13

Men Are Good at Directions

JEREMY: What, so you’re going to marry her out of embarrassment?

MARK: There are worse reasons.

Peep Show, written by Sam Bain
and Jesse Armstrong, Series 4

I’m dancing with Princess Leia in Leicester Square.

I think, ‘Considering we’re completely lost and I’ve no idea what to do next, this is all going quite well.’

A few hours before, Jo, the deputy stage manager, popped her head around my dressing-room door. I’m playing Bertie Wooster in an adaptation of The Code of the Woosters at a West End theatre. The curtain goes up in twenty minutes and Jo usually nips in to tell me how we’re selling tonight and any other bits of housekeeping. She usually finds me pacing up and down, shouting my opening lines and looking slightly ill.

I say, ‘Hello, m’love. What’s the news?’

‘Hi Rob, all good. Nice, full Saturday night. All three levels open and busy.’ She looks through her notes with a secretive grin. ‘Nothing else . . . oh yes, Stephen Fry’s in tonight and he’s bringing a couple of guests.’

‘Stephen . . .’

‘And the guests are his boyfriend Elliott and . . . let me see . . . oh yes, Carrie Fisher.’ I stare at her.

‘So that’s just Stephen, Elliott and Carrie. And then they want to come round after and take you to dinner. Have a good show!’ She does an evil cackle and goes.

And that’s it, really. One minute you’re graduating from Cambridge and the next you’re playing to a full house in the West End which happens to include Stephen Fry, Stephen Fry’s soon-to-be-husband Elliott Spencer and Stephen Fry’s pal, Carrie Fisher.

Actually, I might have skipped a few years. This is 2014 so, to be exact, the number of years I’ve skipped is nineteen. Anyway, a simple nineteen years later . . .

It’s a great part in a great show and I’ve been doing it for weeks. It ought to go well and it does. I change quickly and peer out of the window. The route to the stage door at the Duke of York’s is dimly lit, but I’d recognise Stephen’s silhouette from orbit. Behind him, a young man and a shorter, older woman. Bloody hell!

And here they are in my room. I’ve met and even worked with Stephen by now, but it’s still surreal to have a TV hero moving around in 3D. He gives me a burly hug and tells me what I did on stage was ‘fucking masterful’. Elliott is reserved and charming. He loves comedy and was at school when Peep Show started. I get the impression the 3D thing is happening to him so I’m on my best behaviour. You mustn’t let them down: none of Stephen’s generation let me down. Dawn French could piss in my trifle and I’d tell her that’s exactly what my trifle was missing.

And here is Ms Fisher, five foot one inch in dark glasses, shaking my hand and heading for the window to smoke a fag. She says she loved the show and that the four-minute Charleston that we do at the end is ‘The best damn curtain-call I’ve ever seen’. That’s the daughter of Debbie Reynolds talking there, who may have seen a curtain-call or two. So I’m fairly pleased.

Dear reader, I’m going to take a risk and draw back the curtain to show you the crazed old man with the buttons and levers. Books take ages and the first draft of this chapter was written in the spring of 2016. At that point, Carrie Fisher was alive and well, as was Debbie Reynolds. And so were Prince, George Michael and Victoria Wood. Whenever we lost another eighties icon, I felt sorry for those who knew and loved them, but I also have to admit to the guilty thought of an author’s one-track mind. ‘Jesus,’ I thought, ‘the book is sad enough as it is. I’m just sitting here and the book’s getting sadder by the bloody week.’

But I’m going to leave this little story unchanged because it deserves its own innocence. Apart from being about how rubbish I am at directions, it’s all about being present in the present moment. That’s where we care least about what’s around the corner. And quite right too.

