Vic and Bob
The comedy duo on their return to television
Vic and Bob and I are sitting at a rather cramped table in Poppies, a retrothemed fish and chip shop in Soho, talking about London in the early Nineties. This, after all, is where the cult double-act cut their teeth as comedians almost three decades ago. It is a fittingly surreal venue, and soon we are surrounded by tourists enjoying fish and chips.
Perhaps it’s because Vic and Bob – or Reeves and Mortimer, though as a nation we long ago dispensed with their surnames – have been around for so long, bringing us madcap sketch series, the extremely funny and bizarre quiz show Shooting Stars, and several sitcoms and dramas, but it’s easy to forget that there’s no one else quite like them.
“If you go back a long time ago, there’s the Goons,” Bob corrects me. “I’m surprised no one else seems to bother with this sort of thing, though, because it’s quite good fun. We’re on our own, ploughing this funnel or furrow.”
“Our own furra,” deadpans Vic. In person, they feel a bit toneddown (“Vic and Bob are idiots. We don’t hit each other with frying pans in real life,” says Vic) and say one of the secrets to their successful partnership is that neither is the arguing type. I bring up the idea of the “work spouse” – a colleague who knows you better than anyone. “Oh yes,” says Vic. “He’s me husband.”
In reality, both are married. Bob wed Lisa Matthews, with whom he has two children, in 2015, after 22 years together. The trigger for this, he says, was a heart scare in the same year, when he discovered his arteries were 95 per cent blocked and had a triple bypass (“I’d recommend it. It’s a good op”).
Vic has four children; two with Sarah Vincent, whom he married in 1990 and divorced in 1999, and 12-year-old twin girls, Beth and Nell, with his second wife Nancy Sorrell, whom he wed in 2003. The children all get on well, he says, although there is an age gap of over a decade. “My kids think I’m hilarious,” he adds, before pausing. “Actually they do sometimes say ‘you weirdo’.”
Is marriage better the second time around? He laughs. “Not telling you”.
Ostensibly, we are here to discuss Vic & Bob’s Big Night Out which returns to BBC Four on Wednesday, but with these two, a conversation tends to start in one place and end up several miles west, upside down, spun around, blindfolded and with no recollection how it got there.
For the minute let’s try to stay on topic. So what, I ask, is it about?
“It’s about us arsing about,” says Vic. Indeed it is. The show opens with the pair musically bothering a couple on a dinner date by dancing around, singing “Shut up! Shut up! Eat your boiled potatoes!” and only gets weirder from there.
Other items include an “interruption from Tom Cruise” and “a preview of a new album from Andrew Neil”. It is full of their trademark surreality and anarchy, and
‘Bob and me, we’re tight. So, wherever they are we’ll seek out the best value beans’
makes absolutely no sense at all. But it’s all the better for it.
Although scripted, the new show is filmed more-or-less as live. It’s done in half an hour at the private Hospital Club in London, and is unstructured comedy with the goal of “maximum laughs” – the same phrase Bob has printed on his bomber jacket.
Now both 59, Vic and Bob have been working together since 1989, and made their television debut as a duo a year later. In the late Eighties, Reeves (real name Jim Moir) was performing at Goldsmith’s Tavern in London’s New Cross. Bob Mortimer, then a lawyer, was an enthusiastic audience member who soon became part of the act. At the time they were, in their words, “slender men” and “gorgeous specimens.”
Has comedy changed since then? Probably, they agree, but they were never part of the mainstream anyway. Their material has always differed from the norm in that it’s devoid of references to current affairs. “When we started there were a lot of Thatcher jokes [in comedy],” says Vic. “We wanted to do an antidote to all that – and we still do.”
There does seem to be a greater risk of offending people, they add, although being surreal makes this less likely. “You never know. Whatever you do someone’s going to be offended, or mock offended,” says Vic. “We’re lucky. We don’t seem to dwell in those areas,” adds Bob.
Until now, I had just about kept the conversation on the straight and narrow, then somehow they’re off. Talking about baked beans. Of course.
“Bob and me both, we’re tight,” Vic starts, “so, wherever they are we’ll seek out the best value beans. You mark my words.” He waxes lyrical about the various virtues of beans for a couple of minutes, before concluding that all baked beans are haricot beans, so sometimes, in the name of frugality, “I just put some salt and vinegar on haricot beans.”
“Do you like a butter bean?” Bob inquires.
“They’re all right,” Vic shoots back. “But there’s nothing wrong with putting a bit of salt and vinegar on a haricot bean. I might have it with cabbage and a lamb chop.”
Now, they’ve moved on to the best cabbages. Vic favours savoy; Bob seems keener on “the pointy one”.
It’s like being trapped in a shaggy dog story made up of non-sequiturs. It continues as we take a taxi to their offices (“Vic, we should’ve walked” … “Bob, we should’ve”) and while it is mundane drivel, their creative way with the everyday is key to their comedy. The words themselves may be ordinary, but it’s the way they say them.
“When we get an idea, we try and feed it with good words,” explains Bob. They still love catchphrases – over the years they’ve had “Ul-rika-ka” (for Ulrika Jonsson, their Shooting Stars panel host) to “we really wanna see those fingers” (don’t ask), but the latest is “that’s quite a boast.” I’m a bit lost, but admittedly theirs is a career to boast about, and it’s managed to keep going around all their other endeavours.
Vic is a talented painter, as well as a musician. Bob has a football podcast and starred in the BBC’S sleeper hit of the summer, Mortimer & Whitehouse: Gone Fishing.
We move on to the future. They’re planning a road movie, they say. “It was going to be in Stockton in the Lake District,” Vic explains.
“But now we think it’s going to be in Sussex,” adds Bob. “It’s cheaper.”
And then?
“We might go on tour again,” says Vic. “It’s good fun going on tour. We do an hour on stage, then end it there. It’s better being really funny for an hour than staying on for two or three.”
He pauses. “In fact, we could really condense it and say we’ll do it in six minutes. And then you can go home.”
Six minutes? They’d never stay on topic for that long.
Vic & Bob’s Big Night Out returns on Wednesday, at 10pm on BBC Four