Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Writer, actor and comedian, co-star of Peep Show, co-creator of That Mitchell and Webb, and author of memoir How Not to Be a Boy.
On the island
Eight records
The keepsakes
The book
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:42When did you first realise, Rob, that people found you funny?
Do they though? I mean, I suppose that I was a classic sort of class clown. I was sort of doing impressions of teachers quite early on. And then by the time I was sort of thirteen, there was this fateful day when a friend of mine, Paul, he'd written this ten-minute sort of comedy thing called Class Reunion … And I started to get laughs. And I started to time the lines. And I started to inflect things at the end of lines. … I had been painfully shy when I was little, so this was quite a sort of big deal.
Presenter asks
3:28Did you talk about your ambitions with your parents back then?
No, because it was just ludicrous. With no one in the family had been to university, no one was in the business. It would just be too embarrassing to talk about that. I think the cover story was something to do with computers … Because Generation X, ZX Spectrum at home, and if you could so much as load a video game, then you were sort of seen as some kind of computer scientist by your parent from your parents' generation upwards.
Presenter asks
6:31Is it fair to say you were pretty intimidated by [your father] when you were little?
Yeah. Well, so my mum and dad divorced when I was five, possibly four. He was quite a scary presence in that house. I mean, he wasn't doing anything that was out of place for that time. You would get smacked for reasons that you didn't understand. … I was scared of him early doors, but we came to a sort of understanding by the time I was older.
Clive James
I just love the way he writes. Like all good teachers, he makes you feel much smarter than you actually are.
The luxury
Not recorded.
Presenter asks
10:29How did you cope without [your mother]? She was your best friend?
It was about as hard as it sounds. It was really tough because, like I say, she was my kind of my favourite person, really, and she just kind of disappeared. … I just couldn't believe that she'd gone. And then eventually you accept that this is what's happened. What I did do, I remember, was I made a mixtape of her favourite songs. … And those songs basically were her in a way. And I would sort of play this tape, almost daring myself to get upset. And of course, I did get upset.
Presenter asks
18:40When you were in your second year at Cambridge, you met your long-standing comedy partner, David Mitchell. What were your first impressions of him?
So quiet and so shy and so polite. And then he put on this show with some friends, and I went to see that, and that was sort of the turning point. It was a thing called Go to Work on an Egg, and it was just their little sketch show. … He reminded me of me, and I just thought this guy looks like he lives there on that stage. And I asked him basically if he wanted to do a show with me. I've only had to be smart in my career once, and that was the decision not to compete with David Mitchell, but instead to capture him and take some of his goodness for myself.
Presenter asks
19:50What's the secret [to your enduring creative partnership]?
We've never had the row. I think a lot of double acts, they make the mistake of having the row and we never got around to it. … Whenever we were not getting along brilliantly, there were a lot of tethy silences and there was a lot of courtesy and we just managed never to blow up at each other and we treated each other respectfully basically … we were each other's best man and we managed to keep that friendship going.
“I had been painfully shy when I was little, so this was quite a sort of big deal.”
“I was scared of him early doors, but we came to a sort of understanding by the time I was older.”
“It was about as hard as it sounds. … I just couldn't believe that she'd gone. And then eventually you accept that this is what's happened.”
“We've never had the row. I think a lot of double acts, they make the mistake of having the row and we never got around to it.”
“my thoughts, more or less in this order, went Abby, the children, the rest of my family, my friends. … it's about love, basically.”
“It will remind me that you don't always have to go rummaging around the past to find the good old days. Sometimes, if you're lucky, the good old days are happening right now.”