Nerd Do Well (29 page)

The college was a five-minute walk from the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, and for a time my ambition was to perform Hamlet in the main auditorium, rather than man the dilithium chambers of the Starship
Enterprise
. Thus stories of nerdiness and circularity from this time are scant, although I could fill an entire memoir with my adventures at Stratford, since they include virginity relinquishment of varying kinds, not just sexual.

My initial forays into more grown-up comedic performance definitely occurred at Stratford. Our first production was a revue show, for which I performed several
Monty Python
skits with my friend Andy, an impossibly cool young man whose influence transformed me into a goth. Before the end of the first year, we had formed a band called God’s Third Leg & the Black Candles, after I discovered I could play the drums (a latent skill acquired while messing around among the stock at the music shop in St Aldate Street).

We had one song but never performed it live. We did perform a few Half Man Half Biscuit
¹⁵
numbers at the Edinburgh fringe Festival which drew favourable comments from a three-piece Australian musical comedy act called the Doug Anthony All Stars, who were a fixture at the festival for a time. I’m pretty sure they thought the songs were ours, and in the face of praise from professional comics, we didn’t ever correct them.

The ethos behind God’s Third Leg & the Black Candles was mainly about being
in
a band rather than the actual composing and playing of music. The line-up – Andy Harrison (vox), Simon Pegg (skins), Steve Diggory (axe), Ruth Adridge and Gab Starkey (backing vox) – represented an amiable clique of teenage hedonists: we smoked cannabis resin and crimped our hair with abandon.

It was a heady and formative time for me and I eventually paid tribute to God’s Third Leg in
Spaced
, as the band my character Tim designs a record sleeve for. We had a reunion recently, all of us in our forties and seemingly changed beyond recognition; one of us had a grown-up son; another had recently beaten cancer. It wasn’t until we were a few drinks in and gathered around a drum kit and a guitar that our younger selves revealed their presence and our black candles appeared not to have burned down that far after all.

My time at Stratford wasn’t solely theatrical in pursuit. I witnessed a number of key inspirational movies during that period, including
Withnail and I
and
Evil Dead II
, which I believe I watched as a double bill at Gab Starkey’s birthday party, shortly before going upstairs and losing one of my virginities (the main one). I also developed a love of Woody Allen which I would carry with me ever after, so impressed was I with this diminutive one-man production machine. The film that sparked off the obsession was, predictably, his 1973 science-fiction romp
Sleeper
, which sees Allen playing Miles Monroe, a health-food store owner from Greenwich Village, New York, who wakes up two hundred years into the future having unwittingly been frozen in cryogenic stasis. The film is one of Allen’s silliest and owes much of its slapstick appeal to silent-comedy greats such as Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Allen himself is on hilarious form as the man out of time and Diane Keaton puts in a beguiling performance as Monroe’s hedonistic hostage, Luna.

I actually fell in love with Diane Keaton having seen her in
Sleeper
, an obsession she only compounded with her Oscar-winning portrayal of Annie Hall, a film I latterly sought out while on my mission to consume everything Allen had ever done. My love for Keaton eventually became a key factor in my early stand-up routines, borne out of weekly viewings of
Sleeper
, which my friend Jason Baughan had on video. Every Thursday after college, I would stay at Jay’s parents’ house. We’d eat Marmite on toast and watch the film, never tiring of its perfect blend of smart and silly.

Living away from home in Stratford-upon-Avon enabled to me to experience something very close to the freedom of adulthood while essentially still a child. Anne and John Mallins acted as guardians but never assumed the role of parents and as such I was able to get away with far more than had I still been at home. As a consequence, I chalked up a lot more life experience than I would have done under the constant watch of my liberal but concerned mother. (Although at the Mallins’ we did always eat together at the dining table with our puddings on our laps, and I did once get told off for coming home drunk and covered in make-up, so perhaps it was just like being at home.)

