Back Story

  I find this an unsettling thought. I don’t like to think of myself as dependent on a chemical – I can potter around working, watching TV, going to the cinema, etc., perfectly happily without either drinking or getting the shakes – but there’s no way I’m ever getting through a wedding without several glasses of wine. Only that will sustain me through chit-chat with someone’s humourless Canadian cousin, or them through chit-chat with me. The link between drinking and being able to confidently socialise, feeling ready and in the mood for chatting, is hard-wired in me and I think those particular cerebral electrics were installed at Cambridge with friends like Ellis when I learned to love the pub.

  And it gave me great joy. At Cambridge, I became a happier, more relaxed, more jolly person. I didn’t manage to stay like that forever, but neither have I quite returned to the levels of angst I felt before university. When I think of my first year there, I am tremendously warmed by remembering my sense of relief – things felt like they were going to be all right. It was okay, suddenly, to be slapdash, to screw things up, to get up late, to fail to write essays, to be imperfect and fun-loving.

  Love of theatre, comedy and acting was part of what lightened my mood, but the fun of talking shit and drinking too much was a big part of it as well. Booze is a complicated issue in our society and in lots of people’s lives. There are many occasions on which I’ve drunk more than I should and I wish I could live some of them again and behave differently. But I don’t regret being a boozy student: it didn’t stop me doing other things, it was fun, and I befriended people I still love going to the pub with today.

  Besides, when I got to Cambridge, I’d had a stressful few years. I needed a drink.

  - 21 -

  Attention

  I need pants. I’ve needed pants for some time but now it’s getting critical. A lot of them are ‘rogue’ pairs now – basically just waistbands with some cloth hanging down, not really doing whatever pants are supposed to do that justifies not washing trousers nearly as often, and also increasing the likelihood of a penis or bollock becoming noticeable in a trousers-down scenario.

  When I say ‘trousers-down scenario’, I’m less worried about a sexual one (where the visibility of penis or testicles is probably on the agenda anyway – though it’s embarrassing to be clothed in rags) than about costume fittings or changes while filming. When you’re making a sketch show, you’re forever being helped from one awkward outfit into the next, and the good people who are there to deal with hooks, zips and buttons shouldn’t have to avert their eyes to avoid a genital glimpse. In so many areas of my work, all my clothes are provided apart from pants, and yet it seems that even maintaining a supply of those is beyond me.

  My collection of pants is now about fifty per cent rogue, and almost all of the ‘good’ pants, ones for special occasions or stressful days when you want to feel that everything is in order, are deteriorating into ‘okay’ pairs, while most of those are wearing down towards ‘rogue’. There’s sort of a tipping point: when you’ve only got three or four pairs you’re properly happy with left, they get worn and washed so much that the rate of their decline is vastly increased.

  There’s an obvious solution to this problem, so I turn left off Wigmore Street, down Orchard Street, towards it: Marks and Spencer. One of the two big ones on Oxford Street. I know it’s a cliché that everyone gets their pants from Marks and Spencer but, as far as I’m concerned, it’s also a fact. I don’t know if they do good or bad pants, as I have never compared them to those available anywhere else and think that it would be a vanity to do so – although I do have one pair from John Lewis which I was given by a costume lady after a sketch involving my getting doused in fake cream had put my own pair beyond use.

  I hadn’t known John Lewis did pants and I’m confused by the fact that they do. Where’s the market? I would have thought that the kind of middle English conventional attitude, expecting quality but shunning showiness, that is the hallmark of a John Lewis customer would lead inexorably to buying pants at Marks. Marks and Spencer’s is the John Lewis equivalent for pants. But those who shun the Marks-pants-buying societal rule are surely unlikely to seek their alternative at the High Street’s other citadel of conventionality? That would be like a rebellious son of a Baptist minister running away to join the Methodists. Anyway, I find the waistband on my John Lewis pants slightly annoying and frankly consider that to be the least inconvenience I deserve for owning them.

