The Logic of Chance

M

eeting Nick under such a peculiar set of‘coincidences’ threw up a lot of questions for me at the time; predominantly, if there is no fate and our interactions depend on such a complex system of chance encounters, what potentially important connections do we fail to make? What life-changing relationships or passionate and lasting love affairs are lost to chance?

I met my wife on holiday; ten years later we have a daughter. That means that our daughter’s very life was determined not just by my and Maureen’s decision to go to Thessalonica, Greece, but our decision to go into whatever travel agent we booked the holiday at in the first place at the precise time we did so. Then again, the very fact that we both made that series of decisions suggests that we had something in common in the first place and that synchronicity was slowly drawing us together.

Plainly it isn’t an exact science, despite it being a complex interaction of micro-decisions and corresponding thought; perhaps it doesn’t always work and we pass by some potential soulmates like the proverbial ships in the night, never quite connecting. Then again, perhaps the system is tenacious and continues to run like a computer program on an infinite loop, so that if at first you don’t meet, you are drawn back together for another try.

After Maureen and I met, we realised that, despite the fact that we had never actually met before, we had not only dated friends we had in common but also been in the same place at the same time on several occasions, mainly at gigs where we assembled due to a simple fact that we share a similar taste in music (cultural preferences being one of the more obvious pretexts of quantum attraction).

On another occasion she spotted me in Camden Market, while shopping with her then boyfriend, recognising me from the TV. The boyfriend was a Spaced fan and would often eschew Friday nights out on the razz in favour of staying in and watching the show, much to her chagrin. The next time we saw each other was at Gatwick airport, shortly before leaving for Greece. It wasn’t until the day we returned to the UK that her decision to sit at the back of the transfer bus resulted in our meeting. Nick and I had made the same decision one stop earlier and so, after a number of near misses, I met the woman who would become my wife and the mother of my child. If Nick and I had not retained that same school-kid desire to seek out those seats, I would have missed her again, but then that tiny, seemingly meaningless decision was another part of the sequence that eventually led not only to us meeting but subsequently discovering we lived just ten minutes from each other in north London.

My dad told me that by the time he met his current wife Kath, they had been in the same room at the same time on four occasions and even been vaguely aware of each other before they finally metand fell in love.

Social venues are a valuable sorting tool in this highly dubious ‘science’ (that I just made up), since they bring people together en masse and reduce the odds. The Shepherds (there’s a whole chapter on this pub later) was definitely an important social nexus, where I nurtured several close friendships. I met complete strangers who went on to become an integral part of my life, all because we were drawn towards the same hub. The charm and appeal of the place was like a beacon, which attracted like-minded people in from all over the country, even all over the planet.

X-Files actress Gillian Anderson joined our team one evening for the pub quiz, having become friends with Chris Martin, who I had become friends with through Maureen, who I met on a bus in Greece. This was an extraordinarily exciting prospect for Nick and me, having been avid fans of the show since our days of living together in relative squalor in north-west London. Now, five years later, we were about to buddy up with our favourite actress for a night of beer and competitive trivia. To fully appreciate the enormity of this coincidence, we need to go back five years to a one-bedroom flat in Ivy Road, Cricklewood.

Nick’s girlfriend had recently vacated the flat they shared together after they decided to part ways. On Nick’s request, she had taken most of the contents, leaving only a small amount of furniture, a gas heater, an old TV/video combo and a pile of books. Having both recently emerged slightly bruised from serious relationships and being generally unmotivated and directionless to boot, I moved in with Nick and we proceeded to spend much of our time lying around smoking large custom-made joints and watching back-to-back episodes of The Х-Files', all the while developing a powerful shared crush on Gillian Anderson’s Agent Scully. I had purchased box sets of seasons 1, 2 and 3 after my sister Katy had turned me on to the show. (My baby sister has always had impeccable taste in television and to this day has her finger on the pixel, nee cathode, pulse.)

