Sunshine on Putty: The Golden Age of British Comedy from Vic Reeves to The Office. Ben Thompson
one of his ten minutes count. There is a beguiling feel of genuine otherworldliness about his reminiscences of a dad who spent all his money on the horses – ‘he bought them hats and scarves and everything’.
Harry Hill is a little further down the comedy conveyor belt at this stage, with one Radio 4 series behind him and a series of short black-and-white films coming up on BBC2. He’s got a distinctive look: rosy cheeks, milk-bottle specs and huge shirt collar sprouting out of the top of his jacket, giving him the appearance of a man with no neck. His act has a lovely rhythm to it. Hill sets up a series of riffs – snatches of Queen lyrics, ways of coping with the lack of services on the M40, his father depriving him of the best cuts of meat by saying they were poisonous – and flits between them with blinking eyes and darting tongue. For now, it’s hard to predict where his headlong comic momentum might take him, but there is a definite hint of lizard, as well as Izzard, in this man’s demeanour.
6 The Illusion (or Otherwise) of Spontaneity
Eddie Izzard and Phil Kay play different ‘danger edges’
‘I prefer everyone to know exactly what I’m doing, because that means I’m good at what I can do, rather than what people think I can do’
Eddie Izzard
‘I took some MC squared: it’s great, it’s just like E’
Phil Kay
One of the most striking things about watching Eddie Izzard perform at the Albery Theatre in the winter of 1994, is how much easier it is to keep your mind on his comedy – now that he sports a ruffled shirt and thigh-length Dick Whittington boots – than it used to be when he was crammed into conventionally mannish garb. He just seems so much more physically relaxed for having publicly established himself as a transvestite. Going to see him live a couple of years previously, before the secret of his sartorial leanings was out, Izzard’s body seemed to be struggling to escape from a stone-washed denim prison.
The confidence which comes from commercial and critical success (specifically 1993’s triumphant residency at another West End theatre, the Ambassadors) seems to have made him more disciplined, not less. He hasn’t curbed his rambling, manic digressive style, just tightened up the rhythm slightly. The freshness of Izzard’s comedic menu is remarkable, too, not only for how quickly he rustles it up, but also for the familiarity of its ingredients: advertising; launderettes; the relative suavity of cats and dogs. As served by any other comedian, this would be pretty stale pub fare, but in Eddie’s hands, it’s Michelin-star material.
Izzard’s chief comic gift is the ability to weave vivid mental tapestries out of the dullest strands of quotidian normality: from the infectious rage of a small dog to the joy of turning on in-car heating at exactly the right moment. Only rarely does his fluid wit solidify into quotable shapes (e.g. on the moral dilemmas of supermarket shopping: ‘One jam is made by Nazis out of mud and twigs, the other is made by rabbits out of fruit that agreed to be in it’). But sometimes, when he pulls himself up in mid-flow, there is the same sense you used to get with Robin Williams in his (pre-Hollywood) prime, of the audience racing to catch up with a mind that’s already two blocks ahead of them.
It’s funny talking to Eddie Izzard in person around this time: ‘funny’ in the sense of being held up in the visa-application queue at the border crossing between the kingdoms of ‘Ha Ha’ and ‘Peculiar’. This is not because of anything particular he himself does. He is very quick and open, and if you find yourself lapsing into one of those embarrassingly complicated questions which starts off asking one thing and ends up asking another, he will probably answer both parts, shrugging off any attempt at interrogatory clarification with a friendly but firm ‘I thought I got what you meant’. What hits you about Izzard is just how much those people who really like him – and it’s hard to find anyone who’s seen him perform who doesn’t, at this point – tend to build his speech patterns into their own.
The deliberate pauses that say ‘Ah yes, where was I?’ (like brief suburban station stops to remind you that your train of thought is heading for the seaside). So many people go in for these now – not just other comedians (although there are plenty of these doing it too) but normal human beings – that when talking to the man with whom they originated, it almost feels like he’s been ripped off.
Eddie’s sartorial innovations have been less widely imitated. Today’s look comprises calf-length leather boots, black leggings (which are almost tights), and an emerald blue sweat-top whose buttons fall open, somewhat distractingly, to reveal a silky white shoulder strap. It would be wrong to pay so much attention to the Izzard wardrobe if it didn’t seem expressly designed to be noticed. I saw him in Marks & Spencer on Oxford Street once, wearing a jacket that Tammy Wynette would have thought twice about.
Such chance sightings, or onstage in record-breaking theatrical engagements, are no longer the only way to see Eddie Izzard. He has started to turn up on TV, too, which makes this a crucial passage in his career, as, apart from being a transvestite, the thing he’s been best known for is refusing to appear on television.
After a much hyped but almost entirely disastrous start on Comic Relief, there’s been a disruptively flirtatious and very funny showing on Have I Got News for You, a brisk little star-trip at the British Comedy Awards, a slightly awkward chat show debut on Ruby Wax (‘She said “You can go anywhere you like on the set” and I thought, Oh shit, that’s too much choice’) and then a brutal perfect six on Clive Anderson. On balance, it would be fair to say that the small screen seems to like him.
‘Not being on TV almost became like a religious thing,’ Eddie admits, backing this point up with one of his trademark extrapolations in indirect speech – ‘ “Thou must not go on telly, I will never go on telly, I will kill them all with swords”.’ This unusual act of self-denial seems to have been based on an almost excessively conscientious approach to the Comedic Diversification Strategy (a) (as expounded in the last chapter).
‘My whole position’, Izzard explains, ‘was that I wanted to do straight acting, and if I went on telly and it worked, then I’d have a whole load of comedy baggage that I couldn’t get rid of.89 If Paul Merton did Hamlet now,’ he continues, apparently in all seriousness (I for one, to borrow the immortal words of Paul Calf’s student friend Roland, ‘would rather see Dave Lee Travis play Macbeth’), ‘people would probably just be going “to be or not to be…but in a brown suit” – they’d get all mixed up because his persona is so large. I just thought if I stayed off TV, it might work better.’
The fact that he’s played two major theatrical roles in the past few months suggests the plan might be working. Izzard’s big step up from spear-carrier in a school play to West End lead in David Mamet’s The Cryptogram was, in his own characteristically realistic assessment, ‘Not an unqualified success, but not the complete embarrassment it might have been, either’. At the very least, it established ‘a certain believability in the fact that I can act’.
He’s not at the Robbie Coltrane or Keith Allen level yet [historical note: in the mid-nineties, Keith Allen was a successful TV actor, not someone who wasted his time writing pointless plays about Glastonbury with semi-retired conceptual artists], but he’s working on it. In fact, Izzard is perfectly happy to admit that ‘they are where I want to fucking get to’.
It’s not something you’d guess from his amiable, meandering onstage demeanour, but in person Eddie Izzard is one of the most fiercely and openly ambitious people you could ever encounter – the sort of scarily focused individual whose reading is mainly composed of the autobiographies of film stars and great war leaders, so he can ‘see how they did it’.90 When you’re in a room talking to him, it’s almost as if there are actually three people there: you, Eddie and Eddie’s ambition,