Easily Distracted

by Steve Coogan

Not only had we started to be competitive with our Michael Caine impressions, but we had also decided to use some of the tabloid stuff that had been written about me. I felt quietly victorious that I’d taken the shit that had been thrown at me, turned it around and made it work for me.

  It’s all about using everything and spinning it into something creative. Instead of kicking against the pricks, you readjust your trajectory and go with the current. Instead of pushing back against people you feel are attacking you, you use your opponent’s momentum to disable them, much as you would in ju-jitsu.

  Because we were playing around with the notion of who we are, Rob and I came up with a tacit gentleman’s agreement that we wouldn’t take anything to heart as it was all for the purpose of making The Trip interesting. But it was still tough, at times, to know where the boundaries were.

  There’s an improvised scene in the Yorke Arms in Ramsgill, where Rob is going on about how great Michael Sheen is, that I really love.

  ROB: ‘We’re not in the same group as Michael Sheen, Anthony Hopkins and Richard Burton.’

  ME: ‘Straight away let me distinguish. I’m a triple BAFTA Award-winning comic … comic actor … comic character actor. You’re a zero-winning … entertainer.’

  ROB: ‘BAFTA nominated [entertainer]. How many Oscars did Richard Burton win? Do you want me to tell you?’

  ME: ‘Zero.’

  ROB: ‘Zero. Do you know how many times he was nominated? Seven. Hopkins. Sheen. Brydon. Burton. The Port Talbot four. That’s what we’re known as.’

  ME: ‘Really?’

  ROB: ‘Michael Sheen. We’re not the same. We’re different animals.’

  ME: ‘You’re not the same as him. I’m more similar to him.’

  ROB: ‘Well, why don’t you do the sort of roles he does?’

  ME: ‘Because no one will give those roles to me. I’ve got an albatross round my neck and it’s got the face of Michael Sheen.’

  ROB: ‘Do you try for those roles?’

  ME: ‘Yes. Michael Sheen gets them all. He’s very good—’

  ROB: ‘He’s brilliant.’

  ME (getting antsy): ‘He’s not brilliant. He’s good. He’s solid.’

  ROB: ‘He is brilliant—’

  ME (losing it, shouting): ‘I’m fucking brilliant!’

  Somehow the authenticity of that statement transcends the awfulness of it. It shows a vulnerability that people respond to, because everyone wants to be validated. If you think that sounds a bit like Alan Partridge, you’re right!

  I didn’t want to do what I would have done twenty years ago, which would be to try to find the joke, to make people laugh. Instead I frequently chose the darkest, oddest route available because I no longer felt the need to be funny all the time. It was counter-intuitive and sometimes it made me vulnerable, but it was funny in a subtler way. You end up playing for high stakes, with a greater risk of failure, but with a greater prize at the end if it works.

  So when I was improvising with Michael I had to forget about trying to be funny and sympathetic and just be honest. In The Trip both Rob and I had to allow ourselves to be unattractive.

  Rob is a brilliant comic actor capable of being much darker as a performer than people possibly realise; he was wonderful in Human Remains and Marion & Geoff.

  I am sometimes a bit jealous that he is more at ease with himself than I am. I know that part of not being at ease with yourself feeds creativity; the American writer Shalom Auslander once told me that his therapist said, ‘I could make you feel better, but you wouldn’t be able to write any more.’

  Rob has made me less intense. I would sometimes become profoundly depressed about other people’s cynicism and Rob would say, ‘Why are you so het up about this stuff? It doesn’t matter.’

  Rob might or might not be funnier than me. He is probably more consistently funny. I’m grumpier than he is, but that’s OK.

  I don’t care if people don’t think I’m funny as long as the stuff I make matters to enough people and enables me to keep doing it. I’d rather make people think and if they laugh as well, that’s a bonus.

  CHAPTER 12

  THE SHOOT LASTED for five weeks and we did two circuits of the Lakes. Michael was very clever: he’d cobble together an edit of stuff we’d done on the first circuit, put it together, see what was working and figure out where the gaps were.

