Back Story

There's got to be a nasty or dangerous side to anything enjoyable or there's something wrong, something suspicious and hidden. If everything seems perfect, it means you're one of the Eloi and a Morlock is watching you with a napkin tucked under its chin.

What a uniquely capitalist response to that gender inequality: women have been forced by convention for generations – millennia – to spend money on expensive clothes and agonising shoes, to daub themselves with reality-concealing slap, to smell expensively inhuman, to self-mutilate in pursuit of eternal youth; and this, quite rightly, has come to be deemed unfair. But how do we end this hell? We make men do it too. Well done everyone.

This society doesn't work without booze – our parties aren't good enough, our conversations aren't sufficiently interesting, nor is our self-confidence high enough to sustain our interactions without alcohol. It's everywhere, lubricating everything.

I'm not good with the low-level unexplained. I worry at such things. I'm quite relaxed about the great mysteries of the universe; when it comes to the existence of God, for example, I figure that, as with a good episode of Inspector Morse, I'll find out what's going on eventually.

That’s my problem with new-age stuff. In common with many irrational views it harks back to a sense of something ancient while rejecting anything provably historical. It’s like the miserable concept of Original Sin. There seems to be an obsession with the idea that there were ancient humans, uncorrupted by their capricious intellects, who lived in the ‘right way’. They didn’t eat too much dairy or any wheat. They didn’t sit down too long for their spines or walk around in posture-ruining shoes. They didn’t consume too many sugars or fats for their unblemished guts to digest, or pop painkilling and antibiotic tablets to deal with the short-term symptoms of long-term problems that should be dealt with by wholesale lifestyle change. They didn’t drink or smoke. They were perfect and we should sling out all our stuff and emulate them. Except they had an average life expectancy of about 18 and the planet could only support a few hundred thousand of them. Apart from that, good plan.

The downside is the fear of something happening to her. The pressure of there being two bodies in the world that I want to keep from harm and only being able to watchfully inhabit one of them. I wonder if you know what I mean. I hope that you do, for your sake. It’s a worry I’ll have to learn to live with because I’m definitely out of wishes.

These people, I’m afraid, include those who suffer from ‘wheat intolerance’. I know there is such a thing, which can afflict even the sturdiest, most no-nonsense of souls and causes the consumption of foods containing wheat to bring on unpleasant symptoms that, while not at the same level as an allergic reaction, the sufferer would still want to do something about, such as stopping eating wheat, and that wouldn’t necessarily make them a tedious, attention-seeking wuss. However, I think the vast majority of people who cite the condition are tedious, attention-seeking wusses who mistake the normal symptoms of daily life – feeling sluggish after meals, tired in the morning, hungry before breakfast and generally not as though they want to leap around like someone in an advert – for there being something wrong with them. It’s not just wheat they’re intolerant of, it’s everything. They’re so dissatisfied with the sensation of being human, with the world’s constant assaults on the temples that are their bodies, that they’re now unwilling even to coexist with a grain.

A society where you’re not allowed to blow your own trumpet is so much more nuanced, sophisticated and interesting than the grim world of literalism that’s being ushered in.

Another example of their hatefulness while my dander’s up: in order to get themselves off the hook of sometimes liking uncool things, they refer to them as ‘guilty pleasures’, which is a ridiculous expression. What? So you like Abba, or Roger Moore as James Bond, but have been led to believe that this taste is somehow infra dig, so you style it a ‘guilty pleasure’, thus demonstrating you’re sufficiently relaxed and self-deprecating to own up to it – when in fact the way you have chosen to express it lays bare your bland and inane obsession with the worthless trappings of the zeitgeist. ‘Guilty pleasures’? It’s prudish and judgemental and yet it’s referring to harmless things people do in their spare time. I mean, I’ve watched and enjoyed The X Factor and I know that it’s not exactly the Proms or The Wire or whatever worthy thing I’m supposed to be watching, but why should I feel the least bit guilty about having taken pleasure from it? Or, for that matter, from eating a Findus crispy pancake, watching a Brittas Empire DVD or reading Country Life in the bath?

Mediocrity is fine if you accept it.

We’re sliding into a society where the first thing you need to do to demonstrate that you’re any good at something is to say that you are. Under the old rules, boasts were assumed empty until proved otherwise. You had to impress with your actions, draw attention to yourself subtly without being seen to do so. It’s a hell of a lot more fun than the pantomime of self-belief we see on reality TV today. A society where you’re not allowed to blow your own trumpet is so much more nuanced, sophisticated and interesting than the grim world of literalism that’s being ushered in.

Some might think that acting all modest and yet feeling all megalomaniacal is dishonest. I say it’s a cultural thing. And of course it’s not megalomania (well, if it is, I’m the worst person to judge – just don’t put me in charge of soldiers), it’s just general high self-esteem. And it means that when I do have moments of self-loathing, I don’t feel worthless but that I’ve let myself down – which implies that, even when feeling low, I still sense that there’s something to let down.

the trouble is that I don’t tire readily enough of the dishes I already like to incentivise a search for new flavours. I would get bored if I had steak and chips for every meal. But I’m pretty sure that if I had it for one in four meals, I’d be fine. If it were one in ten, I’d be thrilled every time. Which means I only really need ten things I like in order not to be bored – and I’ve long since overshot that. So why would I go to restaurants with weird cutlery where they don’t serve any of them?

One of the reasons I’d been attracted to showbusiness in the first place was that I thought, most of my experience so far having been of the theatre, that it was a profession that ring-fenced the lie-in. I didn’t mind the idea of working in the evenings, maybe of rehearsing in the afternoons, but mornings, I felt, should be the preserve of sleep, tea and paracetamol. So the realisation that television, the medium I most wanted to work in, required such punishing early starts was a bitter blow.

That’s why I’m so proud to live here. London, more than any other city on earth, is the new Rome – so much so that Rome is in some ways just the old London.

And then there are people – and these don’t unsettle but enrage me – who think comedy is trivial. They believe that serious, intelligent people should focus on worthy, momentous things and that jokes, levity, piss-taking, subverting and satirising are the pastimes of the second-rate. Words cannot express how second-rate I consider such people. In my experience the properly intelligent, whether they’re astrophysicists, politicians, poets, lawyers, entrepreneurs, comedians, taxi drivers, plumbers or doctors, however serious or trivial their career aims, all adore jokes. And they have that in common with a lot of idiots. For as long as I can remember, I have always thought that being funny is the cleverest thing you can do, that taking the piss out of something – parodying it, puncturing it – is at least as clever as making that thing in the first place. This view, which, I’m happy to say, will be most offensive to the people I want most to offend, was probably formed watching my cold grandfather, with all his financial acumen and preference for fish over humans, cry with laughter at a van being repeatedly driven into a swimming pool.

Marmite!’ Never has a product more successfully concealed the truth of its mediocrity merely by conceding the fact that some people find it disgusting.

It is so much easier to live with being annoyed by someone than to live with someone being annoyed by you: the first state is one of irritation, the second is a tyranny.

(I know, before you balk, that the Vikings didn’t really have horns on their helmets, but I can’t help feeling that’s their mistake, not ours.)

when it comes to the existence of God, for example, I figure that, as with a good episode of Inspector Morse, I’ll find out what’s going on eventually.