WTF with Marc Maron Podcast - Episode 983 - Steve Coogan

Episode Date: January 7, 2019

When Steve Coogan realized he was good at doing impressions, he also realized it was a really good way to get attention. But Steve also knew he had to deliver beyond the impressions if he wanted to get funnier. Steve talks with Marc about that evolution, with some help from "Michael Caine," "Sean Connery," and others. Plus, Steve explains how his new Alan Partridge series will force the beloved presenter to adapt to a changing world, how his new movie Stan and Ollie is really a love story about comedy, and how he became friends with his co-star John C. Reilly much the same way the real Stan and Ollie did. This episode is sponsored by Tigtone on Adult Swim, SimpliSafe and the New York Times Crossword App. Sign up here for WTF+ to get the full show archives and weekly bonus material! https://plus.acast.com/s/wtf-with-marc-maron-podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Lock the gates! all right let's do this how are you what the fuckers what the fuck buddies what the fuck nicks what's happening how are you mark maron here you back at work how How's it going? I know, right? Right? You get relaxed. You get sort of into a different time sense. You get into a different groove. You kind of get grounded in who you are and your identity in the world. And now you're back. You're back at work, making the adjustment, checking the mountain of emails. Everything all right? You're going to be okay today? Just hang in there. I guess this is life. We're all pretty excited, right? Y'all got pretty excited and now we're what, seven days into it? And I don't know why we fool ourselves every year. Maybe it's just the ritual. Maybe we actually know in our hearts that, yeah, it might be a little better. It might be a signpost of some kind, but really just another day. And now we're a week into it and we're back. We're back at it.

Maybe you took that time to think about what would it be like if I didn't have to work? I think about that all the time. I am constantly working and I don't know how to really not work because i don't know about you but i get about 10 days away and then it's just a existential whirlpool of possibilities none of them good but uh welcome back welcome back to work folks let's have at it today steve coogan is on the show great guest great guy and a great movie he's in, actually. Stan and Ollie. It's Steve playing Stan Laurel and John C. Reilly playing Oliver Hardy.

I loved it. I fucking love that movie. I will recommend that. I recommend that movie. I will. And I am recommending the movie Stan and Ollie. I'll talk about it before I bring him on I certainly will talk about it with uh with Steve but I just thought it was a beautiful uh little film really well acted and just beautifully shot and I don't know man maybe I maybe I'm getting soft I don't

know if I just found it very touching maybe a performer, as somebody in the business marginally, I found Stan and Ollie to be a tremendous movie. All right. So I had to watch a bunch of movies because of an interview I'm working on. And some of these movies were difficult movies. And I am not a closed-minded person. And it's interesting to not not be a closed minded person, you know, because when you're not closed minded, when you're open minded, you may have resistance to things. But, you know, the thing is, is if you let things in because you're open minded and you're curious and you're interested and you you reserve judgment until you process it, you know, you live a fuller emotional, intellectual

and spiritual life, I believe, because you take a lot of things in and you can sort of, you know, compare things and feel things, different things and decide, you know, who you are in relation to them and what's, you know, what's good for you and what's not good for you and how do you accept other people and, you know, like what are things that are difficult? And I just think that being open-minded uh is a stronger position but it is interesting that that with that comes a certain amount of insecurity in the sense that uh i guess the example is um like i was watching some early films by uh yorgos lathamos and. And I probably should talk about this

when I give you the interview, but it's on my mind. And it does lead to somewhere else. I'm watching some of his films. I'm watching an early one, and I do not understand it. I don't know what the fuck is happening. I know that there is intent in it,

that there was design to it, but it's not making sense to me, and it's provocative, but it's disturbing, and it's not making sense to me and it's provocative, but it's disturbing and it's not forming a story and I'm getting frustrated and it's taking me days to get through a movie.

And, you know, I'm just, but I'm open and I want to understand and I want to know what is trying to be communicated to me or what the effect is supposed to be. And I'm overthinking it, obviously, but the thing I noticed about myself is that if i don't understand a movie or if something is too

challenging creatively like if it's an art film and i'm not getting it i rarely if ever blame the movie i always think like what the why don't i fucking get this what is what is wrong with me and i sometimes it's just it's just supposed to go in sometimes it's just supposed to go in. Sometimes art is just supposed to go in and roll around in your brain a little bit. May not make any sense whatsoever, but you never know what it's going to start in your brain. You never know what it's going to tumble or trigger or morph into or how it's going to pop back at you or how it's going to resonate or how it changes the way you see things. And you've got to let that happen. It's not going to hurt you, especially if you don't get it and it's not expecting anything from you but my point is i i always think that i'm the idiot you know you watch

a movie you're like ah fuck what was that i'm a fucking idiot and then i realized well maybe that's what art's supposed to do maybe you're supposed to walk away going like i'm a fucking moron and then think about it for the next few years and on and off for the next decade after that. And one day you'll be like, oh, that's just like that thing in that movie. I didn't get the movie, but now like, see, now I'm looking at life a little differently, but it took 10 years. So keep an open mind. What fascinates me about closed-minded people, especially in reaction to what's going on politically, is most open minded people can can weigh things and process things based on their own experience, you know, and their own willingness to be empathetic and engage in a bigger world. So they have more foundation to to understand who they are and who other people are and what the world looks like and what is compassionate and what isn't. I believe that to be true. So ironically,

open-minded people are in a stronger position because it amazes me how easy it is with closed-minded people, how easily manipulated they are and how easily mind-fucked they are and how easily misled they are. And they think they're right. But they are the most vulnerable, mush-brained people that I can even conceive of. And they lock into it because belief offers them a portal into being connected to something bigger than themselves that if it speaks to their anger, they're on board no matter how wrong it is. And that's what happens because the open-minded thing, if you're an open-minded person, you can weigh things and process things and somewhat to see the difference between, you know, right and wrong and moral and immoral on a human level. wrong and moral and immoral on a human level whereas if you're closed-minded if somebody just pops that brain open they dump a bunch of angry shit in there you're fully on board with a whole fucking ideology so closed-minded people are much more vulnerable to being mind fucked

than open-minded people and uh and i think in that balance you know lies the future of fucking humanity. The wall. The wall. What a ridiculous fucking... It's literally... This is it. This is like some sort of strange last stand of a particular type of ideology.

May win, may not. not the wall build the wall between you and your neighbors between you and your higher mind but whatever the case this is the fight of the day and i kind of hope i didn't you know like i i i certainly don't want the the democrats to cave because god knows there's a lot of different things you can do with five billion dollars that are more proactive. Obviously, immigration has to be reckoned with. But that's not the point. The point is, I hope that this guy, I hope that King Baby gets his way and finds his money. finds his money i just see i hope he just figures out a way that we whether we agree with it or not he gets it and my hope for the wall is that it just gets half built maybe not even half maybe a third built because i think that all trump wants as a legacy is something built because there's a real good chance that his legacy is just going to be infamy and contempt and shame so i think that being the

builder that he is and wanting to take care of his contracting buddies you know he wants to get something up that he can put his name on that's the wall that's the trump wall that motherfucker he did it he did it i just hope that he he gets started and then it just it just craps out. It doesn't get done. And then like years later, when everybody is turned on him, except for the 35 percent of the closed minded mind fucked minions, they'll never go away. But history does not view tyrants in a in a positive way. I think generally speaking, except for a small contingent of people. But, uh, I just hope that wall just becomes this weird monument to failure and shame and humor. I just hope that it's a, in the future, the half half wall the famous half trump wall people travel miles to see just a

this wall that just stops somewhere down at the bottom of texas and they're explaining to their kids yeah we had this madman uh was president and he had this big idea but he didn't didn't follow through with it well what happened to him mommy oh he you know he he died in prison yeah It's a hell of a story. You'll probably learn about it in school. You wouldn't have if he was president and it was successful, but you will now. So this is just, this was going to be a bigger wall. Yeah. It was supposed to go all the way across the whole bottom of the United States. And it's just this little piece. Yup. Here, hold my hand. Take a few steps. We're in Mexico now. All right, now take a few steps back. We're back in the United States. It's a big silly wall. That's

funny. He's a funny man. I don't know if I'd say that. Hey, this just didn't get done. Now it's just a monument to a horrible dark time in our country. Come back from Mexico. Just step back over here. So, Steve Coogan is a very funny man, a very bright man. And I've always liked his work. I was glad I had a chance to talk to him. But I do want to talk up this movie a little bit because I haven't been hearing much about it. I don't know. I imagine some people have seen it. But it's a lovely, touching movie about the sort of towards the end of the careers of Laurel and Hardy and my generation.

Uh, we, we, we've watched, probably got to see them on TV when we were younger. I remember in New Jersey, there was a station that ran Laurel and Hardy. My grandfather loved Laurel and Hardy, but we all certainly have a picture of Laurel and Hardy. Most of us have seen their bits before, but they're just sort of like these old-timey guys who did a thing. But this movie, like, it's very hard to do a biopic in general because you have a point of reference, but we don't really have a point of reference other than those old black-and-white movies

for Laurel and Hardy, and they did seem somewhat one-dimensional. And what Steve Coogan did and John C. Reilly did was really create Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy from the inside and these are I guess I'm sympathetic to it and it's touching to me because this is a desperate time in their careers where they they wound up broke because of bad production deals and they were sort of forced to tour as a live act in Europe and they were already past their prime and you know just the conversations and the reality of being on the road and having a

partnership. And it's a real, it's a, it's a beautiful movie about a friendship and it's also a love story in a way, not a platonic love story, but, but the way that they just inhabited these men was really stunning and it was shot stunning and it was just a shot beautifully. And I found it to be very touching and very moving. And they both did Oscar-worthy performances. So I just highly recommend the film.