  Because The Trip is half true and half not, even I get confused when I watch it. Oh, it’s not really me, it’s not really Rob. Oh, it is. I love that grey area. By the way, it’s not my parents in The Trip. Or my child. They are very nice people, but they are actors.

  When Michael started talking about doing a second series, I asked how it was going to be different. He said it would be the same thing again, only this time in Italy. The food would be better and the locations more impressive.

  I’d worked so hard on Philomena and Alpha Papa that the last thing I felt like doing was going to Italy to have pseudo-arguments with Rob.

  But, almost too shattered to argue, I agreed to go.

  I got there and stood on a veranda in Genoa in the bright sunshine and had a cold glass of wine with Rob. The first glass of wine I’d had in nine months.

  I thought, ‘This is rather nice.’

  It turned into a five-week holiday, going around the most beautiful places in Italy and eating the most glorious food. It was heaven.

  Rob and I would have these slightly cantankerous dinners on camera and then in the evening we’d choose to eat together.

  One night we ate in this gorgeous place in Tuscany called Relais La Suvera. Just the two of us, no cameras, no crew, and we talked about our lives. By the end of the meal, we were both crying.

  Rob even gave me a hug.

  We had, I’d like to point out, both been drinking.

  It felt really odd because we were sitting there being quite emotional, knowing full well that in the days to come we’d be picking at each other’s scabs on camera.

  You can see certain issues – introspection, the melancholy of age, the acceptance of our mortality – running through the series, partly because we were retracing the footsteps of Shelley, Byron and Keats, two of whom had died before reaching their thirtieth birthdays, immortalised in their prime. There was a slight desperation in our trying to reach out and touch them. It was as though being in the places they had been might allow us to find some deeper meaning in an atheistic world.

  As André Gide said, ‘Trust those who seek the truth but doubt those who say they have found it.’

  Again, not much of The Trip to Italy was planned; Michael simply wanted Rob to be philandering and me to have found some kind of equilibrium after being lost at the end of the first series.

  And, for a second time, we had homework. I watched Roman Holiday and La Dolce Vita, but Rob didn’t. When he was walking around Rome with my assistant, played by Claire Keelan, he had to pretend he knew what was going on.

  He says that he was like that at school: he didn’t do his homework because he was a hopeless procrastinator and never quite got round to it. So he pretended he’d seen those films. I wasn’t much better. Michael was exasperated at times, but we did just fine by winging it.

  *

  When The Trip to Italy was completed, I was caught up by the momentum of the releases of both Philomena and Alpha Papa. I was disappointed that The Look of Love, which came out around the same time, didn’t have more impact; it was by far my best performance as an actor. I really went to dark, emotional places to play Paul Raymond, a man so sad he had an empty fridge at home. It was a grotesque rendition of a world I’d moved away from.

  Unlike 24 Hour Party People, I wanted the filming of The Look of Love to end. It was an exhausting orgy of hedonism; we did all the sex scenes in three days and it was utterly soulless. I started to crave a lone mountain walk in the Lakes. I didn’t even recognise the actresses at the wrap party because they were fully dressed. Be careful what you wish for.

  I had almost forg
otten about The Trip to Italy by the time it came out. The effort involved was so minimal and Michael turned it into something, as he always does, that made it more than the sum of its parts. I would happily do a third one; perhaps we could leave Europe and eat our way around America next time.

  Both series of The Trip were released in the States as feature films and they had real impact. I was shocked by people’s responses to it both in Los Angeles and in New York; I always expected people who approached me in those cities to want to talk about Philomena, but it was invariably The Trip.

  Both The Trip and The Trip to Italy have a languid quality that is a blessed relief. You are invited to spend time with me and Rob, to immerse yourself in our world as we have unhurried conversations over food and drink. It’s a sanctuary for people who’ve had enough of the digital world; they feel as though they are at the table with us, being irascible yet witty and unapologetically analogue.

