Listening to Tom talk was infinitely more entertaining than hearing him read the lines we had written, though suddenly he would become restless telling stories and hurry through the work so that he could disappear off into the streets of London. Tom told us that he had been offered a part in Yasmin Reza’s play Art, which would change its cast every three months over a decade-long run. He said, ‘I asked to meet them before taking the job. They said there was no need; the role was mine. I insisted. I went to meet them. And then they withdrew their offer.’
Having spent time with him I was not surprised. Tom Baker is bonkers. We used his bonkersness to our advantage though.
The writing for Little Britain on radio was sometimes difficult. A sketch show eats ideas so you need hundreds.
Monday 26/03/2001
‘Shall we work on some radio ideas?’ I asked Matt. It was 3 p.m. and we’d spent the morning finishing off our ‘Rock the Blind’ spoof.*
‘Yes,’ he said. Then he went to the loo. Then he spent an age creating a file on his computer like a schoolboy who hadn’t done his homework. He was putting off the moment of truth for as long as he could. He hadn’t thought of anything. I’d spent the last four months writing down ideas when they came to me … in the pool, in the street, out with friends. I had around fifty. All good starting points for us to work from.
‘Did you think of these over the weekend?’ he asked, having listened to my long list.
‘No, when I think of something funny I write it down.’
I always liked to write any ideas I had down in a little black notebook that I carried around everywhere with me. You never knew when you might hear something funny, or have an idea that you might be able to use one day.
Thursday 29 /03/2001
Overheard in the YMCA this morning:
Ten-year-old girl: You’re flabby.
Nine-year-old girl: No, you’re flabby.
Eleven-year-old girl: You’re both flabby.
The truth is they were all flabby.
Idea for a sketch. Some lads are exchanging Xmas presents in the pub.
Lad 1: I got you that X-Files video you wanted.
Lad 2: OK, thanks. I’ve got something for you. Close your eyes … (He produces a box from his pocket. In it is an emerald necklace which he puts around his friend’s neck.) Emeralds. To go with your eyes …
Every six months or so Matt and I would have a big falling-out, but that was generally a good thing. It would clear the air.
Wednesday 17/1/2001
So because I was in a mood with Matt I said little when we recorded Tom’s voice for Little Britain. When we’d finished I plucked up the courage to speak and it all came pouring out – how he’d been lazy in the writing, how his bad behaviour with others has held his and maybe even our career back, how unwelcome he makes me feel when he opens the door in the morning. How he hates work. Everything I’d wanted to say for ages but hadn’t. He listened, accepted most things and came back at me with others. Which I accepted. I am not easy either. What was important was that we were talking like this. It ended with a hug on Tottenham Court Road. I was so pleased and happy afterwards.
Sometimes a strike would get in the way.
Monday 5/2/2001
Today there was a Tube strike.
Today we were due to rehearse Little Britain at 10.30 a.m.
I walked from my flat in North London and arrived at 10.20.
Paul Putner cycled, Samantha Power walked and Ashley Blaker got up early and caught a bus.
Matt arrived at about 11.45. He phoned me at 10 a.m. from his flat in West Hampstead wanting to call the whole thing off.
‘I’m at Camden,’ I said.
‘How did you get there?’
‘I walked.’
‘You walked?’
‘Yes, if you started walking now you’d be there by 11 a.m.’
‘Walk? To the West End?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well …?’
Ashley received bulletins every fifteen minutes or so. By the time he finally arrived Matt had developed a hitherto unseen limp.
However, at our best as a writing team we made each other laugh. When one of us was laughing we knew the sketch was OK. If both of us were laughing we knew we had something good. And of course most often we wrote something together that neither of us would have been able to come up with alone.
The Little Britain radio pilot recording took place at the Drill Hall, just off Tottenham Court Road in central London. We of course asked all our friends. We had invited all our friends to the performance of Crazy Jonathan’s and they had laughed only for the first few minutes. This time they laughed all the way through and immediately we knew we were on to something. But, despite everything falling into place so beautifully – Tom’s links, the classical music, the sketches – Radio 4 still made us wait an agonizing three months before they said yes.
