by Steve Coogan
People would write me letters saying I’d made them laugh and in doing so had helped them through some personal crisis. This was humbling and helped me appreciate the importance of laughter’s medicine. But comedy can also be reductive and limiting.
At least my comedy has a high level of quality control. I’ve been to Edinburgh in recent years and seen comics who are professional but who don’t actually care about anything they’re saying. Equally, I’ve seen young, hungry comics happy to present unpolished material and it’s refreshing. Authenticity goes a long way.
Early on in my comedy career, I used to think, ‘I can unite everyone in one moment, I can make everyone laugh, ergo everyone likes me. I’m not going to risk that unity by upsetting anyone.’
I thought pleasing all the people all the time was the way forward. It’s not. This realisation was only gifted to me following a series of rude awakenings, which certainly took their toll on me at the time, and although I am now able to look at Edinburgh stand-ups with a more discerning eye, my relationship with the festival wasn’t always so black and white.
*
Edinburgh Festival in the summer of 1990 was a real eye-opener for me. Sandy Gort, my first proper agent, asked Frank Skinner to support me at the Pleasance Theatre. It was ridiculous, because he was obviously going to upstage me.
Frank had put in the hours. I hadn’t.
He was clearly the better act, so the audience responded to him much more than they did to me. I didn’t deliver, because I was still coasting. Frank would do the first twenty-five minutes, get the audience on his side, introduce me, I’d do thirty minutes of old material to a lukewarm reception, Frank would come back onstage, and we’d sing a song we’d written called ‘It’s Over Now’.
Frank was always a gentleman, but it was a bit awkward.
Sharing a flat with Frank didn’t make it any easier. The phone was always ringing. I’d always answer it and it was always for Frank. It would be a TV producer whom I knew and who knew me. And who always wanted Frank.
The phone never rang for me.
Coming home in the blue morning light of an Edinburgh dawn, I bought a copy of the List from a newsagent’s in the streets at the back of the castle. The review was effusive about Frank. It said that I came on in the first half as Duncan Thickett and did a reasonable impersonation of a bad stand-up comedian. Then, in the second half, I came on as myself and the reviewer realised I was a bad stand-up comedian.
I was gutted.
I got back to the flat and asked Frank if he’d seen the List. He and his girlfriend both looked at me and told me they’d hidden it under a sofa cushion to spare my embarrassment.
Later on, when we rejigged the show, I decided to get rid of Duncan Thickett.
I said to Frank, ‘Who’s going to tell him?’
Frank said, ‘I think you should.’
I walked into the bathroom, mumbled quietly behind the door, then shouted out in Duncan’s voice, ‘No! Please! Please, I’m begging you! It’s my life.’
Frank was curled up laughing when I emerged, shaken, from the bathroom and said it hadn’t gone well.
There were good times to be had in Edinburgh that summer, but I had a horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach. It was as though my success was already slipping away.
One day I had lunch with Patrick Marber, who was performing at the Gilded Balloon with Jo Brand and James Macabre. We’d met in passing before, when we both did an ill-fated, short-lived TV comedy called Paramount City, but I’d never sat down with him and talked. Although he is only a year older than me, I came away impressed by how very clever, thoughtful and grown up he was.
I, in turn, was down and probably not great company. I still hadn’t found a way to be something other than an impressionist. I talked to Patrick about how I’d had to stretch my material when I’d been a resident comic on Paramount City, and how I felt as though I was having to run before I could walk.
Nothing seemed to be going my way and I felt insecure and anxious.
Things in my private life were also just making me feel worse. I was having a fling with an older comedian and Paul Merton was hanging around her Edinburgh flat. Compared to heavyweights like him, I felt slightly naff.
Patrick listened. He told me that Frank wasn’t upstaging me as much as I thought; he still insists now that I was really good in Edinburgh that year.
Patrick, in turn, was frustrated with stand-up and wanted to be a ‘proper’ writer. We bonded over our mutual discontent.