  It’s odd to see how my life changed from one series to the next. When I made The Trip in 2010, I was easy to wind up about women, drugs and Hollywood. In an episode in The Trip to Italy, Rob talks about how well Sacha Baron Cohen, Ricky Gervais and Simon Pegg are doing in LA. We are sitting in a fantastic restaurant overlooking Capri, and Rob interviews me as Michael Parkinson. I try to get angry with him, but I’m helpless with laughter.

  ROB: ‘I watched Simon Pegg in the Star Trek films.’

  ME: ‘I haven’t seen them, but I’m told they’re very good. I’m delighted for his success.’

  ROB: ‘He worked with Tom Cruise on Mission Impossible.’

  ME: ‘I’ve worked with Tom Cruise. I worked with him on Tropic Thunder.’

  ROB: ‘You died in the first ten minutes, Steve.’

  (I’m laughing)

  ROB: ‘When we think about you, we think about the nineties.’

  ME: ‘Yeah … WHAT?’

  ROB: ‘We think about the nineties. What a wonderful period that was. We think Oasis, Blur. You’re smacked off your tits in a centre-of-London hotel, trying to keep your life together. But you’ve turned it around now. Tell us about your recovery.’

  ME (frowning): ‘Well, I’d rather not …’

  And then we talk about hair loss.

  Rob says that it was the type of quasi-aggressive humour that he uses on his audience members; he knows he couldn’t usually get away with it with me because I’d come back with something just as good. But he was brilliant that day.

  Sometimes I wonder if we will always be playing out those heightened versions of ourselves. There are worse fates to befall people.

  As I’ve always said, The Trip is Last of the Summer Wine for Guardian readers.

  CHAPTER 13

  FOR A WHILE, work provided a distraction from both bad behaviour and press intrusion. I thought that if I kept being funny, the tabloids might eventually go away. Even in my darkest days, when I was messing up my personal life, I still had my career.

  I thought, ‘I might be a disaster as a human being, but I do good work.’

  Creating good art could never justify my behaviour, but it did stop me from going mad. At a time when I didn’t feel particularly positive about myself, the work kept me afloat. Eventually, therapy taught me that I should be as exacting about my conduct as my work. But I was a slow learner.

  And the tabloids didn’t go away.

  I never made a Faustian pact with the press. Just as I never bought tabloid newspapers, so I never courted them. I am not famous for being famous. The newspapers did not create my success. I only reluctantly and very rarely spoke to showbiz reporters and gossip columnists. In their absurdly self-deluding terms, I never ‘invaded my own privacy’. Just one example: I turned down £30,000 from the News of the World for a photo of my girlfriend and me with our newborn daughter.

  It was particularly demoralising to be the subject of articles in newspapers that I never looked at. I wanted to be a private person, but by claiming the moral high ground the tabloids kept trying to draw me into a game of self-justification. I wasn’t interested; I didn’t want to open a dialogue with them in which I had to beg them to think of me as a really nice person. If they were determined to condemn me, I would rather they did so based on a caricature of me. The people in my life know who I am. That’s enough for me. It doesn’t matter if taxi drivers like me or not.

  I have always kicked back against media intrusion. If I misbehaved without affecting wider society, then that was my own business and that of those directly involved only. If I offended people, which I often did, that was also for me to deal with in private. Plenty of people make personal mistakes in their lives; I made mine while living in the full glare of the cameras. My life may be of interest to people, but I still don’t think it legitimises press intrusion.

  So long as I maintained my ‘never justify, never explain’ approach, I really believed that the work would articulate itself. We live in a world where everyone mildly despairs of tabloid behaviour but, in the end, simply shrugs their shoulders as though nothing can be done.

  I have never believed that celebrities have to allow journalists full access to their lives simply because they are successful at what they do and are in the public eye as a result. It’s the intrusive, ugly, immoral and unethical behaviour of certain journalists becoming the norm that I railed against.

  One day I woke up and thought, ‘Hang on a second, is there a possibility that it doesn’t have to be like this?’

