Some people find it extraordinary that I bail out of a successful partnership, one that makes a lot of money too, but I feel trapped and unsatisfied. I am, after all, only an accidental comedian. I don’t want to be just ‘that bloke from Bottom’. I want to do other things. I’m not quite sure what they are, but I’m sure I want to do them.
Rik never gets his head around the decision. For the next decade, whenever I ring him up to suggest we have lunch, just to chew the fat, just to be friends rather than colleagues, he always assumes this is going to be the time I suggest we get the act back together again.
Things aren’t helped by his head. His head that suffered badly in the late nineties when he fell off his quad bike onto a concrete slab. He recovers well initially – we make a feature film and do two tours after it – but despite his ongoing medication he has the occasional seizure and it feels like something is deteriorating, that his memory isn’t what it was.
Every time we have lunch I have to explain my reasons all over again. It becomes our Groundhog Day. He arrives bright and chirpy, thinking this will be the day we start working together again, and every time I have to explain that I just wanted to see him, to be friends, and he looks sad and confused. I start to dread our lunches.
Nearly ten years after we stop working together we have lunch and he asks again whether I’ve arranged to meet because I want to get the act back together again. I try a different tack. I say the executives at the BBC have all changed and that they wouldn’t even want us any more. This is not entirely disingenuous – we were never offered a fourth series of Bottom.
‘But we don’t know that unless we try, do we?’ says Rik.
I hit upon a way to put the idea to bed once and for all.
‘OK,’ I say. ‘Let’s write an episode of something, give it to the BBC, and see if they want it.’
I’m confident they won’t. The beauty of the plan is that now it will be the BBC’s fault that we are no longer a double act, not mine.
We meet up and talk through ideas. It’s hard to avoid the personas of our previous incarnation. We put them in a few different situations: as janitors at an office block; as two old codgers in an old people’s home; and eventually settle on stealing an idea from one of our live shows – Hooligan’s Island.
Hooligan’s Island is basically Richie and Eddie marooned on a desert island after being thrown off a cruise ship for misbehaving. We dash off a script. And I mean dash. It is all very slapdash. I have no interest in prolonging this futile exercise, I just want to get the script written, to hand it in, to get a firm refusal, and get on with my life.
We hand it in . . . and it’s accepted. They offer us a series. Christ Almighty.
So in the summer of 2012 we start writing episodes of Hooligan’s Island. It’s not unfunny, but it’s not our very best stuff. We write two episodes. In the second one they run out of home-made booze and it turns out that Eddie, when sober, when not berserk, is highly intelligent and knowledgeable, someone who even knows the difference between a gerund and a gerundive – Richie is faced with the task of keeping him drunk enough in order to be on a par.
The way we always check back on material is that I read it out, playing both parts, and Rik listens to get an overview. I’m reading out a scene from the second episode when I notice out of the corner of my eye that Rik is counting things off on his fingers. It doesn’t make much sense, he’s using each hand to count something different; what can he be counting?
‘What are you counting?’ I ask.
‘Jokes,’ he says.
‘On two different hands?’
‘I’m counting your jokes and my jokes,’ he says. ‘And you’ve got more jokes than me.’
I go quiet. I’m aware that my breathing is strained. I get that tell-tale pain in my neck that I get when I’m hyperventilating.
If you watch any of our programmes – not The Young Ones, because I didn’t have a hand in writing that, but Bottom, the Dangerous Brothers, Guest House Paradiso or ‘Mr Jolly Lives Next Door’ – I defy you to come to the conclusion that either of our characters has any more ‘jokes’ than the other.
There’s an old actor’s joke where one actor says to the other, ‘I’ll trip you up, you fall flat on your face, and we’ll share the laugh.’ The conceit being that the one who’s talking isn’t really contributing much.
But our stuff isn’t like that, the tripping is as carefully considered as the falling over, the tripping is part of the falling over, it’s always about the pair of us, we’re constantly struggling, as a pair, to make it as funny as possible. This is why so much of our material is framed in a two-shot, because you need to watch both of us at the same time to enjoy what’s going on. The reaction to a punch is as funny as the punch. This is Comedy 101 for double acts from Laurel & Hardy onwards.
‘I thought they were our jokes,’ I say. ‘We’re a double act.’
I’ll admit that some double acts appear more lopsided than ours. Morecambe and Wise, for instance. Everyone thinks Eric is the really funny one and that Ernie is more of a stooge. But there’s a video of a live Morecambe & Wise Show I’ve seen where at one point Eric has a solo spot. This is more than a bridging moment between two sketches, it’s him on his own for some minutes. It’s by far the least funny part of the show. Eric needs Ernie to give him the world in which to do his shtick. The same goes for Little & Large and Cannon & Ball.
Most double acts play it straight down the middle; The Two Ronnies, French & Saunders, Vic & Bob, The Mighty Boosh, Fry & Laurie, Mitchell & Webb, Smith & Jones.
I try to make this point to Rik but I’m too angry to get my thoughts in line. His seizures mean he can’t drive any more so I’ve come to his house. I suggest we call it a day, that I leave, and that we reconvene in the morning.
The next day I pitch up at his house again and we have a friendly cup of coffee and talk through what has upset me. He’s very apologetic, but in that way a child apologizes without knowing what they’re apologizing for. He just wants to get the apology out of the way and get on with something else.
We start writing again. I read it back, playing both parts. And I can see his fingers going again. Counting. Two tallies. I don’t think he’s doing it to provoke me, in fact he’s trying to do it without me seeing.
I challenge him and we go through the script sitting side by side. He points at it and provides a judgement on each line.
‘See, that’s your joke. That’s my joke. That’s your joke . . .’
And I realize that the double act is properly over. There’s no trust any more. We’re just two individuals. He’s fighting for himself, not for us.
It’s a relief in a way because it’s no longer simply my fault that the act has reached the end – like a frost-bitten vine, it has withered and died. It was glorious when it was alive, I’m immensely proud of everything we did together, it still makes me laugh, but I’m glad we didn’t do a dodgy final series.
Things come to an end.
Not this book, by the look of things – how much more can there be?
Steady on, Tiger. You can always bail out like Bonnie Prince Charlie if you like.
It’s been noted by some that if Bonnie Prince Charlie had managed to persuade his comrades in that little room over the pub in Derby to carry on, that George II might have run away. And if Charlie had become king, being an ally of the French, he wouldn’t have been at almost continual war with them for the next seventy years. And therefore Britain wouldn’t have had to squeeze the new colonies in America for the tax revenue to fight these wars. In which case there might not have been an American war of independence. And possibly no French Revolution.
If is a big concept.
In 1985 I made a TV film with a young Gary Oldman and a young Richard E. Grant. Two of us went on to be major Hollywood stars but neither of them was me.
If I’d stopped being an accidental comedian could I have joined them?
If my schoolboy band Peace of Thorn had tried a bit harder could I have been an international rock god?