Easily Distracted

by Steve Coogan

  It was part of a slow dawning in my late teens that respectable, intelligent people could have a different point of view. That there is something valid, in fact desirable, in being disrespectful to any type of establishment institution.

  Still, despite being impressed by the likes of Blake, the story of my education hadn’t really changed since primary school.

  The summary of my summer term in the lower sixth is, in fact, all too familiar: ‘There are some indications that Stephen needs to organise himself better: both for exams and for school work generally … Stephen’s absences and late arrival in the morning are a matter of concern and are, perhaps, a reflection of his poor organisation.’

  I only managed to get an ‘E’ for my end-of-year English exam. ‘A fair result. Unfortunately, Stephen is still too easy-going in regard to essays and revision.’

  When I left Cardinal Langley, I was given a blue folder that I had filled in when I’d first arrived at the school in September 1977. I’d listed my interests and hobbies as ‘compose music; listen to music (all types); hiking; bike riding; youth club, etc’.

  My final assessment says that I was reliable, cheerful, sociable and a leader. My determination, sensitivity and ability to work hard all fall under the ‘?’ category.

  Beneath this final assessment is a box about personal qualities for the teacher to fill in. ‘Extrovert character. Well accepted by staff and pupils. Good musically. Willing to “have-a-go”. Contributes to house activities.’

  The very final comment made on my school report sits in a column of its own and appears in handwriting so small that you have to peer closely to decipher it.

  ‘Destined to go far in the entertainment business.’

  *

  All my school reports refer to me as ‘Stephen’, and my family have never referred to me by any other name. But when I was nineteen I changed my name to ‘Steve’. I vehemently dislike the diminutive ‘Steve’, which makes me sound like a garage mechanic, but I thought ‘Stephen Coogan’ scanned badly.

  I could live with ‘Steve Coogan’ and I was determined to keep my family name: I always thought that if I became successful, I would want my family name to be recognised.

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER 33

  I HAD NO idea what I might do after my A levels. I didn’t know who I was.

  In the final term at Cardinal Langley, I considered several possibilities and ended up sitting the executive officer exam for the Civil Service simply because it sounded like a sensible, grown-up job. And it paid around £7,000 a year, which sounded like a good wage.

  I didn’t even know what the job entailed, but I thought, ‘How hard can it be? You’ll have to put on a suit, but you’re not stupid. Surely you can make a go of it …’

  I failed the executive officer exam.

  Then they phoned me to say I had got in because they’d lowered the entry threshold.

  By which time I had decided I didn’t want to be a civil servant after all.

  I briefly considered being a teacher. For my parents’ generation, becoming a teacher was an aspiration; it was achievable, it wouldn’t mean reaching too high.

  I didn’t think I’d be a good teacher, so I applied to Lancaster University to read Politics.

  But my heart wasn’t really in studying Politics. I was interested in it, but in a social rather than academic context; naturally left of centre, I had developed a kind of knee-jerk left-wing idealism to face down the Little Englanders at school. I became more outspoken and radical than I might otherwise have been, simply because they irritated the hell out of me.

  When Michael Foot became Labour leader in the run-up to the 1983 general election, the Little Englanders suddenly had ample opportunity to mock.

  ‘You really think he should be prime minister? With his donkey jacket and his walking stick?’

  I liked the fact that Foot was a principled politician, but I only defended him half-heartedly. Under his leadership, Labour got its lowest share at a general election since the 1920s; it really felt like fighting the Tories with one hand tied behind your back and both your legs strapped together.

  In an age before it discovered spin, the Labour Party was all about comb-overs, brown kipper ties, Terylene trousers and working men’s clubs.

  Not fully committed to Lancaster, I also applied to all the drama schools in London.

  I thought, ‘I may as well. I think I’ve got something.’

