by Steve Coogan
Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Title Page
Acknowledgements
Dedication
Introduction
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Part Two
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Part Three
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Index
Picture Section
Copyright
ABOUT THE BOOK
Steve Coogan was born and raised in Manchester in the sixties, the fourth of six children. He is the product of his Catholic background, of the grammar school system and of the television generation. From an early age he entertained his family with impressions and was often told he should ‘be on the telly’. Failing to get into any of the London-based drama schools, he accepted a place at Manchester Polytechnic School of Theatre and before graduating had been given his first break as a voice artist on the satirical puppet show Spitting Image.
The late eighties and early nineties saw Coogan developing characters he could perform on the comedy circuit, from Ernest Moss to Paul Calf, and in 1992 he won a Perrier award with John Thomson. It was around the same time, while working with Armando Iannucci and Patrick Marber on On The Hour and The Day Today, that Alan Partridge emerged, almost fully formed.
Coogan, once a tabloid fixture, is now a respected film actor, writer and producer. He runs his own production company, Baby Cow, has a raft of films to his name (from 24 Hour Party People to Alpha Papa, the critically-acclaimed Partridge film), six Baftas and seven Comedy Awards. He has found huge success in recent years with both The Trip and Philomena, the latter bringing him two Oscar nominations, for producing and co-writing.
In Easily Distracted he lifts the lid on the real Steve Coogan, writing with distinctive humour and an unexpected candour about a noisy childhood surrounded by foster kids, his attention-seeking teenage years and his emergence as a household name with the birth of Alan Partridge.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Steve Coogan is an English actor, writer, comedian and producer. He is the co-creator and star of Alan Partridge, and has appeared in numerous films including 24 Hour Party People, Minions, Night at the Museum and the BAFTA Award-winning Philomena. He lives in Sussex.
Thank you to Amy Raphael for co-writing the book with me, for guiding me, helping organise my thoughts, making me sound more eloquent and tolerating my endlessly straying off the point with nothing more than a sigh. Without her it simply wouldn’t have been written. Thanks to my editor Ben Dunn for telling me when I was boring and self-indulgent. To Paul Stevens at Independent Talent for being a very good agent. To Duncan Heath for his sage-like wisdom. To Anna Stockton for managing my life. I’d like to thank Loretta for making me laugh with her gentle mockery, and for her love. To the two Clares: my daughter, for teaching me more than I’ve taught her and my big sister for helping with the book, helping me grow up and always being there for me.
To Mum and Dad
INTRODUCTION
Most of my life has been spent wanting to be someone else. If I pretended to be other people, then I didn’t have to be me.
Mike Yarwood, a stalwart of seventies television who had as many viewers as Morecambe & Wise but who is strangely forgotten now, used to say ‘And this is me’ after launching into his act. Coming as it did after his impeccable impressions of Harold Wilson and Edward Heath, it was always an anticlimax. We weren’t really interested in seeing Yarwood as himself.
When I first did stand-up, I did impressions. When I did my act, I would do a rather distant, pompous version of myself. I continued to do versions of myself in Coffee and Cigarettes, A Cock and Bull Story and The Trip.
All of which was a way of saying, ‘This is not me.’
Well, all right, it’s a little bit of me.
Until now I have shared only versions of ‘Steve Coogan’.
The real me is slightly less desperate for fame than Alan Partridge, slightly less irascible than the Steve who eats his way around the Lake District and Italy in The Trip, and slightly less libidinous than the version of me in A Cock and Bull Story.
It took me a long time to find out who I was. I certainly didn’t know when I was growing up. My views weren’t properly informed; I used to parrot opinions that I thought sounded good. I was in some ways tribal. Cloistered by my Catholic upbringing in suburban Manchester. Naive. Unsophisticated.
I used to value the fact that I didn’t alienate anyone. I didn’t want to say anything that might cause friction. In pursuit of an easy life, I would consciously keep quiet about anything contentious.
When I hear, third or fourth hand, what people think about me and it’s ridiculously wide of the mark, I perversely take some comfort from it.
‘Oh good, they don’t know who I am.’
There are countless examples of those who conform to a role thrust upon them by the media. An unwritten pact to serve each other. I don’t like being defined by others, so for those who are interested I will try to do it myself.
It would be ridiculous for me to pretend that I’ve been a paragon of virtue. Nor have I always been honourable. But it is my work that I have offered up for judgement, not my personal life. I’m proud of my work, and if people don’t like it, then I’ve failed. Judge me on the work, not on the cocaine and the strippers.
