Nerd Do Well

by Simon Pegg

  After the competition was complete, the entrants were given the opportunity to perform their plays in the evening to an audience of parents. This involved the hugely exciting process of returning to school after hours and hanging out in the brightly lit dining halls, waiting to perform in an atmosphere even more exciting than the competition. This felt like proper grown-up theatre and there was something infinitely thrilling about coming to school in the dark, out of uniform. The play went down well, a feeling of achievement made sweeter by the fact that we had come first in the competition despite my rubbish tash, and as we bundled back into the dining hall after our curtain call, the euphoria was total and my good mood indestructible. That is, until I saw Laura produce a packet of Silk Cut cigarettes from her coat and place one in her mouth. I don’t think I would have felt any less betrayed if I had seen her kissing the headmaster. If anything, that would not have been nearly as bad since I had no illusions about actually having some kind of relationship with Laura; it was a crush. Nevertheless, to see her smoking sent her tumbling from the pedestal I had placed her on and I never felt the same way about her again. I had oddly high standards for a twelve-year-old.

  The next production I participated in was Tom Sawyer, which further cemented my passion for acting and proved an even more thrilling experience than the house drama contest, not least because of my new crush on Libby ‘Aunt Polly’ Cox. This was a lead role in a large-scale production, staged not in the makeshift studio theatre of the dining hall but in the cavernous interior of the sports hall for three whole nights. It proved to be enormous fun and ended with an unforgettable after-show party at which I drank half a cup of cider and thought I was drunk. The imaginary high gave me the audacity to persuade Libby Cox into giving me a reluctant peck on the cheek, which I regarded as a massive victory. This acting business was just becoming more and more fun.

  The following year we staged a revue show instead of the usual dramatic production, due to it being less labour-intensive for the staff who had begun their strike. My contribution to the show was to be part of a robotics display, which I performed with Darius and a boy called Glenn. We painted our faces white and our lips black, wore baseball caps, wrap-around shades and wore our shirts backwards in order to look futuristic. Thinking about it, Darius eschewed the backwards shirt trick and wore an ‘envelope’ shirt he’d bought from a fashionable boutique (he was the only boy I ever knew to own a jumpsuit who wasn’t in the air force).

  Glenn chose to be double different and painted his face gold as well as pinning a circuit board to his chest for extra roboticness. Glenn was a late addition to our planned display, having finagled his way into our clique by doing a passable moonwalk in the dining hall. It wasn’t as impressive as the one I had seen a New York street kid do on John Craven’s Newsround, but he presented it with such confidence and pride, Darius and I couldn’t really say no. I remember looking at my fellow robotics expert after Glenn had tiptoed backwards on his kung-fu slippers and seeing my ‘What the fuck was that?’ reflected back at me in his eyes.

  Nevertheless, Glenn joined us onstage as we moved our bodies in a mannered jerky fashion to Shannon’s ‘Let the Music Play’. I still get a tingle of nerves if I hear the hissing rat-a-tat of the intro on the radio. I am instantly transported back to the echoing sports hall, the smell of white panstick and the ache in my arms from attempting to do my buttons up behind my back.

  After the robotics,13 there were no more big productions during my time at Brockworth. The inter-house drama competition continued sporadically, although I actually wrote a play for my final year there, a loose pastiche of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial called G.J. Three Million Light Years From Home. The G.J. of the title was an alien called Gunky Jam who visits Earth and is befriended by a young boy. E.T. had an enormous effect on me as a kid and temporarily eclipsed Star Wars in the gap between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. I had heard of the film from my stepdad, a regular viewer of Barry Norman’s film programme, which ran an item on the huge fuss about the movie in the States. We were on holiday in Devon when he started talking about how the film was by the same man who had directed Raiders of the Lost Ark and how people were getting as excited about it as they had done about Star Wars five years before. We were walking from the lighthouse at Start Point at the time. It’s funny how I can remember that and yet struggle to remember what I had for breakfast yesterday. I guess it has to do with emotional significance. (That or early onset dementia.)

  When the film was released, I went to the ABC to watch it on my own and pulled the hood of my parka up towards the end as the tears began to flow. It was during that first viewing of E.T. that I experienced a little epiphany of understanding about the potential for interaction in art, which I have often used to justify some of my own decisions. There is a moment when E.T. is out and about on Halloween, dressed as a ghost, and spies a small child dressed as Yoda from The Empire Strikes Back. As E.T. spots this apparently kindred spirit, he lifts his arms in greeting and cries ‘Home’. In scoring the moment, John Williams uses a phrase from Yoda’s theme from The Empire Strikes Back, creating a moment for viewers to make a connection for themselves. I got it immediately, having listened to that particular soundtrack over and over again, and found myself looking around at my fellow audience members to see if they had spotted it too.

  What thrilled me about the moment was that it wasn’t telegraphed and explained. It was there to be discovered. It credited me, the audience, with the intelligence to join the dots and I felt privileged and trusted by the film-makers, and was suddenly possessed by an urge to let them know, to tell them that the device succeeded and that I’d got it.

