Respect his authority
Comedian Greg Davies hated his former life as a teacher. But 15 years after chucking it in for comedy, he still can’t seem to get away from it. He talks to
rolling through Damascus, and he was in Prague in 1968, when the Russians invaded. He remembers the ‘‘wired’’ soldiers on the tanks, many of them only four years older than he was. ‘‘Thousands of people on the streets, shouting at these bewildered Russian soldiers, who’d been told, ‘You’re going to be greeted with flowers.’’’
When the family returned to Britain, Michell enrolled at Clifton College in Bristol. His English teacher there was Christopher Jefferies, who would be falsely accused of murdering his tenant Joanna Yeates in 2010. Michell remembers Jefferies fondly as the man who introduced him to Jean-Luc Godard and Federico Fellini, and in 2014 he paid his old teacher the unusual tribute of making a miniseries about the Yeates murder, The Lost Honour of Christopher Jefferies, which won a Bafta.
Michell read English at Cambridge and on graduating got his big break when he was taken on as an assistant director at the Royal Court Theatre in London. That enclave of radicalism was ‘‘a spiritual home’’, he says. ‘‘It left a lasting stain on all of us who worked there.’’ Among them were Beckett, Danny Boyle and the original Angry Young Man, John Osborne (‘‘He was still angry, but he wasn’t young’’).
Michell remembers Beckett as ‘‘very modest, very quiet, very funny; the opposite of this sort of terrifying eagle presence that you might suspect from photographs’’. Michell would walk him back to his hotel after rehearsals. ‘‘Every day we’d talk about something different. He was really interested in sport, and particularly the abstract, irredeemable logic of snooker.’’
Another Royal Court colleague was the writer Hanif Kureishi, with whom Michell has collaborated four times, starting with The Buddha of Suburbia in 1993. That in turn led to ‘‘a really terrific time’’ working with Bowie, who wrote the soundtrack to the series. ‘‘He turned up with a yellow legal pad, a sharp pencil and a fantastic suit. He said, ‘I’ve never done this before, I’m going to need a lot of help.’’’
Michell is feeling the pull of TV, he says, and is developing a series of 10-minute two-handers for a streaming service (he won’t say which), in which the same two characters meet in a pub before they see their respective marriage therapists.
He longs for the days when ‘‘the BBC would make 15 90-minute films a year, Film4 about the same, and if films were successful, they’d be given a theatrical release [as happened with his Bafta-winning Persuasion in 1995]. Neither the BBC nor Channel 4 do that any more. The big game-changer is going to be finding a home for those $2 million art films, which are kind of the lifeblood of the industry’’.
If film is ailing, theatre is in rude health. Michell tries to do at least one play a year; most recently Consent, a well-reviewed rape drama at the National Theatre that starred his wife. Is it weird directing one’s spouse? ‘‘Yeah, it’s horrible,’’ he says. ‘‘We really enjoyed working with each other, but it was with trepidation that I cast her.
‘‘I don’t want to be her husband in the rehearsal room, and be shouted at and told to take the rubbish out. Nor do I want her to be my wife and say, ‘What the f... are you talking about? I’m not going to do it like that.’’’
He pauses and smiles. ‘‘So we had to find a way of being intimate with each other, but in a thoughtful way.’’
Intimate and thoughtful? Neither should have been a problem for Roger Michell. My Cousin Rachel
is out now. Shaun Bamber.
hose who can’t do, teach,’’ riffs Woody Allen in his 1977 classic Annie Hall, ‘‘and those who can’t teach, teach gym’’.
Failing that, like Greg Davies, they could always give stand-up comedy a go.
The British comedian, presenting the second series of Taskmaster on TVNZ Duke from June 29 (they’re up to series number five in the UK), taught secondary school English and drama for 13 years before chucking it in for a life on the stage some 15-odd years ago.
But while Davies often publicly professes to his ineptitude as a teacher and his loathing of that particular career path in general, in many ways it seems he keeps coming back to it.
