Marcus Brigstocke: I was fourteen when they threatened to wire my jaw shut

0:02This is a Global Player original podcast. This episode contains discussion of some very sensitive topics including addiction and some of the ramifications thereof. You may find elements of it distressing so please do take care while listening and feel free to pause or indeed step away if you feel that you need to. I went to school with a relationship with eating that was already a mess. I didn't feel sad. I should have. That would have been an honest response. So you were already bolting on the armour. Yeah. By the time I was old enough to find drugs and alcohol, they were a blessed relief from the pain that I was in, from the eating, which was so out of control.

0:47Addiction, for me, was absolutely baked into who I was by the time I was 10.

1:00Hello and welcome to Full Disclosure, a podcast project conceived entirely to let me interview interesting people in a rather larger space than would ever be available on the radio. Marcus Briggs, welcome. Thanks, man. Renaissance man. Ha! Is it? I don't know. I'll take it. Yeah, okay. Instantly recognisable. Busy. and I have to confess the culmination of a much more traumatic life than I had previously realised or at least early life yeah yeah it was a mess about which you have spoken at length but we will dive into shortly just for people who don't know there are many many strings to your bow are there more and more I mean the main string always is comedy stand up is absolutely the backbone of it because it's it's the one thing that you can just self-generate you know you can just go yes here's the idea and then go and do it and and the feedback on it is instant if it's no good they will you know you know in that moment that it's no good and then you change it and you make it better until it's great and then it's a tour show and i love that i like the I like the absolute honesty of it and that then makes working with producers and actors, comedians, whoever else, improv shows, stuff like that that makes those thrilling because they're the rarity.

2:30And also they're a lot less lonely than stand-up which is it took me a long time but stand-up is actually bad for you. I mean you've spoken to loads of us so you may well have arrived a similar conclusion but the actual act of doing it is pretty bad for you i think you have to do quite a lot of other stuff to make sure you stay okay because it could send you potty yeah i mean you know you're in this relationship with the audience where they are every few seconds going yeah we like that we understand you yeah brilliant that's great and then when you're done after 90 minutes or so of that they go can we have more of that right which is lovely don't get me wrong it's fabulous but then you step off and you're on your own often for the next 22 hours until the next tour show right so if you don't watch yourself that is bad for you when you find yourself in the foothills of a new show how tell me about the moment when you become when when when what it's going to be about begins to crystallize well so i've i've sort of changed how i do it now it used to be all the funny ideas i had got put down in a book until a show was there i'm now uh sort of ted talk approach subject first and beat the living daylights out of it until it's funny and the rules are still the rules right so if it isn't funny it can't become a ted talk then if it isn't funny that bit has to go but i've just found over the last sort of i don't know maybe 15 years it's the last 15 years particularly if i don't feel like i'm say saying something then i in the end i find it a bit unsatisfying a bit empty why do you think that changed what do you think did something happen or yeah i just think by i just think the other for me suffered by comparison i much prefer by the way other people's work when it's saying nothing at all absolutely hilarious yeah i mean with the festival uh the altitude festival i do in uh in meyerhoff and i set up a festival so i could go skiing and snowboarding for free and uh except it wasn't for free no it was really not but you know we had last year we had tim vine out there and i used to gig with Tim a lot, you know, and he was always great, always really funny.

5:05But I watched the audience who vary between about sort of 14 years old at the lower end up through people who are now in their 80s have been coming to the festival. And everyone, every generation, helpless with laughter at Tim's absolute, just the total abandon of logic and everything. Ah, it's great, just wonderful. And so that's sort of what I like more but I guess what happened for me is I started doing a lot of Radio 4 stuff where I was helped enormously helped by good producers to do to make comedy where I was actually saying something started talking about something that I cared about and it just struck a chord in me so the now show would be quite a significant part of that process the now show was massive the first one i ever did i showed up with a thing i'd been doing in fact that became another radio 4 show the giles wembley hog goes off which was very much me i'd been posh kid went on a gap year and genuinely spent time walking around london in a sarong with no shoes on often just walking around in no shoes going yeah no i've um i've really seen poverty and i've got a lot of it on video actually you know just awful and but i thought well i i knew i didn't mean any harm when i was being that person and so it struck me a really good natured yeah posh like jiles wembley hogg meant he always meant well he wasn't tim nice but dim no clearly um he always really really meant well and always sort of tried to help and stuff he was a sweet boy he was genuinely a really sweet boy and there were often moments that were profoundly um emotional i remember doing scenes we were so lucky david tyler got such good people doing a scene with dune mckeegan and she she nudged the sarong aside and exposed me and i went oh just ignore it it'll be like that for a while now uh and just so that was all very silly but anyway so i did jazzy hog on the now show and it was great because they could sell it as a kind of at this time of year lots of people are setting off on their gap year thing and then i came and did it again and the next one i did was not very good and i don't think i even made the edit but then i had the thing that that just has changed my life i worked with good producers and particularly ones who disagreed with me they were the best because about what was funny yes and about politics especially okay i had one very difficult producer a guy called adam bromley uh i'm not sure he likes me and i'll happily say here i don't particularly like him however cracking good producer he used to listen to my script in rehearsal and he'd go um blah blah blah and he'd go just so you know that bit there that's only funny if we agree with you see if you can make it funny for everyone which is a really good note because that's very hard.

