Nerd Do Well (2 page)

I liked Ben as soon as I met him. He was big, specky and friendly. Like a
Guardian
journalist who had turned into the Incredible Hulk while maintaining his smart, liberal sensibility, rather than succumbing to dumb monosyllabic grunts, like someone who writes for
Nuts
magazine. I knew we were going to get on after our first meeting, during which my dog Minnie honked up a disgusting heap of canine spew all over my office sofa. He laughed nervously and pretended not to be nauseated by the stink, for which I was immediately grateful. Minnie isn’t a sickly dog, she chucks up with a corresponding frequency to myself (once every few months) and she doesn’t even drink as much as I do. I appreciated Ben’s tolerance of her gastric faux pas and thus trusted his judgement of my proposed book idea.

An autobiography then, I chin-scratched, weighing up mild naffness in the face of not writing anything at all. Ben offered an angle: an account of my journey from ordinary nerd to nerd participating in the world that made him nerdy in the first place. I liked this. The circularity appealed to me as a narrative device. I am often struck by the irony of my adult life in light of my childhood passions. Also, I secretly intended to ignore his suggestion and write about the superhero anyway. Resolving to humour him with the biographical stuff and sneak the real book in between the cracks. It might just work.

Much is what of written about me, usually during spurts of promotion, seems to dwell on the idea of an ordinary, guy-next-door, non-Hollywood, unattractive loser, somehow succeeding in this fabled land of facile opportunity, despite being handicapped by having red hair (I don’t) and severe physical deformity (my wife thinks I’m handsome). So many articles begin with a passage about why I should not have succeeded, due to my lack of ‘Hollywood’ good looks, as if that has anything to do with being an actor.

And herein lies my initial reluctance to pen something biographical as opposed to fantastic. I’m not entirely comfortable with the ‘fame tax’. There seems to be a consensus these days, a received wisdom, unquestioned even by those who are victim to it, that all actors do what they do because they want to be famous. Not because they enjoy the process but because they crave the product – not even the product, the consequence of the product, which is fame – and by this compulsion are considered to be ‘show-offs’, deserved of some kind of punitive comeback for their desire to be adored. It is as if some ancient rule setter folded his arms back when the concept of celebrity was emerging and said, ‘OK, you can be famous, but by way of payment, you must surrender your private life and be willing to talk about it as if everyone is entitled to know.’ I don’t think that’s particularly fair.

I hate it when I am asked about my family. I get all sweaty and agitated and subtly try to deflect the question towards my dog, whose private life I am willing to sacrifice because she doesn’t read
heat
or watch E!. She doesn’t consume any kind of media, be it entertainment or factual, although she did once watch the opening moments of John Carpenter’s
The Thing
, mainly because it was on a really big TV and involves a husky dog running across a snowfield being chased by a helicopter. She wasn’t particularly concerned with the narrative context – a seemingly innocent and ordinary dog is pursued across the tundra by desperate Norwegian scientists who, we later learn, rightly believe the hapless pooch to be a shape-shifting alien life form intent on assimilating the entire human race. To Minnie it was just a dog running around in the snow. If she thought anything it would have been ‘When did it snow? And where did that big window come from?’ Of course she thought neither because dogs can’t process abstract concepts, as much as we’d like to think they can. How could she think in such sophisticated terms? Her favourite pastime involves eating socks. See, there I go again. It’s like a linguistic screen saver. Whenever my brain switches off I start talking about my dog. It happens all the time in interviews, as this extract from a recent interrogation demonstrates.

Journalist: So, you recently had a baby. What’s it like being a father?

Me: My dog likes eating socks!

