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At the turn of the century, the trajectory of Rob Brydon’s life changed. After years of toiling away on Radio Wales and flogging lawnmowers on a TV shopping channel, he finally had the breakthrough in TV comedy that he’d yearned for. Human Remains and Marion and Geoff, launched on the BBC in 2000, were both award-winning shows and remain cult favourites to this day. To any onlooker, he had made it. But at home, things were falling apart. “I suddenly had the success that I’d wanted for so long,” he says. “I was being interviewed in The Sunday Times and I won Best Newcomer at the Comedy Awards. But I was also in the process of separating from my wife and it was very upsetting, certainly in relation to the children. I learnt that professional success does not necessarily mean peace of mind and happiness. I was up on the stage, with everyone going, ‘You’re fantastic!’, but I was very unhappy.”
This is quite deep. Introspective Rob Brydon wasn’t what I was expecting. He’s a showman! Right? Brimming with gags and impressions! He tells me numerous times over our conversation that he just loves to entertain people, and with his array of accents and amusing bits he does feel like an old-fashioned entertainer. But his early years of rejection and that contrasting personal hardship and public success in 2000 also might be the key to the essence of so many of the characters Brydon plays: the kind that are hurting, but smiling through it all.
That said, his career is hardly lacking for variety. He’s done – deep breath – Bafta-winning TV series (Gavin & Stacey, Would I Lie to You?), Hollywood blockbusters (Barbie, Cinderella), game shows (Destination X, The Floor), adverts (P&O Cruises, Kellogg’s, Toilet Duck), a podcast (Brydon &), numerous standup tours, music with an eight-piece band, an autobiography (Small Man in a Book), and now, to add to that never-ending roster, his first children’s book: The Cat in the Cupboard. But as a father to five children who range from 15 to 31 years old – three with his first wife Martina Fitchie and two with his second, producer Clare Holland – he’s never tried to break America.
“I like my family,” he chuckles. “And I like being at home.” He leans forward and his mellifluous Welsh voice drops to a whisper. “Some actors don’t, and maybe they just want to get away, but I like it. So yes, I’ve had a few opportunities I’ve turned down – there was a Broadway thing recently and I said, ‘I can’t do that and be in bloody New York for however many months.’ I don’t know how you can be Dad if you’re not there, but people manage it, you know, maybe it’s just me.”
Brydon is in full dad-mode when we meet at his publicist’s office in west London. He’s a problem solver: I mention it’s chilly and several minutes are lost to him pressing 172 buttons in a valiant attempt to readjust the aircon. Numerous dad jokes are made throughout the conversation – “I’m 61. How long have I got left? Probably 50 years, tops?” – and he emits an avuncular, kindly energy. He was one of my very first interviewees when I was a baby journalist 10 years ago, and he hasn’t changed.
Ruth Jones and Rob Brydon, who’d been friends at school, as co-stars in ‘Gavin & Stacey’ (BBC)
But back to that essence he seems to emit on screen. In his and Julia Davis’s terrific 2000 comedy Human Remains, one of the parts he played was posh Peter, a man existing at the beck and call of his cruel wife Flick. He adores her; she finds him repellent. “If a life of turmoil, anguish, sorrow, doubt, fear, regret and longing is a bad hand, then yes, I’ve been dealt a bad hand,” he smiles, squinting into the camera. “But is it?” This encapsulates the sort of brow-beaten, warm-hearted naivety Brydon embodies in so many of his roles, from Marion and Geoff’s desperate, divorced cabbie Keith to Gavin & Stacey’s devoted, well-meaning family man Bryn – written for him by his school friend Ruth Jones – and in upcoming BBC sitcom Bill’s Included as a man determined to put on a brave face after his wife leaves him.
“It must be in me,” he says now. “It would be disingenuous of me to say otherwise. Most people who play a comic role, there’s a lot of them in it.” He seems to have a steady, almost pathological optimism even when the signs are bad. It came across in his shopping channel days: he’s not just selling a pair of bistro garden chairs, he is performing. His sights were set higher. “In my autobiography, I wrote all about my early years and the struggles and everything,” he says. “When I showed it to my dad, he said, ‘I didn’t realise how hard it had been.’ And when I read it back, I remember thinking, ‘Gosh, if I’d known that guy, I might have said to him, I’m not sure this is for you, this business. You don’t seem to be getting very far.’ But I didn’t see that at the time. I was just plodding along.”
There are plenty of people out there campaigning – that is not me
Brydon’s boundless optimism is played up in The Trip, his travel sitcom with Steve Coogan, which is coming back for a Northern Lights edition later this year. The pair play exaggerated versions of themselves – Coogan misanthropic and bitter, Brydon eager to please. The friction is palpable. When I bring up Coogan, Brydon doesn’t miss a beat. “Oh my god. How lovely to see Steve is still alive! Thoughts with the family,” he pouts. “It can’t be easy for them.” He says the pair’s relationship has “got softer, warmer” over the years, and he puts this down to ageing. “We know we’re going to die,” he laughs. “When I was your age, I didn’t think it’d happen, for whatever reason. Once you get to 50, you start to get an inkling.” So they’re less spiky with each other now? “Well, we’re never as spiky as we are on screen. If we were, we wouldn’t work with each other.”
