by Steve Coogan
Although I’d created a postmodern character, it took a while to fully understand the postmodern vibe.
Someone saw Rob Newman do a stand-up gig in which he said, ‘I hate working-class people. I wish they’d fuck off and take their scaffolding with them.’
I was shocked; I thought it was a terrible thing to say. I didn’t understand what he was doing. Around the same time, Nick Hancock was booed by freshers for saying that he couldn’t stand poor people because they make you feel guilty for having a few bob. And he patted his trouser pocket.
He had to stop mid-show and say, ‘Why are you booing? Do you not understand irony? Is the only conversation you’re having still along the lines of what A levels you did?’
Rob and Nick were postmodern first. It only slowly started to dawn on me; I wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer at that time. I was keen and enthusiastic, but I wasn’t as smart as Rob Newman, who was really tapping into the zeitgeist.
In the end, I grew to despise everything postmodern for covertly legitimising appalling attitudes that we thought we had got rid of. But the timing was perfect for Paul Calf because people liked to laugh at his outmoded way of thinking.
He was a release because he’d say things like, ‘I’m a radical feminist. I think you have to be these days if you want to get your end away.’
Of course, in much the same way I’d initially been appalled by Rob’s routine, not everyone got Paul Calf.
I was doing a gig in a student union and this guy kept shouting, ‘Sexist!’
I pulled my Paul Calf wig off in the middle of the gig and shouted, ‘It’s ironic, you fucking idiot!’
I put the wig back on and everyone laughed.
*
Paul Calf was so popular that, after eight weeks, someone suggested bringing Paul’s girlfriend Julie to life. Although he talked about her a lot, it somehow didn’t feel right. I thought it would be funnier to do his sister, Pauline, and I knew what kind of woman she’d be like: the ballsy, assertive and predatory girls who had started at my school when it became a comprehensive.
I’d found the new intake of girls vaguely threatening because they came from the local council estates. They were definitely not victims; I’d have been intimidated by Pauline had I met her during my adolescent years.
I tried Pauline Calf out for the very first time on national television on Saturday Zoo. I didn’t test her anywhere else beforehand, I simply walked out in front of the cameras dressed in a big peroxide wig, a short skirt and white stilettos.
Pauline was an instant hit, pretty much like Paul. The key to Paul, in particular, is the fact that he’s old-fashioned and vaudeville. It’s just gags. He’s basically a thin Les Dawson with a feather-cut; the rhythms of his speech are certainly Dawson’s.
At the same time, there is a crossover between Paul Calf and Alan Partridge. Paul has this lack of self-awareness and earnestness that’s also evident in Alan, though Paul is more self-knowing.
Paul’s relationship with the audience is very much, ‘You know what I’m saying is wrong, but I know you secretly agree with me.’
It was cheeky, almost challenging you to remonstrate. Nobody did.
Sometimes I could swap material between Paul Calf and Alan Partridge. If a gag I was writing for Paul was too long, I’d tweak it and give it to Alan.
Alan is more nuanced, so I had to push him into more of a caricature if I took him on tour. But whenever I did Paul Calf live, I knew I could just go onstage and relax. He’s so low energy that it was almost like taking a break.
There’s a twinkle in his eye when he knows he’s being bad. He’s a bit daft, a bit naughty, and he knows he’s saying things he shouldn’t say. I would delight in the delivery of the lines.
It’s traditional, old-fashioned shtick. Paul Calf is a proper comedy character. Unadulterated fun, guiltless joy. I miss him. Sometimes.
CHAPTER 41
JAN MURPHY WANTED me to move to London as soon as I finished college, but I was reluctant to leave Manchester. I bought a house with Martin Murray in 1989 and we rented a room out to Alan Francis, who went on to co-write Jeffrey Dahmer is Unwell at the 1995 Edinburgh Festival.
