Comedy

‘I’m not,’ says Vic Reeves, ‘an expert birdwatcher. But these are geese and ducks.’

The geese and ducks eye him up. He returns their gaze. ‘I was with Bill Oddie. At what must have been the worst bird sanctuary in the world, the grimmest place, and I asked him whether birds have orgasms.’ Feature continues

At the mention of orgasms, a goose takes a speculative dab at Reeves’ foot.

‘I was trying to find out whether animals have sex for procreation or for leisure. What makes them do it in the first place. He didn’t know. You’d have thought Oddie would know that.’

You would, but the world has often struggled to keep up with Reeves’ relentlessly juvenile take on things, thinking that one day he might stop the face-pulling and the messing about and perhaps grow up. But he never has, and the 47-year-old, born James Roderick Moir, seems more inclined than ever to indulge his childish enthusiasms. ‘When I was a kid,’ says Reeves, ‘I was always sticking my nose in bushes and looking for birds.’

There is no need to stick our noses in the bushes around Regent’s Park boating lake, as we’re surrounded by waterfowl. ‘I like to paint birds,’ he admits, ‘but not from life. All my bird paintings are copied from the Collins “Bird Guide”. But I thought I would do versions that were quite scruffy-looking.’ If you would like to see a particularly scruffy-looking Reeves gannet, there is presently one hanging (along with another Reeves work, involving a horse) at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition. ‘They are hung in very good places, right at eye level. I’m proud of that, it’s an achievement.’

Despite this official recognition of his prowess from the RA – plus a bird on the jacket of his just-published autobiography, ‘Me:Moir’ – Reeves claims he is not an obsessive birdwatcher. ‘I don’t have binoculars. It’s like Elvis. I’m not a particular Elvis fan, but everyone seems to think I am.’ Birdwatching just seems to be one of the things that have become attached to him. ‘Along,’ as he puts it, ‘with other stuff.’ The other stuff ranges from a pissed-up car journey to the pub to buy cigarettes, in Kent (where he has lived for the past decade), to his late-’80s reinvention of British comedy as an autistic parade of essentially repellent eccentrics which made much that would follow (not least ‘The Fast Show’, ‘The League of Gentlemen’ and ‘Little Britain’) possible.

That reinvention was based on a nagging, obsessive humour developed during a childhood spent in the rural margins of Leeds (like stage partner Bob Mortimer, Reeves is a Yorkshireman) and Darlington. ‘The humour you get up there is self-deprecating, or people will say something really ridiculously stupid and be very serious about it. In London the wind-up would be quite bitter and at your expense.’