8:04And by the way, sometimes you can't do that and it's fine. It's fine. I don't mind. But if you can, you should try to, especially on Radio 4. Suddenly it will make sense, actually, the idea of it being a lonely business but being a business that can be transformed when there is an offstage, there's a collegiate atmosphere and you have to be prepared to be wrong. Exactly. And David Tyler, who's made loads of my stuff with me, did all the Giles Wimbley Hogs stuff and the Briggs Society and all of that. I mean, he'd be in my house until sort of half 12, one in the morning, the night before a record, going, oh, it's nearly there, it's nearly there.

8:42And you're sort of climbing the walls, but come the next day when you've given it that extra bit, you're so glad of it, especially because, you know, radio is such an intimate, it's such an intimate way to communicate with people. It's usually just you and them. and david always used to say um if i pitched a joke that was a bit spicy he'd pause and he'd go i can't write the letter and i went what and he said well what i do when we have a joke like that is i try to imagine writing the letter to the person who's complained that says this joke was worth it because and if i can't write the letter the joke doesn't go in again like these are smart people who have improved how I do comedy.

9:30Occasionally, I'll leave a joke in my own shows that I know perfectly well I cannot justify. Why should I? But it's a different medium, isn't it?

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10:22what did you listen to did you listen to the radio growing up no not really not really i mean we didn't listen to radio four but i did listen to a fair bit of comedy when i could find it i mean my mum had my mum had some good stuff she had the some goons and she had and i've still got it the seven inch of peter cook doing um i could have been a judge which is just it's heavenly and he so i could have been a judge but i never had the latin never had the latin so i couldn't be a judge instead i become a minor and actually on the seven inch there's an extra bit that very rarely gets paid about he said i sought solace in the printed page and it's a lovely thing about reading about Theseus and us great so good so I did grew up with that and then years later I found out my mum had been to the establishment club and had sort of draped herself over Dudley Moore's piano one evening I don't think anything had happened but but yeah so she was mum was always sort of I don't know dad was really into comedy and we grew up watching the two Ronnies that was our that was our house and then when things like not the nine o 'clock news came along and uh the young ones my mum and dad did they gave me the greatest gift on earth which is they banned me from watching them and that meant that when i watched them yeah they were mine they belonged to me they were truly subversive not just because of what i was seeing but because it had to be a secret and that's so important you know i love that i love yeah um let's get back to Guildford then in the family home.

12:03Your dad was a stockbroker in the city and your mum, I think, was a teacher who became a headmistress in the end. So outwardly, very straight-laced, really. Yeah, yeah. And then they sent you away to school. We've got quite a lot of crossover in our lives, Marcus. We're only a year apart. And I never know what language to use because I didn't feel... Did you feel like you were sent away? I was a bit older than you when I went. I was seven and, you know, my mum had been five when she went because she was a military family. Yeah, yeah. And my dad had been seven and went to the same school that my granddad had been to.

12:40So there was a lot of sort of there's that. No, I didn't feel like I'd been sent away and I didn't worryingly, I didn't feel sad. I should have had I felt sad. I'd have not had a lot of the problems that then came along afterwards. Why do you say that? Because that would have been an honest response to what was happening. So you were already bolting on the armour. Yeah, and what happened for me was I'd had suspected celiac disease when I was very, very young. And the test in those days for celiac was they had to force a tube down your throat and lower a sort of device into your gut to cut a piece of the stomach lining out, which they could then test that was all there was for cd yeah i couldn't digest anything basically and so i had these very traumatic spells in hospital and when i came out they uh i had a very restrictive diet very restrictive i could only eat a few things and when i ate and kept the food down uh that was greeted with huge fanfare and so everybody went oh brilliant oh that's wonderful so food and i had this magic relationship if you eat well you that's your approval right there and actually everybody has that weaning will do that for everybody you know right that's good boy well done if you then you can have right all of that perfectly normal so mom and dad did nothing wrong it's important to to say that but i i went to school with a relationship with eating that was already a mess and so instantly food was a massive comfort and I in my mind's eye for years I thought I was fat forever and I looked back at the pictures when I started at boarding school when I was seven I was just a normal looking kid and then by the end of year one you can see it starting by the end of the second year there I was the fattest kid in every school picture from three years on you'd look at that picture you'd see me because i was taking up twice the space of any other kid and and the truth is and not just at boarding schools you just can't be that fat it doesn't matter if everyone around you is really kind and they weren't you just can't be that fat you can't it's it feels dreadful you're wearing shame you're literally wearing this great big wobbly ugly heavy slowing thing that you just carry around with you and the reason I say you're wearing shame is not that anybody else was shaming me but because I knew it wasn't right what was happening and so at night alone I would think whatever I'd said during the day I would think well that's I mean that's it now I'm I am done now with that because today I ate from a bin or I ate someone else's food without asking them and you know like I really it was oh god that's bad that's yeah that's the end now thank I'm glad that happened because that's the end but I woke up the next morning with no more ability to stop that behavior than I'd had the night before the night before I was alone and and maybe could make sense of it but i had no tools right so i'd wake up and the cycle would begin again and so addiction for me uh was absolutely baked into who i was by the time i was 10.

