Nerd Do Well

by Simon Pegg

  We maintained our love of the show for many years, and when it came to write Spaced, I gave Tim my boyish affection for her as a gift. We even shot a scene for the first series in which she appears to Tim as a sort of Obi-Wan Kenobi-ish phantom, bestowing sage advice. Naively, I had written the scene in the vague hope that she might agree to appear. She was performing in The Vagina Monologues at the Old Vic while we were shooting and I dropped a note off for her at the stage door, explaining about the show and the scene. She always came across as very cool and interesting in interviews and I couldn’t help feeling this might actually appeal to her. Having now received several of these notes myself, I can imagine how she must have felt when reading my request. Flattered but utterly incapable of spreading herself so thin between every entreaty for her attention. The scene was shot with a lookalike but later deleted because it didn’t work.

  The night she came to the Shepherds, I made sure I had copies of both series of Spaced on DVD and passed them to her when I managed to break the ring of rapt male attention that encircled her. I slightly regretted it the next day, since many of the references to her in the show make mention of her as the prime subject of Tim’s masturbatory fantasies and I feared she might watch it and get creeped out. I didn’t occur to me on the night, however. It seemed crazy to Nick and me that the object of our affections had somehow found her way into our little pub and was sat with us poring over Bernie’s quiz sheet, two of the answers on which had been devised specifically for her, after Bernie learned she would be in attendance. Ironically, the questions were about The X-Files and, tellingly, Nick and I knew the answers before she did.

  Unsurprisingly, the night turned out to be one of the best ever during our time as regulars at the pub. Gillian was charming and funny, and for all the awe that her fantasy royalty inspired, she seemed like the kind of person we’d hang out with whether she was our favourite, fictional FBI agent or not. It was tempting to see her presence in the pub as fateful, even more so being cast alongside her in How to Lose Friends & Alienate People in 2007 and becoming proper friends, but it wasn’t fate, it was the complex swirls and eddies of quantum attraction, an interaction of millions of tiny choices, preferences and details that magnetised us and drew us all to that particular coterie on that particular quiz night. Although to Nick and me, it was nothing short of an X-File.

  Something as simple as geographical proximity and a keen interest in manga animation had put Edgar and me in the same auditorium in 1989, but we missed each other that night. It took a more complex butterfly effect to facilitate our actual meeting. That wouldn’t happen until seven years later at the Battersea Arts Centre (although Edgar insists it was the Riverside Studios in Hammersmith). We were there to see Matt Lucas perform his psychotic raconteur and rabid thespian, Sir Bernard Chumley, with his then sidekick, David Walliams. Matt invited Edgar to the show having seen his first raw but undoubtedly impressive cinematic offering, A Fistful of Fingers, championing him to the Paramount Comedy Channel as a potential director for his and David’s first TV sketch show, Mash and Peas.

  I had met Matt on the comedy circuit and knew David well from university. I had also been working on a show for the Paramount Comedy Channel, called Dan Doyle: Space Person, about a British astronaut, stranded in deep space with his dog Shatner and a Hal-style artificially intelligent computer called Alan. I had got the job on the strength of my work as a stand-up comedian, which had also led to appearances on the BBC’s Stand Up Show, on which I performed a routine about coming from the West Country. Edgar, a fellow West Country boy, had seen the show and approached me in the bar at the BAC/Riverside to say hello.

  Eventually, through our connections at Paramount, we found ourselves working on the same show, a strange hybrid sketch/sitcom/stand-up/music show called Asylum, the rough tale of a pizza delivery boy trapped in a mental institution along with a group of other hapless ‘patients’. The devising process began when Paramount assembled a group of stand-ups to workshop ideas in an attempt to create the show collectively from a sort of comedic think tank. After the first session, a number of the original group dropped out due to moral objections to the show’s flippant approach to mental health care (quantum attraction at work). This left us bereft of any female contribution and feelers went out for replacements. I had not long finished filming Six Pairs of Pants where I had met Jessica Hynes due to Katy Carmichael (Twist in Spaced) bringing her along to the audition for moral support. She had made a huge impression on me during the shoot and I immediately thought of her when it came to suggesting new recruits for Asylum. She wasn’t a stand-up as such, but in terms of comic chops, she could definitely hold her own among the professionally funny folk, which included comedians Adam Bloom, Norman Lovett, Paul Morocco and Julian Barratt. Jess joined the group and we continued to work, with Edgar and David Walliams taking an executive role in the writing process, building the narrative around characters and improvisations workshopped by the actors.

