Back Story

  It may sound strange but I treasured that e-mail. It was such a reluctant brush-off – I felt it was almost a sign of achievement for me. Part of me was amazed, overjoyed even, that I’d got so close so quickly to someone I’d fallen for. Because I knew I could only be with someone I’d fallen for and I wasn’t falling for people very often any more. And it had never been quite like this.

  ‘Close but no cigar,’ as Ellis says. Well that’s all right, I thought. Give it another 34 years and you’ll meet someone else nice.

  I did not think that.

  I didn’t blame her – she’d been clear, honest and fair and I loved her – but I didn’t really know how to cope. Being single had never made me lonely before – now the feeling was crippling. There were couples everywhere, it seemed. Everyone had someone. I wanted someone more than I’d ever done before at precisely the same moment that I realised that only one person would do.

  Never was I more bitterly aware that I didn’t have three wishes. But what if I’d already had a wish? What if I’d used it up? I’d wanted my career success so much and for so long. Had I wasted my luck, my wish on that, something that seemed so trivial now? My career, acting, comedy which, at the time of every other crush, had been a consolation and a distraction, this time felt like a rebuke. That’s the cold, selfish glittery object of my desire that I get. Instead of her. Try and console yourself with that, sneers the genie.

  Shepherd’s Bush Green is not a nice place to walk, I think to myself as I cross it diagonally northwestwards, weaving between bench-focused gatherings of chatting tramps. It’s noisy and ugly, but I’m used to walking in drab, boring, featureless places. For years, from the end of 2007, it didn’t matter where I walked. I wasn’t looking at the view. I started walking for my back, I kept going because of her. It made thinking about her more bearable. If I got more miserable, I could just speed up.

  Drinking helped too. I’d always liked getting drunk in the pub or at parties – now I had a real use for it. At the end of a miserable day you could use it to speed up time – almost like cutting to the next morning’s hangover. So I did that a lot.

  A few times, when drunk, I’d get off with someone. The booze allowed me to tell myself that it might make me feel better. Maybe I’ll manage to fall in love with this person instead, I always wondered. It seems that it can happen very quickly. And surely I should be doing something to shake myself out of my obsession with a woman who’s going out with someone else.

  One of those pissed late-night snogs was captured by a paparazzo and printed in Heat magazine. That felt pretty humiliating. What a fool I’d been, I thought. I had no personal life to speak of, not even much experience of how to meet women and form relationships, and yet I’d already become famous. If I was ever to work any of this out, relationships, women, life, as I probably should have done as a teenager, I’d have to do it sneaking around because the press might be interested. I was snogging a girl outside a bar, for God’s sake – that is a normal thing to do, something I should have done more often, and now thousands of people will have seen. No one, I thought bitterly, can have had a higher percentage of their life’s snogs appear in the papers than me. I wasn’t ashamed of what I’d done but I was embarrassed for it to be shown to the world – as if someone had taken a picture of me washing my balls or having a shit.

  It dawned on me gradually that quite a lot of people who I didn’t know were interested in my private life, or my apparent lack of one. My profile had grown slowly – initially Peep Show had barely been noticed but, as more series aired, more people became aware of it. Then some became aware of the sketch show. Others started to see me crop up on panel shows. Gradually the likelihood of a stranger knowing who I was had grown.

  And, as it grew, I was interviewed more often by newspapers, and the nature of the questions I was asked in those interviews changed. They were fishing for details of my private life. I suppose that’s natural – people are always interested in that sort of thing, and my character in Peep Show has his private life very much to the fore. They wanted to know how mine compared. And I’d certainly implied in panel shows, as a way of getting a laugh and developing a persona that people could get a handle on, that I was a lonely, dysfunctional, OCD loser.

  For years, I was very happy with this image. People found it funny, and when I wasn’t that well known they didn’t want to dig any deeper. The language of lonely self-loathing gets a lot of laughs when bluntly used in a comic context – it’s like doing a sketch about the Samaritans. But, in an interview, the context becomes more serious. They weren’t letting me paint a stereotypical, broad-brush picture of an isolated wanker – they wanted details. And, because I was broken-hearted, it was a joke that was getting a bit too edgy for me anyway. It made me sad to describe myself as so sad.

