Easily Distracted

by Steve Coogan

  It’s fortunate that the slight oddness I had wasn’t stamped out of me. When I started working, I was able to nurture the oddness, to let my imagination wander.

  But as a kid, I was more conflicted. I was both upset that they thought I was different, and glad that I wasn’t like everyone else.

  *

  My career as an impressionist started early. From the age of five or six, I used to imitate the sound of car wheels screeching. Sometimes too effectively: Mum was always telling Dad off for driving too fast and on occasion she would tell him off when he was driving at a reasonable speed because she mistook my mimicry for real speed.

  Most kids with a theatrical inclination put on quaint plays for their family. That didn’t occur to me.

  When I was twelve, I spent ages rigging up an elaborate structure in the living room. There were a couple of free-standing lamps in the room that were plugged into sockets but could be controlled via light switches near the door. In one of those sockets I plugged a hand-held tape recorder and in the other an anglepoise lamp, which I pointed directly at the doorway so that whoever entered the room would be dazzled by light. I made a Guy Fawkes dummy by stuffing an old jumper and trousers with socks, added a Frankenstein mask and sat it in an armchair with its back to the door.

  The idea was that whoever walked into the room would flick on the light switch and be blinded by the silhouette of someone sitting in a chair. At the same time they would flick the other switch and trigger the tape recorder, so that the shadowy figure would appear to be talking to them. The creepy, pseudo-Cold War voice would say, ‘Hello. Come in. Do exactly as I say. Sit down. Do not attempt to see who I am. Do not approach the chair. You are here for questioning. Who are you? Where do you come from? Who are you working for?’

  I hid behind the curtains, waiting for someone to come in, excited by the potential theatre.

  Mum walked in, flicking on both switches. ‘Hello. Come in …’

  She went over to the armchair, pushed the anglepoise away and pulled the head off the dummy.

  ‘What’s this?’ she asked impatiently.

  I stepped out from behind the curtain, deflated.

  Mum looked at me, frowning. ‘What are you doing?’

  I replied, ‘I was hoping to trick someone into thinking they were being interrogated.’

  Another time, when I was nine or ten, I read about a man called Peter Cook who had been dubbed ‘the Cambridge Rapist’ and was given two life sentences after his arrest in 1975. He used to wear a balaclava with ‘rapist’ emblazoned on the front whenever he attacked women. I asked my mum what a ‘rappist’ was. She told me it was someone who frightens women and attacks them when they’re walking home at night.

  As well as not being able to pronounce the word properly, I had no sense of how awful the story was. So when my mum came home one day, I jumped out of the bushes dressed in black and wearing a balaclava.

  I started shouting, ‘Ha, ha, look at me! I’m a rapist!’

  She was appalled and chastised me, telling me it was not a nice thing to say or do.

  I, in turn, was miffed as my disguise had involved some thought and preparation. I genuinely thought she’d be delighted.

  I was far more selfconscious around my dad. Mum was calmer and generally more tolerant of misdemeanours or morally questionable behaviour. But as soon as Dad came into the room, I’d stop goofing around. He wasn’t big on praise. He thought criticism was a great way to learn. I have, to some degree, inherited it as a character trait and I hate it in myself. I’ve had to learn to recognise it and try to be effusive when I love something rather than be overly critical.

  If ever I felt dissatisfied with the environment in which I was brought up, it was when I went over to friends’ houses and witnessed their fathers goofing around with their kids. I felt jealous. I wished my dad would do that with us, with me. But he was very much a figure of authority.

  If, on occasion, I acted the goat in front of him, he would tell me to stop. He thought that acting like an idiot was undignified, even if you were just being daft. He loved the Goons, the Two Ronnies and Morecambe and Wise, but they were professionally funny, as if they had been born that way.

  He’d say to me, ‘You can’t get a job by fooling around and acting the eejit!’

  He thought that making people laugh by being a fool was a very bad thing.

  As soon as I got into Monty Python I knew he was wrong. You could earn a living from being daft.

