Thursday 3/7/1997
Oh no. No no no no no no no no no no no no no. I am in pain. At 9.20 p.m. a car ran over my foot. At 12.00 a.m. I got back from the Royal Free Hospital. The day was long. Eleven hours at Fountain Studios in Wembley waiting around to do a handful of reaction shots for the Las Vegas sketch in It’s Ulrika! Racing home I stepped off the 268 bus in Belsize Avenue. As I tried to cross the road in front of it, I didn’t see the car overtaking and leaped out of the way. Unfortunately my left foot was run over. The driver was quick to abdicate responsibility and showed no sympathy: ‘I’ve got to be at work in ten minutes.’ However lots of local people came to my aid, especially an older Eastern European lady who came from the old-fashioned school of first aid, asking, ‘Would you like a cigarette?’
I felt like quite a star – an ambulance and the police arrived. As I was travelling by ambulance I expected not to wait long to be seen at the Royal Free. It was 11 p.m. by the time an inaudible doctor prodded my foot. An X-ray revealed a small break in one of my toes. So I have been given painkillers, and two of my toes have been strapped together. The hospital was full of mad drunk people. Perversely the nurses seemed to enjoy dealing with the nuts more than the patients. I listened in pain as out in the corridor groups of three or four nurses would wind them up: ‘You can’t sit there … Give me that bottle … If you come back again tomorrow night …’ Etc., etc., etc.
Friday 4/7/1997
I got through it. It’s 12.42 a.m. and the It’s Ulrika! recording is finally over. I regret to say that the evening was a little embarrassing. It took four hours to record, and suddenly having to carry a whole show, Ulrika was more than a little out of her depth. Poor woman. It was just all too much pressure on her. She just couldn’t communicate with the audience between takes, and ended up being negative and apologetic. And she kept on swearing, which turned a lot of people in the audience against her. Vic and Bob’s humour might be a little crude at times, but they never swear.
As for me, I relished working alongside Vic and Bob. People laughed and they enjoyed the lookalike sketch, and Matt and I carried our roles off with aplomb. Matt made a couple of wisecracks in the recording breaks, which delighted the audience immensely. What a pro he is. I don’t have the confidence to do that yet. As for Vic and Bob, even though I have now spent a couple of weeks solidly with them, I’m not sure I know them any better now than before. They are really distant, Bob in particular. Vic is more approachable, and we had an interesting chat about art. He definitely tries to draw a veil over his intellect, even though he is seriously bright. Matt has been very supportive and protective of me over the last fortnight, and for that I am very grateful. Like a big brother. Even though I am bigger and older.
Of course the one-off programme never became a series. I was disappointed, as Matt and I could have both really shone supporting Ulrika. However, the experience gave me some much-needed confidence. Your comedy idols laughing as you rehearse a scene – at that time it felt like the absolute peak of my career – but Matt and I were still desperately searching for a TV project of our own. Matt as George Dawes had been for many the most popular element of Shooting Stars, but it was still Vic and Bob’s show.
As luck would have it, a friend of mine from Hewland International, Richard Osman – brother of Suede bassist Matt Osman – had landed at job at Hat Trick Productions. Hat Trick is a brilliant company which specializes in comedy (it produces Have I Got News For You). Richard is fantastically clever, but it was a huge endorsement for him to get a job at Hat Trick, albeit in development. I would often go and visit Richard at the company’s office in Soho to talk about ideas – I was, after all, up and coming. Once I sat in reception with Peter Cook, who was preparing his legendary Clive Anderson chat-show special in which he played all the guests. He was flirting with the pretty receptionist, showing off his bowling skills by getting a paper cup into the bin.
‘Girls can’t bowl overarm,’ he told me.
‘Only underarm,’ I offered, trying and failing to improvise with this comedy god.
‘When a girl throws it’s like this …’ he said, miming a cack-handed delivery. I laughed, not wanting the little private performance ever to end.
Having subsequently met other comedy people who knew him well, including David Baddiel, Jonathan Ross and Graham Linehan, I now know that Peter Cook didn’t save his comedy for an audience or when he was getting paid; he liked to make everyone he met laugh. I was so glad to even sit in the same waiting area as him.