I don’t mean to bum you out but . . . we’re all going to die. The thing is, very few of us actually believe it. We look at pictures of people who have died and marvel at the pathos. ‘Ah, there’s Jean all smiling. She didn’t know she’d be dead in three months.’ Well, maybe Jean knew and maybe she didn’t. But what she didn’t do was go around hoping to provide someone else with a satisfying sense of dramatic irony. Nobody lives like that and it’s odd that we do it to the dead sometimes. What I remember of Carrie Fisher was that she was beautifully, singularly alive.

Carrie climbs through the window, perching on the sill and sticking her feet up on the fire escape opposite, with a three-storey drop in between. She’s in London to start filming Star Wars: The Force Awakens and I briefly wonder about Disney/Lucasfilm’s insurance arrangements. What’s going to happen to me if the tiny star disappears out of the window? I give her a light.

By now I’ve been around enough famous people not to waste time trying to be cool. If an actor means something to you – just tell them. Ideally, don’t bugger around with selfies, but by all means say ‘thanks’ if that’s what you feel. I tell her I’m a massive fan of her films and books, and she rewards me with a couple of details about the new Star Wars movies that are so secret I start watching the door in case a Disney hit-squad of armed woodland creatures suddenly barge in to make an arrest.

Stephen has kindly booked a table at a super-duper Italian restaurant in Archer Street, where he plans to treat us all. He, Elliott and my Jeeves co-star, the excellent Mark Heap, head off, with Ms Fisher and me following. Outside, the chaps stride ahead and I quickly lose sight of them.

I’m aware that Carrie, at various stages of her life, has been addicted to more-or-less every harmful substance ever invented and she isn’t exactly one of those fifty-eight-year-olds who’s still leaping around like a gazelle. She takes my arm. Ooh, get me, squiring Ms Fisher around town and nattering about the theatre! This is fantastic.

There’s just one problem. I haven’t got a fucking clue where we’re going.

What have I been doing in London these last nineteen years? What have I been doing, in particular, over the last ten, when my professional life has centred on the theatres, voice-over studios and production offices of Soho and the West End? Why, during those years of under-employment in the nineties didn’t I just sit down with an A–Z and get some of this shit into my head? Why, more urgently, can’t I find my way from St Martin’s Lane to Archer Street without three maps and an American?

It’s my sitcom flaw. What’s the thing about you that you don’t mind being teased about? The thing that makes your friends take the piss but which you privately hope is endearing. Maybe you do a certain face whenever you look in the mirror. Maybe you blow the crumbs off a biscuit before dunking it in tea. Maybe you only buy clothes in one colour which you don’t even like that much.

Me, I just get lost. I get lost frequently and with distinction. I don’t just get lost when walking or driving – I get lost on trains. I can go to the loo on a train and take ten minutes to find my seat again. I haven’t yet got lost on an escalator but it’s only a matter of time.

I can’t remember the name of the restaurant, but vaguely heard someone mention that you get to it via Chinatown. So I continue to talk to Carrie while cluelessly keeping an eye out for lanterns or pointy roofs. Time is getting on; the other guys will now be waiting for us. You might think, ‘Hey, it’s 2014 – just enter “Italian restaurant, Archer street” into your phone, you idiot.’ That, I agree, would have been the rational thing to do. It does, however, assume a reserve of level-headedness that is difficult to find when you’ve got Princess Leia on your arm and you’re keeping General Melchett from his dinner.

Carrie hears the strain entering my voice and says, tactfully, ‘I guess we’re a little lost.’

I say, ‘Yep, I’ve got absolutely no idea where we’re going. Sorry. I’m really shit at this.’

‘No problem, I’ll call Stephen.’

We’re in Leicester Square and she calls Stephen and I call Mark Heap. There’s a salsa band playing just outside Burger King. While we’re waiting for an answer, she takes my free hand with hers and stretches away. I pull away too and then, moving back, I lift her arm, beneath which she does an elegant twirl.

We’re still dancing when she gets an answer message. She yells, ‘Stephen, you asshole! Where the hell are you, you giant prick?’ She then lets go of my hand and pulls her shades up to squint at her phone. ‘Oh my,’ she mutters with amusement, ‘that may have been the wrong Stephen.’