Our crush was wilfully boyish, harking back to a time when we kissed pictures and not actual girls. Pictures, after all, didn’t sleep with people behind your back and inspire you to unleash hell on interior glazing. Nick taped a cut-out photo of Anderson on to the inside of the mug cupboard so he could look at her every time he made a cup of tea (every fifteen minutes), and when I finally moved into my new flat in Kentish Town, I bought a huge poster of her wearing a blue leather catsuit and mounted it (no pun intended) over my fireplace.

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 Howto 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 simply 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 fora 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 flyover 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 break­up 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 our 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.

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.

‘I knew you didn’t really want to write a biography,’ Ben sighed. ‘You seemed so reluctant. I thought perhaps you might require some inspiration and what better inspir ation than an adventure? I thought perhaps the book might write itself. So I kidnapped Ms Burdot’s dog -’

‘Monsieur Pooh?’ gasped Pegg.

‘Oui,’ faltered Murielle, her eyes brimming with desperate tears.

‘I threatened to kill him unless Murielle stole the Star of Nefertiti from the Museum of Egyptian Antiquity.’

Pegg’s eyes flitted over to the chastened French lovely. She looked at him pleadingly. He knew how much she treasured her Pooh and understood in that moment why she had done what she had done. He caught himself hoping that her deceit had only been partial and that she hadn’t faked it, particularly the orgasms which had seemed really real.

‘I knew that you knew that I possessed the tablet of Amenhotep IV,’ continued Ben, ‘and I also knew that you knew the awesome power of the two antiquities combined. It was a simple case of playing off your innate sense of right and wrong and of course your weakness for beauty.’

Murielle and Pegg exchanged a glance and something eased between them.

‘And what of Lord Black?’ Pegg asked, making sure all the loose ends were tied up neatly.

‘Oh, I have always been Lord Black,’ smiled Ben. ‘Supervillainy is a lucrative sideline. Do you have any idea what I get paid at Century? I mean, it’s good but it’s not brilliant. It’s the authors that earn the big bucks, and what do they do, really?

‘Write books?’ offered Canterbury.

Ben scoffed, ‘You’d be surprised how few of them do. Particularly the money-grubbing celebritwats with their self-indulgent journals of narcissistic twaddle.’

‘You’ve got a Porsche!’ Pegg argued.

‘It’s second-hand,’ countered Ben, triumphant at winning the argument but slightly disappointed that he didn’t have a new Porsche.

‘So all the dastardly acts of wickedness perpetrated by Lord Black were all down to you?’ Pegg enquired helpfully.

‘Not all,’ said Ben, regaining something of his foreboding malevolence. There is one last great wickedness. You see, I decided halfway through this wonderful stratagem that such a story was wasted on an oaf like you. I should do what I’ve always felt I could do better than any of you philistines - I’d write the book myself and earn enough money to buy a new Porsche.’

‘What about It Looks Like a Cock?’ challenged Pegg, referring to the novelty photobook of naturally occurring and man-made phallic symbols Ben had put together with his simpering sidekick, the notorious hunchback Jack Fogg. ‘It sold loads!’

‘I’m talking about a real book, you idiot,’ snapped Ben. ‘A book with a story that has a beginning, middle and end. We’ve had the first two, all we require now is an end - and what a denouement it will be. I’m going to make millions.’

With the speed of a cobra, Ben grabbed the standard lamp by his side, tore out the cable and jammed it into Canterbury’s neck. A surge of electricity coursed through the robot’s body, shorting his primary systems, before he had even clattered to the ground. Ben grabbed for the silver revolver and pointed it at Pegg.

‘All too easy,’ hissed the duplicitous villain/publishing executive, squeezing the trigger.

Pegg was momentarily confused - he was looking into Murielle’s eyes and yet how could this be? She had been on the other side of the room a moment ago and now she was here, her arms clasped tightly around his neck. Her grip loosened slightly and her eyes lost focus. It was then that Pegg realised what she had done and his heart broke in two and then those pieces broke in two so that his heart was in four. Somewhere else in the room he heard Ben fiddling with his pistol, hurriedly loading another bullet into the single-shot chamber. ‘How very impractical,’ thought Pegg, absent-mindedly plucking one of the throwing blades from his combat suit and propelling it into Ben’s forehead. Pegg heard a dull thud and knew his nemesis had croaked.

