The Benefits of Failure

I

owe most of my professional achievements to an earlier monumental cock-up: I failed my eleven-plus exam and as a result was unable to attend the local upmarket grammar school.

Instead, I attended Brockworth Comprehensive and set about the process that would eventually lead me to the heady show-busi ness world of this glass office at the Random House Publishing building. It’s close to London’s fashionable Victoria and provides me with such luxuries as an electric fan, a chair and access to my editor, Ben who occasionally peers through the window at me to make sure I’m not using the Internet to masturbate or tweet, which are essentially the same thing.

However, I almost didn’t make it to Brockworth Comprehensive. The Gloucestershire education board wanted to unload me into a secondary modern that didn’t even allow its pupils to sit О levels and instead fobbed them off with CSEs, which weren’t as difficult or as impressive on a CV. However, Mum was determined that I have the full spectrum of choice and fought a passionate stand-up battle with the local authority to get me into Brockworth, despite my failure to get into the more auspicious Tommy Rich’s Grammar School.

My stepdad had attended Tommy Rich’s in Gloucester and it only seemed right that I should be given the same opportunity. I was a bright and lively pupil and what I lacked in mathematical acumen, I more than made up for in creative writing and general enthusiasm. My Class 6 teacher, Mr Miller, had told my mother that I was potentially a candidate for the auspicious Rendcomb College in Cirencester, a magical institution where kids levitated bricks and bent spoons with their minds, recognising that reality as they knew it was simply a construct of their own subconscious and as such could be manipulated beyond the basic laws of physics.

Actually, it probably just had posher teachers and better sports equipment, but it was cool to be considered worthy. Whether Mr Miller genuinely had faith in my academic ability or he just fancied my mum (all my teachers fancied my mum, even the female ones), I was accepted to Tommy Rich’s on the proviso that I pass a single examination.

The eleven-plus exam was compulsory until the mid-seventies at which point it was used only to determine transfers from state primary schools into more selective secondary establishments, like Tommy Rich’s. Previously it had been part of the old tripartite system of filtering children into secondary, comprehensive and grammar levels of education, and although this practice had been scrapped, it is exactly what happened to me. I was taken out of class one day and led to a small room off the assembly hall and given an hour to complete the test, which consisted of various exercises in verbal and non-verbal reasoning. There were lots of shapes and word games and the whole thing made my head spin. When I finished I had a sick feeling that I would not be receiving the racing bike I had been promised if I made it into Tommy Rich’s, and that inclination was one of the only things I got correct that day.

When the results came in, my scores were so low that the education board recommended me for a school on the bottom rung of the tripartite ladder, whereas if I hadn’t taken the test at all I would have automatically transferred to the school on the middle rung. My mum went bananas and went in to bat for me at the education authority. So it was, in September of 1981, I walked into the sports hall of Brockworth Comprehensive to join my friends from Castle Hill Primary, all of whom were somewhat surprised to see me, having assumed I would be starting my first day at Hogwarts or wherever the hell I was supposed to be going (as mentioned earlier, Warner Brothers did indeed use the interiors of Gloucester Cathedral for certain scenes in the Harry Potter movie, the same windy cloisters I walked down every day during my brief stint at the King’s School, so technically I did go to Hogwarts for a while).

My time at Brockworth Comprehensive School was extremely important and formative in terms of my eventual career path. I appreciate that’s a somewhat trite sentence - doesn’t everybody’s school career affect their career path? That’s what it’s for. What I mean is, I can pinpoint specific moments that contributed to my becoming a professional actor and comedy writer, which perhaps would not have occurred in the more staid, all-male environment of Tommy Rich’s. Fate or not, I can’t help feeling pleased that I failed that exam. I’m not a superstitious person but it’s fair to say that my entire career as I know it now depended upon the outcome of that one little test. I would no doubt have had some kind of career but it would not have been this one. Chaos theory dictates that small events can have massive ramifications; the old flap of a butterfly wing leads to a storm in China, or as I prefer to see it: a gunner on an Imperial Star Destroyer decides not to shoot a tiny escape pod and consequently an entire regime remains impervious to the efforts of a rebellion, lacking the information necessary to bring down its ultimate weapon. Who’s to say what I would have done if I had attended Tommy Rich’s. I might have followed my early dreams of becoming a vet ora professional athlete.

Now, you most probably just spat your hot beverage all over the pages of this book in amused disbelief, but as a youngster I was an extremely fast runner. Unbeatable in fact. Even when I graduated into a more crowded and diverse secondary school, I continued to take the 100- and 200-metre titles for my year on sports day (apart from one occasion, when a slip early on in the race forced me to overexert in order to gain ground and I pulled a muscle in my groin). Perhaps ina more sports-orientated environment, surrounded bythe peer pressure of teenage machismo, I would have eschewed the arts in favour of the track and remained friends with Matthew Bunting.

Whatever path I had taken it would not have been this one and this one has given me so much. Not just in terms of the friends I have made and the experiences I have had. If I had passed that exam I would never have met Nick Frost or Edgar Wright, let alone the mother of my beautiful daughter. Those relationships and the product of those interactions were, for my part at least, determined entirely by my ability, or rather inability, to take one letter from one word and add it to another word to make two new words. Maybe I’m wrong; I might not believe in fate but I do believe in causality and who’s to say fate isn’t just a sort of social mathematics that brings like-minded people together. I have a theory about this, which I’ll get into later. For now, let’s stay in childhood and the decade that taste forgot: the 1980s.

At the age of eleven, I entered Brockworth Comprehensive, slightly shame-faced that I hadn’t made it into the clever boys’ school, and as well as my snazzy new briefcase (which I quickly swapped for a more generic sports bag due to cloakroom ridicule), I carried the baggage of having something to prove with me into the sports hall that morning in September 1981. My boundless enthusiasm to please drove me to volunteer for every single task my new form tutor, Mr Calway, threw out to the class. My hand would shoot into the air if someone was required to fetch the register or relay a message to another teacher. I’m sure my other classmates, even the ones I knew from Castle Hill, a few of whom had joined me in 1 Coopers, thought I was trying a little too hard.