Dramatically speaking, my two years at Stratford also saw me participate in far more productions than I had in five years at Brockworth. In my first term, as well as the revue show, we devised a pantomime called
Not the Wizard of Oz
in which I played a very Rik Mayallish Prince Charming. The following term, we staged Federico García Lorca’s
Blood Wedding
in which I sparkled as 2nd Woodcutter. The next year was busier still for me, including a production of Peter Nichols’s
A Day in the Death of Joe Egg
and a production of
Hamlet
in which I appeared as the ghost of Hamlet’s father. I had hoped to play Hamlet but a slump in my coursework, due to an increased social life, led to a little karmic payback elsewhere. Word got back to Gordon Vallins, the inspirational patriarch of the drama department, that I had burst into an English lesson twenty minutes late one summer Monday, having returned from my first Glastonbury Festival but not from my first acid trip.

Elsewhere, my work suffered due to a habit of spending much of my time in the Green Dragon pub watching the video jukebox and smelling of patchouli oil. Gordon called me into his office and gave me a stern talking-to about potential and the importance of education and how if I continued along the same trajectory, I wouldn’t get into university. I clearly needed this kick up the backside, as Gordon called it, and pulled myself back from the brink of teen abandon on which I teetered.

I remained gothy and faintly rebellious in appearance, but buckled down academically in an effort to get the requisite grades and progress into higher education. I even started going to art classes, much to the surprise of my teacher who claimed not to recognise me. It was all too late in terms of me securing the role of Denmark’s stroppiest prince – that honour went to Dale Crutchlow. I had to make do with playing his dead dad, which I did to the best of my ability and got singled out in the
Stratford Herald
, so stick that up your arras, Dale Crutchlow. Not that I’m bitter. The last production before the end of the final term was Kander and Ebb’s timeless musical satire,
Chicago
, in which I took the role of smooth lawyer Billy Flynn, having bucked up my ideas since the
Hamlet
fiasco. I got to sing classic numbers such as ‘Razzle Dazzle’ and ‘All I Care About’ and had probably the most fun I had ever had onstage.

My time at
SWCFE
was magical from beginning to end both socially and academically. I grew as a person and as a budding actor and, by the time I left, was absolutely certain that I wanted to pursue a career in theatre. I learned as much about life as I did about Bertolt Brecht and Tom Stoppard, and even wrote my first play for the practical part of my theatre studies A level, a predictably sci-fi-tinged tale about a tribe of post-apocalyptic teenagers who worship a bedside table with a light in it. The play was called
Shadowland
and was essentially Mad Max vs the Wombles. As I’ve always said, write what you know.

As much as I loved returning home at weekends from Stratford, leaving
SWCFE
forever to return to the relative solace and isolation of home took its toll on me emotionally and I fell into a depression. The malaise was sparked by the vague irrational fear that I might suddenly turn gay, despite having no impulses in that direction. I also had a very beautiful girlfriend called Caroline at the time, who I had pursued for months with a relentless charm offensive that eventually paid off. The sexuality confusion most likely occurred in the wake of leaving college and the sudden uncertainty of my future.

The results of my A levels would determine my next move, and despite having chosen Bristol University as my intended place of higher education, my tenure there would not be confirmed until late August when the A-level results came in. The limbo I found myself in after leaving Stratford could best be described as post-dramatic stress disorder. I felt isolated and misunderstood, having no one around me who had shared the experience. I kept feeling the urge to fall to my knees and scream, ‘You weren’t there, man!’ It was in a very pure sense a case of culture shock, compounded by my having to work a number of manual labour jobs in order to earn money when what I really wanted to do was act. I had spent the last two years being Prince Charming, Billy Flynn and Hamlet’s dad. I was the 2nd Woodcutter, damn it! Why am I lifting boxes?
What happens if I turn gay?