  ‘Is that what you’re really like?’ interviewers wanted to know. ‘Lots of women find you attractive, you know – just look at the internet.’

  It was absolutely true that, by googling my name, I could find lots of examples of people saying that they fancied me, usually (they added) to their surprise. But then some people will fancy anyone who’s on telly. That just turns them on. As, sometimes, does being funny. As does being unattainable. As does not being there ‘in real life’, all wrong/normal/unglamorous/unhilarious/hairy/human like people are when you actually know them. I get it a lot on Twitter – people saying they fancy me or asking their friends if it’s ‘wrong’ that they fancy me, which is definitely a backhanded compliment, or possibly a backhanded insult. It’s all a bit of an ego boost, I suppose. But I think that moment of saying they fancied me would always be the high point of the relationship, so there’s no need to take it any further. Even in my memories of my racy encounter with the girl at Cambridge who was keen to bed a Footlights president, it’s only the initial realisation that’s an exciting memory – after that it fades to drunkenness and guilt.

  I suppose, if you do decide to shag groupies – and I’m not saying those who do are necessarily wrong as I’m sure it can be done in a fun and mutually satisfying way – you have to deal, as soon as it becomes clear that you’re up for it, with your sudden lowering in the groupie’s estimation. It’s like what I get when someone realises I’m not the novelist. Suddenly you’ve become attainable to the groupie – the excitement of fancying a star from afar evaporates and they have to deal with the reality of a stranger’s body – usually an older man’s.

  There were lots of things about my life that seemed to baffle interviewers. Why did I still live in an ex-council flat in Kilburn? was a very common question. Why did I show no interest in some of the trappings of fame: expensive cars or clothes or giant TVs? Perhaps I came across as some sort of weird ascetic or the kind of person who ‘keeps himself to himself’ and is later discovered to be dwelling on a pit of human bones.

  I think people thought I had something to hide. Maybe he’s gay and can’t admit it, they may have thought. Or spends all his money on morphine. Or, as the Heat photo might have suggested, he’s as promiscuous as Russell Brand but is somehow managing to do it on the quiet. What is his secret? was the implied question I feared. So I tried to be honest, when I went on Desert Island Discs at least, about the bare facts of my life and how I felt – that I was single and unhappy.

  I resented the interest. I didn’t think – I don’t think – that the specifics of my private life were anyone’s business. I was just a purveyor of comedy. If people liked it, they could keep watching. If not, they should stop. I didn’t want to encourage people to buy in too much to ‘what I was really like’. They couldn’t know me personally and I didn’t want to be trapped into creating the illusion that they could – an illusion that might subsequently be shattered if I was caught on film strangling a cat.

  But mainly I resented it because I was hiding something. I couldn’t stop thinking about Victoria. I was hopelessly in love in a way that wouldn’t go away. That’s why I had no private life to speak of – because I didn’t wan
t one, couldn’t face one without her. I told no one about it. Never mind interviewers, I didn’t tell my closest friends or my parents of the enormous sadness that over-shadowed my life. I didn’t tell them because I was ashamed and I knew what they’d say. ‘Stop indulging yourself in these hopeless feelings. Snap out of it. She doesn’t want to go out with you – she said so. She’s going out with someone else. It’s not the end of the world – it happens to people all the time. It’s happened to you before. Deal with it.’

  They would probably have put it more gently than that. But I’m sure that’s what they’d have said I should do. So, if I already knew that, what was the point in telling them? It was stupid to have such an all-consuming crush at my age. So I couldn’t talk about it – and without doing so, I couldn’t adequately explain my life.

  I didn’t want to move from Kilburn, partly because my friends lived there but mainly because it would be a sign of my life moving on without her. I didn’t want to change any major aspect of my existence on my own – I wanted to do it as part of my future with her. I couldn’t let go of that hope even when I told myself that I should.

