, it may seem odd to learn that our live performances were essentially cabaret shows, with the characters talking to the audience. The problem was the cobbled streets of Edinburgh were littered with flyers of pasty-faced posh student types who, not being that funny on their own, had sought safety in sketch groups which would never be heard of again – The Dutch Elm Conservatoire, Curried Goat, The Cheese Shop – the debt to Monty Python sometimes even evident in their names.* So Matt and I didn’t want to do sketches. Matt especially didn’t, as he had developed Sir Bernard Chumley as a stand-up act. But the League was different. Most of their sketches were character rather than concept led, which was unusual at the time. And instead of having members surplus to requirements, all three performers were potential stars.
The League nurtured an army of fans that year; Matt and I had just one. That Edinburgh we met our first super-fan. A large Scottish gentleman came to see our performance every night, and had his picture taken with us every night. Of course when he first approached us we were incredibly flattered, and we talked to him for hours. But as he came time after time we realized he must be a little bit nuts. One night he gave us a script he had written for us. On the cover page was the picture of us with him he had taken the first night we had met. The title was ‘An Evening of Bad Taste’, but he had crossed out ‘Taste’ and written ‘Breath’ instead. Eight hundred pages …
‘I stayed up all night and just wrote and wrote and wrote. It can be your next show …’
‘Thank you so much,’ we said.
It was not unlike the end of Stanley Kubrick’s film The Shining, when it is revealed that Jack Nicholson has written ‘All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’ over and over again. Except the word our Scottish super-fan had written over and over again was cunt. Maybe he was trying to tell us something.
Later that night Matt said to me, ‘If we ever make it really big, and the head of the BBC or whoever says, “Guys, you can make any show you like now,” we should give him this script and say, “This is our next project.”’
That year I spent a lot of time with the League – Steve, Reece, Mark and Jeremy (who only wrote). They were all fiercely intelligent and I learned much from each of them. Reece had a question by which he would judge any comic idea: ‘What is the thing of it?’ In other words, what is the joke of the piece? This became a mantra for me when dreaming up characters or sketches. Each one had to have a strong central comic idea driving it. It was never enough just to put on a wig and affect a silly voice.
Mark Gatiss was by far the naughtiest member of the group, and I instantly adored him. I went countless times to see their performances in the sweltering afternoon heat of the Pleasance. The League’s show could clearly transfer immediately to television, and some of their most celebrated sketches – those in the local shop or Pauline with her job seekers – made it from stage to screen with barely a word changed.
‘Maybe we should do sketches?’ I said to Matt as we were laying out our props in the Wildman Room and saying goodbye to a certain Graham Norton, who was on just before us.
‘Everyone does sketches,’ said Matt. He was right. ‘And the audiences love Chumley.’ He was right there too.
That year we had written a long monologue for Chumley about his fifty years in show business, which was crammed full of jokes – fifty in fact. However, there were an increasing number of performers doing old show business types in Edinburgh, including Steve Furst’s Lenny Beige, Steve Delaney’s Count Arthur Strong and a young pre-The Office Mackenzie Crook as Charlie Cheese. For comedians just appearing at the Fringe means entering a competition. Not only for the Perrier Award (which eluded us but the League inevitably won in 1997) but more importantly to be chosen to develop your show for television. Thousands of performers go up every year. One or two might end up with a television pilot. More often than not, no one does.
‘Sir Bernard Chumley’s Gangshow’ was too rude for television, although a charming producer named Richard Wilson (not Victor Meldrew) from BBC Radio 4 approached us after a performance, and soon after we piloted Sir Bernard’s Soirée, in which Chumley hosted a party in his flat. We must have been influenced by Noel’s House Party, which was towards the end of its torturous 169-episode run, as the concept was very similar. Letitia Dean (Sharon Watts in EastEnders) came to one of our live performances in Edinburgh. We had one famous fan, so we asked her to be in it. The best bit was when Matt as Sir Bernard asks her question after question about the soap she stars in.
‘What happens to Pat in the end?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What happens to Ian Beale in the end?’
‘I really don’t know.’
‘What happens to Dot in the end?’
This went on for ages. Matt is a master of repetition and as a performer has little or indeed no fear. He was prepared to say ‘in the end’ enough times that it would start off funny, become unfunny, then become funny again. It was such a great piece of material, I suggested we re-use it for Little Britain, when Marjorie Dawes has a noooo member in EastEnders actor Derek Martin (Charlie Slater). And of course recycling is good for the environment.
