by Steve Coogan
I said to myself, ‘I don’t want to foster discord. I’ll just concentrate on being funny rather than not liking the establishment.’
I wanted to be adventurous, but without alienating anyone politically.
For a while I got high on the material success of it. I was doing what I wanted to do and earning a bloody good living. How could life get much better? I wanted to make a living and have a career. Even if it meant sidelining my politics. It wasn’t about any kind of Thatcherite dream, it was about taking the opportunities that were on offer.
I had to go where the money was.
*
In October 1988, two days after my twenty-third birthday, I did Sunday Night at the Palladium.
I sanctimoniously said to myself, ‘Keep your distance from these guys. They are yesterday’s people.’
Much as I felt awkward about being on the show, it was a chance to be watched by millions of people on national television. It would have been bizarre to turn it down.
The show was quite glamorous: Kylie Minogue, Robert Palmer and Shirley Bassey were also on the bill. And Jimmy Tarbuck was very nice to me backstage.
He said, ‘Kid, how old are you? If it happens for you, it’s a great life. If it doesn’t happen for you, it’s still a great life. The only real advice I can give you tonight, kid, is: ‘Get on, hit them, get off.’ You get no prizes for hanging around.’
He was right. You should always leave the audience wanting more, tempting though it might sometimes be to bathe in the glow of their applause.
As the curtain came down for the commercial break, Tarbuck came up to me while I was still onstage and thrust his hand into mine. I felt incredibly selfconscious because I didn’t want anyone to see me shaking hands with a supporter of the Conservative Party who was also a very high-profile member of the establishment.
Again, I wanted the exposure, but not the association.
Nor could I deny the thrill of being on television. I rang my mum on a payphone during the commercial break. ‘Mum! Did you see me! I’m going on again at the end, for the curtain call!’
My family were delighted. There was a sense of, ‘Gosh, our Stephen’s on prime-time telly!’
Mostly my parents were baffled by my early success.
I did a gig at the 500-seater Davenport Theatre in Stockport in early 1989 for which I must have cobbled together an hour of stand-up, including Duncan Thickett as my support act and various impressions.
I invited Mum and Dad to the gig and they were amazed that the show sold out.
Mum was as shocked as she was impressed. ‘I can’t believe all these strangers who don’t know our Stephen are queuing around the block for him.’
*
In 1989, the year after I graduated, I was still following the work and the money. I just had to get out there, get my foot in the door and, when I got some purchase, do the work I wanted to do.
Accordingly, my CV for that year is a little strange. I appeared alongside John Sessions on Ten Glorious Years, which marked a decade of Thatcher being in power, and I still have a letter from my agent showing that I was paid £31.50 for appearing on The Krypton Factor. There was an observation round in which contestants had to spot continuity errors in a sketch; the sketches were written by Paul Abbott, who of course went on to write Shameless, and I acted in them.
At least I was savvy enough to know that shaking Tarbuck’s hand on national television had to be tempered with performing at small, out-of-the-way venues such as Stand and Deliver. Between 1988 and 1990, I did some of my first stand-up gigs at Darren Poyzer’s comedy club in Ashton-under-Lyne.
These home-made, below-the-radar gigs were the lifeblood of comedy in the north-west in the mid to late eighties. Darren, a cook on HMS Sheffield before it was hit by an Argentinian Exocet missile in the Falklands, paid £30 or £40 in cash for each gig. You had to get changed next to empty beer bottles and you didn’t have long to get the audience on your side. It was character-forming stuff.
Henry Normal and I used to perform in the theatre bar in Ashton-under-Lyne to about twenty people. I had first bumped into Henry two years earlier, when he was doing his punk poetry gigs at the Greenroom in Whitworth Street, and we used to see each other all the time at small, underground venues, supporting indie bands, playing at student gigs or upstairs rooms in pubs.
Once I had got to know Henry, I realised he was the right person with whom to run Baby Cow, the production company we set up in 1999. Protestant work ethic, disciplined, methodical and diplomatic. I am none of these!