16:13it's an absurdly early age it is and yet it's not that uncommon i mean interestingly if as i have you talk to people who've had a problematic relationship with drugs, alcohol, any other substance or process. Ask them about their eating, if they can remember. A great many of them will tell you, yeah, yeah, I had long periods of really uncontrolled eating or periods of absolute control or purging. Really, really normal for addicts to find food first. And that's what happened for me. And then, of course, by the time I was old enough to find drugs and alcohol, they were a blessed relief from the emotional pain that I was in from the eating which was so out of control and did people see the pain or did they just see the size um no they did I mean bless them you know like mum and dad they they never gave up I think that the thing with boarding school is is hard because I think people outside and even people inside you know look at it and go what yeah And certainly when my eldest son turned seven, I had a really tough time with my parents.

17:25I was like, wait a minute. What? I was that. So small. Yeah. It's just literally physically small. Teeny, tiny little people. And you think, what were you doing? Yeah. But what they were doing was absolutely the best thing they could think of. The best thing that had been shown to them. And, well, in my case, it was better than anything that had been shown to them. They were giving me the golden ticket that my dad and mum never had. Yeah. And they'd act with kindness. I mean, those visits, you know, I don't want to paint a sort of Dave Pelzer version of my... Well, you know, I say things like that sometimes, and I didn't go through what you went through, but you're a kid and you're in agony.

18:08So it doesn't matter whether you're in an orphanage in Kiev or whether you're in a private school in Surrey. It's agony. Agony's agony. Yeah, it's true. And the thing that happened really quickly, actually, was because I was fat, I was no good at any of the sports. I could swim. I was pretty good at swimming. But I really was no good at any of the sports. They sort of leaned me against people in rugby. And I was helpful then, apart from that. But the only visit was then. It was Saturday afternoon. And mum and dad would come and see you do sport, right? And that was quite fun for most of the kids.

18:46It's not all. But when you're sort of huge and you're having to squeeze into these little shorts and waddle around after a ball and no one wanted me, you know, they'd pick the team and I'm the last one because I was fat and hopeless. And so mum and dad would watch me fail. And I knew, of course I knew. And then because I was unhappy and it was unaddressed because I just was hiding it with everything, all the academics had gone to shit as well. so then they'd sort of come in the classroom and see the board with my name on it with all these marks saying how badly i was so their visits became this sort of well you know dude you know do do your best boy and you know they would they try they kept trying to help but the central thing was unaddressed because no one knew how to fix it were there any with any relief i mean yes what But were you good?

19:42Tons. Loads of mates. Oh, good. Yeah, tons of mates. Good, good friends. And I had a, we laughed. We laughed so much and did silly, funny stuff. And I was already funny. They liked, you know, there was a science teacher who had a particular rhythm to his speech. And he would say in absolute exasperation, big stock, will you listen? and that became a thing that myself and my friends would do as we walked around the school big stock will you listen and stuff like that and i could you know it's fairly standard for people like me but i could do most of the teachers and if i couldn't do them if i couldn't do their accent i could do something physical about them i could see all those things comes up quite a bit this so mimicry before you've developed your comedy bones mimicry is funny in and of itself people love it especially i guess because you talk about it being a normal gift but for those of us who don't have it it's like alchemy yeah it's magic it is magic and it felt it felt so good it always felt like the best thing i could do and you know i was i think that that instant feedback thing i mentioned stand up before when you feel very ashamed all the time and you feel all the things i was feeling about being so not just fat but so out of control with food which involved a lot of stealing and stuff which is really shameful whether you sort of morally connect with it or not it's really shameful that instant feedback of i've done this and you have laughed i know you get me i know you understand who i'm being right now i love that straight away and actually the a lot of the teachers liked it i had a shit headmaster who one of the punishments he brought to bear against me was that he prevented me from being in the school plays as a punishment and with hindsight i mean at the time i thought yeah well you know i've been caught and i've done this this is but with hindsight fairly soon afterwards i was like oh man that was the only thing that was the one thing i was really good at there wasn't anything else you know um that's a cruel and unusual punishment yeah yeah i think i yeah i don't know i try more and more i mean nothing nothing will make you forgiving and empathetic which i think is a very good thing uh more quickly than raising kids into adulthood yeah just realizing this is a this is always a series of joyful managed failures.

22:28Were you beaten? I don't think you were beaten. I was beaten. Oh, you were beaten. I was beaten. By him? But, no, because the ban on staff beating kids had come in about a year before I started, but there was no ban on senior boys beating younger boys. I was still getting beaten by the headmaster. I'm only a year older than you. Yeah, well, but that can't have gone on for much longer. It went on until about 80... Well, this is not really the thrust of the year. No, sure, but it's interesting to get... Let's get the numbers right. If he was breaking the law. So you're talking about prep school still?

23:01Prep school, yeah. So seven to 13. So I was there, 85 I was still getting. 84. Really? I was still getting being in 84. My understanding was that it was illegal in state schools, but that private schools weren't regulated by the legislation. Yes, that might be right. Which is fucking insane, right? That is... That's really crazy. And I would say, I mean, the version that I had... Yeah. which was 13 year old boys beating me when I was eight. No, I never heard that. That's insane. While a teacher watched. Whoa. Has a dimension to it that I think is very grim and very bleak. Doesn't it? Yeah, awful.

23:39I just explored, I'm slightly older, but the dynamic is explored in If, the Lindsay Anderson film that I suspect resonates with you in all sorts of ways. It does. When I watched that film for the first time, I was like, yeah, that's it. Absolutely identical. Absolutely identical. You weren't exaggerating because, I mean, I think you were expelled from three schools. But when you say, originally for burning down goalposts, which makes perfect sense in the context of one of the things you've just explained. But you say when you were old enough to discover alcohol and drugs. I mean, that's an arguable term of phrase.

