The Undiscovered County

I

left Brockworth Comprehensive in the summer of 1986 and the following term began a two-year course at SWCFE, living five days a week with Anne and John Mallins, a wonderfully nurturing couple who along with their Weimaraner Misty and moggy Bailey became myde facto family for two whole years.

My time at Stratford was incredibly important to my growth as a person. I was living awayfrom home for the first time in my life and getting to participate in almost constant dramatic endeavour; performing in various shows and plays and loving every second of it. I became something of a theatrical type and my obsessions drifted awayfrom the science-fiction staples of my youth, drawing closer to Shakespeare and Marlowe.

The college was a five-minute walk from the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, and for a time my ambition was to perform Hamlet in the main auditorium, rather than man the dilithium chambers of the Starship Enterprise. Thus stories of nerdiness and circularity from this time are scant, although I could fill an entire memoir with my adventures at Stratford, since they include virginity relinquishment of varying kinds, not just sexual.

My initial forays into more grown-up comedic performance definitely occurred at Stratford. Our first production was a revue show, for which I performed several Monty Python skits with my friend Andy, an impossibly cool young man whose influence transformed me into a goth. Before the end of the first year, we had formed a band called God’s Third Leg & the Black Candles, after I discovered I could play the drums (a latent skill acquired while messing around among the stock at the music shop in St Aldate Street).

We had one song but never performed it live. We did perform a few Half Man Half Biscuits numbers at the Edinburgh fringe Festival which drew favourable comments from a three-piece Australian musical comedy act called the Doug Anthony All Stars, who were a fixture at the festival for a time. I’m pretty sure they thought the songs were ours, and in the face of praise from professional comics, we didn’t ever correct them.

The ethos behind God’s Third Leg & the Black Candles was mainly about being in a band rather than the actual composing and playing of music. The line-up - Andy Harrison (vox), Simon Pegg (skins), Steve Diggory (axe), RuthAdridge and Gab Starkey (backing vox) - represented an amiable clique of teenage hedonists: we smoked cannabis resin and crimped our hair with abandon.

It was a heady and formative time for me and I eventually paid tribute to God’s Third Leg in Spaced, as the band my character Tim designs a record sleeve for. We had a reunion recently, all of us in our forties and seemingly changed beyond recognition; one of us had a grown-up son; another had recently beaten cancer. It wasn’t until we were a few drinks in and gathered around a drum kit and a guitar that our younger selves revealed their presence and our black candles appeared not to have burned down that far after all.

My time at Stratford wasn’t solely theatrical in pursuit. I witnessed a number of key inspirational movies during that period, including Withnail and I and Evil Dead II, which I believe I watched as a double bill at Gab Starkey’s birthday party, shortly before going upstairs and losing one of my virginities (the main one). I also developed a love of Woody Allen which I would carry with me ever after, so impressed was I with this diminutive one-man production machine. The film that sparked off the obsession was, predictably, his 1973 science-fiction romp Sleeper, which sees Allen playing Miles Monroe, a health-food store owner from Greenwich Village, New York, who wakes up two hundred years into the future having unwittingly been frozen in cryogenic stasis. The film is one of Allen’s silliest and owes much of its slapstick appeal to silent-comedy greats such as Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Allen himself is on hilarious form as the man out of time and Diane Keaton puts in a beguiling performance as Monroe’s hedonistic hostage, Luna.

I actually fell in love with Diane Keaton having seen her in Sleeper, an obsession she only compounded with her Oscar-winning portrayal of Annie Hall, a film I latterly sought out while on my mission to consume everything Allen had ever done. My love for Keaton eventually became a key factor in my early stand-up routines, borne out of weekly viewings of Sleeper, which my friend Jason Baughan had on video. Every Thursday after college, I would stay at Jay’s parents’ house. We’d eat Marmite on toast and watch the film, never tiring of its perfect blend of smart and silly.

Living awayfrom home in Stratford-upon-Avon enabled to me to experience something very close to the freedom of adulthood while essentially still a child. Anne and John Mallins acted as guardians but never assumed the role of parents and as such I was able to get away with far more than had I still been at home. As a consequence, I chalked up a lot more life experience than I would have done under the constant watch of my liberal but concerned mother. (Although at the Mallins’ we did always eat together at the dining table with our puddings on our laps, and I did once get told off for coming home drunk and covered in make-up, so perhaps it was just like being at home.)