The school was divided into five houses, Gryffindor, Slytherin ... no, wait, it was Coopers, Painswick, Birdlip, Leckhampton and Crickley, all hills that surrounded and enclosed the valley in which Gloucester was situated. During World War II, Gloucester had escaped the severe bombing of dockland cities due to its ability to disappear in the dark. When the German bombers were detected and the lights went out, the city vanished into the darkness of the valley, making it a difficult target. Consequently, whereas the docks of Liverpool and Bristol sustained heavy damage during the war years, Gloucester’s remained intact and operative. The lack of modernisation in the post-war era meant that Gloucester Docks were the go-to location for TV companies producing maritime period dramas. The BBC’s long-running nineteenth-century shipping drama, The Onedin Line, although set in Liverpool, was filmed on location in Gloucester and called upon many members of the GODS to be extras, including Richard Pegg. In 1982 a mass casting call went out to the company for extras to fill out the background of a German film production. The entire Pegg clan, with the exception of my sister Katy who was only three years old, made the trip down to the docks and dressed up in Edwardian period costume to spend the day as biological scenery. This was effectively my first film. I played the part of a young German boy at the back of the shot. It wasn’t a massive stretch for me. I’ve never seen it, in fact I can’t even remember what it was called. It’s not listed on my Internet Movie Database Page either, but I am positive that it happened. I distinctly recall my costume fitting, in a makeshift wardrobe room in one of the empty warehouses down at the waterside. The seemingly endless racks of musty period costumes being distributed among the excited amdrammers, my mum being delighted at getting the prettiest dress. What with the free lunch and the

twenty-pound note I received at the end of the day, I made a mental note to try and be in a film again some time.

Back in Mr Galway’s classroom, that initial burst of eagerness sustained me for quite some time, despite David Kyle making a ‘swot’ gesture at me by thrumming his nose as I returned from completing my fifth voluntary chore in one day. I told my joke in front of the class every Monday morning and learned my first lesson about social responsibility from Mr Calway after delivering one of Jim Davidson’s Chalky routines, and, towards the end of the year, performed my first self-penned stand-up comedy set to the rest of the school to varying degrees of success.

Before the teachers’ strike put paid to any extra-curricular activity, the pupils of Brockworth Comprehensive were treated to two outward-bound excursions in their first and third years at the school. The first-year trip was to youth hostel in Welsh Bicknor, the third-year one was to a campsite called Biblins in the Wye Valley. We never made it to Biblins due to industrial action and boy, were we bummed! Bummed in the American sense of course, although rumour had it, a boy was bummed in the British sense by a loony in the woods at Biblins. On reflection, I am certain that story was as apocryphal as the ones about the kid who had his balls crushed in a vice or the boy in the fifth-year who had two cocks.

The teachers’ strike became such an annoyance to the students of Brockworth Comprehensive (due mainly to us having to remain outside in the cold during breaks) that the pupils themselves decided to strike. One lunchtime, during a particularly snowy winter, a rumour went round the school that we were not going to return to lessons after break in protest at staff action. Sure enough, when the bell rang, a sizeable chunk of the school population remained on the tennis courts to some amusement from the staff. News of the demo spread to neighbouring schools and soon copycat protests were playing out across the area.

By day two, the local news companies were on the scene. However, by this time, a deep schism had split the protesters down the middle. The problem was mainly one of credibility, due to the ringleaders of the strike being those pupils least likely to take any interest in school whatsoever. The most disruptive, delinquent and apathetic pupils became suddenly politicised and passionate about student welfare, simply because it enabled then to legitimately skive.

It was hard to present a tenable manifesto to the staff and media when our main spokesperson was a notable glue sniffer and cat murderer. By the time the local correspondents started interviewing the children involved, the Brockworth Pupils’ Front had spawned a breakaway front, the sceptical and less militant Pupils’ Front of Brockworth, a group of students who agreed with the fundamental tenets of the original action but were quite cold, didn’t want to get into trouble and, if they were honest with themselves, wanted to get on with lessons because exams were coming up.

I was in the latter camp and admitted as much when the regional news show, Points West, interviewed me outside the school gates. Unfortunately, my blistering polemics were deemed too controversial for teatime television and instead they went with the more measured comments given by Mark Simpson, the boy standing next to me. Nevertheless, that evening I appeared on television for the very first time; not all of me, about 50 per cent if I remember correctly; but it was enough to qualify as an appearance - you can see my face just before I look sullenly at my eighties slip-on shoes and white socks, allowing my dirty-blond hair to fall into my eyes in case any girls were watching. By the time the ringleaders had nobly marched the four and a half miles to lay their protest at the Gloucestershire County Council building, securing another day away from the classrooms all in the name of fairness, everyone else was back indoors. It was quite exciting, although nowhere near as exciting as a camping trip to Biblins would have been, bummers in the woods or not.

Welsh Bicknor was intended as a bonding experience for the first-years at Brockworth Comprehensive. The school was a nexus for a number of junior schools in south-east Gloucester and the classes were only sporadically populated with familiar faces. So, in an effort to integrate us, we were taken away from the comfort of our families and delivered to a sort of manor house in the countryside, supervised by a couple of teachers and a number of sixth-form girls, one of whom I fell hopelessly in love with.

Laura was blonde and buxom and won my affection by holding my hand as we hiked to a place called Symonds Yat. She can’t have been older than sixteen but to me she seemed like a woman. She smelled fantastic and there was something exotic about her big chunky jumper, tight jeans and pixie boots. I stayed by her side for the entire trip and became her devoted fan.

As part of the last-night celebrations at Welsh Bicknor, the students put on a cabaret, a mixed bag of songs and poems and sketches. To impress Laura, I decided to draw on my experiences as a racist comic at the Salvation Army and class entertainer back at school, performing a stand-up comedy routine comprising observational material I had written myself. It was a concept I didn’t entirely understand, assuming the trick was simply to mention things that the audience could relate to. The jokes were mainly about children’s television programmes and relied on members of the audience being familiar enough with them to find the memory of them funny. For instance ...

Do you remember The Wombles? They were pretty funny, weren’t they?

It didn’t occur to me to make any particular funny observations about them to qualify the set-up. Not quite grasping the notion of observational comedy at this point, I neglected the crucial process of developing a comic take on familiar reference. I didn’t use the touchstone of well-loved children’s entertainment to launch into an amusing analysis of sexual politics beneath Wimbledon Common then segue into some topical stuff about the difficulties of puberty. I’m sure the question of which Womble Madame Cholet was sleeping with would have brought the house down with the kids and teachers alike. Of course, what I should have done is step out in front of the assembled throng, lit a cigarette and said ...