24:14You were quite precocious. Yeah, yeah. I started drinking when I could, which is very, very infrequently. But at about 12 and then drinking a lot as soon as I went to senior school, because at 13, it was not hard for me to get alcohol. Right. By stealing it. I was really, really good at shoplifting by then. Really good at it. So much so that as an amends, I made a very, very significant. uh i won't tell you the figure but i made a very significant contribution to the independent shopkeepers association charity uh as an adult because i could i mean i couldn't quantify how much i'd stolen or from where sure um but i uh i there was an amazing story so i hosted um an awards ceremony as a stand-up many many years later uh for the independent shopkeepers and i talked about shoplifting and i said you know blah blah this happens this happens this happens it was getting good laughs and then i said yeah there was a there was a londis on the bridge at bruton in somerset and this bloke stood up went that's my shop no and i was able in front of all of these people to apologize to him in person and say man i am so sorry for what i did good so sorry It hadn't been his shop when I looked after it.

25:39There you go. When I used to steal from it. But nonetheless, the apology was in the right place. That's incredible. And were you, I mean, did the stealing itself provide an addictive adrenaline rush? Or were you simply stealing to get drunk? No, I didn't like it. I didn't like stealing. So more shame then? More shame. And it's terrifying. It's really scary to steal. I mean, there is, being as honest as I can be about it, there is a rush when you've got away with it of like, wow, you know, I beat the system. But not one that I identified clearly enough to make me go, I want to ever steal for my own sake.

26:22I stole because I was out of control. And how drunk would you get? As drunk as I could. So either ran out of booze or passed out. there was no it was exactly the same as food as soon as i found it alcohol i mean as soon as i found it i i used it to its capacity and it was the same with eating and no teachers no one kind of noticed or yeah very occasionally but you became a master of occasionally they'd spot it like i wasn't habitually drunk because it was hard enough to get alcohol but you know I mean when I did I really went for it and actually the the friends who sort of came with me on it were the ones I think it caused much more immediate damage to because I was I'd become very used to being drunk by the time I was 14 15 I was used to it I could do all sorts of things whilst drunk right as in go get through school i mean you could get your homework done yeah i could have a yeah i could have a conversation with you gosh um and then drugs or around the same time proper drugs as well yeah not just smoking a bit of weed well weed was uh weed was sort of the main thing and then solvents were free effectively other drugs were complicated to get sure not necessarily that hard especially when i lived in devon um it was weirdly easy uh i have no idea why exeter did what it did but uh i don't know but yeah solvents which i mean i'm lucky i'm incredibly lucky in so many respects in my life i've had so much help from so many people but i'm lucky to be able to do what i do and have coherent thoughts because i abused solvents for quite a long time that's no fun and until i passed out too i mean it's the death of however many million brain cells in a single go so i don't have much experience of that and any experience i do have is second hand and i remember seeing people in in in in i mean in quite a seriously already a seriously bad condition using plastic bags to sniff glue in bus shelters and things like that and I can't quite conceive of it in a middle class environment I can't quite, where would you do it?

28:44Would people see you do it? Would you hide when you do it? I tried to bring a few mates along with me with that and they didn't because it's grim That's what I mean really It doesn't feel good I mean it's a big rush and if you're in the sort of mess I was in then it, I mean it works and it works very quickly As in oblivion? As in oblivion. Oblivion comes really quickly with it. So my friends didn't... But I'm just trying to think if I was secretive about it. I suppose I was a little bit secretive about that. Just because no one really wanted to come with me, you know.

29:28So, I mean, you're now an alcoholic, effectively. And you're taking drugs, solvents. you've hit 20 stone by the time you're 14 i think yeah so the eating never stopped even as all the other stuff no i had one intervention from one of these then they now do terribly well online um a sort of wellness an early version of one of these wellness hucksters who did a thing called applied kinesiology i think it's called that where you hold a a test tube with an amount of lemon in it and then you sort of arm wrestle with them and they say you're allergic to lemons right and then you have another one with chocolate in it and then they say you're allergic to chocolate and it's um absolute dangerous hokum and so when i was about 14 before the last expulsion i had a about i think about a six stone weight loss okay uh so when i went close to being a normal weight and was much celebrated around the school these kids were were amazingly supportive and sort of prefects would go uh go that thing you're doing um that's well done that's good and it was a my god it was amazing and of course completely unsustainable because i had this brand new diet which was me down to about sort of six things that i could eat and it worked for a spell and then it then when it stopped working it it stopped so badly and the weight went back on dangerously fast and yeah but that was the only interruption and mum and dad were trying the whole time to help i mean they took me to great ormond street this awful guy awful awful he put me on lithium when i was 14 which you know these days they prescribe lithium reluctantly for people with very severe depression yeah he put me on it and he would take it in turns he'd either send my parents out of the room or me and off across two occasions i think they were the last two times we saw him uh he threatened to have my jaw wired shut and he'd say my parents they'd say you know they can do that we they can literally wire your jaw shut if you don't stop this and i mean i don't know maybe he's someone who felt he was out of options and i needed a scary threat or something but i mean it didn't work no and it scared me and made me sad and resentful and angry and all of those sorts of things um but it didn't work was there a how conscious were you of of the other you how conscious were you of the you who was not plagued by these compulsions and these addictions and these abuses did you have an idea that's such a that's such a kind question actually that's really the idea because i i i suppose i haven't really thought about that but i was really conscious that there was somebody else that wasn't that wasn't lying to everybody every day and failing to do the thing i promised myself the night before every day you know i knew i also like i knew i wasn't thick but i hadn't been i hadn't managed to achieve anything because everything was in the way every day i was i and my behavior was in the way of achieving even basic academic stuff but i sort of knew um and i knew that stealing wasn't something you know like i think when i got caught they always thought oh it must be because you don't care or you're so arrogant that you think that you can have something that doesn't belong to you but it wasn't true i didn't i didn't think i can just have that and screw you i i just thought in that locked addict mindset i have to have that the desire for that is so powerful that everything else is secondary i was talking to a friend about this just recently and i was saying the curious thing and i've seen it represented in film and sometimes in literature about an addict who's got the compulsion on them that it's represented as something really loud that there's this loud hunger sort of madness it's so quiet yeah it's so quiet and you just go quiet and very focused and the voices that say not today don't do it come on don't steal don't use act out eat whatever it may be they just go even quieter it's like this stillness very focused pure flow activities why so many addicts struggle when they get into recovery is that they don't find a flow activity to make use of those skills they've learned.

