Small Man in a Book (36 page)

Not sure where this is but apparently drinks are free and there’s enough fun and sunshine for everyone.

I named him Colin; he’d come to the farmhouse to get himself together after a difficult time in his romantic life. He spoke in a posh, clipped Welsh accent, the kind that pronounces the word ‘university’ as ‘
ewe
niversity’. I’d loved this kind of voice for a long time but had never managed to do anything with it. The character would get lots of laughs around the dinner table and by the pool, so I decided to make the most of the incredible location and film a little video of Colin, just for fun. When it came to costume, I stripped down to my boxers, tucked them in so they resembled a posing pouch, and oiled my body until it glistened. The final touch was the bandanna. With the magnificent Tuscan hills rolling away behind me, I stood by the pool, glistening in the sun, and began to speak to the camera as though recording a video message for a dating agency website. The comedy was helped by the unplanned additions of an intermittently barking dog and a curious wasp, both of which caused Colin to lose his composure.

I’d liked the results of this messing-about-on-holiday tape, and had thought for a while that there was more I could do with the character. So, once I was home, I sat down to write another few minutes around Colin, which involved him going on his first date – to an amusement arcade, with Steve Speirs. In the finished video Ruth Jones pops up in the final scene as she waves Steve and me off on holiday.

I wrote two other characters. One was a Londoner, named Terry, who we see enjoying a night out in Cardiff and interacting with the drinkers and clubbers he meets on the streets. I also revived a character from my earliest days at Radio Wales, Chuck Webb. Chuck was an American reporter, again interacting with real people as he filed his reports for an imaginary US network. The joke was an old one – his misunderstandings of British culture – but there were some nice moments. I went to the Museum of Welsh Life at St Fagans, on the outskirts of Cardiff, and interviewed visitors, asking them what they thought of the place. The museum has many buildings from all over Wales that have been transported from their original location and then rebuilt, brick by brick, at the museum. I pronounced St Fagans as ‘St Fagin’s’ and questioned whether Fagin, famously brought to life in
Oliver Twist
, should ever have been made a saint, and whether it was fair that he’d forced street children to steal the houses brick by individual brick and bring them to Cardiff.

Remarkably, no one questioned my logic, one chap saying that at least these kids weren’t on the streets and we should be thankful to St Fagin for that.

The final character on the tape was Keith Barret, who I hadn’t visited since
Who Died Earlier Today
, two years previously. I wrote a brief episode for Keith; it involved him visiting a fellow taxi driver in hospital who had been attacked by a passenger. Talking to a camera set up on the dashboard, Keith tells us that he himself has never been attacked, as he simply doesn’t look for trouble. He then of course inadvertently does just that, and gets set upon after searching for his pick-up, a Mr Anka, in the course of which he leans out of his window and loudly asks a passer-by if he is Mr Anka.

‘Excuse me, Anka? Are you Anka?’

It wasn’t the most sophisticated gag I’d ever written. We see the passer-by approach the car and grab Keith as the camera slides to the floor, and we hear the savage beating that ensues.

I recorded all the sketches over a couple of days with Rhys as cameraman and director, and then set about compiling and editing them. I designed a cover for the VHS cassette in the style of the posters for
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
, packaged about thirty of them in padded envelopes and sent them off to a variety of casting agents, directors and producers. Almost all of them were never heard of again, or plopped sadly back on to my doormat unwatched; the only positive response was from Carlton Television, whose casting department put me in
Barbara
, a sitcom starring Gwen Taylor and Sam Kelly. The show also featured the brilliant Mark Benton, who would go on to appear with me in
Human Remains
and
A Small Summer Party
. Other than that, there was nothing.

Undeterred, I would carry a copy of the tape around with me wherever I went in case I should run into anyone whom I thought might be able to help. One day, I was walking down Sherwood Street in Soho and saw Sir Peter Hall walking towards me. We were both strolling along the middle of the road; this was a hell of an opportunity. I reached down to my bag, my fingers itching like a gunfighter’s. Did I dare to accost the great man of theatre and press a copy into his hands? Did I have the nerve to step forward and take control of my destiny? Did I have what it took to seize the moment. To
carpe diem
?

No, I didn’t.

This was a shame – at the very least, I could have told him how much I had enjoyed his production of
The Merchant of Venice
at the Phoenix Theatre in the West End a few years previously. Dustin Hoffman played Shylock; I’d watched a
South Bank Show
on the making of the production and was beyond excited at the prospect of seeing Hoffman onstage. As we milled about outside the theatre, I did a double take at the unexpected sight of Benjamin Braddock/Ratso Rizzo/Dorothy Michaels himself strolling past. It was Hoffman, complete with appropriately Venetian merchant facial hair, walking unimpeded through the crowds and into the theatre, giving a little wink to the stage-door attendant as he entered the building, as if to say, ‘Fooled them, again.’ I was so flabbergasted I had to sit down. That’s not just a figure of speech; being ten feet away from an undetected Dustin Hoffman really did cause me to have to sit down.