Do you remember The Wombles? They were funny, weren’t they? Which one do you think was fucking Madame Cholet? Anybody? I mean, I’m just going by personal appearance here but surely Tomsk has got the biggest penis. He’s all muscles and confidence, isn’t he? Sure he’s a little slow but then what does that matter when you’re packing trouser grams. Am I right, ladies?

Mind you, as an unintelligent bodybuilder, chances are he’s using anabolic steroids, in which case (wiggles little finger) knob tax!

Could be Tobermory, I suppose. He has a porn-star moustache and a backless apron. He does seem to put a lot of his energy into making stuff, though. Maybe he lost his balls in a workshop accident involving a lathe and a tin can.

It sure as shit isn’t Great Uncle Bulgaria; I mean, he was probably an absolute fuck machine in his day but the dude is never out of his slippers.

I don’t think it can be Bungo because no one gets laid wearing tweed and it definitely isn’t Orinoco because he is clearly gay. Come on, the big hat, the way he wears his scarf over the shoulder, just off the neck? He has way too much style to be straight.

Which means it can only be Wellington. Who’d have thought that little pipsqueak would be capable of boning such a hot French chick? I’m amazed. Actually, I’m not, it’s always the nerdy-looking guy who whips his pants off in the changing rooms to reveal what appears to be a German sausage in a bird’s nest. I see it all the time in the showers after rugby. One week the guy next to you is a fly half, a week later he’s a prop forward. Not that I’m looking ... oh, who am I kidding? Of course I’m looking. It’s like a vintage-car rally in the boys’ changing room. Everyone’s checking out each other’s junk and pretending not to be impressed.

It just seems to me the change happens so quickly. But when? I’d like to know, because right now mine still looks like something you’d find on top of a seafood cocktail (close your ears, Laura). Do you wake up in the morning like David Banner in the woods, to discover your shredded pants next to you? I mean, puberty’s insane, isn’t it? Am I right, guys? Girls, I can’t speak for you, I’ve never even seen a vagina. Well, I have but it was about five years ago and I don’t really want to get into that now. Which is coincidentally what I said at the time ...

What I mean is, I don’t get to see what goes on in the girls’ changing room. Not since they blocked up that hole in the boiler-room wall. I’m kidding, I’m kidding ... It’s still there!

Waiting for puberty is like waiting for the postman to bring you something fun. Every morning you leap out of bed and check if it’s there, only to be disappointed. Difference is, it’s not the Incredible Hulk Weekly you’re waiting for, it’s body hair, a deeper voice and a hairy little monster, and no, I’m not still talking about the Wombles.

You’ve been a great audience, thanks so much for listening, we’ve got a great show lined up for you this afternoon. Next up, Erica and Meredith will

be singing ‘Frere Jacques’.

I’ve been Simon Pegg, thanks for listening ... goodnight!

Mr Calway would have removed me from the makeshift stage and exacted swift justice before I’d even got into the stuff about Tomsk’s tiny cock, and he read the Guardian (Mr Calway, not Tomsk. Tomsk would probably have read a tabloid. I should tour this stuff round schools, it’s golden!).

Despite the lack of any substance, my nostalgia routine played well with my peers, probably due to the cocksure delivery and the fact that the mere mention of Wombles brings a smile to anyone’s face. In fact, we were so pleased with our little revue, we decided to transfer it to the sports hall where it would be performed for the rest of the school.

The Monday after we returned from the wilds of Welsh Bicknor, all bonded and different as if from combat, the school assembled in two shifts to witness our variety show. First up were the second- and third-years (or Years 8 and 9 as I believe they are called now). This was what comics often refer to as a ‘tough crowd’. The second-years had just advanced into a position of power, having spent an entire year as the most vulnerable and disrespected group in the school’s social infrastructure. It’s the way of every school and no doubt always will be. No longer the weakest in (micro)society, the newly promoted second-years, empowered by their status, replicate the disdain heaped upon them as first-years and inflict it on those who have replaced them.

This would actually later backfire on me in a karmic fashion once I had made it to the heady heights of the second-year, when I selected the wrong whelp to push around in the corridor. While lined up outside a classroom, a caterpillar of sheepish-looking first-years filed past us, clearly worried and uncomfortable, much to our smug, old-hand amusement. I singled out one skinny little candidate and shoved him against the wall as he shuffled past. He resisted me slightly, which I didn’t expect. First-years were supposed to automatically kowtow to their superiors - it was the law of the blackboard jungle and resistance was rare. I laughed it offand just about hung onto my dignity as my victim stalked away, scowling.

Over the next few years, puberty hit this boy like a freight train. He literally doubled in size, and not just in terms of height. A time-lapse film of his physical development over just twelve months would have been a ghastly spectacle, reminiscent of Jekyll and Hyde. He became muscular, almost misshapen, and sprouted so much hair, it looked as though he had been covered in glue and rolled in the dog basket. Even more worryingly, he grew in status. He became one of the hardest boys in the school.

It was only a matter of time before my former victim decided to act out his revenge on his one-time tormentor. It started quietly enough in the corridors between lessons, where he would often go out of his way to shoulder me into the wall, pretending he hadn’t seen me but making it very obvious that it had been intentional. His recollection of my unprovoked shove had not been lost amid the swelling folds of his brain as I had hoped. I was clearly being dished up a revenge that, after three years, was still being served ice cold.

The shoves soon became more and more frequent and I began to plan my passage between classrooms specifically to avoid him. In the end, he exacted his final vengeance under the fabricated pretext that I was hanging around with his girlfriend. It’s true, I was friendly with the older girl he was dating, but there was nothing going on. I had hoped her friendship might have eased the tension between Bigfoot and me, but in the end it was used as an excuse for violence.

I was sat in the cloak bay at lunchtime with a couple of friends when he rounded the corner, immediately cutting off my escape from the cul-de-sac of hooks in which I had trapped myself. He asked me if I had been having it away with his missus, to which I responded in a panicky negative. He then walloped me, rebounding my skull off the wall behind me. I remember feeling a vague sense of disappointment that he had initiated his assault with such a flimsy accusation, even as his fist slammed into my forehead. A furtive little henchman encouraged his boss to finish me off, but the big kid said it was pointless because I wouldn’t fight back. He was absolutely right, there was no way I was going to enter into physical combat with this behemoth - it would have been suicide.