  And my career just went from strength to strength, as if taking the piss. I had a successful sitcom and sketch show on the go at once, I was a sought-after guest for panel shows, I was a praised columnist in a fine newspaper, everyone wanted to make a programme with me, everyone seemed to be saying I was the next Stephen Fry. And, because of the walking coupled with the appetite-suppressant effect of a broken heart, I’d lost some weight. I was looking healthier and more attractive. Every wish had come true except the one that mattered.

  The ‘six months or so’ came and went. I’d occasionally see her at panel show recordings. If there was a Peep Show screening party, I’d invite her. She’d come and we’d chat and it would be lovely but I was never left in any doubt about her status: she had a boyfriend. That was that.

  I waited for three years. Isn’t that weird? Aren’t I odd? I can’t explain it other than to say that I couldn’t do anything else. She’s not only too wonderful, she’s too right for me. Any sane straight man would find her attractive but she’s funny, bright, sexy, nervous and confident in ways that could have been meant for me. I suppose that’s why I waited. I couldn’t shake the cheesy thought that it was ‘meant to be’.

  Three years after we met at that party (met for the second time I bloody-mindedly can’t not say) she became single again. And we went on some dates again. It was different this time. We started gradually – secretly really. But each week, we spent more time together than the last.

  I switched over from feeling cursed, as if the world had been constructed to spite me, to feeling so much luckier than I believed I could ever deserve. If only I’d known I just had to wait three years, I kept thinking. That was nothing – I would have gladly suffered ten times as much, as long as I’d known it would work out and we’d have our chance. We.

  It’s so much easier to talk about what makes you unhappy than what makes you happy, I’m now discovering. And I am happy now, I can’t deny it. And I am happy because of Victoria. All my priorities are different now, and better.

  In March I asked her to marry me and she said yes. In fact, to my unsurpassable delight, she said ‘Of course.’ Of course we’re getting married. It’s obvious. Perhaps I should have asked her at that party.

  There’s a down side to all this – and I don’t mean not being able to drink beer in the bath or scratch my balls during dinner, because she insists on both. Neither do I mean the fact that we won’t be living in Kilburn, although I’ll miss it. But Harlesden it has to be – she insists.

  The down side is the fear. The fear of something happening to her, the pressure of there being two bodies in the world that I want to keep from harm and only being able to watchfully inhabit one of them. I wonder if you know what I mean. I hope you do, for your sake.

  It’s a worry I’ll have to learn to live with because I’m definitely out of wishes. And whatever happens from now on, I want to concentrate on being grateful. I thought I was too old to change – someone once told me that anything you haven’t done by the age of 28, you’ll probably never do. And by my mid-thirties I’d never formed a long-term relationship, never moved in with anyone, hardly ever got off with the same woman twice. Now I’ve met someone who I can’t live without – and I don’t have to.

  So I’m inexpressibly grateful, to her and to fate, for this change, this miracle. It would have been an incomplete life, one not properly lived, if I’d never fully loved or had the amazing feeling of it being reciprocated.

  - 35 -

  Centred

  I cross Uxbridge Road opposite the Defectors Weld pub. Now there’s a name! No apostrophe so we can’t be sure that the weld – the joining of two metal parts together – belongs to the defector or defectors. But, as apostrophes are often omitted in names of businesses (Waterstones, where you may well have bought this book, have dispensed with theirs) we can’t be sure that it doesn’t either. Maybe it’s a statement: that’s what defectors do – perhaps metaphorically. Is it a refutation of the argument that suggests defectors, those who desert or leave a country, company, cause or civilisation, are divisive figures? On the contrary, the pub is saying, defectors weld: they join together nations and ideas, their very act of treachery a sign that people are not so different. Somehow. Or is it just a reference to a Soviet émigré’s bodged bit of metalwork?