  My parents brought us up to be respectable, to be kind to people, to take personal pride by contributing to society in a traditional way. As it turned out, I’ve made my living from contributing to society in a very untraditional way. I have made a career by goofing around in exactly the way my dad disapproved of.

  In its simplest terms, I have embraced my weaknesses and been liberated by laughing at myself. I have flagged up my imperfections and let Alan Partridge absorb some of my foibles.

  All the things that were seen as not particularly attractive qualities are things I have utilised in my working life. There is method to it. It’s almost like saying, ‘You can be rude and swear and drop your pants and do things that are disrespectful and make a very good living out of it. Shining a light on the human condition by being ostensibly rude and disrespectful.’

  My stupidity became my raison d’être. I discovered that I could mock myself through my characters and that as long as I was the architect, playing the fool gave me a certain sophistication. I was playing a trick on everyone: by being profoundly uncool, I ended up being the coolest person in the room.

  Short-term fool, long-term cool.

  It was exciting just by virtue of it being oppositional.

  Mum told me that when I booked her and Dad into the hotel opposite the Lyceum in 1998, he was still incredulous that I had made a success of my fooling around.

  Apparently he looked out of the hotel window, turned to Mum and said, ‘When you think of what a bugger he was …’

  The irony is that while Dad disapproved of my silliness, the rest of my family were always asking me to be a performing monkey.

  I can’t say I protested too much.

  CHAPTER 24

  AS MUCH AS I am a product of my Catholic, lower-middle-class background, I am also a product of the television generation. I should emphasise that television watching was rationed in my home. We were never allowed to sit around all day in the holidays slumped on the sofa, watching television. Books were considered to be far more important and outdoor play was always encouraged.

  We had a big house, fitted carpets, central heating and eventually ran two cars, but we were the last family in the neighbourhood to have a colour television. It was probably something to do with inverted snobbery. It wasn’t budgeted for and Dad wasn’t going to be hoodwinked into buying one.

  Money was better spent on the Encyclopedia Britannica; the whole set cost about £500 in 1977, which is the equivalent of nearly £3,000 in today’s money. Mum and Dad had to extend the mortgage on the house as they couldn’t afford the books otherwise.

  My dad, incapable of throwing anything out, was often given second-hand black-and-white TVs that he fixed when they broke down. There’s still a photo in the lounge of two broken TVs placed on top of one another and, on top of those, a small working portable.

  All my friends had rented colour TVs, which was the sine qua non of early seventies suburbia. By the end of the decade it was the video recorder. Those two developments bookended the seventies as the television decade.

  There were only three TV channels, so they were touchstones for my generation – an intimate feeling of connection. Millions watched these shows.

  If my dad was working in the attic, he would occasionally nudge the aerial while we were watching TV. An operation to correct it would immediately swing into action, made up of available family and friends. A chain would be formed down two stairways and the hallways, with me generally standing in front of the telly.

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sp; Dad would make small adjustments to the aerial and the question, ‘How’s that?’ would be relayed along the chain to me.

  ‘A bit better …’ I would reply, and back the message would go.

  The message would change. ‘The picture’s gone again!’ or ‘It’s perfect, don’t move it!’

  By the time Dad received the message it was often too late and the aerial had yet again been moved from its optimal position.

  It was a painful process, but crucial if I was to have my lifeline to this other world.

  One of the most visceral pleasures of my childhood was opening the Christmas double issue of the Radio Times and circling the films and TV shows we wanted to watch. It was always an embarrassment of riches.

  We only had one television, so if there was a consensus about watching a particular film, say Ben-Hur, that clashed with my preferred choice (James Bond), I would have to phone Brendan, Ged or even Paul Allsop. If any of them were watching Bond, I’d rush round and watch it at their house.

  Afterwards I would run home, knowing that I would only miss the first five minutes of The Guns of Navarone.

  I feel terribly nostalgic about the television I watched in my youth.