Richard had seen the spoof boy-band documentary Matt and I had done for Paramount. Boy bands were everywhere at the time. Take That dominated the charts, and in their wake many lesser acts followed. There had been an unintentionally hilarious documentary on TV called Making the Band about the creation of the group Upside Down, which had inspired Matt and me. Two middle-aged gay men who had made a fortune in business had decided they wanted to be pop Svengalis. Writing the script for our Paramount spoof was a case of watching the documentary over and over again, and identifying the funniest parts (of which there were many). Some of it you could put in the script verbatim.
Richard Osman thought there might be a Channel 4 series in the idea, so Matt and I met up with him. This was a huge break – to star in a series made by the best comedy production company in the country, a series that would be seen by millions, rather than thousands on Paramount. But Richard and Matt instantly disliked each other. There was mutual mistrust, and perhaps jealousy, as they were both friends I wrote comedy with.
‘So shall we start here in the office at 10 a.m. every day?’ suggested Richard.
‘I want to start later,’ said Matt. ‘That’s rush hour and I want to get a seat on the train.’
‘But you get on the Tube at Edgware, which is the start of the line. That means you’re guaranteed to get a seat!’ Richard was laughing but Matt was not amused.
Being caught between these two undeniably talented people became increasingly uncomfortable.
Wednesday 9/7/1997
There was tension at the end of the day when I suggested we start half an hour earlier tomorrow, 10.30 a.m. instead of 11. This didn’t go down well with Matt. He really hates having to get up early and will do anything to prevent it. Richard had previously idly suggested that anti-Semitism wasn’t as widespread as racism against Afro-Caribbeans, which was a mistake. Against overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Matt completely refuted it.
Thursday 10/7/1997
An eventful day. Hat Trick at 11 a.m. Matt huffed and puffed his way in at 11.15. He said he refused to work any earlier because he won’t travel on rush-hour trains. He told me and Richard this as if we had never been on a busy Tube before. When I remarked I was writing a diary, he reacted very badly: ‘Oh no. I’m gonna have to write a counter-diary denying everything!’ And he wasn’t joking. At the script meeting today, ‘Put this in your diary. Me and Richard having a bet about whether Ben Folds Five are on Nude records or not.’ Both of them can be Professor Neverebberwrongs at times. But every day they work together they become increasingly antagonistic. At one point when Richard left the room Matt complained that Richard had not made enough eye contact with him when he was talking. ‘Did you see? He was looking at you the whole time I was speaking.’
With Matt sometimes unavailable or unwilling, Richard and I pressed on with the project without him. We wrote the first episode together, and I was really thrilled with it. Matt did not share our enthusiasm, and as subsequent episodes arrived in which the world of the series opened up, Matt counted his lines and grumbled that there weren’t enough.
Despite all this my allegiance was always to Matt. Working with Matt could be difficult, but we were infinitely closer than Richard and me. Of course Matt is also an undeniable comic genius, something Richard is not. As the weeks and months passed, and Channel 4’s interest grew, Richard started behaving strangely towards me too. I would turn up for a writing session at the Hat Trick offices, and he would be distant and s
ilent. Or Richard would say he was busy, and having cleared the whole day to write with him I would end up going home after half an hour. I began to get the feeling that he wanted not just to produce but write the whole series on his own.
Friday 21/11/1997
Lunch with Richard Osman confirmed my worst fear: he hates Matt. That is the essential truth behind our contractual nightmare over Boys R Us. And although he hasn’t said it, I am sure Matt hates Richard too. And unfortunately the deck is stacked in Richard’s favour. ‘I know Matt can be difficult, but as a comedy actor few can match him. No one could play Gareth, the fat singer/songwriter better than him. Can you not at least concede that?’ Richard dismissed this. But we did do some great work on script four. It’s going to be brilliant and it would break my heart for Matt and I not to be part of it. But my loyalty is to Matt, and always will be.