He also responded to my vulnerability; I later found out that, until we’d sat down for lunch, I had struck him as incredibly confident, successful and rich.
I was still earning good money from voiceovers, but I was aware of being regarded as a bit Mickey Mouse. It bothered me for a long time. It’s that typical creative angst: you feel like you’re going to be found out after your initial flush of success.
I spent far too long thinking, ‘I’m a fraud. Everyone is going to realise I’m stupid.’
I’ve got beyond that now, thank goodness.
The show with Frank was a turning point for me. It was akin to a wake-up call, coming as it did so soon after my first London agent, Jan Murphy, had told me to pull a rabbit out of a hat.
As was Sean Hughes winning the Perrier with A One Night Stand that year. It was his first time at Edinburgh, and he became the youngest-ever winner. He looked like a pop star and women adored him. In the summer of 1990 I spent far too much time imagining what it might be like to be Sean Hughes.
And I probably got the crumbs off his table in terms of women. Edinburgh was as much about sleeping around as being funny. It was part of the lifestyle: you did your show, went out, got drunk, had sex, woke up, had a late breakfast, went to see someone else’s show if you could be bothered. On and on it went.
It was exhausting, but exceptionally good fun.
*
I nearly had the show ready to take up to Edinburgh in 1991. Jan had secured me a venue and I was very tempted to take it. But the show wasn’t quite ready.
I thought, ‘I’m going to skip this year, get the show really tight. I’ll take it to Edinburgh in ’92 when it’s dead right.’
Which is exactly what I did.
In the interim, I had to navigate 1991, which turned out to be an odd year. For example, when I decided I no longer wanted to do impressions on Granada Up Front with Tony Wilson and Lucy Meacock, Granada threatened me with legal action. If I didn’t show up of my own accord, they would issue court proceedings forcing me to show up.
I argued that I hadn’t agreed to anything; they said my representative had verbally agreed that I would turn up and do all these shows. My agent was in a panic: she couldn’t afford to be sued.
Reluctantly, I went into Granada and did the shows. As I was sitting there writing the topical comedy that I was legally enforced to do, the executive producer of Granada Up Front came up to me and said, ‘I’m sorry about all that legal business.’
I wouldn’t describe his manner as disingenuous, more like fleet-footed. It was as if he’d had nothing to do with it.
My focus was on my prospective Edinburgh show. I decided to take the work-in-progress around arts centres in the north and hone it until it was perfect. I vowed to keep away from London and all those niggly, back-biting bastards. I didn’t want the show strangled at birth by some acerbic wanker from Time Out.
John Davy and Maria Kempinska, who founded Jongleurs in 1983 in a room above a pub in Battersea, were always in my corner. In the summer of 1991, John suggested I take a trip to Rhodes to do a residency in a resort. It was just something he was into at that time. You’d get your flights paid for, a few days in the sun and a few hundred quid.
And so I found myself, three years after I’d first been on television, standing by a swimming pool, trying to make largely disinterested holidaymakers laugh.
As I was doing impersonations, blokes in trunks kept interrupting: ‘Do you mind not swearing? The
re are kids around this pool.’
I said nothing, but I kept thinking, ‘How the fucking hell have I ended up here?’
It was just awful.
My single box room was like a cell. Every time I went back there and looked straight out on to the air-conditioning unit, I would literally put my head in my hands and think to myself, ‘This is desperate.’
I remember standing in the gift shop, looking at the overpriced Greek phalluses and thinking, ‘What am I doing here?’
The only glimmer of hope on the horizon was my plan of returning to Edinburgh the following year with a brilliant show.
One afternoon I had nothing else to do other than sit alone on my narrow bed and read a copy of the international Guardian. The first thing I saw was a story about Frank Skinner winning the Perrier Award. The previous year he had supported me and now he’d won.
Meanwhile, I was in a room with no view in Rhodes.