  This was the first time Jess, Edgar and I had worked together as a threesome. The pre-existing chemistry Jess and I had established on Six Pairs of Pants meant that we naturally gravitated towards each other in rehearsals, which in turn motivated David and Edgar to write with this in mind. Many of my scenes in Asylum involved Jess, who played two characters, the psychotic Scottish Nurse McFadden and a sweet, befuddled patient called Martha, obsessed with Channel 4’s Countdown. Interestingly, Jess was the only performer in the show not to adopt her own name for her character(s), marking her out as the only real actress among us.

  As the series evolved (Edgar and David were still writing as we were shooting), My and Jess’s storyline developed into a sweet will-they-won’t-they romance which eventually motivates my character (Simon Pegg, the pizza delivery boy) to lead a mass breakout and overthrow Norman Lovett’s misguided, experimental psychologist, Dr Lovett.

  At the time, I was also shooting a new sketch show for Channel Five, produced by the same people who had created Six Pairs of Pants. We Know Where You Live was to feature as part of Channel Five’s launch package and eventually produced some funny moments from a strong cast which featured Sanjeev Bhaskar, Amanda Holden, Fiona Allen, Ella Kenion and Jeremy Fowlds. I worked on the show for six days a week, and on Sundays, travelled down to a disused children’s hospital in Cobham, Surrey, to shoot Asylum. It was very hard work and I resented Edgar slightly for his part in dragging me south every week on what should have been my day off. His work method was exhaustive, complicated, and at times his motives were difficult to fathom.

  Six days a week I was making point-and-shoot comedy sketches at a breakneck pace, then I’d find myself in Surrey, performing multiple takes on complex set-ups, all the while wondering what the hell was going on. We were, after all, only making a low-budget comedy show for a cable TV channel. Did it really require such studious application of technique and attention to detail?

  Despite my exhaustion, which was actually nothing next to that suffered by Edgar who was living and breathing the show, writing, shooting and editing in a perpetual sleepless cycle, I eventually enjoyed the shoot, since it seemed sillier and more edgy than the more conventional fair I was knocking out through the week.

  When I finally saw Asylum edited together, everything made sense. I was blown away by Edgar’s style and technique, and marvelled at his apparent ability to hold the fluid and intricate camera movements of an entire show in his head while creating it in a random order. The whole thing held together like an expensive movie. And justified the time and effort Edgar had devoted to it. Elements of scenes that were shot weeks apart blended together seamlessly, and I experienced the same sense of wonder and admiration for Edgar watching the cut as I had done for the Coen brothers watching Raising Arizona.

  This particular film has had a huge influence on me as a film-maker, with its frantic directorial style, heightened performances and poetic writing and construction. It was perhaps the first time I realised that comedy could be derived from more than s
imply the script and the actors. The camera itself became an integral part of building the comedy. The Coen brothers didn’t simply point their lenses at the actors and capture the funny; they used their cameras to enhance and augment the comic beats. This device naturally extended into the way the film was edited and scored, creating a beautifully integrated comic masterpiece, which represents a brilliant unifying of the film-making process. I watched the movie twice in a row and decided that if I ever made films or TV shows, they would have to be like this. Of course, I would need to find a director who felt the same way as me, someone who could speak graphically, who could read a script and translate it into a series of visual beats that enhanced the physical action and dialogue, someone with lots of hair and a beard.

