Not a square Pegg
Simon Pegg is leading a comic revolution on TV. Why? It's only fitting, says Stephen Armstrong
In comedy the revolution is usually televised. When the young guns of Oxbridge or local radio or stand-up finally clamber over the gates of the Winter Palace, they find themselves in the BBC's Television Centre or Channel 4's Horseferry Road headquarters sipping canteen coffee and making polite small talk. It's an Animal Farm thing and it's not really anyone's fault.
Recently, however, a new breed of comics have slipped quietly up from the stand-up circuit and the drama schools. They're making comedy that's the closest we'll get to slacker gags this side of the Atlantic. They're downbeat and personal. They cover misery, loneliness and PlayStations and they manage to make those subjects funny using jokes you have to work at to realise their full potential. This autumn, they're all over your television. They've been in The Royle Family, Spaced and now they're in Small Potatoes on Channel 4 and Hippies on BBC2.
First among these equals is Simon Pegg, the 29-year-old star of Hippies - the new sitcom from Father Ted creators Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews - and co-creator of Spaced. Pegg has an impressive television CV, having performed in Big Train and I'm Alan Partridge, but those who saw Steve Coogan's last tour in 1998 will remember how close he came to blowing Coogan clean off the stage with his stand-up routine. Pegg's surreal observations about the humdrum and everyday flirted with Seinfeld at his best.
He started work on Spaced when the Paramount Comedy Channel offered to create a vehicle for him and his Spaced partner, Jessica Stevenson. They insisted on writing the sitcom themselves, so scornful were they of television's writing talents.
"If comedy isn't honest, it's not worth doing," Pegg says. "I like to take elements of real life and add something a little bit offbeat, a little bit unreal, and it somehow makes the real-life aspect seem even realer. We wanted the lighting in Spaced to be really dark, for instance, to reflect the grimness of those shared London houses in the years when you're finding your way."
Now he feels he's arrived because Kylie Minogue is a huge fan of Spaced. He's also getting idolised in public by twentysomethings who recognise their own when they see him. We met in Bar Vinyl, Camden's funky cafe-cum-record shop, and strangers interrupted regularly to ask whether Spaced has a second series lined up yet. Just in case you missed him in Camden two weeks ago, you can relax. It is coming back. Pegg starts writing with Stevenson in two weeks' time.
Right now, though, he's more concerned with Hippies. It's a six-parter set in the 1960s offices of Mouth, an Oz-style radical protest magazine staffed by a bunch of weirdos, freaks and dropouts. Pegg's character, Ray Purbbs, is our way in. He wants to throw himself into the 1960s and all that free love, protest, drugs and rock'n'roll. Instead, his girlfriend, Jill Sprint (Sally Phillips), is battling with the nascent strains of feminism and won't let him touch her, while his every attempt to party so hard he'll forget what he was doing in the 1960s is met with frustration. Rather like Blackadder's romp through history, Purbbs is the man with 1990s values let loose in the 1960s.
Pegg's style is to underplay his comedy, with his face giving the minutest twitch to indicate infernos within. "I find the idea that there's a catastrophe going on within but there's only the slightest sign on the face very funny," he says. In Hippies, he avoids the ridiculous panic-stricken histrionics that seem to come so easily to most sitcom actors and he's all the funnier for it. Indeed, it's his performance that lifts Hippies up a notch, as this isn't the greatest script that Linehan and Mathews have ever delivered. In places, it dips into rather obvious gags and doesn't ooze the same effortless brilliance that characterised Father Ted.
None the less, starring in Linehan and Mathews's primetime BBC sit-com is a result for Pegg, who spent eight years slogging his guts out on the stand-up circuit having decided to drop straight acting after leaving drama school. As a result of his live work, Pegg's comedy references are impeccable. We talk about the history of British humour and he manages to connect Chris Morris, Monty Python and Rabelais. Great comedy, he explains, is about pain. "In the animal kingdom, we are not alone when we laugh," he explains. "Our primitive monkey ancestors also like to crack a chuckle or two. In them it's a sign of fear, so perhaps that's why the funniest stuff is often the most painful. It's a relief to laugh, it eases our fear."
Taking the self-torment approach when writing Spaced, Pegg found he was drawing heavily on his own painful experiences of being dumped by a girlfriend he'd spent five years living with to create his character. "The early scene about me going round to her house and telling her I still loved her was written incredibly early on and I found it really hurt to write it," he explains. "By the time we came to film it, it felt like nothing. Jess calls it therapy." He laughs. And then when I ask if his ex-girlfriend would recognise herself in the script, his face tightens for a second and all the old "tears of a clown" cliches come rushing into my tired old journalistic head. "I wouldn't know," he says. "We're not speaking."
After that, he's off to have his photo taken in the heart of this groovy bar. It's a measure of how far he's come that he barely finds this awkward, despite the stunned gaze of the excited lunch-hour crowd. Just for a moment, he seems almost too sure of his star status and I worry for the state of the revolution. Then he laughs shyly at the photographer's suggestion and I think, well, we're okay. For now.