And I'll talk to Steve about it and about other things because the film does open. Well, it's playing now in New York and California. But it opens across the world and the country on Friday, January 18th. It's called Stan and Ollie. And this is me talking to Steve Coogan. You can get anything you need with Uber Eats. Well, almost, almost anything. So no, you can't get snowballs on Uber Eats.

But meatballs and mozzarella balls, yes, we can deliver that. Uber Eats, get almost, almost anything. Order now. Product availability may vary by region. See app for details it's terry o'reilly host of under the influence recently we created an episode on cannabis marketing with cannabis legalization it's a brand new challenging marketing category and i want to let you know we've produced a special bonus podcast episode where I talk to an actual cannabis producer. I wanted to know how a producer becomes licensed, how a cannabis company competes with big corporations,

how a cannabis company markets its products in such a highly regulated category, and what the term dignified consumption actually means. I think you'll find the answers interesting and surprising. Hear it now on Under the Influence with Terry O'Reilly. This bonus episode is brought to you by the Ontario Cannabis Store and ACAS Creative. so wait so that's uh the cottage is your main house no it's just a house i had next to my main house just outside brighton i have no nothing about brighton is that nice it's where all the mods and the rockers had fights on the beach in the 1960s. Have you ever seen footage?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's a beach house. It was, no, it's kind of back from the beach. It's like a little cottage. You know, it's like we have lots of old,

it's just an old building. Yeah. Loads of old buildings. Yeah. Have they, is it like renovated? Is it like, I mean,

is the area been gentrified or? It's, no, Brighton was always, Brighton used to be the place where people would go for dirty weekends in the 19th century. Oh, okay. I don't like, I have no sense of England,

and every time I have somebody in here from England, I seem to need a history of England. Yeah, well, it's been going, the thing about American history is it's like 250 years old, so everybody knows it like back to front and it just goes over and over and over again. Yeah. But ours is a little longer and it gets muddier and muddier the further back you go.

So everyone, nobody knows all of it. They just know little bits here and there. Right, right. And you can always be surprised when somebody tells you something about a king or a piece of property or a house. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah. Like here, everyone's like so steeped in American history. If they don't know a part of it, they get like a rap on the knuckles. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah. Like here, everyone's like so steeped in American history. If they don't know a part of it, they get like a rap on the knuckles.

Oh, I wish. I wish people were as educated as you're giving them credit for. It seems that here the history gets erased daily. Yeah, or rewritten. Yeah. Completely. So you grew up where? What part?

I grew up in Manchester in the north. Oh, yeah. So that's industrial. It was industrial. Yeah. It's like a kind of, I think, I compare Manchester to Chicago. Yeah. Lots of Irish diaspora people.

I'm half Irish. Oh, so one of your folks is full Irish? My mom grew up in Ireland during the war. She was sent back there. She was actually born in England, but my mom and dad were like what I call bog Irish. Yeah. Super poor Irish.

Yeah. And everybody left Ireland then. There was no work. Turn that so it's facing. There you go. The country was dying. Yeah, yeah. It was only actually the population

since the famine in Ireland was going down until the 1980s. There's only like 8 million people there now. Yeah. I mean, it's crazy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The whole country. It was shrinking,

and then it went back up. Anyway, my mom's parents came over to England in the 1930s, and she was born, and then they sent her back during the war. So, yeah, on my dad's side further back is Irish. So, even though I grew up in the North,

there's a bunch of Irish Catholic diaspora the kind of ghettoized area of Irish Catholics right next to the Jewish area in Manchester in North Manchester really yeah it's been a like Chicago I compare it to Chicago yeah industrial town it was kind of gritty a little sort of dirty but it's kind of gone beyond that now it's like a post-industrial town I guess so like so there was a Jewish ghetto there too yeah yeah there's like a post-industrial town, I guess. So there was a Jewish ghetto there too? Yeah, there's like a Jewish area right next to the Irish Catholic area. How'd they get on?

They lived side by side. We didn't hang out, but we didn't fight. Were they Orthodox Jews or just regular Jews? Pretty Orthodox. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, regular Jews, I mean, they would assimilate more. But no, the Orthodox... Well, they kind of...

It's an enclave. Yeah, yeah. And there's lots of... Britain has a pretty diverse history of accommodating people of different... Yeah, yeah. Having said that, the Irish did have their own... There used to be signs on doors that said, no blacks, no dogs, no Irish. Oh, boy.

I mean, they don't do that anymore, but they did once upon a time. Yeah, I mean, I talked to Cleese, John Cleese, you know, and it sort of seemed like that the Irish were sort of, they took the brunt of the humor and they were always ostracized. Sure, they were, yeah. And it was okay. I mean, growing up, they were, yeah, and it was okay. I mean, growing up, when I was growing up, it was all right

to tell Irish jokes, but this, I mean, funny enough, because of the terrorism and the nationalist movement and the... Right now.

No, I mean, I'm talking back in the day when the IRA was at the height. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that was really quite, then it was like

you were a social priority. There were people in England pressing for the Irish, if you had to carry an ID card, just if you were Irish, because you might be a terrorist. That seems so crazy. Well, that was way back in the day. But it's happening now with Muslims. I mean, the exact same thing is happening.

Sure. But now, of course, it's cool to be Irish. Every pub claims to be Irish. There are not enough Irish people in the world, I think, to justify the number of Irish pubs. But it's so weird. It's not even 100 years ago, that history, where they didn't want the Irish there. It's crazy. I know.

It's funny. I mean, in Ireland, I have two sides of my family. On my dad's side of the family he had a he his brother was wealthy and they were targeted at one point by the ira the ira used to kidnap rich people oh yeah i raised money from the kidnap from the ransom and by arms right and on the other side of ireland my mom's side of the family is actually the ira was people who supported the ira who were who were kidnapping the same people that were targeting my dad's brother. And that was two sides of my family who had connections to different sides of. I thought it almost felt like a setup for you saying, and that's how my parents met.

Yeah. Do you go back there? I mean, like it would. All the time. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, pretty regularly. I mean, I go to Ireland and I feel like some weird connection to it.

I'm full on Ashkenazi Jew and I can't understand what my connection is, but I go there and I'm like, I want to live here. It's so fucking beautiful. What it is is when you grow up in England, if you're from Ireland, it gives you a kind of anti-establishment fervor that means that you don't, I mean, for example, growing up, I felt British and I supported the England football team. But we were always like, you know, don't forget the British screwed the Irish big time.

Forever. Forever. And so we never quite bought the whole flag-waving, the royal family. We were kind of slightly Bolshevik, kind of like they should take them all into the cellar. Yeah. But the only thing was, I think my mom and dad said,

the queen's okay. She earns, but the rest of them, they can get rid of them. Yeah, the queen's like 900 years old. She's always been there. It's weird. I don't know if it's reverence or just sort of amazement that this queen has lasted so long. Well, longer than Victoria or any of those.

I mean, yeah, you kind of, it's kind of. Like your entire life, that's been the queen. Yeah, of course. Right. Yeah, it's her, yeah, no one says his. No, I don't think anyone's old enough to remember someone saying his majesty. Right, it's her majesty.

Yeah, and it's going to happen eventually. Sure, sure, yeah. But I would think by that time, no one would give a shit. Well, you know, it's like they keep, I mean, forever they were saying it's the end of the royal family and when Diana died,

but you know, people love, they're just, I don't know, I think the British are suckers. What I find depressing about the British is a lot of swathes of the working class want to be told what to do and just want to doff their caps and say, I don't want to empower myself. I want that guy to be in charge and tell me what to do. That caps yeah and say and say i don't want to be in i don't want to empower myself

i want that guy to be in charge and tell me what to do that's dug into the culture i some aspects of course i mean there's a lot of um um the whole union movement started in the north of england i'm very proud of that yeah kind of a uh a diffidence and a kind of a uh an opposition to uh established yeah institutions right but um but you know if that was the case then we'd have a radical of an opposition to established institutions. But, you know, if that was the case, then we'd have a radical government. And the fact is that we never do. We have kind of a very conservative with a small C government. Yeah. Because really, at the end of the day, it doesn't matter how many people are banging

the table. There's too many people who just kind of roll over and say, yeah, okay, just, you know. It's a weird thing, though, because we don't,'t like in this country there's not a lot of conversation about class because they they just hide it they subvert the the whole idea that there's a lower middle or upper class but in it's sort of established in in britain because here it seems like people that don't have a lot they're they're either angry or they think it's only a matter of time before they get it i know i know that's this is the This is the big difference, I think, between the British and the Americans. And it's the fact that they're not class obsessed.

Yeah. It's a double-edged sword. There's good and bad in both. And I'll tell you what it is. In the UK, we don't measure success by the size of your bank balance. Right. But that means we also have snobbery. It's like we think even if you have a lot of money in Britain, people can look down the nose at you sure if you didn't if you're not bred if you're not from the right

right if you didn't get it through the family or you didn't get if you got bad taste right then you ought to go to hell kind of thing you know whereas in the u.s it doesn't matter if you made money that's it yeah you've arrived you won and that also means like um if you made money and you're a horrible person it doesn't matter you can be president yeah exactly so it's fine um so there's a lack of snobbery in that but it also means that uh uh you can have assholes that do very well well the lack of snobbery is is is essentially what's killing us culturally right now because of this fucking monster at office i mean he is the he's one of those guys that was he never felt like he was accepted by the people that had the money and he had money so it's he is the exact example of why

snobs that's his whole platform it's like the elites i know i know i know and they i know but we don't have to talk we can't solve that problem so you grew up what i imagine catholic yeah yeah yeah i grew up well i did and i did i did a movie about that called filomena about five years ago oh i saw that it's great yeah yeah i mean yeah so i grew up catholic but and i and that was my kind of uh way of talking about that that was a touching movie that was a yeah i forgot yeah it's a good movie yeah i mean i have a kind of i i don't just although there's a lot of stuff screwed at sexual certainly about about repressed sexuality. Right.

