by Steve Coogan
I stood there and said, ‘Come upstairs and have a cup of tea,’ in Mancunian, Scouse, Cockney, vaguely posh and cut-glass accents.
Then, in a cut-glass accent again, I had to repeat, ‘I put some money in the bank today.’
Alex pulled me up on my flat vowel on the word ‘bank’, but otherwise said my accent was impeccable.
When I had finished, Alex looked at me. He knew I was going back to RADA for a recall, and he didn’t want to risk losing me. ‘We normally operate a recall system here, but we’re going to offer you a place straight away.’
I was amazed that they had broken the rules to offer me a place on the spot.
Andy, who had been waiting for me in the pub over the road, remembers me walking out of the audition looking shell-shocked.
Flushed with excitement, I went home and told my mum. Perhaps I was right after all. Perhaps I had something.
*
Despite the Manchester Poly offer, I couldn’t ignore the RADA recall. Once again I did the formal pieces followed by the Duncan Thickett routine, curious to know how RADA would respond. They sat rather formally in a line, looking at me with poker faces; after the easy-going atmosphere at Manchester Poly, it felt sterile and slightly hostile. One of the principals clearly liked what I was trying to do, but I needed the whole panel on my side.
I rehearsed one scene with Rosemary Leach and another with an actor called Lucy Maycock who now works in Oxford. I remember sitting on the stairwell in RADA and chatting to Lucy, who had just come down from Oxford. I secretly hoped she and I would become friends at RADA.
I mentioned her to Patrick years later and he remembered her. He seemed to have known everyone at Oxford, whatever college they were in.
Rosemary Leach was lovely. She put her arm round my shoulder.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘You’ll get in.’
She was wrong. I didn’t.
I wasn’t surprised not to be offered a place. I got a rejection letter that said something along the lines of, ‘You made the final hundred, but you didn’t make the final thirty. You’re quite good, but you’re not good enough.’
My dad was so impressed he actually framed the rejection letter.
Of course I would have gone to RADA had I been offered a place, but part of me was glad to stay in Manchester. I had warmed to the people on the panel at the poly and, frankly, after all the rejections I needed their validation.
I thought, ‘I want to be with these people who think I’m good. Fuck the others.’
CHAPTER 34
THE HIGH OF being offered a place at Manchester Poly did not, inevitably, last. I still felt out of place. I tried to be enthusiastic, even signing up for yoga and buying special blue tights. But there was no escaping the fact that the southerners who got on to the theatre course with me were fellow London drama-school rejects who seemed to have more confidence than talent and were shockingly poncey.
There was the odd exception: Gary Sneddon was in my year at college and he did really good impersonations. He still owes me money because I paid his rent for a year. Or maybe we’re quits. Martin Murray, whom I met in the first year and who remains one of my best friends, invited me, Gary and another friend, Alan Francis, to his parents’ house in Wales. I drove us there in my dad’s Volvo. We were on the M56, going fast, when Gary and I had an argument. I got so cross that I reached across and punched him in the face. He punched me back. I barely took my foot off the accelerator. I don’t even remember what the argument was about. Something trivial, no doubt.
Generally, though, the students and teachers were all equally pretentious. There was a Geordie tutor who was just the kind of self-righteous, subsidised-theatre person I couldn’t stand. He thought he was Bertolt Brecht, or at least he dressed like him.
And he kept trying to make me perform Brecht even when I made it clear that I wasn’t interested. He would dismissively tell me, ‘Well, you had your chance and you blew it.’
I didn’t care. I didn’t get Brecht and I didn’t know how to do it.
I did, however, like Martin Nestor, the anti-structuralist tutor who was always smoking roll-ups and who had cried with laughter at my audition. Decades later I met students doing the same course and apparently Martin Nestor would entertain them with a detailed description of my audition, which I still find hugely touching.
Martin was the maverick poet of the drama teachers. He didn’t fuck around. He was a mix of Oliver Reed, Ian McShane and Alan Bates. Like someone who took time off from writing poetry to build another drystone wall.
