I didn’t get off to the most promising start with my co-star Paul Darrow, who’s best known for playing Avon in the 1970s and early ’80s sci-fi saga Blake’s 7. We were meant to be a comedy double act in the series, Rats and Seedy, two low-life characters both somehow mixed up in the sci-fi story. He was Seedy and had a costume to match – flared trousers, open-necked shirt, medallion and toupee. We passed each other on the stairs of the studio.
‘Ah, Mr Darrow, a pleasure to meet you, sir,’ I ventured.
‘You must be David.’
‘Yes. I have to say, sir, the outfit is amazing.’
‘Thank you. I chose it myself.’
‘The toupee is very funny.’
‘Why thank you. It was my idea.’
‘And I love the comedy teeth.’
There was a pause.
‘Comedy teeth?’ he said.
‘Yes …’
I looked closer. They were real. I watched every episode of Blake’s 7 but I must have completely forgotten about his real teeth, which although being large and protruding, were definitely not from a joke shop.
‘I must go to make-up,’ I said.
To my horror I saw that we were sharing a dressing room. The embarrassment was set to continue. When I couldn’t put it off any longer I knocked and entered.
‘Oh hello again, Mr Darrow, sir. I have to say you were absolutely stunning as Avon in Blake’s 7. It’s one of my favourite programmes of all time …’
‘You were joking about the teeth?’
‘Yes,’ I lied.
Paul spoke about himself as if he was one of the biggest stars in the world.
‘Do you go to sci-fi conventions at all, Mr Darrow?’ I asked over lunch.
‘Yes, I love them. But I did one in America —’
‘Blake’s 7 is big there?’
‘Huge. And as I arrived there were thousands of people all calling my name: “Paul!” “Mr Darrow!” “Avon!” I went out to greet them, and the security man pulled me over.’
‘Security?’
‘Yes, I had security. And he said to me, “You must never ever do that again.” And I said, “Why, I was just greeting my many fans.” He said, “Remember what happened to John Lennon.”’
‘Sound advice,’ I said, screaming inside, AS IF ANYONE IS GOING TO ASSASSINATE PAUL BLOODY DARROW FROM BLAKE’S 7!
When we were filming the second series of Little Britain we asked if we could vomit on him in a Maggie and Judy (named after Dames Smith and Dench) sketch.
‘I’m only doing this because it’s you, you understand?’ he said. I’m sure he was also pleased with the fee and the being-on-TV-again, though.
Matt had seen Paul in a daytime advert for mobility scooters. Casting directors think you’re past it when the only work you get is advertising hearing aids, walk-in baths and the like. I had told Matt that Paul was quite a character, so he couldn’t resist asking him about the advert between takes.
‘Mr Darrow, I saw you in an ad on TV for mobility scooters,’ said Matt.
Without a pause Paul replied, ‘Favour for a friend.’
‘Favour for a friend’ became our new catchphrase, and we even wrote a series of short sketches for the next series of Little Britain about an out-of-work actor seen doing a number of increasingly humiliating jobs. When spotted by someone he knew while cleaning toilets he would merely say, ‘Favour for a friend.’ Sadly the sketches never made it to TV. Matt and I could never decide whether the idea was only funny to us because we had actually met Paul Darrow.
But for all the laughs he had given me and Matt, I loved every moment I spent with Paul, and when The Strangerers finished, I missed him …
Friday 27/8/1999
Last day on The Strangerers. My feelings for Darrow have come full circle, and despite him always doing his Humphrey Bogart impression which is only fifty years too late, and going on and on about how he once played Macbeth, I was very sad to say goodbye to him. At the end of the day I could tell Paul had grown fond of me too. In our shared dressing room he said, ‘I used the small towel. I left the big towel for you.’
Perhaps one day I will be advertising mobility scooters.
Other minor roles followed. In Alexei Sayle’s Merry-Go-Round I had one line as a newsagent. Even though I acted with Alexei Sayle, he didn’t speak to me, not even to ask me my name. (When I became a star on Little Britain I made sure I would at least always say hello to all the supporting actors and ask them their names. Not just out of common courtesy, but also to put them at their ease.)