We found them in the end. On the way, I was determined not to panic. I thought: come on, this stuff doesn’t happen. I don’t know if I’m ever going to meet this person again, but I do know that I am never, ever going to have Carrie Fisher all to myself on a balmy evening in the middle of London. At the end of Star Wars, Princess Leia gives Luke Skywalker a smile and a medal. But even Luke doesn’t get to dance with her.

Anyway, this wasn’t getting lost; this was a minor navigational hiccup. To get really lost we’ll need to go back to 1998 and the six days I worked as a truck driver.

*

In 1998 I supposedly live in a flat in London’s Kensal Green with some friends, but in fact I spend most nights with Jenna in London’s Swiss Cottage. The downside is that Jenna shares a flat not only with our friend Sally Watson, but with our friend David Mitchell.

David and I are two years into the business of creating a career in comedy and we do so with the quiet hysteria of the chronically obscure and stonily broke. We write together, we travel together to meetings, we travel back from them, we perform fringe stuff together, we watch TV, we stop watching TV and go to the pub, we walk home from the pub, we say goodnight. He is the first vertical person I see in the morning and the last at night. We’re annoying each other and I’m not helping the situation by living in his flat without paying any rent. But the flat for which I am paying rent seems a long walk away and contains a cat that isn’t house-trained. So I can either live with David, or I can live with a load of piss and shit. He doesn’t seem as flattered by my preference as I might have hoped.

Sally’s boyfriend Richard offers me some work. He’s the warehouse manager of a company that supplies events lighting. For example, if an incredibly wealthy person is having a wedding reception in a marquee in their vulgarly enormous garden, some company will have to supply all the pretty lights, lasers and star-cloths, as well as the less pretty cables and generators. And that company will need someone to deliver all the stuff on time and to the right place. That driver had better know what he’s doing.

That’s where I come in.

Eighty pounds a day. That’s the stupendous and irresistible offer. The twin novelties of having a break from David (while giving David a break from me) and actually getting paid mean there’s nothing to think about. Unfortunately, the thing about decisions where there’s nothing to think about is that they’re usually worth at least a quick think . . . half a think . . . a thought’s-worth, at minimum.

I have a standard driving licence which means that – in 1998 – I’m allowed to drive a seven-and-a-half-ton truck without a moment’s tuition. Yes, that surprised me too.

Outside the warehouse, Richard shows me the truck. You know those massive articulated lorries? Well, it’s like that but slightly shorter and minus the bendy bit at the front. So I guess it’s about ten metres long.

Richard sees the way I’ve gone very still. He offers a bit of cheerful South London reassurance. ‘Yeah, basically just think of it as a very long car. And obviously a bit wider.’ He nods to himself, looking at it. ‘Also quite a lot taller, obviously, so watch out for low bridges!’ He hands me a piece of paper with the delivery address. I can’t help noticing that the last line of it says ‘Gloucestershire’.

The truck is still being loaded. I’m twenty-five and the other company workers are my age or a bit younger. I light a cigarette because I think it will make me look like I’m still working class. After a couple of glances from the lads I stub it out again, having quickly remembered that, when working, a defining characteristic of the working class is doing some bloody work.

I try to help them load the camlocks. What is a ‘camlock’? It’s a two-inch-thick insulated copper power cable. It needs to stretch from the pretty lights where the party happens to the noisy generator, placed as far away from the party as possible. The camlocks are coiled neatly into a large loop and secured with industrial-sized cable ties. If you stood in the middle of such a loop, it would come to the middle of your shins.

I suppose what I’m trying to tell you is that each coiled camlock weighs about as much as your average fridge, assuming your fridge is where you keep all your gold bars.

I try to lift one of the coils but unfortunately this one has been nailed to the floor. I try another, but apparently someone has nailed them all to the floor. One of the lads politely waits for me to get out of the way and then hoists the coil onto his shoulder like it’s made of firmly cooked linguine. I half expect him to drop it onto a hip and stare unsmilingly back at me, doing a hula hoop.