34:28You must. Anyone going into recovery, drugs, alcohol, food, porn, anything, find shit you are good at and do that thing a lot because addicts are really good at doing the thing we do. So good at it. Focused, laser sharp activity. Do you know, there's a sort of physical manifestation of that that you see sometimes when you can tell that somebody is going to score. You can see an addict is going to score, and the way that they move is extraordinary. It's like mercury. There's a liquidity to their movements. It's almost as if they're on rails. Their feet are barely touching the ground, and they're in some space I've never been in where they are.

35:11Because I know, like a local addict or something like that, and you can tell because the rest of the time they're completely chaotic and they're a complete mess. But if they're going to score, they've got the money in their pocket and they know it's at the end of the journey there's an extraordinary physical difference in the way it's so practiced yeah and yeah and those other voices are so wow quiet in that moment you know so yeah so so there was all sorts of help offered and and you know people trying and then i ended up in this school in in devon there's been an interesting thing where that's concerned so this was a school where they sent kids the local education authority would send kids who couldn't get a place anywhere else okay right and for the benefit of local schools these were usually kids who sort of did need to be somewhere else yeah but it was also an absolute dumping ground of people with really complex trauma and um undiagnosed you know nowadays uh it would be very easy to see oh there's this this and this happening for these traumatized um kids but very little help was given to us but the reason i say it's interesting is in the last couple of years i've made contact with some people who were at that school and you know some have been exactly the tragedy you might expect but the ones i've managed to make contact with have all said the same thing to me and it's been really helpful they've all said yeah in the best place for me and at the time i was so angry and so like every day was this painful mess and then realizing okay well what were the other options and there really weren't any yeah there really weren't any so that's been an interesting sort of change of of of focus and then a guy a guy who my parents knew saw me when i was about 15 and he said to my mum he'd been in 12 step recovery and he said to my mum i don't think he's ready yet but when marcus is ready here's my number give me a call 15 yeah when i was about 15 and she was like yeah all right and uh then about two and a half years later when all of the wheels had come off everything she thought well i better i better give this plug a ring and she described what was happening and she said is that what you meant and he went yeah yeah yeah and then and that was that and uh you know the next thing i knew i I had to be sectioned because they couldn't get me into the recovery center that I needed to be in because I was still under 18.

37:46So I had lawyers had to get involved to get me in there. And then at 17, I went for I was about 24 stone then. And I went to 11 stone in about nine months. I lost 13 stone. That'll change. Yes, it will change. But healthily. yes very healthily i went to three meals a day no sugar no white flour i was too rigid with it this is partly rehab begins in rehab yeah and you know it was very very rigid and i would not i still do three meals a day and i don't snack and stuff you know just to keep my life simple but um and i don't eat sugar because it's because the effect is so immediate you know so um but it yeah I mean it was really quick and and I was helped a lot and I addressed lots and lots and lots of the painful stuff that had been going on for me and also got honest about all of the things I'd done I mean there was not a single secret left which is the way 12 steps isn't it that is the way if you are trying to get well from a pattern a cycle of addiction and you have any secrets from anybody that matters in your life you won't you won't get through it you have to it all has to go out there I don't know that I've ever met anyone who has been through this so early in life I've met people who've been through this but not yeah in such a sort of fast forward and and and junior version oh it was it was amazing and it definitely saved my life and I literally yeah it literally saved my life I mean not not just because I'd had a couple of somewhat half-hearted attempts to take my own life but they were you know like all of those they were a bit of sort of luck luck versus design kind of thing um but i mean just what i was doing would have killed me there's no doubt but i did i did realize um a lot of years later that it i have to be careful how i phrase this but in its way it's a little bit like chemotherapy in that it get the the that chemotherapy and radiotherapy will get rid of the thing that's attacking you right but they do have side effects and the side effects for me of needing to do so dramatically what i did were that once again the entire world i inhabited all of my friends that had to finish i had to not see any of those people anymore i had to move house again i had to keep company really only with people who were much much older than me whose lives were very different i was 17 18 years old you know uh and i had to watch every part of my behavior to look out for shortcomings in decision making and be accountable for all of those things because to not do that as an addict in early recovery especially is so dangerous if you you know if you allow your your human shortcomings to get the better of you you'll end up in a spiral of shame and all of that and you will act out again and you know where that leads you just do so i had to have this super accountable very adult life and a lot of it was fun still sure but it took me years i mean a couple of decades to to realize oh yeah that even even that wonderful thing that happened was in and of itself another trauma it was another thing that was really difficult for me um none of which really strikes people listening as the most obvious apprenticeship for a career in comedy and yeah it definitely is it definitely is man i mean yeah just the honesty and the um that thing that's that all the stand-ups who i love have which is uh skin as thick as a rhinoceros and also at the same time absolute vulnerability yes both things are true at once it's the same with status as a comedian you are always the highest status person in the room and the lowest at the same time you're the clown on the floor rolling around making silly noises begging them to laugh at you and you're also up there going listen to me and pay attention i've thought about this more than any of you have i am there is a little hiatus here though which i've mentioned it a couple of times in recent interviews because you have to rely on ai has made things worse not better if if a lie about you or a falsehood about you gets into the official version oh yeah yeah i could easily end up presenting it during this interview as one of the nuggets of my extensive extensive research i don't think that's the case here but i also mentioned that there are quite a few crossover points in our lives just sort of biographically i think i was at the ministry of sound at about the same time that you were there but i wasn't on a bloody podium ah yes well uh yes or if i was i was soon pushed off it so the ministry of sound when it first opened yeah i was Had no liquor license, remember?