  Edgar was a director who seemed inextricably plugged into his own vision, who totally understood how the movement of a camera can inform a scene. How it can increase tension or communicate drama, urgency or danger (and he definitely had a beard). Watching just a few moments of Asylum in the edit, I knew immediately that if ever I got to make my own TV show, I would want Edgar to direct it. I later discovered that Edgar and I had both attended the opening-night screening of Katsuhiro Otomo’s anime masterpiece Akira at the Watershed, Bristol, in 1989, and that Raising Arizona, Dawn of the Dead and Akira were Edgar’s three favourite films. It’s strange to think that sitting in the dark all those years earlier, perhaps just a few seats away from me, was a fifteen-year-old boy who would eventually change my life completely. If the laws of quantum attraction do apply, then it would seem not meeting Edgar would have been harder.

  The Wizard of Oz

  A

  s Smiley and I sat together in the sweltering heat of an Ozzy beach, a particularly mesmerising ambient house track played on the minibus stereo, building gradually into great swooping loops, promising the return of the pounding backbeat but holding off tantalisingly, as if knowing how much we wanted it. The moment finally arrived when withholding the base drum would have been cruel; we looked at each other and, with goofy whacked-out smiles, said in unison, ‘Here we go.’

  Life was changing rapidly for me at this point. Eggy Helen and I had broken up just two months before and in the aftermath I had wandered dazed into the Garden Hospital in Hendon with a smashed knuckle on my right hand thanks to the partition window in our flat. Now I was jetting off to Adelaide, Australia, to begin the biggest adventure of my life, with a group of other wide-eyed comics for whom the experience was similarly huge.

  It was while on this trip that I forged another of the most significant friendships of my adult life, with a mercurial Northern Irish stand-up, rave bunny and bar-room philosopher called Michael Smiley. I had been aware of Michael for a few years, having first seen him delivering frenetic and oddly absorbing field reports for the magazine show Naked City. There was something magnetic about him. Occasionally, you will see someone on television for the very first time, and such is their charisma and presence, you assume they have been around forever and somehow just avoided your attention. This was most certainly the case with Smiley; he had a confidence, an assurance, even a slight air of danger about his persona that gave the impression he had been drafted in from somewhere else, a place where he was king.

  A year or so later, I found myself on the same bill as Smiley at the Cosmic Comedy Club in Fulham. I had gone along with Nick Frost in tow, to perform at one of the hellish Christmas party bashes, which sapped the soul but made sense financially. Usually, comedy clubs are filled with people who have paid specifically to see a night of comedy, but at a Christmas party bash the audiences were merely out on a ‘works do’ and it was a hard job diverting their attention to the stage, particularly when where they really wanted to be was back at the office, drinking red wine out of paper cups and trying to persuade Tina from accounts to photocopy her vagina.

  Nick and I both recognised Smiley from Naked City and exchanged a few pleasantries in the artists’ holding area (an empty upstairs bar). Smiley is not the type of man to suffer fools gladly, and knowing him as well as I do now, I can only imagine what he must have thought of this fresh-faced little smarty-pants student comic and his even younger Essex sidekick.

  I saw him again in a bar in Edinburgh the following year and offered a quick hello, which I think he returned with a surly nod. We were both at the festival performing one-man shows. Smiley had become a fixture at the fringe having come second to Dylan Moran in the annual ‘So You Think You’re Funny’ new-act competition (I went out in the heats), whereas this was my first time performing a one-hour show and I felt like a first-year at a big comprehensive. Scouts for a number of Antipodean comedy festivals, including Adelaide and Melbourne in Australia and Wellington and Auckland in New Zealand, were trawling the venues for potential acts to fly over and both Smiley and I eventually made the grade.

  The following February my agent informed me that Smiley and I would be on the same flight to Sydney and gave me his mobile phone number to coordinate meeting at the airport. I was very impressed by this – after all, it was 1996 and cellular phones were still something of a luxury. I called the strange, futuristic series of digits and arranged to meet Smiley at Heathrow, along with a number of other acts, including Andrew Maxwell, Simon Munnery and Sean Lock. Thrown into this strange adventure and bonded by the uncertainty we faced, Smiley and I began to warm to each other.