You won’t find any grief porn in this book. It isn’t Angela’s Ashes. I didn’t learn my comedy on the playing fields of Eton, nor am I a horny-handed son of toil. Andrew Collins wrote a book called Where Did It All Go Right?: Growing Up Normal in the 70s, a title as apposite for my book as his.
I come from the kind of strong, secure and loving lower-middle-class background that is not celebrated enough. Contrary to what some might think, not everyone from the lower middle class is a xenophobic Little Englander like Alan Partridge.
My parents instilled decency, kindness and a generosity of spirit in me. They may have been baffled for a long time by my career, but I owe them everything. This book is as much about them as it is about me.
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1
IF 1998 WAS the year that everything came together, it was also the year that everything began, slowly, to fall apart.
The central London hotel room was perfect. When my parents opened the curtains, they could see the Lyceum Theatre. And there in front of them was my name in lights: Steve Coogan: The Man Who Thinks He’s It.
I was about to turn thirty-three, but I hadn’t stopped seeking validation from my dad. My sister, Clare, says I sti
ll do it, but perhaps I am less obvious these days.
I should have been luxuriating in my success in 1998 rather than trying to impress my parents. I had the best comedy on television and a sell-out national tour. I’m Alan Partridge was incredibly popular and liked by clever people. Alan had matured to perfection. The reviews were staggering; it was probably peak Partridge. I had yet to be overwhelmed by drugs and drink, but I can see now that the adulation sent me a bit crazy. I earned well over a million pounds from The Man Who Thinks He’s It, the kind of money I didn’t earn again for a very long time.
The tour culminated in a sold-out ten-week run at the Lyceum Theatre in Covent Garden. Most days, as I was on my way to the stage door in my anorak, ticket touts would try to sell me tickets for my own show at £300 a pop. Six nights a week I dressed up as Alan Partridge, Paul and Pauline Calf, Tony Ferrino and Duncan Thickett in front of 2,000 people. I only stepped down for The Lion King to take up residence.
I was determined to create an intimate show on a large scale, with musicians, dancers and a supporting cast. Simon Pegg and Julia Davis provided the best reinforcement available, and the Steve Brown Band, who performed the title music to Knowing Me Knowing You with Alan Partridge, provided live backing. I knew that having a live band would eat into my profits, but I didn’t want the audience to feel cheated when they were faced with yet another comedian muttering into a mic.
Comedy in the late nineties was still embracing jeans and T-shirts, and there remained a residual anti-establishment mindset. I, meanwhile, was trying to reclaim and reinvent the big music-hall-style show that had been denigrated because of its association with politically incorrect comedy.
I wanted to take the format that had once been embraced by the establishment and reinvent it as a proper show with well-observed characters. And it worked. Consequently, both old-timers and young people who came to the show loved it. Simon Pegg gave me a congratulations card. ‘Well done,’ he had written, ‘one day you will throw these BAFTAs through the windows of a large empty house.’ It was very funny at the time, but has haunted me ever since …
Meanwhile, as if all this wasn’t enough, in the midst of the sell-out Lyceum show I was rewarded three times at the British Comedy Awards: Best Actor and Best TV Sitcom for I’m Alan Partridge, and Best BBC2 Personality. I’m Alan Partridge also won a BAFTA for Best Comedy, and I won one for Best Comedy Performance.
We went to the Comedy Awards after one of the Lyceum shows. During the interval, I watched the Awards live on television with Simon and Julia. After the Lyceum show, motorbike taxis raced the three of us across Waterloo Bridge so that I could sit in the audience, hear my name and pick up the gong that I was inevitably going to win for playing Partridge on television.
It was everything I had dreamed of since watching Fawlty Towers as a child and thinking, ‘What an amazing thing it would be to create a character as loved as Basil Fawlty.’
I couldn’t imagine anything more satisfying. And I’d done it.
My parents came down from Manchester to watch the show and my assistant booked them into a hotel room directly overlooking the front of the Lyceum.
I had unwittingly cast my dad as Doubting Thomas, the Apostle who refused to believe that Jesus was raised from the dead until he felt his fresh wounds for himself. I’m not casting myself as Jesus, but I needed Dad to see my success for himself.
I took Mum and Dad for dinner after the Lyceum show. We didn’t really discuss the performance. There is no moment of catharsis when you come from a lower-middle-class background. Nothing is really talked about. So perhaps I got a ‘that was very good, son’. But certainly no effusive eulogies.
But then firm handshakes with my dad have only recently progressed to hugs. A tenderness seems to be creeping in with old age. There is acknowledgement of my success, but it’s measured. Great shows of anything, from wealth to emotion, have never been encouraged.
