Small Man in a Book (40 page)

When it came to casting, there were a few people we already had in mind. In particular, in the episode
All Over My Glasses
, we asked Mark Benton and Ruth Jones to play Leighton and Elaine, which they did brilliantly. I think we made a horrifically convincing foursome. When Ruth, Julia and I had been members of More Fool Us in Bath, we had worked alongside Jane Roth. Jane and Julia had performed as a double act for a while, the Sisters of Percy, and she came in to play the owner of the bridal shop who goes along admirably with Stephen and Michelle’s enquiries, even tolerating being put in a headlock by Stephen (‘I’m only pissin’ around. Look at her! Fuckin’ cackin’ herself, she’s cackin’ herself …’). Jane gives a beautifully understated performance; at the time the show came out, I remember being asked repeatedly if it was a real shop owner featured in the episode. This was one of my favourite scenes – Leighton laughing along for fear of being out of step with Stephen, Elaine telling Stephen to stop, and Michelle cowering in the cubicle as Jane keeps a smile on her face despite being afraid of the idiot who’s invaded her shop.

We used another of our More Fool Us colleagues in
Hairless
, when Toby Longworth played Dr Boxer, the therapist with the unusual, if not unethical, methods. Toby had always been the star of the improv group; he had been part of a double act with Bill Bailey, the Rubber Bishops, and had always seemed a few years ahead of the rest of us. He came in to audition for Dr Boxer and blew us away with an improvisation in which he asked Barne to imagine a number between one and ten.

Then, on hearing which number Barne had chosen, he replied: ‘OK, that number is you. Now I want you to imagine another number between one and ten … it could be a number of greater numerical value, or it could be a number of lesser numerical value. The important thing is that it is your number.’

Barne offered up another number.

Toby paused, before replying: ‘OK, that number is you
now
.’

We loved this and lifted it in its entirety into the episode (with Toby rightly receiving an additional material credit).

In
An English Squeak
we struggled to find an actor to play the clown with whom Flick has a brief encounter in the bedroom until a then unknown Stephen Mangan walked in and played it perfectly. It was one of his first jobs, something I now like to remind him of at every opportunity. For the part of Nana, the domestic help, we were very lucky to get the also then unknown Joanna Scanlon (long before she became celebrated for shows such as
The Thick of It
and
Getting On
).

We worked and worked on the scripts, right up to and during the filming, which took place around Brighton in the summer of 2000. We began with
An English Squeak
, finishing each day with a trip to Henry’s house, where we would go over the script again and again, looking for areas that could be improved upon. It was an intense and exciting way to work; in addition to any changes we’d made the night before, we would also record looser takes once we felt we had the scripted version in the bag. We would also just keep going, once we’d reached the end of what was written, and see what happened.

We shot an episode a week; once the first episode was finished, it went off to be edited into a rough assembly. I remember us watching the first pass at
An English Squeak
and being hugely disappointed. This, I was to learn, is a common response to seeing a rough cut, but at the time I was unaware and just knew that what we’d done wasn’t anywhere near as funny as I’d thought it would be. We set about writing new stuff for the episode; the bits by Geoffrey’s grave, the croquet, the tennis and the scenes with Peter pushing Flick around the grounds in her wheelchair were all shot in one day at the end of the six weeks. If you look closely, you’ll notice that I’m wearing a wig in these shots (my hair having been shaved off to play Gordon and Barne).

The extra day of filming came about as a result of an insurance claim after Julia injured her hand in the door of one of Steve’s cars – probably a Ferrari. She had been due to play the guitar as Fonte in
Hairless
but was unable to use her hand properly after the accident. That is why I was playing the guitar in the episode. But, again, this happy accident worked perfectly with the characters. It made complete sense that someone like Fonte, who claimed to be a great artiste while merely covering the songs of another (in this case, Alanis Morissette), would happily get someone else to play the guitar for her. It made further sense that that someone should be poor Barne, who did all the donkey work in the relationship while sitting at the back of the stage, out of the spotlight.

Our make-up artist for the series was Vanessa White, who had just done excellent work with
The League of Gentlemen
. It was Vanessa who persuaded me to bleach and cut my hair and then ultimately completely shave my head for the shoot. I wanted Stephen in
All Over My Glasses
to have bleached blond hair, and had assumed we would achieve this through a wig or temporary dye, but Vanessa was having none of it. She convinced me that bleaching my hair was the only way forward for a serious actor, so off I went and had it bleached. The following week, I had the top shaved off to play Gordon and then Barne, so the sides were still blond but the top was bare. When we had to do some pick-ups as Stephen, Richard Mawbey (the renowned wigmaker) made me a little blond toupee that sat on my head. I’m wearing it in the scenes set on the train, as I talk to the camera while Mark Benton moves stock around – although, thanks to Richard’s skills, you’d never know.

With the make-up team during the filming of
Human Remains
.

Vanessa also introduced me to the world of prosthetic make-up, something I’d never experienced before and a great help in bringing a character to life. Teeth were made for a couple of the roles and eye bags fitted for a few. The great thing about eye bags and ageing make-up in general, beyond what they bring to the characters, is the moment at the end of the day when you’re sitting in the make-up chair getting it all taken off. As the eye bags are peeled away, you suddenly look ten years younger and fresher.

This feeling of rejuvenation can last a good fifteen or twenty minutes. If you’re lucky.