Brydon and Coogan sparring in ‘The Trip to Spain’ (Sky)
He admits he has to be more careful with his banter on the show than Coogan. “I do, more than him, because I have a career as me, right? He’s always hiding behind a character and is famously combative with his political campaigning, whereas I’m hosting family shows for the BBC. You can’t have your cake and eat it, and there are guidelines within the BBC – you have the whole Gary Lineker situation.” (Lineker’s 26-year BBC career was dogged in its latter stages by a number of controversies about his political statements.)
Brydon shrugs. “I don’t have that appetite anyway for controversy. I don’t think I’ve ever ranted about anything in my life, it’s just not me. But equally, I am just an entertainer. I’m just here to make people laugh, smile. That’s all. And in these times now, of unrest, I take a quiet satisfaction and pride that I try to put things in the world that entertain people. My contribution is to try and make people forget about all that. There are plenty of people out there campaigning, that is not me.”
Even when I ask about his thoughts on the funding crisis at the BBC, where he’s had all his biggest hits, he is tight-lipped. “I’m a huge supporter and fan of the BBC,” he says. “It seems to be something that Britain does very well. But I never really get into politics.” His longest-running show, Would I Lie to You?, is on the BBC. He’s been hosting it for 17 years. “Like Gavin & Stacey, the response to it is so heartfelt and warm, because it’s a happy show,” he says. “When you watch it, you could think the world is a friendly place. And I know a lot of people watch it before they go to bed. It puts them in a good frame of mind to go to sleep.”
‘Would I Lie to You’ stars Brydon and Lee Mack (BBC)
He is not worried about it getting the chop in BBC cuts. “No show is here forever, so it’ll finish at some point. I just turn up and do it.” Of Live at the Apollo, on which he has starred and which is ending after 22 years, he says: “Maybe it had run its course. Twenty-two years, that’s a very successful show. Nothing lasts forever.” A lot of his own projects have had fairly short runs in comparison, leaving people wanting more. But an attempt to make another series of Human Remains didn’t get off the ground. “We nearly did an update on them, and we did write more stuff, but we couldn’t get the deal right and it never happened. It’s a shame really.”
Since turning 60 last year, Brydon has entered a new era of his career. He has been saying yes to things he had historically shied away from, including writing his first children’s book, a rhyming story called The Cat in the Cupboard, about his family pet Crumble. “I used to think it was a bit of a cliche for someone in my position to bring out a children’s book, and that it might look a little opportunistic, so I’d always said no.” But then an idea popped into his head – his cat hangs out in a cupboard in his kitchen, and one day he realised those words “had a very pleasing sound”. He started coming up with rhymes in a sing-song voice to amuse himself, and the story evolved from there.
He is also becoming a little less enamoured with acting. “One of the things that becomes less appealing as you get older, for me, is out-and-out traditional acting, because the reality of that job is super long days, and for much of that day, you’re not doing the thing, you are sitting around, waiting, and eating rubbish. And I just started to feel that I wanted to do other things. So for example, I said yes to Destination X, after I’d been offered game shows before and said no to them. I said yes to The Floor. I said yes to a country music documentary. I’m just doing things that are a bit different, and there’s something far more immediate about jobs like that.”
Brydon and Julia Davis as posh couple Peter and Flick in ‘Human Remains’ (BBC)
Reality TV is rare territory into which he has not ventured. His Gavin & Stacey co-star Melanie Walters is one of the more recognisable names on this year’s Strictly lineup – has he ever been asked to go on? “Oh yeah, everybody gets asked to do that show,” he says, adding that he’d never go on it. “For so many reasons: number one, I’m not a very good dancer. I find it quite hard. Number two is my knees are basically deteriorating by the minute. And it just doesn’t appeal to me, you know? It’s one of those shows I love to watch, but I wouldn’t want to be in it. I would hate to stand there while people are judging me.”
He has no interest in The Celebrity Traitors either. “To what end?” he says. The only competition he’s tempted by is Last One Laughing, the Prime hit where comedians are stuck in a room where they’re not allowed to crack up. “I might do that one because I think I’d be quite good at not laughing,” he says. “I’m not a big corpser. I like to get it done. I’ve worked on things with quite a few actors who just burst out laughing in the middle of a take, and it can be a bit irksome because you think, ‘That was a good take, you know, come on, let’s get this.’ I’ve got quite an old-fashioned view of show business.”
Brydon flashes that dimpled showman’s smile and holds out his hands. “I just have that feeling of wanting to go, ‘ba dummmmm!’”
‘The Cat in the Cupboard’, published by Puffin Books, is out now