Sunshine on Putty: The Golden Age of British Comedy from Vic Reeves to The Office

‘Not being on TV almost became like a religious thing,’ Eddie admits, backing this point up with one of his trademark extrapolations in indirect speech – ‘ “Thou must not go on telly, I will never go on telly, I will kill them all with swords”.’ This unusual act of self-denial seems to have been based on an almost excessively conscientious approach to the Comedic Diversification Strategy (a) (as expounded in the last chapter).

‘My whole position’, Izzard explains, ‘was that I wanted to do straight acting, and if I went on telly and it worked, then I’d have a whole load of comedy baggage that I couldn’t get rid of.

(#litres_trial_promo) If Paul Merton did Hamlet now,’ he continues, apparently in all seriousness (I for one, to borrow the immortal words of Paul Calf’s student friend Roland, ‘would rather see Dave Lee Travis play Macbeth’), ‘people would probably just be going “to be or not to be…but in a brown suit” – they’d get all mixed up because his persona is so large. I just thought if I stayed off TV, it might work better.’

The fact that he’s played two major theatrical roles in the past few months suggests the plan might be working. Izzard’s big step up from spear-carrier in a school play to West End lead in David Mamet’s The Cryptogram was, in his own characteristically realistic assessment, ‘Not an unqualified success, but not the complete embarrassment it might have been, either’. At the very least, it established ‘a certain believability in the fact that I can act’.

He’s not at the Robbie Coltrane or Keith Allen level yet [historical note: in the mid-nineties, Keith Allen was a successful TV actor, not someone who wasted his time writing pointless plays about Glastonbury with semi-retired conceptual artists], but he’s working on it. In fact, Izzard is perfectly happy to admit that ‘they are where I want to fucking get to’.

It’s not something you’d guess from his amiable, meandering onstage demeanour, but in person Eddie Izzard is one of the most fiercely and openly ambitious people you could ever encounter – the sort of scarily focused individual whose reading is mainly composed of the autobiographies of film stars and great war leaders, so he can ‘see how they did it’.

(#litres_trial_promo) When you’re in a room talking to him, it’s almost as if there are actually three people there: you, Eddie and Eddie’s ambition, and if you had to pick out which of the trio was calling the shots, you would probably guess it was the last one.

The roots of his almost frightening capacity to apply himself run deep: ‘There are two types of people,’ Izzard insists, ‘some who’d quite like to get something going, and others who have to…and I sort of had to.’ The traumatic circumstances of his early life – Eddie was born in Yemen in 1962, and by the time he was six he’d moved from Northern Ireland to Wales to Bexhill-on-Sea, his mother had died and he’d been sent away to boarding-school – seem to have given him an appetite (creatively at least) for running towards the danger.

Izzard’s career up to this point has combined ruthless calculation with devil-may-care aplomb (the latter honed over years of sword-fighting, escapology and ‘talking bollocks from a unicycle’ to the backs of retreating crowds in shopping centres from Peterborough to Worthing). ‘The “don’t give a damn thing”,’ he says fondly, ‘you need to bottle that…they were Hell Gigs, but learning to survive them mentally gave me a safe sheet of ice.’

He seems to refer just about everything he does – from running his own Raging Bull club in the seedy heart of Soho to breaking out of comedy into straight acting – back to these formative years as a street-entertainer. But there is no precedent there for the issue he is currently addressing, which is whether the TV exposure he now feels he can allow himself will tarnish the distinctive Izzard mystique.

The idea of a comedian saying no to any form of self-advancement, even if he’s only doing so out of a more evolved form of self-interest, is certainly a beguiling one. Watching Eddie being a TV comedy personality on Ruby Wax, there’s definitely an extra edge of piquancy to that familiar feeling of disappointment you get when you see someone do part of their act on a chat show as if they’ve just thought it up.

Izzard insists he is not going to make a habit of doing this, but transvestism – the issue in hand – was too important to take chances with. ‘For me to get on there and talk about being TV [he favours this insider abbreviation even though – or perhaps because – it confuses more people than it reassures] in a relaxed way, and be fuck-off about it, that was my whole plan. Somebody watching out there who’s TV and just thinks that they’re the abominable snowman could maybe use that…’

Presumably there aren’t an infinite number of ways of saying something that is important to you in an amusing way?

‘If I find one that works,’ Eddie acknowledges with feeling, ‘I’m pretty pleased.’

One of the things that makes Eddie Izzard such an exciting comedian to watch is the sense that his set is evolving as you watch it. It would be a mistake to run too far with this particular baton, though. ‘What I do does have a feel of spontaneity because I start out going “right, now…fish…er…fish”,’ he explains, ‘but I always know roughly where I’m going to end up. The unfortunate thing is if people think it’s totally improvised, then when they realize it isn’t, they’ll think I’m letting them down.’

So he’s not happy if people think he’s making the whole thing up on the spot?

‘No, I prefer everyone to know exactly what I’m doing, because that means I’m good at what I can do rather than what people think I can do.’

However honest he is about the amount of preparation that goes into what he does, people still seem to have something invested in the idea that he’s plucking it all out of the air as he goes along. Eddie’s act was recently described in the following (somewhat florid) terms: ‘Like the bumblebee who hasn’t studied aerodynamics and therefore doesn’t know the impossibility of it all, he flies.’ But this particular bumblebee has actually studied aerodynamics very hard indeed, as the following full-stop-free statement of comic practice makes abundantly clear.

‘When you first come up with some new material,’ Eddie explains, ‘it tends to be a bit clunky, and then you suddenly click into an angle so that when you’re doing it you think “Oh, here comes this bit again” and you really power up to it, and the audience feels excited because you’re obviously giving it a whole bunch of energy, and then you find that you can ad-lib it and go off at tangents, adding new bits all the time,

(#litres_trial_promo)