  Am I really going to be able to buy pants? Marks looks quite busy. Maybe that’s good – I’ll blend in with the crowd. But what if I get recognised, while I’m holding pants? I’d be terribly self-conscious. I’d look all embarrassed, which would make things worse. People might laugh, because I’m a comedian – I’d be a comedian holding pants, which must be hard-wired into the British psyche as a scenario in which laughter is expected. But that would be being laughed at, having accidentally elicited a laugh, one I wasn’t in control of. What if someone asks for a photo? I couldn’t say no – but there I’d be, holding my pants. It would be up on Twitter in seconds – me all embarrassed, my choice of underwear being analysed by well-meaning thousands. ‘Pants’ would instantly be the first word that came up after my name when you typed it into Google.

  I should have bought them on the internet, but that relies on being able to hear my doorbell, which I can’t. That’s because doorbells all need batteries these days rather than being wired into the mains. And, unlike smoke alarms, the new doorbells don’t start making warning beeps when they’re running out of power. To be fair, that would be confusing because you’d keep thinking someone was at the door. As it is, my flatmate and I just assumed nobody ever came to see us any more, until we realised the batteries had run out and, so far, we’ve failed to replace them. So buying pants on the internet would mean in effect sending money to some strangers for some pants to be moved from their warehouse to the Post Office one, while my scrotum continues to abrade its way through to the inner corduroy.

  I think most people hope, when buying pants, or condoms, pile cream or even loo roll, that they don’t bump into someone they know – some professional acquaintance in front of whom they want to come across well. If you’re on TV, the chances of a slightly mortifying encounter are massively increased, as anyone who recognises you is effectively just such an acquaintance, and the moment of your meeting will be all the more memorable if you’re doing something embarrassing (I imagine that’s why so many celebs get into scrapes with brothels – it’s so awkward trying to sign autographs when your cock’s in someone’s mouth). And in the camera-phone and internet age, everyone is equipped to record and broadcast the awkward moment in seconds, leaving an indelible, searchable record of the frail humanity of any poor sod with a DVD out. In self-pitying moods, I feel like the iPhone, Twitter, Facebook and the battery-operated doorbell are all conspiring to make this the worst time in history to become famous.

  I don’t want to turn into someone who has ceased to live a normal life – who won’t take the Tube in a normal way, shop normally for pants, go and get a normal haircut, quite normally pay a hooker to fellate me – but I’m so self-conscious about it, maybe the battle is lost? It doesn’t count if I’m bloody-mindedly still getting the Tube as a sort of performance – I’ve only properly kept my feet on the ground if I find it a useful means of transport which I get on without thinking about it. ‘Without thinking about it’ is the key phrase. I hardly do anything without thinking about it.

  I know I asked for this, though. At Cambridge, I almost literally asked for it. One of the things I wanted was to be famous. And I wasn’t ashamed to say it, which I am now ashamed to say. I must have sounded like a contestant on Britain’s Got Talent. I wanted to be a famous comedian and actor on TV, I said. And first I wanted to be famous within Cambridge, in that odd way a student can be. I was aware that the president of the Union Society, the Marlowe Society or the Amateur Dramatic Club, the editor of Varsity and the various student union officials all ha
d status within the university – were talked about, envied and tipped for success. I wanted that, both because it appealed to my vanity and because such status seemed like the closest you could get to securing future employment – particularly if you’d utterly given up on getting a 2:1.

  And the position I wanted more than any of those, the one that seemed to bring status, artistic acclaim and glorious if unnerving historical associations, was president of Footlights. My time at Cambridge, however academically disappointing, surely couldn’t be deemed a failure if I got myself onto the list of people who’d held that office.

  It sounds like a feeble ambition to me now – largely because I’ve long since both realised it and realised that it didn’t matter. Anyway, there were only really two people who were considered for the job in my year: me and Matthew Holness. I think we were both deemed funny, but I was thought to be better at admin. I probably was better at admin, to be honest. So he was made vice-president.