In Spaced I played the performance artist Vulva. The role was a homage to the great Leigh Bowery, whom Matt was also soon to play in the Boy George musical Taboo. It was the best part anyone had ever written for me, and Simon Pegg, Jessica Stevenson and Edgar Wright welcomed my input. I added a tiny moment at the end of Vulva’s performance where he bows and then says, ‘It’s not finished … It’s finished.’
Paul Kaye played Vulva’s co-star Hoover. Amazingly, despite swinging a vacuum cleaner around his head in the performance scene at the end, he never hit me with it. Paul and I were close friends at the time, and worked together on many occasions. First on The Sunday Show, then on a spoof rock band documentary with Annie Griffin for Channel 4 called Wrath about a fictional band called Spunk, and on his Dennis Pennis video Rest in Pennis. I hero-worshipped Paul. He was talented and glamorous, and women found him irrestistible – one day he turned up to meet me with Hollywood star Chloë Sevigny on his arm, at that time the hottest girl in the world. Paul was not a trained actor; he really wanted to be in a punk band. He had seemingly fallen into comedy by accident, and had an amazing rock ’n’ roll approach to performing.
In Wrath Paul played someone full of anger. His character Seamus, the lead singer of Spunk, took his frustrations out on me, Gavin, the guitarist. Paul didn’t like to rehearse much and liked performing scripted lines even less. So most of what he did was improvised. In character he threw a great many objects at me, one beer bottle narrowly missing my head.
Even though I never missed an episode of Shooting Stars and even sat through the whole of the unwatchable Sunnyside Farm, Matt never watched my episode of Spaced. Nor anything else I did at that time.
‘Did you see it?’
‘See what?’
‘The episode of Spaced I was in.’
‘No, I was on the phone.’
‘Oh. Could you not have videoed it?’
‘I was recording something on the other side.’
‘Aren’t you interested in what else I’m doing? I mean we are a double act, aren’t we?’
This made me sad.
Annie Griffin remembered me from a summer course she had run at Bristol University, where she taught me to do something I never thought I could do: a cartwheel. I have never attempted one since, but my huge lumbering frame spinning wildly through the air must have stuck in her mind. After Wrath she cast me in her comedy drama series Coming Soon, which concerned the events leading up to an alternative theatre troupe’s first night. Annie, an American performance artist who later in life developed a desire to become much more mainstream (she went on to write and direct Book Group), assembled a retrospectively astonishing cast: Julia Davis, Ben Miller, Omid Djalili, Paul Kaye and Billy Boyd (who went on to play Pippin the hobbit in the Lord of the Rings trilogy).
The production was shot in Annie’s adopted hometown Glasgow. On Friday 12 February 1999 I missed my plane as I was in the airport bookshop buying J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (I had no plans to assassinate anyone, not even Paul Darrow). It was the last flight that night, so the plan was for me to go to Euston and get the overnight train at midnight. That gave me four hours to kill …
Leaving Heathrow, I found myself on the travelator next to a beautiful blonde British Airways stewardess called Ina. She was Norwegian.
Russell Brand would later say to me when we were both taking regular flights to LA for work, ‘You’re wasting your time with BA. The st
ewardesses are much fitter on Virgin. And they’re all up for it.’
Well if that was the rule, this lady was the exception. Blonde, shapely and her eyes twinkled with sexual desire. Incredibly for me.
‘I live nearby,’ she said. ‘Would you like to come back for some coffee?’
‘I only drink tea,’ I said, not used to the euphemism.
After we had had sex a few times back at her flat, I lay there smugly and said, ‘I’ve never picked anyone up at an airport before.’
‘I picked you up!’ she said.
She had indeed picked me up. Despite now being in my late twenties, it was my very first one-night stand, though I couldn’t actually stay the night as I still had to be in Glasgow first thing the next morning to film. She called a minicab for me, but even though Ina’s flat was near Heathrow, the driver had no idea how to get to London, let alone Euston. So I missed my sleeper train, and the whole filming schedule had to be changed. The consequences of my adventure were:
Annie Griffin never employed me again (I would have loved to have been in her follow-up Book Group).