Hello. Of course there is. We all know that now. I have a theory about that. I really think that in neighborhoods, I think that some mothers who saw that their sons were heading that way, pushed them into the priesthood to save them from that life. I think you're right. And I think some of them thought, hey, you know, and I think some guys themselves were like, I have these dark thoughts.

If I become a priest, they'll all go away. I think that's true. Yeah. And I have to say, for all the kind of horror stories, there are, and this is what Philomena was about, there are some decent people, not normally the people in charge, the people right at the base who are just trying to live a decent life and trying to do good stuff quietly. Service. Just service. Just people of simple faith. I'm not religious.

I'm an atheist. But I respect those people of simple faith who just try to do the right thing without fanfare. And especially the Catholic Church and a lot of those religious institutions in general, it gets to the point where they're the only ones doing it. Like,

where the government won't, you know, that they're going to show up. Sure. I mean, the thing is, someone,

I remember an article saying, I read some article about, hey, you know those guys that help out at soup kitchens and stuff like that?

Yeah. They're not like liberal intellectuals. Yeah. They're people who actually are kind of helping people by giving them soup and that and those some people are some in some ways socially conservative some of them might be believe it or not anti-gay marriage sure so it's it and that's kind of you go well hang on a second do you like those people i'm saying that it's it's a lot of the people who might be not socially progressive quietly do decent stuff for some, you know, for people on a kind of classless basis.

But that's part of the benefit of having a sort of faith is that the idea of selflessness is rewarding. I mean, it's part of being human. You know, you have to train yourself to do it, but there is a benefit to it for everybody. Yeah, I know. But it's kind of learned behavior. I think that's true. It's certainly not for me.

I mean, I would like to, and it's kind of weird, I would like to just go off and have a good time. Part of me would just like to, you know, the thing with John Lennon is that living is easy with eyes closed. Yeah. I mean, I just want to go you know the thing, John Lennon said, living is easy with eyes closed. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I just want to go off and just have a good time and have a hedonistic time. Yeah. But then it's like, you know, anything,

but I think when you, there is a thing, certainly if you're raised a Catholic, you've got some of the Catholic guilt. Yeah. That you feel, I feel like I have to, at the end of the day,

you know um the the crappy stuff yeah there's like a line of cocaine yeah and uh the the good stuff is like a nourishing meal right the the line of cocaine might seem like a good idea at the time yeah but you don't get nourishment from it ultimately right unless you do the line of cocaine then go to feed the guys at the soup kitchen. Yeah, or if you're like Pablo Escobar and you sell the cocaine and use the money to buy a nourishing meal for your family, right?

Right. But did you, like, were you, was the fear of God in you or was there a point in your life where you're like, I'm done with this? Yeah, I mean, I think I was super religious earlier. I mean, I go to, you know, I mean, I was forced to go to church. You got a lot of siblings? Do you have the full Catholic?

Yeah, I've got four brothers, two sisters. They've all got kids. I've got 25 nephews and nieces. Wow. We are kind of, but we're a mixed bag. You know, some people don't think it's all BS. Other people are, I would say, I wouldn't say devout because that sounds like a weird thing. They're just they're just they're all liberal. Even the ones that are Catholic are liberal.

And in actual fact, we all we have different opinions. We're a broad church. Even the family, we get together and we love each other. But sometimes we drive each other nuts. Of course. And that's like a normal, marginally dysfunctional family setup like the whole world. Yeah. But there is a thing, I mean, I was raised a kind of socialist-ish.

My parents would say Jesus was a socialist. He hung out with the poor and he hung out with the criminals and the prostitutes. That's the progressive line on Jesus. Yeah, exactly. But then you get some people. What I found amazing, and it's particularly in America, is the people who managed to conflate Christianity with cash.

Yeah. It staggers me. They go, Jesus wanted us to make lots of money. I'm like, I don't remember reading that. I really don't. It's an interpretation. It's just an interpretation. Joel Osteen, the super church guy. Yeah, that guy, yeah. reading that i really don't it's an interpretation it's just an interpretation he joel osteen the

super church guy yeah there's a lot of that guy yeah it's he had this empowerment yeah it's not christianity as being you know doing christian deeds it's christianity for means of personal empowerment i know it's it's uh it's crazy it's a racket dude it's amazing how you can well just so as you can i just honestly think with this whole fake news thing, we're living in an era where, you know, you could, I could show, I'm holding a white mug here with some lovely tea you made for me. There are people on this that would say, I know you think that mug's white, but you know, it's kind of black.

It's not white. There's a, like I've been doing a bit on stage about that, about false equivalences, where you have a concrete, like I say, I'm sitting on a stool, and the response to that would be like, yeah, but there's a lot of things out there that aren't stools. So can we really be sure? Exactly. I know. I mean, wait, we have to have some parameters. Otherwise, we're going gonna talk ourselves into a soup No, it like the like the the way that the truth is being dislodged and then people's ability to actually

Want to pursue the truth. It's crazy. And of course, it's it's I think it's like the trouble is Mm-hmm. And you know, I hate to say this because like it's a very unegalitarian thing to say Okay, it's when they what was that thing that? Bukowski said about all the smart people are full of self-doubt and all the stupid people are very confident?

Yeah. Well, that's the era we're living in right now. What's the Yates one from Second Coming, lack all conviction? The best lack all conviction and the worst are filled

with passionate intensity. I know, that's right. That's the slightly clever, I was trying to make it more accessible in my version, but no, but no, you broke it down to smart and stupid. He left it a little more vague. That's right. That's the slightly clever. I was trying to make it more accessible in my version. No, you broke it down to smart and stupid. He left it a little more vague. That's right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, hell. But when did it drop out for you? When did you realize, like, hey, maybe this Jesus isn't a flying man? Oh, that stuff went pretty early on, I think. Oh, yeah. I mean, really? Yeah.

It's kind of crazy. So you never believed in hell? Well, I did for a while. And then I was like, and then I met all the liberal. And then I was educated by these brothers that were very liberal. And they were saying, oh, it's okay. Don't worry. Everything's a metaphor.

Oh, yeah. Good. And you go, okay, okay, okay. That's good. That makes it a little more tangible. And you go, hang on a second. I don't even buy the metaphor thing. I just think it's just it's just a lot of stuff it's and and you know hey there's some really

good people and they don't believe in any of that stuff and they are really decent so why do I need that stuff yeah it's you know the people who are great really good people some of my family are people I've got you know I love and I've huge respect for who adhere to that religion. Yeah, sure. And there are lots of good people who do. And then there are some people who don't adhere to any of it and are amazing, wonderful contributors to humanity.

Yeah, it seems like a lot of times people do it out of just the community element. And I think it takes a bit off their plate as parents and stuff. Of course. And I tell you what, and also the trouble is there's all these people, what's that Alexander Pope thing? A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Drink deeply or not at all. We've got a lot of people who have had a little bit of a sip and think that Einstein. Oh no, that is a big problem. I know it is. It's weird, man. It's like a lot of these confident people

who are saying, I know all this stuff because someone's, I don't know. It makes me think, you know what? In the old days, like 500 years ago, they didn't let ordinary people read the Bible. Right. That's a terrible thing. My liberal instincts say that. But when I look around now, I feel like maybe they had a point.

If they read it, they'll get it all wrong. Well, yeah. And that's the thing is that that kind of stuff, i believe that that if once you buy the bible right so once you you you sort of believe it then your brain is open to any other kind of bullshit that makes well the problem is the thing is that this is what i think about let me as well just touch on trump without getting completely uh consumed by him is that i think the people who his base don't, there's no point arguing with them with intellectual discourse

because it's like talking to someone whose religion is saying, I'm sorry, God doesn't exist because, or talking to creationists or talking to people who have this, is saying, these are the facts and here's the evidence and it's like, that doesn't mean anything.

I believe. Those people just believe and it's like that doesn't mean anything i i'm i'm i believe they believe that's right believe and they're and the thing doesn't matter what you say they're not even talking about evolution or or jesus they're talking about you know hillary clinton running a pedophile ring out of a pizza parlor you know yeah it and then and then when you do present them with truth they'll say that's a good theory i know i know under the problem is it's like well you know, one of my barometers for whether I, when the alarm bells go off in my head if I've just met someone new,

is if someone mentions a conspiracy theory to me. That's it. I'm like, I'm done. I'm out. I'm done. It's just like religion, because you can't prove it. And you know, the thing about conspiracy theories is you say, you know, the truth, if the truth is, okay, closure. And do you know, the thing about conspiracy theories is you say, you know, the truth, if the truth is, okay, there's all these possible theories.