  When I say it didn’t matter, I don’t mean that Footlights didn’t matter. Doing shows, learning how to write sketches by trial and error, making friends of like mind – these things were all massively fun and hugely important to my future career. But it didn’t matter who was nominally in charge of the club. I think I had an inkling at the time that it wasn’t really as crucial as I felt it to be – but then I thought, and this reasoning still holds good: ‘Well, maybe it doesn’t make much difference, but it can’t hurt.’ And a certain amount of university-wide status definitely came with the job title and I’m afraid I liked that.

  Here’s a moment that gives an insight into the darker parts of my soul. At the ADC Theatre, if you signed up on a list to tear audience tickets at the door, you could see the show for free. On one occasion in my third year, when I was a reasonably big cheese on the small cheeseboard of Cambridge drama, I was doing this job with Jon Taylor, an actor, writer and future coiner of the term ‘FRP’, who’d graduated the previous summer but had popped back for the weekend. It was the interval and we were standing in the bar in our theatre T-shirts drinking a couple of pints which, strictly speaking, we weren’t supposed to do on duty. But, you know, everyone did. We weren’t flying a fucking airliner.

  Anyway, a stranger came up to me and said: ‘You’re not supposed to drink if you’re doing front of house, but maybe those rules don’t apply to you,’ and walked off. Jon was furious on my behalf.

  ‘It’s so unfair,’ he said. ‘I can’t stand the injustice of it. Why does he assume it’s favouritism? Everyone has a drink at the interval. I’m having one – but he didn’t know who I am so he didn’t criticise!’

  My reaction was different. I was delighted.

  ‘But can’t you see how envious he was?’ I said. I was basking in the back-handed compliment that the insult ill concealed. This guy seemed to think everything was different for me – that I was privileged, a VIP, sailing unchallenged through the world. If enough people bitterly assumed that to be the case, it might become true. I liked the feeling of being lucky in a stranger’s eyes – my revenge for his unpleasantness was the resentment I suspected he felt.

  What a little shit I was! I don’t feel like that any more. I’ve come to recognise that other people’s envy, and related anger, is a nasty thing – for them, but also for me. I don’t think it’s politic to come across as too much of a jammy sod. But I try to recapture that attitude occasionally, when I read hurtful internet comments, for example. In the aggression, the insults, the nastiness, there is envy for the job I’ve got and the life they assume I lead. Well, anyone who calls me a cunt without even having met me can wallow in that envy, as far as I’m concerned.

  But a stranger’s envy wasn’t my only ill-gotten gain from meaningless office. I had my first experience of a groupie. It was after a Footlights performance; we were having a few drinks and a very attractive girl in a little black dress introduced herself, struck up a conversation and basically threw herself at me. I was quite drunk, she was very sexy and had kindly obviated the need for me to make any kind of approach to her (which, you’ll know by now, was not my style), and soon we were snogging outside, with my hand discovering the enormously exciting fact that she was actually wearing stockings and had no objection to my investigating that. I’m not sure which of my series of doomed infatuations was obsessing me at that point, but this was an extremely effective distraction.

  I don’t remember much about that night – because I was drunk, not because it blurs in with the myriad of other, similar encounters. I remember going back to her room. I remember having to go off and perform a sketch in a late-night revue at the ADC. I stumbled onto the stage, just about spat my lines out, got the giggles, finished the sketch and then hurried back to her. And I remember, quite clearly, forming the impression early on in the evening that the main reason she’d been attracted to me was that I was president of Footlights. I was one of the ‘famous’ people in the university and, because of that, she liked the idea of having got off with me. And, do you know what? I didn’t mind that at all. I was turned on by it. That status was something I valued and was proud of, so it seemed reasonable, complimentary even, that someone else should value it in me. This office, this job title, was, to my mind, the closest I could get to a proof of achievement – to having something to show for a string of successful but fleeting attempts to amuse students. So, if she found that attractive, it was fine by me.