Martin and I played a trick on Alan once. Martin bought a couple of blank-firing pistols that were very realistic: a Browning 9 mm and a Walter PPK. We used to mess around with them; I could exactly mimic the sound of the gun being loaded and then fired. The blank bullets were deafening and quite dangerous because they gave off this charge.
Alan came back home one day to find me downstairs and Martin upstairs. Martin and I staged an argument and then suddenly I pulled a blank-firing pistol out of my jacket pocket and started shooting down the stairs. Martin was shooting back up at me. The house was full of smoke and the noise deafening.
We completely traumatised poor Alan, who was screaming at us to stop before someone was hurt.
I did eventually rent a flat in Balham, south London, with Miles Harvey, who had been at Manchester Poly with me. I was aware that I was working all the time and Miles was always waiting for the phone to ring. It was brutal enough for him, without me doing well.
Miles was the brother of Marcus Harvey, one of the Young British Artists who would later shock the tabloids with his portrait of Moors murderer Myra Hindley. Damien Hirst often came round to the flat; I always encouraged Miles to invite him because he was very funny.
Damien once showed us a photo of himself leaning on a dead man’s head.
I thought, ‘Well, that’s not very nice.’
I didn’t think it was art, I just thought it was a stupid photo he’d taken for a laugh. There was no indication at all that he was going to become one of the highest-paid artists in the world.
I didn’t settle properly in London; I got my work done there and went back up to Manchester whenever I could. My personal life was complicated. I was seeing a woman called Lizzie when I bought the house with Martin. She had been Martin’s girlfriend and, as one of my best friends, he wasn’t delighted. But he got over it – he says now simply that it was ‘awkward’ – and Lizzie moved into our house.
Lizzie and I were together for three years. She was great. She was very organised, so it was like having a PA as well as a girlfriend and she helped me get the Edinburgh show ready for the summer of 1992.
While I was still with Lizzie, I met Anna Cole.
I caught Anna’s eye in a pub in 1991. She was a student in Manchester and she didn’t have a landline, so I used to sneak out of the house I shared with Martin and Lizzie and throw rocks at Anna’s window. Eventually she’d let me in.
When Anna moved to London in 1992, I used to see her there and Lizzie up in Manchester. Neither of them knew about the other. I was such a fool. It wasn’t even exciting after a while; it just became normal once I got into the rhythm of it.
In fact, it was often just exhausting.
There were a number of times I went to Euston and put Lizzie or Anna on the train, went to a cafe and waited for the next one to turn up. I just had to make sure the train times allowed a gap of around an hour.
Lizzie came up to Edinburgh for the festival in 1992 and then, after she’d gone back to Manchester, Anna came up from London.
I knew it would all catch up with me eventually.
In the end, one found out about the other and they had a long conversation on the phone. Remarkably, instead of dumping me, they both told me I had to make my mind up. I ran away and hid in London.
Eventually, I chose Anna; Lizzie went on to forge a successful life in the theatre. I think she dodged a bullet.
Anna and I moved into a flat in Belsize Park. But I had to work for her affection. She wasn’t remotely interested in my work, which was good in a way. I liked the fact that she was conscientious about things. She was smart, provocative, very political, very left-wing.
I could assuage my occasional bouts of guilt about earning proper money by subsidising Anna as she studied to be a lawyer.
I was happy with
Anna, but I had endless flings. For about a year, when things started to happen for me, I slept around. If women came my way, I wouldn’t avoid them. And there were always girls hanging around. Slightly wild girls I met in the pubs and clubs of the comedy circuit.
I had been cloistered as a Catholic teenager, and now I was like a kid in a candy shop. Or a bull in a china shop. Take your pick.
There’s a strange Victorian morality about being sexually active that I don’t share, as long as it’s consensual. Judging people’s behaviour has become a national sport.
I don’t regret sleeping with all those girls. Not really. I thought I was Byronic.
I had a long, delayed adolescence.
