‘Our institutions are spineless – they’ll never put up a fight’
The ‘Pointless’ host and Classic FM presenter fears cancel culture and the ‘terror of offence’ are threatening aspects of our lives we should all hold dear
Alexander Armstrong spent much of this summer in a helicopter, flying over an erupting volcano in Iceland. It was all in the name of work, of course, the actor and allround perennial British favourite having been dispatched to front a Channel 5 documentary about the country. It was supposed to be a series about China, “but obviously that went out of the window”. So then it changed to India, “which also went out of the window. We might have called it ‘Alexander Armstrong’s Tour of the Green List Countries!’” He’s supposed to be doing another one next year, and he jokes that it might be a tour of Chichester.
But back to Iceland, which Armstrong describes as “heaven. Absolute heaven!” He is one of those infectious people who talk almost entirely in superlatives, even when discussing what he watches on telly (Masterchef is “fantastic” and The White Lotus is “extraordinary”). Anyway, he could hardly believe what he saw in Iceland – the midnight sun, the geysers, the volcanoes, the humpback whale that casually leapt out of the water one day while he was on a boat trip.
At the beginning of the documentary, he points out that there are 130 volcanoes in Iceland, which is half the size of the UK. As a result, the people “have a kind of gleam in their eyes that is not far removed from mania,” he says now, as we drink tea in a restaurant overlooking the Thames. “You can’t take anything for granted. You’d never be complacent in Iceland. And I bet you they wouldn’t waste time with all of this terror of offence. They can’t muck about with that, because they’ve got too many life-or-death issues. I bet they very quickly realise that they’re all decent people, and nobody wants to upset anyone.”
The “terror of offence” is never far away during my interview with Armstrong. To be fair to him, the advent of cancel culture means it’s never very far away from the mind of anyone in the public eye, but I suspect that the 51-year-old was experiencing it long before the culture wars were even a twinkle in the eye of Twitter. His character is that of the courteous, well-brought-up Englishman, his melodious voice reminding us of some imaginary golden time in the nation’s history. We all know him as the terribly polite, slightly posh man who presents Pointless, although he tells me that he thinks his poshness “is a red herring, really. I mean, it’s easy for me to say.” Then he gets himself in a tangle, worried that he might have … well, offended someone.
He is pretty posh, I would say, though that isn’t a judgment, just an observation. He had a solidly middleclass upbringing in Northumberland, the son of a GP. As a child, an act of rebellion was considered listening to his parent’s classical music on their precious record player when they were asleep. He went to private school with Dominic Cummings, who later married his second cousin, Mary. “Do I call Dom a friend?” he says, when I ask him. Well, he calls him Dom, which is more than most. “I haven’t seen him for years and years. I think he’s fascinating. Extraordinary! Undoubtedly a brilliant person, whether you like him or don’t like him. He’s got an incredible mind.”
Armstrong went to Cambridge, where he joined the Footlights. After university, he was introduced to the actor Ben Miller by the playwright Jez Butterworth. The Armstrong and Miller Show was hugely popular throughout the late 1990s and the 2000s, but he isn’t sure they could pull it off today. I suggest to him that their best-known characters, two Second World War pilots who speak in modern street language, would never see the light of day now: two actors who went to Cambridge saying “alright blud” in super RP accents probably wouldn’t be good optics in this deadly serious period that calls on us all to recognise our privilege, constantly.
“Yes, you couldn’t even do that,” he nods. “Usually the line is here as to what you can and can’t say,” he says drawing an imaginary line with his fingers. “But nobody wants to come close to the line, so they have their own little line here. And then that becomes the line, and people don’t want to come close to that. So people are forever redrawing their own unofficial lines. We’ve got to a place where I think everybody’s a bit scared of saying…” he pauses, and tries to work out what it is he’s scared of saying. “Look, no one wants to say anything upsetting. Particularly now, when you might have half the world calling for your imminent death if you say something that offends them. Nobody wants to offend anyone! You really don’t! So you go a long way round to avoid even a whiff of offence. Which means that you’re not really giving yourself much comic territory to play with.”
He says that there is a side to us all – himself included – that rather enjoys being righteous. “I don’t think it’s a particularly attractive side, but we all slightly have it. And in weaker moments, we perhaps indulge it. I think all of us [sometimes] long to be in a position where we can righteously say something, but sometimes that means wilfully misunderstanding it.” By way of example, he tells me a story about a heckler who criticised Al Murray’s Pub Landlord character for being outrageous, which of course is the whole point of the Pub Landlord character, who was created by Murray to send up the sort of toxic masculinity you find at the beer pumps. “It’s very interesting how some jokes work. In some sketches you have people who are bad and they say outrageous things and that’s why they’re in the sketch. So to have people say: ‘That’s offensive!’ Well, of course it is, that’s the point!”
Sketch shows, he says, are like muesli. “It can’t just be a bowl of raisins. It’s got to have the nuts and the roughage and the oats. And some things are in there to level out other things that are in there. Some things will not be to everyone’s taste but actually the whole mix works very well.”
Whether it works in this new atmosphere of the perma-offended is debatable. And so with that in mind, what is the future of the sketch show? Neither he nor Miller feels they would have the bandwidth for it right now, but he also worries that tick-box culture would make anything produced feel contrived. “I understand why we are very data driven, that we want quotas for things. If anyone was putting a sketch show together now, it would have to be something where people were selected and thrown together, I think. Maybe not. But it feels to me that it would be too controlled and contrived.”