I toured with lots of interesting people in 1989: Simon Munnery, Stewart Lee, Richard Herring, Patrick Marber. Sometimes we’d be on the same bill as Jon Thoday, who had co-founded Avalon the previous year and who tried to be my manager for a while. And I had a few gigs with Richard Thomas, who went on to compose Jerry Springer: The Opera.
In the summer of 1989, I went back to Edinburgh and did a double act at the Playhouse with Mike Hayley, who had also been on First Exposure. It was called Coogan and Hayley’s Seaside Special, and our publicity said that we wanted to create ‘a show that proves you can be radical – but still wear a sweater’. We had investment in the show and there were adverts on the back of buses in Edinburgh.
Mike and I shared a flat right behind the Playhouse with an older American comedian called Will Durst. The Marchioness disaster, in which two boats collided on the Thames and fifty-one people died, happened on 20 August and I remember Will trying to write material about it before realising it was way too soon.
Mike and I wrote some sketches together and I did Duncan Thickett. I’d come onstage as Steve Coogan, leave after doing a series of sketches with Mike, and return as Duncan Thickett as a failing stand-up. Duncan always drew a big laugh.
The Scotsman reviewed the gig on 25 August:
Coogan, a voice behind some Spitting Image puppets, has an unrivalled repartee of impersonations ranging from Ronnie Corbett’s squeak to Roy Hattersley’s slobber which should rightfully put Mike Yarwood and the like out of business and into premature retirement.
Published two days earlier, the Herald review was a little more probing:
With a little more work, Coogan’s stand-up creation, Duncan Thickett, an unconscious icon of Northern gormlessness, could go on to rival Harry Enfield’s Stavros and Loadsamoney in capturing a nation’s imagination. But the question of whether or not that happens will only be resolved when Coogan and Hayley decide which audience they want to attract, family or adult, alternative or mainstream.
There it is again: alternative or mainstream. I was still not part of the circuit and I was definitely regarded as a lightweight. I only bothered with the Comedy Store or Jongleurs. I’d do two shows on a Friday and two on a Saturday, and pocket £500 in cash. I was certainly never short of work – perhaps because I was so willing to cast my professional net wide. If I was worried that it left me open to gentle ridicule, I was right.
At the end of 1988, for example, I supported Kit & The Widow at the Lyric Hammersmith for five weeks, providing light relief in the middle of their show. My routine was to finish the gig on a Friday night and drive all the way to Hull every weekend in a battered Vauxhall Chevette to see Maggie Jones, the sister of Bernie, my first true love.
Kit & The Widow were a double act who performed songs in the vein of Flanders and Swann; their audience was populated by posh theatre people who considered them a bit racy and who liked their witty songs. It was about being clever as much as funny.
Kit Hesketh-Harvey, the singer, and Richard Sisson, the pianist, would introduce me thus:
‘Here he is, in his Burton suit.’
I didn’t quite understand why it was funny. As far as I was concerned, Burton was a good shop where you got quite nice, shiny suits.
If people asked me where I’d got my suit from, I certainly wasn’t embarrassed to say.
In his 2001 autobiography, Frank Skinner recalls comedy-circuit dressing rooms in the late eighties and early
nineties: Eddie Izzard would be discussing how some rooms suited comedy while others didn’t, while I would be ‘getting all excited about a new pair of tan-leather driving gloves’.
Those dressing rooms were verging on the anarchic; at the Comedy Store I frequently saw female comics pissing in the sink in the dressing room to avoid the long walk through the crowd. In fact, both female and male comics, myself included, would piss in the sink. It was the act of being OK and accepting of this environment that meant I was able to be spat out the other side relatively unscathed. I was still very naive at this time, I can’t deny this.
CHAPTER 40
I RECENTLY FOUND a dusty box of random mementos dating back to the eighties and early nineties. It’s always unnerving looking at visual evidence of your life, not least when you don’t know what you might find.
I found my Youth Hostel Association membership from 1981, in which my face looks like a smacked arse. It’s shocking how young I look, but preferable to photos from the nineties in which I mostly look chubby, pallid and unfit, a direct result of no exercise, a bad diet and too much alcohol.