Dramatically speaking, my two years at Stratford also saw me participate in far more productions than I had in five years at Brockworth. In my first term, as well as the revue show, we devised a pantomime called Not the Wizard of Oz in which I played a very Rik Mayallish Prince Charming. The following term, we staged Federico Garcia Lorca’s Blood Wedding in which I sparkled as 2nd Woodcutter. The next year was busier still for me, including a production of Peter Nichols’s A Day in the Death of Joe Egg and a production of Hamlet in which I appeared as the ghost of Hamlet’s father. I had hoped to play Hamlet but a slump in my coursework, due to an increased social life, led to a little karmic payback elsewhere. Word got back to Gordon Vallins, the inspirational patriarch of the drama department, that I had burst into an English lesson twenty minutes late one summer Monday, having returned from my first Glastonbury Festival but not from my first acid trip.

Elsewhere, my work suffered due to a habit of spending much of my time in the Green Dragon pub watching the video jukeboxand smelling of patchouli oil. Gordon called me into his office and gave me a stern talking-to about potential and the importance of education and how if I continued along the same trajectory, I wouldn’t get into university. I clearly needed this kick up the backside, as Gordon called it, and pulled myself back from the brink of teen abandon on which I teetered.

I remained gothy and faintly rebellious in appearance, but buckled down academically in an effort to get the requisite grades and progress into higher education. I even started going to art classes, much to the surprise of my teacher who claimed not to recognise me. It was all too late in terms of me securing the role of Denmark’s stroppiest prince - that honour went to Dale Crutchlow. I had to make do with playing his dead dad, which I did to the best of my ability and got singled out in the Stratford Herald, so stick that up your arras, Dale Crutchlow. Not that I’m bitter. The last production before the end of the final term was Kander and Ebb’s timeless musical satire, Chicago, in which I took the role of smooth lawyer Billy Flynn, having bucked up my ideas since the Hamlet fiasco. I got to sing classic numbers such as ‘Razzle Dazzle’ and ‘All I Care About’ and had probably the most fun I had ever had onstage.

My time at SWCFE was magical from beginning to end both socially and academically. I grew as a person and as a budding actor and, by the time I left, was absolutely certain that I wanted to pursue a career in theatre. I learned as much about life as I did about Bertolt Brecht and Tom Stoppard, and even wrote my first play for the practical part of my theatre studies A level, a predictably sci-fi-tinged tale about a tribe of post-apocalyptic teenagers who worship a bedside table with a light in it. The play was called Shadowland and was essentially Mad Max vs the Wombles. As I’ve always said, write what you know.

As much as I loved returning home at weekends from Stratford, leaving SWCFE forever to return to the relative solace and isolation of home took its toll on me emotionally and I fell into a depression. The malaise was sparked by the vague irrational fear that I might suddenly turn gay, despite having no impulses in that direction. I also had a very beautiful girlfriend called Caroline at the time, who I had pursued for months with a relentless charm offensive that eventually paid off. The sexuality confusion most likely occurred in the wake of leaving college and the sudden uncertainty of my future.

The results of my A levels would determine my next move, and despite having chosen Bristol University as my intended place of higher education, my tenure there would not be confirmed until late August when the А-level results came in. The limbo I found myself in after leaving Stratford could best be described as post-dramatic stress disorder. I felt isolated and misunderstood, having no one around me who had shared the experience. I kept feeling the urge to fall to my knees and scream, ‘You weren’t there, man!’ It was in a very pure sense a case of culture shock, compounded by my having to work a number of manual labour jobs in order to earn money when what I really wanted to do was act. I had spent the last two years being Prince Charming,

Billy Flynn and Hamlet’s dad. I was the 2nd Woodcutter, damn it! Why am I lifting boxes? What happens if I turn gay?

I worked as a packer and loader indifferent warehouses, including a mouse-infested animal-feed factory, this one being at the height of my depression. The job required me to lift big sacks of grain on to pallets and break down huge eight-foot clusters of expired Sugar Puffs to be bagged and sent to farms as horse food. Break times were a bizarrely disorientating affair for someone in my delicate state. The facility seemed to be staffed entirely by gruff, sullen old men, all on the verge of retirement. During downtime, they would sit themselves in various chairs and sleep soundly as hundreds of mice swarmed around their feet, and I would sit among them, wired on my own endorphin deficit. There was a perpetual haze of grain dust that hung in the air, defining the scant light that leaked into the room through the filthy windows as churning, visible shafts, making the whole environment fantastic and nightmarish. I would sit bolt upright with my sandwiches on my knee, my eyes darting from oblivious, sleeping men to the hundreds of grey blurs flashing across the floor, all the time wondering if it was really happening. Wasn’t I just onstage singing ‘All That Jazz’? I lasted eight days before I told the temping agency that the grain particles were aggravating my asthma. Fortunately for me, they didn’t ask for a letter from my doctor.