I’d only had one fight before and that was when I was nine, with the boy who turned out to be my second cousin, and it had thoroughly traumatised me. I had called him out after a dispute over a game of rounders and met him on ‘the green’ after school. During the scrappy struggle, it occurred to me that we weren’t just trading blows in some noble pugilistic ceremony, this boy was actually trying to hurt me, any way he could. My eyes filled with tears at the sudden horror of it all and I called a halt to proceedings, conceding defeat.

He was tougher than me, from a more physically oppressive background (his mother had once punched the headmaster), so he was more equipped to deal with the situation, although I think he was as relieved as me to see the skirmish end. Four years later, there was no way I was about to reprise the experience with somebody twice my size, so my long-time persecutor stalked off scowling, leaving me humiliated but relieved that it was over. He met me outside a classroom later that afternoon and asked if I was going to report him. I mustered up courage enough to say ‘no’, even managing to add a grumpy disdain, although in truth I just wanted the trouble to end.

A few months later he got into an altercation with Martin (the other school nutter) about who was the hardest in the school and found himself on the end of a punch so forceful, it dislodged his eyeball. I experienced only a glimmer of Schadenfreude. Eventually, relations between us thawed, although we never became friends. I was walking towards the sports hall in my fifth year and felt a hockey stick slide between my legs, threatening to pull back against my plums. I spun round with a tremendous ‘fuck off and found myself face to face with my old enemy. He laughed and didn’t take offence. By the time I left Brockworth Comprehensive, we had even exchanged semi cordialities, something of a relief, since the threat of his physical presence had never fully gone away.

Anyhow, I had all this to come as I stood before the daunting audience of second- and third-years about to deliver my children’s TV routine that had had them rolling in the aisles at Welsh Bicknor. The routine was met with a bemused silence from the audience who regarded me as if I was nuts. The biggest laugh I got was when I panicked and activated my new digital watch so that ‘Scotland the Brave’ rang out from behind my back, signalling it was time for me to leave the stage.

Only slightly disheartened, I stepped out before an even more intimidating audience of fourth- and fifth-year students but luckily found them to be far more appreciative. The social gulf between us was such that I appeared small and cute and eligible for the sort of affectionate patronising that children are so quick to level at their juniors. Their appreciation spurred me on and the performance went really well - I even improvised a little and scored extra laughs. As a result I found an ‘in’ with a group of fourth-year boys for whom I became a sort of humorous pet.

I would find them at their hang-out spot during lunch break and make them laugh with various impressions and silly improvisations. One of them in particular seemed to relish our comic sparring sessions and would set me up and encourage me. He became a friend who I later missed; he seemed to get me, where the others just found me a bit weird and annoying.

The faint disdain I had experienced from the second- and third-years stayed with me fora while. I decided to reinvent myself as a cool, stand-offish type who didn’t get involved in school drama productions and pushed younger kids around in corridors, a decision I eventually regretted on both counts. The annual school production rolled around a few months into my first year at Brockworth and, rather than sign up, I decided to contemptuously dismiss it as the stuff of poofters and girls and hang out with other boys for whom disdain was a badge of honour. Lee Beard didn’t. Lee had finally shaken off his Perthes’ and burst from his calipers like Forrest Gump, becoming one of the most enthusiastic and active boys in the school.

Lee and I had been separated by the house system at Brockworth Comp and didn’t hang out as much as we used to. I had retained Sean Jeffries and a few other boys from Castle Hill in the sorting and made new friends who had come from other schools in the area, like Nick May, who eventually became my best friend after we had both left Brockworth behind, and Darius Pocha, a curiously androgynous, highly intelligent boy who professed to being bisexual and was given to rampant fantasism. Darius and I had bonded over a love of cinema at Welsh Bicknor and it wasn’t until a few years later that I realised he hadn’t seen half the films he had claimed to have seen. He did, however, elaborately reinvent the plot lines of films such as Mad Max and Mad Max 2, piecing together details he had read from various magazines and the back of VHS boxes. I seem to recall being suspicious of his knowledge and matching him with a made-up film of my own, which featured a werewolf squashing a human eyeball between finger and thumb. I thought it sounded pretty cool.

In our third year, Darius sombrely informed me that he had a month to live, having swallowed some toxic waste which was slowly poisoning him. It

sounds outlandish but I’d actually been with him at the time. We were playing near my home on one of those legendary rope swings that inhabit almost every young boy’s childhood. The rope was originally suspended by some brave soul on a thick branch, ten or so feet above a brook, in an area referred to by the local children as ‘the bunker’. The area was so called because of a large brick structure, with sealed iron doors, engaged in some purpose that remained ever a mystery to us. A thick concrete wall extended from its side, tall enough to step on to from one side, a sheer drop to the brook on the other. The rope hung just within reach where the wall crumbled away down the bank, so that a swinger could launch himself off at speed into a fifty-foot arc, with the option of letting go at three points of differing difficulty. The buzz was particularly keen when the waters of the brook rose and churned with great force after a heavy rainfall, and it was on one such occasion that Darius fell off.

It happened in the sort of slo-mo with which one can so often recall misfortune. It is similar to the acute presence of mind that slows time during the actual event; allowing you to comprehend what is about to happen, to brace for impact, to duck, to reach out. Unfortunately, I was unable to help for two good reasons. Firstly, I was on the opposite bank to Darius so there was simply nothing I could do, and secondly, I was laughing my arse off.

Now, I wouldn’t say Darius was dyspraxicat that age, but he was definitely very gangly. He had that teenage physicality of someone not entirely adept at inhabiting his own shape. As if put in charge of a vehicle he wasn’t qualified to drive, Darius was plainly still getting used to his new, taller, fuller form and did not yet have all the controls down pat. He let go of the rope at the most treacherous point, where only seasoned swingers were able to negotiate the awkward drop on to the small bank. Inevitably, he landed badly and, with an expression of extraordinary concern, toppled into the brook, disappearing beneath the swirling currents. I was spastic with laughter on the other bank; doubled up with helplessness.

I wanted to assist in his rescue, I genuinely did, but I was worried that if I uncrossed my legs I would wet myself. He surfaced almost immediately, gasping for air, and scrambled up on to the bank. Meanwhile, I was still rolling around on the floor in fits of hysterical giggles, my throat hoarse, my vision blurred by tears. It was by far the funniest thing I had seen since Mr Miller fartsploded the table in Class 5, and I felt awful. I actually kicked myself, physically drove one foot into the side of the other leg to try and curb my mirth in the face of Darius’s misfortune.