Thursday 5/2/1998
The day spent writing with Matt was disrupted by phone calls from our agent Samira. Apparently Kevin Lygo (anagram of King Lovey), who is head of Channel 4 comedy, doesn’t think Matt and I should play Gareth and Scott. Why? Even more unbelievable than that, neither does she! And she is our agent! When she said that I thought, You’re not my agent any more. The only flicker of hope rests in the fact that between us, me and Matt own two-thirds of the format and maybe could ‘pull’ the show. But I doubt this. Later I spoke to Matt on the phone, who had been talking to Bob Mortimer about the Hat Trick situation. Bob came up with the completely maverick idea of me and Matt doing our own boy-band spoof on the Channel 4 sketch series Barking. I am doing to show the world it was our idea and piss off Hat Trick. But I doubt the bigwigs at Channel 4 would let it happen. ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,’ I said to Matt. Maybe we’ll bow out of TV for a year and concentrate on live work.
As I noted in my diary, Richard was forgetting something very important: Matt and I were the creators of the show. Although a spoof documentary about the creation of a boy band was not something you could patent, we were the first people to do it, and most of the characters and situations in the Channel 4 series had their origins in our sketches for Paramount. We were summoned to a meeting at Hat Trick’s offices with its boss Jimmy Mulville and Richard Osman. We thought it was to resolve our differences; it was more of a military coup.
Friday 12/12/97
A devastating day. From 10 until 11 a.m. in the Hat Trick meeting room with Matt, our agent Samira Higham, Jimmy Mulville, Richard and his agent. We were characterized by Jimmy as talentless fools who had left Richard in the lurch by going on tour and who should not be allowed to ruin his brilliant scripts.
Richard said nothing, not a word, as Jimmy Mulville shouted at us for half an hour.
‘Richard has worked so hard on these scripts,’ he snarled. ‘I am not having you two ruining this show!’
‘But we created it,’ I said, shaking with anger.
‘I have seen your sketches. They are nothing. Nothing. Do you think you have a monopoly on boy-band spoofs?’
We didn’t of course, but if Hat Trick didn’t need our permission to take our idea Jimmy Mulville wouldn’t be wasting his breath screaming at us.
I tried to catch Richard Osman’s eye. He just sat there and smirked.
‘You are going to sign this contract,’ said Jimmy. ‘Count yourself lucky we’re giving you anything for it. Now get out of here.’
I have never been treated with such disrespect. Samira crumbled and I had to take it upon myself to fight our case. It was a valiant effort but ultimately in vain.
Matt and I walked out into the streets of Soho. We couldn’t believe that Jimmy Mulville – who we had vaguely enjoyed watching on the comedy sketch show Who Dares Wins – had screamed at us. Matt said, ‘I hope Jimmy Mulville drops down dead.’ And that Richard, like a guilty man on trial who did not want to incriminate himself, had chosen to say nothing. ‘I told you we shouldn’t have trusted Osman,’ said Matt. He couldn’t even bring himself to say his first name any more. I felt so bad that I had trusted him and so helped create this awful mess.
Increasingly bad news came via Samira Higham at ICM. ‘Neither of you are going to be in it.’ We were incredulous. ‘But you do need to sign a contract so they can make the series.’
‘I am not signing it,’ said Matt.
‘If you don’t sign it neither of you will ever work in television again,’ hissed Samira.
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Because you will have stopped Hat Trick producing a series with Channel 4, and people in the business will talk, and you will have such a bad reputation that no one will ever want to work with you again.’
‘I am not signing it,’ said Matt again.
But in the end he did. It felt like we had a gun to our heads. The contract netted us a small amout of money each, and the show went into production with the title Boys Unlimited. A young James Corden was cast in Matt’s role, and although he was good, I can’t help thinking that Matt would have been better in what was really an extension of his performance as Gary Barlow on Rock Profile, which was masterful. Needless to say, Matt and I were delighted when the series bombed. It sank without trace and was not recommissioned.