Richard introduces me to Gabe and Jonno, two Australians who will be riding in the cab with me to somewhere in Gloucestershire. They’re both about nineteen: Gabe is square-jawed and muscular, Jonno is rounder and mixed race. A flash of liberal guilt makes me want to ask Jonno if he’s descended from the Wise Aboriginal Peoples but decide this probably isn’t the moment. Gabe says, ‘All right, mate?’ and Jonno says, ‘How y’going, Rob?’ Neither of them is big on eye contact. I reply with a hearty Lincolnshire ‘Now then!’, which slightly baffles them, but I think they get the general goodwill.

Jonno sits near the window with Gabe in the middle. I take the driver’s seat, for – yes – I am the lorry driver. The Yorkie bar that Jenna gave me as a good-luck gift is sticking in my right thigh. We laughed at the time but now it feels like the unwanted lipstick smudge on the cheek of a little boy. I grapple it out of my jeans and chuck it in the door slot. Here be man-time!

Right. Three pedals all in the usual place. Super. Here’s a manual gearstick with most of the numbers still on. Good. This, of course, is a steering wheel. Check. So that’s . . . where’s the fucking handbrake!? Oh I see. The handbrake is this plunger that comes out from the dashboard. And the lights, indicators and windscreen wipers all seem to be operated from stalks coming out of the steering column with no discernible markings. Fuck me, it’s the TARDIS. But the boys are waiting so I almost shout, ‘Righto then, off we jolly well go!’ I’m nervous. I’m veering wildly between Paul Webb and Gussie Fink-Nottle.

I drive carefully out of the warehouse car park and turn left onto Wood Lane. Of course, that involves using the brakes. When you’re driving something heavy enough to crush a Sherman tank you need some quite fierce brakes. Jonno and Gabe are amiably bantering about how the truck is ‘obviously overloaded’ and ‘definitely illegal’. What I was used to with Chesney was sticking my foot down hard and waiting for Chesney to get the idea that I wanted it to slow down. You can drive in absolute safety like this as long as you don’t have to go down hills or around corners.

The truck, however, is fitted with air-brakes. That means the moment your right foot even starts to think about hovering over the middle pedal, the effect is one of slamming head-on into a mountain. ‘Sorry, lads,’ I say, as the three of us bounce around the cab like ping-pong balls in a prize draw. ‘No worries,’ says Gabe, expressionless and looking straight ahead. ‘Air-brakes – total killer.’

I’ve consulted an ancient road map and I’m pretty sure that the next thing that happens is that I turn right onto the A40. At this time, ‘sat-nav technology’ is something that only people with tin hats and every back issue of Conspiracy Tomorrow talk about. ‘Okey-dokey!’ I say with petrified jauntiness as we approach the junction with the Westway. I stop at the lights. I can just make out BBC Television Centre in the distance, a building in which I’m yet to set foot. What the fuck am I doing here? Why doesn’t someone just put me on the telly?

The lights turn green. I stall. I start the engine and we lurch forward and stall again. I reach for a handbrake that isn’t there. Cars behind start beeping. Gabe and Jonno are instantly livid on my behalf. Gabe shouts ‘Fuck off!’ to no one in particular. Jonno winds his window down and sticks his head out. ‘FUCK OFF! He’s doing the best he can!’

I get the truck started again and commit to the turn just as the lights go red. The trick here, I think, as I keep a grip on the steering wheel despite all the sweat, is to go forward and then turn at the last moment. It’s the right idea but I do it half-heartedly and too early. Looking in my wing mirror I can see that on the present trajectory I’m going to take out two sets of traffic lights. The truck stalls again. ‘Think I should reverse and try that again,’ I say, peering at the gearstick and looking for an ‘R’. Gabe is quietly putting his seat belt on. He says, ‘I don’t know if reversing would be altogether wise in this situation, mate.’