Yeah. What if the most likely one was the most boring one? Yeah, it is. And generally it is. Yeah. The most likely explanation for something is the most boring one. Yeah. That means you can't stay up late over a drink, pouring over the infinite details of your

infinite, endless conspiracy theories. It's crazy. And the truth is normally boring. Yeah. And it's it's i think conspiracy theories to support the point with that we've sort of dragged through the conversation is that it makes stupid people feel smart oh it does it totally does it's like are you and they think that because you don't believe in the conspiracy is you drank the kool-aid and

they're like one step ahead yeah that drives me nuts yeah yeah yeah i can't you can't you can't engage with that oh so when did you start, like, when did the comedy start happening? Well, I just used to watch TV. I just didn't work hard in school, and I did impersonations of teachers in school, and that kind of got me off the hook because I would have been given a lot of crap for the fact that I could do impersonations. So teachers would say, hey, Coogan, come to the front of the class and do impersonations of all the other teachers and I go

I don't want to do that and then the other and they say okay well everyone can open their books and we do some work right and then everyone say do it Coogan and I go okay and I go to the front and I do impersonations of the teachers I take assemblies as teachers they'd say do that you can do the assembly this morning and really yeah and I'd be 14, and I'd be going up to like 16, 17-year-old kids, straightening their ties and telling them to smarten up. And I was like 13 or something like that because I was impersonating the teacher. Yeah, and they would laugh. And they'd laugh, and they'd take it.

And it got me out of a lot of trouble. And it also gets you access with other kids, right? It's a way of socializing. I wasn't tough. I wasn't tough. I wasn't tough. I wasn't a hard nut. And I wasn't super smart, but I had my comedy. But I wasn't the class clown.

I was a little bit of a snob. I had my group of friends. We liked our comedy and we didn't like. And I had an older brother who was in a rock band. They had some success. Oh, yeah? Yeah, they were called the Mock Turtles. How old are you?

I'm 53. I'm 55, yeah. I had the older brother. My older brother was cool. Oh, thank God. Music. Exactly. Music and culture.

I mean, you know, there's a headline in the Onion Moms. It said, parents record collection deemed hilarious. Now, that is what my parents had. As my brother pointed out, my parents had snide fake versions of authentic acts. So we had like an actor in our country called Mary Hopkins who was kind of like a lightweight Joni Mitchell. Sure. And then we had the Seekers that were like a lightweight Peter, Paul, and Mary.

Right. And everything was like the kind of fake lowbrow, low grade. Well, they just were riding the coattails. Exactly. This is the angle. And that was the stuff my parents bought. No, they liked that stuff. Yeah, that's the easy listening version. Well, they just were riding the coattails. Exactly. This is the angle. And that was the stuff my parents bought. No, they liked that stuff. Yeah, that's the easy listening version.

Yeah, all that version. How much older is your brother? Five years older. Yeah, yeah. So he would tell me, this is cool. These are the cool bands. I mean, and this is the cool stuff on TV, not the main channel, this stuff.

And I remember he'd actually, he'd say, go out and buy this record. There's a single coming out next week. It's called Hong Kong Garden by Suzy and the Banshees. Go and buy it because people are going to be talking about it. And I go, okay. And that's how I learned about stuff that was off the grid, slightly left field.

And it's weird because I'm the same age as you, but in Britain, there was still a big singles market. Like there was like, you could go buy 45s. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there were tons of them. I remember being there at that time. Well, briefly after high school right right you go to record stores they're just hundreds yeah and and and that's a music and kind of uh that was a way of escaping from uh and making smart choice i mean i mean i was a little i didn't quite i was figuring out

i was a little up my own ass i remember like refusing to go and see greece age 13 because i told my friends it was too commercial. That's the older brother. That's right. My older brother told me this word, commercial. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's so funny. Was his band a punk band?

They were kind of punk, new wave. I remember my dad screaming at my brother because he had orange hair and an earring, saying, what's wrong with you? You look like a girl. know like like society was breaking down as far as it was in the home because his 18 year old son was looking androgynous so that was like so that that period was it was in in the in the movie the 24-hour party people oh yeah yeah would that would that have been the time but yeah yeah well it was earlier earlier right

the first wave it kind of spanned two periods 24 hour party people like the end of the 1980s sorry end of the 1970s the arrival of Joy Division

and the post-punk new wave and Suzy and the Banshees Suzy and the Banshees were part of that period they were like new wave post-punk like after 77

78, 79 a lot of these bands they were kind of a refined punk wasn't it new wave and then in, 78, 79, a lot of these bands that were kind of a refined punk, wasn't it? New Wave. Right, right. And then in the 80s

it became electronic and it was like art house kind of cool androgynous bands and then there was a fallow period and then

there was this period of the Happy Mondays and Stone Roses where guitar bands suddenly came back and the movie covers all that period but I grew up in Manchester so the and uh and that the movie covers all that period but i i grew up in manchester so i the guy i play in the movie tony wilson who discovered

those bands was also a tv presenter i i um i knew him and i presented the tv show with him before i played him in a movie uh oh really yeah like it's sort of a yeah like so he was like he was a local celebrity he was a local tv presenter yeah and his other job was, he was on the, so people knew him. In fact, it was kind of like Tony was a little unwanted because the people who were really cool thought he was a bit of a. Sure. A square. It's like Murray the K or whatever from the, whoever that guy was from the, in the old days. Like these DJs.

They're like DJs. They're not cool, but they're opening the door. Exactly. So they wanted to be, it was opening the door exactly yeah yeah so so they wanted to be it was like the oldest guy at the party yeah yeah um but also he was uh but if you were watching the t if you saw him as a tv presenter he seemed like a youthful edgy tv presenter because his hair was a little long he sometimes didn't wear a tie right but like that when in the 70s were so because of the older brother you were you were because like in the

states we didn't get that shit until years later. No. But you were there, and you had a brother that was on top of it, so you got to experience the Sex Pistols in real time and all those bands in real time. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I remember I went halves with my buddy on Nevermind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols, and we hid it in a Perry Como sleeve because it had the word bollocks on, which in England was, my father would have considered that a rude word. And he was pretty traditional. And so I couldn't have that album cover around.

So you put it in one of their albums? In a Perry Como. And my buddy would come borrow it and he would take it to his house in a Perry Como sleeve. It was a good record. Yeah. Right? Yeah, it was great.

Yeah. So when, now, what were some of the, see, because I don't know, Como sleeve. It was a good record. Yeah. Right? Yeah, it was great. Yeah. Yeah. So, now, what were some of the, see, because I don't know, I'm not well-versed in British comedy other than talking to people about it. Well, a lot of sitcoms I used to watch, and I used to, Monty Python. Monty Python was a cool, edgy thing, but a lot of comedy in those days, before VCRs, it was on vinyl. Right.

So, you'd listen to comedy, even even older comedy like some american comedy a lot of american comedy was ahead of british comedy like in the fit like bob newhart and and mel brooks and stuff like that and that stuff was on vinyl parents have that yeah they had that so that was a kind of cool bit of the when my dad had that and he had like some peter sellers stuff he was in a thing called the goons but peter oh yeah yeah yeah that was in england that was yeah that was that the goons were like a pre-Money Python. Yeah, right. But so you were growing up with that. But there wasn't

a huge stand-up scene in Britain yet. No, there was not. It was kind of very old, regressive. Billy Connolly was this folk. Yeah, I know Billy.

I've interviewed him. Okay, so he was part of a strain of folk, almost like comics. Storytellers. Storytellers. They used to come on with a guitar

and sing a song. And in between the songs, they'd talk. And the talk got bigger and bigger. And the songs got less and less until eventually they put the guitar down and just talked. And that's what Billy Connolly came out of. And Billy Connolly was kind of someone you thought, hey, you don't have to tell cheesy gags. You can reel people in. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Storytelling. Yeah. And that kind of comedy. And so figures like him were like, they weren't these Oxbridge intellectuals, and neither was he like some blue-collar Joe. Right. He was right in the sweet spot between them.

That's what Billy Connolly was, because he managed to be smart, and yet from a kind of working background. And I think that his style kind of defined a lot of what was going on in the uk and in ireland because like i went to edinburgh you know like 2006 and it seems like still that the format for even young comics is like they're going to put together an hour they're going to title it and it's going to be long form it's not going to be like necessarily punchline efficient tommy but tommy tiernan's directly uh like tommy tommy Tiernan's directly like that. Tommy Tiernan,

yeah, he inherited that kind of style. That's right. I saw Tommy Tiernan, Irish comedian, 20 years ago and I was already like getting some traction

on TV in the UK doing my thing and I saw Tommy Tiernan was blown away by the purest simplicity of what he did. And then I saw you did something with that guy, what's his name, Johnny Vegas?

Yeah, my company produced a TV series he did. Because I remember him when he was a stand-up. But he's new generation. Yeah, he came way after me. I was like, I mean, I was, there was kind of a, there was like, like after the, before the Pythons, there was like, well, there was the goons, then there was like Peter Sellers,

you'd know. Then there was Dudley Moore and Peter Cook would be on the fringe. And after that, there was the Rowan Atkinson and those guys. He's an interesting talent, isn't he? Yeah, very quiet, quite sort of enigmatic. Yeah, almost old school, like clowning in a way, almost. But did you study theater and shit? I just went to theater and did acting, the whole thing, the Stanislavski thing.

You did? It brought the pants off me. I was thinking, why am I doing yoga? What am I doing? None of it sunk in because you have become a better actor i think well what i did was i just i i was doing stuff outside i was moonlighting doing you know doing voiceover ads i got more traction from doing ads for local radio stations than i ever did doing any kind of shakespeare or checkoff in drama school. But you did do that stuff. I did that stuff, yeah.

But I was like, and then I started getting- Were you good at it? Not really. No. I mean, no, I was- Because of why you wanted to get the lab? I just wanted to, I wanted, the thing is, I knew you were supposed to be trying to,

I mean, I was quite lowbrow. I just wanted everything right now and I didn't want to have to tread the boards for no money. Yeah, right. And I got some traction I would go into a TV show I was doing comedy I was 22 years old and I was on this TV talent show in London but it was pretty cheesy and I knew it was cheesy but I thought hell it's a gig yeah and I got my foot in the door maybe I can get my foot in the door then I can get smart what'd you do

I did like impersonations I did impersonations of uh oh I'm trying to people you of people you'd know. So I do like, you know, Michael Caine. I can do like, you know, I could do Michael Caine. But quite well, I know how to do those voices. I know how to speak. It's got that sort of crusty voice like that. I knew how to do people like him.

