Sunshine on Putty: The Golden Age of British Comedy from Vic Reeves to The Office. Ben Thompson
in the summer of 1991. Recognizing a good thing when he heard about it, he wasted no time in coming back to London on the coach.
‘I just think he [Iannucci] cast it brilliantly,’ Marber asserts. ‘We all knew each other a little bit, but not too much. We were people who had been around a bit, but not long enough to be bitter, who were young enough to be hungry, but all at a point in our careers where we really needed it to work.’
Beneath the imposingly monolithic surface which results from this cunning manipulation of human resources, On The Hour is riven with intriguing fault-lines. As with its clearest historical parallel – the emergence of the Beyond The Fringe quartet of Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller, and their televisual satellites from That Was The Week That Was, way back in the early sixties – the rapid advent of this new comedic generation entails not only a maelstrom of competing egos, but also a grisly wake of hurt feelings, inter-personal complexity and apparently lifelong antipathies.
When Alan Bennett said at Peter Cook’s funeral that ‘His [Cook’s] one real regret was that he had saved David Frost from drowning’, it was a mistake to think he was speaking entirely in jest. And while the On The Hour story involves nothing quite as inherently dramatic as the moment in 1963 where the talented man who could swim (Cook) prevented the not so talented but very ambitious man (Frost, who had persuaded the BBC to let him star in just the sort of epoch-making TV series which the former individual might have made, had he not been away opening on Broadway) from meeting his end in an American swimming-pool, there is no shortage of human conflict there, either.
Remembering the formative experience of On The Hour ten years afterwards, Steve Coogan says: ‘I’ll never forget the first day I walked in to work on that show…I really felt like I’d found my home.’52 The impression Coogan means to give by saying that he felt at ease with On The Hour in a way that he never had before is that this was the point at which the yearning to produce high-quality work (which had so far remained implicit rather than explicit in his career) finally found the chance to express itself. ‘I didn’t remember him ever having done anything much good before’ is how Stewart Lee puts it, somewhat more bluntly. And if Coogan had some cause to feel intimidated on finding himself in such acerbic company, he also had his own ways of establishing his status with the group.
‘We were all children at that stage really,’ says Patrick Marber. ‘We certainly didn’t have much experience of success. But Steve was really rich and knew a lot about money – he was just so flash and cool. He had a Mazda MX-5! I realize now that’s a hairdresser’s car, but it didn’t seem that way at the time.’
‘Steve Coogan was earning tens of thousands of pounds from adverts,’ recalls a slightly less bowled-over Stewart Lee, ‘and I remember him saying things like “It’s really nice to be able to do this, as I get loads of money from my voice-over work and this will bring me a new level of respect”.’ A phlegmatic pause ensues. ‘For me and Rich [Herring], it was what we’d always wanted to do and it was also the bulk of our living. For him with his bad Ronnie Corbett impressions, it was the peanuts on top of his Ferrari advertising life!’
Before we can proceed any deeper along the Coogan trail into the On The Hour jungle of behavioural complexity, we need to find out why those particular peanuts meant so much to him.
Steve Coogan in flashback
‘I remember thinking very rationally,’ says Steve Coogan of his fiercely ambitious younger self, ‘I’m eighteen years old now, and all the people in show business who I find entertaining – Rowan Atkinson, John Cleese – they will get older, and there will have to be new people. There are people in sixth forms now who in ten years’ time will be successful and they’re just like me, so why can’t I be one of them?’
No one could accuse this man of lacking focus. As an adolescent, Coogan would drag schoolfriends off the bus to his home in the Manchester suburb of Middleton to force them to enjoy his Monty Python and Not the Nine O’Clock News records. ‘“No, Steve,” they would say, “I don’t want to listen to comedy, I want to go home.’”
Diverting from an apparently pre-ordained course to ‘an all-right sort of white-collar job’, and having been rejected by several fancy London drama schools, Steve Coogan went to Manchester Poly and launched himself into show business. Doing live gigs as an impressionist as a means of getting an Equity card – ‘I just thought, What can I do that other people can’t? and I knew I could do voices’ – Coogan, in his own words, ‘achieved mediocrity very quickly’. He got on TV, did Neil Kinnock and Jeremy Paxman for Spitting Image, sat on Des O’Connor’s sofa and even shook hands with Jimmy Tarbuck on Sunday Night at the London Palladium.53
His voice was – if a momentary slip into the Partridge-esque idiom can be forgiven before Norwich’s most eloquent ambassador has even had a proper name-check – quite literally his fortune. Coogan’s knack for modulating his tone of address to send out just the kind of confident, thrusting message advertisers liked to deliver meant that alongside his straight comedy work there was also a good living to be had from voice-overs, corporate training videos and presentations. While this work brought substantial material rewards, it nevertheless intensified the young Coogan’s apprehension that as quickly as his career was progressing, it was not necessarily moving in the direction he would have wanted.
His fear that he might be becoming, in his own damning phrase, ‘a cut-price Bobby Davro’ was intensified by a harrowing experience at the Edinburgh Festival in 1990. Sharing a flat and a nightly bill with the as yet largely unheralded Frank Skinner, Coogan found himself horribly eclipsed by the latter’s easy way with the crowd.
‘He was very hard-working and very good,’ Coogan remembers. ‘He did twenty minutes at the top of his act unscripted, just chatting to the audience, and I couldn’t do that – I’m someone that has to craft what I do, but Frank can busk it: he’s a natural.’
One year later, Coogan – having opted not to return to the scene of his Edinburgh humiliation – was in a hotel in Rhodes in Greece, ‘doing a sort of holiday rep entertainment for families and getting told off for swearing’. He picked up a newspaper in a hotel box room and read that Skinner had won the festival’s prestigious Perrier Award. ‘It was’, Coogan admits with engaging frankness, ‘probably the most depressing moment of my life.’
At this point, he had already started work on On The Hour and by the time a further twelve months had passed, Coogan would be back in Edinburgh, winning the same award for himself with a new show (performed in conjunction with future Fast Show mainstay John Thomson) featuring more developed comic characters, rather than throwaway impressions. A key influence on this happy reversal of fortune would be Patrick Marber, who not only directed and co-wrote Coogan’s Perrier Award-winning 1992 show, but seems to have played a role in the successful overall redirection of his career not dissimilar to that of Noriyuki ‘Pat’ Morita in the Karate Kid films.
‘For a while it was kind of like a big brother/little brother relationship,’ Coogan remembers. ‘I wouldn’t do anything without asking Patrick what he thought.’
They first met properly in Edinburgh in 1990.
‘Steve was depressed because he was getting annihilated by Frank,’ says Marber, ‘but I did my best to reassure him that he was a funny guy who would have his day.’
On this sympathetic foundation, a friendship was built and Marber soon found himself acting as a ‘kind of mentor…I think at that time I had more confidence in Steve’s talent than he did’.
To say that the high-earning but as yet critically unacclaimed Coogan had a chip on his shoulder at this point might be putting it a little strongly, but there was certainly a salt and vinegar crisp or two up there. And presumably, in terms of On The Hour, his burgeoning alliance with the Oxford-educated Marber must have made for