The magic voice won him a job on BBC Wales aged 20, for which he left the
Welsh College of Music and Drama without graduating. He wrote monologues for
characters: a camp German called Konrad; Bob Goldentan, an American TV
anchor; Barry Shoulder, a Partridge-esque local DJ. “Sometimes I’d phone
people up and pretend to be my own agent. I was asked to compere a charity
concert and I went [breaks into wheezy Cockney huckster], ‘The fing is, my
darlin’, I know you’ve spoken to Rob and the man is an angel, but I wouldn’t
be doin’ my job if he didn’t get a little sumfink for this…’ They gave me a
fee! That is the only time I used my powers for evil.”
Sea-fret is blowing off the estuary as we approach the Severn Bridge, through
the extortionate five quid toll to enter Wales, past the sign that reads
“Croeso i Gymru”. “Ah yes, welcome, Janice! Now, you’ll enjoy yourself if
you follow a few rules. We don’t like sarcasm, jokes made at our expense and
please don’t mock the language. Otherwise kick back and have fun!” So does
his soul leap to be home. “Actually,” says Brydon, “hearing that lady at the
toll booth, her accent just makes me smile. It’s that thing of realising
I’ve gone away, trying to get a career going, working my balls off. And you
lose track of where you come from and who you are.”
Or you could say Wales dumped Brydon like a heartless lover and only now he is
happy again, has he learned to forgive. He spent six years on BBC Wales, a
non-Welsh speaker who infuriated more nationalist colleagues with his inept
pronunciation of places like Llanystymdwy. Then, abruptly, his contract was
not renewed and Brydon realised if he wanted to work, he had to leave.
In London, the magic voice kept him in work. He earned £200,000 a year doing
voiceovers for Sudafed or Bounty or Toilet Duck. He worked on the Shopping
Channel demonstrating hover-mowers and the like. But he couldn’t break into
acting. Meanwhile he was watching Steve Coogan, at the apex of his Alan
Partridge fame, identifying with his dark, discomforting humour. So with an
old drama school mate, Hugo Blick, Brydon invented the character of Keith
Barret, made a tape and sent it to Coogan’s production company. The moment
Coogan said, “I think you’ve got something, I think we can work together,”
was the pivot point of his life.
Marion and Geoff made him famous at 35, a good age he says. “I didn’t take it
for granted, I had children and a life that was not all about funny
characters and reading scripts and wanting to meet this director.” But about
that time his first marriage unravelled. He is irritated by assumptions that
Keith Barret must be based upon his own circumstances. He has two daughters
aged 13 and 8, and a son, 11. But although he sees his children as often as
he likes – they live a few miles away – and they are close to Claire (a
former South Bank Show researcher with whom he is expecting a child in
April), clearly he has feared himself in Keith’s position, displaced from
his own life. He is immensely grave about divorce, counsels discontented
friends to try to stick it out. “However happy I am now, something is broken
in my life, and I will have to live with that for ever.”
While Wales rejected him, England bestowed him with success and in his 20
years away, he absorbed, he realises, a hostile, English view of his
homeland. “I saw pessimism, histrionics and gloom as being very Welsh. I
didn’t realise until I was making this show that I’d become quite cynical,
quite down on Wales.”
Suddenly we are in Porthcawl, looking over the rocky beach, the far-out sea
melding with the grey sky, pensioners being blown along the esplanade. “It’s
lovely in summer,” says Brydon, disappointed. He drives us a little out of
town to the wilder Rest Bay, where he would lie gazing at unattainable girls
through the spokes of his discarded bicycle. The surfers were the cool guys:
he never owned a board.
Brydon’s parents moved him from a genteel boys’ school in Swansea to Porthcawl
comprehensive when he was 14. “I thought it would be like Grange Hill, or
Grange Hell as I called it.” He sounds a prim, even priggish young man,
refusing to drink vodka smuggled into the youth club because it was “seedy”
and consequently not drinking alcohol at all until his mid-thirties. He is
still oddly shockable, wishes his friend Jonathan Ross wouldn’t do filthy
material and that Gavin & Stacey didn’t contain such graphic sex. With girls
he always lacked follow-through: he’d laugh them into liking him, but never
dared reach for the kiss. His awful, scarring acne didn’t help his
confidence.
