Perhaps you know Rob Brydon from The Trip, Michael Winterbottom’s uproarious trilogy of improvised sitcoms, which were also edited in three successful feature films. The concept: Brydon and Steve Coogan travel around the north of England, Italy and Spain, staying in lavish hotels, eating in top restaurants, and sparring endlessly over whose career is the more stellar and who is better at doing celebrity vocal impressions of the likes of Michael Caine and Mick Jagger.
Because the comics are playing version of themselves, some people assume there is a competitiveness between them in real life – an assumption that Brydon is quick to scotch on the phone to Time Out. “I don’t have a rivalry with him,” Brydon says. “But we’re both aware of the dynamic existing in our business, so we play off it. In reality, the meals we have [together] are low key, whereas in The Trip I’ll ask him what he’s been doing and try to undermine him… there are times when I go: we’re in this beautiful location. We have beautiful food. And now we have to start being arses to each other.”
Brydon is the rare celebrity who commands a large following not for one thing in particular but for the combined impact of several small but intensely admired things. If you don’t know The Trip then perhaps you know Brydon as the host of panel comedy show Would I Lie to You? (on which he once accurately confessed to having stolen Catherine Zeta-Jones’s lunch money while at school with her Swansea, Wales). Some admire Brydon’s work in his video-diary comedy series Marion and Geoff, playing cuckolded taxi driver Keith Barret. Then there are those who love his Uncle Bryn from James Corden and Ruth Jones’s romantic sitcom Gavin and Stacey – a duffer whose intelligence shines at a lower wattage than his good heart.
So last year when Brydon announced his first stand-up tour of Australia, he wasn’t at all sure how ticket sales would go. “A lot of performers are in this social media bubble and you can get 20 Tweets and be mistaken that it’ll be Beatlemania when you arrive, when really it’s just a hardcore of comedy fans.” He needn’t have worried, as an extra show at the Palais was quickly added.
Brydon’s show, I Am Standing Up, is his first live outing in nine years due to the rigours of raising five kids from two marriages. But he’s been stockpiling comedy ideas during that time. “I’m 53, so I talk about getting older [in the show and] the pressures of being a parent. I tell stories about my work, I talk about The Trip, I talk about things that have happened between me and Steve.
“One of the things I love doing, and it has an Australian link, is talking to the audience. I basically learned it from Barry Humphries. I used to watch the way Dame Edna used to talk to the audience and get information from them and create comedy from that.”
Then of course there’ll be some of the vocal gymnastics that Brydon has made his trademark. The Small Man in a Box – an uncanny trick where he constricts his voice box to make it sound like he’s trapped in a muffled space – will make an appearance, as will his celebrated Michael Caine and Al Pacino impersonations. But Brydon is not about to write ‘impressionist’ in the occupation box. “I realise I’ve made a rod for my own back, but it’s just a little trick. We have guys [in the UK] who can do over 100 voices.”
Still, not everyone considers Brydon a master vocal acrobat. Playing Inspector Lestrade opposite Will Ferrell and John C Reilly in the recent Holmes and Watson, Brydon found himself approached by the American actors’ English accent coach after a take. “The coach said, ‘Rob, just be careful with some of those vowel sounds,’ and my instinctive reaction was ‘who the hell are you to tell me how to do an English accent?’ but I checked that. And I walk back to see Will and John smirking, because they’d put him up to it.”
Brydon has his own starring role in a film about to drop – synchronised swimming comedy Swimming with Men, opening locally on March 21 in time for his live tour. And while it’s his first Australian tour, it’s not the first time he has worked here. The comedian spent several weeks in Sydney and Broken Hill 14 years ago starring in obscure sitcom Supernova with Kat Stewart. “It’s fair to say the show did not set the world on fire, but I had a great time doing it and have been itching to come back.
“If you are British there’s a lot that’s appealing about Australia. It’s like Britain on multivitamins. You go down to the Botanic Gardens and see these massive bloody bats hanging there, and you know you’re not in Britain then.”