I read Catcher in the Rye. Which is astonishing. Though quite short.
Most importantly I proved Russell Brand’s theory wrong before he had even thought of it.
At this time I had little money to speak of and was praying for a job which meant I could at least buy a small flat. Unfortunately, adverts almost always eluded me. The best thing about adverts for struggling actors is that they pay well, which means your card doesn’t get declined in the supermarket when you’re buying food. As mine often did. My face, according to readers posting comments on the Daily Mail website, is ‘creepy’, ‘frightening’ and like ‘a bag of spanners’. So perhaps I never looked friendly enough to sell anyone anything. Advert castings tended to be humiliating.
Tuesday 7/12/1999
I had an advert casting in the afternoon. The name of the director, John Lloyd, excited me – he is the legendary producer of Blackadder, among others. However, it couldn’t be more demeaning: wearing only my pants, I had to beg like a dog for a Quality Street. I might as well have been begging for the job.
I did once get cast in an advert though – for the Home and Leisure channel. There was an amazing set of a garden, so what would have been outside was actually inside. I had no lines, but was playing a husband who had to come in through a garden gate carrying a gnome for my wife. On the first take I smiled as I opened the gate.
‘Cut!’ shouted the director.
On the second take I smiled some more.
‘Cut!’ shouted the director again.
For take three I was a little nervous. What did the director want that I wasn’t giving?
‘Can you come through the gate,’ he said, ‘with a look on your face that says, “Hello, I’ve got a gnome for you”?’
‘Of course!’ Quickly I flicked through Stanislavski’s books about acting in my head. I had studied them all at university, but unfortunately neither An Actor Prepares nor An Actor’s Work nor My Life in Art had any mention of what expression you should adopt when carrying a gnome for your wife through a garden gate.
So I pulled an even bigger smile and tried to twinkle my little piggy eyes.
‘Cut! We’ve got it!’ shouted the director. ‘That was exactly it!’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I studied drama at Bristol University for three years and we did a whole module on acting with gnomes.’
‘Really?’ he said, not getting the irony.
‘Yes,’ I said, after an uncomfortable pause.
To its great credit Channel 4 was always trying to break new talent, and a sketch show was commissioned called Barking with unknown performers doing separate scenes – people like myself, Catherine Tate and Peter Kay. Matt co-wrote some sketches with me, but was already too well known at the time to appear in a show of unknowns.
Monday 19/1/1998
A solitary Barking writing day. Matt phoned and gave me some great thoughts for which I felt very grateful. He has a sense of absurdity that can really enliven some of my more straightforward ideas.
I performed a few characters, such as a posh wedding planner who would like to serve Ginster’s pasties, the royal watcher turned stalker from our live shows (a spoof of real royal expert James Whitaker), a police sketch artist who wants to pin every crime on Ruth Madoc, and an out-of-work actor who writes threatening letters to try and get work. They were all reasonably amusing, but slight. There was certainly nothing of the quality of the characters that would later capture people’s imaginations in Little Britain.
Barking was instantly dismissed by the critics, and no one I have ever met watched it. I mentioned it to Catherine Tate recently, and she had never seen it either.
Sunday 21/6/1998
The Sunday Times today – Barking – C4 11.30 p.m.
‘Dire new sketch show. If anybody ever tells you that television comedy writing is desperately competitive and only the brightest and best come through a rigorous selection process, show them a tape of this.’
However, it was Victor Lewis-Smith’s review that hurt the most. The headline was BLAME IT ON THE HUMOUR ERROR, and underneath was a large photograph of me as spoof royal watcher Peter Andre, with ‘Barking Up the Wrong Tree’ underneath.
Thursday 25/6/1998
Paul Putner phoned and spoke to Matt. He wanted to warn me I had been badly reviewed for Barking in the Evening Standard. I rushed my pudding and went out to discover my fate at the newsagent. [Lewis-Smith] hated every minute of it it. He hated my sketch.