He wasn’t afraid to give us short shrift if he thought we were performing badly.
He’d say, ‘I didn’t believe what you were doing then. Do it again.’
If he praised you, it actually meant something. He threw me a few morsels and it made me feel good.
But the theatre course was, in the end, too prescriptive for me. I was repeatedly told to read Stanislavski and Chekhov, and I cared for neither. Most of the other students had a pretentious, pompous love of theatre that left me cold. They read all the books on the syllabus, whereas I read none. I didn’t think that a theatre course should be so inflexible, that a rejection of Stanislavski should imply a lack of interest in acting. My approach was more populist.
Even when I tried to fit in, no one seemed to notice. I did a piece from Alan Ayckbourn’s play Just Between Ourselves, which I thought was really well crafted, and yet the casting agents that turned up from London paid it no attention. They were interested only in floppy-haired students ready for their Merchant Ivory moment.
It came as no surprise that my report at the end of my first year echoed those handed out at school:
ATTENDANCE AND CONDUCT:
All the staff were impressed with the improvements this term – until the final week. Your essay was inexcusably late, and despite the fact that the ideas were clearly expressed (i.e. it was good work) I sense it is far below the standard you could achieve with more thought and preparation. You also let down the entire third year and the school at the Library Auditions. (I am still receiving complaints about them, which I could well do without.) Stephen – get your priorities SORTED OUT – and FAST. You are wasting your talent and everyone else’s time otherwise. A.T.
‘A.T’ was Alex Taylor, a harmlessly camp tutor who once said to me, ‘Ooooh, Steve, I can see your knickers through your tights!’
I do remember being in trouble for letting the school down, but I must have blocked out the reason. I possibly didn’t show up.
There’s a line elsewhere in the report that speaks volumes about how the course worked: ‘General comment from all staff – don’t confuse mimicry with acting or your work will remain superficial.’
*
Despite the tutors’ persistent negativity, I managed to take my ‘mimicry’ and spin it into something more mature and sophisticated. Most people go to college hoping to get a decent job once they graduate; I was performing or getting paid work nearly the whole time I was there.
I wasn’t even intending to make my live debut as early as I did.
Martin Murray, who, incidentally, was the lead guitarist in The Mock Turtles and who many years later played the priest at the start of Philomena and a paparazzo in Alpha Papa, was in a covers band who played at a Law Society revue at the end of my first year. Gary Sneddon – the guy I punched in the car; we were still friends – and I went along. There was an open mic slot in which students were performing appalling sketches. Everyone was booing and it was completely shambolic.
Gary and I were on the side of the stage, waiting for Martin’s band to come on.
Martin said, ‘Why don’t you two get onstage and do your Zippy and Bungle impersonations?’
I didn’t want to.
I genuinely tried to resist, but Martin coerced me. He literally dragged me to the microphone.
Our confidence grew as the students started laughing really loudly, really quickly.
We had saved the night!
>
Well, what had come before was so shabby, it didn’t take much. The audience was grateful for anything.
When we walked offstage to applause after five minutes, I was on a huge high.
I thought, ‘I’ve never had an experience like this before. Everyone in the room was listening to everything I was saying. And laughing at everything I was saying.’
It was the summer of 1986 and I was hooked.
CHAPTER 35
THE THEATRE COURSE at Manchester Poly has some celebrated alumni – Bernard Hill, David Threlfall – and of course it’s where Julie Walters famously met Victoria Wood at an audition in the spring of 1971.
It’s also where I met Simon Greenall, who gave me my first break and then went on to play Michael the Geordie in I’m Alan Partridge, and John Thomson, with whom I was to win the Perrier Comedy Award in Edinburgh in 1992.
Simon was in the third year when I was in the first year. He was well dressed, clean-cut, quite well spoken. He was also unique among students in that he was never in debt.
