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Brydon joy
(Daily Mail Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) For years, the nearest Rob Brydon came to being a household name was as the anonymous and unsung voice of Toilet Duck and Tango in TV commercials.
In other ads, his reassuringly convincing sales patter sold everything from dog food to medicines and cornflakes. It gave him a very comfortable living, with earnings of more than GBP200,000 a year, but the actor and comedian inside him eventually rebelled against the voiceovers.
'I was one of the most frustrated performers you could meet,' he says. 'I had all these ideas, but all anyone wanted me to do was to sell stuff on TV.
I was ready to explode.
'I'd been working so hard and it still hadn't happened for me. I was always being told I was funny, but I wanted to sit at the table with the big boys, as it were.' Brydon branched out, creating the critically acclaimed BBC2 series Marion & Geoff, in which he played the pathetically optimistic Keith Barret, a Welsh minicab driver whose life begins to unravel when his wife elopes with Geoff, a fellow sales rep at her pharmaceutical company. 'The way I see it, I've not lost a wife, I've gained a friend,' he comforts himself.
When it was first shown in 2000 as a series of ten-minute monologues, it quickly became a cult classic, developing into a major series and then a spoof chat show in which the hapless Keith quizzed B-list couples about their marriages. Brydon also starred alongside Julia (Nighty Night) Davis in Human Remains, an acclaimed series of six comedy dramas, which explored the extreme behaviour of strange couples. By now he was one of our biggest comedy stars.
At last the voice was promoting its own message - and it had a face.
It was while he was being interviewed at the British Comedy Awards about his alter ego Keith (a man described as being so nice he could see the silver lining in a mushroom cloud) that the idea for his latest show was born. 'I was sitting there with my coproducer, Paul Duddridge, and, while I was answering the questions, we both realised that I was being, well, a nice guy, yet there was a gap between what I was saying and what I really thought. We realised that there was a comic possibility in putting me out there and showing another side.' The result is his new BBC spoof panel show, Annually Retentive. He plays himself as the hypocritical host - smarmy and sincere to his guests' faces, but blisteringly bitchy about them backstage. He leaves it to us to identify exactly who he's parodying, but, in truth, it's probably an amalgam of many presenters.
A typical example of the two faces of Rob Brydon, as panel show host, is the exchange with TV presenter Gail Porter. When the producer tells Brydon she is to be a guest, he snarls, 'Oh, someone on the show with less hair than me,' referring to her alopecia, and 'She's not as beautiful as she used to be.'
But, to the TV audience, he gives an overjoyed welcome to 'the lovely, the talented Miss Gail Porter.' The guests - who will include Elton John and Jonathan Ross - know it's a joke panel show, of course, but as Brydon improvises, they are never sure how far he'll go. 'I was a bit worried because Gail wasn't around when I was saying horrible things about her,' he says.
'But we ran it by her afterwards and she was fine.' Although most of the humour is based on infighting between the guests and Brydon, he also wants to expose the falseness of many panel shows, where much of what they want viewers to believe to be off-the-cuff, is actually scripted and rehearsed.
It's very funny, but also uncomfortable viewing. 'I think the guests like the idea of just showing up and taking it on the chin. It's such a change from being given the questions beforehand and working out what you're going to say. But there's vanity, too, in the opposite approach, when you don't know what's in store: "Oh, look at me, aren't I wonderful? I'm willing to show myself in a poor light."' Inevitably, vanity must come into Brydon's own participation in this, but it also takes courage to expose yourself to the risk of being seen as so nasty, especially when you are using your own name in the role.
But it does blur the line between the real Rob Brydon and the characters he plays.
Recently, he seemed closer to his real self with his friend Steve Coogan in the film A Cock And Bull Story, in which the funniest scenes are the verbal jousting between the two of them. Confusingly, Coogan took three roles - one of them as himself.
Brydon played two parts - one as himself.
The script called for intense rivalry between the two. They both said it was all in fun, but some of the vanities and
insecurities they played on with each other seemed very real. So are they friends?
'We socialise when we're thrown together.
Steve's not a happy-go-lucky kind of guy. I'm extremely comfortable with him in a way that I'm not with many people. But, as for our lifestyles I'm a far more fragile creature than him and I couldn't have all the late nights that he enjoys. I'm doing a charity benefit show in a couple of weeks and he's in it too, so we'll get together, then we'll promise to hook up again but probably won't. We're chums, but not as much as it gets painted.' Their association goes back several years, to when Brydon's close friend and later Human Remains co-star, Julia Davis, sent Coogan's production company an early test video of Marion & Geoff. Coogan immediately saw its potential - he later sold it to the BBC - and invited Brydon to a meeting at his house in Brighton, East Sussex.