  You realise that while it may be OK for Piers Morgan to strut around saying, ‘You don’t get to be the editor of the Mirror without being a fairly despicable human being,’ it does not have to be that way.

  In this case, flippancy doesn’t stop it being profoundly true.

  Nor is it in any way acceptable for newspapers to practise the so-called ‘dark arts’ – where editors, executives and foot-soldier journalists or subcontracted private investigators gather information by illegal means.

  The first time I was the subject of an intrusive tabloid story was in January 1996, when the Daily Mirror published two kiss-and-tell stories about me. ‘Kiss-and-tell’ is a sugar-coated term which the tabloids invented to disguise the uglier truth – these are actually ‘shag-and-sell’ stories. Later the same year, a journalist phoned my daughter’s maternal great-grandmother and pretended to be doing a survey for the council while asking personal questions about my daughter’s mother and me.

  In 2008, I agreed to do a profile for the Sunday Times in good faith. The paper not only printed photos of my young daughter taken by a paparazzo using a telephoto lens, but also wrote several untruths. These are, of course, obvious breaches of the industry’s own ‘Editors’ Code of Practice’. The paper printed an apology for using photos of my daughter without permission, but instead of being as prominent as the photo-spread, it was just a one-inch item buried on an inside page.

  When I lived in Brighton, journalists and photographers regularly camped outside my house. Some went through my bins, some followed my car when I left home, others hung around pubs asking people if they knew me.

  As well as being stalked and effectively put under surveillance, I faced blatant falsehoods. Back in the autumn of 2007, the Daily Mail printed a number of articles that repeated the lie that I was somehow responsible for or connected with Owen Wilson’s alleged suicide attempt.

  Although I know Owen, I hadn’t at that time seen him for nine months and I hadn’t ever taken drugs with him or in his company. My reputation was immediately tarnished: I was forced to make representations to various people in the American film industry explaining that the allegations were completely false. I could have sued, but a legal case would itself have meant more intrusion into the life of my friend.

  Those stories are still online and I’m sure the Daily Mail is in no rush to take them down.

  And then there was entrapment and blackmail. Even earlier, in August 2002, I received a phone call from a reporter called Rav Singh who worked on Andy Coulson’s ‘Bizarre’ column in
the Sun. He told me that I was about to be the target of a sting from Coulson’s office. A girl I’d had an affair with would ring me and try to lure me into revealing details about my private life. Coulson would be listening to the call. When the call came, I gave nothing away. Nothing was printed.

  In April 2004, Rav Singh, who now had his own gossip column in the News of the World, phoned me. They wanted to print a story that Sunday about a relationship I’d had. If I admitted to part of the story, the paper would hold back on details that might be embarrassing to my family. Because Singh had tipped me off about the earlier sting, I trusted him. I talked to him openly.

  And then Coulson, by now editor of the News of the World, called my publicist and told him they had recorded the whole conversation. The supposedly confidential conversation would be presented as an interview, as my side of the story. This was by no means the worst thing they did.

  The final straw was discovering that my phone had probably been hacked by News International. I decided that I could no longer sit back and do nothing; I had to be proactive and push for press reform, even if the fallout might do me no favours. This was all before ‘Dowlergate’ – the big hacking revelations of the summer of 2011.

  At this point, Andy Coulson had left News International to work as Director of Communications for David Cameron, the leader of the Conservative Party. Coulson was working at the heart of government, and I wanted to show people what he was really like: deceitful and a liar.

  Everyone kept advising me not to take action against News International.

  I had a frank phone conversation with my publicist, who had connections with Murdoch. He knew Rebekah Brooks, the then chief executive of News International and former editor of the Sun and the News of the World, as, it seemed of the whole political, media and policing establishment. Scary.

  He tried to warn me. ‘Do you really want to make enemies of these people? If you’re doing this because you’re after Andy Coulson, you’ll never get to him. He’s at the heart of the government, protected by a ring of steel. This story has gone away, it’s not coming back. Maybe you’ll get a few quid out of them but …’ He paused. ‘Do you really want to make enemies of these people?’ he repeated.