I say ‘Quite right’ and put the truck into first and stall. I’m now blocking three, possibly four, lanes of traffic. The cacophony of beeps and horns has left Jonno quite beside himself and he’s now having an actual argument out of the window with another driver.

‘It’s his first day! Of course he doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing! Oh yeah? Well, you come and try if you’re such a fucking genius! You prick!’

Gabe has correctly surmised that the time for respectful silence has passed and that my male pride could now withstand some guidance. He says to me, ‘Just go straight and then give it a hard right turn when I say so.’ I could kiss him. Gratefully, I do exactly as he says, moving the truck straight at the concrete wall of the far left of the road we’re turning onto. ‘Now!’ he says, and I turn the wheel hard to the right as far as it will go. As we turn, Jonno’s side is going to come mightily close to that wall. He reaches out to retract his wing mirror but it’s not that kind of wing mirror. I look out of my own and see I’ve missed the traffic lights by centimetres, but we’re mounting the kerb of the central reservation and crushing a bollard. Jonno winds his window up to avoid the sparks now flying up as his wing mirror makes slow-motion contact with the wall. ‘You doing fucking great, Bob!’ he says. Gabe is smiling too. We clear the wall and straighten up. The beeping stops.

I have successfully made a right turn. I only caused a medium-sized tailback and destroyed one piece of road furniture. Jonno says, ‘Now we’re cooking with gas!’ and turns on the radio. I love these guys.

I got better at driving the lorry but no better at driving it in the right direction. In all, during my lorry-driving career, I took it out six times and got lost twelve times. At least on that first trip to Gloucester and back, I had Gabe and Jonno to navigate. More usually I was on my own, getting lost in Plymouth, getting lost trying to find Spitalfields Market, and on one night, randomly ending up in Cambridge and having to perform a twenty-three-point turn in the car park of Queens’ College.

That first night, coming back from Gloucestershire, the bastard thing even broke down. The three of us spent the night in the cab. Every time I was close to the impossible destination of sleep, Jonno would suddenly remember how annoyed he was and randomly yell, ‘I am so fucking cranky about this!’

*

It’s only called ‘male pride’ when it’s being challenged; the rest of the time it’s just pride. I’m not indifferent to taking pleasure in traditional areas of male competence on the rare occasions that I actually show any.

As part of the writing process for the Footlights Tour Show, the club used to splash out on a writing week in a holiday cottage in Bacton, near Great Yarmouth. One of the best things about the place was a real fire in the front room, and Eddie and I quickly set to work lighting it. We had both watched our fathers do it in exactly the same way. A clean grate, of course, then a layer of tightly scrunched newspaper, on top of which you place a lattice of chopped sticks and then just a few initial lumps of coal. The two of us worked in a reverie of contented silence. We were definitely enacting some kind of rite.

A similarly happy man-based memory comes from Le Touquet in France. It was 1999 and the first time we’d all got just about enough money to have a holiday. Le Touquet was just a stopover on the way south for a week in a villa. As it happened, Jenna and the other women opted for an early night, leaving me, David, Jack and two other friends, Tom and Ellis, to go to a pool bar.

There’s something to be said for exclusively male company from time to time. That might strike you as ridiculous if you are, or you’re close to, a man who prefers male-only company all the time. But for me, playing pool and having a pint in a friendly bar with just ‘the boys’ was fairly novel. We were a mixed bunch anyway. But I’d been relying heavily on Jenna, and Clara before her, to be basically all my friends at once. It’s quite a bad idea.

In the bar, the five of us didn’t suddenly fall into a chauvinistic orgy of braggadocious machismo, and neither did we get more than usually pissed. It was just five blokes enjoying each other’s company. What I really liked was that we were all playing pool as skilfully as possible while not giving the slightest fuck about winning.

