Alistair Mcgowan and Ronni Ancona discuss working together as ex-lovers
Impressionists and former couple Alistair Mcgowan and Ronni Ancona are reuniting for a new TV show. They talk to Nick Curtis
I’m trying to conduct an interview but Melania Trump, Mo Farah and Jennifer Lawrence keep interrupting. This is because I am talking to veteran impressionists and former lovers Alistair Mcgowan and Ronni Ancona, and old habits, clearly, die hard. The pair have reunited more than a decade after their Bafta-winning The Big Impression ended in 2004 to create The Week That Wasn’t, a topical comedy show in which they give existing news footage a new spin. The pair’s voice-overs reimagine the young royals as an argumentative, Oasis-style band, while Simon Cowell and Cheryl Cole are seen planning a live sacrifice to boost X Factor ratings. Mcgowan, 53, and 49-yearold Ancona can’t resist showing off their vocal dexterity.
“I’ve been doing a lot of Melania,” murmurs Ancona in a kittenish echo of the First Lady. “It’s very easy to do her as an aggressive, East European voice… but she has a soft, wispy one.” She plays her opposite a younger comedian on their roster, Matt Forde, because “I refuse to do Trump”, Mcgowan says. “Ideally, you want to do people you like or are interested in, and he horrifies me on every level.”
President and First Lady aside, they remain a striking pair – she with her dramatic Scottish-italian-jewish looks, and he with the dark eyes and solemn features inherited from his Anglo-indian father. It is 18 years since the BBC One impersonation-fest that made their names (particularly Mcgowan’s, after whom the show was originally named before being dropped from the title to recognise Ancona’s contributions) began, their most notable iterations including Posh and Becks as a sort of Dumb and Dumber, Sven Göran Eriksson and Nancy Dell’olio as the Macbeths, and Richard and Judy as a crosspatch Richard and Feud-y. Replicating the required couple’s chemistry was complicated as they had split before filming started, following a seven-year relationship that began when Mcgowan saw Ancona doing a surreal stand-up routine at the Balham Banana club in the early Nineties. “It was such a male environment, the room full of testosterone, and seeing Ronni was like seeing a fairy at the bottom of the garden,” he recalls.
Breaking up before working opposite one another “was difficult, very hard”, Mcgowan adds. “But a lot of people we were doing together were couples, so there was a frisson, an energy – sometimes positive, sometimes quite negative – that probably added to the show,” says Ancona. “There is a degree of honesty and intimacy when you split up with someone, and it’s almost like going back to the rawness of when you were first going out.”
Playing a warring version of the daytime TV favourites was, then, “easy to write”, according to Mcgowan, “because it was about two people disagreeing and playing off each other. We used a lot of our relationship [in the show], sometimes romantically. We had a very romantic ending to the Sven and Nancy special. I cried in the edit suite.”
They won’t tell me the exact reason for the split, only that, in Mcgowan’s words, “we could potentially have killed each other”. Ancona adds: “It would have been self-defence, your honour.” But in 2009 they collaborated on a book explaining how to wean a man off football, and Mcgowan said then that he lost Ancona because of his obsession with the game. Now he says he was joking, though he does lean toward compulsion and overcautiousness: he has never had a hangover, wears his clothes until they fall off, and has never owned a car.
“When I start something I throw myself into it whether it’s piano or snooker or tennis.” Indeed, he credits Ancona with the fact he became a decent classical pianist during their relationship. “One of the things that used to annoy me about Ronni was she took ages to get ready,” he says, “but eventually I used to do an hour a day of piano practice while I was waiting for her to put the right pair of shoes on.”
He and Ancona have remained close since their split and have only ever referred to each other in fond terms. As such, they seem slightly mystified by comedians Sara Pascoe and John Robins, currently touring competing stand-up shows about the end of their relationship, and the case of Louise Reay, who is being sued by her ex-husband for allegedly defaming him in her act.
“There are some very old-fashioned things I was brought up with and one of them is not washing your dirty linen in public,” says Mcgowan, “along with not talking about money or telling people how you vote. None of which seems to have any credence in modern society.”
Ancona nods: “We ARE oldfashioned. We were uncool even when we were hot. I am less of a dinosaur: I have a teenage daughter, so I am a bit more in the groove than you, my darling. Though I am terrified of social media. I said something about Scottish independence once and I might as well have disembowelled William Wallace with a rusty teaspoon.”
Ancona has two daughters – Lily, 13, and Elsa, 10 – with her doctor husband Gerard Hall, whom she married in 2004, while Mcgowan married singer and actor Charlotte Page, his co-star in a production of The Mikado, in 2013, and says they do not want children. Their spouses don’t mind them working together, they insist. “Alistair is married to the most fantastic woman, very understanding, and a great performer herself,” says Ancona, turning to Mcgowan, “and you imitate my husband, don’t you?” “Not really,” he says, before doing so.
The two have diversified since The Big Impression ended – Mcgowan into stage acting, playwriting and the aforementioned piano-playing, and Ancona into straight and comedydrama roles on stage and screen, as well as six appearances on QI. The latter remains pretty rare for a female comic, but Ancona insists things have changed. “There is still sexism that goes on in comedy,” she says, “but there is more representation now, which is a great thing. When I started out there were so few women doing stand-up and it was very gladiatorial.”
Certain comedy formats, however, remain notoriously laddish. “Lots of men and women have a softer, more surreal style, whereas the nature of a panel show is gag, gag, gag. That by its nature is competitive and it becomes a vicious circle.”
When I last spoke to Mcgowan back in 2010 he said impressions were in decline: multichannel TV meant the pool of identifiable personalities had fragmented, and conversely, the novelty of seeing a politician or a soap star mocked was lessened when you could find out what the real person was doing on social media 24/7.
“That’s true, but it feels like impressions have come back a bit,” he says. New voices have come through: he cites Judge Rinder and the newly ubiquitous Piers Morgan. Ancona says that after a long time when “eccentricity was less tolerated in a female personality on TV”, she now has Strictly judge Shirley Ballas and Paloma Faith to work on.
Their humour has always had an affectionate edge, which is why they have rarely been upbraided by their victims. Friends of Nancy Dell’olio told Ancona she’d got her mannerisms spot on: Gary Lineker learnt to control his gymnastic eyebrows after Mcgowan – literally – sent them up. And it’s why they aren’t bothered by the idea that many celebrities, from Trump to Paul Hollywood, are beyond satire. “We all bow down before the great God Satire but it doesn’t always make me laugh,” says Mcgowan. “And we are in the business of making people laugh.”
‘One of the things that used to annoy me about Ronni was she took ages to get ready’
‘When I started there were so few women doing stand-up and it was very gladiatorial’