Back Story

  Walking around that beautiful city on a sunny autumn weekend, I was properly excited. I loved where I was, I was relieved to be allowed to be there and, for the first time, I seemed to be in possession of some of the energy and enthusiasm I’d previously associated with people who went bungee jumping in Thailand. The mist of puberty was lifting and things were beginning to seem possible.

  The auditions were held in a wide range of venues – some were in newer college buildings and felt municipal and drab. But many were in old college rooms with dusty medieval staircases, up which you would queue for your chance to be in some pseud’s production of The Changeling while looking at shabby old posters for previous productions.

  These were first-round auditions. Outside the room would be photocopied sheets of speeches to prepare (not necessarily anything from the play you were auditioning for – this stage was a general trawl for acting talent). You’d practise the speech in the queue outside – there seemed to be loads of people auditioning for all of these productions, although I noticed some recurring faces, from which I inferred that I wasn’t the only one doing the rounds. When your time came, you’d go in, give your name and college, read the piece out, get told to do it differently, read it out again with that in mind and leave. It was all done with the seriousness and self-conscious professionalism that only enthusiastic amateurs ever possess. A couple of days later, a list would be posted on the noticeboard of the ADC Clubroom of those invited to a ‘recall’ audition. Of those, less than half would be cast.

  Everyone involved in this process was a student. There were no grown-ups. You can’t read drama at Cambridge, so it’s only ever something people do alongside their degrees, as a hobby. This is a brilliant system as it prevents anyone in a teaching capacity from interfering – from saying there’s a right way and a wrong way of putting on a play. You get to learn by experience, from your mistakes, from each other and from each other’s mistakes. And the main thing you learn from this whole process is how much entertaining people, telling them a story, moving them, making them laugh, is about instinct and luck. Those who succeed are, in general, those who don’t let the failures or the successes turn their heads too much, and who keep at it.

  The audition I was most excited about, and felt I had the least chance of succeeding in, was for the Footlights pantomime, Cinderella. As a comedy-obsessed teenager, I’d obviously heard of Footlights. It was the club of which so many of the comedians I admired seemed to have been members: Peter Cook, John Cleese, Douglas Adams, Stephen Fry – these were the brightest stars in the firmament but, like a night sky in the countryside, the more you looked, the more stars you saw: writers like Michael Frayn and Clive James; producers like David Hatch, John Lloyd and Jonathan James Moore; directors like Jonathan Miller and Trevor Nunn; actors like Eleanor Bron, Miriam Margolyes and Simon Jones; Cecil Beaton, Germaine Greer, Bill Oddie, Julian Slade. The more you found out, the more Footlights seemed to be behind about half of the stuff worth paying attention to.

  And there was something intriguing about that clubroom. I mean, it was horrible. It stank of stale beer. It was unpleasantly dark, but it would have been worse if you could see into the corners. Getting in involved a long walk through the union cellars, down a corridor so narrow it felt like it had been hewn out of the earth by Morlocks and as weirdly, frighteningly and garishly painted as a punk’s squat. But I’d noticed there were posters on the wall of shows that looked old and significant, and photographs of famous people sporting haircuts from the era preceding that of their breakthrough.

  The director of the pantomime wasn’t present at the first-round audition – it was left to Footlights committee members to separate the wheat from the chaff. I auditioned in front of the two vice-presidents, Dan Mazer and James Bachman. I read out an Alan Bennett monologue in which a man is speaking on the phone, trying to arrange for a saucy telegram to be sent to his girlfriend. What James told me later is that, just before I came in, Dan had groaned, ‘Oh no, here comes that keen one.’

  That interests me. First because it gives an insight into my own uncool naïvety – that in one conversation with Dan at the squash, in which I was just attempting to be appropriately enthusiastic and upbeat as minor public schoolboys are trained to do, I’d transmitted a desperate and unattractive keenness. They were looking for people who were keen, presumably. But I had obviously seemed keen in a way that, in Dan’s view, almost precluded my also being funny.