When my results finally arrived, I had started to feel better and was fairly happy, working in a double-glazing warehouse, assembling packs of parts and moving boxes around. There were a few younger guys there and I had even made a few friends. The foreman approached me one morning smiling broadly and let me know that my mother was on the phone. I took the call in his office and was excitedly told that I had met the entrance requirement for Bristol’s placement offer and would be starting in October. I walked back on to the warehouse floor with a spring in my step and assembled some of the neatest double-glazing packs of my career, buoyed by the knowledge that I had managed to scrape a В and two Cs and thus ensured my continued presence within the education system. My dreams of becoming an actor were alive again and I was about to take one step closer. I had no idea that Bristol, for a time at least, would take me in a completely different direction.

Student Union

I

felt prepared for Bristol University, having already served some serious hard time in Stratford - playing pool, smoking other people’s weed and making five pounds last seven days. I was well versed in living away from home, although the whole idea of preparing my own food was initially baffling now that I was bereft of Anne Mallins’s weekly set menu, and for my first year I conducted an experiment to see how long a human being could subsist solely on toast and Marmite (163 days).

The difference between going to drama school and studying drama at university is that drama school is almost entirely practical, whereas university is predominantly theoretical. That’s not to say Bristol was just about theory; the drama department put on a number of productions every year, as did the drama student body know as Studiospace. Students were also encouraged to put on their own productions, ranging from traditional plays to ten-minute theatre pieces performed at lunchtime. We also learned about all aspects of theatre, film and television production, not just performance, the idea being that we graduate with a broad spectrum of skills that would enable us to work in the industry in a variety of capacities. Some of the most successful Bristol University Drama Department alumni have been directors, producers and writers. It certainly changed my outlook in terms of my future involvement in the arts. If anything, it engendered in me a healthy wariness of convention and encouraged me to develop self-reliance, rather than simply become an actor beholden to the swirls and eddies of fate. After all, as Sarah Connor told her son John, there’s no fate but what we make, and who are we to argue with Terminator 21

It was at Bristol that I discovered the joys of critical analysis, which eventually inspired me to pick apart my beloved Star Wars as part of my final-year exams. Lectures and seminars on populist cinema were hugely interesting, since they enabled me to consider what I had previously assumed to be a disposable art form as a rich source of academic study. I was able to watch my favourite films again then address them as historical ‘texts’, reflecting a host of psychoanalytical complexities. Alien became a treatise on genital terror and fear of the mother, Terminator became a tale of Oedipal obsession and mutations in received notions of masculinity, and Top Gun became about... well, we all know what Top Gun is about. The process was fascinating and enlightening. At the beginning of our first film studies lecture, Professor George Brandt informed us that after that day, we would never be able to view a film in the same way again. By developing and engaging our critical faculties we would effectively be given the ability to see through the artifice in three dimensions, able to detect meaning both intentional and unintentional, understand the intellectual mechanics at work in the narrative as well as identify temporal expressions of social neuroses and preoccupations, and thereby become boring cunts.

This is all very well when you’re studying Jean-Luc Godard’s Numero Deux but slightly distracting when you’re watching The Jungle Book and feeling irked by the use of infantilised anthropomorphic proxies as racial stereotypes, while everyone else is dancing around singing ‘King of the Swingers’ or finding yourself unable to enjoy a film because of the clumsy use of hastily written ADRis employed to disguise unwieldy transitions that join scenes not originally intended to be consecutive.

It’s not totally debilitating, you can turn it down to a muffled complaint in the back of your head or even suspend it, if you’re determined to enjoy something despite its shortcomings, which is sometimes entirely possible. It leaves you with slight multiple personality disorder since the little voice is impossible to silence completely, but you can ignore it, like you might ignore an annoying younger sibling or the sound of pigeons having sex on your windowsill or your best friend kissing a French exchange student.