I was getting frustrated. I was completely broke; my debit card was being declined in the supermarket every week or so, and I was too proud to ask my parents for help. I didn’t want them to know quite how little money I was making, and I knew they thought, particularly my father, that I should give up on this dream and get a proper job. Much of our work was unpaid – our Edinburgh performances for example just about covered their costs. Developing ideas and scripts was mostly undertaken on spec, and unlike Matt I had no income from adverts or Shooting Stars, with its lucrative book, tour and videos.
However, with the radio pilot of Little Britain I knew Matt and I had produced something of undeniable quality, something I could be proud of. I knew it was the best piece of work we had ever done. So I was exasperated by the long wait.
Finally we received the call. Radio 4 would like to pick up a series of four episodes. The fee would be £500 each for writing and performing in each one. We spent the next six months working on them, so I lived on seventy-six pounds a week. I would have been better off claiming unemployment and housing benefit, but I knew we were getting closer and closer to our dream …
27
The Comedy Pope
The best thing about making a comedy show on the radio (apart from not having to learn your lines) is that you don’t need any sets, costumes or make-up. So you can rewrite the script at very short notice, invent a new character or sketch on the day. That’s much harder if not impossible on television.
We recorded the episodes once a week, which meant we could gauge how the characters were received by the audience. If they liked them, we could feature them more.
Vicky Pollard is a case in point. All our Little Britain characters started with one sketch. We wrote a two-minute piece about the most inarticulate person in the world being put on trial. Matt’s performance was extraordinary, and no one had heard anything quite like it before. Buoyed by the audience’s laughter, we wrote more and more. Other characters never made it past their one sketch, but it didn’t matter. Soon we had a cast of characters to equal our contemporaries. Not just Vicky, but Daffyd, Emily, Sebastian, Kenny Craig, Jason (who fancied his friend’s grandmother), Mr Mann and Roy, and Little Dennis Waterman made their debut in front of an audience on the radio show. Marjorie Dawes had appeared as George Dawes’ mother on a couple of episodes of Shooting Stars, but this was a different incarnation of her – as a ‘Fatfighters’ group leader.
Some of our best sketches were written at this time. Because radio humour can never be visual, you have to work doubly hard on the words. The ‘Pirate Memory Game’ sketch, the first appearance of Mr Mann and the long-suffering shopkeeper Roy, may just be my favourite piece we ever wrote.
In the days when I was pretty much anonymous I could while away time idling down the street without any feeling of self-consciousness. After a drink at the Hollytree pub in Hampstead with Graham Linehan I looked in the window of the toy shop opposite and saw in the display Yo Ho Ho: A Pirate Memory Game. The specificity of it amused me, and I thought how funny it could be if someone came into that shop, asked for somet
hing as specific as a ‘pirate memory game’ and then rejected it as ‘not quite what I had in mind’. I told Matt the next day at work. Many people cannot believe that writing comedy sketches can be regarded as work.
‘I guess you come up with it all down the pub. Have a few beers then just get talking?’ and ‘Do you write the stuff in advance, or just make it up on the day?’ are just a couple of the questions I get asked. Now writing may not be going-down-a-mine hard work, but it is still work, and can be exhausting, mentally. Matt and I wrote the ‘Pirate Memory Game’ quickly, like all our best sketches. The ones you labour over and rewrite ten times generally turn out the worst. The sketch was old-fashioned, but in my opinion old-fashioned in a good way. For me the ‘Pirate Memory Game’ was important, as it proved we could write a ‘classic’-style sketch, with a proper beginning, middle and end. It would not have been out of place in an episode of The Two Ronnies.