  It all felt terribly exciting. The next day it all felt terribly terrible. I was consumed by embarrassment and guilt and I didn’t really know why. I somehow felt as though I’d taken advantage of her. I didn’t think that – I knew it had all been her idea, even if I hadn’t taken much persuading – but that’s how I felt. I also didn’t want to see her ever again and felt guilty about that. Half of my brain felt that she must now think I was loathsome or ridiculous; the other half was scared that she might now want to be my girlfriend, the thought of which utterly appalled me. Not because she wasn’t perfectly nice but, I suppose, because she wasn’t perfect – unlike whoever it was I was hung up on at that point. The thought of having been intimate with someone I didn’t really know and, in the cold light of day, wasn’t particularly keen on, was excruciating. And I knew I couldn’t explain that to her. Of course I was wrong in thinking I’d have to. But I couldn’t shake the horrible sensation of having been dishonest and unfair.

  I’ve had a few one-night stands since – not many but a few – and I’ve always felt the same. I’ve always deeply regretted it but never been quite sure why. I don’t think I’ve ever been nasty or unfair – I think that in every case the encounter was embraced in a mutually casual spirit by both parties. And in every case I’ve thought in advance: ‘Why not? You’re single. This is what people do.’ And I’ve thought, while it was happening: ‘This is great.’ And then afterwards I’ve hated myself. Hated the thought that I’d behaved differently because I was drunk, hated the fake shared intimacy of sex with a stranger.

  Still, I’ll never forget sliding my hand above her stocking – that was a good bit.

  Back in my first year at Cambridge, I wasn’t yet president of Footlights; if women were going to let me touch their arses, it was down to my rugged good looks and smooth chat-up lines alone. So I had plenty of spare time for comedy. Unfortunately Footlights seemed to have had enough of me for the moment. After the pantomime, the next big Footlights show of the academic year is the Spring Revue in the middle of the Lent (spring) term. This is a sketch show made up of new material written by the cast, director and other prominent Footlighters. It usually has a cast of about eight, of whom five or six will go on to be in the May Week Revue, Footlights’ main show of the year which goes on national tour and to the Edinburgh Fringe.

  Having been in Cinderella, I fell at the second hurdle – I wasn’t cast in the Spring Revue. This was the decision, and by ‘decision’ I mean fault, of Tristram Hunt, the director of the show and now MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central. I was incredibly disappointed and slightly b
itter about this at the time, but it was a perfectly fair call. There were lots of funny people around, and it was unusual for a first-year to be in a Footlights revue (although of course Collie was, talented cow). So I have long since dropped any grievance I had against Tristram – and I’m a slow grievance dropper. He was a tremendously enthusiastic, energetic and irreverent influence on Footlights, certainly never pegged by me as a future TV historian, serious opinion former and democratic representative of the Midlands. But I will say that he passed up the opportunity to have my undying gratitude.

  I had to make do with appearing in normal plays: in the Lent term, I played Dr Rance in What the Butler Saw and the Reverend Parris in The Crucible and even helped out as assistant stage manager for Into the Woods, which mainly involved pushing a wooden cow on and off stage (I am not referring to an inexpressive and truculent actress). Boring though that was, the excuse to hang around the theatre even more was irresistible.

  But I was obsessed with Footlights and desperately wanted to break back in – and I knew the key to that was writing and performing my own material. I’d written some sketches at school – Leo, Harry, Daniel, Ed and I spent several months pretending we were going to do a sketch show, amassed reams of material, and then very sensibly decided to put on a production of Ten Times Table by Alan Ayckbourn instead. On closer inspection, the reams of material, certainly the ones I’d written, were unusable shit. My approach had been to take a potentially comic situation – say the boardroom of an old company – populate it with comic stereotypes and then make them converse for page after page. I must have been watching You Rang, M’Lud at the time. It was uncomfortably close to the technique I’d used to write that playscript fantasy epic in front of the TV as a child. The sketches were very long and had no point to them, no premise. Clearly I needed a completely different approach.