  When I was very young, I loved The Clangers and Bagpuss – in fact, anything by the wonderful Oliver Postgate – and Trumpton, which was narrated by Brian Cant. I did a voiceover with him in 1990 and asked him to say ‘Pugh, Pugh, Barney McGrew, Cuthbert, Dibble, Grub’. He was very gracious and I was thrilled.

  There was a complete difference between the BBC and ITV. Blue Peter was informative and reassuring, with John Noakes like a favourite uncle. But the show had a whiff of imperialism about it. ITV’s answer to Blue Peter was Magpie, which although always seemed a bit more rock ’n’ roll was like a pretender to the crown. Swap Shop on a Saturday morning was presented by Noel Edmonds. Even as a child I regarded him as far too smug. He was completely trumped by Chris Tarrant on ITV’s Tiswas. Tarrant’s anarchy and irreverence made the BBC seem boring and po-faced.

  The female presenters on Blue Peter and Magpie were posh and attractive. But I got excited about more grown-up and sexy shows such The Persuaders!, with Tony Curtis and Roger Moore, and The New Avengers with Patrick Macnee, Gareth Hunt and Joanna Lumley. To me they were the epitome of sophistication.

  We all watched Top of the Pops religiously. If I saw a band on Top of the Pops that I really liked, I was always shocked by what they looked like; I’d only ever heard their music before, and maybe seen photos of them in the music press. I’d never seen them actually moving around.

  Barry Norman’s BBC film programme – Film 75, Film 76, and so on – was religious viewing. I learned about interesting movies from Norman, and of course the films he was reviewing then are now the iconic films of the maverick decade of creativity, covered in Peter Biskind’s book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.

  As much as I enjoyed watching TV with my siblings, I have even fonder memories of sitting down with all my family to watch shows like Porridge. Now there’s a false god of choice and people watch programmes on catch-up. Then, because you couldn’t record television, it was a live event. When the show ended you knew it wouldn’t be repeated for over a year, sometimes two. If you missed the show it would be crushing.

  The immediacy of it brought it right into your home. You knew that everyone who was like you was watching the same programme. It made the country feel small and intimate.

  The ire now directed at smartphones, laptops, Facebook and Twitter was reserved for television in the seventies. Although it was known as the idiot box by some, TV was king.

  When John Cleese ran into the hotel in Fawlty Towers you had to remember exactly what he was saying because you couldn’t rewind the scene. Afterwards we’d go into the kitchen, someone would put the kettle on – we drank gallons of tea – and we’d have a post-mortem about our favourite moments. Unless you talked about it and kept it alive, it would be gone for ever. You had to commit it to memory.

  I always looked forward to Morecambe & Wise and The Two Ronnies. My parents looked down their noses at The Generation Game, considering it vulgar, but they liked The Good Life, a gentle comedy with some moments of brilliance. I bought a box set of the series recently because it perfectly captured the suburban snobbery my parents laughed at. It held up a slightly exaggerated mirror to our world.

  As a social document, a series like The Good Life is a more reliable portal into the mindset of the country than any newsreel footage or journalistic accounts.

  A lot of TV comedies are rightly consigned to the dustbin of light entertainment history. On the Buses, for example, regularly had viewing figures of many millions in the early seventies but is completely unwatchable today. Its level of humour is Neanderthal.

  Fawlty Towers and Dad’s Army have both matured like fine wine. ITV sitcoms have almost all turned to vinegar.

  One of the few good ITV sitcoms was Rising Damp. Leonard Rossiter’s Rigsby was a Little Englander and a predecessor to Alan Partridge. Intolerant, inadequate, snobby and casually racist. The same adjectives could just as easily apply to Captain Mainwaring in Dad’s Army and to Basil Fawlty. They have all failed in some way, which is at the heart of so much British comedy.

  It separates us from the Americans, who, Larry David and Woody Allen aside, tend not to embrace noble failure quite so much in their comedy. As far as the Americans are concerned, you either win or you lose. Our ability to laugh at ourselves is to be celebrated. Bill Bryson writes about it in Notes from a Small Island. It’s one of the things he loves about us: everyone likes to have a joke, even strangers.

