The unintentional catchphrase that made her name
We ask artists and performers about how some of their most famous work happened, and this week we talk to Catherine Tate about her enduring catchphrase ‘‘Am I Bovvered?’’
It wasn’t a conscious thing to write a catchphrase. You can’t write a catchphrase, because it’s the audience that makes a catchphrase by picking up on it.
‘‘ ‘Am I bovvered ?’ was totally unintentional.
‘‘It was before I filmed my first season at the BBC. I said I don’t want to go out before an audience – because we filmed The Catherine Tate Show in front of a studio audience – I said I don’t want to go out with material that’s not tested.
‘‘So we hired a room above a pub and invited some people, an audience, to see it so I could finetune the material.
‘‘The words ‘am I bothered’ were just written down once.
‘‘She [the character Lauren Cooper] wasn’t due to riff on it or go off on a tangent or repeat it or anything like that, but as I said it in the moment I repeated it.
‘‘I just said it twice and I noticed that the audience kind of tittered a bit, picked up on it.
‘‘In the moment, I decided to do it again and go on a riff.
‘‘It kind of happened in real time in front of a try-out audience.
‘‘I realised that – as it’s a really small place, like a dressing room – you could hear people milling out of the place after the show had finished and people were saying ‘am I bovvered?’
‘‘So at that point I thought, ‘oh, I wonder if I should actually
It was absolutely unbelievable to me, and then the word ‘bovvered’ actually became part of the language, so much so it’s now in the Oxford Dictionary.
consolidate that and make that a thing with that character?’
‘‘It hadn’t meant to be, she just said it once in one script ‘am I bovvered’ and that was it.
‘‘It’s never happened like that before, I was completed shocked. I had no idea, and even though I designed it to be incorporated into the TV show, I still had no
idea that the general public would pick up on it.
‘‘It was absolutely unbelievable to me, and then the word ‘bovvered’ actually became part of the language, so much so it’s now in the Oxford Dictionary.
‘‘That was crazy. But I ain’t bovvered!’’
– as told to Kylie Klein-nixon
Catherine Tate plays 9 shows in New Zealand, starting with Auckland’s Bruce Mason Centre on November 28. For more information see Ticketmaster.