Sean Connery too, right? I like to do Sean. A lot of people claim to be, a lot of people claim to do Sean Connery because they go, you show up at a party and everyone goes, I'm Sean Connery. But they don't get the depth. And that's part of the secret is getting the depth.

And if you can't get the depth, there's no point doing it at all. So you do that. And then I learned to do Roger Morton. This sort of accent like this. Combine people like that. And I do that with people like, I do Sylvester Stallone doing Shakespearean soliloquies. Oh, yeah, okay. To be or not to be, that is a question.

Whether there's no one in the mind to serve the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take a sidewinder helicopter with... I don't know. I do stuff like that. I was 22, 23. I'd just throw I do stuff like that and I just I was 22 23 I just throw all this

this stuff in but you had a framework like that classic sort of impressionist framework where you take the the guy and you put him

in a situation yeah so you'd switch it up so I'd have like Arnold Schwarzenegger as a social worker you know and I'd have

I'd do Martin Sheen I'd do weird Martin Sheen that sounds tricky he has I normally do I just shove Martin Sheen I'd do weird Martin Sheen that sounds tricky he has I normally do I just shove some food to the top of my mouth

like a broken biscuit but he speaks like that about the president of the United States and when he gets angry he goes real horse his voice gets kind of squeaky like that

it's show like that Martin Sheen that's great you could just drop into that shit yeah the thing is I could just do that stuff.

And tell you what, what was good about it was- Because that's like esoteric. A Martin Sheen impression is- Damn. It's like, it's unique. I know. You're just going to go, hey, I wonder if I can do that guy. I wonder if I can do him.

What's good about it is that if you're trying to get on in this business, everyone is starting out in the business. You're trying to grab hold of someone's coat saying, look at me. Give me a break. Yeah. When you do a funny voice like that, you might not show that you've got profound, profound, some sort of profound intellect. But very quickly, people can go, that's pretty impressive. In about 30 seconds, you can impress someone.

And they might not think, but they go, okay, well, he can do that. Yeah. Right. That's something. We can work with it with it we can work with it so then you've got their attention then you can say uh and hey do you want to see my other stuff yeah right that's not quite so funny but is um you know the rest of the show yes that was the first 10 minutes and then i'm going to talk about this. So how did you... You started doing stage work primarily? I started doing stuff like that, doing clubs and nightclubs. In Manchester before this, what they call the alternative comedy circuit,

when comedy that had already been established, good stagecraft comedy, stand-up comedy had been well-established in the US, and it was kind of reborn in the UK in the 1980s. But in Manchester, where I was was there was no room for it was just kind of working class working class stuff that was kind of gag based and just lazy and crummy I had to support indie bands yeah to do my comedy I'd show up a club with some band on stage yeah and I they'd say okay before the band this guy wants to do some funny voices that's tough man boo get off

and I'd go on I'd just ram a few down their throat and normally within 30 seconds some people go wait wait wait a second he's good

yeah yeah right and then I'd have him and I'd do like 15 minutes of weird stuff that's how you started yeah and that's how I started so it's a baptism of fire

so there was no kind of PC and I'd go down to London and suddenly there were these kind of vegan venues where people would go on and be given a very easy time by the audience because they weren't aggressive.

Surprise, surprise. Well, that's what you get. If you, like, I started in New England doing like pubs and shit like that and you get this edge to you where you're like. There was a show, there was one venue in London called the Tunnel Club. Yeah.

And that was a baptism. If you could survive that, you had respect. And you'd go on stage, and they would throw glasses at you. I mean, I think they'd give them plastic ones eventually. And I got a chair thrown at me. I mean, within 30 seconds, I got a chair thrown at me. And I started doing really stupid kids TV show voices.

Yeah. But then screaming. But doing them. I just did kids cartoon characters saying obscene things sexual things yeah yeah that was pretty how can i put it accessible yeah to even dumb people and they would go wait huh this is funny yeah and then i managed to segue into stuff that was a little smarter yeah and i did like 20 minutes and then and and i came on stage and they were chanting more and more they said do you want to go back and do an encore and I said no fuck them

I beat them I'm done I'm never coming back why risk it fuck it I'm out of here goodbye don't ever take

that second chance no no no yeah yeah well that's how you got the edge and I just I ended up writing who was around

when you were did you do the club circuit there you did the comedy store and stuff I did the comedy store and all that for a while yeah there's a lot of people eddie is contemporaries eddie was you know he was he was before the dress yeah before the dress and i remember eddie starting out i mean i remember thinking god he's terrible yeah wait i remember

thinking i honestly i was thinking i was thinking at one point going up to saying you're a really nice guy but you really should quit comedy because it's really not your thing. And he is a testament to tenacious hard work. Oh, people can get funny. As a stand up, you know, you start with guys, you're like, there's never going to turn for this guy. But some dudes, like I think you're, because of the impressions, like some guys are going to go after the comedy. They're going to go after the funny no matter what. But then there are those dudes that are just,

they can't change their speed. No, no. And you just look at them when they're starting out going like, oh, this is going to be a slog. You're not going to make it. But then all of a sudden, it clicks. This innate faith of this inability to do it differently, eventually, if they're persistent, it sticks.

Yeah, well, it's like marching to a different drum yeah exactly you look at the crowd you're thinking how long can I not do what everyone else is doing and then eventually you throw a towel

and think I'm going to have to join the crowd and do what they do because it kind of works some people don't have that they can't switch yeah but I'm thinking when I was doing comedy

I was thinking I was doing this impersonations and stuff and I was like this is so boring I didn't other people liked what I did,

but I didn't like what I did. And I started, so I figured, oh, I'll just, I'll do some, I know a bit of acting, so I'll do stand-up comedy characters rather than just doing stand-up. I'll do a character in front of the microphone and I started doing that. And I got some traction with that.

A character of your own creation. I did a bunch of different characters. You know, I did a woman and her brother. So it's like a one-man show thing? Yeah. You do it at Edinburgh? I did it edinburgh i won the fringe award at edinburgh when i did it in like 26 years ago uh and that kind of i'd already done this cheesy tv shows but when i won that that gave me some credibility it was like oh he's not just some cheesy like uh flash in the pan guy yeah he can do stuff that's smart and funny and then also not an impression i didn't do any

impressions in that show to deliberately to say to see if i could go hey and the weird thing was because i don't tv people like oh he's the other funny voice guy yeah i was like no i can do other stuff like yeah yeah everyone can do other stuff whatever right so so i did the show in edinburgh and and where i did all these characters and and it it it was Is that where Alan Partridge came from, that show? Just before that, I started doing him on radio with a guy called Patrick Marber, who became a screenplay writer, and he wrote a movie called Closer,

and Notes on a Scandal, and he's now a successful screenwriter, but he was, at the time, trying comedy, which he wasn't great at. So you did a sort of team thing? Team thing, and I joined him and a guy called Armando Iannucci, who'd done some movies like The Death of Stalin.

Oh, I just saw The Death of Stalin. He did that other one, In the Loop. In the Loop, yeah. Didn't he have something to do with Veep, too? Yeah, he wrote and created Veep. So Armando was the guy I met and started doing radio comedy with, and that's where Alan Partridge came from working with him. From radio.

But radio's great, isn't it? Well, but public what you have like public at the BBC radio right they the good thing about BBC was and that one of the great things about the BBC is because it was publicly funded through a through a levy it's not no one has it's like you yet if you if you this is so weird about it sounds almost like communist like if you own a TV you have to pay the license fee and that and and you have no choice. Back in the day, someone who worked at the BBC would go, I like that guy.

I'm going to give him a TV series. And you're on. There's no market research. There's no like audience testing or saying how this is measured. It would just be one guy at the seat of his pants go, I like that guy. That's what happened with Python.

That's right. Yeah. And sometimes people make mistakes, but really odd, misshapen, genius stuff- Finds its way through. Finds its way through, because in a way that wouldn't if you just relied on market research of what people want. Or the development process, or sort of like a room full of executives going, I don't know.

Well, yeah, there's the old thing that a camel is a horse designed by a committee. Right, right. But just because it was state-run, you didn't have to deal with that process. No, no, no. They just go, okay, give this guy a... You know, this guy seems to know what he's doing. Yeah.

And they kind of didn't really interfere much. In fact, they... This guy seems to know what he's doing. Give it a try. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. Yeah, yeah. And it's not my money. It's like the government's money.

Yeah, fuck it. So, yeah. So that meant you could do stuff that was just different. it doesn't work yeah yeah and it's like and it's not my money it's like the government's money yeah fuck it so yeah so that meant you could do stuff that was just different is that why some things only like cause I've noticed

and I respect it a great deal but I don't think it's necessarily intentional that some of the greatest British sitcoms are only like three seasons

or two seasons or four seasons yeah yeah well Fawlty Towers is like there was two seasons of that I mean The Office too

was only what was that three three seasons and a couple of specials that's right that's right towers is like there was two seasons of that i mean the office too was only what was that three or three it was three seasons and a couple of specials that's right that's right so the radio plays so that was the the first time you started writing scripted bits yeah and we didn't have team writers like you're doing right so people get burnt out more quickly and there's like things are written by like two people maybe mostly written by two people. And they go, I'm done. I'm done. I just did like, whereas here.