Later that day, having got Darius dried, dressed in some ill-fitting clothing and sent home, I cried, unable to contain my guilt at finding my friend’s misfortune so funny. I felt genuine and heartfelt remorse and in retrospect could not locate the ‘funny in his extreme panic and discomfort. A few weeks later Darius summoned myself and Nick May into the boys’ toilets and delivered the news of his impending death. He told us that the water he had ingested as a result of his fall had contained a number of lethal toxic chemicals that were to be his undoing.

A month passed and Darius remained chipper, and for some reason we never asked why he wasn’t dead. He still remains chipper as far as I know. I’m sure he contracted some sort of parasite or stomach upset, the possible conclusion of which may have been terminal, in the same way that flu or asthma are terminal, but I don’t think his life was ever really in any danger. Given to the occasional Walter Mittyesque tales, I’m pretty sure Darius was just exacting revenge on me for the humiliation he felt in the face of my cackling hysteria, and I don’t blame him. We remained close until I left school. He was excellent company, and a shared love of modern music nourished our friendship through hours of sitting in his bedroom reading Smash Hits and playing his Casio VL-Tone keyboard.

He possessed an acute natural intelligence, which informed his undeniable wit and inspired me to try and match him. He wrote the word ‘coitus’ in biro on the wall next to his desk as a sly dig at the crass graffiti that adorned the desks, walls and textbooks, and in a moment of uncharacteristic laddishness had once impressed me no end with this exchange with an attractive female teacher, attempting to shoo us out of the cloak bays.

Attractive Teacher: Can I have you outside please?

Darius: You can have me anywhere you like, Miss.

Crude, I know, but he was thirteen and political correctness was barely even fashionable in the early eighties, let alone common practice. It was the speed at which he processed the comeback that impressed me. Also, and importantly, it was Darius who introduced me to the comic 2000 AD, for which I will always love him.

So it was that I developed new friendships awayfrom those I had cultivated at junior school, and although Lee Beard and I would end up being friends into our forties, I didn’t see him much that first year. I heard about him though. Lee, being the outgoing and confident young boy that he was, had auditioned for the school play in our first year and won the part of a band conductor, which he apparently performed to much appreciation all round. Lee’s glory pricked at the impulses I had attempted to suppress with my reinvented cool and I resolved to give apathy the heave-ho and audition for the next production. This turned out to be in the inter-house drama competition, which was an annual event, pitting house against house in a one-act-play festival, staged over the course of a school day and adjudicated by a local luminary.

Coopers’ effort that year was a reworking of the Greek myth concerning Telemachus and his search for a family. A third-year boy called Wayne (who eventually became known for being able to execute a particularly difficult break-dancing move called the helicopter) played the eponymous hero. The story revolved around a young man on a quest, trying out various possible families along the way. I played one of the parental suitors, a sort of upper-class military type with a comically plummy voice. The role required me to wear a fake moustache, which I ended up having to hold on with my finger when the spirit gum I had borrowed from my mum’s theatrical make-up kit proved ineffective.

The character got a laugh and I had fun with the role, but when the adjudicator made his comments at the end of the competition, he focused on the failure of my moustache to remain on my face rather than on my efforts as an actor, which was hardly constructive, I mean, come on, tell it to Screen Face.ii Nevertheless, it was a heady time for me, and the thrill of the extra-curricular activity was made all the more intense by the presence of my sixth- form crush, Laura Bot, who as luck would have it was playing my wife.

There was something so exhilarating about hanging out with my fellow pupils in the dining halls, getting ready to perform. The buzz was palpable and the usual barriers that separate the year groups, creating the traditional social hierarchies, were non-existent. Theatrical types often wax lyrical about the familial nature of theatre but there’s definitely something in that hackneyed gush. Even the hard kids who had opted for the drama competition as a skive became approachable, almost affectionate, as we pulled together in the name of our designated local hill. Just to be hanging out with Laura again was reason enough to participate for me. She had vanished back into the impenetrable sixth-form block on our return from Welsh Bicknor and I only saw her now and again, between lessons or during breaks, when sometimes she would blow me heart-stopping kisses or administer sweet-smelling hugs. To her I was the little first-year boy/puppy who offered her limitless adoration and loyalty; to me she was a woman, an exotic goddess to be worshipped and desired. That is, until she did something that shattered my opinion of her forever and gave me a sensation I understood to be something like heartbreak.

After the competition was complete, the entrants were given the opportunity to perform their plays in the evening to an audience of parents. This involved the hugely exciting process of returning to school after hours and hanging out in the brightly lit dining halls, waiting to perform in an atmosphere even more exciting than the competition. This felt like proper grown-up theatre and there was something infinitely thrilling about coming to school in the dark, out of uniform. The play went down well, a feeling of achievement made sweeter by the fact that we had come first in the competition despite my rubbish tash, and as we bundled back into the dining hall after our curtain call, the euphoria was total and my good mood indestructible. That is, until I saw Laura produce a packet of Silk Cut cigarettes from her coat and place one in her mouth. I don’t think I would have felt any less betrayed if I had seen her kissing the headmaster. If anything, that would not have been nearly as bad since I had no illusions about actually having some kind of relationship with Laura; it was a crush. Nevertheless, to see her smoking sent her tumbling from the pedestal I had placed her on and I never felt the same way about her again. I had oddly high standards for a twelve-year-old.

The next production I participated in was Tom Sawyer, which further cemented my passion for acting and proved an even more thrilling experience than the house drama contest, not least because of my new crush on Libby ‘Aunt Polly’ Cox. This was a lead role in a large-scale production, staged not in the makeshift studio theatre of the dining hall but in the cavernous interior of the sports hall for three whole nights. It proved to be enormous fun and ended with an unforgettable after-show party at which I drank half a cup of cider and thought I was drunk. The imaginary high gave me the audacity to persuade Libby Cox into giving me a reluctant peck on the cheek, which I regarded as a massive victory. This acting business was just becoming more and more fun.

The following year we staged a revue show instead of the usual dramatic production, due to it being less labour-intensive for the staff who had begun their strike. My contribution to the show was to be part of a robotics display, which I performed with Darius and a boy called Glenn. We painted our faces white and our lips black, wore baseball caps, wrap-around shades and wore our shirts backwards in order to look futuristic. Thinking about it, Darius eschewed the backwards shirt trick and wore an ‘envelope’ shirt he’d bought from a fashionable boutique (he was the only boy I ever knew to own a jumpsuit who wasn’t in the air force).

