by Simon Pegg
‘There’s no way he’s decorating that room with antiquities,’ said Pegg emphatically. ‘That pool’s tiny! – I saw it in OK! – it would be way too cluttered.’
‘Ee said it would go nicely with some of the stuff his great-uncle Barney left him in his will,’ Murielle recalled. ‘Ee did seem to have a few design ideas, even if eet wasn’t for the pool area.’
‘Oh, he had a design all right,’ seethed Pegg, ‘and if by Uncle Barney he means Colonel Barnabus McCartney, then his design is to hold the entire world to ransom by threatening to fire an ancient Egyptian laser beam into the sun.’
‘Fuck er duck!’ said Murielle.
‘We have to get to Hendon and stop Black before he puts his plan into action,’ said Pegg, punching a series of numbers into a wall-mounted control panel.
‘I am sorry.’ Murielle hung her head in shame, her hair forming a curtain across her coral-pink areolae, so that Pegg could no longer officially see her boobs. ‘Eet’s so hard to tell what ee’s thinking due to the mask.’ Lord Black famously insisted on wearing a mask, reminiscent of Doctor Doom from The Fantastic Four, despite having to settle out of court with Marvel for the privilege.
‘Don’t be sorry,’ said Pegg, checking to see if he could see them from a different angle. ‘You had no idea and I know your judgement is often clouded by your love for your deaf brother.’
‘Not just my deaf brother,’ she said honestly, lifting her head, much to Pegg’s relief.
‘We’ll leave immediately,’ said Pegg. ‘It will take fifteen minutes for the jet to power up and perform its auto-check cycle – I’ve just activated it remotely via this pad I had installed last year.’
‘What shall we do until zhen?’ asked Murielle, noticing Pegg’s penis had inflated and was rising into threat pose like a one-eyed pink cobra.
Pegg smiled and walked towards her slowly, wiggling his hips.
‘Actually, I am on,’ admitted Canterbury.
The Benefits of Failure
I
owe most of my professional achievements to an earlier monumental cock-up: I failed my eleven-plus exam and as a result was unable to attend the local upmarket grammar school.
Instead, I attended Brockworth Comprehensive and set about the process that would eventually lead me to the heady show-business world of this glass office at the Random House Publishing building. It’s close to London’s fashionable Victoria and provides me with such luxuries as an electric fan, a chair and access to my editor, Ben who occasionally peers through the window at me to make sure I’m not using the Internet to masturbate or tweet, which are essentially the same thing.
However, I almost didn’t make it to Brockworth Comprehensive. The Gloucestershire education board wanted to unload me into a secondary modern that didn’t even allow its pupils to sit O levels and instead fobbed them off with CSEs, which weren’t as difficult or as impressive on a CV. However, Mum was determined that I have the full spectrum of choice and fought a passionate stand-up battle with the local authority to get me into Brockworth, despite my failure to get into the more auspicious Tommy Rich’s Grammar School.
My stepdad had attended Tommy Rich’s in Gloucester and it only seemed right that I should be given the same opportunity. I was a bright and lively pupil and what I lacked in mathematical acumen, I more than made up for in creative writing and general enthusiasm. My Class 6 teacher, Mr Miller, had told my mother that I was potentially a candidate for the auspicious Rendcomb College in Cirencester, a magical institution where kids levitated bricks and bent spoons with their minds, recognising that reality as they knew it was simply a construct of their own subconscious and as such could be manipulated beyond the basic laws of physics.
Actually, it probably just had posher teachers and better sports equipment, but it was cool to be considered worthy. Whether Mr Miller genuinely had faith in my academic ability or he just fancied my mum (all my teachers fancied my mum, even the female ones), I was accepted to Tommy Rich’s on the proviso that I pass a single examination.