43:08Yeah, I do. And those were, I mean, that's really because everybody, bar me and my best pal who had heart condition, everyone else was on drugs as far as I knew. But it was a particularly good place for me because no liquor license. I liked that. And also, I'd just lost 13 stone. So my body was this brand new thing, brand new. And I'd never felt like that before when I was 18. 19 years old and so dancing felt it didn't just feel like oh this feels good because i like this music for me it was a state of pure ecstasy weirdly and everyone else was like yeah with a couple of pills i can get there i was like yes from the moment i walked in and eyes wide like i looked absolutely like i was off my nut and i would dance and dance and dance with huge exuberance I took up a lot of space hence climbing up onto the podium and I liked how showy offy that was because I was not drunk and I was not high I was not even particularly interested in meeting anybody I just liked moving and being on a podium meant I could do it more and then I got uh one of the dance crew at ministry came up and said do you want to be want to be one of our dancers and I was like um yeah obviously yes yeah straight away yes so then i was that and i danced there and limelight and equinox and a few other places did you feel beautiful uh did i feel beautiful yes i think i did i yeah i mean i was still i was still kind of i had a really complicated relationship with my body So I wouldn't go top off very much, not least because I had a lot of loose skin.

45:07You know, I mean, I was lucky I was young enough that there was some elasticity there. So I wouldn't go completely top off. But yes, I think I did feel beautiful. I certainly. I certainly felt something I hadn't really felt before, which was a really pure state of joy. joy and it that did seem to go hand in hand with um with what the people taking mdma particularly were experiencing and so i found it very easy just to be to be amongst them uninhibited yeah and the few that i would speak to could never believe that i hadn't taken anything but i'd stay i'd stay till it shut at eight in the morning you know so

45:59and what was what was happening here was this oh here i am finally this is who i've always been and now i'm free or was it more complicated than that it was a bit complicated because you know i'd left school with nothing and no qualifications but it didn't take me very long to go okay oh that one's fixing right and i went off um there's an amazing red brick college as you leave london on the a4 uh opposite the beautiful artist studios on the talgarth road there's a red college there and i went and you know there are this studios because of the windows the amazing windows beautiful beautiful windows that look out across six lanes of the a4 nonetheless the light the light streams in and they're still artist students um so i went to that college and i i thought well i better i did a performing arts course i thought i better do an a level at night school just so i've got one bit of paper that will show look if pushed i can do this and um and that was sort of the beginnings of a plan i'd been i'd been dancing i'd been i'd done a year at drama school and i'd worked on an oil rig as well for a bit um just sort of the opportunity came up so i went and did it and it was a good way of making money and then i was so what were you doing on an oil rig well uh this features in in my most recent show actually i was officially a deckhand right uh so i the rig was in the chromaty firth they pulled the exploration rigs in and they fix them up when they've been knackered out in the North Sea and they fix them up and then when they're all fixed up they tow them back out to sea but it won't surprise you to learn that everyone who works on an oil rig much prefers being in a firth than they do being in the North Sea so one of my jobs was banging I was sent out with a length of metal pipe to bang things during the day for a couple of hours at a time so that the port authority would believe we were still working on our rig and needed to be uh within within range of the land meanwhile presumably there were other rigs queued up outside waiting to be towed in uh so i genuinely i was sent out banging but i sort of came into my own when they sent me ashore to do the shopping that i was i was i was exactly as good at working on an oil rig as you'd expect from my tone of voice okay not great yes however when they put me in charge of the domestic uh dealings of the rig i excelled because they you know the guys on the rig we were down to a fairly minimal crew and they were used to crew food out at sea but the budget for an oil rig to buy food remains the same whether there's half a crew or a full crew so i took the credit card and the boat and went ashore and did the shopping and instead of coming back with the cheapest mince you could turn into mince and tatties for everyone i bought best end of scotch beef and an entire wheel of smoked scottish cheese so they were like right that's it you don't work outside anymore you do the shopping mate i went okay fine fine um and things move quite quickly now don't they so um you went to bristol but I think it was there that a friend said you're funny you've obviously got the performance thing as we've established what one of the some of the moments of joy in your early life were when you made other boys laugh and your friendships clearly were built upon laughter even if there was so much misery elsewhere in your life so there is for all the trauma that we've discussed there is a sort of inevitability to yeah to what happens next and it needs a degree of self-belief which interests me because it's hard to know where that would have come from given what you've been through well I think there's a combination probably of whether whether private boarding school works for you or not it gives the thing that goes in you yeah is the absolute certainty that the things you want to make happen you just sort of probably can yeah i mean rachel uh my wife she even wrote a stand-up routine about us trying to book a barging holiday and me saying yeah we'll do that we should do that she said but but can you drive a barge and i and i said yes i should think so which is exactly the attitude boris johnson adopted to be prime minister this is precisely why people like me should not be in westminster because you know it's a short step from i imagine i can do that to uh yeah to boris johnson so yes so there's that but then there's also the you know what rehab and all of what i'd had to do to do that which was i had to work so hard and face down really difficult stuff and and so not a great deal has scared me since then of course i knew like again you know i say this mindful that a great many people's lives are infinitely more difficult than mine but remember so well when i went into rehab i was good friends with someone in there and she was told by one of the counselors quite rightly by the way look if you're not here to recover if you're not ready if you think you've more in you you've got to go back out there and do it again that's how it works you can't have people who are not there to do it of course and what that's meant to do is make you go no i'm done with it and i'll look at all the reasons why i'm done with it and she went i'm not sure i am done with it and she was 31 and was dead within a week god and you know she it just yeah it just it just took no time for her and i was 17 and so i you know and she wasn't the only one one of my closest friends relapsed and he'd bless him he'd been a drinker and drug taker for so long and he went and got antabuse which is the a pill you can take that will make drinking very painful it'll make you very ill if you drink and he was taking antabuse he knew it was coming and he was trying to stave it off and he was taking antabuse and he arrived at my house and he was taking antabuse taking the pills with whiskey oh god and when you see someone just that gone and that out of control i mean you know that's what i mean about that time in my life being amazing transformative and i will forever be grateful for it but also really traumatic and so i'd seen a lot of that stuff and so to some degree the idea of i'm gonna make you laugh now and uh if you don't i sort of know I'm going to be okay.