Glenn chose to be double different and painted his face gold as well as pinning a circuit board to his chest for extra roboticness. Glenn was a late addition to our planned display, having finagled his way into our clique by doing a passable moonwalk in the dining hall. It wasn’t as impressive as the one I had seen a New York street kid do on John Craven’s Newsround, but he presented it with such confidence and pride, Darius and I couldn’t really say no.

I remember looking at my fellow robotics expert after Glenn had tiptoed backwards on his kung-fu slippers and seeing my ‘What the fuck was that?’ reflected back at me in his eyes.

Nevertheless, Glenn joined us onstage as we moved our bodies in a mannered jerky fashion to Shannon’s ‘Let the Music Play¹. I still get a tingle of nerves if I hear the hissing rat-a-tat of the intro on the radio. I am instantly transported back to the echoing sports hall, the smell of white panstick and the ache in my arms from attempting to do my buttons up behind my back.

After the robotics,n there were no more big productions during my time at Brockworth. The inter-house drama competition continued sporadically, although I actually wrote a play for my final year there, a loose pastiche of E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial called G.J. Three Million Light Years From Home. The G.J. of the title was an alien called Gunky Jam who visits Earth and is befriended by a young boy. E.T. had an enormous effect on me as a kid and temporarily eclipsed Star Wars in the gap between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. I had heard of the film from mystepdad, a regular viewer of Barry Norman’s film programme, which ran an item on the huge fuss about the movie in the States. We were on holiday in Devon when he started talking about how the film was by the same man who had directed Raiders of the Lost Ark and how people were getting as excited about it as they had done about Star Wars five years before. We were walking from the lighthouse at Start Point at the time. It’s funny how I can remember that and yet struggle to remember what I had for breakfast yesterday. I guess it has to do with emotional significance. (That or early onset dementia.)

When the film was released, I went to the ABC to watch it on my own and pulled the hood of my parka up towards the end as the tears began to flow. It was during that first viewing of E.T. that I experienced a little epiphany of understanding about the potential for interaction in art, which I have often used to justify some of my own decisions. There is a moment when E.T. is out and about on Halloween, dressed as a ghost, and spies a small child dressed as Yoda from The Empire Strikes Back. As E.T. spots this apparently kindred spirit, he lifts his arms in greeting and cries ‘Home’. In scoring the moment, John Williams uses a phrase from Yoda’s theme from The Empire Strikes Back, creating a moment for viewers to make a connection for themselves. I got it immediately, having listened to that particular soundtrack over and over again, and found myself looking around at my fellow audience members to see if they had spotted it too.

What thrilled me about the moment was that it wasn’t telegraphed and explained. It was there to be discovered. It credited me, the audience, with the intelligence to join the dots and I felt privileged and trusted by the film-makers, and was suddenly possessed by an urge to let them know, to tell them that the device succeeded and that I’d got it.

A more cynical commentator might dismiss the moment as a shameless exercise in brand sharing, but I happen to think it was more affectionate than product placement. Years later, George Lucas secreted a delegation of E.T.s amid his galactic senate in The Phantom Menace, confirming that E.T. had indeed witnessed a familiar face that Halloween night, although the moment felt somehow less magical. Perhaps it was the context. Back in the early eighties, I found the moment thrilling and never forgot the sense of communication I felt between the film and my twelve-year-old self. It taught me that the viewing experience could be made even more fun with the addition of interaction. This collaborative approach was something I would use a lot in my work, particularly in Spaced, which often relied heavily on the audience’s cultural awareness to get all the jokes. I never forgot the sense of empowerment I experienced in that cinema, like someone had thrown me a ball which I had not only caught but thrown back.

G.J. Three Million Light Years From Home was never staged at Brockworth, due to industrial action, and eventually got lost amid a mass of paper I destroyed in celebration of leaving my comprehensive education behind. I’d be interested to read it now. I remember G.J. had a robotic arm and a Mohican haircut, looking more like a refugee from a Mad Max film than a cute little alien, but then this was 1985 and Beyond Thunderdome had just been released and I’d been slightly obsessed with that particular film series since Darius Pocha had embellished it into oblivion at Welsh Bicknor. It is most certainly the case that my time at Brockworth Comprehensive encouraged an interest in writing as much as it did in acting, and in my first few years at the school that was entirely down to the efforts of one amazing teacher called Mrs Taylor.

Mrs Taylor was one of those teachers who seemed born to do the job. She had the capacity to make any pupil, no matter how reluctant, want to work for her and she did this without ever really raising her voice. Her method was a simple and irresistible wave of positive reinforcement, which made her impossible not to love. The scariest, most dangerous pupils in the school became sweet-natured and attentive in her presence, and her lessons were always the highlight of any day.

She was attractive and mercurial and a cloud of grey hair seemed to have arrived prematurely on top of her head. Her comments in the margins of stories and projects were always emphatically positive; even when she was offering constructive criticism they sat there happily emblazoned in bright red pen. She would add positive comments throughout, rather than reserve her opinion for the end, and she would congratulate the smallest flourishes in your creative writing with ticks and stars.

Looking through a project on the movies I completed for her in 1983, there are frequent examples of her technique. She compliments artwork with superlatives, but then adds a recommendation to draw on plain paper, as it will look even better. After a short chapter on censorship and some hilariously hypocritical moralising on the subject of pornographic films which, I write, will ‘soon hopefully be banned’, she added the question ‘Have you seen any?’, challenging my preconceptions even on such a sensitive subject and no doubt sensing my decision to somewhat toe the PTA party line, rather than formulate my own opinion.

Concluding a protracted chapter about Star Wars (the real reason for me starting the project in the first place), I wrote the words ‘May the force be with you’, under which she added the rejoinder, ‘And to you, brother.’At the end of this lovingly crafted piece of coursework, which came bound and illustrated,

I had left a page with the word ‘Comment’ written at the top, on to which she wrote the following, in her usual scarlet ink:

A+

Another outstanding piece of work, Simon. Very interesting indeed and fascinating to look at. You certainly have a good eye for visual detail. This kind of book could go on and on. How about continuing it? One day you may use it in some form, when you go into print that is. Others have published far less interesting and absorbing material. You could capture the ‘teeny boppers’ market. Well done, Simon. Colour would add a new dimension, though I do like your black-and-white effect.