  Patriotism is hugely overrated, but sometimes it goes too far the other way and you’re not even allowed to make observations of national characteristics. I love Britain. I love my country in a way that’s not nationalistic or blindly patriotic. The Opening Ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games blew me away because everything I love about Britain was there on the screen in front of me. History, the NHS, music, cinema. It celebrated the culture of dissent and embraced the eccentric.

  It was the first time I consciously thought, ‘Oh yeah, this is my country too.’ I wrote a long letter to Danny Boyle and writer Frank Cottrell Boyce admiring their work; they wrested the flag from blind nationalism and effectively gave us a licence to be patriotic.

  Celebrating certain national characteristics has for too long been the preserve of racists, but it really depends on what you’re celebrating. Self-effacement is one of the best things about Britain. We are very clear about certain things that differentiate us from the Americans: we don’t admire people just because they’ve got money. In America, as long as you’ve got money it doesn’t matter where you’re from. It’s a very Thatcherite stance.

  At the same time, the old Tory class system in Britain means there is very little social mobility. So you are judged on your character.

  I’m not a huge fan of period dramas that celebrate the old class system. Julian Fellowes is the epitome of Middle England values and of that selective revisionism that some people have about our culture and history. Downton Abbey is at best a simplistic fiction of a golden past and at worst a total distortion of facts. It’s the kind of period drama that Alan Partridge would write.

  I bumped into Julian Fellowes in 2013 and he was aghast that the BBC news had devoted time to discussing Hilary Mantel’s follow-up to Wolf Hall and only two minutes on the baptism of our future king.

  I was appalled that he was appalled.

  I’m fascinated by British attitudes to certain things. We can be very negative, which, at its best, means we’re not easily impressed. And certainly not by money. At its worst it can descend into a debilitating cynicism.

  In England people judge the fact that I like classic cars; I must be a wanker because I occasionally drive a bright yellow Lotus that makes me feel like James Bond.

  If the sun shone all the time, we might well be less repressed, less uptight. But we wouldn’t be as funny. When I was grow
ing up, mocking people with humour was a very roundabout but sophisticated way of saying ‘I love you’. It’s a peculiarly British sign of affection.

  *

  Seventies comedy is an easy target. People judge Les Dawson for his mother-in-law jokes, but in doing so they miss the point: it was all about Dawson not having the power. About him being disempowered, impotent. I admired the way Dawson, who also came from Collyhurst, wrote his way out of hardship. One of the great things about humour is that anyone can create it. It’s free. For him, comedy was about survival. It was always a treat to watch The Les Dawson Show on the BBC, especially if a guest like John Cleese turned up.

  Paul Calf owes his lineage to Les Dawson and Alan Partridge to John Cleese. One is intuitively melancholic, the other intellectually adventurous.

  The BBC was my education. There was education at school, of course, but a sense of society, of a life outside my own, came from television. It was a smorgasbord of information and entertainment. We were definitely a BBC family – my parents were BBC1 while my brothers and I were the edgier, artier BBC2 – because ITV was too lowbrow. Not because we were intellectuals, but because Dad thought we should aspire to more than he thought ITV had to offer.

  The BBC was accessible, entertaining and informative. My parents didn’t have the values of the Oxbridge-educated people who ran it, but the output was aimed at people who wanted to be entertained and learn something.

  The BBC educated my parents too. It made them more open-minded about the changing world around them. My dad didn’t like Jon Pertwee as Doctor Who because he found him too effeminate; he was too much of a dandy in his velvet jackets and frilly shirts. Dad thought Sean Connery was far more masculine than Roger Moore. Slowly, however, he became less judgemental. Both my parents watched The Naked Civil Servant in 1975 and were suitably impressed by John Hurt’s performance.

  I have heard some great stories about the BBC. Terry Jones told me that when he heard that the BBC was about to erase the master tapes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, he smuggled them out of the building and stored them in his attic.