Does all of this stifle creativity? “Well, I think all the best things in life essentially grow out of s---. That’s what all our gardens are. They are decaying matter. It’s things that are broken down and bad – they are the very areas out of which interesting and exciting and fun things grow. That’s how life is. I’m not interested in a shiny, polished surface, I’m interested in nooks and crannies and crevices, and little yeasty corners where the fun things grow. That’s not to condone what happened in previous generations. But you’ve got to embrace every part of life. You’ve got to take it on.” He sips his tea. “Everyone knows this, but our institutions are spineless beyond words. No one stands up and says: ‘No! I see what you’re saying but no.’
Everyone just goes: ‘Oh God, I’m so scared of you not paying! I’m so scared of you not buying the product! I’m so scared of you not turning up to the event! Or I’m so scared of you mustering a crowd of other people with flaming torches to come and stand outside this thing, that I’m just going to cave in, and I’m not going to put up a fight!’”
I ask him which spineless institutions he means. “Oh, God, now I’m terrified! It’s terrible, isn’t it? Publishing … well, there’s a world that I know lives in constant fear of book burning. And so now books that a great many people would quite like to read are not being published.”
I tell him that I recently read The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis, and that I felt it was unthinkable it would be celebrated as a novel now. “Yes! I worry that …” Again, he searches for the words uncomfortably. “I mean, my hope is that it’s a cyclical thing and we’ll work our way through it and everyone will realise that we operate on a very broad spectrum and we mustn’t diminish our abilities to think from different perspectives, some of which are mercifully very far from where we actually are in ourselves.”
He thinks it’s very British to take the p--- a bit. “I mean, I think people still have wonderful senses of humour. People still throw back their heads and laugh. I just worry that people laugh behind closed doors now. And actually, I don’t think it helps anyone. Because I know my friends really like me when they say rude things to me. When everyone’s being polite to me, I start to worry. Laughing is what we do at the people we love.”
F‘As a performer, your life is one of stress... my blood cortisol levels are off the charts’
or all this, he is very happy to acknowledge his own privilege. “I’ve been so incredibly lucky. I’ve had all kinds of opportunities.” He has not had to rely on comedy – he has gone from sketch shows and the odd ad for Pimm’s to one of the most in-demand entertainers in the country. There is Pointless, there is a daily slot on Classic FM, and there are even chart-topping albums. A few days before we meet, he sings 24 concerts in 24 hours to raise money for the young people’s charity Make Some Noise.
Singing is really his first love – he attended Cambridge on a choral scholarship, and was bass-baritone with the college choir. “If you sing for 20 minutes a day, you will be high as a kite,” he explains. “And it’s also a very social, lovely, communal thing to do.” Is it good for his mental health? “Definitely. Absolutely, without a shadow of a doubt. I think that was actually what got me through the 24 hours, it was getting up and parping something out every hour.”
His daily gig on Classic FM is, he says, his dream job. “Two of my favourite things: classical music and banging on!” He adores Pointless almost as much as its viewers. “It’s just a beautifully crafted idea for a show. It’s very hard to walk away from. You say, ‘I’ll just watch this next little bit,’ and then you get drawn in. You’re shouting out names of footballers, or capital cities, or things in the periodic table. It’s such a brilliant way of drilling into that thing we all have, which is slightly competitive obscure knowledge. It’s very British and very anoraky.”
He played it with the Queen in 2019, when he went to host a Women’s Institute event at Sandringham. “One of the things I really like about Pointless is that it confounds on several levels. It’s sort of confection, but it’s also got real heft to it because our question setters are so brilliant. And I love that Richard [Osman] and I are sort of anti-quiz hosts.” He tells me that the first series was something of a shocker for them. “We were just so bad at being slick. I had a conversation after that first series and said, ‘I think you either need to recast this, or make a virtue of our slipshodness.’” They went with the latter, and nobody has looked back.
Osman is currently enjoying an extremely successful side hustle as a crime novelist. “He’s unbelievable! Amazing!” Does Armstrong fancy having a crack at books? “Well, it’s hard now,” he laughs. “It would have to be really good. What if it were terrible! I can only lose.” But as it so happens, he does have a novel he wants to write, the first chapter of which he has started on 17 separate occasions. “I wanted it to be a funny thriller for children, but it’s just ended up being desperately earnest. It’s just the fitting in though, Bryony!”
On top of the multi-faceted entertainment career, he also has a wife and four sons, who are aged between six and 14. How is it bringing up boys? “That’s a really interesting question, and let’s talk about it in about five years’ time,” he smiles. “It’s so weird, family life. You have this creature who is born to you, and you surround them with love and you make sure they’re all right, and then you have another one, and that one gets put down there so you can surround the new one with love. And out of this you have automatically created volatility. They hate each other for competing for your love. You have this lovely Eden then suddenly you have to say ‘WILL YOU STOP PULLING HIS HAIR! WHAT DID YOU DO TO YOUR BROTHER?’ Out of nothing but love, you have somehow got massive conflict and rivalry. Luckily, in a house of boys, most of these rivalries are solved either by an early night or some food.”
When they are not trying to calm sibling rivalries, he and his wife, Hannah, can usually be found in their Cotswolds farmhouse watching television, “and for fun, we will draw the cork on a bottle of wine”. He can’t think of many ways he relaxes. “It’s a funny thing, because your life as a performer is one of stress. And I don’t really think I am stressed, but my God I am! When I had my various things analysed the other day, the cortisol levels in my blood were off the chart. I mean, they weren’t even there!” He tries to do “that Headspace meditation thing”, but he often can’t find the time. He says this with a wry smile, aware that he should really make the time.
But he has so much to do, and he needs to get on a briefing call with The One Show. He has his picture taken, and worries if he has said anything that might offend anyone. No time for that! His taxi is waiting to take him off to the next thing.