  And it also interests me that such a category of people exists at all – that we go beyond the insight that enthusiasm is no guarantee of talent to the conclusion that it actually makes talent less likely, and indeed that a snooty take-it-or-leave-it standoffishness suggests you’re likely to be hot stuff. It’s a sort of Groucho Marx perversity: like the club who’ll accept him as a member, my enthusiasm was somehow repellent. If Dan had felt he had to court my enthusiasm for Footlights, he’d probably have found it easier to believe I might show promise.

  I don’t mean to criticise the 21-year-old Mazer here. I’m just using him as an example of how pervasive is our culture’s attraction to cool and sangfroid. I was guilty of it myself when I found the unfriendly Footlights squash more attractive than the more open ADC one – I was almost directly conforming to the Groucho quote there. But, for all that I’m susceptible to it, it’s a phenomenon I hate. I hate cool. I’m impatient with disingenuous affectations of having better things to do, being untroubled, being an unflappable presence disdainfully moving through the world. What’s particularly daft is that people who affect such an attitude are often incredibly fashionably dressed, giving the lie to their claims of immunity to a desire to be included. I prefer less hypocritical expressions of human frailty, where saying things like ‘Yes I’d be really keen to get involved in your comedy club’ doesn’t immediately get you marked down as a cunt.

  I’m really not as bitter as this makes me sound, or at least not in the case of the Cinderella audition. They thought I was funny and gave me a recall for the show, which I was hugely excited about, a feeling I didn’t yet know I was supposed to conceal. Like a goth looking at a winkle-picker, all my desire was flaming in contemplation of Cambridge, acting, the theatre and, most of all, Footlights.

  - 19 -

  God Is Love

  I’m passing a round church: All Souls’, at the top of Regent Street, next to Broadcasting House. It’s only really the entrance that’s round – the porch bit under the spire. In Cambridge, next to the Footlights clubroom, there’s a properly round church. A lot of students from my college seemed to attend services there – people I was chatty with for the first few weeks and seldom spoke to afterwards. With that guilty thought, I’m glad to turn down Cavendish Place and leave it behind.

  For the first couple of weeks at Cambridge, I thought maybe everyone was Christian. When I arrived at Peterhouse, there was a nice note in my pigeon-hole from a group of second-years asking me round for a cup of tea. I jumped at this opportunity, as I’m sure most people jump at any sign of friendliness when they first arrive somewhere strange. Certainly, when I went round for tea, a lot of other freshers seemed to be there. It was all very friendly – a bit boring, a bit safe, as conversations between strangers often are, particularly when most of them are nervous and homesick – but a reassuring induction into a new place and a good way of meeting the other recent arrivals.

  And that’s how the first few days were. We freshers would meet up for cups of tea and biscuits with one or other of this friendly group of half a dozen second years who had taken it upon themselves to be so welcoming. And, as you will have suspected, they kept mentioning church – in a very natural, low-key way. ‘We’ll be going to church on Sunday’ … ‘We go to the Round Church’ … ‘Do come to the college Christian society lunch’ … and all we freshers nodded along.

  I don’t think there was anything sinister about this. They were never nasty about my not going and, as people who thought it was good to go to church, it’s natural that they
should advocate it. They thought it would be a good use of my time, to say the least. And I’m not even sure they really advocated it, they just mentioned they were going.

  What amuses me in retrospect is that I was so baffled by the experience of being somewhere new on my own, so weirdly deracinated, that I genuinely thought: of course! This is a Christian country. I’ve massively over-estimated the pace of historical change and my background must be much less normal than I’ve always assumed. It turns out, basically, everyone is still C of E. That’s what’s still going on: everyone’s still going to church every week apart from my mother, who’s a Christian Scientist and goes somewhere different (Why does our family always have to do something weird, I used to grumble. It was the same when they bought me that odd brand of disc drive for my BBC Micro which my dad said was better, but I just wanted the one everyone else was getting), and my dad, whose religion is ‘Ask your mother’. So fine, everyone in Britain is still Christian.

