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Ricky Dene (he says the spelling may be explained by his dad being drunk)
Gervais is wearing a white shirt, braces and the trousers of a pinstriped
hoodlum suit.
“It’s a bit gangster, innit? Scarface at a funeral.”
“It is. Why did you read philosophy at university?”
“Right. True story. I suppose I should tell you a bit of background. I’ve
always loved science and…”
The suit, combined with the highly gelled, slightly receding reddish hair, the
pale, pudgy face and the amiable paunch, give him the air of a bookie circa
1955. So does the loquacity. But the giant watch and the free-associating,
enfolded sentences are all Gervais 2009.
“… nature and how things work. Because I was an accident. My mother told me
when I was 13, ‘You was an accident.’ Cheers! I had older brothers and
sisters, so I was a bit of an experiment. They were 11, 13 and 14 years
older than me… Come in!”
A girl has arrived, bringing us cappuccinos. “So I suppose I had the best and
worst of both worlds. I had to fight to be heard and I was bullied and
teased and maybe a bit spoilt.”
He is talking quickly and eagerly. I’m not sure how being an accident entailed
a love of science, but this is no time to interrupt. “I was reading at
three. I probably remember it because my mum made a big thing of it, and
then it was a lost art by the time I was 12 or 13. Do you know what I mean?
I was just ‘Awww, okay, what else is there to read?’ You know…?”
I am trying to formulate a theory of Gervais-speak. There’s a lot of teen
argot in there, a confusing amount of reported speech, and digressions are
so smooth and somehow weightless they imply logic while delivering none.
“… I’ve always carried that with me. I suppose I was a bit of a Renaissance
man. I went to school at five and I felt smarter than everybody else and I
felt sorry for them, which was ridiculous. Lately I’ve felt guilty about
being smart at an early age and not making the most of it. I was one of
those people… I would pride myself on being able to pass doing nothing. It
was cooler not to study and pass than study and pass — do you know what I
mean? And I think that’s totally wrong now.”
“Too cool for school?”
“Well, yes, I’m ashamed of it now… The pure joy of learning is a revelation at
forty-something.”
He’s 47.
“I think The Office taught me that the struggle is the best bit. I couldn’t
have been prouder of it, even if it had never won an award. I’ve never had
the feeling of achievement like writing The Office. That was because it was
a late chance. I liked learning the struggle. I was always good at something
the first time and there wasn’t a second. I’m as good at playing the guitar
now as when I learnt it, same with golf. And I’ve really tried to get good
at writing stand-up. The pleasure is the journey, looking back and seeing
how hard it was.”
The “Why philosophy?” question has come to seem trivial, so I’ll come back to
the answer later.
“What are they doing up there? Riverdance?” Mysterious stomping in the room
above is causing a light fitting to vibrate. It annoys Gervais, as does the
fact that he feels hot. We’re in some photography studios in Kentish Town. I
suspect neither Riverdance nor the heat is the real issue — it’s the
interview thing that’s making him jumpy. “I’m very suspicious. The only
thing worse,” he says, with an unconvincingly self-deprecatory chuckle,
“would be if you were a psychologist or a policeman.”
He doesn’t do much personal stuff and the room chills when I get too close.
Any mention of Jane Fallon, his girlfriend — they’ve been together since
they met at University College London, where he read philosophy, but I’ll
come back to that — produces a sudden solemnity. And he jokes his way out of
any discussion of why they don’t have children. He says they both made the
choice. “We have a cat.”
“I hate cats.”
“Oh, right, what about a cat in a clown outfit?” I had mentioned my mild
coulrophobia — fear of clowns. He hates them too, but he’s not phobic, it’s
just because they’re not funny, they try too hard.
But the children thing? “You make a choice. Pros and cons, really… yeah. They
give you nothing back, children. Spongers. I said we could adopt, but I
wanted to adopt a 30-year-old lawyer who’s already paying rent.”
This is how he keeps people away from the personal — with digressive jokes. He
also pretends to be personal. Gervais interviews are full of blokeish tales
about peeing in the sink and his general slobbery. Hacks fall for this as an
insight. It’s all a diversion, a mask, the pose of a hyper-intelligent man
who wants to keep you at arm’s length. His faux-arrogant routine at award
ceremonies — saying they picked the right guy instead of being ever so
humble — is an aspect of the same mask. In reality he is obsessively private
about anything that matters. He admits this in a typically convoluted way.
“Bertrand Russell once said no one gossips about the virtues of others.
Isn’t that great? And I suppose the theme in my life is demanding my right
against what doesn’t seem like adversity to most people — but your
reputation is all you’ve got when everything else is quiet and so on. So I
am quite militant about my… well, my truth, really.”