How come I had enough money to go on holiday? It’s a two-word answer: Michele Milburn. Two things happened in May 1997: Britain elected its first Labour government in eighteen years and I got an agent. Tony Blair was, of course, extremely popular at this time, as absolutely nobody likes to be reminded. New Agent! New Britain!

Before then, for the two years after leaving college, I’d lived on Super Noodles and toast. I tried to avoid opening letters or answering the phone in case it was the landlord, the bank or the DSS. I was claiming housing benefit and taking whatever part-time work turned up. I worked as an usher in a theatre; I drove a lorry; I worked in a photo-library for a magazine about buildings (that’s Buildings Magazine).

Jenna had a credit card and would occasionally bail me out. I tried to get my own credit card, but was refused. It was the Co-op offering a card to Labour members that turned me down. I must say, I thought that took the biscuit.

The credit report I subsequently ordered made for interesting reading. Fed-up with gang-mastering, Dad had opened a fruit and veg shop in the middle of Woodhall. For some reason he needed me to sign a few papers to get it started, but assured me that it wouldn’t affect me in the slightest way. I vaguely understood I was going to be some kind of sleeping partner in the business. It seemed a painless way of doing him a favour and I’m quite sure he believed what he said. After all, no one starts a business thinking it’s going to end in bankruptcy, even though, in this case, that’s obviously what happened almost immediately.

It was an excellent shop, but a financial failure for two reasons. One was that Dad would undercharge his friends or insist on giving away stuff for nothing. Since he was on first-name terms with about 80 per cent of the village, that was quite a lot of apples. Second, what profit he did make, he immediately spent in the pub. A fine example of a small businessman supporting the local economy. Sadly, the shop went bust and my credit rating fell through the floor.

So it was with a shaking hand that I held the letter that Michele Milburn had sent to the Etcetera Theatre in Camden in 1997. Eddie had come up with the idea of doing a schools tour of a play that was on the A-level syllabus. He found a translation of Molière’s The Miser and cast me in the title role, with himself, David and Colly (Olivia Colman) playing all the other parts. Together with Tom and Charles (a sort of upmarket Gabe and Jonno), who had organised Footlights tours and were also brilliant lighting and sound technicians, we became the Juggling Fiends Theatre Company.

The plan was simple. What you did was, you wrote to lots of private schools that you suspected of having more money than sense. You used headed notepaper and kept mentioning Cambridge University. Charles worked out a budget that would not only allow us all to get weekly wages (money for acting!) but would leave enough cash to fund a four-week run in a small London theatre.

Dear Robert,

I’m sure you already have representation but in case you’re still looking . . .

Michele was an agent at Amanda Howard Associates and Amanda didn’t want me. They came to see me and David doing our first two-man show in Edinburgh and Amanda didn’t want David either. But she reluctantly allowed Michele to take us both on. Michele got us a string of meetings with producers and the part-time jobs started to fall away as we slowly began to earn a living as comedy writers. I started to open letters and answer the telephone. I even got a credit card.

*

By 2002 I was nearly thirty and living with Jenna in a tiny flat in Belsize Park. David and I were writing for other people’s shows and had even been in a sketch show for BBC2 called Bruiser. During a failed attempt to make a team-written sitcom, we’d met and really liked another pair of writers called Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong. They got in touch to say that a producer called Andrew O’Connor had come to them with an idea for a clip show where two flatmates watch TV and misinterpret everything – a kind of live action Beavis and Butt-Head. Sam and Jesse thought it would be cool if we saw everything from the characters’ points of view and sometimes heard their thoughts. The five of us had a meeting and Andrew got some money from Channel 4 to make a fifteen-minute pilot which would be called P.O.V.

*

So the plan I wrote in the diary on my eighteenth birthday is starting to fulfil some of its freakish ambitions. Robinson, yes; find someone funny to work with, yes; Edinburgh Fringe, yes . . . the job is looking up. The life, though: I’m not really thinking about the life. The life is surely fine until somebody tells me it’s not fine. That’s life, isn’t it?