Like most students, I had to keep shifting my debt from one account to another, paying off the old debt before the bank came after me. If you had zero money in the bank and no debt, it was a cause for celebration; you felt rich simply because you weren’t in debt.
I didn’t, of course, move my debt to Barclays. The big banking issue of the mid-eighties was the bank’s involvement in South Africa. The British student population put huge pressure on Barclays to withdraw from a country where apartheid was still legal and, in March 1987, it ended investment in South Africa.
I don’t think the bank had a Damascene conversion; I doubt they were responding to moral outrage, rather they realised that the student activists would one day have money and they wouldn’t invest it with Barclays if it appeared to condone apartheid.
To quote Bobbi Flekman from Spinal Tap, ‘Money talks and bullshit walks.’
Anyway, word got around to Simon that I was doing impersonations in the college cafeteria and he turned up one day to listen. He was doing some comedy for Radio Manchester and in early 1986, in the second term of my first year, I was the only first-year to be invited to contribute alongside three third-years.
Julie Taylor, Pierce Quigley, Simon and I met up and wrote and performed in a series of comedy sketches and then performed them for a show called The Buzz, which was hosted by Phil Caldwell.
One of the sketches I wrote was an advert for an imaginary board game called Revolution that was all about toppling fascist dictatorships. It was a welcome distraction from my drama course and, better still, I got paid fifty quid by BBC Manchester for services as a sketch-show artist.
The Buzz was my first ever professional engagement. It started a ball rolling; by the end of my first year – and after my triumphant appearance at the Law Society – I was doing a few impersonations at a cabaret night in a pub bar.
Simon and I worked well together. We sent sketches off to Colin Gilbert at BBC Scotland, responding to an advert he’d taken out in The Stage simply saying ‘sketches wanted’. We were nothing if not ambitious: in the early eighties, Colin was a producer on A Kick Up the Eighties, which gave Rik Mayall his first TV break, and a few years later he created Naked Video, which starred Helen Lederer.
Simon wrote a sketch that I slightly embellished and it ended up on Smith & Jones. When I heard Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones doing this sketch, I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m nearly connected with a TV show.’
Simon also wrote some of the material that I eventually used in my stand-up act in 1987, including a brilliant sketch in which Nato bombs Trumpton.
I didn’t think about it much at the time, but this first experience of writing with Simon was a blueprint for the way I would eventually work, collaborating with one or more writers. Writing alone is too solitary, too lonely. I like dialogue. Unless I can articulate my thoughts to another person, they’ll just remain jumbled up inside my head.
In the meantime, I was trying to get my Equity card. I figured out that stand-up was my best way in because Equity was pretty much a closed shop: you couldn’t get paid work unless you were a member, and you couldn’t become a member unless you’d had paid work.
When I submitted my Equity application and said that I’d been paid £50 by Radio Manchester, the Equity representative went straight to the BBC and caused a furore about them paying a non-union member with cash. Which tells you everything you need to know about the closed-shop mentality of the unions and the failure of the Left.
Phil Caldwell got himself into a panic and washed his hands of me.
And instead of getting my Equity card as planned, I was blacklisted for a while for being a sort of mini acting scab.
*
When Simon left college, I gradually lost touch with him. A decade later, we were auditioning for the part of an ex-army Geordie handyman whom Alan Partridge would befriend in I’m Alan Partridge because he was vulnerable and weak. Simon popped up on a tape – we used to watch auditions because Armando Iannucci, Pete Baynham and I were writing and too busy to meet everyone – and I recognised him immediately.
I didn’t tell Armando or Pete that I knew him. I wanted to work with Simon again and return the favour, but it was important that Armando and Pete liked him independently. When they both said he was the best candidate, I admitted I knew him and that he had given me my first break.
It’s still strange to think that I’ve known Simon since I was eighteen; perhaps that’s why we have effortlessly developed an on-screen rapport that has become part of the Alan Partridge narrative.