Having said that, I did hurt people and I’m not proud of it. But I felt slightly disconnected from it, and at the time I didn’t really think about the consequences. Sex is just sex. It doesn’t necessarily carry any emotional involvement. When you’re young it doesn’t really matter. If I was still shagging around now it would probably be a bit grim. Contrition has been shown and apologies made to those affected. I don’t intend to elaborate here out of respect for those people. And I will say that I can still count as friends all the women I ever had a relationship with.
In the late eighties and early nineties, however, it was a big adventure. It was a big wide world populated by women who seemed quite sophisticated and who wanted to have sex with me.
I thought, ‘Gosh, I must be interesting.’
It wasn’t, at the start at least, about being famous, because I wasn’t that famous; I’d only been on TV a few times.
Famous is when you get in a taxi and the driver says, ‘Here, you’re that fella on the TV!’ That didn’t happen to me until 1994, when Knowing Me Knowing You with Alan Partridge moved from radio to television.
The girls I met in the early nineties were just responding to me as the funny guy who’d performed earlier in the club. They were attracted to the fact that I was funny. They also seemed to like the fact that I wasn’t an alpha male. I was a bit square, a bit nerdish. Never cool. I slowly realised that some women liked the fact I wasn’t urbane, nor was I trying to be.
CHAPTER 42
IN 1991, AS I was feeling sorry for myself in Rhodes, Patrick Marber had moved to Paris to try to write a novel. I was lost and lonely in Rhodes, and Patrick was lost and lonely in Paris.
In the meantime, Armando Iannucci, who had been working for the BBC since the late eighties, was working as a light entertainment radio producer. He was on a BBC training course learning how to make feature programmes. He didn’t want to make a straight feature or news programme, however, and he was fed up of conventional radio comedy. Instead he came up with the idea of a spoof news comedy programme called On The Hour.
He put together an informal pilot that was too straight because it used real reporters. For the proper Radio 4 pilot, he assembled a group of performers including me and Patrick, Chris Morris (who also wrote for the show), David Schneider, Doon Mackichan and Rebecca Front, and writers including himself, Stewart Lee, Richard Herring, David Quantick and the late Steven Wells.
It was an extraordinary collection of people, all in their twenties. And, best of all, I was in their gang.
Armando had used Patrick on Week Ending, the satirical current affairs sketch show on Radio 4, which he had produced, and Patrick had recommended me. Armando had also seen me doing impersonations and thought I’d be useful in a repertory group because I was versatile and quite funny.
I don’t think he adored my comedy, but he could see I wasn’t just doing silly voices, that I was trying to do something a bit different. Perhaps he recognised, consciously or otherwise, my own burgeoning frustration with the comedy I was doing.
Back in the day when people still wrote letters, Armando wrote to me.
Apparently I didn’t write back for six weeks.
Armando says that when we finally spoke on the phone, I was horribly quiet and monosyllabic.
When I turned up at the studio and we physically met for the first time, Armando was surprised by how low-key I was. He wasn’t sure how to interact with me.
I was low-key because I was nervous. I thought it better, as Mark Twain said more eloquently, to keep my mouth shut and be thought an idiot than to open it and remove all doubt.
The On The Hour writers had come up with a script, and to loosen us up, Armando suggested we play with it a little. He remembers the transformation in me: I went from shy to fearless when I started doing impressions and improvising. I could deal with anything and everything that was thrown at me. He says I came alive.
I had turned up at On The Hour knowing it was a spoof current affairs show, but not quite realising how special it was. On that first day, Armando read something that Stewart Lee and Richard Herring had written. It didn’t follow the normal rules. It was properly funny, Python funny. Avant-garde, different, fresh.
On The Hour felt experimental, for me at least. I learned that you don’t have to be conventionally funny to get a laugh. You can laugh at things without quite knowing why they’re funny.
Armando knew exactly what he wanted to do with On The Hour – and, when it transferred to BBC2 in 1994, The Day Today. He was brilliant at pushing me away from punchlines and the more traditional comedy formats that I was still hanging on to.