However, this book will require me to talk about my private life as well as my working life, since the two are inextricably linked. Events in my private life have greatly affected my creative decisions over the years, and in early life my decision to be creative. As such, this book is likely to be associative, in that it will hop around like a dog with a sock, as different events call to mind various forebears. For instance, when I was very small I used to fantasise about having a dog, to the extent that I used to confer with the phantom pooch while walking down the street. This eventually crept its way into
Spaced
, a sitcom I wrote with my friend Jessica Hynes (née Stevenson). Midway through the first series, Jess’s character Daisy decides she wants a dog, having played out similar fantasies to my own as a small girl. The dog she eventually purchases is a miniature schnauzer, which she calls Colin (played convincingly by a two-year-old bitch called Ada).

Years later, I decided to similarly realise my childhood fantasy and add a dog to our family unit. Due to my wife Maureen suffering a mild dog allergy, we needed a breed that didn’t shed. I immediately thought of Ada, who had not only been a delight to work with but also didn’t leave hair everywhere. So, in May 2007, we drove out to a farm in Buckinghamshire and adopted a seven-week-old miniature schnauzer bitch. Her Kennel Club name was Wicked Willow but we called her Minnie. That’s a double circle right there: life is imitated by art, which in turn is imitated by life, life then directly affects art due to my pushy stage-mother insistence that Minnie break into cinema. She was fired from
How to Lose Friends & Alienate People
(2007) for being too boisterous, cut out of
Paul
(which was shot in 2009), but finally made it into John Landis’s period murder comedy
Burke and Hare
(2010), in which she expertly portrays a Regency period street mutt. Strange to think such consequences were born from the idle fantasies of a dogless child
¹
. That was pretty personal, although it was still about Minnie.

There have been many of these moments of circularity in my life. I have so often found myself in situations whereupon I internally lament not owning a time machine that would enable me to travel back into the past and inform my younger self of future ironies. It’s actually been a long-held fantasy of mine. We generally experience life in increments; we learn gradually as our reality evolves; there are rarely great leaps that shock us. Take the iPod for instance. If my older self had appeared in my bedroom, out of a glowing, electro-static ball in 1980, just as my ten-year-old self was lowering the needle of his red briefcase record player on to the tar-black surface of Adam and the Ants’
Kings of the Wild Frontier
and produced a sleek little super matchbox that could hold not just Messrs Ant and Pirroni’s second, and arguably best, album, but the entire back and future catalogue of not just Mr Ant but twenty thousand other dandy highwaymen, I would have seen it as being some kind of joke (that’s if the sudden appearance of an old me in an electro-static time ball hadn’t already convinced me otherwise).

Remember when only a few people had mobile phones. Generally regarded as an object of derision, you would occasionally see business types clutching these ridiculous grey bricks to their faces and mutter to yourself, ‘What a prick.’ Nowadays, an eyebrow hardly flutters when we see a ten-year-old child happily texting away. You probably wouldn’t notice anyway; you’d be too busy downloading an app that could definitively pinpoint who it was that had just farted in your Tube carriage.

Wouldn’t it be great to grant someone the joy of truly appreciating the future, of surprising them with a turn of events that wasn’t heralded and predicted through logical development? Getting to meet and work with Steven Spielberg was the culmination of many events, which had pretty much prepared me for it, and yet, if I could have travelled back in time and told the excitable young boy who had just watched
Raiders of the Lost Ark
that one day in the future the man who created this brilliant piece of cinema would call you on your mobile phone (I probably wouldn’t even notice the mobile phone part, I would have been so apoplectic with joy at getting to speak to the man who so spectacularly melted all those Nazis), I can only imagine the sheer joy and excitement that would have consumed me. It’s not as if I didn’t throw a complete nerdgasm when it actually happened, but to my younger, less mature self, with no idea where my career would take me or even a real idea of what a career might be? Surely, I would have burst into flames and melted like a Nazi right there and then. Thus, I will revisit those key times during childhood and retroactively try to inspire the wonder that would have been, had I been given access to an electro-static time ball, let’s call it an
ESTB
(the idea and name for which I have copyrighted, by the way. In case I accidentally invent it in the future which, believe me, I do).

Despite all of this divulging of long-held secrets, what you won’t be reading about in this book are salacious details of, say, for example . . . my first sexual experience.