52:59I will just be all right. I have a different context for this from you. What's the worst that can happen? Yeah. Yeah. And what that actually meant was they did laugh every time. Because like an uncle at a wedding dancing, if you're having a good time, you look great. It's infectious. You just look great, you know. It's fascinating to me. SNL just started as we record this. And I'm so excited. It's so great that this is happening. It's so brilliant. and when i look at the the cast in that doing this live show i've just seen the the first one you can see the ones who've got the internal glee they all will have they're all brilliant i think but the ones who've got the internal glee that i had the internal feeling of like this is so great and it was the same feeling as being on the podium just pure the joy of it and people can't take their eyes off you.

53:54They can't take their eyes off you. That's the beauty of it. And that explains this momentum that kicks off pretty much, well, you haven't even finished your degree when you become a full-time comedian. You then move through all of the things that people will know you from, some of which we've touched on, the sort of staples of Radio 4, the Giles Wembley Hog, the late edition on BBC 4. I mean, you turn, and doing some serious writing and doing some West End acting and some serious acting and some comedy acting. I mean, do you just sort of exercise much editorial control in deciding what you're going to do next?

54:27Not with regards to the stand-up shows? Or do you just... You're like a kid in a sweet shop. My mum got me a framed print that says well, yes. And I opened it and I was a bit quizzical and she said, that's you on the phone to anyone. That's lovely. And I went oh yeah, it is, isn't it? They go would you be interested in playing barnum right and and i went um well yes and i did and so i had to do every night a 10 meter tightrope walk and i'm i'm the wrong age height weight and all those things but i did it because um well yes sure so now i don't exercise a great deal of um editorial control over it all not least because almost all of it i think are you kidding yeah me yeah yes please yeah i love it the stand-up always and the you know the sketch and character stuff that i've always done with that that takes a lot of thought a lot of consideration yes and i'm in it now i'm in the process the new show is called throwing sheep and it's about the beginnings of attention economy and the beginnings of surveillance capitalism so you may remember on facebook we could poke each other poking that was a thing you could also do you remember throwing a sheep no i don't okay so before we all knew what the attention economy was you could poke people on facebook and you could say why did you poke me and someone would say well i don't know because you can i just wanted your attention you could also throw a sheep at someone which was just a bit bigger than poking them and it was a cute sheep it wasn't we're not talking about an act of violence here it was a cute sheep that went meh and you i threw a sheep at you i vaguely remember and it was yeah it was before the developers of facebook knew what they were doing they didn't know that we were about to move into the most valuable commodity on earth not being oil even when there's a war being our attention yeah they didn't know but they figured out really quickly that if i could poke you and you don't do anything and then throw a sheep at you then you'd do something you go hey you threw a sheep at me now we're chatting now we're chatting that was as far as i can tell the beginnings of a fascinating terrifying cycle and my belief is my belief is that with all the things everything because i'm still you know i don't i mercifully I don't have to be as politically and news engaged as you have to be.

57:13I choose to look away quite a lot of the time now because it's too much. However, I'm still in my heart a news junkie, really. And my belief is until we regulate tech in a meaningful way, things can only get worse. Our democracy can only get worse until we have meaningful regulation of tech. because it is tearing at the absolute foundations of who we are to each other of what we are to facts of what our children are capable of of being i have an adult son who's who's 23 who i know because i've checked won't mind me telling you he's he's hot in generation one of the there you go there's a smartphone kiddo yeah and then covid at exactly the age where you know they might have been doing other things and they are in the eye of a particular storm without regulation attack.

