Small Man in a Book (38 page)

When we arrived at the pub it was crammed with post-theatre drinkers but in amongst the crowd I spotted Julia. We went over and joined her, asking how the show had gone that night. She replied that it had been good, but she was tired now and so she was going to head straight home. With that, she left.

So, now I was in the bar but without anyone to reintroduce me to Steve, whom I doubted would remember our fleeting encounter at the Reading Holiday Inn some months previously. I was just about to leave, when suddenly there he was, the reigning monarch of Comedy Land, and he was heading in my direction.

Unless I was the poorest judge of body language, he seemed to be smiling in recognition.

‘You’re Rob, aren’t you? I saw your tape. I thought it was really good. I think you’ve got something, not many people have. Julia has, and Simon has, and I think you have too. I’d like to work with you one day …’

I don’t remember anything else that was said between us.

I couldn’t believe what I’d heard. This was huge.

If it had been ten years later, I might have been tempted to say, ‘
OMG!
’

When I think back to that night, I seem to have floated back home several feet off the ground, my mind buzzing. I arrived at the house; it was dark, the children were all in bed asleep. I went straight upstairs and woke Martina.

I couldn’t wait to tell her: ‘I’ve just met Steve Coogan; he’s seen the tape.
He likes it!
’

19

It wasn’t long after this thumbs up from Steve that Julia mentioned something Henry Normal had said to her. Henry was a former performance poet and writer responsible for, amongst others,
Paul Calf’s Video Diary
and
The Royle Family
, as well as now being Steve’s business partner. The two were in the process of setting up the production company that would go on to become Baby Cow Productions. Henry had one day mentioned to Julia that, if she ever wrote anything, would she bring it to him and Steve rather than, say, Talkback? This was the hugely successful production company set up by Griff Rhys Jones, Mel Smith and Peter Fincham, which was responsible for many of the most highly regarded comedies of the day. Julia told me of her chat with Henry, and suggested that we try to write something together.

This sounded like a good idea; we’d always had a chemistry when we’d been part of the More Fool Us group in Bath, and we shared a sense of humour and love of making each other laugh. After some thought as to what it was specifically that we should do, we settled on the idea of writing about couples, about relationships. We both loved Woody Allen and felt that we’d like to explore similar territory – the ins and outs of relationships, the odd shorthand that develops through intimacy and familiarity. We realized also that, in writing about a couple, we could keep the whole thing self-contained and wouldn’t be reliant on others.

We decided to meet in town at a private members’ club I’d just joined, Blacks on Dean Street, and spend the day writing in one of their many elegantly faded Georgian rooms. We sat opposite each other, one of us holding a pen and pad, and waited for the muse to descend.

We waited.

And we waited.

Nothing happened. I should, perhaps, say
incredibly
nothing happened, as we’d arrived full of enthusiasm with the expectation that by the end of the day we’d have taken the first steps towards a substantial piece of work. We were both such fans of each other’s talent that the thought of a day spent staring at a blank piece of paper was one that we had never considered. By the end of the afternoon, it was clear that nothing was going to come and so we decided, in a mood of great disappointment, to call it a day. Perhaps this writing partnership lark wasn’t for us.

As an afterthought, I suggested that maybe it would be better if we just did what we’d done back in Bath – improvise and see what happened.

The next day, with nothing to lose, I set off across London with my video camera, a microphone and a tripod and made my way to Finsbury Park, where Julia had a room in a shared house. We set up the camera, sat down on the sofa and began to talk. We had no preconceived idea of where we were going, the type of characters we were trying to create, or the situations we were trying to engineer; we just talked. To begin with we spoke with Birmingham accents. Immediately, characters came tumbling out.

Gordon:
How long has your sister been with us now?

Sheila:
Seven years …

Gordon:
That’s it, seven years. But she doesn’t judge us, she doesn’t judge.

Sheila:
Well, that’s the beauty of a coma.

That was the beginning. Two characters, Gordon and Sheila Budge, running a guest house, Budge Lodge, complete with playroom for similarly broad-minded couples, and all the time caring for Sheila’s bedridden and coma-stricken sister, Val.

With Julia as Sheila and Gordon.

We were able to talk and talk, in character, for hours at a time, often making each other howl with laughter, weaving intricate storylines that arose entirely naturally and unforced. At the end of each session, I’d transfer the audio from the videotape on to a cassette and send it off to a freelance secretary I’d found who lived close to my home in East Sheen. She would then transcribe the sessions and send us back what she thought she’d heard. There would be a lot of mistakes where the sound hadn’t been clear enough, or Julia or I had gabbled a line. We didn’t always correct the mistakes, as they were often quite funny, so we’d just go with the flow. In
Slither In
, the episode featuring Gordon and Sheila, Gordon says, ‘Some people think that swinging is all about jerking off over other men’s wives …’ When the transcription came back, ‘jerking’ had become ‘junking’. We both liked the sound of junking – it seemed like the sort of thing a long-established couple might say – and so it stayed in.