There was never a homework assignment more exciting than a creative-writing piece for Mrs Taylor, knowing that every flourish of the imagination or descriptive metaphor would be picked up on and noted in the margin. A somewhat significant story I remember getting good marks for was written in the same year as my‘Movies’ project and concerned a simmering obsession of mine at the time: zombies.

Zombies

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ack in 1983 and technically a zombie virgin, I was nevertheless able to write a zombie story for Mrs Taylor, pieced together from stuff I’d read and heard, long before I became an authority on the subject.

The story concerned a young boy who awoke one morning to discover the world had been overrun bythe living dead. Realising he is the sole survivor of the outbreak, he attempts to escape from the bloodthirsty ghouls by running up a local hill, where he falls through the ground to find himself in a forgotten munitions dump.

This might sound far-fetched, but there were several military installations on the hills around Gloucester, left over from World War II. On our frequent walks to Brockworth, over Nut Hill, we would pass an old air-raid shelter and anti-aircraft gun mount. Drawing on Robert Westall’s famous children’s novel The Machine Gunners, the story of a group of wartime kids who take possession of a German machine gun, the hero of my story finds a similar weapon among the forgotten ordnance and uses it against the zombie horde who have followed him up the hill (at a slow, stumbling pace). Part of the appeal to me as a kid was the bizarre lolloping threat that zombies presented, a critical handicap which enabled survivors to take stock of their surroundings and regard their attackers with fascinated disgust as much as fear as they staggered towards them. In the story, as the zombies’ heads become visible over the brow of the hill, my little survivor opens up with the machine gun, aiming for the head, the only way to effectively stop the walking dead.

Mrs Taylor’s response to the story was typically enthusiastic; whereas some teachers might have dismissed it as schlocky and overwrought, she offered a volley of bright-red encouragement and genuine glee at all the gore. This definitely stands out as an ESTB moment, if only to go back and give Mrs Taylor a VHS copy of Shaun of the Dead. I think she’d be rather chuffed, that’s if the whole time-travelling student thing didn’t turn her grey hair white. If you’re reading this Mrs T, I’d love to know what you think.

Although I’d never actually seen a zombie movie when I was thirteen, I knew all about them. In the early eighties, as the popularity of home video grew, a number of small UK distribution companies started up with the express intention of cashing in on the sudden interest in affordable home entertainment. Video rental libraries began to appear everywhere, offering an extensive catalogue of older titles although little in the way of new releases.

The larger studios, somewhat myopically, held on to their content, choosing to generate revenue from repeat theatrical presentation, assuming video to be something of a fad. This led to a dearth of content for video distributors who, in response, took advantage of certain censorship loopholes and imported a variety of low-budget, foreign exploitation films that had never been seen theatrically in the UK. Although unregulated by conventional cinematic classification, the videos did fall under the remit of the Obscene Publications Act 1857, which rendered the distribution of any material which ‘tends to deprave and corrupt’ as a statutory offence.

Eventually, these titles drew the attention of the media and subsequently a whole army of crusading moralists on a mission to eradicate this filth from our high streets. Smart, well-made horror titles, such as Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead and George A. Romero’s seminal zombie flick Dawi of the Dead, were lumped in with the likes of I Spit on Your Grave and Last House on the Left and as a result lost to a generation.

Obtainable only on grainy pirate video after the ban, these films became the stuff of legend, often far more horrifying in description than they were to actually watch. The film that fascinated me the most amid this censorship massacre was Dawi of the Dead. Romero’s star was sufficient that the film already had a certain amount of credibility, particularly within the horror community. The film had been released unrated in the US so as to avoid the porno tarnish of an X and had done good business in America as well as non-English-speaking territories, where Romero’s friend and collaborator Dario Argento had final cut. Argento’s version concentrated on the more visceral aspects of the film and is likely to have been the version that found its way to the UK on VHS, further bolstering the case for the National Viewers’ and Listeners’Association’s decision to consign it to the video nasty sin bin. Several images from the film featured in The Encyclopedia of Horror I received as a Christmas present in 1983 and I became fascinated by this tale of a shopping mall that becomes awash with blood.

I would stare at the image of David Emge’s zombified flyboy character, trying to make sense of the apparent gaping hole in his neck, or the shocked face of the zombie with a machete embedded in his cranium. The film became something of an obsession for me. I quizzed friends who had seen it and would get them to tell me in as much detail as they could exactly what went on this blood-soaked mall, listening open-mouthed as they regaled me with gleeful reports of helicopter decapitations and graphic disembowellings. I read everything I could about zombie movies, dwelling on the more extreme descriptions of unfortunate individuals being forced to regurgitate their insides or suffer eyeball impalements on wooden splinters. Not including John Landis’s groundbreaking video for Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’, I didn’t actually see a zombie movie until 1985 when Romero’s third instalment of his Dead trilogy came to home video and I experienced Day of the Dead. I saw Dan O’Bannon’s comical Return of the Living Dead before I finally got my hands on a copy of the elusive Dawi and actually saw Tom Savini’s remake of Night of the Living Dead before I saw the Romero.

Audio Gold

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f course it wasn’t all videos, videos, videos - before the advent of sell-through VHS, there was a sizeable market for album versions of films, just as there was for stand-up comedy and musical theatre. As a very small boy, I would avidly listen to my father’s Bill Cosby albums and still recall his routine about Noah building the ark despite not having heard it for thirty-five years; the ‘shru-baa shru-baa shru-baa’ of Noah’s saw is still audible in my mind.

Owning a piece of spoken entertainment and then listening to it at will seemed awfully novel at the time. Today, comedians define their entire careers by making themselves available to watch at home and comedy DVDs are everywhere. Back then, only a select number of highly regarded and established comics were able to commit their musings to vinyl. Another audio comic delight I recall enjoying at this time was the more musical styling of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band. Both Cosby and the Doo Dahs were a little sophisticated fora five-year-old, but I distinctly remember enjoying Cosby’s vocal gymnastics and crazy characterisations and the silliness of Bonzo songs such as ‘Mr Slater’s Parrot’ and ‘Jollity Farm’.

I would often sit in the corner of the room wearing Dad’s massive headphones, carefully replaying the records time after time. It was something I did frequently throughout my childhood with music, comedy and film, inspiring my own creative imagination, the headphones rendering the experience intensely personal, as though it were all happening inside my own head.

