But what is an actor? What do they do? And why would Jerry want to be one? More to the point, why would I want to be one? In fact am I being one in The Young Ones? Or am I being a comedian? Is there a difference?
I have some shared character traits with Vyvyan – I am the man who tried to drive his motorbike up the stairs at a student party – but Vyvyan is not exactly me. There’s a photo of me on the set of The Young Ones, obviously taken between takes or in rehearsal, in which I’m dressed as Vyvyan with the spiky hair and the spots and the stars on my forehead – but I’ve got my glasses on. It immediately makes me not Vyvyan, so something’s going on.
Acting is lying. And the best acting is the most convincing form of lying. If you can lie really, really well, they give you a small statuette of a naked man holding a sword.
Konstantin Stanislavski, born in Russia in 1863, is the father of modern ‘method’ acting. His acting theories were formed partly to accommodate the new writing style of people like Anton Chekhov, which needed actors to tease out the interior life of characters. It was very different to the histrionic style that had gone before: legs wide apart, chin thrust forward, shouting into the dark. After the melodrama of the nineteenth century it was suddenly all about subtext. (This is the only chapter in which my degree in drama comes in handy.)
Some others – notably Lee Strasberg and Sandford Meisner – refined the technique, but they all had the same intent: they wanted actors to achieve a form of reality, an emotional authenticity. Truth is the word they like to use.
Stanislavski was keen on actors finding something within their personal lives or the people they knew that resonated with what the character was going through. Meisner went the whole hog and suggested you should treat the other actors around you as real – and that you don’t do something ‘as the character’, you ‘are’ the character.
Of course you then have to ask yourself why you’re in a room with a film crew and one of the walls missing. Or standing on a stage with a thousand people looking on, eating Maltesers and coughing. It’s all about different levels of deception, and a lot of it is about deceiving yourself.
There’s a famous story about Dustin Hoffman and Laurence Olivier on the set of Marathon Man which supposedly demonstrates the clash of acting styles. Hoffman’s playing a scene in which his character has had no sleep for three days and he decides not to go to bed for seventy-two hours so that he can play the truth of the scene. Olivier arrives in make-up, spots a tired-looking Hoffman, and asks why he looks so rough. Hoffman explains, and Olivier says: ‘Dear boy, why not try acting?’
In early 1985, when Elaine Paige and Barbara Dickson are top of the pops with ‘I Know Him So Well’, I audition for the director Les Blair and get cast in his film Honest, Decent & True – part of the Screen Two series on BBC2, the strand that took over from Play for Today. Les is looking for someone to play a shit-stirrer, and something in The Young Ones or The Comic Strip Presents catches his eye. Les is a genial soul with a warm Salford accent and a friendly face. There’s something of the teddy bear in his demeanour and the twinkle in his eye is the only hint that he’s an anarchist too. He and Mike Leigh were childhood friends and Les produced Mike’s first film Bleak Moments. They share a similar film-making technique and call it ‘devising’.
Devising goes something like this:
1. Les chooses a subject matter. In this case a satirical swipe at the advertising industry.
2. Les chooses a group of actors: me, Derrick O’Connor, Richard E. Grant, Gary Oldman, Arabella Weir and a few others.
3. Each actor chooses someone they know well from their own life and bases the character they’re going to play on this person. I choose a bolshy comedian I know who likes to fuck things up for the fun of it. I know him so well. I call him Alun.
4. Les works one-on-one with me to determine what kind of person Alun is. This involves improvising something as mundane as how Alun gets up in the morning, and what he has for breakfast. When we were at uni we used to use the question ‘What did your character have for breakfast?’ as a kind of jokey shorthand to imply that someone was taking this acting lark far too seriously. Now I’m taking it this seriously.
5. Les gives Alun a job – advertising copywriter. To this end I spend a week in an advertising agency shadowing a creative team. The one I shadow likes to secretly incorporate Masonic symbols into their ad campaigns. It’s a quiet and pointless level of anarchy that I integrate into Alun – more a symptom of impotence than of real revolution.
6. Les brings the characters together in pairs. I first meet Richard E. Grant in a pub when I’m pretending to be Alun and he’s pretending to be Moonie, an advertising art director. I first meet Gary Oldman in a cafe when he’s pretending to be my flatmate, Derek. You couldn’t get more Meisner. I’m not sure I’ve ever met Gary when he wasn’t in character. Have I indeed met Gary, or have I only met Derek?
7. Les develops a palette of a dozen or so actor/characters, gives them all jobs – mostly in the advertising agency – and then throws various spanners in the works to see what happens.
8. Les generally hides himself away behind a pillar or the sofa while all this improvising takes place, like a little gnome with a pad of paper, and takes copious notes.
9. He devises a story based on all these improvisations.
10. We set about filming it: for each scene he reminds us of attitudes we’ve expressed in rehearsals, and after an hour or so’s improvising on the set we generally agree on the shape of the conversation and bring in the cameras.
The rehearsal/devising period takes about three months, and the filming takes about two months.
Nearly everything of worth I’ve learned in life has come to me outside formal education. Working with Les is my version of drama school. It’s basically a five-month training in the ‘method’.
In fact I enjoy Honest, Decent & True so much that I go on to make another film with Les in 1990 called News Hounds – a satirical swipe at tabloid journalism. In preparation for playing someone who works on the news desk of a tabloid I get a placement for a week on the news desk of the Daily Star. I sit in on editorial meetings, listen to everything that’s going on around me, and make mental notes about how deeply unhappy everyone seems. There’s a moment when I’m sitting on the news desk and someone at the back of the room pipes up: ‘Greenpeace on the line!’ And the news editor barks back: ‘Tell ’em to fuck off!’
This is the kind of research Stanislavski would have loved – using real life experience to feed a character.
News Hounds also features the brilliant Alison Steadman, and it goes on to win a BAFTA in 1991 for Best Single Drama. It’s a wonder to me that it turns out so well because, as a major fan of Nuts in May – the comedy she made with Mike Leigh, co-starring Roger Sloman, about a husband and wife having an appalling camping holiday on the Isle of Purbeck – I spend the entire five months trying not to sing Alison’s songs to her: ‘cigarette smoke, it makes me choke, litter makes me quiver.’
The BAFTA doesn’t launch me into the world of straight acting in the way you might think it would. Or perhaps in the way I hoped it would.
It would be nice if my life fell into neat compartments – or would it? Either way it never happens, so I’ll never know. During the period I’m making these two films with Les I’m still heavily involved in the world of television comedy, and directly after News Hounds I start on the first series of Bottom – a project that will stretch over the next decade and beyond.