We have lunch in Pietro’s cafe, where my cheese toasty arrives speared with a
little Welsh flag. I hand it to Brydon. He sticks it in his baked potato
thoughtfully. “You see the old Rob would have sneered at that. But the new
Rob loves it.” Later we walk by the Pavilion Theatre, where he wowed in
youthful productions of Carousel and Guys & Dolls, the Woolies where he
bought his first album (Springsteen’s The River) and down the high street
where a gang of boys from Porthcawl Comp, his old school, gather to shake
his hand: “Awright Rob, my mam knows you.”
Word spreads he is in town and shopkeepers come out to greet him as a hero. He
is oddly shy, stuck for something to say, so he resorts to a surefire burst
of Ronnie Corbett.
In making his documentary Brydon attempted, through a series of gigs, to
create comedy about, but not hostile to, Wales and which would meet the
approval of David Williams. Of the first show, he says, “I talked about the
Welsh as ‘them’ not ‘us’, which shocked me. I was a bit condescending about
Wales. I could feel people were thinking, ‘He doesn’t like us very much.’”
But by the last gig, at the Coliseum in Aberdare, he has found his métier.
He does a long rap about the Welsh tongue, the oddness of middle-class
parents insisting their kids learn a language they can’t speak themselves.
He receives a standing ovation and backstage waits for the verdict that
matters most. But David Williams, pursed-lipped, still thinks he’s being
anti-Welsh. Mind you, here is a nationalist so hardcore, he says – barely
joking – that in a football match between England and the Third Reich he’d
cheer for Germany.
Back on the M4, Brydon reaches for the stereo. Although only 42, his musical
tastes befit a man in his mid-fifties: James Taylor, obscure Elvis-geek
studio out-takes and general MOR porridge. But he says the southern
sophistication of the Clash or the Jam never spoke to him: living in
Porthcawl, he felt more moved by Springsteen’s anthems to alienation in
deadbeat towns.
“I used to do this journey every Friday when I was doing a radio show on BBC
Wales,” he says as it gets dark. “I’d finish the show at midnight, then
drive to London. So many times I nearly fell asleep at the wheel. So I used
to buy these little sausage finger things in the services. They had fibres
on them, almost like little hairs. I used to tell myself they were human
fingers and the sheer horror would keep me awake.”
At that moment, I am startled by a blast of freezing air as the Audi’s windows
glide down. I glance at Brydon, puzzled. He looks shifty. “I have done that,
Janice, in your very best interests,” he intones, covering his
embarrassment. Trapped wind dealt with like a gentleman.
Brydon was once named by the Western Mail newspaper as the 47th sexiest man in
Wales. I tell him that, according to my research, he hadn’t made the most
recent list. Competition can’t be that fierce: Huw Edwards is number
37. “Yes, I know I’m not on it,” he says. Such is his cocktail of vanity and
vulnerability, the product of so many struggling years and a constant fear
they may, any day, return, he is aware of every media mention of himself. He
knows, for example, every clip of his shows that have been put on YouTube,
and he hands me his iPhone to listen to a podcast of him on Radio 4’s I’m
Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, singing Who Do You Think You Are Kidding, Mr Hitler?
to the tune of a Carpenters song. “You have a lovely voice,” I remark, which
he does. “Yes, I know,” he replies. “I’d love to do Sondheim. Make sure you
put that in.”
The traffic thickens towards London and Brydon calls friends he will meet at a
Chris Rock gig every ten minutes to revise his estimated arrival time. Even
though he is fizzing with lateness, he still stops at an orange light while
swarms of cavalier London drivers amber-gamble past him. “It says it all,”
sighs Rob Brydon, gesturing at the law-breakers, an island of suburban sense
in the wicked city.
Rob Brydon’s Identity Crisis is on February 29 at 9pm on BBC Four