Little Britain was to be broadcast at 6.30 p.m. on Radio 4, and so it couldn’t be too rude either. It could explore some adult themes, but there could be no swearing or explicit sexual references. Again that made us work harder as writers, as both swearing and sexual references are easy buttons for comedians to press to get a laugh.
We assembled a little repertory company of actors around us: Paul Putner of course, Samantha Power (who we had met on Spoofovision) and Jean Ainslie. Jean was eighty when we worked with her. She was a rare talent, an old lady who never acted being an old lady; she just was one. We had seen her be naturalistic in Brass Eye and knew she would be perfect as the grandma Jason fancied in those uncomfortable sketches. Very sadly Jean died between the recordings of the first and second radio series, so we never had the chance to bring her with us to the television series.
The reviews for the first radio series of Little Britain were all positive, only my dad was unable to give me a full endorsement. When I asked him if he had heard it, he replied, ‘I was driving back from seeing your mum on Brownie camp with someone and I didn’t think I could just put the radio on and listen to it with him.’ This struck me as very strange. If I’m a father one day and my son makes his own radio show, I hope I make everyone in the world listen to it.
Despite the good reviews, television was still not taking much notice of the series. Graham Linehan was and still is a close friend. He’s a legendary and much loved figure in the world of comedy, his work at the time including Father Ted, Big Train and Black Books. I told him that even with a successful radio series we were struggling to make it on to TV.
‘I want to help you and Matt,’ he told me one night at the pub. ‘Little Britain is a good show – it’s a great show. I’ll direct the pilot for you.’
‘Oh Graham, thanks …’
‘I won’t do the series. I can’t. I’ve got too many other projects to do. But if my name can help you get Little Britain on to television, then I’d be happy to help.’
His endorsement was like being anointed by the Comedy Pope. Suddenly BBC television executives sat up and took notice: ‘If Graham Linehan thinks it’s good, then it must be …’
The new channel BBC3 was preparing to launch in a year. Having already made two series of Rock Profile (and the strangely unfunny special Rock the Blind ) for a digital channel, we were reluctant to give the series to them. We needed to be on terrestrial television with our contemporaries. Matt and I wanted a large audience to see us, and to be able to tour after the series had come out. It was pretty much impossible to sell a tour unless you were on one of the major TV channels. Our success at Edinburgh convinced us we could deliver a good live show as performers, and now we had the material too.
However, Jane Root, who ran BBC2 at the time, never warmed to us, so we went to see Stuart Murphy, the controller of BBC3.
BBC3 had trendy offices, and on the wall a poster which read:
The BBC3 viewer is –
Jacqui
23
Likes pubs and clubs
Single but dating regularly
Drinks Bacardi Breezers
Works in PR
Earns £25,000+ a year
Spends her money on CDs and clothes
Holidays in Greece
As Matt, Graham and I sat outside Stuart’s office, I stared at it and said, ‘Is that their only viewer?’
Of course ‘Jacqui’ was meant to be representative of who their viewers might be; whether our show would appeal to ‘Jacqui’ was beyond me. The average age for listeners on Radio 4 was fifty-five.
A secretary took us into Stuart’s office.
‘Have you heard the radio series?’ prompted Graham.
‘I haven’t had a chance to listen to it yet,’ Stuart said, ‘but I’ve got the tapes right here on my desk.’ My heart sank. ‘But I’m a big fan of Rock Profile and of course Shooting Stars.’
‘Thanks,’ said Matt.
I nodded a thank you, as I had only been in Shooting Stars for ten seconds so didn’t feel I was in any position to take any credit for it.
Stuart’s ideas were not to any of our tastes.
‘We can put dance music on all the sketches and release a CD of it afterwards,’ he said.
‘That’s not important,’ I said.
‘It is important, David. The marketing of the show is very important.’
Tense.
‘What’s important to me is that it’s funny,’ said Graham. ‘And I think it’s very funny.’
‘We want to be as big as the Two Ronnies,’ said Matt.