We would each receive separate copies of the sessions and then go through the material independently, highlighting what we thought was usable in terms of storylines and dialogue, after which we would compare notes. The plots and stories were worked and reworked as the rewriting progressed, but much of the dialogue remained unchanged from the original improvisations. There’s something about the spontaneity of good improvisation that offers up material far superior to anything I could ever conjure up while sitting in front of a computer. One of the keys to the success was trust. We had complete trust in each other, and were unafraid to go off down dark avenues that could turn out to be dead ends; nor were we afraid to fail in front of each other.

From Gordon and Sheila we next came up with Peter and Flick Moorcross, the upper-class couple trapped in a quietly hostile marriage lived in the shadow of Flick’s former love, Geoffrey. On top of this was Flick’s debilitating illness, extreme vaginismus.

Flick:
During intercourse the vaginal walls contract to the point where penile accommodation is absolutely impossible.

Peter:
Even a small penis feels like an aubergine.

From Peter and Flick we went to the other end of the social scale. Stephen and Michelle were a young couple preparing for their wedding day, living on next to nothing in the Rhondda Valley in South Wales. Stephen was a character I’d wanted to try for a long time – a basic, seemingly monosyllabic boy yet with incongruous flourishes of language, which he struggled to articulate. I thought of him as a computer with a large hard drive but small processor, who chose to be with the slightly mentally challenged Michelle as she was someone he could dominate and feel intellectually superior to. I had heard his voice so many times when I was growing up in South Wales, but had never seen it used in drama or comedy on the television.

Stephen and Michelle socialized with Michelle’s brother Leighton and his girlfriend Elaine who joined them at the bridalwear shop as Michelle tried on an assortment of wedding dresses. Michelle wanted something that surely all girls dream of, a dress that simultaneously captured the spirit of both Princess Diana
and
Mariah Carey, while amongst Stephen’s concerns was the following instruction: ‘Top of the tit … visible.’ He was also keen that she should have a veil or, as he put it, ‘a long hat’. When Stephen was satisfied that the outfit in which Michelle eventually emerged from the changing cubicle was provocative enough, he asked, ‘Who’s got wood?’ Holding up his own hand as proof of his aroused state, he waited until Leighton, Michelle’s brother, reluctantly did the same.

This was the only episode on which Julia and I found ourselves in disagreement with Henry and Steve. There is a scene in which Stephen and Michelle sit at their dinner table discussing the seating plan for the wedding. They are using household objects to denote the guests; Stephen is a very phallic black torch while Michelle is a peach with glasses drawn on in marker pen. Michelle is shocked to discover that Stephen plans to sit next to Leighton during the reception

Michelle:
But you’ll be sitting next to me …

Stephen:
I’ll be sitting next to Leighton, this is my day, ’Chelle.

Michelle:
I’ll be your wife …

Stephen:
Exactly! I’ll have you on my back all bloody day like a big pencil, won’t I?

Stephen then leaves the table in disgust and walks into the kitchen. While he is gone, Michelle moves the peach and places it next to the torch. On his return, Stephen sits down, notices this change and, without saying a word, calmly picks up the peach and eats it, places the remains back where they came from and puts Leighton, in the form of a pepper grinder, back at his side. Originally we had written that when he sees that Michelle has moved the peach, Stephen picks up the torch and smashes the soft fruit into oblivion. Steve Coogan was unhappy about this; he felt that it was condoning violence towards women and said that he wouldn’t allow us to include it in the final cut. We shot the scene both ways; in the take with the torch hitting the peach, some of the fragments of splattered fruit ended up on Julia’s face. It was perfect, but we had to go along with Steve – it was, after all, his company. This was the only disagreement in the whole of the series. I still prefer the version that condones violence towards women, and it’s on the DVD extras if you want to see it.

Our next couple, Tony and Beverley, again came from improvisation, just evolving from seemingly random conversations. With these two we knew that we wanted to do something concerned with extreme religion and I was interested in playing someone who was determined not to let guilt get the better of him, regardless of how badly he had behaved. This was an attitude I’d witnessed in characters on early-morning shows like
Tricia
and
Vanessa
. We also liked the idea of a couple at war with their neighbours, so the episode kept coming back to the bedroom window where Beverley and Tony spied on the couple next door as they sat in their garden, innocently minding their own business.

Tony:
Very strange pair. Started out perfectly well, and then it all blew up.

Beverley:
It all blew up at the barbecue, didn’t it?

Tony:
They took exception to us barbecuing dove.

Beverley:
Can’t see a problem with that.

Tony:
It represents peace. Dove burgers to represent peace, and red wine for the Boss’s blood. Now, they took exception to it and there’s been a lot of bad feeling, a lot of resentment, and it’s culminated in some very abusive daubing.

Beverley:
Had to do something, didn’t you?

Tony and Beverley kept an assortment of dogs in a large fenced-off area at the bottom of their garden, were keen fans of Scottish dance and held regular prayer meetings at their home. They frequently visited the home of their pastor, Vicar David, and his close friend Dennis, clutching a curly sausage casserole, but usually left it on the doorstep after their repeated knocking had gone unanswered.