Okay, okay, back up. Ricky Gervais, 47-year-old comedian and comic actor, is
giving an interview to promote the issue of his movie Ghost Town on DVD.
Downstairs there’s a coffin, a make-up girl, and a photographer and his
crew. Plus a girl from Paramount to make sure I mention the DVD. Done.
I could easily have forgotten, in view of the blizzard of things he’s doing at
the moment. There’s his film “directorial debut” coming up. It’s called This
Side of the Truth, a high-concept romcom, as they say, and apart from
Gervais it stars Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman, Tina Fey, Rob Lowe,
Christopher Guest — “Comedy cast of the decade!” he says. There’s Flanimals,
a film being developed from his children’s books. The Men at the Pru is
another movie, set in his home town, Reading. And he’s developing a new
stand-up routine, also about truth. It’s called Science, but by the sound of
it it should have been called Philosophy. “It a study of everything
irrational, nonrational — from homophobia to Noah’s Ark. What I’m fascinated
in is, you know, ‘That’s not true — why do you believe it?’ Deconstructing
an apocryphal tale. And it’s to do with ignorance.”
He was born on June 25, 1961. The family lived on a council estate in Reading.
His father, Jerry, a labourer, was a French-Canadian, hence Gervais. He was
brought up as a good Christian boy, but at eight he lost his faith. “It was
weird. I loved Jesus. But one day I was drawing this picture of him doing
something, and my brother came in. He must have been 19. He said, ‘What you
drawing?’ I said, ‘Jesus.’ He said, ‘What’s he doing?’ I told him and he
said, ‘How do you know he did that?’ I said, ‘It’s in the Bible.’ He said,
‘Why do you believe in the Bible?’ And my mother went, ‘Bob, shut up.’ And I
thought, ‘She’s lying.’ And within an hour I was an atheist.” He’s now an
honorary associate of the National Secular Society.
It wasn’t a show-business family, and initially he’s vague about early
influences, but then he fixes on two things that, with hindsight, can be
seen as the foundations of his comedy. First, Laurel and Hardy. “There’s
nothing that hits you on a subconscious level like Laurel and Hardy. I love
them firstly because comedy has to be about empathy. You can’t laugh at
people you don’t like.”
“Hitler slipping on a banana skin?”
“Okay, you can’t laugh with people you don’t like. If you like someone, they
can say horrendous things because you know it’s coming from a good place.
There’s no place for machismo or genuine cruelty in comedy. It either comes from
a good place or a bad place. You can’t be rolling in the aisles with a
stand-up and you hate him. Why I like Laurel and Hardy is they are
precarious and they pick themselves up and dust themselves off.”
“Obama used that in his inauguration speech.”
“Well, I’m very much like Obama.”
“Because you’re black?
“Exactly, because I’m black.”
Laurel and Hardy gave him content — the likable blokes you desperately want to
save from themselves. The Office, he says, was pure Laurel and Hardy, except
there were many Stans but only one Ollie — Tim. But it was Mike Leigh’s TV
play Abigail’s Party (1977) that gave him style. It is a horrific, barely
watchable comedy of suburban life, with Alison Steadman playing the aspiring
bitch-from-hell whose mindless savagery finally gives her husband a heart
attack.
“I was blown away by it. I’d never seen anything like it. It hit me at the
right age. Later I resented it because I thought, ‘That’s my family you’re
laughing at there.’ There’s little lines that I loved at the time, but you
come out of that snobbery — I’ve gone back into it now — but in my
anti-snobbery phase I suddenly didn’t like lines like “Shakespeare,
leather-bound, of course you’d never read that sort of thing” because I sort
of thought, well, most people wouldn’t. I know the joke they’re making, but
it feels weird to have a swipe at working-class nouveaux riches.”
Abigail’s Party gave him his primary mode — uncomfortable satire — and his
style — realism painful enough to make you squirm. David Brent was born in
1977. But perhaps the biggest influence of all was his awareness of his own
intelligence. “Growing up I thought, ‘I’m surrounded by idiots,’ and the
last couple of years watching reality-TV shows and reading some press, I
realise I was right.” He falls about laughing — “But now I’m angry and
militant!”
The word idiot inspires another big thought about comedy. “It’s in my comedy.
I like people who are too smart laughing in the face of adversity. I did it
in Ghost Town. It doesn’t do you any favours to be the smartest person in
the room, because if you’re surrounded by idiots and you point out that
someone is an idiot, all the idiots look at you as though you are an idiot.”
“It was a happy childhood, then?”
“Yeah, I didn’t feel poor. Let me qualify that: we weren’t the Waltons, but
everybody was in the same boat, and we didn’t want for anything. My mum used
to buy at jumble sales. Also — I didn’t know this until I was 14 or 15,
f***ing tragic, really — she’d get me these things I wanted from the
catalogue and then pay for them for the rest of the year. I shouldn’t have
been able to have those things, it seems weird. Mum didn’t really go out
until I was about 12. She was just a mother.”