I felt sick to the pit of my stomach. And so alone. Frank had worked hard and deserved to win. I was full of self-pity. I was a known quantity and I wasn’t much quantity. I was a funny voice man from the north.
I thought, ‘I’ve got to do this myself. No one else is going to do it for me. I’m just going to have to put the hours in.’
*
Gradually my attitude started to change and I began to think, ‘You know what? I don’t care any more about people who don’t like me. I’m just going to say what I think, because I feel fraudulent doing otherwise.’
I don’t think I had a specific epiphany, rather a slow dawning. I went to see Stewart Lee a few years ago and was really impressed with his refusal to compromise for the sake of a cheap laugh. He was released by his brutal honesty. I was envious.
Deciding not to care what anyone thought about me was incredibly liberating. After years of not speaking up, I stopped giving a damn about how others defined me.
I made a simple but conscious decision to be true to myself, to follow my instincts, to stop trying to second-guess everything or worry about how I’m coming across. The truth, as the Bible says, will set you free. It will also, of course, piss some people off. That’s the worst feeling: being authentic and honest and being misinterpreted.
If you are sincere and others judge you as being disingenuous, there’s very little you can do about it. You don’t have a choice; you just have to carry on. And maybe, if you’re lucky, the truth will set you free.
It’s not, however, like I’m now a ‘grown-up’ and therefore constantly in this fantastic place, or that I’m behaving with integrity all the time, because I’m not. It’s just that the feeling of acting entirely in my own self-interest was making me feel bad. Making every decision thinking, ‘What can I get out of this?’ isn’t good for the soul after a while.
Compared to my almost overnight decision to stick my head above the parapet, my drift away from comedy has been slow.
By way of example, I like Saxondale more than Alan Partridge. I realise I’m out of step with most people. Those who like Saxondale absolutely love it and totally get it. And yet the majority would hold it up next to Partridge and insist it’s not as funny. It isn’t literally as funny as Partridge. But there’s more depth to it and therefore it’s more satisfying to do.
Saxondale marked the start of a shift away from comedy and towards truthful, painful and funny drama. It’s more exciting to touch people than to make them laugh. And I don’t mean physically. If you manage to make laughter and emotion work side by side, it can be transcendent.
After Saxondale, I started to accept straight acting roles in dramas such as Sunshine, a three-part BBC series written and directed by Craig Cash in 2008. In doing so, it became clear I was inviting some journalists to mock me.
Caitlin Moran wrote in The Times that I was ‘faffing around with this wholly forgettable straight role’ and that watching me in something as ‘outrightly mawkish’ as Sunshine was ‘like watching electricity curdling on a tray’.
I tend to think success is the best form of revenge, but in this instance I decided I could prove whole cliques of naysayers wrong by finding something really positive to say about humanity. I was used to uniting an audience with humour; this time, I wanted to unite an audience with humanity.
And if I failed in doing so, at least I would have failed on my own terms and I wouldn’t have anyone else to blame.
CHAPTER 3
I HAD DEFINITELY lost my way before Philomena. My advisors spent years trying to position me in the States.
‘You need to do a buddy movie with Vince Vaughn! Then you’ll finally be successful in America!’
It wasn’t what I wanted to do, but at the same time I didn’t know what else to do.
In September 2009, I was in New York with my then girlfriend, China Chow, making a film called The Other Guys with Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg. I played part number three. Will Ferrell is incredibly funny. I just phoned in my performance. I was in a treading-water period, always wondering what the hell I was doing.
One morning, while I was still in New York, I read Martin Sixsmith’s story about Philomena Lee on the Guardian website. The accompanying photo showed Sixsmith, a former foreign journalist and advisor to the Labour Party, sitting on a bench next to an older woman. The warmth between Martin and Philomena was evident. Sixsmith’s piece told the story of an unmarried teenage mother whose young son was sold by Irish nuns to an American couple without her permission. He had agreed to help Philomena find the son she hadn’t set eyes on for fifty years.