Desp
ite its moments, our Radio 4 pilot was scrappy and only intermittently funny. A year came and went before the station finally told us it wasn’t going to be a series.
It was a difficult time for Matt and me. Our contemporaries were overtaking us at speed: Simon Pegg and Jessica Stevenson were developing Spaced for Channel 4, and the League was recording what would be the precursor to its TV series – On the Town for Radio 4. What was worse for me was that Matt was increasingly in demand on his own. Shooting Stars was becoming wildly popular, and Matt was its breakout star. He appeared in a BBC2 sitcom called Sunnyside Farm with Mark Addy and Phil Daniels; earned what most people would consider a fortune doing Cadbury’s Creme Egg adverts on TV, and received the biggest cheer on his entrance in the Shooting Stars live show. I was starting to feel like an albatross hanging around his neck.
In the midst of all this something happened that made all this seem unimportant. Matt’s father died. John Lucas had had a difficult life. He had served a short sentence in prison for fraud, and ended up divorced from Matt’s mother. Now at just fifty-two, he was dead. Matt and his brother Howard were devastated, as was John’s second wife Andi and her two children.
Matt was on the Shooting Stars tour at the time, and rang me early in the morning to tell me the news. The night before the funeral we sat in my tiny one-room rented flat in Hillfield Court in Belsize Park to watch The British Comedy Awards. Matt had sensibly decided not to go. Shooting Stars picked up an award, and Vic and Bob took to the stage to massive cheers. It struck me how this moment of public triumph had coincided so cruelly with his private grief.
As Matt left I hugged him and said, ‘Everything is going to be all right tomorrow.’
He looked at me without saying a word and then turned to go.
The door closed behind him and I instantly regretted what I had said. Everything was not going to be all right tomorrow, or the day after, or the weeks and months or even years that followed. Poor Matt. He gave up on religion after his father’s death. For him it confirmed that there was no god. Something that I had realized many years ago.
Around this time my relationship with Katy finished. We had spent a lot of our time together staying out all night clubbing, and in that haze we had lost sight of the friendship that initially brought us together. Katy was much more of a party monster than I was, and had begun renting a flat in Soho. Every time I went round to see her it was full of strangers wanting to stay up all night and get drunk, or whatever. I still loved her, though she was making it increasingly hard for me to do so.
Katy initiated the break-up by inviting me to Bristol, where she was acting in a Restoration comedy at the Old Vic Theatre, and then completely ignoring me when I arrived. I was going to stay with her in her digs but she was so dismissive of me, humiliating me in front of her friends, I had to wander the streets of Bristol and find a hotel at midnight. I took the first train I could the next morning. Soon after, it emerged that she was dating an actor in the play. She had forced me to break up with her.However, I don’t begrudge them their happiness because fifteen years later they are still together and have three beautiful children. So Katy made the right choice.
For many years afterwards the only love I knew was of the unrequited kind. I fixated on a girl who sold newspapers …
Thursday 21/6/1998
Once every six months the daughter of the news-stand vendor at Belsize Park Tube sells the papers. I really really fancy her. She has a kind face and can sense my attraction and smiles back. Whenever she’s there I buy a paper whether I want one or not. Last time I bought an Observer I never read, today an Independent. All I’ve been able to do is mutter a few words like some voice-breaking acne-riddled schoolboy. Today I surprised myself by striking up a conversation. I was still nervous but at last we spoke to each other. I learned that she works for a music management company. But as more and more people were demanding their Mails and Telegraphs I became embarrassed and left her to it. I wish I was more of an operator. Then I would have taken her number or given her mine. Or at least learned her name. But I am a fool. And will have to wait another six months until I can move things on. My life is like The Remains of the Day.
20
‘Asleep in yesterday’s suit’
In 1997 Matt and I were presented with a huge opportunity. Vic and Bob were producing a programme for Ulrika Jonsson, the ex-weathergirl who had been such a surprise hit on Shooting Stars. It was to be called It’s Ulrika! and Matt and I were to be her co-stars in the sketches. Vic and Bob were so busy with other projects, they wanted us to (kind of) be them in this spin-off. At that time Ulrika was one of the most famous women in the country. Everything Vic and Bob touched turned to gold. What could possibly go wrong?
I recorded the whole experience in my diary.