Victor Lewis-Smith is a great writer and I loved reading his criticism. Though not of me. That night I prayed that one day I would do something he would like.
Even though no one yet had digital television, the BBC was preparing to launch a digital comedy and music channel. Its first name was UK PLAY, which then for no apparent reason changed to, wait for it … PLAY UK. Finally it became BBC3. A whole host of comedians were asked to provide links to go between the music videos. As Matt and I were never ones to wing it – I in particular like to plan meticulously – we took some time to think about what we were doing and write the links as a script. Our idea was simple: as we were linking music videos we would portray famous pop stars. Matt was Gary Barlow and I had my shoes on my knees as Mark Owen from Take That. We did Brian May and Anita Dobson as a two-headed monster as they had the same black curly hair. We even did a very imaginative act called Keith Harris and Bjork in which I was the ventriloquist and Matt the dummy, his head pushed through a curtain over a tiny doll’s body.
So impressed was someone (it can’t have been the viewers because there weren’t any), the BBC asked us to make a full series of these spoofs. Matt was initially quite reluctant. It was quite a step down from being on a hit BBC2 series (Shooting Stars) to a channel no one had heard of. However, I was keen as it was an opportunity to earn money and stave off what I was now beginning to think was inevitable – getting a proper job.
I had seen this happen to a number of my friends. Like them I was approaching thirty, and I had always felt this was something of a cut-off point. If you hadn’t made it by that age, you probably never would. By then you had been trying to break through for nearly a decade after leaving drama school or university, and if you weren’t working on good projects you were looking increasingly like you never would.
After a few days talking at each other’s flats (Matt now had a huge and expensive apartment in West Hampstead bought from the proceeds of his Creme Egg adverts and Shooting Stars tour, whereas I was still renting a tiny one-room dwelling), we came up with a concept which we called ‘Rock Profile’. We would dress up as pop stars, and Jamie Theakston, who at that time was the face of pop music on the BBC, presenting Top of the Pops and The O-Zone, would interview us. We knew Jamie a little through our mutual friend Steve Furst, and sometimes we would perform at Steve’s cabaret club, the Regency Rooms.
Having Jamie Theakston was vital to the show’s success – h
e would give it authenticity. Jamie had some experience of acting (let’s not forget he was in the National Youth Theatre’s production of Marat/Sade playing a mentalist) and didn’t mind being sent up. With him on board, Matt and I set about deciding which pop stars we could portray. Matt can do almost any voice on the planet, and even when he can’t do an exact impression he can approximate somebody’s way of speaking and make it funny. However, I really can’t do anyone other than Frankie Howerd, so we had to decide how to approach this. We arrived at the concept of ‘non-impressions’. Matt and I would dress up as particular people but not especially bother to do their voice. There had been hundreds of high-voiced spoofs of Michael Jackson; when I played him I just used my own. In that episode Matt played Elizabeth Taylor with a cockney accent. We hoped the approach would make us stand out and counter any criticism that we weren’t impressionists.
The first series of Rock Profile ran for thirteen episodes, and probably about half of those are good. The Take That spoof of an embittered Gary Barlow and his live-in servant Howard Donald during the wilderness years was by far the best, as it had some emotional truth. Some were surreal, such as Matt doing Prince as a Scottish tramp with me as his social worker. Others were simply unwatchable. Matt and I as a middle-aged husband and wife who were Prodigy fans just didn’t work at all. It was all done incredibly cheaply. We filmed two episodes a day, and catering was some stale sandwiches from the local garage.
The presence of Jamie and the quality of some of the episodes led to a second series. However, there was a problem: Matt had accepted the role of Thersites in a touring production of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and wouldn’t be around to write it with me. So we planned out the episodes together, and I wrote the scripts on my own. This time we were much more confident about what we were doing, and the ABBA, Bee Gees, George Michael and Geri Haliwell, Tom Jones and Shirley Bassey, and best of all Sir Elton John and David Furnish episodes became cult viewing.
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