There’s a photo of me youth-hostelling in France in the eighties in obscenely short shorts. Another shows my old friend Mike Taylor diving into the sea from the top of a forty-foot cliff in 1985. I remember standing on the edge of the cliff for twenty minutes before I was brave enough to follow him.
My Filofax from 1988 lists gigs and voiceover sessions, meetings with my bank manager, random lists of earnings and one entry that simply says ‘lunch with Geoffrey Perkins’.
A sheet of negatives reminded me that Bruno Tonioli taught me to walk like a woman when I first started doing Pauline Calf.
He would show me how to walk with a braggadocio that I lacked: I had to suck my tummy in, push my bum and fake tits out, put my shoulders back and my chin down, put one foot in front of the other and sway my hips from side to side.
But the key to it was when he said, ‘OK, Steve, you’ve got the technique and now I want you to forget about everything I’ve taught you. Do it again but without concentrating too hard on the technique. And, as you walk along, you should be pretending you’re a woman and thinking, “I want you to fuck me.”’
I bumped into Bruno at an airport years later and he couldn’t stop laughing. ‘Can you believe what’s happened to me, Steve? I’m famous and rich. It’s ridiculous!’
I also found a handful of photos taken on the set of 24 Hour Party People, in which I played Tony Wilson, a genuine eccentric and a legend in his own lifetime. I couldn’t bring myself to look at them. More than any other film I’ve done, 24 Hour Party People made me realise what I might be able to do with my life, what might be possible.
In 1986, I did a gig at the Hacienda just a few hours after I’d been a pallbearer at my grandad’s funeral. Someone in the audience threw a glass at me. Two of my best mates, Ged and Mike, happened to be standing right next to the guy and they jumped on him. Dave Allen, son of playwright Jim, was also there. I could see them from the stage, fighting next to one of the iconic Hacienda pillars painted in black-and-yellow diagonal stripes.
When I did 24 Hour Party People in 2002, I was amazed to see that the set of the Hacienda had been so faultlessly recreated. I stood on the stage, looking out at the black-and-yellow pillars, and thought, ‘I performed on the real stage fifteen years ago and someone threw a glass at me. And now here I am on a replica stage, playing the guy who opened the club.’
It was a perfect moment.
I haven’t watched 24 Hour Party People for a decade because it seems so real to me. It’s part of my identity. Watching it would be like looking through those old photos. I don’t want to go there, not yet.
Finally, at the very bottom of the box, I found an undated Christmas card from Frank Skinner. Inside it says, ‘I miss you, you cunt. Merry Christmas from Frank.’
Back in 1989, I often used to stop off at Birmingham on the way to London and do a gig at the Bearcat Club, where Frank Skinner hosted a night.
He always gave me a generous introduction along the lines of: ‘This guy’s fucking brilliant. You’re going to love him. He makes me laugh, anyway … Steve Coogan!’
I’d do my show and then I’d hang around and watch Frank. He was funny full stop. He was quite old-fashioned in some respects, and his material was sometimes a bit coarse, but he always transcended it with an irresistible charm. He felt familiar, like an old friend.
I assumed that the content of his material would stop him from ever appearing on TV. It seemed such a shame that this properly funny guy would be consigned to the shadows. How wrong I was. As soon as postmodernism kicked in during the early nineties and Loaded magazine was launched, comedians like Frank were in favour again. He was suddenly the right man at the right time.
What impressed me most about Frank was his work ethic. He was always working, always writing things down. He really pushed himself, endlessly trying out new material and seeing how far he could go.
My attitude in turn was, ‘Everything is going to happen for me now. I’ve done all the hard work. Surely someone else can pick up the baton and just do it all for me.’
Of course it never stops being work. If you want to do well, you have to do the work. There is no way round it.
There is a Zen saying by Lao-Tzu: ‘Before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water.’ Not someone I was in the habit of quoting as a child – he wasn’t on the telly.
Slowly, my laziness started to impede me. Frustration began to creep in. I didn’t want to be known as the man who did funny voices. Peter Sellers had the same issue for a while; being a good impressionist can be a curse as much as a blessing.
But I didn’t know how to move away from impressions.
I was like a rabbit in the headlights. Everything had happened too quickly.
