Mark Watson

What would your younger self make of your life today? 41, author and comedian

Through no fault of anyone, I grew up thinking the general path of things was you went to university, got married, bought a house and had children relatively young. As a result, I had children before I was really ready for it and went headlong into quite a lot of life’s landmarks not necessarily because I was ready, but because it’s what I thought you did.

Now I’m divorced, although very active in the parenting of my children. I don’t live in that big house I succeeded in buying in my twenties and I obviously don’t have a 9 to 5 job or a conventional routine.

I enjoy the unconventionality of my life compared with most people’s. I don’t know if it was an active rebellion, but I’ve enjoyed finding things to explore which were not obvious to me when I was a child.

As far as I knew when I was 15, nobody did comedy as a profession. I knew people wrote books, but I’d never encountered them. My dad was a teacher. My mother was secretary to a neurologist. I had a reasonably set idea of jobs and family which hasn’t ended up being much like the way I live. My younger self would be very surprised by the way in which my life has diverged from all the ideas I had.

I was quite hard-working and bookish. I liked writing my own stories; I’d get my dad to staple them together so they looked like actual books. I had some cute nerdy habits.

I did school debating, which was my equivalent of being on the rugby team. I was conscious then that I did like being in front of an audience, although I didn’t especially enjoy drama and I never had any intention to train to be an actor. I had the taste for performing but no strategy at all.

Even well into university [at Cambridge] I was very lightly involved in sketch comedy. I was quite imitated by the people in those circles; the people with more confidence or knowledge.

When I started out, I was trying to find a way of being on stage and sidestepping the self-consciousness of hearing yourself in the microphone. I was pretty good at a Welsh accent, because I have lots of Welsh family, and it felt very natural. It wasn’t really a persona because it was exactly the same as myself but talking in a Welsh accent. It was intended as a sort of comfort blanket. Then I became successful and I got stuck with it.

I’d started appearing on TV and it was getting confusing as to whether I should keep the accent going. It got to the point where I’d be driving home with other comedians from a gig and I’d have to maintain the fake accent for hours. I knew if I didn’t cut the Gordian knot I’d be doing it forever.

My first two Radio 4 series were in a quite a broad Welsh accent and it gradually receded to nothingness. Very often people don’t notice it, which makes you realise the peculiarities of your speech aren’t as important to other people as you think they are.

I’m aware that my identity as a comic comes from the puzzlement of being alive. Sometimes I’m conscious of playing up to that: “I must be able to monetise all these problems I’m having.”

There are regular moments in my parenting life when I step outside it and I’m amazed to look at myself as the protector of two more humans, because it never feels like this is an appropriate time in your life.

I have an 11-year-old son and I know he has Googled me. I sometimes wonder what it would be like to be able to Google my dad when I was that age. There shouldn’t have been much to find; he was a popular chemistry teacher.

People online say unkind things, and when I was his age I was very sensitive to criticism. I hated getting bad marks at school. I was very easily upset by failure. My younger self would be very surprised to see I’ve put myself in an arena where you are very exposed to instant feedback.

For a time in my thirties I was really preoccupied with how successful I was relative to other people. I got into a pretty unhealthy thought pattern of comparing myself not just to other people but to an idealised version of the person I should have become. I was constantly telling myself I wasn’t good enough and hadn’t achieved anything. I still am disposed to be that way and I have to keep a really close eye on it.

It’s really hard to ever be happy if you keep pushing yourself to higher things without reflecting on what you’ve already got. You have to remind yourself that at most stages you would have settled for where you are now. In those early gigs I would have been flabbergasted to see myself in the future as a person on TV, to have a fan base of any size.

I think my 12-yearold self would be delighted that my books were in shops with an actual cover that people could buy. That was what I aspired to more than anything else.

Only a few years ago, I would have said I’d like my writing to reach a bigger audience. I’d like to write a screenplay that made it to the screen, or to have written a novel that somehow had a bigger impact than what I’ve written before. All those things are unspecified ambitions that will leave you disappointed. So these days I focus on continuing being able to do the things I am currently doing, and getting better at them, rather than being more popular or famous. I think that is probably where happiness lies.

g Mark Watson dreamt of writing books as a boy, even stapling together pages of his own work