‘I’m a nice person, you know,” says Rob Brydon, as I met him in a basement green room of the BBC, where probably nobody with such a mellow ego has ever sat. “I am a people-pleaser. That’s who I am.” It’s an unnecessary clarification – at 61, he’s been nice on TV, as himself and in character, for most of our adult lives.
We’re here to talk about his new six-parter, Bill’s Included, but his character in it, the eponymous Bill, is such a distillation of pure Rob Brydon that it’s (accidentally, he says) a celebration of his entire career. As the show opens, Bill has just been left by his wife, who’s run off with the gardener. At no point does he ever fire the guy – “I like him!” – but otherwise, his life is completely upended. The utterly plausible cocktail of his civic mindedness and howling loneliness drives him to take in four lodgers, local university students.
The opening moments, before he gets his young super-woke crew, are so powerfully reminiscent of Marion and Geoff that it’s like being whacked around the head and given a hot chocolate at the same time by the year 2000. The hugely funny and poignant series was Brydon’s breakthrough sitcom, the first he wrote himself (with Hugo Blick), based on a character he’d created at college – Geoff, a taxi driver, speaking straight to a dashboard camera about a marriage that, the viewer realises, has been toast for ages. “I’m so thick,” Brydon says now. “It’s only when watching Bill’s Included that I went: ‘Oh, it’s got a bit of a Marion and Geoff vibe.’ Honestly, I swear to you, that hadn’t occurred to me. You don’t think about your own stuff. That’s 26 years ago!”
Steve Coogan was one of the executives on Marion and Geoff, and has been badgering Brydon to do more character comedy ever since. “I fobbed him off for years, then we made a taster of this landlord-and-students idea a few years ago, but it wasn’t right. I was too creepy.” Surely not … “I was, I was creepy, and I didn’t realise it! It was just me as a middle-aged guy, going: ‘Come in, have a sit down,’” – he does an impression of his most mellifluous and ingratiating Welsh timbre, and he’s right, it’s incredibly creepy – before snapping back to his regular voice.
Brydon and Coogan’s creative entanglement has been fruitful: 24 Hour Party People, about Factory Records in Manchester in the late 80s/early 90s – Brydon had a small part as a caustic naysayer who doesn’t like the music, Coogan played the legend Tony Wilson, head of the label. Then, Cock and Bull Story, in which they both brought the atmosphere, playing themselves, sort-of, as two egotistical actors scrapping with each other, failing to make a film about a book, Tristram Shandy, failing to become a novel. The genius of that film is all in the control: they caper about but pull it back from slapstick; it’s knowing but not arch. Seeing Brydon and Coogan mess about on set gave director Michael Winterbottom the idea for The Trip, whose Northern Lights series – its fifth – is coming soon.
When the pair first met in 1997ish, it was at a Holiday Inn in Reading. Brydon was in an improv group with the solidly magnificent Julia Davis, along with Ruth Jones, who he was also at school with, and they’d all been to the Hexagon to see Coogan, who “was already at his first peak. He was in the West End with The Man Who Thinks He’s It, he’d won a million Baftas already, he was doing what I wanted to do at the time, which is character comedy,” Brydon remembers.
“He’d started out in voiceovers, he was the same age as me, so I could see all these parallels between us.” I can’t help but remark that people, if they meet a peer they really admire, sometimes don’t like that person very much. “What, envy and stuff like that?” says Brydon, taken aback. “I can imagine that sort of person, but I can’t imagine me being like that. Envy, brute rage, competitiveness? I’m none of those things. I just look at him and think: ‘Great. Isn’t he good?’ One of the hardest things in The Trip is when Michael wants me to ridicule his career. He’s got a brilliant career!”
Brydon’s career isn’t exactly a Harrison Ford-level wilderness-to-stardom tale; he had work in improv, doing voiceovers and radio panel shows before Human Remains in 2000, when he was 35. But that blistering two-hander with Julia Davis, in which they play a variety of miserable couples, landed the same year as Marion and Geoff, and Brydon’s forte was unarguable: character comedy in which he is defiantly uncool, self-deluding and in a variety of luckless scenarios. He can effortlessly carry a show, but is just as memorable in an ensemble. His tightly wound Uncle Bryn is the performance people can’t let drop, “more or less every day, someone will come up to me and tell me how much they love Gavin & Stacey. There’s a real affection for it.”