Meanwhile, here I was, stalking the West End with my new showreel, showcasing all my own characters, hoping to catch someone’s eye. Amongst the many people I had considered sending the tape to was Hugo Blick, a name from the distant past of my college days in Cardiff. I hadn’t seen him for some time but was very aware of his progress. He had worked as an actor, appearing in films like
Batman
and
The Wind in the Willows
. I had seen him pop up on shows like
Jeeves and Wooster
and
Blackadder
. He was now at the BBC as a writer and producer, and was credited as such, as well as for his acting, in the comedy series
Operation Good Guys
.

It would have made sense to send the tape to Hugo; given our history, I could at least be sure that he’d watch it. But I didn’t. The thought of a polite ‘no’ from someone I’d been at college with was too much to contemplate – although I had thought to myself that if I ever bumped into him by chance I might casually bring up the fact that I’d made a tape and possibly pass it on for his opinion. This was one of the reasons for carrying the cassette around with me everywhere I went.

A couple of weeks after I’d failed to make a connection with Peter Hall, I was at the BBC TV Centre. I had just recorded a voice-over (‘… and with
Match of the Day
at ten, that’s Saturday night on BBC1!’) and was walking through the corridors on my way out. Knowing that Hugo worked in that same enormous building, I imagined how fortuitous it would be to bump into him and be given the opportunity to hand over the tape in person. At that very moment, he walked round the corner and almost bumped into me. Television Centre is a huge building containing an enormous number of people; the chances of bumping into one specific individual must be very slight indeed. I burst out laughing. This was a bizarre piece of synchronicity.

We went and had a drink together and caught up with what we’d been doing over the years. He explained that part of his job at the BBC was to read new scripts and find new talent; he also had a modest development budget for any projects he felt showed promise. Hmm … a very small light bulb illuminated a far corner of my mind. All through our chat the tape was sitting in a bag at my feet, but still I hesitated to bring it into the conversation, worried by the possibility of rejection from one of my contemporaries.

Eventually, and after much internal debate, I quietly mentioned that I’d done this thing, this video, this collection of characters: ‘I have a tape and, if you like, you could watch it …’

He was probably just being polite but, to my surprise, he said he’d love to see it.

I handed over the box, and left.

An hour and a half later, I was back in my second home, Soho, sitting in a café on Broadwick Street, just along from the public toilet where Peter Cook and John Lennon had filmed a sketch in the year of my birth, when my phone rang. It was Hugo. He’d watched the tape and, while the first three weren’t to his taste, he liked the last character of the four, Keith Barret, and suggested I come back to the BBC and talk about it.

I didn’t know it at the time of course, but this phone call was a fantastically important, game-changing, pivotal moment in my life. It was the beginning of a whole new chapter.

The next day, we met in his tiny office and straight away seemed to be in tune with each other as to how we saw the character and where it might develop. There was a great deal of very fortunate timing involved in this coming together, for both of us. For my part, I was absolutely desperate to play a character with some depth, some substance, a character with a story arc – something I had yet to do on television with my gallery of five-line nerds. I think that Hugo was looking to develop something less slapstick and perhaps more subtle than the knockabout humour of
Operation Good Guys
. The idea we had – that Keith would continue, as he’d done on the demo tape, to simply drive around while telling us, albeit unreliably, about his life – was a relatively simple and, more importantly, inexpensive one to attempt.

With Hugo writing
Marion and Geoff
.

We began to construct a rich backstory for Keith. All that existed at this point was Keith, his taxi and his wife, Marion. Together we decided that Marion had left Keith for a man named Geoff, taking with her the two boys, Rhys and Alun, so named in honour of Rhys John and Alan Thompson. Alan was changed to Alun, the Welsh spelling, pronounced ‘Alin’, for no other reason than that it used to annoy Al when I called him that. Childish, I know. We placed our hero in London and sent Marion back to Cardiff, Keith’s natural home, so that he was left struggling to survive on his own, far from his native land, living in a single room in a house shared with loud and noisy students. This was surely inspired by my horrible room in Grangetown, sleeping on a mattress on the floor, just feet above the noisy architect. Keith drove around in his taxi for hours on end, telling the camera about his life and inadvertently revealing his true self by degrees.

The story of what became the first episode began to emerge: how Keith was going to drive to Cardiff and surprise Marion at the anniversary party of Edith and Neville, his former in-laws; how he had bought presents for Rhys and Alun, his ‘little smashers’, worrying that one of the gifts, a gruesome action figure, might be too violent for his son, ‘But, like his mother said, he’s a very violent child.’

When we were happy with our story, we arranged the shoot. A camera was borrowed from
Noel’s House Party
, handed over rather bizarrely by Noel Edmonds himself. Hugo, with the pioneering use of a large wad of Blu-tack, then stuck the camera to the dashboard of the rented car and we were away. We shot the pilot and the subsequent first series primarily on the streets around my home in East Sheen; local residents familiar with the geography of the place would have been well placed to point out the absurd routes that Keith often appeared to take as he doubled back on himself and drove along the same stretch of road several times in succession.

We would shoot the script we had written but I was also able to improvise and create material on the spot, which could be instantly edited and added to by Hugo as he sat crouching out of sight in the back of the car. When I was trying to deliver a gag or tell a story with a sudden humorous twist at the end, I’d know if I was on to something if I could feel the car vibrating ever so slightly as Hugo struggled to contain his laughter. It was a wonderful way of working, a little two-man underdog team pulling together to create our own very special, very different story.