  Generations of comedy have always replaced each other. The Goons were replaced by Beyond the Fringe, which was then replaced by the Pythons, after which came Not the Nine O’ Clock News and then The Young Ones. As sure as night followed day, a new generation was bound to emerge. It was just the way of things.

  I was aware that some of my contemporaries would be part of the next wave of comedians without yet knowing it. It was a moment I remember with great clarity: I was sitting in the refectory area of the sixth-form common room.

  I thought to myself, ‘I’ll do whatever you’re supposed to do and see what happens.’

  I also thought, ‘I can’t do anything else. And I don’t want to be a bloody civil servant.’

  With money saved from my part-time job at the petrol station, I got the National Express coach down to London about five times in my final term at Cardinal Langley. I then had to pay for each audition: it was £11 for the Central School of Speech and Drama and £15 for LAMDA.

  I stayed at my aunt Patricia’s house in London, which turned out to be a learning curve in itself. Patricia, who was a TV make-up artist, invited a few neighbours around, a couple of whom happened to be the producers of an ITV drama called Dempsey and Makepeace.

  I didn’t bother standing up to shake their hands, because I didn’t know that you ought to get up when someone comes into the room. I didn’t show due reverence to these ostensibly sophisticated, confident people.

  I had been brought up to be well mannered and polite, but not remotely metropolitan.

  It didn’t occur to me at the time that naivety can also be a strength. Teenagers find it much easier than adults to think, ‘Well, why can’t I?’ about so many things. It’s not really entitlement as such, more a kind of bluster.

  At eighteen, I was a fairly typical contradiction of confidence and self-doubt.

  It didn’t help that, because I’d stayed on an extra couple of months in the sixth form, I felt like a dimwit.

  It was that term that I auditioned for Hamlet and my younger brother Kevin got the role instead. I played Polonius. I can’t deny that I was a bit gutted. On a very minor level, Kevin and I were like the Milibands. But with much less at stake.

  Jane Hazlegrove was Ophelia. She was in Coronation Street while she was still in the sixth form and she’s been in Casualty for years now.

  I went out with her for a while. She’s a lesbian now.

  Not being cast as Hamlet really wasn’t a big deal. I didn’t take any of it that seriously; I remember getting told off by the director for playing the piano in the rehearsal space.

  I was, however, serious about drama school. I certainly felt anxious and uneasy about the auditions. It was a world I knew only from a distance, from watching television and going to the cinema and from the once or twice I’d been to the Royal Exchange in Manchester to see a play. Actors such as Tom Courtenay and John Thaw were northern and had been to drama school, so it wasn’t necessarily beyond my grasp.

  I wasn’t uncultured or ignorant, but I was naive in so many ways.

  I was of course aware that arty people existed, but I hadn’t been among them or seen them up close.

  I was immediately apprehensive about the other students at the auditions, most of whom exuded an innately bohemian, cosmopolitan confidence.

  At the audition for the Central School of Speech and Drama, everyone seemed to be called Sebastian or Julian. While I was waiting, a bloke with Byronic hair, a long overcoat and a statement scarf strode in, thrust his hand into the principal’s, shook it manfully a
nd said, rather loudly, ‘You know my father? He works for the BBC World Service.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ responded the teacher, clasping the applicant’s hands with both of his.

  More bollocks was spoken, with sackfuls of confident laughter.

  That bloke cast a fine silhouette and had swept into the audition. I had trudged in, with bad posture. I sat there looking at this walking cliché, my shoulders sagging, despondent, thinking to myself, ‘I’m not in this club.’ I was a petulant child having a silent tantrum. ‘It’s not fair, because I think I’m good at impersonations and I’ve got a fertile imagination, but I don’t know anyone at the BBC. I haven’t been to fucking finishing school.’

  My thoughts were interrupted by a bouncy girl in dungarees, her hair in a ponytail, her manner excessively friendly.

  ‘You must be Stephen! Come this way. Have you had a long journey?’

