Soon it was easier for everyone to pretend it had never happened. Although the thoughts of killing myself became quieter, they would never fall silent.
14
A Giant Egg
At the first studiospace party Jason Bradbury and I had performed separately, but now we decided to put on a sketch together. One of the things we enjoyed doing was making stupid noises and creating words, so I had this idea for a piece in which we would be two very serious intellectuals who made stupid noises. We wrote it in his room in Manor Hall. It was heavily influenced by my idols at the time, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie, whose masterful series A Bit of Fry & Laurie was then playing on BBC2. I was in the Stephen Fry role as an eccentric host interviewing an academic writer (Jason in the Hugh Laurie role) about his new book. All the quotes from the book were surreal sounds, so by the end of the sketch there were no words but just the two of us on stage looking serious but making loud discordant noises at each other. It was a decent if studenty sketch with a beginning, middle and an end, and when we performed it the laughter grew and grew and loud applause and cheers broke out at the end.
‘That was really funny, guys,’ said Simon Pegg. There is nothing like the approval of those you admire.
‘Oh thanks, Simon,’ I replied like a bashful schoolgirl.
‘You could put that straight onto television,’ added Domink’s friend David Young, who ended up being one of the most successful producers in British television.
Suddenly we found ourselves accepted into the comedy clique, and Dominik had a plan. He suggested we should all set up a comedy night together separate from the department or the university. We would be forced to work hard to create a new set each week, and might even take home some money at the end of it. Unlike many students at Bristol, none of us had rich mummies and daddies. My parents gave me a small allowance and I ate jacket potatoes with beans every night. An extra ten pounds or so meant I would be able to transform my meals with a sprinkling of grated Cheddar.
Dominik would run the club and compère the night. Two other performers would also appear, Barney Power, a short bald energetic man who somehow never managed to be all that funny, and Myfanwy Moore. Myf had a very likeable onstage persona, and was gently amusing as a stand-up with material like a humorous column you might read in the Guardian.
Jason and I had a continuous identity crisis as a double act. For some reason now lost in the mists of time we decided upon an utterly misguided name, the Dr Johnsons of this World. We were both called Dr Johnson and wore lab coats and had toy stethoscopes around our necks. Worse than our name was the one Dominik had chosen for the whole group, David Icke and the Orphans of Jesus. The popular sports presenter David Icke had recently become a national laughing stock by claiming on the TV chat show Wogan that he was ‘the son of a godhead’ but even worse he wore a turquoise shell suit.
A venue was selected, the Dome Café in Clifton, and the plan was to perform there once a week for six weeks, and we would split the profits, with Dominik taking a double share as he was administrating. I couldn’t believe I was going to get paid to perform. Before we were allowed to step onto a professional stage Dominik called us all to his flat for a ‘heckler workshop’. Having done a few professional gigs around Bristol, Dominik was the expert on all things stand-up comedy. He instructed us to do our acts as he shouted out interruptions.
Eventually it was me and Jason’s turn to perform in his living room.
‘Tell us a joke!’ shouted Dominik.
I immediately broke out of the act: ‘Two lesbians walk into a bar …’
Everyone laughed except Dominik.
Actually no one heckled on our first night, or on any other night. Simon always went down the best, and Jason and I received generous laughs from an audience made up principally of our university friends. We would perform out-front sketches: that is to say we spoke to the audience rather than just each other. One concerned me mistaking a milk bottle left on a doorstep for a baby. Another time we dressed in Victorian bathing suits and performed a bizarre circus strongman act.
For me what I was performing didn’t matter; it was enough that we were performing at all. And of course taking home ten pounds a week was a boon.
At the end of the first year I went back to the National Youth Theatre to perform a play. That summer I would meet the one person who would change my life for ever.
Matt Lucas.
‘You have to meet Matt – he’s so funny,’ said a mutual friend at the NYT. I had noticed Matt. Everyone had noticed Matt. He was fat and bald and pale. Like a giant egg. ‘Wait here,’ I was instructed.