In a way, my seeking of approval has turned out to be no bad thing. The verbal diarrhoea you might encounter somewhere like California is the enemy of creativity. It’s what isn’t said that is the lifeblood of any writing. Paradoxically, the way I was raised has empowered me: praise has never been lavished on me and therefore I’ve never become complacent. I’ve always had something to prove, to my dad, to my mum, to myself.
I should probably even thank Dad for being dismissive of my playfulness when I was growing up. My parents had six kids, and I was the one they worried about. I was daft. I daydreamed. To cut through the noise, I was always shouting, ‘Look at me!’
Drawing attention to yourself wasn’t the done thing in our respectable house in suburban Manchester. My parents wanted me to fit in. They expected me to get the kind of respectable job, preferably in the public sector, that would allow me to give back to society. Why would you want to ‘act the goat’ or have people think you were a halfwit?
For a long time I know they felt both a curiosity and anxiety about my work. It had all happened so fast.
Less than a decade earlier, at the age of twenty-three, I had been a light entertainer in a shiny suit who had appeared on Sunday Night at the Palladium. I had shaken Jimmy Tarbuck’s hand. And here I was in 1998, an edgy, urbane comedian celebrated for Alan Partridge and performing in front of 2,000 people a night.
*
But all wasn’t well: we had to cancel five dates in the middle of the run because I was partying too hard; the official line was that I had acute laryngitis. I was going out every night, getting on it, recovering and doing the next show. The audience didn’t know what I was up to because I was looser onstage as a result of my hellraising. I was like a jazz musician who had lost all inhibition. What the show lacked in laser-like precision, it gained in swinging braggadocio. I’d enjoy it even though I was half-cut.
I loved having Simon Pegg and Julia Davis as the support actors. The whole thing was a blast. I was in a fog most of the time, which in itself was amusing. I’d find myself in Soho House, a private members’ club, every night. In the end Phil McIntrye, who was promoting my tour, had to send someone to babysit me; their job was to ensure I got into a car to Brighton at the end of the evening. I had to go home: I’d stay up far too late if I was booked into a hotel.
Despite constant partying, I was still driven and rigorous about the show. I still cared about the quality of my work. I knew I cared about the important things; I just happened to be doing all this hedonistic stuff too. I thought I could get away with it.
I had an affair when my girlfriend was pregnant with our daughter, and the story was splashed all over the papers. And then I had another affair. I know it was entirely my fault and I know I behaved selfishly. I became of interest to the tabloids, my behaviour was made public and it was even more traumatic for the people I love.
By the time we recorded the second series of I’m Alan Partridge in 2002, I was sometimes falling asleep in the middle of a take because I’d been up all night. I couldn’t stay away from cocaine. I couldn’t be faithful. I tried to be good, but failed.
Stop. Start. Stop. Start.
CHAPTER 2
I DIDN’T SET out to be a comedian. I always wanted to act. Comedy was a way of getting my Equity card after studying drama at Manchester Poly, but I got caught up in a predicament entirely of my own making.
I would do a gig, it would go really badly, and I’d think, ‘I can’t leave on that note. I have to do one more show. I have to walk away on a high.’
Then I would do a show that went incredibly well. And of course I’d think, ‘That was incredible. I have to do it again.’
I loved having 2,000 people in the palm of my hand, all laughing at the same time. I’m not the first comedian to acknowledge how addictive it is to feel empowered on that scale; it’s the biggest high you could possibly have, better than any drug. Especially when you do a joke that shines a light on the human condition and everyone, regardless of personal taste or politics, laughs in unison.
This went on for years
, until people who recognised me in the street no longer nodded a hello, but shouted out, ‘A-ha!’
I soon became used to the instant rewards comedy brings. There’s no delayed gratification. You tell a joke and you get a wave of love – bang! You learn fast what does and doesn’t work. There’s no filter and it’s beautifully unambiguous. The audience either make that noise or they don’t. You’ve succeeded or you’ve failed.
The silence of failure is, of course, deafening.
Comedy is all about precision. Cutting it back until it’s razor-sharp. You become conversant with its rules, you become fluent in its idiosyncratic language – so much so that you start to recognise patterns and formulae. Comedy is about having a box of tricks up your sleeve, and that’s good up to a point; you can be incredibly proficient at comedy and yet never reach the realm of emotional truth. Sometimes things are funny and you don’t know why. Often, when comedy is sublime, there is no apparent explanation for it. Vic and Bob can be like that: hilarious yet impossible to explain.
*
I managed to convince myself for a long time that comedy was important as an end in itself. And of course it is, in certain ways.
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