  I didn’t come from a demonstrative, effusive family and I didn’t know how to respond. It seemed I was out of my depth in myriad ways. Or at least that’s the message I was receiving.

  I felt like Frank Spencer drowning in a sea of Mr Darcys.

  *

  I auditioned for all the London drama schools and was knocked back by every single one, apart from RADA, who offered me a recall.

  The truth is, I didn’t know what I was doing at those auditions.

  When asked why I wanted a place at their drama school, I would reply, ‘Because I do impressions at school. People say I should be on the telly.’

  The panel would look distinctly unimpressed. The late Edward Hardwicke, who played Dr Watson in Sherlock Holmes on Granada TV, was on the RADA panel. When I said I did impressions, he looked at me and said, with something approaching disdain, ‘We all used to do that.’

  I felt utterly deflated.

  I was out of place. Northern, provincial, state-educated. I hadn’t read the relevant books, nor was I interested in Stanislavski and his quest for some kind of psychological truthfulness. I watched telly, I was good at voices, and people were always telling me I should be on the telly. That was the sum total of my reasoning for wanting to be an actor.

  *

  My A-level results were disappointing. I didn’t get the grades because I didn’t put in the work and so I decided to return to Cardinal Langley to do resits.

  When I told my English teacher that I wanted to go to drama school, he shook his head.

  ‘That’s a shame,’ he said. ‘If you’d got into Cambridge, you could have joined Footlights and you’d have been away.’

  It was like the die was cast and the odds were stacked against me. Every time drama school was mentioned, there would be a puffing-out of air and a slumping of shoulders. It was the antithesis of the American dream/delusion that anyone can grow up to be president.

  The implication was clear: it wasn’t going to happen for me. I had the talent, but I was never going to get the break. Unless you knew the right people, you’d never get on, especially when you weren’t from the right background in the first place.

  While waiting to resit my A levels I signed on and, during a visit to the job centre, noticed a simple card: ‘Actor/actress required.’

  I asked about it. The job-centre person said, ‘It’s not a proper job, it’s just profit-share.’

  I didn’t care. I wanted to meet Andrew Mulligan, whose name and number were on the card.

  It turned out that he had moved to Manchester from Oxford to set up a regional theatre company. He had no money, but he was very clever.

  Years later, when I mentioned Andy to Patrick Marber, he told me that at Oxford University Andy was the director of his generation. Everyone wondered what had happened to him; he was expected to pursue glamorous directing jobs in London, but instead came to Manchester to work with real working-class people.

  Or, in my case, a real lower-middle-class person.

  I went along for an interview and Andy asked me what I thought about politics and art. I wanted to please him, so I said, ‘Oh, I think they are intrinsically linked. It’s very important to be political.’

  I was bluffing, but I sensed he was pretty left-wing, probably one of those good old-fashioned militants, and I was willing to say whatever I thought he wanted to hear. I probably mentioned Jim Allen; Jim’s son David had given me a copy of The Spongers and at some point I watched it with Andy.

  Whatever I said did the trick, because Andy asked me to join his company and I left school a couple of months after going back to do the resits.

  The company was very much of its time. It had a truly terrible name that sounds even more Stalinist now than it did then: Greater Manchester Theatre Company.

  We did straightforward adaptations of plays, including C. P. Taylor’s The Magic Island, about a bloke who lives in a cave. We took it around schools and showed it to six-and seven-year-old children, who laughed at me playing this bogeyman.

  The theatre company reflected the politics of the time, and ‘inner-city deprivation’, a shocking by-product of Thatcher’s first five years in power and one of the main buzzwords of the eighties, was a central theme. It’s remarkable, in fact, how that deprivation has since more or less disappeared from the inner city and in its place we have shiny new city centres and rings of neglect on the outskirts.

  Andy sent me out to wander around the Miles Platting housing estate, taking photos on an SLR camera. Everything was boarded up and it was incredibly depressing, almost dystopian; in fact, just a decade after it was built, the estate was earmarked for demolition. We used the images to devise a play that we then took around adult education centres in the north-west. There were only four of us doing this DIY theatre: Andy, me and two young women.