I was standing in the bar of the Tufnell Park hall of residence where all the National Youth Theatre members gathered at night. I was cast in a play called Surrender Dorothy, which was heading to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Matt was on a course as it was his first year in the company.
The bald sixteen-year-old walked over, his appearance even more startling up close. His skin was so pale it was almost translucent, and he had no eyebrows. He looked like a cross between a baby and a very elderly man.
‘Matt,’ said Matt.
‘David,’ I said. I was nearing nineteen.
‘Matt does the most amazing impression of Jimmy Savile!’ said our friend.
Inwardly I groaned. Everyone does an impression of Jimmy Savile.
‘And David does this impression of Frankie Howerd.’
‘I’d love to hear it,’ said Matt with a tense smile.
‘You go first,’ I said.
‘OK,’ he said a little too quickly. ‘Now then, now then …’
I had to admit it did sound very much like the Jim’ll Fix It presenter.
‘I have a letter, I have a letter …’
‘Very good!’ I said, no doubt cutting him off before he got to the punchline.
‘Now you do Frankie Howerd.’
‘Oh no, oh missus, oh yes, get your titters out!’
Matt smiled. There was an awkward silence when we realized we had nothing whatsoever to say to each other.
‘Well I better be getting back to my friends,’ he said.
‘Me too.’
We nodded and smiled at each other. Then we retreated to opposite sides of the bar. We would not speak again for a year.
Meanwhile, a girl had caught my attention. She was pretty and funny, and as I had floppy long hair at the time she called me the Eskimo Princess. (I do have small eyes like an Inuit.) Her name was Jessica Stevenson (now Hynes), and she went on to appear in Spaced, The Royle Family and Twenty Twelve. Despite the National Youth Theatre being a company, it had its stars and Jessica was definitely one. She had been given the lead role of Mrs Bitzstein in a revival of Lionel Bart’s musical Blitz! Katy Carmichael and Jessica were best friends, and Katy organized a date. So I took Jessica out for a pizza at a greasy restaurant on the Holloway Road in London. As if to deliberately sabotage the evening, Katy came too and sat at a nearby table, waving and laughing at us throughout.
Unsurprisingly the date was a disaster, and so was Surrender Dorothy. It was a play about students who go mad and take on the identities of characters from the books they are studying. ‘Surrender Dorothy’ is of course what the Wicked Witch of the West writes in the sky in The Wizard of Oz. I played Doctor Chaney, who turns into a werewolf. We played in the big theatre at the Pleasance in Edinburgh, which seats around 400. Comedy rarely works with only a handful of people in the audience, and unfortunately nobody wanted to part with money to see a play they had never heard of performed by a group of teenagers they had never heard of.
However, Surrender Dorothy was only an hour long, and as I was in a show at the Pleasance I could see anything there for free as long as I didn’t mind standing at the back if it was sold out. So that summer I gorged on comedy. Steve Coogan and Frank Skinner were doing an hour together; Jim Tavare was performing, as was Norman Lovett. I saw them all time after time. The one I loved the most was The Bob Downe Show. Mark Trevorrow’s o
utrageously camp safari-suited lounge singer had me laughing time after time. Mark Trevorrow has a great gift for physical comedy, and all of Bob’s songs were accompanied by absurd and frenetic dance moves.
When you’re a comedian or someone who wants to be a comedian, sometimes it’s hard to laugh at a gig. You are so intent on studying how the performer is eliciting laughter, you end up watching like a scientist observing an experiment. I had watched many stand-up comedians, and I found them very hard to relate to. Their observations were not the same as mine. Buying Rizlas from all-night garages to roll joints, or girlfriends complaining about how quickly lovemaking was over were comic staples at the time. Of course I had neither smoked a joint nor had sex with a woman. So that summer as I died on stage night after night in Surrender Dorothy, howling through my change into a werewolf to an otherwise silent theatre – something that had seemed so funny to the rest of the cast in the rehearsal room – I made an important breakthrough. Like with the Dame Edna show I had seen a couple of years before if confirmed that you don’t have to be a stand-up comedian to make people laugh; you can play a character. What’s more, it’s probably best if that character is an extension of you. I decided I had to go back to the Edinburgh Fringe one day and perform professionally.