  A more cynical commentator might dismiss the moment as a shameless exercise in brand sharing, but I happen to think it was more affectionate than product placement. Years later, George Lucas secreted a delegation of E.T.s amid his galactic senate in The Phantom Menace, confirming that E.T. had indeed witnessed a familiar face that Halloween night, although the moment felt somehow less magical. Perhaps it was the context. Back in the early eighties, I found the moment thrilling and never forgot the sense of communication I felt between the film and my twelve-year-old self. It taught me that the viewing experience could be made even more fun with the addition of interaction. This collaborative approach was something I would use a lot in my work, particularly in Spaced, which often relied heavily on the audience’s cultural awareness to get all the jokes. I never forgot the sense of empowerment I experienced in that cinema, like someone had thrown me a ball which I had not only caught but thrown back.

  G.J. Three Million Light Years From Home was never staged at Brockworth, due to industrial action, and eventually got lost amid a mass of paper I destroyed in celebration of leaving my comprehensive education behind. I’d be interested to read it now. I remember G.J. had a robotic arm and a Mohican haircut, looking more like a refugee from a Mad Max film than a cute little alien, but then this was 1985 and Beyond Thunderdome had just been released and I’d been slightly obsessed with that particular film series since Darius Pocha had embellished it into oblivion at Welsh Bicknor. It is most certainly the case that my time at Brockworth Comprehensive encouraged an interest in writing as much as it did in acting, and in my first few years at the school that was entirely down to the efforts of one amazing teacher called Mrs Taylor.

  Mrs Taylor was one of those teachers who seemed born to do the job. She had the capacity to make any pupil, no matter how reluctant, want to work for her and she did this without ever really raising her voice. Her method was a simple and irresistible wave of positive reinforcement, which made her impossible not to love. The scariest, most dangerous pupils in the school became sweet-natured and attentive in her presence, and her lessons were always the highlight of any day.

  She was attractive and mercurial and a cloud of grey hair seemed to have arrived prematurely on top of her head. Her comments in the margins of stories and projects were always emphatically positive; even wh
en she was offering constructive criticism they sat there happily emblazoned in bright red pen. She would add positive comments throughout, rather than reserve her opinion for the end, and she would congratulate the smallest flourishes in your creative writing with ticks and stars.

  Looking through a project on the movies I completed for her in 1983, there are frequent examples of her technique. She compliments artwork with superlatives, but then adds a recommendation to draw on plain paper, as it will look even better. After a short chapter on censorship and some hilariously hypocritical moralising on the subject of pornographic films which, I write, will ‘soon hopefully be banned’, she added the question ‘Have you seen any?’, challenging my preconceptions even on such a sensitive subject and no doubt sensing my decision to somewhat toe the PTA party line, rather than formulate my own opinion.

  Concluding a protracted chapter about Star Wars (the real reason for me starting the project in the first place), I wrote the words ‘May the force be with you’, under which she added the rejoinder, ‘And to you, brother.’ At the end of this lovingly crafted piece of coursework, which came bound and illustrated, I had left a page with the word ‘Comment’ written at the top, on to which she wrote the following, in her usual scarlet ink:

  A+

  Another outstanding piece of work, Simon. Very interesting indeed and fascinating to look at. You certainly have a good eye for visual detail. This kind of book could go on and on. How about continuing it? One day you may use it in some form, when you go into print that is. Others have published far less interesting and absorbing material. You could capture the ‘teeny boppers’ market. Well done, Simon. Colour would add a new dimension, though I do like your black-and-white effect.

  There was never a homework assignment more exciting than a creative-writing piece for Mrs Taylor, knowing that every flourish of the imagination or descriptive metaphor would be picked up on and noted in the margin. A somewhat significant story I remember getting good marks for was written in the same year as my ‘Movies’ project and concerned a simmering obsession of mine at the time: zombies.

  Zombies

  B

  ack in 1983 and technically a zombie virgin, I was nevertheless able to write a zombie story for Mrs Taylor, pieced together from stuff I’d read and heard, long before I became an authority on the subject.

  The story concerned a young boy who awoke one morning to discover the world had been overrun by the living dead. Realising he is the sole survivor of the outbreak, he attempts to escape from the bloodthirsty ghouls by running up a local hill, where he falls through the ground to find himself in a forgotten munitions dump.

  This might sound far-fetched, but there were several military installations on the hills around Gloucester, left over from World War II. On our frequent walks to Brockworth, over Nut Hill, we would pass an old air-raid shelter and anti-aircraft gun mount. Drawing on Robert Westall’s famous children’s novel The Machine Gunners, the story of a group of wartime kids who take possession of a German machine gun, the hero of my story finds a similar weapon among the forgotten ordnance and uses it against the zombie horde who have followed him up the hill (at a slow, stumbling pace). Part of the appeal to me as a kid was the bizarre lolloping threat that zombies presented, a critical handicap which enabled survivors to take stock of their surroundings and regard their attackers with fascinated disgust as much as fear as they staggered towards them. In the story, as the zombies’ heads become visible over the brow of the hill, my little survivor opens up with the machine gun, aiming for the head, the only way to effectively stop the walking dead.