The eleven-plus exam was compulsory until the mid-seventies at which point it was used only to determine transfers from state primary schools into more selective secondary establishments, like Tommy Rich’s. Previously it had been part of the old tripartite system of filtering children into secondary, comprehensive and grammar levels of education, and although this practice had been scrapped, it is exactly what happened to me. I was taken out of class one day and led to a small room off the assembly hall and given an hour to complete the test, which consisted of various exercises in verbal and non-verbal reasoning. There were lots of shapes and word games and the whole thing made my head spin. When I finished I had a sick feeling that I would not be receiving the racing bike I had been promised if I made it into Tommy Rich’s, and that inclination was one of the only things I got correct that day.
When the results came in, my scores were so low that the education board recommended me for a school on the bottom rung of the tripartite ladder, whereas if I hadn’t taken the test at all I would have automatically transferred to the school on the middle rung. My mum went bananas and went in to bat for me at the education authority. So it was, in September of 1981, I walked into the sports hall of Brockworth Comprehensive to join my friends from Castle Hill Primary, all of whom were somewhat surprised to see me, having assumed I would be starting my first day at Hogwarts or wherever the hell I was supposed to be going (as mentioned earlier, Warner Brothers did indeed use the interiors of Gloucester Cathedral for certain scenes in the Harry Potter movie, the same windy cloisters I walked down every day during my brief stint at the King’s School, so technically I did go to Hogwarts for a while).
My time at Brockworth Comprehensive School was extremely important and formative in terms of my eventual career path. I appreciate that’s a somewhat trite sentence – doesn’t everybody’s school career affect their career path? That’s what it’s for. What I mean is, I can pinpoint specific moments that contributed to my becoming a professional actor and comedy writer, which perhaps would not have occurred in the more staid, all-male environment of Tommy Rich’s. Fate or not, I can’t help feeling pleased that I failed that exam. I’m not a superstitious person but it’s fair to say that my entire career as I know it now depended upon the outcome of that one little test. I would no doubt have had some kind of career but it would not have been this one. Chaos theory dictates that small events can have massive ramifications; the old flap of a butterfly wing leads to a storm in China, or as I prefer to see it: a gunner on an Imperial Star Destroyer decides not to shoot a tiny escape pod and consequently an entire regime remains impervious to the efforts of a rebellion, lacking the information necessary to bring down its ultimate weapon. Who’s to say what I would have done if I had attended Tommy Rich’s. I might have followed my early dreams of becoming a vet or a professional athlete.
Now, you most probably just spat your hot beverage all over the pages of this book in amused disbelief, but as a youngster I was an extremely fast runner. Unbeatable in fact. Even when I graduated into a more crowded and diverse secondary school, I continued to take the 100- and 200-metre titles for my year on sports day (apart from one occasion, when a slip early on in the race forced me to overexert in order to gain ground and I pulled a muscle in my groin). Perhaps in a more sports-orientated environment, surrounded by the peer pressure of teenage machismo, I would have eschewed the arts in favour of the track and remained friends with Matthew Bunting.
Whatever path I had taken it would not have been this one and this one has given me so much. Not just in terms of the friends I have made and the experiences I have had. If I had passed that exam I would never have met Nick Frost or Edgar Wright, let alone the mother of my beautiful daughter. Those relationships and the product of those interactions were, for my part at least, determined entirely by my ability, or rather inability, to take one letter from one word and add it to another word to make two new words. Maybe I’m wrong; I might not belie
ve in fate but I do believe in causality and who’s to say fate isn’t just a sort of social mathematics that brings like-minded people together. I have a theory about this, which I’ll get into later. For now, let’s stay in childhood and the decade that taste forgot: the 1980s.
At the age of eleven, I entered Brockworth Comprehensive, slightly shame-faced that I hadn’t made it into the clever boys’ school, and as well as my snazzy new briefcase (which I quickly swapped for a more generic sports bag due to cloakroom ridicule), I carried the baggage of having something to prove with me into the sports hall that morning in September 1981. My boundless enthusiasm to please drove me to volunteer for every single task my new form tutor, Mr Calway, threw out to the class. My hand would shoot into the air if someone was required to fetch the register or relay a message to another teacher. I’m sure my other classmates, even the ones I knew from Castle Hill, a few of whom had joined me in 1 Coopers, thought I was trying a little too hard.