I buy a copy of Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, feeling immediately very pleased with myself that I’m man enough to read a popular book about relationships.

The slight downside to popular books about relationships is that all of them are wrong. Wrong because they all start from the premise of difference: that men and women are so fundamentally, innately, mentally and culturally different that they might as well be considered as two different species from two different planets. If you start from there, you give yourself permission to accept every stereotype you’ve ever heard about men and women. So books like the one mentioned – as well as its imitations with titles like Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps (Orion, 2001) and Why Women Talk and Men Walk – How to Improve Your Relationship without Discussing it (Vermilion, 2007) – are there not to question the different expectations placed on men and women: they’re there to excuse and reinforce them, usually with a truckload of hokey metaphors and dodgy-looking science.

For example, in Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, John Gray suggests that men and women react in different ways to stress. Women want to talk about it with close friends, while men want to go into their ‘cave’, i.e. retreat to the shed or games console. Rings a bell, surely? If the sales of his book are anything to go by, Gray has indeed rung more than fifty million bells.

That’s how you make serious cash at this gender lark. Make a generalisation and then explain it with horseshit theory that lets everyone off the hook. If Gray had a couple more jokes he could be on Live at the Apollo. ‘Men and women, eh? Eh? They’re different, aren’t they? Eh? Why can’t men wrap presents? C’mon, fellas, you know it’s true! There you are, Sellotaping your fingers together! Why can’t we wrap presents? Eh? Ladies! You have to come and do the wrapping for us, don’t you!? Eh? Ladies? You have to do the wrapping. Sometimes, we’ve got you a present and you have to wrap it! I’m saying you have to wrap your own presents! Exactly!’¹

And it seems to Jenna and me, as once again she goes glumly to bed and I stay up with a bottle of wine to play Civilization II for another two hours, that yes, Mr Gray is definitely onto something. I’m not rejecting Jenna – I’m just ‘in my cave’. And when Jenna wants to talk about how our relationship doesn’t seem to be much fun any more, that’s just because she’s from Venus. Luckily, Venusians only want to be listened to; there’s nothing a Martian can actually do to help. In fact, if a Martian tries to ‘solve the problem’ then he’s just showing that he doesn’t get that she’s from another planet. So I make a big show of ‘listening’ because, conveniently, that is now the maximum requirement.

It doesn’t occur to me that the reason why Jenna wants to talk about our relationship is that it really is looking quite peaky. Neither do I consider that, as a girl and then a woman, she has been told about five times an hour that care of personal relationships (wrapping presents, among other things) is her job. I, on the other hand, am quite certain that care of personal relationships is basically none of my business. I wouldn’t know where to start. I mean, I’ll read the stupid book and everything, but the stupid book just gave me a massive pass. So, if you don’t mind, I’ll just do my ‘listening’ and then play Civilization II because that’s precisely what I feel like doing with my time. Men don’t have ‘me time’, you understand: they just have ‘time’. And now, rather marvellously, spending large portions of it alone doing something enjoyable isn’t being selfish, it’s fulfilling the basic psychological needs of my people: the Martians.

Jenna gets a job and goes on tour in a production of Charlotte’s Web. It’s a Theatre in Education tour, which is where you do a show for schools and then follow the performance up with some kind of workshop with the children. It’s an established route for making-it actors to get work and maybe an agent. Given that The Miser was nothing if not a TIE tour, I have absolutely no right to be snooty about Jenna’s job, but I manage to be snooty anyway.

Partly I’m jealous. Almost all the work I’m doing with David is writing. Bruiser had vanished in the same way it had initially surfaced – without a trace. It seemed like we were going to subsist as writers (which was something) but not as actors (which was everything).

Also, even eight years on, the memory of what happens when your girlfriend goes away for weeks on end was still rancid enough to make me feel sick. I completely trusted Jenna not to shag Tony the Techie. But still, even I could see the relationship wasn’t in great shape and the last thing I wanted was for Jenna to break out and Get Some Perspective.