58:12So that's the focus and the fascination for the new show and I'm in the research bit of it at the moment going sweet mercy, how am I going to make this one funny? But I will find a way. That's a good feeling. It is a good feeling, yeah I like it. Are you still touring Vitruvian Mango? Just, just. so you're now on that I don't know what the word would be so you've got one just coming up and one just coming down yeah yeah so that's how it works you know uh as I I can't do I know Stuart Lee's always been amazing about writing the next show while he's doing the one he's doing uh I don't yeah I can't quite manage that but yeah Vitruvian Mango's been amazing I mean it's sort of the louis through um uh documentary about the manosphere which has caught so many people's attention um overlaps a lot with what i've been discussing not i haven't really looked very far at the manosphere in my show but at what we as men might be for so all the nice people all the nice men i know have a pretty comprehensive list of things we know not to do right lots of the sort inherited unhelpful patriarchal stuff you might throw it all under the umbrella of don't do much for a woman unless she's asked you to uh that would be one thing um one way of looking at but there's quite a list of what not to do as a man not much of a list of where are we helpful where are the things that make me a man not not being an ally to uh my feminist wife for example which I happily am but what as a man with the chemicals that swim around inside this body, what's useful and good for me?

1:00:04So that's what Vitruvia Mango has been all about. I'm so bad at making my show sound like anything other than a very tedious lengthy TED talk but I promise it's funny. It's really really funny. Honest. Yeah. I mean given what we said about how you pick and choose or don't pick and choose what the next project is going to be. I like this idea of parallel two trains really running down two different tracks the stand-up which you take and you mentioned Stuart so you take it very seriously yes you have to and Stuart is kind of the person that introduced me to that concept of taking it very seriously while also being hilarious but then you've got this other career which is you know everything else in a way yeah did have you ever had formal ambitions on either train track have you ever thought I want to do that or I want to get this or I'd love to have a go at that?

1:00:55Like boxes that you want to tick or things that you want to try? Well, not so much in terms of a grand idea, but yes, in terms of individual projects, absolutely. So I wrote a play that I was really proud of called The Red about someone in long-term recovery from alcoholism dealing with the inheritance of a magnificent wine cellar from his father which is a bit close to home which is extremely close to home my dad who's who's just a wonderful wonderful man really enjoys wine knows about it and one of the great joys of my life has been seeing him express his boundless generosity to his friends and family through wine and it is a joy it's a lovely lovely thing to see and i have only very occasionally felt on the outside of it because of where i was yeah uh but it was an interesting thing because his cellar and he does literally have a cellar and it's beautiful they're terracotta uh wine bins with all of these wines and he will tell you with great enthusiasm about many of them and you know uh so i wrote a play about that which i was really proud of um but all the writing that i do that isn't to be immediately performed is much more difficult right because i if i if i left here now right and you said in three hours time you've got to come back with something yeah to make you and everybody here at global laugh brand new thing i could go off and do that wouldn't be long it might not be brilliant but i could go often do it because i know there's the deadline of me having to perform it and i i just get that but having to create outside of that is much more difficult much more difficult for me and that's how i've always done it i book my tours my edinburgh shows and my other things long before i've finished the show then you have to finish the show it's perfectly reasonable trick um final question can you think of a point during that just because it was relatively speedy doesn't i don't know but nobody listening is going to think that it was easy by any stretch of the imagination but i'm we haven't talked much about them you just brought your dad up at the end i was struck by the idea of your mum taking on board what her friend said about the 12-step program and it's still being in her mind two and a half years later what was there a moment where you can remember your mum and dad relaxing and thinking he's okay now yeah not yet yeah yeah yes I totally can I totally can I mean they when I was at Bristol uni so I'd gone to Bristol and uh they'd said to me when I did my interview you won't get halfway through your degree and quit will you because I'd said I really like comedy I'm really into comedy and I went no and they went because we've just lost one to that you know this guy matt lucas and i laughed and i went yeah but he's matt lucas right he's matt lucas he's brilliant he's amazing two two years later i had a tv show and i was like i'm so sorry none of us could have seen this happening however i had promised my parents when i went to bristol um that i would get a job and actually i did i did get a job weirdly and i was sort of doing bits and pieces but they wrote to me and they said oi you you said you'd get a job and the support we're giving you is going to stop and i wrote to them and i said this comedy thing i promise you there's something in it i promise you and just so you know i'm doing it in every waking moment that i have where i'm not doing my academic studies i was with danny robbins and Dan Tetzel who again I mean you talk about luck I met two of the best writers and performers too but particularly best writers far better than I've ever been able to and we as a as a team started making stuff together so I wrote to mum and dad and I said this is a thing that's happening and they said okay well if you say it's happening then fair enough and then I went to Edinburgh at the end of that first year and i won the bbc new comedy award and it was on it was live on tv and then and then that was it and they went uh i think they genuinely went yeah that makes sense i think that makes sense yeah yeah and bless them they love what i do they love it unless they actually see it in which case they sort of go oh oh right gosh well done darling gosh how do you remember all that no they loved actually they really loved Petruvian Manga they came to this show and loved it so yeah Marcus Brickstock thank you thanks man so nice

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