'Now that was exciting,' says Brydon. ' Having somebody like Steve accept me as an equal was pretty thrilling. The train journey down to Brighton was the most exciting of my life; full of anticipation. I remembered this quote from Tom Jones in which he said that it was far more exciting for him to go from his home in Pontypridd to London than it was from London to Las Vegas, and that's something I can relate to.
'In many ways, the first meeting with Steve has been more exciting than anything that has happened since. Everything since has been trying to sustain that level of momentum.' But now he is as established as his hero Coogan, with his own circle of friends. 'I have pals in the comedy business who I phone almost daily. [Little Britain's] David Walliams and I, we're proper friends. He'll come round for dinner. We hit it off immediately - he made me laugh hugely. We both like camp humour: Frankie Howerd, Kenneth Williams, that kind of stuff.' Brydon is obsessively circumspect about his private life. He is the fiercely protective father of two daughters and a son, aged 12, nine and six. He does not divulge their names, nor that of their mother, whom he married in 1992. The marriage disintegrated just as Brydon was becoming famous, and he moved out of the family home to a flat near Richmond Park in south-west London. He is proud that he sees the children frequently, taking them to school when he can and having them to stay. 'I'm most at peace when I'm with my children,' he says.
'That is when I find serenity.' Brydon once said publicly that he did not let his children watch Little Britain because it was too racy. 'They know it, because they know David and they see the pictures of him. " Daddy, why is David wearing a dress?" But no, I think it's too sexual for them.' He has shown them less risquE bits of the show - and they can boast a unique performance in their own home by David Walliams himself. 'He can do a child-friendly version for them in the kitchen,' says Brydon.
Brydon's marriage break-up hit him hard.
'At the time of the first British Comedy Awards I received [in 2000 and 2001], I was very, very unhappy. I lost a lot of weight and, if you look at the photos then, you'll see I'm too thin.' He did his share of partying, but it wasn't his style. As a teenager, Brydon was both mocked and admired for not drinking. 'Half a glass of champagne and I'm laughing my head off. I've had my naughty moments; it's all relative.
'By the standards of some of my old chums in Wales, I lead the most glamorous, exciting life.' He adopts a Welsh accent. '"Who were you with?
Whose house? Who came round? What did you do? Wow."
By London standards I lead a pretty calm life, but after my divorce I had a wild time - in the unsettled sense of the word - and it wasn't nice. I did the out-all-night stuff, but I function best with nine hours sleep.' Brydon is now engaged to Clare Holland, a producer on the South Bank Show, whom he met four years ago.
Last New Year's Eve, Brydon got down on bended knee on top of Table Mountain in Cape Town, South Africa, and asked Clare to marry him.
They have moved to a new home in Twickenham, Surrey, and will wed later this year.
Brydon was brought up in Baglan, near Port Talbot, before moving to Porthcawl. His parents, Howard, a car dealer, and Joy, a teacher, sent him to a private day school and then to Porthcawl Comprehensive, where he was inspired by his drama teacher, Roger Burnel.
'People talk about escaping, but I never felt that I had to. I always knew I wanted to act and do comedy. I was encouraged to pursue the acting thing.
Maybe my parents could see I could do it. It wasn't like I'd perform and they'd say, "Oh dear". I could make people laugh.' After failing to get into RADA, he earned a place at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, but, after two years, dropped out when he was offered a job at BBC Radio Wales in Cardiff as a presenter. He worked there for six years. 'For some, that would be the height of their ambitions. Not for me.' Sidetracked into commercials - 'even when I did land a TV gig it was on the Shopping Channel' - hope came from a surprising quarter. He was cast as a traffic warden in Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock And Two Smoking Barrels. Spurred on by unexpected praise in a review of the film, he created Keith Barrett, and after a tape of the idea found its way to Coogan's company, Brydon never looked back.
'I got to my mid-30s without any proper creative satisfaction [he is now 41], and Human Remains and Marion & Geoff were an expression of that. I was saying, "Look at what I can do." Since then, a lot of that urgency has gone.
'Everything changed after making that tape.
You get used to your new way of life quickly and you can take it for granted, which is very dangerous. I'm having a nice run, but go to a vintage magazine shop and get a Radio Times from the 1980s, have a look at the names, and see how many of them still have a career. It's quite sobering. You have to keep reminding yourself, "This is great. I'm here talking to you about this new show that I've made through my own company, I've got all these people to come on it: Elton John, Jonathan Ross, Alistair McGowan"' It's unlikely that Rob Brydon will ever become complacent; it doesn't seem to be in his genes. 'If someone overly praises my work, I'll pick holes in it, and if someone picks holes in it, I'll say, "Hang on" And I'll find its good points.
I don't know what that is. I'm sure there's a name for such a state.' It's probably contrariness - a useful tool to keep him on his toes.
Annually Retentive, BBC3, July 11, 11.30pm.
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