I shone so brightly that, in retrospect, it was inevitable burnout would follow. Although, in truth, laziness was as much of an issue.
I rang my agent Jan in 1990 and said, in a panic, ‘Why am I not getting any work? I thought everyone liked me? Where’s the noise gone? What’s happening?’
She said, ‘Darling, they’ve seen you. They know what you do. You’re an impersonator. You do funny voices and you’re very good at it.’
I said what I always say. Only perhaps, in this instance, I was slightly more petulant. ‘I want some acting work.’
Her response was unequivocal. ‘If you want to do something different, love, you’re going to have to pull a rabbit out of a hat.’
*
When I worked at Spitting Image, I used to mess around between takes doing funny voices. I did Duncan Thickett, my first real character, and Gavin Gannet, who later became Gareth Cheeseman. Gavin was a yuppie with slicked-back hair and a double-breasted suit. He was very Thatcherite and would lecture everyone about how good he was at business. He wasn’t very subtle; he was more of a caricature than a character study.
Jon Glover, who did the voices of the Duke of Edinburgh and Oliver Reed on Spitting Image, used to encourage me to do Ernest Moss, a health and safety officer who complained in a broad Lancashire accent about people not following proper procedure. There is a tiny bit of my dad in Ernest Moss: they share a preoccupation with the minutiae of technical engineering.
When Harry Enfield joined Spitting Image, he would look at me and say in a withering tone, ‘Are you doing your funny characters, Steve?’
Everyone else was laughing at me, but Harry wasn’t. He’s been very nice to me since; back then I was no doubt rather obnoxious.
Anyway, I suspected the ace up my sleeve was Duncan Disorderly, the drunk who hates students.
I went into the wig cupboard at Granada and nicked a streaked-blond feather-cut, a hairstyle that had been very popular with certain men in the eighties and immediately felt right. I bought a stick-on moustache, borrowed a jacket with rolled-up sleeves from one of my brothers and added a thin tie, slip-on shoes and white s
ocks.
By 1990 it was already a dated look: Duncan was still wearing a Bryan Ferry jacket just as the world was turning its attention to grunge. He was Miami Vice meets Rochdale. With a fag dangling from his mouth and a Ford Capri outside.
Just before John Thomson and I performed at Edinburgh in the summer of 1992, Patrick Marber suggested I change Duncan Disorderly’s name.
Again, I nearly missed a trick.
In early 1993, I started doing sketches on Saturday Zoo, an alternative variety show on Channel 4 hosted by Jonathan Ross. For the first show, John Thomson and Simon Day did a sketch in which they played two gay Hollywood men gossiping, while Patrick Marber and I did a lame sketch.
I was holding Paul Calf back, being precious about him.
At the end of the show, the photographers swarmed around John and Simon. Patrick leaned over to me, nodded at the pack of photographers and said, ‘There you go. It’s all over, mate.’
Patrick and I were both humiliated, and my blood ran cold. I thought I’d been in the driving seat. I immediately knew I had to stop messing around and put Paul Calf on the next week.
Meanwhile, Henry Normal and I wrote and rehearsed every week to make sure we had five minutes of rock-solid material every Saturday. Paul Calf was then given the Patrick Marber polish.
And the viewing figures spiked every time Paul Calf came on.
Suddenly people in the street started shouting ‘bag o’ shite’ at me.
Paul Calf’s catchphrase was catching fire.
Paul Calf was instantly recognisable. He was yesterday’s man playing catch-up with the new world. The classic pub bore. In a period of near-obsessive political correctness in which you could get a dirty look for opening a door for a woman, Paul Calf got away with everything. He was postmodern just as it was becoming a buzzword. In 1994, a test copy of Loaded magazine had Paul Calf on its cover, alongside the slogan ‘For Men Who Should Know Better’.
Loaded became emblematic of everything that was tired about postmodernism. But when it first came along, it was like punk. There was a strangulation of ideas at the time, and Loaded was a breath of fresh air. It was a totally legitimate and authentic response to the zeitgeist. It’s important sometimes to take everything, throw it up in the air and see where it lands.