Monday 23/6/1997
At 10.30 a.m. I arrived at the American church on the Tottenham Court Road to rehearse It’s Ulrika! At 11.30 a.m. Vic Reeves arrived and we started. Today I rehearsed a couple of sketches in which I play small parts. Sir John Birkin is the director and a grand master. He calls Vic and Bob ‘Gentlemen’ and Ulrika ‘Miss Ulrika’. Matt was there until about 1 p.m. but I had to stay until 3.30 as I was cast in a Watchdog spoof he wasn’t in. I was concerned about being left ‘alone’ without Matt, as he is of course now really such a big part of Vic and Bob’s world.
However, I didn’t need to worry. Ulrika was wonderfully friendly and not the least bit starry or patronizing. We got on very well and I immediately understood why this whole show is happening. She has real charisma. You can’t help but warm to her. She is part teenage girl and part middle-aged bloke down the pub.
I had to play a man who has been murdered by his own pullover to Ulrika’s Alice Beer in the Watchdog spoof. I gave quite a naturalistic performance that had Vic ’n’ Bob laughing generously. This made me deliriously happy! To have these two icons that I have adored for years (I’m looking at a picture of them on my wall right now) laugh at me. Wow! It’s the stuff dreams are made of. And without my comedy partner there I was forced to talk to them as me rather than as Matt’s mate. So I left the rehearsal rooms with a definite spring in my step.
Tuesday 24/6/2007
The first day of filming on It’s Ulrika! The studios were at Wembley Park, and as the production company Channel X are too mean to send a car I had to get three buses and the Tube. Much of the day was spent filming a Las Vegas nightclub scene. The director John Birkin is very thorough and the process was painstaking but never boring. The highlight of the day for me was recording a short scene for the Watchdog spoof. Ulrika as Alice Beer was interviewing me as a murder victim/murderer. It felt very funny. It wasn’t gaggy but it just had a comic feel. So much so that Ulrika had a fit of the giggles which halted filming for about fifteen minutes. The worst thing about getting the giggles is that after a while you don’t know why you’re laughing and that makes you giggle more. Vic and Bob were very encouraging of me with their laughter. I was completely at ease with them and felt privileged to be part of their world. It is a very special place.
In the Las Vegas scene Vic played a nightclub host. For some reason he was dubbed ‘The Chimp’ and the lulls in recording were filled jamming scenes with this new character. It was hilarious. He would wander over to the rest of us and open with ‘I got a great deal. Three hundred coconuts are coming into town tonight. Are you in?’ I hope they develop this character further; it was brilliantly funny. He became ‘Kinky’ John Fowler in Bang Bang, It’s Reeves and Mortimer and Catterick. And what a joy to see the two funniest men in the world create something new, right in front of my eyes. I will never forget that.
Friday 27/6/1997
During the day I rehearsed It’s Ulrika! at the American church on Tottenham Court Road. Vic and I amused ourselves looking at the bizarre religious children’s drawings that adorn the walls. In the morning I had to stand in for Gloria Hunniford in a sketch with Matt and Ulrika. I did it so well it was decided that I should play the role in
stead, even though Ulrika still has to say the line ‘… aren’t you Gloria Hunniford?’ to me. The whole sketch had metamorphosed into something very peculiar by the time we had finished with it. Bob was not so keen on me being in the sketch so I had to squirm in silence as my fate was discussed by these show business legends. Surely I’m funnier than Gloria Hunniford! This week I was lulled into believing that Vic and Bob are really friendly, but when rehearsals ended they virtually ran out – barely even saying goodbye to Ulrika. They are both quite unknowable.
Tuesday 1/7/1997
The It’s Ulrika! rehearsals went well today. As each day passes I become more and more convinced that Vic Reeves is the living embodiment of comedy. Pet Shop Boy Chris Lowe said to me, ‘You only had to look at him standing at the bar and you laugh.’ Vic has that rare quality that Eric Morecambe and Tommy Cooper had. Impossible to describe, but if I had to I’d say it was pure absurdity. Anyhow Matt and me ran through our Ulrika lookalike sketch and it got funnier each time.
Wednesday 2/7/1997
Today’s It’s Ulrika! rehearsal was very strange. Vic was asleep in the rehearsal room in yesterday’s suit. Matt said he rolled in drunk but insisted on staying and then fell asleep! So the producer made up a bed for him in the corner of the room. And as I was on the phone to a friend in the corridor Ulrika flashed her tits at me. Back in the rehearsal room she kept on attacking me, or drawing on my arm for no apparent reason. Very difficult to know how to respond, so I ignored her. However, that just made her do it more! My grandma said of Ulrika, ‘Don’t let that woman get her claws into you!’ I think she flirts with every man she meets.
Thursday 3/7/1997
Camp David Page 15