Interview taken from HermAphrodite #10

Chris Addison. A Springer-loving, sports-hating, dwarf-admiring, computer-allergic Mancunian (not a scally, he’s from Didsbury), ferocious of energy and bouncily cheerful of demeanour, ever ready to laud the Scots, decry the high-jump, and talk at length of Gentlemen’s Relish. A self-styled ‘controversial thin man’ (“I’d have that in my passport”) and gleefully self-deprecating, he is happy to point out his physical resemblance to a ‘mad ostrich’, and unafraid to out himself as a ‘middle-class ponce’. He was up for the Perrier in 1998 (but lost out to the Boosh), has done stand-up work all over the television (from BBC1 to, um, Ch5), and has been described by ‘Time Out’ as simply ‘sensational’. Yet for all this, most people just know him as ‘that bloke from that thing with Gail Porter.’ For yes, Chris Addison was indeed a co-host of Ch4’s ‘dotcomedy’, the internet-trawling peculiarity-revealing onscreen compilation of the world’s weirdness. And yes, that means he got paid to sit next to Gail Porter. And be funny. But it is for the sake of the latter (alone) that I am here…

Yesterday, in a pub kitchen in the Bristol suburb of Bedminster, I interrupted the backstage questioning of his friendship with Gail Porter (“yes, I really do know her – I have her number and everything”) to request an interview. Chris, being a thoroughly decent sort of chap, agrees. Which explains how I find myself today in a pub kitchen in the Bristol suburb of Bishopston, marvelling over the décor (ha) and admiring Chris’ tentative rota-system for the usage of the room’s only piece of seating apparatus that was designed for the purpose and not to keep food cold. (Of which Joel, his support act, is currently in occupation.) Somehow able to contain himself amongst the racks of horse-radish sauce and industrial-sized cans of beans, Chris eschews the freezer-option, and procures two more chairs. And so we can begin…

me – “What did you want to be when you were little? Was it this?”

Chris – “I wanted to be a kid.”

me – “When you got slightly bigger.”

Chris – “When I was very little I wanted to be a doctor.”

me – “Was that because of the uniform?”

Chris – “The nurses’ uniform… no that was later…”

There was more to it than that. Promise.

Chris – “It was because my father was a doctor. And when you’re a kid you want to be what your dad is. And I wanted to be a doctor until I was eleven or twelve, and I realised that I didn’t have a scientific brain.”

But it is a dream that he has not forsaken.

Chris – “I’d find it very difficult if someone said to me: ‘You can do this for the rest of your life or, by some flip of magic, you can be a doctor’.”

With the right sort of brain and an instant 7 years of training. (He could be the anti(thesis of)-Harry Hill…)

But that was not his only youthful dream; he also toyed with the idea of becoming a theatre director.

Chris – “Yeah, that would also be something that I’d like. (happily) Maybe I could be an operating theatre-director.”

me – “And operate in Grecian masks, rather than surgical ones…”

Chris – “Yeah – trestle theatre!”

Hee-hee.

Chris – “I wanted to do that [directing] for a long time. Which is, in an odd way, how I came to be doing comedy.”

But it wasn’t an acting path that led him to either directing or comedy.

me – “You weren’t in the Nativity and though ‘Ooh, I could get big laughs as a shepherd’?”

Chris – “No, no no. I was Gabriel in our Nativity play, and I think it gave me delusions of grandeur. A false sense of my own self. I believed that I was a great authority figure, and everyone else was just looking at me going ‘You’ve got a great silk halo hair-pinned to your head!’”

So it was not, by any means, the first step on a road to acting glory. In such a context, he much prefers to be the orchestrator, behind the scenes and with the power.

Chris – “I directed plays at the Festival when I was a student, and abroad in Germany in my year off, and PASSIONATELY wanted to do that.”

But his love for the job was off-set by its accompanying complications. Directing means there are halls and lights to be hired, costumes to be created, actors to be organised and an audience to be lured.

Chris – “It’s an awful lot of heartbreak and responsibility, and it takes a long time. If you want to do comedy, all you have to do is find someone like Steve who’s already organised a night like this, and then say ‘Can I do an open-spot?’ That’s it. Someone else organises absolutely everything; all the posters, all the lights, microphone, venue, listings. You just turn up. So that seems the ideal creative outlet for my immensely lazy persona.”

Though you shouldn’t get the idea from that that he’s just a lay-about whose sole energies are devoted towards his time onstage. Oh no.

Chris – “Because I didn’t get into this on purpose, I never had a set of ambitions or game-plan. And consequently there are LOADS of things that I want to do. There are radio shows that I’d like to, there’s a film I’d like to write, stories I’d like to write, programmes that I’d like to do for television – there’s soo much.”

And the lack of one burning ambition means that he can turn around to a juicy offer and happily say ‘oh, okay’, without wondering if it will disturb his other projects. Of which there are several, all on the go simultaneously.

Chris – “I have the same approach to writing as I do with books, where I read LOADS of books at the same time, and barely finish any of them.”

So he knows what he’s doing. And what he doesn’t want to be doing. And that if, in the future, it all goes horribly wrong he will never ever be tempted to go down the pantomime path (as a way of making money, and meeting one-time Aussie soap-stars).

Chris – “Oh no never. Absolutely not, no. Oh no. Pantomime. Aargh. Can’t bear it. No.”

Not even if he got to meet Rolf Harris at the same time.

Chris – “I think deep down I must have some childhood trauma associated with panto. The very idea makes me shiver.”

I ask sympathetically whether he was ever hauled onstage and made to dance before a capacity crowd.

Chris – “No. I wasn’t. I think maybe because I was never allowed onstage. And I could never catch the sweets.”

But it’s not just bitterness. There’s nagging suspicion in there too.

Chris – “You know when you’re a kid, and you get a feeling about things? I knew something wasn’t right. Maybe it was the Principal Boy as a girl in tights, which is just too much for a young chap.”

Mmm-hmm.

So it definitely wasn’t the bright lights of that sort of stage which first struck a chord with him. So. Of a childhood spent wanting to either direct, or fix broken people, where did the comedian idea spring from?

Chris – “I think the biggest influence on me and my style of doing things is a guy called James H. Reeve.”

My blank face is mirrored by Joel’s. An explanation is hurried into.

Chris – “Yeah, he’s not a comedian. He used to do a phone-in show on the radio in Manchester, which ran mid to late Eighties. And for three years of my adolescent life, between ten at night and one in the morning, on a Monday to Thursday, I listened to him. And my personality in the Sixth Form was almost entirely based on his.”
Which he has since carefully scrubbed himself free of. But the man still underlies Chris’ sense of humour.

Chris – “He was the driest, funniest, wittiest, most intelligent, thoughtful broadcaster that I’ve come across. Working somewhere that you wouldn’t expect. So yeah. He was a HUGE influence.”

But beyond that, Chris will only admit to an over-riding respect for Billy Connelly and Eddie Izzard. (Which you can see in his stage-act, in that, like the both of them, Chris tells stories, and is happy to chuck in some accents and helpful situation-mime along the way. But he doesn’t just talk about jam or banjos in a Scottish burr. Obviously.)

>>> Part 2

Last revised: 26/07/01