Bill’s Included is his first show since Gavin & Stacey’s epic finale, and the camera’s on him almost constantly. His relationship with the four students, Christian (Dylan Brady), Hettie (Ada Player), James (Harry Baxendale) and Zahra (Yasmin Al-Khudhairi) starts off as a broad clash of the generations. They’re noisy, he’s fussy, and whenever they use their buzzwords – checking their privilege, trauma bonding, finding a safe space – Bill says naive, delighted things, such as: “These are the kinds of nuggets I’m going to get from you, like truffles.”
“I think that’s quite an authentic thing, someone of his age, his personality, would feel,” says Brydon. Quite fast, it becomes affectionate. “He starts off calling them the students, and by episode three, he’s saying: ‘I’ve got to go and do a thing for the kids.’ They’re not my kids! But I like to be needed.” It may sound low-stakes, but his heart is so painfully close to the surface, and the peril of some Dr Marten-ed youngster stamping on it by accident sets up intense emotional jeopardy.
Often the laughs feel ripped out of you, sheer exuberant relief that no one got hurt – like the feeling of being at a circus, except instead of tigers, you’re being entertained by suburban manners and wounded middle-aged pride. “I am what I am,” he says at that “suburban” word. “My world is not the world of the agent provocateur, activist, disruptor. That’s not me. I’m riding the horse in the direction that it’s travelling. That’s a phrase, isn’t it?” I’ve never heard it – maybe it’s Welsh, I suggest? “It’s probably from a self-help book, isn’t it?”
To stick with the phrase, few could have predicted that the horse he’s riding – whether on The Trip, Gavin & Stacey or Would I Lie to You? – would travel for so long. These are, or were, all decades-long shows, yet when Brydon describes The Trip taking shape, it sounds like that episode of Seinfeld where Jerry and George go to see some TV bigwigs to pitch a show about nothing. “Michael [Winterbottom] said: ‘Six half-hours, no script really, and different restaurants.’ I said to him: ‘You’d be lucky if you get one good half-hour.’ I was very wrong.”
From the first episode, The Inn at Whitewell, in 2010, it is plain that the idea is dynamite, but very weird dynamite. Between the squabbling, the self-aggrandisement and the impressions, you can understand why it’s funny, but the depth of feeling catches you unawares. Even by series four, you still can’t figure out why it’s as moving as it is. “How [Winterbottom] makes those shows, he doesn’t cut to comic rhythms, he has storytelling rhythms, so when we saw the cuts of the first series, it was quite jarring. He’s quite pure, Michael. He isn’t manipulative of his audience, whereas a comedian, all you’re doing is manipulating your audience.” Even after 16 years, Brydon still hasn’t turned into a food snob. “We had whale and stuff, in Scandinavia. It’s a bit like chicken.”
If you think The Trip’s been going a long time, Would I Lie to You? is now in its 19th series. “A lot of people say they watch it before going to bed. It puts them in a nice frame of mind. If you watch that show, you think the world is an agreeable place, where people get on with each other.” His nice-guy shtick is surely parodic, I decide, though he says, no, he can do villainy if he wants to, it just doesn’t do it for him. “There was a while when I thought: ‘If I host a show like Would I Lie to You?, I’ll never be taken seriously as an actor.’ But then I thought: ‘Look, I’m never going to be bloody Robert De Niro anyway, so let’s just do it.’ I think the fragmented media landscape is a gift to someone like me. There were people in Barbie – I had a tiny part in that – who didn’t even know I was an actor.”
If he sounds philosophical, almost Buddhist-ly – without front, or certainly without professional puffed-up-ness – that’s because “people always look at careers in a vacuum, and they’re not, because my life is not my career. My life is my home, my family, my friends. I’ve got five children! Katie’s 31 and George is 15. So I’ve never been in that place where I could go to Atlanta and make the X Men versus the B Men.” He’d take a second season of Bill’s Included, for sure; he’d love that. But, he says, “I don’t think your career is your greatest source of happiness. Maybe it’s from being divorced – this is my second marriage – and I’ve worked out where I’m happiest. And it’s being in the garden, with friends and in nature.”
Bill’s Included starts on 20 November on BBC One at 9.30pm.