by Steve Coogan
But he didn’t want to be Fat Bob any more.
I said, ‘Please, just one more time. I’m asking as a friend.’
He looked me in the eye and said, ‘No.’
He didn’t mess me about, he didn’t keep me waiting. But I was hurt.
*
Other than meeting Simon and John, the best thing about being at college was living in a flat and being able to have sex freely. I no longer had to have hurried sex in my dad’s car and then wind down the windows to release the steam.
I fell in love with two women while I was a student, both of whom I met when we were all working as stagehands at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester.
Rosie Blackshaw was a few years younger than me and I was slightly obsessed with her, even after she had moved in with the actor Adrian Scarborough. Whenever I phoned her and heard their joint answer-machine message, I used to petulantly say to myself, ‘Who the hell is this Adrian?’
But I got over it and the brilliantly talented Scarborough worked with me on Coogan’s Run and continues to be one of our finest character actors.
The other stagehand I fell in love with was Trisha Budd. She was a year or two older than me and went on to become an art director for Aardman Animations.
Although neither relationship lasted that long, both Rosie and Trisha stick in my mind as first loves.
Working at the Royal Exchange was another welcome distraction from my course. It was – and is – a fantastic theatre.
I was in charge of the revolving stage when Harriet Walter starred in The Merchant of Venice. One night I took off my headphones and didn’t hear my cue to switch the lever that revolved the stage and put the actors in the right position. The actors were all waiting about onstage, wondering what the hell was going on, until someone nudged me. I got away with it by claiming it was a technical fault.
I was also a stagehand on Nic Hytner’s 1986 production of Edward II. I used to watch with curiosity as a handful of the audience walked out each night when Ian McDiarmid appeared to have a red-hot poker shoved up his arse.
The following year, I was a Greek spear carrier in a Royal Exchange production of Oedipus by Sophocles. It starred David Threlfall, who had graduated from the theatre course at Manchester Poly around a decade before me. Alongside the other spear carriers, I had to stand stock-still onstage as the audience came in. Every night we had to concentrate really hard to avoid fainting. We weren’t allowed to move, so there was a real danger we might black out; we weren’t even allowed to rock on our heels, like police officers do to keep their blood flowing.
The casting director had turned up at college one day to find some suitable spear carriers. The audition was simple: we rolled up our trousers to see who had the best calves.
I might not have had the floppy hair that was de rigueur among poncey actors, but at least my calves were OK.
CHAPTER 36
MY TUTORS EXPECTED me to get work experience at the Royal Exchange, but they were less supportive of the regular work I was building up as both a stand-up comedian and a voiceover artist for local radio ads. Although I had got on to the course on the basis of my impressions, I was then widely regarded as being lowbrow for doing voiceovers for Yorkshire Bank.
As far as the people who ran the course were concerned, earning money wasn’t the path to true art.
I was at drama school during the height of the militant Left, and at times I felt like I was surrounded by a sort of Stasi-in-dungarees: ‘You will read Stanislavski and Bertolt Brecht, you will not do voiceovers for Piccadilly radio.’ I felt like I was living in East Berlin and nipping over the wall to do voiceovers.
On one occasion I was even taken aside by two drama students who sternly told me I was not supportive of the group. My activities outside college were, in fact, counter to the spirit of the group and were not about the pure art of acting.
My brazen ambition didn’t help. In my first year at college, I heard about a local woman who wrote for Spitting Image, the hugely successful satirical television puppet show on ITV. Co-created by Roger Law and Peter Fluck in 1984, it was an institution; 10 million people regularly tuned in to watch the puppet of Margaret Thatcher using the men’s toilets, Norman Tebbit dressed in leather or the Queen supporting CND.
Spitting Image was never perfect, but 60 per cent of it was funny and it felt as though everyone was watching it. It was one of the last programmes we watched as a family.
I sent the local woman a letter asking if I could help. I enclosed some short dialogue for Margaret Thatcher, Norman Tebbit and Michael Heseltine that was risibly bad. Unsurprisingly, nothing came of it.
I was momentarily hurt that this was not to be my big break, but decided to focus on stand-up. I didn’t earn much, but the voiceovers paid well and funded the comedy.
By 1987, when I was in the second and then third year of my course, I was performing in various venues in and around Manchester.
I often had to support indie bands because there was a dearth of places to perform in Manchester. I did gigs at the Greenroom in Whitworth Street and sometimes supported The Mock Turtles, my brother Martin’s band. The Greenroom also ran buskers’ gigs, where people would turn up to play guitar or sing or perform comedy. It was properly exciting; anything could happen.
The gigs rarely lasted longer than twenty minutes but they gave me time to try out my increasingly surreal impersonations. I often juxtaposed famous people with unusual situations: Ronnie Corbett in Vietnam, Sylvester Stallone as a social worker, Robert De Niro meeting Alan Bennett, Terry Wogan possessed by the devil in The Exorcist.
I deconstructed The Sweeney, and in ‘A Question of International Revolutionary Politics’ I did David Coleman discussing the Chilean coup d’état of 1973 as though it was a sports event.