Personally, I value this capacity since it can be enormous fun and comes in handy as a screenwriter, enabling you to determine your film’s hidden meanings and identify its social context before a frame has been shot. I was well aware of the psychoanalytical implications at work in Shaun of the Dead’s Oedipal subplot and exploited them as a dramatic device rather than them simply reflecting my and Edgar’s own relationship with our parents. The ‘father as enemy and rival’ story is subverted slightly by a last-minute redemption for the dying Philip (Bill Nighy) that forges a crucial connection between (step)father and son, defined exclusively by their own (male) bond as opposed to their status as rivals for the mother’s affection. Similarly, I was well aware of the symbolic significance of Shaun having to literally kill his mother, Barbara (Penelope Wilton). The drama of the moment lies in the son’s rejection of his mother as the object of his affections, substituting her with a sexual partner. In order for Shaun to move forward, he replaces Barbara as his figure of worship with his girlfriend, Liz (Kate Ashfield), and to that end, he shoots her in the head.

The situation arises because Barbara cannot survive this new phase of Shaun’s life, unlike Liz who survives with him until the end. At the very end of the film, we see Shaun and Liz living in domestic bliss with Liz as mother, doting on Shaun. Yet even after this transformation, Shaun cannot fully reject his past and clings to his dead best friend, Ed (Nick Frost), his proxy father/son, whom he has concealed in the shed.

We always intended an ambiguity at the end of the film regarding whether or not Liz knows about Ed. If she does, she is complicit in Shaun’s failure to evolve and as such is as reactionary as he is. If she doesn’t, then Shaun’s transformation from zero to hero has meant nothing, as he continues to cling on to his past by hanging out with his zombie friend. Also, there are numerous unintentional processes at work here, not least our fantasy female’s ultimate acceptance of Shaun despite his being a bit of an idiot. Deep down, we all hope to be accepted despite our shortcomings and Edgar and I were effectively building an all-new bride of Frankenstein in Liz, a gestalt entity fashioned to satisfy both of our subconscious desires. We tried very hard to make Liz believable and have her protests be justified and not just needy and boring, but ultimately she is still a male fantasy: a beautiful girlfriend prepared to look past failings in the face of one’s romantic gesture, maybe not a bunch of flowers but certainly extreme courage in the face of a zombie apocalypse (chicks love that shit).

The film is in some respects about human emotional consistency in the face of fantastic events. If a giant squirrel starts running amok in your city, it affects you only in a direct sense; you don’t suddenly start liking broccoli or stop being afraid of spiders. All of Shaun’s petty tendencies remain the same despite the zombie invasion - he still hates David and Dianne (Dylan Moran and Lucy Davis) and likes peanuts; the bravery he displays has always been in him and the changes he makes in his relationships are all forced upon him. By the end of the film, it is clear that Shaun hasn’t really been changed that much by his recent experiences, and although he has won the day by beating amazing odds, the fact that he remains unable to let go of his now literally toxic best friend hints that the final idyll will be short-lived. Or then again, maybe it’s just a film about zombies ...

I have to get off this tip, as I can feel myself being drawn back into old patterns. I’ll be pulling an all-nighter with a bag of Murray Mints and a packet of Camel Lights next and we can’t have that (I gave up smoking in 2001). What I will say, however (as I desperately search for my lighter), is that my early love of zombie cinema has persisted well into my adult life because the genre is so metaphorically rich and interesting. Edgar and I were certainly able to develop Romero’s use of symbolism in his films and apply it to our own, specifically using the zombies as reflections of various social concerns: collectivism, conformity and the peculiar condition of modern city living. I believe it is this metaphorical richness that forms the cornerstone of their continued appeal. It’s why I get miffed at all the dashing around in recent zombie films. It completely misses the point; transform the threat to a straightforward physical danger from the zombies themselves, rather than our own inability to avoid them, and these films are about us, not them. There’s far more meat on the bones of the latter, far more juicy interpretation to get our teeth into. The fast zombie is by comparison thin and one-dimensional and, ironically, it is down to all the exercise.

Where was I? (Long exhale.) Ah yes ...

First Man Standing

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t was customary in the drama department at Bristol University for the departmental students’ organisation, Studiospace, to throw a party at the beginning and end of every term. Being a drama department, the party also included a cabaret, during which students would sing songs, recite poems, perform sketches and generally feel pleased with themselves. However, almost nobody among our new batch of freshers was prepared to get up and risk humiliation in front of this collection of too-cool-for-school, bohemian intellectuals. The old school rules of social order applied even here, and although the second-years didn’t push us up against walls, their knowing smirks were enough to worry our self-esteem, as was the almost total disregard of the third- years, who barely noticed our existence. Everyone seemed so at home and assured, the thought of performing for them was too terrifying a prospect to endure.