‘Simone.’ Murielle’s voice sounded distant and strained.

Try not to speak.’ Pegg brushed a strand of hair from her eye.

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I’m sorry I lied. If eet means anything, I only told one lie, everything else was true, I promise.’

‘So you weren’t faking it then?’ Pegg asked tentatively.

‘Non,’ Murielle whispered.

The orgasms, I mean,’ Pegg pushed.

Murielle smiled and put her hand on the side of Pegg’s face and shook her head. Pegg breathed a sigh of relief, secure in the knowledge that he was still great at sex. Murielle shuddered, regaining Pegg’s attention. She pulled him close and looked into his eyes.

‘I love you,’ she whispered.

Pegg immediately thought of Han Solo but decided not to go for the obvious.

‘I love you too,’ he replied.

Murielle’s body went limp, her eyes fluttered into stillness. Pegg knew she was gone but held her closer anyway, burying his face in her hair. A clank from across the room drew his attention and he lifted his head to see Canterbury pulling himself upright. Relief spread through Pegg’s body; at least his best friend was still alive, at least everything was not lost. For the first time in his life, since he was a baby, he cried. He cried in a way that was acceptable fora man to cryand had been since the mid-nineties.

‘Why do you cry?’ asked Canterbury.

‘It’s an emotional response,’ sobbed Pegg. ‘Fluid leaks from the tear ducts ...’

‘No, sir,’ said Canterbury softly, ‘I mean, why are you crying now?’

‘Murielle,’ said Pegg, his voice cracking, ‘she’s dead.’

‘My scanners would suggest otherwise, sir.’ Canterbury gazed at Murielle for a few moments, seemingly searching her inner body. ‘Her heartbeat is faint but it’s there. It would seem the bullet glanced off a rib and exited through the soft fatty tissue in her abdomen.’

‘She’s not fat!’ said Pegg defensively.

‘Sir, she’s lost some blood, but if we hurry, we can get her to Hendon Garden Hospital. I’m not a medi-droid but I would wager she’ll make a full recovery.’

‘Really?’ said Pegg, snorting a rope of snot from his upper lip. ‘What about Black’s goons?’ asked Pegg. There must be forty of them between us and the jet.’

‘Not to worry, sir,’ beeped Canterbury. ‘If you’d just give the word.’

Pegg lifted Murielle into his arms and smiled at his mechanical confidant. He opened his mouth and whispered a single word.

‘Toast.’

Breaking the Telly

N

ick and I discovered the spoof news show The Day Today by complete accident one Wednesday evening in 1994, and instantly become utterly obsessed with it. The feeling of excitement we got from watching that first episode reminded me of the thrill of finding those few minutes of Vic Reeves Big Night Out after Play It Again, Sam, or the time when I was finally allowed to watch The Young Ones.

And so it was that a short chain of events, kicked off with meeting Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews after a gig at the Chiswick Comedy Club in west London, would end with me working with the creator of one of my favourite ever comedy shows.

It was 1997 and Linehan and Mathews were the writers of the now classic, then white-hot, Channel 4 sitcom Father Ted. The Chiswick gig had gone particularly well and Graham and Arthur came up fora quick chat after my stint was finished.

We hit it off immediately, and a few days later I was invited take part in a couple of TV pilots they were writing. The first was fora sitcom called A Bunch of Hippies, the second was a sketch show called Big Train. I loved the sound of both projects and being involved in the pilots was an unmitigated pleasure not least because I felt as though I was finally working with people whose creative motivations were more in line with my own. The Big Train pilot was particularly exciting for me as it was to be directed by a huge comedy hero of mine, the brilliant Chris Morris. Chris, along with Armando lannucci, had been responsible for the aforementioned The Day Today.