You did 90 things. Yeah. So I've done everything. Whereas here you have, it's more of a, okay. Well, the Americans have always been good at getting an idea and going, how can we make this generate as much capital as possible for us? That's right.

Whereas the Brits have never been great at that. They have a good idea. In fact, a lot of good ideas we have. And then the Americans go, okay, we can, now we can mass produce this. No, we'll take it. We'll buy it from them. And we'll make it so everyone can have it good idea. In fact, a lot of good ideas we have, and then the Americans go, okay, now we can mass produce this. Yeah, we'll take it. We'll buy it from them. And we'll make it so everyone can have it.

Right. Yeah, but I don't know. Who do they pay for those things? I mean, how does that work? Have you sold a TV show? Well, we try to. I have a production company. We make some shows over that.

We have a show that was called Camping that Lena Dunham is doing, an American version of. That was yours? Yeah. So that was called Camping that Lena Dunham was doing an American version that was yours? yeah so that was sold the regular way yeah yeah yeah

and when you're saying that when you do the BBC thing you're like you're gonna get experience writing acting producing

we would go along and we'd record the show for the BBC we'd go have lunch yeah and we'd be having lunch and we'd go we have an idea at lunch

yeah and then that afternoon we'd go and record it and it would be broadcast at the end of the week yeah i mean there was a fast turnaround of stuff and so that and and then uh but i i was sort of saying i want to write and i want to i want to do more seriously as well and and so how did alan part how many versions of the alan partridge show did you do we did like one two three tv series in the uk we did one talk show and then we did two sitcoms two sitcoms then we went and did some stuff on radio and stuff for sky uh sky that's uh murdoch's thing

it is yeah yeah and uh we did two series for that and then we're doing now we're back on the bbc really so we're back on we just finished the finished a TV series. It starts next February. Another Alan Partridge series. Another Alan Partridge series. But this one is like a magazine type show. So it's like a, like a, like a, like a sort of a morning thing with a female and male co-presenter. And you've aged him? He's a little, well, he's old. He's as old as he would be.

He's always been about 10 years older than me. Yeah. Which has worked out pretty well. Yeah. But as I'm getting older i'm making i'm catching up with him slowing his age down so i think he's about seven years older than me now but um but yeah we've got like a new it's a great i'm really excited about the show it's uh it's uh you know it's thing where alan tackles uh serious topics like the whole me too

thing there's a whole episode about that because we were saying that's such a difficult thing to talk about for anyone to say anything about but if you're doing a character it weirdly gives you

this license to you can get things wrong in a big way and it's fine because it's him doing it and also

you're not saying you're not sanctioning or agreeing with what he's saying you're saying this guy gets things wrong so you have license to do it and this is the crucial thing because you've got a comic character he can say stuff that you go that is so off message but sometimes he can say stuff that's true that you don't that that I can't say. The ampersand clothes. Exactly.

So the fool can point something out. The fool can point something out that everyone secretly knows to be true. It's a good point because like my, when you're telling me this, my first reaction is that there is no dialogue around that stuff. So like, you know, because, you know,

men in general, I'm not going to. Of course. So when you can just do a character that is already an asshole and insensitive. You can talk about it. And you can kind of have your cake and eat it. Because you can say, and what we do is we have him try to jump on the bandwagon and say, you know, hey. You know, I mean, he says, I'm, you know, I want to apologize. I've made mistakes.

I've stood on the side of the sidewalk and tried to slow hand clap while I watch a woman try to parallel park. You know, I want to apologize. I've made mistakes. I've stood on the side of the sidewalk and tried to slow hand clap while I watch a woman try to parallel park, you know. And I feel bad about that. And now, if I saw a woman doing it now, I would shout instructions. Yeah, right. Like, see, I'm afraid to laugh on the mic. That sounds terrifying. Yeah, but the point is, it's him.

And we have, like, we have actors, you know, we have femin laugh on the mic. That's how terrified we are. But the point is, it's him. And we have actors, we have feminists on the show putting that point of view. And we have actors playing both sides. And I have a female co-host. In an exaggerated way, you're actually servicing the side of the dialogue that is not enabled. Yes, exactly. And doing it in a kind of a, it's weird

because it's a safe environment. You're not saying that he's right. Right. You're not saying he's wrong. Or you endorse it. And sometimes it enables you to sometimes, how can you, sprinkle a little humanity on arguments that become very atrocious. Yeah. That's what it does.

And even now, you see, I'm choosing my words very goddamnrocious. Yeah. Right. That's what it does. And even now, you see, I'm choosing my words very goddamn carefully. But I am, you know, because you kind of have to. We go,

and it is. No, like there's nothing unreasonable, you know, about the intent of what's happening, right? No.

And you know what? I'll say this about the, when you do, when you, when you're writing comedy, I feel like I'm very ethical when I write comedy. What I mean is, I don't mean that I, when you do, when you, when you're writing comedy, I feel like I'm very ethical when I write comedy. What I mean is,

I don't mean that I, I'm sanctimonious about it. But, but what you do when you write comedy is you feel, okay, I don't like,

I don't like to use comedy to attack people who don't have any power. Right. Some people, some people do that and I don't like it. It's like,

hey, let's, let's, punch up, don't punch down. Yeah, punch up, of course. And a lot of people don't get that. But I, to me, it's like, you have to do that, and I don't like it. It's like, hey, let's- Punch up, don't punch down. Yeah, punch up, of course. And a lot of people don't get that. But to me, it's like, you have to do that.

There's kind of an ethical responsibility. And are you laughing at a prejudice? Or is the prejudice why you're laughing? Now, I don't sit there mocking myself, but intuitively, that's what I want to do. And also, you also have uh the the parameters of the character so when because when you start doing character work and you're making these characters up you're infusing them with the humanity so once you and you understand certainly

alan partridge you know bottom you understand the depth of that guy so you can also sort of temper it with that like is this gratuit? Is this something he wouldn't say? Is it within the realms of the humanity of the character? Because that's what's going to ground it in the humanity. Yeah, you can't be a monster. You can't... If you create someone who's just obnoxious, then, you know, and he's sometimes ignorant

and prejudiced. But the one thing is, he tries to do the right thing i think early on we made him a little too sort of uh unreconstructed and um a little too predictably conservative that looked like picking shooting fish in a caricature caricature whereas now we do him as someone who's like who realizes that that he's got to get on message, as it were. And someone is struggling to do the thing he's supposed to. Not unlike a lot of men his age. Yeah.

And sometimes, I mean, I remember my father, my late father, trying to be, you know, it's like my mom saying, you know, the older generation get into grips with being enlightened about gay relationships. Yeah. And and get into the get into the stage where my mom can say, and does he have a friend? You know, but that's what like before Trump came in, you know, when I would talk about the nature of because tolerance is what it is. It's what it is in order for democracy to work or do you have a social fabric that's at all progressive? People have to engage tolerance. And that means like it starts off with with guys going like, oh, fuck the gays.

Fuck this shit. But as it becomes culturally infused and fought for, they're like, well, it's not for me, but it's fine. It's moving, moving, moving. Right, right. It's moving. And some people are open to that. And I kind of like, it's all to do with the intention. I remember my, you know, it's that,

it's what's your intention? Is your intention to be mean-spirited or is your intention to try and do the right thing? And that's really the measure of what, you know, is it sincere or is it, what's the motivation behind something? And also just that conversation or weighing that stuff out, it gives the characters depth. Which is what, like, when I watched Stan and Ollie, that, you know, having seen you do not a lot of stuff. I didn't grow up watching you do impressions or without Alan Partridge, but just seeing that movie

and having experience, you know, Philomena, The Trip, you know, Tropic Thunder, 24-Hour Party, people I'd seen a lot of films that you're in, was that, you know, I grew up, my grandfather, I'm your age,

so in New Jersey, the Laurel and Hardy stuff was on. So it's part of my childhood, knowing those guys. But these are two guys that not a lot of people know anymore. But if you do know them, they're just these broad clown characters. And the fact that you were able, both of you, to give them such humanity and depth at that stage in their career and behind the scenes was kind of mind-blowing to me.

depth at that stage in their career and behind the scenes was kind of mind-blowing to me that like because like knowing now how how adept you are at impressions you still had to fill this guy out sure you know it on on the level of having heart and and and and and also exploring that relationship yeah well i mean uh taking this job on first of all you're right about anyone under 40 like who the hell are those guys then you show them they go, oh, the fat guy and the thin guy that wear those bowler hats. Yeah, those guys. They kind of love the image, but... It doesn't matter, by the way, to see the film.

No, it doesn't. You don't need to know who they are. It's a really... I mean, I wanted to do this because, A, growing up, they were very important to me. But really, beyond that, what they did, to me, it's a bunch of things. But I was trying to sort of sum it up. I think it's a love letter to comedy I think that's true I could see

that that a way of celebrating those because you know you I've had spent a few years in comedy and and as well as writing moving into sort of dramatic stuff and it's yeah there's a sweet spot where comedy to me as an end in itself is is a great thing that yeah I do but it's it's what it's it's it's kind of, there's a sweet spot where comedy to me as an end in itself is a great thing that you can do. But it's, when I did Philomena, I thought comedy is more useful as a way to sugar the pill of difficult subject matter. You know, if you make people laugh, they're not scared. You don't feel like they're going into a lecture. You go, hey, you can laugh at this stuff.