  I’m not being sarcastic when I say ‘fine’. I really would have been fine with that, if that was the system. I can spare an hour a week and I like a bit of ritual, a bit of a routine. If I’d grown up, as most humans have throughout history, in an unquestioning religious community I would happily have gone along with that – probably not got too involved but certainly not been the first to quibble with it. In fact, I would have been grateful not to be encouraged to address the eternal questions on my own. I would have been soothed by the solace it provided and avoided over-analysing it for fear that it might collapse in my head if I did. And I wouldn’t have been stuck, as I am now, an agnostic who vaguely feels there might be a God and likes carol services, hemmed in by enthusiastic worshippers pushing various morally discredited organisations on the one hand, and the Dawkins brigade gleefully telling children that Father Christmas doesn’t exist on the other. For the week when I was duped into thinking that we were still a Christian country, I was happily looking forward to some hymn-singing and certainty.

  A lot of people assume I’m an atheist. I can see why. I don’t seem to be practising any religion and I slag off homeopathy and astrology a lot. I think there is a perception that I have a rational and analytical approach to the world. I certainly try to, as far as is consistent with an aversion to the cracks between paving stones and to page numbers in books containing recurrent digits. But, yes, I try to analyse things rigorously – partly because that’s a good approach to life in general and partly because it’s easier to find comic angles that way than by trying to nudge myself into flights of surreal invention.

  What I don’t understand is why so many people, the religious and the irreligious alike, have swallowed the idea that atheism is the most rational conclusion to draw about humanity’s position and state of grace. Even those who oppose atheism do so in terms of its being too rational: lacking imagination or faith. ‘Just because there’s no actual reason to believe in something doesn’t mean it can’t be there,’ they say.

  But atheism isn’t the most rational approach – agnosticism is. You can’t know, so it’s irrational to say that you do. An atheist or religious observant might counter that agnosticism – saying you don’t know if there’s a God or gods – isn’t a conclusion at all. They’d have a point – but in that case, I say it’s irrational to draw a conclusion. We don’t know and we can’t know.

  Atheism also requires a leap of faith, albeit a nihilistic one. It might as well be a religion – many of its adherents evangelise about their philosophy and beliefs as much as the religious do. They claim their opinions to be certainties. They viciously criticise those who believe otherwise. They are, in some cases, emotionally attached to the idea that there’s no God and dislike being gainsaid as much as a Pope or an Ayatollah does. They then wrap up this annoyance as anger at the terrible suffering religion has brought to the world – as if they truly think it’s the religious beliefs themselves, rather than humanity’s in-built urges to kill, persecute and suppress, that led to the Crusades or the Troubles or the failure to address the AIDS Pandemic.

  Don’t they get it? Humans will always find an excuse. The avowedly atheist communist states of the twentieth century killed greater numbers than any regimes before or since and needed no religious justification. A politically ideological one served just as well. Humans don’t kill, or boss each other around, or say sex is evil and should be controlled or that certain people are wicked and should be oppressed, or that certain clothes are inappropriate or compulsory, because of their religious beliefs – we do it because some of us want to and religion is a convenient excuse. Atheists are being incredibly naïve if they think that, in the absence of religion, other reasons won’t be found for disguising violence as virtue – or indeed that atheist belief systems aren’t just as potentially susceptible to murderous extremism as any of the religions they oppose.

  Sorry, I don’t mean this to be a diatribe against atheism. Believe me, I get just as cross with aggressive god-botherers. Just as cross, though. No crosser. I’m always struck by how similar the two groups seem, and how we poor agnostics, who aren’t trying to convince anyone of anything, are laid siege to by these irreconcilable yet uncannily similar groups.

  I’m striding along the north side of Cavendish Square now, heading west. I pass a man with lots of piercings, including one of those massive ones where the lobe-hole is widened by the earring so that you could almost get an egg through it. You can see air and sky the other side, as if you’re peering into another dimension. I try not to stare – but at the same time, surely, on some level, he wants me to stare? I mean, it’s there to be noticeable, right? Maybe even to look nice? Is it okay to stare as long as, if questioned, I say: ‘I like the huge hole you’ve fashioned in your ear’?