One of the first long-playing records I ever owned was a Wombles album, called Keep On Wombling. The Wombles was a hugely popular, animated children’s TV series, about a family of diminutive creatures living on Wimbledon Common in south-west London, ‘making good use of the things that [they] find, things that the everyday folks leave behind’. It was essentially a show about recycling, thirty years before it became fashionable. It became so popular that Merton council, which presides over the borough of Wimbledon, had to deal with a sharp increase in littering, after children desperate to catch a glimpse of these little eco-warriors began wilfully discarding rubbish across the common.

The theme tune became a hit and composer Mike Batt went on to produce further singles and albums under the guise of the Wombles, one of which marked my first foray into studious vinyl appreciation. Side one of Keep On Wombling was a sort of concept album, which gave way to more generic fare on side two, a bit like Sgt. Pepper. Everything on side one fell under the banner of ‘Orinoco’s Dream (Fantasies of a sleeping Womble)’ and encompassed the most popular Womble’s dreams of being an astronaut, a cowboy, a jungle explorer, etc.

I spent many hours in my nan’s front parlour (one of those silent front rooms, seldom entered) listening to this album and imagining I was Orinoco living out these diverse fantasies. Predictably, my favourite track was ‘Womble of the Universe’, in which Orinoco travels into space in a clockwork rocket ship with only Madame Cholet’s cucumber sandwiches for sustenance. Space travel appealed to my imagination even before Star Wars arrived, and the possibility and potential contained in the dark void that surrounded us always filled me with enormous excitement.

My vinyl collection eventually grew to include two films, which I would listen to repeatedly, happy in my headphone cocoon. The first was Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein, whose purchase coincided with my mum marrying Richard Pegg.

When Mum married Richard, not only did he take on a ready-made family in Mum and me but I took on new grandparents, John and Pam, who I loved very much, and also a new uncle called Greg. Greg was a something of an AV enthusiast, and around Christmas time, the Peggs would gather to view 16mm movie prints, chosen and projected by Uncle Greg. It was always incredibly exciting, not just because it felt like we had a cinema in our house but because we never knew what we were going to watch.

At the time, the notion of home cinema was an absolute luxury; prints were expensive and complicated to screen, and the appeal was rather specialist. This made it all the more thrilling as our annual movie nights approached and speculation would mount as to what film it would be, information Uncle Greg proudly held back until the last moment.

When home video erupted in the early eighties, Uncle Greg’s film nights evaporated somewhat. It’s odd that I can go into a Blockbuster or increasingly visit a LEGAL download facility on the Internet and stare blankly at the endless choice, only to give up in the face of so many options. I never felt disappointment when Uncle Greg announced the title of that year’s film, only intrigued and excited. Invariably, I hadn’t heard of the film anyway. Lovingly projected on to the kind of screen used to look at holiday snaps, were Richard Lester’s Royal Flash (1975), Sky Riders, a James Coburn, Robert Culp hang-gliding actioneer from 1976, and Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein (1974). I have dim memories of enjoying the first two, but it was Mel Brooks’s loving parody of the old Universal horror films that really captured my imagination. It made me laugh, totally freaked me out and left me desperate to see it again. Fortunately for me, the film was available as an album, which my stepfather purchased from a record shop on St Aldate Street called Hickies. What is it with that street?

I listened to it again and again. Poring over every word and musical cue, replaying the film in my head. Closing my eyes I was able to clearly visualise the events of the film - Gene Wilder and Peter Boyle stomping out their hilarious version of ‘Putting on the Ritz\ or sexy Teri Garr playing the violin to lure the monster back to the castle. I must have listened to it hundreds of times.

It’s interesting that, years later, my first foray into film-making would not only be a horror/comedy but would similarly achieve its aims by employing a beloved horror staple and placing it within a comedic context. I’ll talk more about Shaun of the Dead later, but it occurs to me there is a correlation between my love of Brooks’s movie and the film that would mark the beginning of my big-screen career. I certainly poured real-life experiences into my contribution to the film, not least Shaun’s relationship with his stepfather. My own relationship with Richard Pegg was complexand problematic, as are the majority of step relationships. It basically boiled down to a power struggle for my mother’s affection that caused a certain amount of tension between us. We’re friends now but at the time we most certainly weren’t.

I was already six when I met him and he, at twenty-four, had no prior parenting experience. It was a learning curve for both of us and it wasn’t a particularly smooth arc. As much as I saw him as an interloper and he saw me as the physical manifestation of another relationship, when we did bond, we did so enthusiastically over films and music. We were the opposite of best friends, in that we were generally at odds, but occasionally we did enjoy bouts of welcome unity.

In the summer of 1980, he made a promise to take me to the fair that annually camped out on Gloucester city’s parkland. On the day of the proposed excursion, I visited him in Debenhams, where he worked at the time (Richard was another frustrated creative, venting his urges with the GODS), and he offered me the choice of either going to the fair or going to see a new film called Raiders of the Lost Ark. I’d seen the trailers on the tele vision, and duly noted its credentials as being ‘from the producers of Jansand Star Wars’, and decided I’d forgo the dodgems and the waltzers in favour of another trip to the ABC. With hindsight, I did it as much for Richard’s sake as for my own ends. I did it because I sensed it was what he really wanted to do, and I knew if I agreed, it would not only soothe the tension between us but win me some approval. I was ten years old at the time.

Looking back, the decision I made on the third floor of the Gloucester branch of Debenhams (the back entrance of which was on St Aldate Street, opposite where our music shop used to be) was absolutely key. I didn’t realise it at the time but I was quite possibly at a metaphorical fork in the road. One path led away to easy superficial fun - all bright lights, loud noise and sugar - the other led to the movies. Now, I know Raiders of the Lost Ark isn’t Fellini but, crucially for me, it represented choosing substance over stimulation, mental interaction over a more fleeting sensory gratification.

My reason for doing this wasn’t a noble embracing of the humanities over the more base pleasures of the senses, it was an attempt to ingratiate myself with my stepdad; but, like Star Wars before it, Raiders served to further inspire my love of cinema and my interest in the film-making process. I have no doubt I would have seen it eventually, but something about making that specific choice resonates with me even now. Twenty-eight years later the man who made that film asked me to be in one of his films and one of the first people I shared that information with was Richard Pegg.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 1227