I was doing unusual, odd, daft comedy just to test the water.
Stand-up gave me a real buzz, but I was initially only doing it to get my Equity card. I got my card at the end of 1987, then, in 1988, when I was in my final year at college, I slowly started to get offers to appear on television. This guy at the Greenroom – I can’t remember who, perhaps a scout – thought I might be able to get a slot on a London Weekend Television talent show called First Exposure. Hosted by Arthur Smith, it was a way for up-and-coming alternative comedians to get on TV.
In early 1988, I got the train down from Manchester to audition for First Exposure. I found my way to an upstairs rehearsal room in Kennington, south London, and stood nervously in front of yet another expectant panel. I did the same impressions I’d been doing in venues in and around Manchester and they immediately asked me to go on the show. They even offered to pay my train fare back to Manchester, although they weren’t paying for any of the other comedians’ travel expenses.
I’m not sure if they thought I was unusually funny or they simply felt sorry for me because I was still a student.
First Exposure was recorded several months later, in May 1988. I had my own chinos and Doc Martens, but I ‘borrowed’ a dogtooth sports jacket from the costume room in the basement of the drama school and a polo shirt from my dad.
My family watched the show at home in Middleton when it was broadcast. It was strange, I think, for them to see me on television when not long before I’d been sneaking under the sofa to watch late-night programmes.
I felt sick with nerves before walking onstage in my half-borrowed clothes. At least I wasn’t daft enough to try anything new; I was just dipping into the best bits of the material I’d endlessly refined in small northern clubs.
Afterwards Juliet Blake, the producer, came up to me and said, ‘I hope you’re ready for what’s going to happen to you.’
I was shocked, but then I’d only performed in the north-west before. I’d never, at that point, done a gig in London. As far as Juliet was concerned, I’d come from nowhere.
I also met Geoff Posner for the first time at that First Exposure recording. He had directed Not the Nine O’Clock News and The Young One
s and would later direct several of my TV shows, including Coogan’s Run.
He came up to me and said, ‘We stopped doing Saturday Live because we thought we’d exhausted all the talent. Are there more people like you up north?’
I didn’t really know, or care. Saturday Live was the Channel 4 comedy show that made stars of Ben Elton, Stephen Fry, Rik Mayall, et al. And Geoff thought I was good enough to join them.
*
I went back to Manchester on a high. I was twenty-two, I looked even younger and I had just made my first appearance on television.
I had also done an audition for Spitting Image.
My first proper agent, Sandy Gort, had seen my dream advert in the Stage at the end of 1987: ‘Voices required for Spitting Image.’
I sent off a cassette tape with a selection of my impressions and was called down to London. The late Geoff Perkins, a producer on the show, showed me around the studio. It was strange to see Neil Kinnock and Roy Hattersley lying deflated on a shelf and several puppets of Thatcher, each with a different grotesque expression.
I had an informal chat with Geoff and then went home.
In the days before the mobile, all the news at drama school would come via the pay phone in the corner of the canteen. There was often someone yelling, ‘Is so-and-so here? Can you go and get him/her?’
Students hung around the canteen for hours, partly because they were so fond of Elsie and Margaret, the dinner ladies. If former students went back to college, it was to see those two and not the tutors, to whom they mostly had an ambivalent attitude.
One day, someone shouted my name across the canteen. This time the phone call was for me.
It was Sandy, beside himself: ‘Spitting Image want you.’
I couldn’t believe it. I was stunned into silence.
I found out later that John Lloyd, the Spitting Image producer also famous for Blackadder, had worked his way through thousands of taped auditions. He was listening, throwing a tape in the bin, listening, putting a tape to one side. Endless bloody listening.
He arrived at my tape and stopped in his tracks. At the same time, Juliet Blake had told Geoff Perkins to watch my First Exposure appearance.
John Lloyd rang Geoff. ‘I think I’ve found the new voice for Spitting Image. You won’t have heard of him …’
Geoff: ‘Is he called Steve Coogan?’
John: ‘How …?’
Curiously, they had both found me separately.
Back in the canteen, I returned to the table and sat down with my student friends.
I said, still incredulous, ‘I’m the new voice of Spitting Image.’
They looked at me, as shocked as I was: ‘You jammy bastard … I suppose you’ll be all right then.’
*
By my final year, I knew it was all to play for.
There was a girl at drama school called Fran Ryan whom all the boys fancied.
She said to me, ‘It’s no good just being talented. You need to have a talent for having talent.’
In other words, you need to know how to deploy that talent when the opportunity presents itself. Fran’s advice really stuck with me. I decided not to go on holiday in case anything happened. I wanted to be available for any opportunity that might come my way.
Even before I started at Spitting Image, I was summoned by some pretty heavyweight television people.
David Liddiment, who was head of entertainment at Granada TV at the time, had seen me do a play at college as well as one of my local stand-up shows. He contacted me and we met in the Parrswood pub.
He wanted me to be the warm-up for a Granada TV sitcom called Watching, with Liza Tarbuck. I didn’t do it in the end, I can’t remember why; the point is that I hadn’t even left college and I was on his radar.