I worked as a packer and loader in different warehouses, including a mouse-infested animal-feed factory, this one being at the height of my depression. The job required me to lift big sacks of grain on to pallets and break down huge eight-foot clusters of expired Sugar Puffs to be bagged and sent to farms as horse food. Break times were a bizarrely disorientating affair for someone in my delicate state. The facility seemed to be staffed entirely by gruff, sullen old men, all on the verge of retirement. During downtime, they would sit themselves in various chairs and sleep soundly as hundreds of mice swarmed around their feet, and I would sit among them, wired on my own endorphin deficit. There was a perpetual haze of grain dust that hung in the air, defining the scant light that leaked into the room through the filthy windows as churning, visible shafts, making the whole environment fantastic and nightmarish. I would sit bolt upright with my sandwiches on my knee, my eyes darting from oblivious, sleeping men to the hundreds of grey blurs flashing across the floor, all the time wondering if it was really happening. Wasn’t I just onstage singing ‘All That Jazz’? I lasted eight days before I told the temping agency that the grain particles were aggravating my asthma. Fortunately for me, they didn’t ask for a letter from my doctor.

When my results finally arrived, I had started to feel better and was fairly happy, working in a double-glazing warehouse, assembling packs of parts and moving boxes around. There were a few younger guys there and I had even made a few friends. The foreman approached me one morning smiling broadly and let me know that my mother was on the phone. I took the call in his office and was excitedly told that I had met the entrance requirement for Bristol’s placement offer and would be starting in October. I walked back on to the warehouse floor with a spring in my step and assembled some of the neatest double-glazing packs of my career, buoyed by the knowledge that I had managed to scrape a B and two Cs and thus ensured my continued presence within the education system. My dreams of becoming an actor were alive again and I was about to take one step closer. I had no idea that Bristol, for a time at least, would take me in a completely different direction.

I felt prepared for Bristol University, having already served some serious hard time in Stratford – playing pool, smoking other people’s weed and making five pounds last seven days. I was well versed in living away from home, although the whole idea of preparing my own food was initially baffling now that I was bereft of Anne Mallins’s weekly set menu, and for my first year I conducted an experiment to see how long a human being could subsist solely on toast and Marmite (163 days).

The difference between going to drama school and studying drama at university is that drama school is almost entirely practical, whereas university is predominantly theoretical. That’s not to say Bristol was just about theory; the drama department put on a number of productions every year, as did the drama student body know as Studiospace. Students were also encouraged to put on their own productions, ranging from traditional plays to ten-minute theatre pieces performed at lunchtime. We also learned about all aspects of theatre, film and television production, not just performance, the idea being that we graduate with a broad spectrum of skills that would enable us to work in the industry in a variety of capacities. Some of the most successful Bristol University Drama Department alumni have been directors, producers and writers. It certainly changed my outlook in terms of my future involvement in the arts. If anything, it engendered in me a healthy wariness of convention and encouraged me to develop self-reliance, rather than simply become an actor beholden to the swirls and eddies of fate. After all, as Sarah Connor told her son John, there’s no fate but what we make, and who are we to argue with
Terminator 2
?

It was at Bristol that I discovered the joys of critical analysis, which eventually inspired me to pick apart my beloved
Star Wars
as part of my final-year exams. Lectures and seminars on populist cinema were hugely interesting, since they enabled me to consider what I had previously assumed to be a disposable art form as a rich source of academic study. I was able to watch my favourite films again then address them as historical ‘texts’, reflecting a host of psychoanalytical complexities.
Alien
became a treatise on genital terror and fear of the mother,
Terminator
became a tale of Oedipal obsession and mutations in received notions of masculinity, and
Top Gun
became about . . . well, we all know what
Top Gun
is about. The process was fascinating and enlightening. At the beginning of our first film studies lecture, Professor George Brandt informed us that after that day, we would never be able to view a film in the same way again. By developing and engaging our critical faculties we would effectively be given the ability to see through the artifice in three dimensions, able to detect meaning both intentional and unintentional, understand the intellectual mechanics at work in the narrative as well as identify temporal expressions of social neuroses and preoccupations, and thereby become boring cunts.