Perhaps his two best known television roles have been teachers – playing the psychotic Mr Gilbert in The Inbetweeners (a role he also reprised in two films) and downtrodden Dan in Man Down, a sitcom based on Davies’ own experiences.
Then there’s Taskmaster, a comedy panel game show in which Davies and his ‘‘evil’’ assistant Alex Horne assign a series of usually quite excruciating tasks to a group of hyper-competitive comedians who appear willing to do whatever it takes to win (Horne actually first created Taskmaster for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Festival in 2010, before it was picked up by TV).
‘‘Yeah, I’ve been in two sitcoms where I’ve played a teacher and now I’m a sort of warped authority figure in Taskmaster,’’ Davies replies to the suggestion he can’t get away from his former life as a teacher. ‘‘I guess all of those years teaching weren’t wasted then.’’
Hardly. Davies’ years in front of a blackboard have provided a wealth of material for his stand-up act (not to mention Man Down) and it seems he still enjoys wielding a bit of misplaced authority.
‘‘Someone’s said, ‘You are allpowerful’, so for me it’s just joyous,’’ he says of working on Taskmaster. ‘‘I come in and see people humiliate themselves and then I am given ultimate power to be as judgmental as I want you know? There’s nothing not to like.’’
Speaking of seeing people humiliated, Davies is endlessly fascinated with what he and Horne can get the contestants on Taskmaster to do, all in the name of winning a collection of mostly useless baubles, which are donated by the contestants themselves at the start of each series.
These have included a bowl of threeday-old chowder, a 10-year-old tin of soup, and a vegetable supposedly signed by Malcolm X (it hadn’t been).
‘‘That’s probably the most surprising thing for me about the whole show, is that people with very successful comedy careers, who don’t need to do any of this, just forget all their inhibitions and cast aside how they might be perceived, just so they can win a load of s...,’’ says Davies.
‘‘It’s fascinating to me. But victory is everything. And I think the show wouldn’t be what it is if people didn’t take it seriously, if they didn’t throw themselves into it and say ‘I’m gonna win this’. And we’ve had people cheating, I’ve had people trying to bribe me – genuinely. So it’s fascinating what the show does to people.’’
The incredible lengths those on Taskmaster will go to to win were probably best demonstrated by series one victor Josh Widdicombe, during a segment in which contestants are required to present Davies with a gift of some sort.
‘‘Josh Widdicombe’s gift to me was having my name actually tattooed on his foot,’’ marvels Davies. ‘‘And I think if someone’s prepared to mark themselves for life, they’re going to win a round on this show, you know?’’
While it’s a little surreal to think that a quite successful comedian had someone else’s name tattooed on his foot just to win a contest, Davies says the most surreal moment of his career so far was working with English alternative comedy pioneer Rik Mayall, star of such shows as The Young Ones, The New Statesman and Bottom.
‘‘I’ve had so many surreal experiences,’’ says Davies. ‘‘I’ve worked with people who when I was a teenager I was obsessed with.
‘‘I worked with Rik Mayall on my show Man Down – and in the 80s when I was at school The Young Ones was the centre of my world. Me and my stupid friends used to run in on a Monday so we could talk about The Young Ones – we were obsessed with it.
‘‘And Rik Mayall, before he sadly passed away (Mayall died suddenly at the age of 56 in 2014), was in the first series of my show Man Down, and that to me was surreal. Him walking on set the first day blew my mind. I never got used to him turning up. He played my dad in the show, so very strange. And wonderful. I loved it.’’
Hearing Davies harking back to his childhood, the question arises – given he hated teaching so much, what was he like as a child at school? How did he behave for his teachers?
‘‘I was never an especially academic child – I never really enjoyed school. I was always waiting to get out of the class so that I could go and talk absolute rubbish with my friends. So I think I’ve finally found a job that I always should have done. Someone’s paying me to talk rubbish now.’’ Taskmaster, TVNZ Duke, Thursdays from June 29, 8.30pm.