My first sexual experience involved a girl I shall not name, so as to preserve her dignity. Let’s call her Meredith Catsanus, which, let’s face it, couldn’t possibly be her real name or that whole dignity-preservation thing would be a complete waste of time.

Meredith and I had been friends since the age of seven. Even at such a young age I felt the first tentative stirrings of physical attraction towards another human being, rather than towards a picture of Princess Leia or my Tonto action figure
²
when he wasn’t wearing his little beaded suede two-piece outfit with the fringe. There was something about Meredith that really fascinated me. Possibly the fact that she looked a bit like Barbra Streisand, but perhaps more the way her hair fell down across one side of her face, covering her right eye, making her look cute and demure, or perhaps to hide a hideous disfigurement (like Batman’s popular adversary Two Face, he of the bisected personality/physiognomy). I was seven years old and would have found all possibilities equally appealing.

Aside from that tender romance with Carrie Fisher’s profile page, which I tore out of
Look-in
magazine, I hadn’t experienced romantic love before the age of seven. It’s fair to say not many have. I had an odd crush on a boy called Ross but it wasn’t motivated by any infant manifestations of sexual lust. He was just really lovely and I wanted to be near him. He was about three years older than me and I remember following him around the playground on one occasion, just aching to be his friend.

I also used to frequently snog my friend Kyle because it made all our other friends hoot with laughter. I hadn’t been rendered homophobic by received notions of masculinity at the age of six and I had no problem doing ‘film star kisses’ with another boy if it meant getting a big laugh.

I had no intellectual understanding of sexuality other than the strictly hetero goings-on in films and shows I’d glimpsed on grown-up television while playing on the floor with my Steve Austin rocket and bionic operating theatre. There were the rumblings of future impulses implicit in the tiny waves of pelvic vertigo I felt with naked Tonto or read the section about the Romans in my pop-up book of history. At my sixth birthday party, my mother entered Nan’s austere front room to find Kyle and myself going at it in the middle of a circle of screaming children and broke us up as though we were fighting, barely concealing a wide smirk of confusion on her face. I’m not sure if she was worried that I might be gay or just thought the behaviour was inappropriate for a children’s party, no matter what the sexual orientation of the participants. I’m going to ring her and ask her now.

She says she doesn’t remember, so it can’t have been all that shocking to see two six-year-old boys locked in a passionate embrace on an armchair in the front room while other children clapped and laughed in some bizarre exercise in mini-pops dogging. It strikes me as something I’d remember if I caught my daughter putting on a display of sapphic passion for the amusement of her friends, but then Mum was always pretty liberal and progressive. As I am of course.

I did experience an icky sense of unease witnessing John Duttine from
Day of the Triffids
kiss a man in what must have been a
Play For Today
in the late seventies. It wasn’t disgust though, more a primal fear of something to which you cannot relate, like gay men get around vaginas, or lesbians experience if they are unfortunate enough to stumble upon a cock. I’m not sure how my mother would have felt if she had interrupted one of the exploratory games I played in the shed with a number of the girls that lived in my nan’s street, despite them being ultimately more socially conventional. Those very early forays into our sexuality that we all experience and which we seldom discuss unless under the umbrella euphemism that is ‘doctors and nurses’ have nothing to do with romantic love and are inspired by ancient curiosities buried deep within our
DNA
. I recall being no older than seven and getting naked with a girl my age on her bunk bed, just because it felt right. Grander concepts such as romance and love were beyond my understanding and separate from this strange little automatic event. It wasn’t until a year later, when a young woman with Danish pastries on either side of her head knelt down in front of a walking dustbin to record an important message, that love truly came to town.

Anyway, before we explore that major obsession, let’s get back to Meredith Catsanus. I have a clear memory of the first rumblings of sexual tension between us on a field trip to Gloucester Cathedral in 1978. I had attended a school attached to the cathedral as a very young child and found myself possessed of the confidence one feels in familiar surroundings, among those for whom the setting is new.