  I like quirky pub names and I think it’s always a shame when one is lost and turned into an All Bar One or Slug and Lettuce, horrible chains that roll out their dismal puns nationwide. But my pleasure here is marred because I’m pretty sure Defectors Weld was an Edwards Wine Bar ten years ago. Maybe this is a reversion to an older name? I hope so but I suspect that ‘Defectors Weld’ is a recent attempt at quirkiness which I slightly despise. Although, full marks for weirdness – and I suppose for confirming my theory that it doesn’t much matter what things are called.

  I continue past the pub up Wood Lane. I’m nearly there. I’m tired now and, as I drag myself along the side of the giant retail cuboid that is the Westfield shopping centre, I feel like an ant doggedly crawling across a tile. Or antedly perhaps. This place where things are sold was built in a massive ‘brown field site’ where, a hundred years ago, things were made. Not many things are made in London now. I’m going to one of the few places where they still are. Although not for long.

  I pass a multi-storey car park, continuing under a railway bridge and past the new Wood Lane Tube station, on the site of the derelict remains of the old Wood Lane Tube station. I carry on a little further without looking to my left yet. I want to get to the point where I can see it all properly, before turning. To catch that famous, familiar, ugly, lovely sight all in one go.

  I turn and read the words written across the bland brick of Studio One: ‘BBC Television Centre’. There’s no visible ‘For Sale’ sign.

  I’ve worked here a lot. I still do, although at the moment I’m making a Channel 4 show, 10 O’Clock Live, here. We did the studio recordings of our sketch show in TV Centre. We shot our first Comedy Nation sketch in an office here. So many excited Bruiser, All Day Breakfast and That Mitchell and Webb Look meetings happened here, so many panel show recordings, so many drunken after-show drinks dos in the dingy basement green rooms.

  I’d been heading here for years, really. Since I first saw it on TV – this was the place the programmes came from, we were given to understand. This was where the Blue Peter garden was, where Not Only … But Also and Monty Python’s Flying Circus were dreamt up, as well as Morecambe and Wise, The Two Ronnies, Dad’s Army, Fawlty Towers, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Yes, this was a place where the British still made things.

  They’re closing it, selling it. Everything’s moving either to Portland Place or up to the new ‘Media Village’ in Salford. ‘It would cost more to update it than it would to knock it down,’ some people say. Although it’s listed so they’re not allowed to k
nock it down. Anyway they’re leaving and I only just got here. It seems, when I left Oxford, I took the M40 in the wrong direction.

  I’m not from London, but I came here because it’s the capital. It seemed logical to me that this would be where most of the TV comes from – just as it’s where most of the theatre and film happens. I thought that was the system, so that’s why I made the journey. I didn’t think it was unfairly advantageous to Londoners because London, I thought, was everyone’s, was the world’s. That’s what Sherlock Holmes thought too. So it’s galling to see that system suddenly change, apparently for the benefit of people in other regions whose desire to get into broadcasting isn’t sufficiently strong to make them willing to move house.

  I’m confused. Confused that the thing I’ve been travelling towards is closing just as I arrive. I don’t just mean the BBC, I mean the whole old media. Television, radio, publishing and newspapers, these grand old thriving British traditions that I grew up with and dreamt of being part of, are all now foundering and changing. They’re retreating in the face of technological developments that threaten to render them obsolete, or at least undermine their ability to pay people for their work.

  Opportunities, excitements, technological revolutions abound – we’re living in a heyday for entrepreneurs. But I don’t want to be an entrepreneur or a businessman. I don’t want to try and guess the future and make money from it. I want to make normal programmes within established parameters. I feel like a painter who’s been handed a video camera.

  For years, I was driven on by ambition. And also by the absence of a private life – a nagging unhappiness like the burn of sciatica which can suddenly rear up into crippling pain. I had to keep moving to walk it off.

  There was this brilliant exciting job called ‘TV comedian’ that I knew a very few lucky souls could get. I was determined to be one of them. And now I am and I love it. I don’t want to do anything else. I don’t want to move on – I just want to carry on. And that’s an increasingly unacceptable aspiration in our age. People say, ‘If you’re not moving forwards, you’re moving backwards.’