As if this wasn’t enough, I soon after found myself having to sit on the wall outside Talkback’s production offices in London’s Percy Street waiting for my heart rate to slow down having been given the opportunity to audition for the Steve Coogan vehicle I’m Alan Partridge. The first time I was introduced to Steve, I was required to improvise with him in character, wig and all, as Partridge for about fifteen minutes. This was my first experience of performing with a character I had extensive prior knowledge of, and looking into the eyes of Alan Partridge was as intoxicating at the time as looking into the ears of Mr Spock would be twelve years later.

I got the part in I’m Alan Partridge, the pilot for Big Train was picked up, as was A Bunch of Hippies (now just called Hippies), although it wouldn’t go into production until after Big Train. As a result of being introduced to Steve Coogan, with whom I had established an immediate rapport, I was asked to accompany him on tour, along with fellow Big Trainer and exceptional comic mind, Julia Davis.

At the same time, after the critical success of Asylum, Crispin Laser, a producer at the Paramount Comedy Channel, approached Jessica and me with an idea about creating a vehicle for us to star in together. Naive and confident as we were, we accepted the offer on the proviso that we write it ourselves. We decided to fashion a modern take on the old flat-share sitcom model and create a show that was part Northern Exposure, part X-Files, a sort of live- action Simpsons by way of The Young Ones. It started out as Lunched Out but soon changed to Spaced.

I regarded this new-found autonomy as the perfect opportunity to drag Nick kicking and screaming into the world in which he undoubtedly belonged by writing a character in the show specifically for him. Similarly, Jess saw the show as a chance to return a favour to Katy Carmichael, who had facilitated her inclusion in Six Pairs of Pants.

And the final piece of the jigsaw arrived the day that Edgar Wright came round to Jessica’s house with a book full of storyboards he had put together for the first episode of Spaced. I simply had to marvel at his extraordinary and inventive interpretations of our script and felt so lucky and excited to have him on board. I remember looking up from the book to his face and studying it; trying to see his brain through his ridiculous mop of black hair. I felt as though he had seen into our own heads and somehow extrapolated exactly what was needed to make the show work visually, despite our own inability to describe it. He seemed to be so in tune with the script that it was evident his contribution was the missing part of the creative jigsaw which we hadn’t noticed was incomplete.

With Edgar on board as director, we began writing and created the first series piecemeal over the next twelve months, working at each other’s houses in between other projects.

It was while writing Spaced with Jessica that my love of the zombie was reanimated by Japanese video game company Capcom and the first instalment of their now classic horror survival title, Resident Evil.

The game enabled players to experience surviving a zombie outbreak first hand. Set in an old manor house, Resident Evil captured the spirit of Romero’s mournful, shuffling originals brilliantly, bringing back the same frisson of terror and fascination that inspired my love of these tenacious movie ghouls in the first place.

At the time, the freedom to co-write my own sitcom was affording me a certain amount of wish fulfilment. Just as I wanted to comically play out the grand tropes of the war movie and deliver a truthful and honest representation of the London rave scene, I realised I had the perfect opportunity to posit myself within one of my most beloved fantasies. The set-up wasn’t even particularly tenuous; my character Tim, a shadow version of myself, was, like me, a gamer and as such would doubtless be engrossed in the first sequel to Resident Evil, which had soon followed the original game. The show was given to literal metaphors as Tim and Daisy fluctuated between reality and fantasy and it only took a few extra narrative grams of bathtub speed for Tim to find himself living out the game for real.

During the writing process, I discovered that Edgar had been equally beguiled by Romero as a youngster and he jumped at the chance to direct a slice of George-inspired carnage. So it was at nine thirty on a Friday night in October 1999, less than five minutes after Joey, Chandler, Rachel et al. had finished smart-mouthing each other in a fictional Manhattan coffee house, I blew the back of a dead man’s head out with a silver, pistol-grip, pump-action shotgun.

We hoped and prayed that there were people out there who hadn’t switched channels, as they idly wandered out to make a cup of tea, returning to witness their cosy Friday-night entertainment awash with blood. The opening scene of Spaced, Episode 3, ‘Art’, was the first sequence Edgar tackled in the edit after principal photography was complete. He used it as a personal mission statement for demonstrating his intentions for the series; it was the first fully formed moment of Spaced ever to exist and it set us out on a journey that would take us much further afield than Tufnell Park, north London. On the morning of the shoot, having completed the scene before lunch, Edgar and I both remarked that it would be fun to do that again sometime.