I approached Mark Trevorrow after a performance. ‘Hi. It’s the third time I’ve seen your show and I absolutely love it.’
‘Why thank you,’ said Mark, only slightly less camp than his alter ego.
‘It’s such a funny character …’
‘Thank you.’ He was really smiling and staring at me now.
‘The dance moves are hilarious.’
‘Oh yes.’ He was looking me up and down.
‘Well, nice to meet you.’
‘Do you fancy a drink?’
‘I have to get back to the place we’re staying. I’m with the National Youth Theatre.’
‘Oh, right. I see. How old are you?’
‘Nineteen.’
‘You look older.’
Walking to the bus stop I realized why he was looking me up and down like that. He was coming on to me.
In 2007, when Matt and I were touring Australia with Little Britain Live, Mark came and saw us perform in Melbourne and invited us to his apartment the next day for lunch. I was glad to have the opportunity to tell him how seeing his act seventeen years before had inspired me. I didn’t mention that we had met before.
Back at university for my second year I noticed most of the girls had become lesbians over the summer holidays. Indulging in a bit of ‘licky licky’ was the best option politically in the Drama Department. It meant you were right all the time about absolutely everything.
Jason’s ambition was growing daily. He said to me, ‘I have this dream that I’m driving around in a brand-new open-topped sports car and I stop at the lights. Then all these kids start recognizing me and shouting, “Jason! Jase!” and I smile and wave and then the lights change and I drive off.’
‘Really?’ I asked.
‘Surely you have dreams like that?’
‘No, never,’ I answered. And I was telling the truth. I never once thought what it would be like to become famous.
Deep down Jason really saw our comedy act as a stepping stone to what he is today, a TV presenter.
Trevor (Neal) and Simon (Hickson) were an amusing double act on Saturday morning children’s TV, famous for their catchphrase ‘Swing your pants.’ They spanned two hugely popular series, Going Live! and its successor Live & Kicking. In 1991 they temporarily left Going Live, and despite still being in the middle of our university course Jason decided we were the perfect people to take over from them.
For some reason we had changed our name to Bunce ’n’ Burner.
‘I’m David Bunce.’
‘And I’m Rally Burner.’ *
Somehow Jason managed to secure us an audition at the BBC. We had done a few local things such as a series for BBC Radio Bristol entitled Bunce & Burner Visit Interesting Places and an appearance on the local TV news performing a sketch in a local café. Jason was very pushy and somehow managed to convince people to give us a chance. I remember making the grumpy stand-up comedian Stewart Lee laugh out loud when we rehearsed a guest spot on a long-forgotten Radio 4 comedy series which he and Richard Herring wrote. The programme travelled around the universities, showcasing a little local talent along the way. Jason and I had written a piece that ended with me saying, ‘At Christmas I love nothing more than settling down in front of the fire with my family and having a jolly good wank.’
Stewart Lee exploded with laughter perhaps because nothing Jason or I had said previously was all that funny and his expectations were low.
The stressed-looking producer came up to have a word. ‘Yes, yes, it’s all very funny but you can’t say “wank” on Radio 4.’
‘Jerk off?’ I suggested hopefully.
‘No.’
‘Whack off?’
‘No.’
‘Masturbate?’
‘No.’
‘Play with myself?’
‘Absolutely not.’
Jason and I looked at each other. This was the biggest laugh we would get and it was going to be cut.
‘I’ve got it!’ said the producer.
‘Yes!’ I said, my voice soaring with hope.
‘Wink,’ he said.
‘What?’ I replied.
‘You can say “… settle down in front of the fire and have a jolly good wink”.’
‘Wink isn’t funny,’ said Jason.
‘Can I pronounce it “wank”?’ I asked innocently.