You can laugh at bad stuff. Yeah. And you can learn about it. And hey, learning can be at this stuff. You can laugh at bad stuff. Yeah. And you can learn about it. And hey, learning can be fun. Right, sure. But with Stan and Ollie, it was a way of saying, you know,

we see, I was thinking about going back and doing the research on the movie that Jeff wrote. Jeff, who wrote Philomena with me, he wrote Stan and Ollie by himself. What compelled him? He would just,

I don't know, actually. I do know that he thought that he knew that they'd done tours of Europe in their 50s and wondered why the hell they were touring 20 years after their heyday doing live gigs in Europe and then started to do some digging. It was like, they were broke. Why were they broke? Because Hal Roach stiffed them on the deals. And so he started to learn more about them.

And then from that came this idea of looking at the relationship between two men who had known each other their whole lives. People had come and gone in their professional life. Wives had come and gone. But at the end of the day, all they had was each other.

And it's about learning. It becomes a metaphor for living with each other, of understanding the person who's in the same space as you. And also in terms of the love letter to comedy, what was sort of amazing about it, no matter how begrudgingly they were doing these tours or how they were getting screwed,

and even with their popularity dissipating, if at all, being a nostalgia act, is that once they took the stage and did those bits and they worked every fucking time, no matter how many people were there, as a comic, you see that. Those questions are answered. It's like you see guys who are older than you and I

who have been doing the same act for 20 years, but they get out there and they do it and they're in it. And then whatever happens offstage is what happens offstage, but that professionalism. Exactly. The thing is we we all know about the other tears of the clown and the kind of you know that uh you know what what the darkness behind the humor but nobody looks at it and looks at the humanity of something which i

think is the old cliche about laughter being the best medicine you know it's it's it's never been more apparent to me how important this is now i remember i did a lot of live stuff on stage a couple of tours where i do big, big audiences before I got into doing the movie stuff. And I used to look at the audience, and this is something I think helped me identify with Stan Laurel, who wrote the comedy, was that there's something incredibly powerful

that we underestimate. If we look at comedy, it makes you laugh. It must be lowbrow it's right it's it's it makes this visceral reaction it's one of the few things apart from some stuff that touches you emotionally can make you cry but but that's a kind of a there can be a silent thing unless you're bawling your eyes out but yeah when when you find something funny we all make this noise yeah it's unambiguous yeah there's no gray area if it if you didn't make that noise you didn't find it funny if you didn't laugh it's not funny there's no it's it's unambiguous yes now if you have a big crowd of people and they all laugh at the same

time there's a lack of bullshit in that yeah they're laughing that means they found it funny that's indisputable right now you've got a group of people in that crowd, and by 2,000 people in a venue, it might be millions of people watching something on the screen. They can have the most diverse political views, the most diverse ethnicity, religion. Right. But if they all laugh in that one moment,

they're all unified in that moment, however fleeting it is, when they all laugh at the same time. When you think about it that it's in that in that regard it's mind-blowing oh sure that you that you can make all these people who might otherwise be at each other's throats yeah be in complete union in a moment and that's what that's what the greatest comedy does and yeah it was kind of like um that the respect for that yeah uh and and the fact that stan that Laurel and Hardy, when you look at some of their movies, some of their best stuff, it is timeless and quite nuanced because it works in a childlike way.

You know, when a brick falls on Oliver Hardy's head and he takes his bowler hat off and rubs his sore head and then another one lands on his head, and then another one. It's kind of like it never goes in or out of fashion, that stuff. But you see the expressions, there's a humanity to it and a kind of love of humanity that comedy they do is never vicious mean or or or or uh or cynical yeah um and i when i was looking back at the movies it occurs i thought shit this they were making this stuff while fascism was on the rise in europe yeah and the Great Depression was sweeping this country yeah and yet they were doing this stuff that just made people laugh yeah and I thought well that's um that's pretty powerful

understanding the context yeah yeah and uh so in making this movie we just wanted to I think in some ways tell a story about something that's important. And people who have the ability to make people laugh and unify people like that, that's important and is worth saluting. And also, like, be it a love story to comedy, it's also a love story about a relationship between two guys who, you know, who despite, you know, whatever their emotional liabilities were or whatever they were unable to communicate,

had this depth of feeling for each other. And that was sort of a fascinating thing. You know, you see, well, you do see it in, you know, when you see some of those political, I saw a documentary on John McCain the other day and about- Him and Lindsey Graham? Yeah, and it showed his friendship with Joe Biden. political i saw a documentary on john mccain the other day and about uh him and lindsey graham yeah and then and i showed his friendship with joe biden yeah and i and and when you see people

who don't agree with each other but have love and respect for each other that's that's that's where the that's where the um hope of humanity is in people who see beyond their ideology and their differences and find a way through. However imperfect that way through is, there's never going to be a gold at the end of the rainbow. Right. But there's a kind of a way through by people accommodating those. I mean, you can do that to an extent.

I mean, if someone says, I want to kill or wipe out a whole race of people, that's pretty, there's no kind of, there's no compromise on that. That's when, you know, the chips are down. You have to just stand up against that stuff. That's right, yeah.

But beyond that, people, you know, there are people who disagree fundamentally fundamentally but are equally noble and also like maybe uh you know there's that sort of thing with with people where you may not know why you may not understand it but they're emotionally they're connected sure whether it's noble or not you know they they they they get along on a level that's not necessarily explainable. No, and do you know what, however much they, because the normal narrative of Laurel and Hardy is that they're trying to get some scam, they're trying to struggle, they're

kind of blue collar workers, they're kind of a little poor in that ways, but they're trying to get on it, and Stan Laurel screws it up for Oliver Hardy, but however mad Oliver Hardy gets, at the end of it, he goes come on you know it's like he can't bear his buddy but he never abandons his buddy yeah there's a surrender to it yeah another thing the movie shows if you don't remember it or is that they despite the fact

that they were how roach players they may not have known each other before and that the outfit you know the bowler hats were something that was established by chaplain or whatever was that they are totally unique in in their presentation and in their act there's nobody like them no they they know and they just they were put together they were like the kind of uh they were like the monkeys of the pop uh world you know like it's like we were talking about before, your parents' records, that there was a lot going on culturally that was popular in comedy, and Hal Roach wanted to capitalize on that.

The Monkees had some great songs. A couple. Yeah. So they discovered these characters. They created these characters. Interestingly, Chaplin and Stan Laurel came over from England on the boat together

and Stan Laurel was Charlie Chaplin's understudy in fact you can see photographs of Stan Laurel wearing the Charlie Chaplin clothes oh really

yeah yeah with the mustache and the bolt and the stick the walking stick at United Artists or like before before that

when they were doing the stuff live oh okay before he got so but but Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy did that stuff together. Stan Laurel did all the work behind the scenes. So when you...

I talked to Dick Van Dyke. Dick Van Dyke, okay. Yeah. Go ahead. This is... Okay, you tell me... Well, no, no. He tells a story about when he got to Hollywood

and how much he loved Stan Laurel, and then he just looked him up in the phone book. That's right. And he called him. And he had a relationship with I know that's right well I was going to go on and say is that the research that I did on Stan Laurel was because he was in the phone book uh Dick Van Dyke you know famously called him up but a bunch of other people just phoned up Stan Laurel and recorded the conversations down the phone really yeah on tape recorders and so there was a bunch of recordings of Stan Laurel down the phone.

That you listened to? That I listened to of Stan Laurel just talking about Laurel and Hardy. He would talk to anyone who rang up. He would give them the time. I think he said to Dick Van Dyke, I think he said, does your mother know you're calling? Yeah. It's a trunk call and it's going to cost a lot of money, isn't it?

Yeah. So that was how? So this was in the late 50s, early 60s. Stan died in 65. Yeah. But those phone calls, a real eye opener to not only the rhythms of his speech, but how he used to think. Yeah. He was like cantankerous about certain things.

Like, ah, he was a jackass. And you hear him being kind of quite rude about some people, which is nice to hear somehow right because he's the hapless kind of idiot but he's this the powerhouse of generating stuff and he said when what was interesting he said when talkies came in before that laurel and holly made the transition very well he said when talkies came in he said people were talking nine to the dozen they were just wouldn't shut up on movies because they could talk suddenly. He said, but we, me and Ollie, we just kept it to a minimum. We stuck to what we knew worked.

So they kept the physical stuff. They put a few words in here and there. They didn't go crazy just because they could speak, which a lot of movies at that time did. Moving yadda, yadda, yadda, yadda, yadda, all the way through. They didn't do that. So that was interesting.

That's a smart way to adapt. Don't throw the baby out with the bath through. They didn't do that. So that was interesting. That's a smart way to adapt. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Right. So for you, like, since you have this natural ability to sort of, you know, become, you know, to take on an impression, so these phone calls and the research you did were able to inform this impression

into a full character. Yeah. Look, when people say, what's it like when you play this impression into a full character yeah look when you when you people say what's it like when you play a like a real character if a blank page is more difficult at least you got someone who lived a life and they've done a bunch of they've done the research for you stan laurel has left behind a footprint in the movies he did in some of these conversations in a few books his letters there's stuff there yeah and also the thing was is that like you know biopics can go either way depending on how familiar people are with with who it's about

like if that person's still alive or it's relatively contemporary you're up against this sort of like well he doesn't quite look like him but he kind of got him but these guys are far enough in the past and the makeup and and the attention to detail was so what it was but i feel as a biopic, the depth of it is much different than anything I've ever seen before. Because it doesn't really, it's got to work, it has to work if you don't know who they are. You just need to look at it and say,

this is about a relationship between two guys who are funny, and show them being funny. And if you show them being funny on stage, and then you see, okay, this is what goes behind people who do that funny stuff, You show them being funny on stage and then you see, okay, this is what goes behind people who do that funny stuff. And you just see the, like any kind of relationship,

you see the tensions, you see the arguments, the kind of the baggage that people carry around in relationships and they let it fester and then it's something that bursts up and then you either resolve it or you don't. bursts up yeah and then then and then you either resolve it or you don't yeah and um but the the sort of the the sort of onstage personnel personas you know and the backstage offstage realities was done so well so how how did you and and john work it out we well first of all you talked about me doing impersonations uh the way i did it john was a little different for me but the but the way I did it was I thought, well, I know how he talks. He sort of speaks like this. He has a kind of strange way of talking.