Nearly a decade later Matt and I were walking down Old Compton Street in Soho with our Little Britain producer Geoff Posner. We were stars now, and Little Britain was undeniably the biggest comedy show in the country. Lovely Geoff, who is a friend to everybody, knew nothing about all this ancient history. Walking towards us was Jimmy Mulville, shockingly thin as he was recovering from cancer, and Geoff introduced us. Matt and I both bristled. I really really didn’t want to shake the hand of the man who had shouted at us in his office that day, but I didn’t want to embarrass Geoff, so reluctantly I did. I looked out of the corner of my eye to see what my comedy partner would do. Matt was more inclined to harbour a grudge than me, but after a while he shook Jimmy’s hand too. When we walked away I was shocked at how raw the anger in me still was.
Not long after that I met Jimmy again by chance at a dinner party and he finally apologized to me.
‘You could have had Little Britain,’ I said, ‘if you had stuck with us.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘Don’t think I haven’t thought about that.’
‘You would have made a fortune.’
‘I know. Look, tell Matt I’m sorry too.’
‘No, that’s not good enough. You have to write to him.’
‘Write to him?’
‘Yes. He deserves a proper apology.’
‘Oh OK. I will.’
‘Then we might, we just might, consider appearing in a Hat Trick show.’
Both of us had refused to appear in anything made by the company, and we had been asked countless times to appear on Have I Got News For You after the success of Little Britain.
Jimmy wrote his letter. It is strange how healing a simple apology can be. Now I rather like Jimmy Mulville. He is a funny and intelligent man. In fact he told me one of my favourite show business anecdotes.
A friend of his attended an avant-garde Polish mime act at the Edinburgh Fringe in the early 1980s. A man came on the stage naked covered head to toe in white paint. The audience went with it, thinking, Ooh, very experimental. The man bent down and shat on the stage. The audience stayed with it: Very interesting. At the interval an announcement was made: ‘The performance cannot continue because of the ill health of our leading performer.’
Richard Osman never said sorry.
Now I switch on the TV waiting for the news to start and see that he is dispensing facts as Xander Armstrong’s sidekick on the daytime quiz show Pointless. So the story does have a happy ending. For Matt and me.
21
A Surprise Guest Star
In the autumn of 1997 Matt and I put together the best of our Edinburgh shows and entirely on the strength of Matt’s success in Shooting Stars went on the road. We called it ‘Sir Bernard Chumley’s Grand Tour’. The show played arts centres, small theatres, even a nigh
tclub. A decade later Matt and I toured Little Britain Live through the UK, Ireland and Australia. We played to a million people in total, often at arenas where the audience topped 12,000 each night. Fewer people saw us over six weeks in 1997 than they did on one night on the Little Britain Live tour. However, it was one of the most important experiences of our lives.
Matt was already a very seasoned performer, having ‘done the circuit’ for years. I was much less so. At the Edinburgh Fringe Festival the audience is pretty middle class, akin to a theatre crowd; a comedy audience is much less forgiving. If they don’t think you’re funny they don’t sit in silence like a the theatre audience, they let you know.
As 99.9 per cent of the audience had bought tickets because they had seen Matt in Shooting Stars, when I came on at the start of the evening as stage manager Tony Rogers, most people thought I was the real stage manager. Being almost completely unknown could be a blessing or a curse. Sometimes the audience were pleasantly surprised that there was someone else funny in the show other than Matt; at other times they were restless because the person they had come out to see wasn’t on stage yet.
For me it was a really important challenge. To be able to make the audience laugh for ten minutes on my very own at the start was never going to be easy. Mostly I succeeded. Sometimes I failed. When I failed I just had to go on stage the next night and try again.
Matt’s friend Tim Attack joined us to play keyboards. In 2011 Matt fulfilled his ambition of appearing in Les Miserables. Until then he had been something of a frustrated musical star, and in my view there were far too many songs in the show. Our great friend the comic actor Paul Putner toured with us too. Paul played the manager of whatever venue we were playing, and as he did not have a high TV profile the audience usually believed he was the real thing. Paul would come onto the stage unannounced and threaten to stop the performance as it had become too rude. Often the audience would boo him, and of course most comedy audiences like their entertainment rude. Using a successful sequence from our Edinburgh show, Matt as Sir Bernard Chumley would dance around him singing ‘Cunt cunt cunt!’ to the tune of the ‘Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy’.
Camp David: The Autobiography Page 16
