Nerd Do Well (33 page)

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 met and 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 X-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, née 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
How to 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.

As 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.