One of our number, however, seemed fearless in the face of all the newness, due to a healthy disdain for virtually everything. Dominik Diamond, a fop­haired, young dandy from Arbroath, Scotland, got up and delivered an assured stand-up routine which outraged the numerous feminists in attendance for its use of the phrase ‘dolly birds’. This one incident set Dominik in permanent conflict with the moral elite of the drama department, whose rigid political correctness held inflexible dominion over artistic and social proceedings at the time. It was a period when the policing of language and behaviour was at its most draconian, and stories about a member of a feminist physical theatre group, ousted by his colleagues for offering to be ‘mother’ when pouring tea, seemed not only feasible but right. Dominik immediately became the Jeremy Clarkson of Bristol University Drama Department, a role that alienated him from and endeared him to his fellow students in equal measure.

I thought he was great. I felt a huge surge of admiration for him as he stepped up to the mike during that first Studiospace cabaret and a tinge of jealousy that I had not had the balls to do the same. I became aware of a sensation I used to feel when competing in athletics events with other schools or Cub Scout packs, finding myself pitted against their fastest runner or best bowler. Suddenly, the comfortable hierarchies of school seemed meaningless and the status you had worked so hard to establish was voided by someone who might actually be better than you. I had always been the funny one, at Brockworth and Stratford, and yet here was this ballsy young funny man in a big-shouldered jacket, doing pretty well in front of a not entirely partisan crowd. I clapped and I cheered and I was proud that one of our own was making a splash, but at the same time I was quietly hatching a plan for the next Studiospace cabaret.

I had dabbled with poetry while at Stratford and had even written a couple of comedy songs, one of which I wrote for the express purpose of seducing the girl whose heart I would successfully win. Caroline, a friend of a friend’s sister, was a vision in gothic gorgeousness to the seventeen-year-old me. Dressed in flowing black skirts and fragrant leather, she sported the most impressive hair extensions I had ever laid eyes on and, wonder of wonders, she found me funny. I spent the best part of a year wearing her down by openly expressing my affection for her in the Green Dragon pub and other goth-friendly venues, including a Fields of the Nephilim concert in Coventry. During one flirty conversation she had told me she was celibate, which I wilfully misheard as halibut. I then wrote a song called ‘Caz is a Fish Blues’ and sang it to her at the Binton Folk Club where Andy (God’s Third Leg) Harrison, Jason (Sleeper) Baughan and myself performed weekly as Blind Dog Harrison and the Dirty Gerbils.

The evening was supposed to be about folk music, but we had hijacked it and frustrated the regulars by bringing in a lot of much needed custom but somewhat muddying the point of the gathering. The evening became more of a free-for-all for drama students at SWCFE to indulge their musical fantasies in front of a friendly crowd. This loosening of parameters encouraged other acts and, before long, people were getting up and telling jokes and reading poetry. A chap whose name I believe was Mave, presumably short for Mavis, began reading his performance poetry and it greatly impressed me as a means of performing comedy without the need fora band and I started to write verse of my own, including the fish song, which I sang to a twelve-bar blues with the Gerbils, not quite ready to go solo.

Eventually, my persistence won out and Caroline succumbed to my dubious teenage charms. We stayed together for almost two years, eventually breaking up while I was at Bristol, a callous act of social evolution on my part which I still look back on with regret. Presumably I was too comfortable and chose instead to throw myself into an angsty pit of despair, which, while creatively productive, lost me a treasured friend and the first person I felt genuine romantic love for. The girl on to whom I transferred my unrequited affections provided dramatic impetus for me to fashion a brand of melancholy that formed my early efforts as a semi-professional stand-up. Finally we got together, and after five happy years, I found myself in the Hendon Garden Hospital with a smashed hand. I’m sure Caroline would call that karma.

I’m getting ahead of myself again here, or possibly behind. The point is, having seen Dominik Diamond perform a successful stand-up set in front of the student body, I decided I would do the same; styling myself as a performance poet, so as not to appear as though I was jumping on Dominik’s bandwagon, and developing strengths I had already acquired in Stratford. I bought a notepad, stole a pen and began to write things down.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 930