The devotion and guilt that underlie this quote are the key to his character.
Because of the age gap, his mother plainly spoilt him — almost as an only
child. This indulgence, this marking out as special, plainly links to his
confidence bordering on arrogance, and to a potent cocktail of self-love and
vanity of a kind often found in creative artists. He can do what he does —
shock, tease, wheedle, amaze, irritate — because he is sure that, in the
end, his audience will bow to the dictatorship of his imagination.
He went to University College London, despite his best efforts to appear too
cool for school. He did biology for two weeks, then realised it was hard
work. “I got there and thought, ‘I’ve been conned into this.’ Like you felt
conned when you’d been watching Blue Peter where they sneaked in all this
learning and Magpie was much cooler.”
So he asked a friend to name a letter of the alphabet. He said “P” and Gervais
picked philosophy. The department accepted him partly, he thinks, because he
would be the only one on the course who didn’t speak like Prince Charles. “I
was the only person not in a fur coat. I was quota-filling! I didn’t know I
was working class until I got to university.” He didn’t go to lectures and
he doesn’t seem to have read much. (He later tells me he’s only read one
novel, The Catcher in the Rye, but I’m not sure I believe him.) He was good
at arguing, which is all philosophy is, really. With finals approaching he
read Philosophy Made Simple. It worked: he got a 2:1.
He was also a singer in a band — Seona Dancing, who released two singles, one
of which got to somewhere in the seventies in the charts. He says you could
stop anybody in the street and they’d have had a single higher in the charts
than that. I try to establish that this was what first gave him his taste
for performance, but he won’t have it. “Pop stars should be viewed
differently from comedians. Comedians who want to be pop stars, they don’t
last. There’s something unsavoury about it. There no place for being cool or
sexy in comedy, and as soon as you start thinking you are, then you’re not
as funny. I like a comedian who shambles out and moans about his day. I
don’t want someone going. ‘Thanks for your 50 quid, now let me tell you
again how brilliant my f***ing life is.’”
He ended up working at ULU (University of London Union), first as office
nobody then as entertainment manager. He was there from 1988 to 1997,
subconsciously gathering material for The Office. But this meant he’d
reached 36 and was going nowhere, and a 41-year-old student manager would be
an embarrassment. It didn’t seem to trouble him. “It’s weird, obviously it
must have been in my childhood. I always think everything is going to be all
right. If somebody had said when I was on the dole or working in reception
at ULU, ‘Your music career is going nowhere, you’ve got nothing and you did
philosophy,’ I’d have said, ‘Yeah, it’ll be fine,’ which is ridiculous for a
logical, quite analytical sort of person. But I do feel like that.”
And, of course, he was fine. Sammy Jacob hired him as “head of speech” at his
new radio station — XFM. Gervais had no idea what to do, but he did have to
hire an assistant. So he advertised, and in walked the tallest person he had
ever seen. “He looked smart and he’d done film studies or media and he was
13 years younger than me. I went, ‘Awright?’ and he went, ‘Awright?’ He
wanted to be a stand-up comedian, so I started doing impressions to show him
I was funny. I did Seedy Boss — it was David Brent.”
It was Stephen Merchant, and to say they clicked is a wild understatement.
They weren’t much good at being XFM executives. Before they were due on air,
Sammy Jacob lost his temper. They were supposed to have booked celebrities.
“Sammy came in and said, ‘You’ve got to come up with something today and I’m
going to get rid of you useless couple of c***s if you don’t.’”
They didn’t book anybody. Instead they went on air themselves, taking the piss
out of the DJs. Sammy e-mailed to say it was the funniest thing he’d ever
heard and they had to do it every day. The rest is history. Merchant left at
one point to do a BBC producer’s course, assuming XFM was going nowhere.
Gervais carried on “mucking about” and then one day Merchant called and said
he had a film crew for the day and he wanted to film Gervais’s characters.
He ad-libbed David Brent and The Office was born.
It came from a zeitgeisty insight about the nature of the modern manager,
trapped in a world of failure and management babble.
“He was middle everything: middle-aged, middle manager. Life hadn’t turned out
like he thought and he was desperate.” But without one further element it
would have been, Gervais says, “a boring sitcom about some boring people”.
The additional element was the tragic corruption of Brent by the fact that
he had agreed to be filmed for a documentary. Fame — and this is where the
moral sense Gervais acquired from his mother rises up in anguish — is the
big contemporary escape from the drudgery of work.