As well as my theatrical agent, Sandy Gort, I had a voice agent who found it easy to get me work; I often bunked off college to do voiceovers.
I had a state-of-the-art pager that made one beep for my voice agent and a different beep for my acting agent in London. I could never tell the difference, so I ended up ringing both of them every time it beeped.
After that I had a text pager, which I clipped attractively to my belt. The text would run along the screen: ‘Phone your agent now’ or ‘You need to be at this address for this time.’
You had to phone a messaging service to reply. It was painfully slow compared to the way we text now, but it felt revolutionary at the time.
Having two agents was complicated, but useful in unanticipated ways. When I needed an overdraft, I asked the voice agent if he would write a letter to my bank assuring them that I would earn good money when I left drama school.
The letter said something along the lines of: ‘Based on Steve Coogan’s current earnings from voiceovers, he should be earning in excess of £8,000 a year once he leaves drama school and pursues a career in comedy.’
The bank were impressed, said they looked forward to seeing me on television and gave me the overdraft.
*
And still the tutors, Martin Nestor and one or two others aside, refused to take me seriously and paid little or no attention to my graduation show in the summer of 1988.
One of the pieces I chose to do was from The Vortex, the Noël Coward play that caused a sensation in 1920s London for its unapologetic look at posh people taking drugs and having sex. I wanted to perform the play according to the drama-school rules of How You Act, but I fell at the first hurdle.
To get into character, I was told to put pictures of my family on the wall and imagine what it was like to be sad. But I wasn’t into method acting and I preferred to do it in a different way.
When I look in the mirror, in costume, and see somebody else, I start to become that character. Paradoxically, starting with the exterior aspects of a character helps me then go back inside and find out who that person is.
As a student, the more I thought about the process of acting, the worse I became. I was a square peg being knocked into a round hole and I felt cowed by my college tutors into towing the line.
I didn’t have a clue how to do a straight, posh role in The Vortex. I realised, with dismay, that drama school is about overthinking everything. There were some great people there who could talk the talk, but couldn’t walk the walk. I, meanwhile, couldn’t talk the talk, but I could walk the walk if you didn’t tell me how to do it.
I then played Wall in an ensemble production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It’s a small role, but I played him as Duncan Thickett and it worked perfectly.
Still no one paid any attention.
The casting directors knew nothing about comedy and were interested only in the good-looking, privately educated students. All the focus was on the Celestia Foxes, wrapped in their pashminas; I didn’t have floppy hair, I didn’t speak with a posh accent and I did stand-up instead of serious theatre, so I was routinely ignored.
There seemed to be an inordinate number of female casting directors who in my mind’s eye smoked cigarettes in long holders, though I’m sure none of them did.
There remains a huge problem with equality of opportunity in this country. There are, without doubt, privileged, privately educated kids who are incredibly talented, but it is also beyond doubt that anyone from such a background is going to find it easier to get into the world of acting than those who go through the state system.
The odds are stacked against you if you come from a modest background; you need exponentially more talent and determination to make it. If you are moderately talented and very privileged, you’ll find it easier. It’s just a mathematical paradigm.
I’m reliably informed by a Conservative friend of mine that when the Eton-educated David Cameron became prime minister after a blip in which PMs were state-educated, there was a general feeling that ‘normal service has been resumed’.
Yuk.
I’m afraid it applies to the acting world too. There was a brief hiatus when the angry young men of the 1960s came along, working-class pla
ywrights and actors who explored the underbelly of Britain. Before that, theatre was all about people coming in through French windows in Noël Coward plays.
But there was no point in me being chippy about my lower-middle-class background. I didn’t really care what anyone else thought. I had secured a job as the new voice on Spitting Image before I’d even graduated. I had my foot in the door. People were already talking to me.
I even had a part in a film in my final year. Paul Greengrass had seen me on TV, thought my impersonations were funny and had given me a small part in his first feature film, Resurrected. I liked him hugely and worked with him again a decade later on The Fix.
So I knew it didn’t really matter about casting directors who knew nothing. I just went where the work was.
I just couldn’t wait for the course to end. I knew I was going to swim while others would inevitably sink. I wanted to be thrown out into the world because I knew I would make things happen.
CHAPTER 37
IN THE SUMMER of 1988, after I’d been on First Exposure and graduated, people started saying I should do gigs in London. And then, when I initially went down to London, they said I couldn’t join the capital’s comedy circuit because I’d already appeared on television.
For a while I carried on doing gigs in Manchester. A guy called Tim Firth held an event in Salford called Poet’s Corner to try to encourage southern-based comedians to travel up to Manchester. He resisted booking me at first, saying he preferred London acts. Finally, however, he relented and gave me an open spot.
I knew exactly what I was capable of. I always killed an open spot because I was on top of my material. I was hard on myself too: if the audience didn’t demand an encore then I had failed. Firth watched me bring the house down and gave me some paid bookings, but I still had my eye on London.
Persistence paid off in the end. I managed to get open spots at the Comedy Store and Jongleurs, two of the most popular venues in London at the time, killed them both and got encores.