  But have I stooped to the reasoning of the tit-starers? ‘If she didn’t want me to gawp, she shouldn’t wear a low-cut dress!’ That’s certainly not a line of argument with which I want to associate myself even if, to be honest, I can’t immediately see the flaw in it. But it’s definitely a very stupid thing to say, as I assume it’s likely to annoy women showing a lot of cleavage – and that’s not something that it’s in the interests of anyone apt to tit-stare to do.

  Or is the ear hole supposed to look challenging? A big ‘fuck you’ to all the tweedy hypocrisy that I stand for, striding through Cavendish Square in my jacket and cords, too complacent to self-mutilate in the face of a horrible world. Or maybe, among his group of friends, everyone’s got massive holes in their ears so it just seems normal. Perhaps, if I asked him, he’d say: ‘Ooh, I don’t really think about it – I’m just used to it being there’ – like I am with a pocket handkerchief.

  The second thing I noticed about Robert Webb was his earring. The first was that he was holding a gun. That’s a lie. I was just trying to take a leaf out of Raymond Chandler’s book but I haven’t lived an exciting enough life. No, the first thing was his long hair – by which I mean the fact that it was long. I don’t want to accidentally sound romantic: ‘As soon as he walked in I was dazzled by the sheen of his golden locks.’ No, I noticed he had long hair which, I’m sure he’ll mind me saying, at that point in his life was a touch mullety.

  He looked like a bit of a rebel, a bit cool, left-wing, metrosexual. ‘Even if almost everyone’s Christian, I bet he isn’t,’ I thought. He certainly didn’t seem very Footlights, which was surprising because he was one of only two second-years on the Footlights committee and, consequently, automatically got through to the recall audition stage for Cinderella. The recalls were held in groups, which was the occasion of our meeting.

  I know it’s a bit of an obvious thing to say about someone with whom I was soon to form a twenty-year double act but, as soon as the audition started, I thought he was funny. We were reading out little sections of script as a group and he made every character he played properly, physically funny. One of the reasons I was struck by it is that he didn’t look like he was going to be funny. He looked like he was going to be serious and talk about po
litics and betrayal – he came across a bit mopey, a bit damaged. But then suddenly he was putting on a silly voice and pretending to be an old-school musical entertainer, a pampered effete prince, an unhinged and impish king or a comedically tedious palace servant. Those were the parts we were auditioning for. I expect you can guess which ones he and I were cast in. Unfortunately I can’t hear if your guesses are correct because this medium is so damned uninteractive. Well, he was the prince and I was the palace servant. Did you get it right? Why aren’t you answering me?

  That Footlights show, Cinderella, was by far the most exciting thing that I’d had anything to do with in my life so far. I don’t know that it was a particularly brilliant show – although I think it had its moments, and it was well received by packed houses of drunken students – but being involved in it felt amazing. Comedy and acting had been obsessions of mine throughout my teens but I’d hardly ever got the chance, or been enterprising enough to make the chance, to actually do much of it. It had all been watching videos, listening to cassettes and writing a few sketches that were never performed. Saying you wanted to be a comedian didn’t feel any more worth the breath at Abingdon School or Oxford University Press than saying you wanted to fly. But suddenly I was in an environment where loads of people were openly sharing their ambitions to act, write, sing, improvise comic characters or do stand-up.

  And we were getting to put on this huge show, with a large cast and a band and an original comic script and songs and a big colourful set and even a couple of pyros for the finale. I suppose I’d doubted that Footlights, and Cambridge drama in general, would turn out to be all it was cracked up to be. In that term of rehearsals and performances, I found it to be so much more than I’d hoped. Not necessarily in terms of the quality of the shows we put on (they were seldom ‘professional standard’ although that was always the boast) but in the vibrancy of the creative atmosphere. This was a place to play, full of people of like mind. My hopes and ambitions crystallised very quickly in the autumn of 1993. I realised I wanted to be a comedian and an actor – to entertain, to write jokes, to be on TV like the people I’d admired through my teens. And I was in an environment where that all felt eminently achievable. It didn’t feel like the ridiculous long-shot that in fact it was.