In the early half of 1998, I disappeared off on tour for six months with Steve Coogan’s live show, The Man Who Thinks He’s It, taking in what must have been every major city in the UK. Together with Julia Davis, we filled in the gaps during Steve’s costume changes with characters and material Julia and I wrote with Steve and his long-time collaborators Henry Normal and Peter Baynham. I played a neurotic stage manager attempting an onstage proposal to Pauline Calfs best friend, Michelle, played of course by Julia (Him: ‘I’ve picked your ring.’ Her: ‘That’s no basis for a marriage!’), a hapless actor by the name of Alex D’Arcy (that’s D, apostrophe, arsey) and Paul Calfs new romantic friend, Keith Todd, who together with Julia’s militant folk singer, Emma From, had given birth to a mutant child with seven ears (Keith: ‘He’s an ugly little bastard.’ Emma: ‘Be quiet, Keith, he’ll hear you!’ Keith: ‘He’s back at the hotel.’ Emma:‘I KNOW!’).

The tour was an amazing experience and Steve was extremely generous in ensuring the cast, dancers and hair and make-up artists all stayed in the very best hotels en route, something he didn’t actually have to do. By the time June came round, I was physically and emotionally exhausted, although I barely had time to breathe before starting my next job.

We shot the first full series of Big Train that summer and had a thoroughly fun time doing it. There was a real excitement on-set, with both cast and crew aware that something genuinely different and inventive was being hatched. Joining Julia Davis and myself in the cast (Julia and I saw a lot of each other that year) were Kevin Eldon, Mark Heap and Amelia Bullmore, brilliant actors and formidable improvisers all. For the first time in my television career I felt as though I was contributing to a project which represented my own sensibilities completely, as did the rest of the cast. Whether we were protesting a ban on wanking in the office or playing showjumpers desperate to be firemen, we did so with total commitment to the moment, which made the comedy all the

more strange and hilarious. Writer Graham Linehan stepped in to call the shots this time, infusing ingenious comic flourishes, which ensured its unique feel. The show was at once subtle and outrageous, and day-to-day shooting was never short on giggles, particularly from Amelia, Julia and me who couldn’t match Kevin and Mark’s uncanny ability to keep a straight face. I actually managed to blag Nick Frost a small part in one episode, as a lascivious builder, making eyes at an attractive marionette, marking his first ever appearance on TV.

The show ran on BBC2 later that year and was critically well received, winning an ITV Comedy Award the following year for ‘Best Broken Comedy’ (whatever the hell that means). A second series followed three years later, which despite being very funny never quite reached the heights of its predecessor. It felt a little belated and, from a purely selfish perspective, I look well fat in it.

After shooting the first series of Big Train, it was back to the stage and The Man Who Thinks He’s It, which transferred to the Lyceum Theatre in London’s West End, remaining there for three months. I played out the rest of the year as Steve Coogan’s sidekick and was extremely happy to do so. Steve has the kind of mind which is constantly ticking over, and spending time with him is always huge fun. He taught me a hell of a lot... about cars.

It was a big year for me, 1998, and in a different book I might have lingered longer on the details, but I feel momentum gathering as the end draws near, and stories about exploits on the road and random anecdotes about the business of filming television shows and even films feel less relevant here, particularly in the light of how this book has evolved during the writing process. What’s important is the fact that in the space of twelve months, I found myself working with Bill Bailey, Steve Coogan, Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews, all of whom had been an inspiration to me as a young comic. Comedy fans are nerds after all, in fact arguably one of the fiercest nerd tribes out there. I felt very lucky, as did Julia, who had sent her home-made comedy showcase video to Steve, never expecting him to even watch it let alone hire her as a result. It was good to have a fellow newbie sharing all the wonder that year; geeking out is always more enjoyable in groups of two or more.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 870