  One was an eighties political cliché: a militant lesbian vegan in dungarees who spent all her spare time on the picket line, supporting the miners’ strike. I had total sympathy with the miners, but her constant talk of the picket line irritated me in much the same way the Little Englanders had done at school.

  I used to wonder what those miners thought of this daft lesbian in fingerless gloves warming her hands around their brazier.

  I loathed Margaret Thatcher with as much gusto as this woman did, but I mistrust anyone who has absolute moral certainly about anything. It’s irritating that such people feel they have found the truth. It’s a reductive, simplistic world view. But she wasn’t a nasty person, just too earnest for my liking.

  *

  Each day I caught the bus to Hulme, rehearsed with Andy and the two young women in a private space in the library, ate fish and chips at lunchtime and returned to my parents’ house in the evening.

  Andy ran the theatre company like a boot camp, breaking us down before building us back up again. At nineteen, I was still terribly selfconscious and more than a little graceless, but Andy refused to indulge me.

  There wasn’t time. If he told me to pretend to be a fried breakfast, I had to get on with it.

  The exercises were often quite brutal; he liked, for example, to use a drama-school exercise in which you play a character who has no dignity. He taught me that you have to lose all inhibitions if you want to be an actor. You can’t worry about looking like a dick.

  He would say, while pushing his glasses up his nose, ‘I don’t know why you bother coming here to rehearse if that’s the best you can come up with. If you don’t want to be seen making a fool of yourself, then you shouldn’t be doing this sort of thing. Stop worrying about what people might think. Just do it or fuck off.’

  Occasionally, at the end of an explanation or instruction, he might add, ‘It’s as simple or complex as that.’

  I thought it a fascinating way of breaking everything down: you could choose to see things in two different ways. It may sound obvious, but those revelations matter when you’re nineteen.

  It was a steep learning curve, but slowly my confidence grew.

  Of course, in typical Stockholm-syndrome fashion, I wanted to please Andy most of the time. Sometimes I felt so ex
posed that I objected, but it was worth the pain.

  He believed in me when no one else did.

  I recently saw him for the first time in thirty years – he now writes very successful young adult fiction – and we reminisced about the eighties.

  Among other things, he reminded me that he had helped me prepare for my audition at Manchester Poly, now Manchester Metropolitan University, where I’d applied to do a diploma in theatre after my London knockbacks.

  Clearly I hadn’t thought carefully enough about my earlier auditions in London. No one had been around to give me advice, and I’d been too vague during the auditions about why I wanted to go to drama school.

  Andy knew I had to stand out from the other candidates. He suggested starting with two standard speeches – typically Shakespeare followed by a modern piece – and ending with Duncan Thickett doing a bad audition.

  Duncan was, at this stage, a nascent character, a little voice that had started out in my head and grown into an inadequate fool. I hadn’t consciously thought about developing a character, I just used to do him in rehearsals to make Andy laugh. He was, I suppose, my first foray into the comedy of embarrassment, which I would later revisit with Alan Partridge.

  I rehearsed in front of Andy, and as he drove me to the audition I was as anxious as I’d been during my visits to London. It felt like my last real chance to get into drama school.

  I read from Shakespeare’s Pericles, Prince of Tyre in a Cockney accent, standing on a chair like a market trader, followed by a speech from Arnold Wesker’s Chips with Everything.

  After the Wesker speech, I left the room, knocked on the door as Duncan and asked if I had come to the right place for my audition. I walked back in with my papers and immediately dropped them all over the floor.

  I kept saying, in a ridiculously overconfident way, ‘I just want you all to relax and enjoy my audition.’

  The panel was crying with laughter.

  The voice teacher, Alex Clement, then asked me to repeat a specific phrase after him in a variety of accents.