‘No!’ said the producer angrily. ‘Now take it or leave it. I have a show to produce.’
Our contribution in the final programme was edited down to less than ten seconds.
We were pretty sure you couldn’t say ‘wank’ on children’s television, so we wrote a number of new sketches for our Going Live! audition. We took the train to London and made our way to the BBC rehearsal rooms in Acton for our audition. Somehow having an audience of three people was worse than having 300. We repeated our milk bottle baby routine from the Dome Café. I was so nervous my hands were shaking and the bottle dropped out of my hands and landed with a thud on the floor of the huge rehearsal room.
Of course we didn’t pass the audition. Two Cambridge Footlights performers called Nick and Jamie took over, died week after week live on TV, and Trevor and Simon heroically returned the next year. Nick and Jamie were never heard of again. In retrospect it was a lucky escape for us, because Jason and I were not ready for television. In fact together we never would be.
That summer I was cast in the National Youth Theatre’s production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest in the supposedly comic role of Trinculo. Given the task of moving the scenery around was the bald boy from the bar who did a Jimmy Savile impression, Matt Lucas. Fate had thrown us together again.
15
One Person Laughing
University terms are only ten weeks long, so I had a couple of months before rehearsals for the National Youth Theatre production of The Tempest were to start. My dad knew a man who knew a man who ran the Fortune Theatre on Russell Street in Covent Garden, where The Woman in Black was (and still is) on. I was an usher. I earned fifteen pounds a night, thirty pounds on matinee days. My duties were selling programmes and ice creams, and then clearing up when the play was finished, which wasn’t too bad, as you often found coins that had dropped out of people’s pockets. One night a man asked me to show him to his seat and gave me a 50p tip. I was ecstatic.
Often coaches full of tourists would park outside the theatre. One night I was standing on the first floor looking out the window at a large group of European teenagers in their coach. It was the second half of The Woman in Black, and I all I had to do was collect the discarded ice-cream tubs at the end of the play. I could see that a few of the teenagers were looking at me, so I thought to amuse myself I would amuse them.
At first it was a li
ttle wave, then I would disappear behind a curtain and wave again. Soon I saw that a few of them were laughing and telling their friends to watch me too, so I started running up and down the stairs and waving each time I did so. Then I pretended to be really out of breath, got some tap water from the bar, and drank it like a toddler might with two hands, pouring most of it down my red Fortune Theatre usher’s waistcoat in the process. Next I ran downstairs again and into the street. I took off my waistcoat and acted as I if I was a matador, the waistcoat was the cape, and the coach was the bull. Unbelievably the coach driver played along, and the coach lurched forward towards me as I pranced around. I have no idea if the teenagers were Spanish, but this delighted them no end. They all crowded towards the front of the coach and peered out of the grimy windscreen to get a better look.
Finally I felt a swarm of people brushing past me and realized the audience were exiting the theatre. Knowing that both the play and my little performance were now over, I took a bow. The teenagers all applauded, and a girl got off the bus and gave me a bunch of flowers. This only added to the performance, as now I was an overemotional actress on a first night, crying and blowing kisses to my public. The driver hooted his horn as they drove away, all their faces pushed up against the glass to catch one last glimpse of the crazy Englishman who had entertained them for a few minutes as they waited for their coach to depart.
I had created a little show out of nothing, and made some strangers laugh. For a few moments we were all happy.
It was one of the most magical moments of my life.
On 8 October 1996 the Sun newspaper’s front page read DI SPY VIDEO SCANDAL, with the strapline ‘She’s filmed in bra and pants romp with Hewitt’. As it turned out the video was fake. The newspaper had been duped by a man called Nick Hedges into paying him £100,000. Five years earlier he had been directing the National Youth Theatre production of The Tempest.
Nick Hedges was a disciple of the avant-garde dancer and choreographer Lindsay Kemp, whose style was for all the performers to white up their face like clowns and move very slowly.* So that is what Nick made us do. It was a very original production, if you had never seen a Lindsay Kemp performance, which most people hadn’t.
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