The school was divided into five houses, Gryffindor, Slytherin . . . no, wait, it was Coopers, Painswick, Birdlip, Leckhampton and Crickley, all hills that surrounded and enclosed the valley in which Gloucester was situated. During World War II, Gloucester had escaped the severe bombing of dockland cities due to its ability to disappear in the dark. When the German bombers were detected and the lights went out, the city vanished into the darkness of the valley, making it a difficult target. Consequently, whereas the docks of Liverpool and Bristol sustained heavy damage during the war years, Gloucester’s remained intact and operative. The lack of modernisation in the post-war era meant that Gloucester Docks were the go-to location for TV companies producing maritime period dramas. The BBC’s long-running nineteenth-century shipping drama, The Onedin Line, although set in Liverpool, was filmed on location in Gloucester and called upon many members of the GODS to be extras, including Richard Pegg. In 1982 a mass casting call went out to the company for extras to fill out the background of a German film production. The entire Pegg clan, with the exception of my sister Katy who was only three years old, made the trip down to the docks and dressed up in Edwardian period costume to spend the day as biological scenery. This was effectively my first film. I played the part of a young German boy at the back of the shot. It wasn’t a massive stretch for me. I’ve never seen it, in fact I can’t even remember what it was called. It’s not listed on my Internet Movie Database Page either, but I am positive that it happened. I distinctly recall my costume fitting, in a makeshift wardrobe room in one of the empty warehouses down at the waterside. The seemingly endless racks of musty period costumes being distributed among the excited amdrammers, my mum being delighted at getting the prettiest dress. What with the free lunch and the twenty-pound note I received at the end of the day, I made a mental note to try and be in a film again some time.
Back in Mr Calway’s classroom, that initial burst of eagerness sustained me for quite some time, despite David Kyle making a ‘swot’ gesture at me by thrumming his nose as I returned from completing my fifth voluntary chore in one day. I told my joke in front of the class every Monday morning and learned my first lesson about social responsibility from Mr Calway after delivering one of Jim Davidson’s Chalky routines, and, towards the end of the year, performed my first self-penned stand-up comedy set to the rest of the school to varying degrees of success.
Before the teachers’ strike put paid to any extra-curricular activity, the pupils of Brockworth Comprehensive were treated to two outward-bound excursions in their first and third years at the school. The first-year trip was to youth hostel in Welsh Bicknor, the third-year one was to a campsite called Biblins in the Wye Valley. We never made it to Biblins due to industrial action and boy, were we bummed! Bummed in the American sense of course, although rumour had it, a boy was bummed in the British sense by a loony in the woods at Biblins. On reflection, I am certain that story was as apocryphal as the ones about the kid who had his balls crushed in a vice or the boy in the fifth-year who had two cocks.
The teachers’ strike became such an annoyance to the students of Brockworth Comprehensive (due mainly to us having to remain outside in the cold during breaks) that the pupils themselves decided to strike. One lunchtime, during a particularly snowy winter, a rumour went round the school that we were not going to return to lessons after break in protest at staff action. Sure enough, when the bell rang, a sizeable chunk of the school population remained on the tennis courts to some amusement from the staff. News of the demo spread to neighbouring schools and soon copycat protests were playing out across the area.
By day two, the local news companies were on the scene. However, by this time, a deep schism had split the protesters down the middle. The problem was mainly one of credibility, due to the ringleaders of the strike being those pupils least likely to take any interest in school whatsoever. The most disruptive, delinquent and apathetic pupils became suddenly politicised and passionate about student welfare, simply because it enabled then to legitimately skive.
It was hard to present a tenable manifesto to the staff and media when our main spokesperson was a notable glue sniffer and cat murderer. By the time the local correspondents started interviewing the children involved, the Brockworth Pupils’ Front had spawned a breakaway front, the sceptical and less militant Pupils’ Front of Brockworth, a group of students who agreed with the fundamental tenets of the original action but were quite cold, didn’t want to get into trouble and, if they were honest with themselves, wanted to get on with lessons because exams were coming up.