This is what clinched it for Stuart.
‘I love the Two Ronnies,’ he said. ‘I will give you the money to go and make a pilot, and then I can put it out on the launch night of BBC3 next year.’
Walking out of the office, I said to Graham, ‘What about the thing about having dance music on the sketches? That would kill them stone dead.’
‘Oh that doesn’t matter. We’ll just take his money and make the show we want to make,’ he said, obviously a great deal more experienced at dealing with television executives than me. ‘He won’t remember what he said in the meeting. They never do.’
Graham is not only a master of comedy, he’s also a student, forever reading books about the art of screenwriting, and expounding upon it. He bought me a book by William Goldman (screenwriter of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men, Marathon Man, The Stepford Wives, Heat, The Princess Bride) called Adventures in the Screen Trade for my birthday one year. Its first sentence is ‘Nobody knows anything.’ Goldman was writing about Hollywood and how no one truly knows how to have a hit movie. The same of course can be said of a hit TV series.
However, Graham knew more than we did. He certainly knew something about comedy. Delivering three consecutive television hits – and co-creating Ted and Ralph for The Fast Show, that sublime comic reworking of Lady Chatterley’s Lover along the way – was no fluke.
‘This is TV, not radio!’ he would tell us over and over again, when we dusted off another successful radio sketch and presented it to him. ‘Just because it worked on the radio doesn’t mean it will on TV.’
‘I’m going to fight these changes every step of the way,’ said Matt to Graham after one particularly strong set of notes. I was so embarrassed as Graham was my friend, and I had brought him to the project, which he was doing as a huge favour.
‘I’m only trying to make it better!’ said Graham. ‘If you don’t want me to I’ve got plenty more things I could be getting on with.’
Fortunately I managed to talk Graham round, and work continued. He made Matt and I work really hard, creating strong visual humour for the pilot episode:
Sebastian jumping on top of the PM when he says there’s a sniper outside.
Ian and Ian, the world record breakers, with their one box of dominoes.
Jason’s point of view when he sees his friend’s nan for the first time, complete with soft focus and romantic music.
And he generously suggested some of the visual jokes that accompanied Tom B
aker’s narration.
Graham encouraged us to be ambitious with casting too. Instead of trying to get ‘a Tony Head type’ for the role of the PM, we just called Tony Head.
Wednesday 29/05/2002
Anthony Head came into rehearsals for the first time today and was brilliant. His performance was so still and truthful. It’s amazing how working against a quality actor can lift your own performance.
The location sketches went well, though I was surprised Matt didn’t feel it necessary to be there when he wasn’t in a sketch. He was never a one for getting up early, however much was at stake. The night in the studio went brilliantly, and I remembered the Richard Wilson trick of talking to the audience before and making them laugh between the takes to keep them entertained.
I still felt very much in Matt’s shadow and knew I had to earn my right to be perceived as a partner rather than a ‘sidekick’. The audience’s reaction was tumultuous. Of course there were lots of friends there. If you listen closely to the audience laughter you can hear Edgar Wright’s distinctive guffaw. However, most weren’t friends, and they still laughed. It was a glorious night. The show was received as if it was an old favourite, rather than something new.
Matt and I both knew that this pilot was something really special and deserved to be seen by more people than the tiny audience that was going be available to BBC3, so we had to go back to Jane Root at BBC2. It was 20 August 2002. I remember it well because it was my thirty-first birthday. It seemed I was at least a year late on my deadline for success.
‘What sketches do you think don’t work?’ the wiry blonde bespectacled channel controller asked. This was a horrible question to have to answer – a bit like when the great Sir David Frost famously made Tony Blair squirm by asking him, ‘What do you think is your worst quality as prime minister?’ No one wants to emphasize their failures; they want to concentrate on their successes.
‘Well,’ I said, trying to be assertive even though I knew that my future was in her hands, ‘there are many sketches we think are good.’
Camp David: The Autobiography Page 22