After we met up again in the mid-nineties, Simon went on to have a phenomenally successful career in advertising as the voice of the Russian meerkats in comparethemeerkat.com. Luckily for me he still acts and was pleased to reprise the role of Michael in Alpha Papa. It would’ve been a little odd doing an Alan Partridge feature film without him. I’m really happy with how it worked out.
*
In my third year, I lived in a house with some first-year students at 40 Mauldeth Road West in Withington. I was the oldest bloke but I was given the smallest room and in it was an ungenerous single bed. I had no one to blame but myself: I’d pretty much run out of friends because I never did any washing up or housework.
One weekend, my student housemates – Andy Spearpoint, who became vocalist of New Fast Automatic Daffodils in 1988, Johnny Moran and Neil Gallery – threw a party.
John Thomson, who was also a first-year, turned up.
We had a kind of impression off in which he did Bruce Willis quite well and I dazzled him (his words, not mine) with my two versions of Sean Connery: as a young man circa Dr No and as a more mature man.
John and I hit it off straight away; he was like a younger brother who could really make me laugh. We hung out in the Black Lion bar in the basement of the Withington Ale House, drinking and having impersonation competitions, much as Rob Brydon and I would do much later over very expensive meals in The Trip.
John and I also used to drink in the Parrswood pub, opposite college. It was here that an early incarnation of Paul Calf materialised.
I would make other students laugh by pretending to be this drunk bloke hurling inarticulate abuse at all the privileged, poncey students who were thriving on subsidies provided by the hard-earned taxes of the working man. Apart from anything, it was a good way to vent the frustrations I felt about some of the other students.
Paul Calf was also based on the guy who drove a stacker truck at the chemical plant in Rochdale where I had worked in the summer of 1985, just before starting drama school. During breaks, I would sit on my own in the corner reading the Guardian while they were all leafing through the Sun and playing cards. They would glance over at me with a look that said, ‘Who the fuck is he?’
I wasn’t beaten up because I could do a good impersonation of Sylvester Stallone in Rocky. They loved it.
One lunchtime I was in my corner, laughing at an article in the Guardian by Hugo Young,
a stalwart writer for the paper at the time.
One of them looked across at me. ‘What are you laughing at?’
I said, ‘Oh, it’s just an article.’
He said, ‘Read it out.’
I read out this nuanced observation of the prevailing political machinations of the mid-eighties, which was greeted with a bunch of faces reminiscent of Easter Island statues.
And utter silence.
Finally, one of the men said, ‘You think that’s funny, do you?’
‘Well, to me it is.’
Again, silence.
Mick, the hard man, piped up and threw me a lifeline. ‘Do yer Rocky.’
I contorted my face, affected a deep baritone with a speech impediment, got down on my knees, pretended to be battered and bruised and screamed, ‘Adrian! Adrian!’
One particular guy who worked there really didn’t take to me. He was dense and aggressive and he curled his lip at me. He was always saying things like, ‘I bet you can’t wait to get to drama school and put your fucking tights on and get the arse fucked off you by a bunch of poofs.’
He also had a slight speech impediment which meant I could impersonate him very easily. Although they all held me in contempt for wanting to be a poofy actor, they loved the fact that I could impersonate their slightly stupid workmate. And in turn he couldn’t beat me up because all his mates thought I was funny.
Paul Calf was a combination of both this bloke and the locals in the Parrswood pub, but he didn’t yet have a name. He was just the drunk guy in the pub who hates students.
*
After I graduated, I stayed in touch with John and regularly went back to college just to see him when he was in his second and third years. Much like Simon, he has been in and out of my life since then; we won the Perrier together at Edinburgh in 1992 and, in 1993, he played Fat Bob in Paul Calf’s Video Diary.
John’s star really took off later in the nineties with The Fast Show and Cold Feet. Around that time I asked him, when the old BBC was still in Wood Lane, if he’d do one more: Paul and Pauline Calf’s Video Diary.