  When we arrived in Australia, any cautious circling was abandoned in favour of excitable giggling at this exotic new land. The weather was beautiful, the landscape beguiling, the girls were uniformly gorgeous – and what’s more, every household in Adelaide was permitted by law to cultivate nine marijuana plants for personal use. Something about the culture shock and the psychological impact of being geometrically opposed to our lives back home sent us into a spin of hedonistic fervour. Suddenly I found myself relishing my status as a single man and I felt happy and liberated, as though I had been given the chance to start my adult life all over again. I went slightly insane, throwing myself into new experiences. I did a bungee jump, got a tattoo, grew my first beard and had a lot of sex. In the two and a bit months since she’d dumped me, it was the first time I actually felt glad that Eggy Helen had given me the elbow.

  We spent most of our days down at Glenelg beach with the increasingly close-knit band of comics and friends we had made along the way. On one occasion, having indulged liberally in the local recreational herb, a sticky and pungent strain of marijuana, I found myself stood silently in the sea with a number of other comics including Smiley and Maxwell, the warm, blue water gently lapping against our hips as we stared into space, every one of us unspeakably happy but somehow struck dumb. After a minute or so of blissful, hazy peace, I lifted my head to my compatriots and uttered a simple devastating truth: ‘This is our job.’ We remained in a circle for another five minutes before we eventually stopped laughing.

  On the surface, Smiley and I in particular were seemingly totally incompatible as friends; our respective credentials read more like a gay version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. He was a working-class Northern Irish tough nut, who was married and divorced with two kids and a wealth of life experience that might make a less resilient man feel as though the world owed him a living; whereas I studiously played the fresh-faced, middle-class university graduate who had always had it comparatively easy.

  Before our time in Australia had ended, Smiley and I had agreed to share a flat together. Since I was living on Nick’s floor in the aftermath of my break-up with Eggy Helen and Smiley found himself similarly transient, kipping on various sofas around west London, we resolved to start house-hunting as soon as we returned. This experience later inspired some of the details of Tim and Daisy’s homeless exploits in Spaced, a show in which Smiley would eventually play the protean rave-pixie by the name of Tyrone ‘Tyres’ O’Flaherty.

  A few months after we found a flat in Kentish Town, Nick joined us. Having finally given up the ghost on his deserted flat in Ivy Road, he found sanctuary in o
ur spare room, a cell, which soon became affectionately known as ‘the crab pit’. By a variety of incidents and accidents, the three of us had been drawn together from wildly disparate backgrounds under one roof to forge an enduring bond that had become nothing short of brotherly.

  Michael and Nick were both best men at my wedding to Maureen and are both godfathers to my daughter. It sounds like I’m waxing fatal again, but I’m not; it comes back down to my whole dubious science thing. We might not know we are seeking out the people who best enrich our lives, but somewhere on a deep, subconscious level we absolutely are. Whether that bond is temporary or permanent, whether it succeeds or fails, fate is simply a conflagration of choices that combine with others to shape the relationships that surround us. We cannot choose our family but we can choose our friends, and we do, sometimes before we have even met them.

  11

  Hanging from the end of Canterbury’s outstretched arm was Ben from Century (an imprint of Random House Publishing) a look of terror on his stricken face.

  ‘B-But . . .’ Pegg stammered.

  ‘If you put me down, I’ll explain it all,’ Ben rasped, his face reddening further.

  Canterbury lowered the publisher to the ground. He staggered slightly and clutched his bruised neck like a fairy. More of Lord Black/Ben from Century’s goons had gathered at the door and were hammering incessantly to get in.

  ‘Stand down,’ choked Black. ‘Everything’s fine.’

  ‘Are you sure, Ben – I mean, Lord Black?’ said a voice of muffled concern.

  ‘Yes,’ Ben insisted, sinking into a chair and putting his head in his hands.

  ‘Why?’ Pegg said simply.

  ‘I did it for you!’ muttered Ben.

  ‘For me?’ Pegg said incredulously.