And third, despite The Miser, I was snooty about TIE for the sake of being snooty. I remembered a company visiting QEGS and doing an amazingly shit play for the fifth-years and sixth form about the dangers of alcohol. The shouty but turgid performance of the patronising and humourless play was greeted by the audience of Lincolnshire teenagers with giggling incredulity, replaced gradually by sullen resentment. I’m pretty sure that UKIP recruited about a hundred future voters that day. Typical Metropolitan Elite! Who are these London cunts? Who do they think they are, telling us there’s something wrong with getting smashed on Thunderbird before we go to a barn-dance? One of them has a red-label bottle of Thunderbird as a prop when everyone knows that the blue-label stuff is much stronger. And this bloke – the one doing the workshop – is he even Rik Mayall? He isn’t, is he? He’s an actor from London and he isn’t even Rik Mayall.

Sixteen years old, I was out of my mind with envy. Despite how badly it had all gone, these guys were in their mid-twenties and professional actors. Look at their proper facial hair. Look at the way even Tiffany and Zelda are excitedly waving them off as they get back in their bloody Transit van.

I say goodbye to Jenna as she gets into a Transit van. I decide I need to up my game. What, after all, is the problem? Well, I think to myself, I’ve just turned thirty, and Jenna is about to turn thirty, so she’s probably worrying about children. That’s it! She probably wants to know whether or not I’m going to marry her. Am I going to marry her? Hmm, tough one. Er . . . yeah, why not? Jenna’s great! I mean, it’s not brilliant ALL THE TIME but what relationship is? I’d definitely be sad if we broke up or she died . . . Soooo . . . Yeah! I’ll just ask her to marry me. That should do the trick.

My friend Ellis is well travelled and I ask him to suggest a romantic city where I might pop the question on an away-break. He says ‘Milan’. Cool. Milan, then. This’ll show her! Sure, it’s been a bit nothing-y lately, but once we get married and have children, that’s when the romance really starts, my friend! This is where it gets romantic!

Jenna comes home in a break from the tour. We’re walking on Primrose Hill and I drop a heavy hint about how she shouldn’t make any plans for the next weekend . . .

She bursts into tears and moves in with her mother.

It didn’t cross my mind that she would say no. I don’t know whether to be relieved or annoyed that she said no before I’d even asked the question. It turned out that she had indeed Got Some Perspective on tour, but I think she was well ahead of me anyway. She told me that she’d been waiting for me to ask her for a long time, but that the moment I did, she realised it wasn’t something she wanted any more.

That day, we go to the pub and I make lots of soothing noises about how she probably just needs to have a proper think. I’m still kidding both myself and her. I won’t need to cancel the flights to Milan because I didn’t book them.

She doesn’t move out straight away. There’s a surreal limbo period of out-of-body weirdness. Neither of us can believe it’s happening and we talk to each other quietly like we’re both stoned.

The pilot called P.O.V. has been commissioned for a whole Channel 4 series and the new title is Peep Show. I do the first week’s filming and Jenna even leaves me some warm food for when I get in at night. On the Saturday morning, we’re watching MTV when ‘The Scientist’ by Coldplay comes on. Oh great, thanks lads.

She looks at me. ‘This isn’t going to be our break-up song, is it?’

‘No,’ I say decisively. I immediately like ‘The Scientist’ but I’ve also heard that Coldplay are massively unfashionable, so I add, ‘We deserve a better song.’ It’s just more bullshit.

She moves out four days later.

Yes, let’s go back to the start. Let’s ask our questions and tell our secrets and run out of the theatre bar and kiss in the street.

I’ve got a job to do. But at the weekends, I go back to playing Civilization II on my tangerine iMac. Except now, I do it with two bottles of wine instead of one.

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¹ Men really do seem to be worse at wrapping presents and I suggest that’s because they’ve had less practice. As to why that might be . . . John Gray is about as interested as John Bishop.