In turn, I brought some accessibility to the characters and made them approachable. Not that we sat for hours and hours discussing character motivation. Most of the time we just chucked ideas around: ‘What about a guy who talks like this?’ Or ‘Who has this kind of voice?’
We recorded On The Hour in the Paris Studios in the bowels of the BBC on Lower Regent Street. Photos of the Goons and Tony Hancock adorned the walls, and I was exactly where I wanted to be – and, unusually, I knew it at the time rather than only with hindsight: following in the footsteps of the BBC comedy giants that I’d listened to on vinyl time and again as I was growing up.
We’d talk about things, improvise, go out for lunch, then try to spin things one way or another. Writing comedy isn’t always funny, but we were always laughing. It occurred to me that the Pythons must have felt the same when they first met.
Some of the sketches were scripted, some had bullet points to be covered and others were improvised. I remember reading scripts and crying with laughter, but knowing I’d be hard-pushed to explain why.
Armando’s comedy was funny partly because it was so silly. He didn’t employ the normal cadences and rhythms of traditional comedy, where the audience is given a green light to laugh. There was a nervousness about it.
I was incredibly excited by the material, some of which was very abstract. I loved the fact that On The Hour wasn’t derivative. It was its own thing. Fresh and confident, with this brilliantly acerbic quality, a kind of ‘we don’t care if you don’t get it, we don’t care if you don’t like it, we’re doing it because it amuses us’ attitude. It was quite elitist, and very uncompromising. Radio 4 had faith in the talent and therefore let us get on with it; it was the BBC at its very best.
It quickly became clear that we were making the kind of cutting-edge comedy that would make French and Saunders and The Comic Strip Presents … look dated. In fact, I felt like I was in on a big secret that reduced much of the other comedy around at the time to hot air.
We all felt like we’d discovered treasure.
On The Hour felt like a TV show on the radio, and that’s what made it funny. It was arrogant enough to believe it was more important than TV. Paris Studios was isolated from Oxford Street, so you felt like you were in a timeless bubble of radio comedy. We knew there wouldn’t be anything like On The Hour for at least another five years.
There was no one in my line of work who I would have swapped places with. It was what I’d been working towards for years. I would read the material and be impatient to record it. Not just the sports commentator who became Alan, but all the characters.
On The Hour might have been innovative, but it was nonethe
less made in an old-fashioned way; we all sat around wearing Bakelite headphones with a woven cord. It was always pre-recorded, and it was very ad hoc. There’s something special about radio: you feel you can do anything. You could have an idea at lunchtime and execute it that same afternoon. The expediency of it made for very fresh, spontaneous material.
I remember watching Armando, who was doing a radio course, edit with a razor blade. It seems prehistoric now. We were still in an analogue world, but On The Hour laughed at the past as well as presciently mocking a digital future dominated by surreal soundbites.
I occasionally listen to radio comedy now, and it seems the affable, jocular, avuncular, middle-class nature of Radio 4 remains unchanged and undimmed.
We played around with the formula, challenged it and ignored the rules. There was nothing friendly about On The Hour, and that’s what was so delicious about it. It was incredibly acerbic and a total release.
*
I wasn’t very sophisticated when I joined On The Hour. At drama college I was surrounded by people who would talk endlessly about the process, while I was just chomping at the bit to ‘do it’.
When I did my impressions at college, people were often surprised at my detailed observations. But I can pick up mannerisms easily, and I like observing the oddness of people. I have always been able to dip into this big bucket of observations in my head, to change my voice and find voices for characters.
I knew I had a skill, but I felt selfconscious and slightly out of my depth in Armando’s gang.
Everyone on the On The Hour team was clever and confident, and I wanted to be like them. I wanted some of their smartness. I’d been frustrated on my drama course, but I was learning from Armando et al. every day; they made me think, they raised my game.