“Everything he does is for this imaginary goal. He’s sold his soul to the
devil. He’s let these people in the door and he’ll do anything. He’s become
a clown. And what’s nice about him being in charge is that he should know
better — he’s older than them, he gets paid more. And that’s why we never
took him out of the office. When people in sitcoms go on holiday and behave
like idiots — well, they’re on holiday. They’re allowed to be idiots by the
pool.”
The BBC bought it. But the way they bought it was incredible, and the single
most vivid example of Gervais’s absolute faith in himself. Gervais, a little
fish in the little pool of a small radio station, dictated terms. He wanted
total control and he got it. This suggests a staggering level of confidence:
a man in early middle age quibbling with the terms of a chance at stardom.
“I felt I had so much to lose by losing control. There would have been no
fun in that. The important thing is I wasn’t bluffing. There’s no point in
bluffing.”
But, even if this was arrogant, it was also moral. Just seizing a chance at
stardom on any terms would have meant capitulating to the fame culture. He
says, bizarrely, he learnt it from the 1970s sitcom The Good Life — suburban
couple make their own self-sufficient life to get out of the rat race. “It
was the most aspirational thing I’d ever seen. They were happy. Just aim at
happiness, don’t aim at things you think are linked to happiness — fame,
whatever.” Gervais and Merchant agreed the show was going to be the best
thing either of them would ever do. They were fiendishly exact. Scenes were
never lit other than by the deadly lights of the real office in which they
filmed, and the colour grade was shifted towards the green, making everyone
look slightly ill. With high moral intent, he wanted to show a man, not a
good man, but a man for whom you felt sympathy devoured by the chance of
fame. He quotes Oprah Winfrey to make the point. “If you don’t know who you
are by the time you become famous, it will define you.” And, at the end of
his next series, Extras, his hero quotes the now late and very great John
Updike. “Fame is a mask that eats into the face.”
Extras — about extras hanging about for tiny parts in films — was a more
literal take on the same theme. He despises the cult of fame, especially the
gross exploitation of reality TV.
“I want to find someone to blame… I just think whoever is in charge of
television… You can’t be a millionaire taking your kids to school in a
Rolls-Royce and then go to work and ruin people’s lives. You can’t wash your
hands of it.”
He says he’s now stopped being angry, he’s moved on. This is a problem because
anger — not just at celebrity but also at the human condition — is what has,
so far, fired his comedy.
Ghost Town makes the point. Mass-produced Hollywood sentimentality sits
alongside Gervais’s bewildered smart-guy shtick and there’s no contact
between them. He looks as though he’s wandered in from another movie.
But he’s going to America. He loves the place and raves about its TV comedy
and films. The US version of The Office indirectly made his name and now
they seem to love his stand-up. He’s even appeared in and part-written an
episode of The Simpsons. This all puts huge new pressures on his
authenticity. Can he protect his comic/tragic vision from the US media
market? His “it’ll be fine” gene kicks in at any suggestion that it won’t
work out. In fact, he doesn’t think he needs to change at all, but the
vehemence of his defence suggests at least a degree of fear.
“I never felt sorry for putting everything into David Brent. I wanted that
show to be my best thing ever, and so you don’t worry about ‘Maybe I should
change my hair’ for some director. Look at all my favourite people. They
didn’t put on 10 different wigs and do funny accents. They did one thing
well. Woody Allen, same character in every film; Laurel and Hardy, same
characters in every film; Tony Hancock, same character in every film. So
this thing about being a versatile actor — I don’t know what versatile is.
Who’s judging you? Who am I trying to please except myself?”
Suddenly the central theme of his character — his self-faith and self-love —
has become explicit. He seems to be teetering dangerously on the brink of
real arrogance here. He knows he’s on top and the next move is the big one.
As when he sold The Office, he’s demanding his own terms, and I don’t think
he’s bluffing. He was banging the table at the end of that last remark, and
he comes back to the subject of the supreme autonomy of the Gervais self a
few moments later. “I’m doing it all just to please one person — me.”
There’s a silence. Needing to keep saying this is Gervais at his most
emotionally naked. Perhaps sensing my slightly stunned reaction, he resorts
to a joke. “You thought I was going to say ‘you’, didn’t you? Right, from
now on it’s you.”
Then he goes downstairs to have his picture taken. He turns the photographer
into his straight man. He does his “pap walk” past the camera and turns to
look back. “I know you’re not scum, really. Just doing your job…”
Everybody, me included, cracks up. “That was,” I tell him, “one of the most
interesting interviews I’ve ever done.”
He looks startled. But it really was. And what was it all about?
Remember Eva, his mother. Remember he was the youngest by a long way, because
I think Sigmund Freud got Ricky Dene Gervais in one. “A man who has been the
indisputable favourite of his mother,” he wrote, “keeps for life the feeling
of a conqueror, that confidence of his success that often induces real
success.”