We began filming at the end of July and went through a mostly hot, blue-sky summer to early September. I remember being in the make-up truck with Julia one day, the door fixed wide open to allow a slight breeze as my eye bags were being forcefully evicted, and seeing my first piece of press in relation to
Marion and Geoff
. The series was scheduled to begin going out on BBC2 at the end of September, and this was a little piece in
Red
magazine featuring the photo that most of the papers ran in association with the show – Keith staring out of the window of the car, his reflection caught in the wing mirror.

Marion and Geoff
came about, again, through the support of Henry and Steve. Hugo and I had made our pilot episode (it would go on to be episode one in the eventual series) and had submitted it to the BBC, where it sat for nine months without a response. In the meantime, two things happened: I began to write
Human Remains
with Julia; and I started to receive a great deal of very positive feedback on the pilot from everyone who saw it. But from the BBC there was only silence. Looking back, nine months without a response was perhaps another way of saying ‘no thanks’, but I still held on to the hope that we might get good news any day soon.

As the time passed, I kept hearing of other shows which I knew had been submitted at the same time as ours and had already heard that they’d been commissioned. Eventually, and in some desperation, I called Henry Normal at his home in Brighton; by now, we were well into the writing process for
Human Remains
and I told him that we’d still heard nothing from the BBC about
Marion and Geoff
. I knew that he and Steve had seen the pilot; he’d told me that they’d watched it together in his living room one evening and it had so moved them that, at the end, they couldn’t look each other in the eye for fear of betraying their emotions.

I asked Henry if he and Steve would be interested in adopting it as a production for their new company, Baby Cow. He said yes straight away and the BBC, with the weight of this endorsement behind it, commissioned the show. Better than that, they commissioned ten episodes. Our show was ten minutes long and the BBC had also commissioned ten episodes of a fifty-minute show called
Attachments
, so they needed something to round up the hour.

It had been the best part of a year since we’d filmed our pilot episode, and in the intervening time Hugo and I had come up with lots of ideas and directions in which we might take the story. It was wonderful to finally get the chance to create more stories for Keith, knowing that they would make it to the screen and be seen by the viewing public.

While keeping everything focused inside the car, we expanded the world outside to include tales from Keith’s past. How his ‘one proper job was for a Japanese company, at the very cutting edge of technology, and I’m very proud to have worked for a company that was so advanced that it was able to do away with manpower’. How his honeymoon with Marion hadn’t been an entirely happy affair, ‘But then, what honeymoon is?’ We sent him up and down the M4 motorway, desperate to see his beloved boys. When Marion and Geoff took Keith’s little smashers to Disneyland Paris, Keith simply got on the Eurostar car transporter and followed them, delightedly telling us of his plan to surprise them in a restaurant with the greeting, ‘Avez-vous your real dad?’

His job as a minicab driver was one for which he was clearly not cut out. In the first episode, he fails to make radio contact with the taxi company and later in the series, while delayed on his first airport job (‘quite glamorous, really’), he fills his time by going to a safari park, on his own. Before leaving the airport, he speculates about how much of the five-hour delay he could fill within the terminal building.

I could look around the shops. Not for five hours. I could do that for about forty minutes. I could have something to eat, half an hour, another forty minutes, that’s one hour twenty minutes, then I’ve got another three hours and forty to fill. Uh, three hours and forty, I could play on some of the games in the arcade. Say I could do that for half an hour, if I played slowly at low levels. Got another three hours to fill, have another drink, coffee or something for … ten minutes, that’s … I’m pushing it, really pushing it. I could browse in Smiths for … if they don’t move me on, I could do that for an hour … It’s not going to happen, is it? Whichever way you look at it, it doesn’t add up. Hmm, right … Bloody hell. What to do? What to do?

I would imagine that the line about browsing in Smiths came from the endless hours I’d spent in the Hounslow branch. Once at the safari park, Keith begins to wonder why the plane is delayed.

They never tell you why a plane is delayed, have you noticed that? They never … give a reason. Keep you in the dark. Technical fault, could be, um, maybe it’s a hijack situation … [PAUSE] Imagine how stressful that is, eh? Terrible. A hijack situation. Very stressful. I mean, in the old days with the propeller planes, the smaller planes, it was much easier. You would stand at the end of one aisle, wave your gun about, show who was boss. Nowadays with the bigger planes you can have three or four aisles, different sections, how do you police it? Um, you know, do you, do you treat people differently because they’re in different sections, are you a little less cruel to the people in First Class? I mean, you’re no fool, you know they’ve paid more. [PAUSE] You imagine, delivering a bomb somewhere, I mean you’ve got the bomb with you, could go off at any time, you’ve got to remember the secret code to alert the media, and I dare say you’re not allowed to … I wouldn’t imagine they encourage you to write it down. Like a PIN number, you’ve probably got to memorize it. [PAUSE] At any moment ‘ba-boom’. [PAUSE] It’s the modern curse, you see, stress. Doesn’t matter what you do really, if you’re a terrorist or a doctor. Or a zebra.

A little later, Keith is parked near some passing camels and is prompted into a memory of his parents.

See these camels now, I’m told they mate for life. Smashing. Like my mum and dad, really, they mated for life … literally. I mean Mum … Mum died on … the Thursday, in hospital [PAUSE] and then the following Monday, Dad shot himself.

The idea of the gun had been planted in episode two, when Keith drives to Cardiff with the weapon that had belonged to his father and uses the telescopic sight to spy on Marion and Geoff. The safari-park episode is a good example of how we would often create material on the hoof. On arriving at the park, we discovered that there were no monkeys (they had all been shot after contracting a virus). We came up with a lovely little moment for Keith as he sits eating biscuits in the car park and reflects on the news.