  Mrs Taylor’s response to the story was typically enthusiastic; whereas some teachers might have dismissed it as schlocky and overwrought, she offered a volley of bright-red encouragement and genuine glee at all the gore. This definitely stands out as an ESTB moment, if only to go back and give Mrs Taylor a VHS copy of Shaun of the Dead. I think she’d be rather chuffed, that’s if the whole time-travelling student thing didn’t turn her grey hair white. If you’re reading this Mrs T, I’d love to know what you think.

  Although I’d never actually seen a zombie movie when I was thirteen, I knew all about them. In the early eighties, as the popularity of home video grew, a number of small UK distribution companies started up with the express intention of cashing in on the sudden interest in affordable home entertainment. Video rental libraries began to appear everywhere, offering an extensive catalogue of older titles although little in the way of new releases.

  The larger studios, somewhat myopically, held on to their content, choosing to generate revenue from repeat theatrical presentation, assuming video to be something of a fad. This led to a dearth of content for video distributors who, in response, took advantage of certain censorship loopholes and imported a variety of low-budget, foreign exploitation films that had never been seen theatrically in the UK. Although unregulated by conventional cinematic classification, the videos did fall under the remit of the Obscene Publications Act 1857, which rendered the distribution of any material which ‘tends to deprave and corrupt’ as a statutory offence.

  Eventually, these titles drew the attention of the media and subsequently a whole army of crusading moralists on a mission to eradicate this filth from our high streets. Smart, well-made horror titles, such as Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead and George A. Romero’s seminal zombie flick Dawn of the Dead, were lumped in with the likes of I Spit on Your Grave and Last House on the Left and as a result lost to a generation.

  Obtainable only on grainy pirate video after the ban, these films became the stuff of legend, often far more horrifying in description than they were to actually watch. The film that fascinated me the most amid this censorship massacre was Dawn of the Dead. Romero’s star was sufficient that the film already had a certain amount of credibility, particularly within the horror community. The film had been released unrated in the US so as to avoid the porno tarnish of an X and had done good business in America as well as non-English-speaking territories, where Romero’s friend and collaborator Dario Argento had final cut. Argento’s version concentrated on the more visceral aspects of the film and is likely to have been the version that found its way to the UK on VHS, further bolstering the case for the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association’s decision to consign it to the video nasty sin bin. Several images from the film featured in The Encyclopedia of Horror I received as a Christmas present in 1983 and I became fascinated by this tale of a shopping mall that becomes awash with blood.

  I would stare at the image of David Emge’s zombified flyboy character, trying to make sense of the apparent gaping hole in his neck, or the shocked face of the zombie with a machete embedded in his cranium. The film became something of an obsession for me. I quizzed friends who had seen it and would get them to tell me in as much detail as they could exactly what went on this blood-soaked mall, listening open-mouthed as they regaled me with gleeful reports of helicopter decapitations and graphic disembowellings. I read everything I could about zombie movies, dwelling on the more extreme descriptions of unfortunate individuals being forced to regurgitate their insides or suffer eyeball impalements on wooden splinters. Not including John Landis’s groundbreaking video for Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’, I didn’t actually see a zombie movie until 1985 when Romero’s third instalment of his Dead trilogy came to home video and I experienced Day of the Dead. I saw Dan O’Bannon’s comical Return of the Living Dead before I finally got my hands on a copy of the elusive Dawn and actually saw Tom Savini’s remake of Night of the Living Dead before I saw the Romero.

  Audio Gold

  O

  f course it wasn’t all videos, videos, videos – before the advent of sell-through VHS, there was a sizeable market for album versions of films, just as there was for stand-up comedy and musical theatre. As a very small boy, I would avidly listen to my father’s Bill Cosby albums and still recall his routine about Noah building the ark despite not having heard it for thirty-five years; the ‘shru-b
aa shru-baa shru-baa’ of Noah’s saw is still audible in my mind.

  Owning a piece of spoken entertainment and then listening to it at will seemed awfully novel at the time. Today, comedians define their entire careers by making themselves available to watch at home and comedy DVDs are everywhere. Back then, only a select number of highly regarded and established comics were able to commit their musings to vinyl. Another audio comic delight I recall enjoying at this time was the more musical styling of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band. Both Cosby and the Doo Dahs were a little sophisticated for a five-year-old, but I distinctly remember enjoying Cosby’s vocal gymnastics and crazy characterisations and the silliness of Bonzo songs such as ‘Mr Slater’s Parrot’ and ‘Jollity Farm’.

  I would often sit in the corner of the room wearing Dad’s massive headphones, carefully replaying the records time after time. It was something I did frequently throughout my childhood with music, comedy and film, inspiring my own creative imagination, the headphones rendering the experience intensely personal, as though it were all happening inside my own head.