Have I Got News For You

This was one of the first of these sort of celeby game shows I had ever done and I remember being very nervous. Also these shows are always quite scary because you feel you have to spend the entire week leading up to them committing to memory every morcel of every newspaper as though you are studying for your finals at university.

I was also very excited because Dolce and Gabbana had sent me a suit to wear.

I had worked with Paul Merton at various benefits and shows when he was doing his stand up act and I was doing Victor and Barry. He is really nice and very funny

 

Talk shows/awards

I appeared on Pebble Mill to talk to Ross King about Comic Relief, gave a gong at the Scottish BAFTAs, gave the Costume Design award at the BAFTAs, and popped into Scottish Television to talk about Goldeneye.

The High Life

The BBC commissioned me and Forbes Masson to write a half-hour comedy pilot which became The High Life, and we shot it at the beginning of 1993, and was broadcast with a number of other pilots as part of Comic Asides in 1994.

Then a  full six-part series was commissioned, and we wrote that in various cottages and houses in Perthshire, Crewe and the Midi Pyrenees to name but a few in 1993/94 , shot in the autumn of 1994 and they were broadcast in early 1995.

The series followed the antics of Sebastian Flight (named after the character in Brideshead Revisited, but spelled differently of course), played by me and Steve McCraken, played by Forbes. The chief purser, Shona Spurtle ('Hitler in tights, Mussolini in micromesh, Pol Pot in pantyhose'), was played by the amazing Siobhan Redmond, and their pilot, Captain Duff was played by Patrick Ryecart. They all worked for a tatty Scottish airline called Air Scotia, and were all a bit mad. The series location sequences were shot at Prestwick Airport, and in and around Glasgow, Scotland. Production then moved back to London and studio sequences were shot in front of a live audience.

This was really fun to shoot because we were getting away with so many dirty things. It was quite wicked because a lot of the Scottish-ness in the script hid the fact that we were saying things that people hadn’t said on national TV before. The writing was really difficult because we were trying to do something different, something almost surreal and the people at the BBC were a little frightened, a little nervous. They kept trying to hem us in, but we knew the success of the show would be its wildness and abandon. And I think we were right.

The High Life was the swansong for Forbes and I working together, and whenever I go back to Britain I am always amazed and happy that it has a place in so many people's hearts and I think it is a great thing that we created something together that has had such a lasting effect.

Someone has very kindly put the entire series up on youtube, but here is my favoutie bit out of all the episodes. I think  Ann Scott Jones who play Gretchen Betjamin is brilliant. I sort of still can't believe we got away with being so bonkers.

And also the opening titles dance, which is something of a classic, even if I do say so myself.

The Chemistry Lesson

Part of a series of BBC TV films under the collective title Ghosts, The Chemistry Lesson was written and directed by Terry Johnson.

I play a Chemistry teacher named Phillip Goodall who is in love with his co-worker Mandy, played by Samantha Bond. But when his love for her is not requited, he devises a very unusual way to change her mind.

The film also starred British film legend Sylivia Sims, Jack Klaff (who had co-written the play It's Not The End of The World which I toured Scotland with in 1987), Louise Rea and Julia Ford (whom I had worked with in Knickers at Bristol Old Vic in 1989). I later appeared alongside Samantha Bond in the James Bond movie Goldeneye, a year later.

I had admired Terry Johnson's work in his plays Insignificance and Hysteria, so I was really delighted to get to work with him. The film was originally more about sexual obsession, so Sam and I became pretty intimate shooting some of the sex scenes - a lot of which ended up on the cutting room floor, due to the BBC censors. There's nothing worse than having a sex scene cut! You feel you went through all that stress for nothing! But even so, it was a really interesting idea, and it was great to be in something so radically different coming right out of shooting The High Life!

Cabaret

Kander and Ebb's musical based on Christopher Isherwood's books, Goodbye to Berlin and Mr. Norris Changes Trains, was revived at the Donmar Warehouse in London, opening in December 1993.

Sam Mendes directed me as The Emcee, and Jane Horrocks as Sally Bowles. The production set the action in the actual cabaret club - the audience in the downstairs of the theatre were seated at tables and could have drinks during the action. Also, the true seediness and decadence of the time was evoked by the cast of actors and musicians.

We did a lot of research on getting the feel of life in those clubs in Berlin in the late 20s/early 30s.  I only wanted to do the part if it was going to be an authentic look at what it was really like to be alive then, to be a part of a decadent world that ultimately disappeared. I wanted to be dirty and to be shocking, and to look like a drug addict, and to scare people and enchant them at the same time. It was a very scary thing for me, as I had never done any other big musicals before, and here I was doing one in the West End with the audience right up against me. It was also kind of foolhardy because I was so exhausted by Hamlet, and I rehearsed Cabaret during the day while performing Hamlet at night. But I am so glad I did it for so many reasons. It felt great to do something so different and very liberating to be so exposed - literally!

I was nominated for Best Actor in a Musical at the 1994 Olivier Awards, and the show was taped and broadcast on ITV.

A Word In Your Era

I appeared in two episodes of this BBC2 comedy show in which famous dead people went on trial to see who would become immortal!  Yes, reallt.

I played Mozart (who won) and Lord Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts (who didn't).

Comic Relief: Mr. Bean on Blind Date

In this spoof of the real dating show, Blind Date, I played one of the contestants who loses to Mr. Bean, played by Rowan Atkinson. The spoof was shown as a part of BBC's Comic Relief night.

I got to meet Cilla Black, and she gave me a row for saying my Blind Date contestant lines in the wrong order. I also discovered she had a penchant for champagne. It was very enlightening.

Micky Love

Micky Love was part of a series of three films made for Granada TV under the umbrella title Rik Mayall Presents.

Rik plays the title role of Micky Love, a TV game show host, and I played his nemesis Greg Deane, the presenter of a youth TV show that was claiming Micky's prized time slot. It also starred Jennifer Ehle (who later worked with me in Design For Living) and Eleanor Bron (who later played my mother in Hamlet). It was shot in Manchester at Granada TV studios, and directed by Nick Hamm.

The Airzone Solution

The Airzone Solution is a sort of Doctor Who homage, and indeed features four actors who played Doctor Who in the cast.  It was made in those wilderness years between Doctor Who series on the BBC, and I became involved with it via my friend Bill Baggs who directed it and who was an AD on The Last Romantics. We shot it in Nottingham, and I liked being a baddy.

Blood and Ice

This Yorkshire Television play was based on the theatre piece by Scottish writer Liz Lochead. The story again concerned the poets Byron and Shelley, and again I played Shelley! This time though, the focus was on how Mary Shelley came to write her novel Frankenstein.