It's like mid-Atlantic. It's kind of a little bit British, but it's also slightly American. You can't quite place it. Yeah. And he sort of throws his arms up and has these strange expressions where he can't quite show what. You see him do about four or five expressions

in the space of 30 seconds, each one with a completely different thought process. Yeah. And you see it in his face. So you have, it's almost like because you have this

stuff on screen and then there's some conversations, it's like, well, I know the outside sort of superficialities of his character and the physicalities and you can use that as a way of going back into his character, the physicality.

And you can use that as a way of going back into the character a little. You go, okay, well, I've got a handle on him and now I can develop it by doing some research. It's like working backwards. Like you go, well, I've got the answer. I'm just going to figure out what the question is. Okay, yeah.

And that was kind of how I went about bringing Stan to life. Now we had, obviously, we spent four weeks in rehearsal. John C. Reilly playing Oliver Hardy, and I sat in a rehearsal room for four weeks, and we learned these dance routines. We learned some of the physical stuff.

We had this clown advisor. And he loves clowns. John loves clowns. He was a clown for a while, early on. And we had this guy called Toby Sedgwick who taught us how to walk, taught us how to move. We had to learn dance routines. We had to learn dance routines we had to learn dance routines

that they did and then learn their mistakes and put the mistakes in as well it's like a band we had to learn

each move meticulously and then make it messy like a good band that can play tight you had to make it like they would do it

yeah and then play it be loose make it give it that jazz element yeah that where things are not quite you know detune your guitar slightly like right that kind of thing was it fun it was it was great fun it was hard work but it was fun and that was the but in doing it together john and i got to know each other we became friends the same way that you know we were saying

hey this is just like stan and ollie were put together we've been put together let's find out who we are yeah let's learn to trust each other and and we got on great became the the it was all designed to make the movie work but but the byproducts of that was that we became of course inevitably became very good friends because we were living each other's pockets and having to take care of each other on screen and guide each other a little too yeah like look out for me and like, hey, you know, when you did that thing, it was better the first time you did it. Oh, right. Okay, what about me?

You know, you're constantly there. Trusting each other. Trusting and saying, hey, give me some feedback. What do you think of that? That was pretty good, right? Mm-hmm. What do you think we can do? You know, it's great.

It must have been a very, like, because I was really, and I'm not cynical, but I'm judgmental. You know, I was, like, completely blown away by both of the performances and the movie itself. I thought it was great, and I didn't know what to expect. When I saw the trailer, I was like, holy shit. This is going to be insane. And it doesn't matter if you know who they are. who they are uh you know it's you you know it's it's really an interesting portal into not only a past time but the the sort of um kind of eternal dynamic of of you know

relationship and guys who i just feel it's i i feel like it's there's some it there's especially right now where any conversation because of the world we're living in, most conversations where differences of opinions are at tend to spiral and escalate into this kind of, you know, biblical meltdown time and again. Yeah. And, uh,

it's, it's just about two people figuring out a way through the fucking mess. Yeah. Yeah. It's great. Uh, and was it rewarding for you? I mean,

in terms of, you know, what you've done in your career as an actor you i mean in terms of you know what you've done in your career as it was yeah i mean i i you know i i did this when i wrote this film filomena a few years ago that you mentioned and that was to me that was a kind of a a little epiphany for me because i was like hey you know uh comedy is isn't just an interesting thing in itself it's it's it's more interesting as a component and and as a as a as a tool yeah a weapon sure use yeah to try and tell stories to keep people's heart open people yeah and and it's

it's and storytelling you know that's why I fell in love with and I think like so especially with I keep thinking about the political on the global landscape and everything, of people who are at each other's throats and the atrocious nature of any kind of discussion. Yeah. And when you put comedy into something, it just softens things. People just are more open to something. It's like any kind of storytelling.

If you have an intellectual discourse, you and I could have an argument, some political argument, where I present all the merits of my evidence, and you could do the same whenever you're gonna i mean you might uh you might accommodate a little bit of it but really if you really want to um make people think about that it's the idea of uh consider it was an oliver cromwell said you know i beg you in the depth of, consider it possible you may be wrong. You know, just the notion of self-doubt.

That's a healthy thing. Right, sure. To think you might not be right about something. I'm very healthy then. It's just a good thing. And I think, but the only thing that really makes people think about that stuff is if you tell a story. The Bible is full of stories. Yeah.

And that's, you know, it's not about if you tell a story yeah but the bible is full of stories yeah and that's that you know it's not about you tell a story if the story touches someone yeah it'll make them think about something oh absolutely more powerfully than a whole spreadsheet of statistics and you've done and you've done also like some of the other movies you you know you've done you've been part of like because really you know good satire is not you there's not a lot of it and i think that you know the british are a little better at it generally but also i think tropic thunder is one of the greatest satirical movies yeah i mean it's like it's a really deep movie yeah it's well it is it's about the funny thing is you're right i think you're right it's about it's about something yeah it's

the point is it's not just funny it's about about something. Yeah about something that's about human nature Right says something and also show business and vanity and show business and shallowness and asses, but it's a commentary on something unfortunately, I think because it's comedy that it's still it's of Things like that get because they don't wear their importance on the sleeve right comedy by its very nature doesn't wear its importance on its sleeve it because it makes you laugh so you think well it can't be that important and of course it can be yeah i think it's uh underrated in terms of the intelligence of the whole thing how'd you get involved with that with the i knew still uh oh yeah uh i can't remember what i i knew him just because he knew my stuff and i knew his stuff and i think he came to london and met me and said hey I really dig your stuff

and I said well I dig your stuff and he said well what do you do and then I and I did those Night at the Museum movies

with him I think that might have been after I can't remember I think it's after it was after but anyway but he said

come and play will you play the director play the British director interestingly he said the funny thing is I wore a for some reason

I don't know why i was playing the british director i think he wanted me to seem dislikable but i wore a confederate flag yeah i wore a confederate flag on on my it wasn't my choice yeah they put a confederate flag on my shirt yeah and uh because i was playing the british director yeah they associate that that why that choice yeah anyway when they tested the movie ben said um the only thing people didn't like about the movie was the confederate flag and they they they digitally removed it from every frame that's crazy of me yeah yeah so that uh i just had a plain blue t-shirt on oh i didn't i wouldn't have noticed that yeah but i think in the trailer there may be there may

be somewhere online there's a trailer where i'm still wearing it like a and and yeah and do you you so do you you you do like doing that kind of stuff where you're really cut like even the political comedy with with uh anything which is you know I like I've done a lot of comedy that which is uh edgy and I like doing uh stuff which is uh I mean Lauren Hardy the so Stan, so Stan and Ollie, as it's called, is quite a sort of a gentle thing. It's always the trip, too. I mean, that was kind of a relationship with two older guys.

It is, actually, yeah. Yeah, similar. It is similar in a lot of ways, actually, the trip about two middle-aged guys trying to figure out life. Yeah, I like that. But I think, I don't know what it is, I just think when you're younger,

it's like... Got more to prove? You want to be... The comedy I did was sort of more acerbic and fun and cynical, but it's like, I don't know,

it's like kind of giving the finger to the establishment and then when you, if you're over 40 and you're giving people the finger, it's kind of, it's kind of, it's not a good look.

Well, I love the movie. It was great talking to you. I'm glad you took the time to do it. Thanks for hanging out. Hey, Mark. I like it a lot. I like your garage. I don't know why you've got a hammer on the table.

A half a hammer? A half a hammer. Is that for me to attack you or you to attack me? I don't know. Whatever you feel like doing with it. Generally, neither has happened. People just ask what the fuck has happened. I found it somewhere and it was on the table in the old garage,

so now it's over here. So how long are you in town for? Three days, and I'm flying to Monaco to do it. Actually, Michael Winterbaum, I'm doing another movie with him. I'm doing a movie about a rich billionaire bastard. Are you him? I'm him, yeah. How's the script? Good?

It's funny. yeah how's the script good it's funny uh it's uh yeah he's like a a super rich guy who has super yachts and uh big parties and uh and employ and employs people in sweatshops in uh in in um uh Sri Lanka and make his clothes super super cheap so you can tell him on the high street and does he have an existential moral crisis at the end of Act 2? No, he's a bastard all the way through, and then he dies. So that's refreshing. Unpredictable. Thanks, man. Well, have a good trip.

Okay, dude. Thanks. Go see that movie, folks. That was Steve Coogan, who did an amazing job. The movie's just great. Stan and Ollie playing now in New York and California. It opens everywhere on Friday, January 18th. Okay.

Okay. We don't need no stinking wall. Dig it. I'm going to play some guitar. Some slightly border-tinged guitar, I think. It's got an echo to it. I'm going to play some guitar. Some slightly border-tinged guitar, I think. It's got a little echo to it. It's got a twang, a little Tex-Mex-y. Maybe not. Maybe it's just me doing what I do at the end of the show. guitar solo Thank you. Boomer lives! It's a brand new challenging marketing category. And I want to let you know we've produced a special bonus podcast episode where I talk to an actual cannabis producer. I wanted to know how a producer becomes licensed, how a cannabis company competes with big corporations,

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