Philomena’s story had an instant and profound effect on me. I immediately wanted to find a way to tell it. On a simple level, it was about two people, Philomena and Martin; one from the Old World, the other from the New World. Intellect versus intuition; open-heartedness versus cynicism; upper-middle-class socially liberal versus working-class socially conservative.
Beyond the obvious dramatic tension, it had a very personal resonance for me. I had been brought up in a Catholic family and spent summer holidays with extended family in Ireland. No one in my family talked about religion. If there was a story on the news about a Catholic sexual abuse case, we wouldn’t say, ‘It’s a real problem for the Church, isn’t it?’ We’d just go quiet and then we’d start talking about something else. I understood why Philomena had kept her secret for fifty years.
China suggested I have a go at writing the screenplay myself. I’d only written one film before, The Parole Officer. It could have been an edgier film; it could have had more substance. My performance is demonstrative and unsophisticated. The script, which I co-wrote with Henry Normal in 2001, is silly because I didn’t know what I wanted to say about things then. I thought it might be a fun and interesting little caper about a parole officer framed for murder, but the execution was too broad. It became a paint-by-numbers film.
After the premiere, Patrick Marber, who had helped in the creation of Partridge a decade earlier, came up to me and diplomatically said, ‘Congratulations, you’ve made a film.’
That really was the best thing he could say about it. It really irritated me at the time, but frankly he was very, very generous.
With Philomena, I decided to see if I could finally make the kind of film that I wanted to see. No one advised me to do it, which is rare in itself. As co-founder of Baby Cow Productions, a company I’d set up with Henry in 1999, I was at least in a position to take a risk.
But I’d never written a serious drama. I had always thought to myself, ‘Other people do serious work.’
At the start of my career, when I’d worked with Armando Iannucci, Chris Morris and Patrick on Radio 4’s On The Hour, I’d come into contact with an endless stream of people who were uber-confident and educated at Britain’s finest universities. I, meanwhile, was a grammar school kid from a Manchester suburb who had failed English O level not once, but twice. I resat it for the first time in the lower sixth and, like a dunce, failed it again.
This might be a class thing, but I never felt like I was
the person running the shop. I was never in charge. I wasn’t officer material. We, the lower middle class, are destined to be corporals, or sergeants at best. But then, very slowly, I started to realise that my opinions were valid. I had, as all people do, a unique perspective. I realised that in the case of Philomena, my background might actually help me.
Also, liberal-leaning intellectuals might worry about castigating the simple world view of an old Irish lady. It wasn’t a concern for me. I grew up knowing lots of old Irish ladies and I can say with some authority that they do say lots of daft things. I knew I could mine comedy from playing with Philomena’s character and then dignifying the grace and serenity of that same woman.
You can mock the things you love.
Similarly, with Martin Sixsmith I saw an opportunity to exorcise my own cynicism. I identify much more closely with his character’s disillusion with religious institutions. I am an atheist but not a nihilist.
Critics tended to lazily define me by my performance as Alan Partridge and seemed to think I was incapable of doing good, serious work. Perhaps it was time to see if I could prove both them and myself wrong.
Of course, I didn’t realise all this at the time. I wasn’t sitting around feeling insecure and irritated with critics. Nor was I being precious or snobby about comedy. I had just been looking for some kind of artistic nourishment and I found it in the form of Philomena.
I didn’t tell many people that I had bought the film rights to Martin Sixsmith’s book, The Lost Child of Philomena Lee. Rather than be accused of failing before I’d even started work on the project, I decided to keep my head down.
Initially, I didn’t think I could write Philomena; I thought I’d get an experienced writer on board. But the more I thought about Philomena’s voice, the more clearly I could hear it.
China introduced me to Gaby Tana, a great film producer who had worked on The Duchess and Coriolanus. Gaby and I then went to see Christine Langan, the head of BBC Films. I talked about my ideas for the film and said I needed a good writer.
Christine immediately said, ‘You should write it. You just need a good co-writer.’