I was in the latter camp and admitted as much when the regional news show, Points West, interviewed me outside the school gates. Unfortunately, my blistering polemics were deemed too controversial for teatime television and instead they went with the more measured comments given by Mark Simpson, the boy standing next to me. Nevertheless, that evening I appeared on television for the very first time; not all of me, about 50 per cent if I remember correctly; but it was enough to qualify as an appearance – you can see my face just before I look sullenly at my eighties slip-on shoes and white socks, allowing my dirty-blond hair to fall into my eyes in case any girls were watching. By the time the ringleaders had nobly marched the four and a half miles to lay their protest at the Gloucestershire County Council building, securing another day away from the classrooms all in the name of fairness, everyone else was back indoors. It was quite exciting, although nowhere near as exciting as a camping trip to Biblins would have been, bummers in the woods or not.
Welsh Bicknor was intended as a bonding experience for the first-years at Brockworth Comprehensive. The school was a nexus for a number of junior schools in south-east Gloucester and the classes were only sporadically populated with familiar faces. So, in an effort to integrate us, we were taken away from the comfort of our families and delivered to a sort of manor house in the countryside, supervised by a couple of teachers and a number of sixth-form girls, one of whom I fell hopelessly in love with.
Laura was blonde and buxom and won my affection by holding my hand as we hiked to a place called Symonds Yat. She can’t have been older than sixteen but to me she seemed like a woman. She smelled fantastic and there was something exotic about her big chunky jumper, tight jeans and pixie boots. I stayed by her side for the entire trip and became her devoted fan.
As part of the last-night celebrations at Welsh Bicknor, the students put on a cabaret, a mixed bag of songs and poems and sketches. To impress Laura, I decided to draw on my experiences as a racist comic at the Salvation Army and class entertainer back at school, performing a stand-up comedy routine comprising observational material I had written myself. It was a concept I didn’t entirely understand, assuming the trick was simply to mention things that the audience could relate to. The jokes were mainly about children’s television programmes and relied on members of the audience being familiar enough with them to find the memory of them funny. For instance . . .
Do you remember The Wombles? They were pretty funny, weren’t they?
It didn’t occur to me to make any particular funny observations about them to qualify the set-up. Not quite grasping the notion of observational comedy at this point, I neglected the crucial process of developing a comic take on familiar reference. I didn’t use the touchstone of well-loved children’s entertainment to launch into an amusing analysis of sexual politics beneath Wimbledon Common then segue into some topical stuff about the difficulties of puberty. I’m sure the question of which Womble Madame Cholet was sleeping with would have brought the house down with the kids and teachers alike. Of course, what I should have done is step out in front of the assembled throng, lit a cigarette and said . . .
Do you remember The Wombles? They were funny, weren’t they? Which one do you think was fucking Madame Cholet? Anybody? I mean, I’m just going by personal appearance here but surely Tomsk has got the biggest penis. He’s all muscles and confidence, isn’t he? Sure he’s a little slow but then what does that matter when you’re packing trouser grams. Am I right, ladies?
Mind you, as an unintelligent bodybuilder, chances are he’s using anabolic steroids, in which case (wiggles little finger) knob tax!
Could be Tobermory, I suppose. He has a porn-star moustache and a backless apron. He does seem to put a lot of his energy into making stuff, though. Maybe he lost his balls in a workshop accident involving a lathe and a tin can.
It sure as shit isn’t Great Uncle Bulgaria; I mean, he was probably an absolute fuck machine in his day but the dude is never out of his slippers.
I don’t think it can be Bungo because no one gets laid wearing tweed and it definitely isn’t Orinoco because he is clearly gay. Come on, the big hat, the way he wears his scarf over the shoulder, just off the neck? He has way too much style to be straight.
