Circuit Training 77: What's Driving Simon Evans?

It's one of the most unfathomably unlikely facts in the history of British stand-up comedy: that Simon Evans was born in Luton. No, I know, we can't believe it either. During our while-he-was-driving Circuit Training chat, the now Brighton-based comic referred to his onstage persona as 'cartoon brigadier', which is pretty accurate, although that dapper duffer is actually one of our sharpest comic minds. 18 years in, he's written gags for an enviable list of TV and radio shows, as well as many better-known (but often not-as-good) comics.

Evans has just regurgitated the best of his own stuff on his first DVD, filmed at Brighton's suitably posh Theatre Royal, with an intriguingly healthy budget coughed up by Universal. While there are indeed some rather nice ideas and extras, its Evans' masterly grasp of the stand-up arts that really grabs the attention. An overall air of gravitas is crucial to his gag-telling, and I was particularly keen to find out when exactly it set in: surely he wasn't giving it off from the get-go? I mean, as we've already ascertained, he's from Luton.

Actually one of my favourite bits of this interview was the revelation that Evans' dad used to work in my hometown, Ware, but I left that section out. Well, self-indulgence is for Christmas, and it's only early December. Right, Brigadier Evans?

What's your current status, Simon?

It's been an interesting morning. I bought a new car a couple of days ago and I'm just taking it back because I'm not very happy with it, and on the way back I've managed to get a puncture. Which is going to complicate things.

I did see your recent tweets about buying a posh car.

It's difficult, to be honest, on Twitter, but I like to get people's opinions about these things. I spend half my life in the car and I wanted to buy quite a nice one, but you never like to say so of course, and now of course I've come unstuck because I've bought a nice car and it's proved unreliable over 48 hours.

Is a situation like that at least handy for new material?

That's my rule in life. Sometimes I think I let my wife have her own way too often on issues that I feel quite strongly about, because there is always that possibility that if I'm then proved right, I've got five minutes out of it.

Jobs can take over your life. I wonder if I shout at the TV more because I'm supposed to have an opinion.

What, writing for the comedy guide?

Well, as a journalist generally. Comedy-wise I started off with Metro years ago...

I'm glad that was in the old days because I don't like them anymore.

Really?

They were very mean to Robin Williams and I vowed that I'd never work with them again. The second day after he died, they carried an appalling, completely unnecessary intrusion into his last few hours, 'was he using drugs? Was he doing this or doing that?' - all of which, incidentally, the autopsy cleared of him of. It was just terrible. I don't really understand Metro. I don't know what their pitch is or where they see themselves.

I don't get up early enough to see it these days, but the arts section used to be rather good.

The drive downmarket generally, I know I'm 49 and no doubt becoming middle-aged, but even the broadsheets seem to be increasingly concerned with scandal and gawping. Never mind! Thank goodness that stand-up is here to redress the balance with its focus on the higher things in life.

The new DVD then, is it a best-of?

It is, it's my first DVD, and a bit of a chronological journey through 18 years as a stand-up.

It's good to preserve these things - a lot of good material disappears after the comic stops performing it.

Yes, absolutely - when I went up to Edinburgh a few years ago I got hold of a few DVDs that were around, Rhod Gilbert's Award-Winning Mince Pie, an Ed Byrne one, Stewart Lee and a couple of others, just to reacquaint myself with the long-form thing. And I have to say, although the material was good, I felt that they didn't really work as DVDs if I'm honest. I didn't feel that gripped or involved, I felt that I was watching some other people have a good time. Which is not really what you want.

So did you actively try to do it differently?

Universal were calling the shots to a large extent, in terms of the budget and everything, and I'm very grateful that they agreed to do it. They spent a lot of money on it, we went into a really lovely theatre in Brighton, it's absolutely gorgeous, it's got a capacity of about 900, which would flatter me if I'm honest, but we managed to get all my Brighton buddies to come along - parents at the school and stuff! Swelled the audience nicely, made it look really pukka, loads of cameras, a nice stage set, properly thought through, a little bit of movement and stage direction. To me it does look a little bit more than just another show that someone's put a camera in front of.

There's a nice Statler and Waldorf-style introductory bit - any special features on the DVD?

There is an interesting extra that I'm quite proud of, a short film that was written by David Quantick - he and others who I've got to know on Twitter asked me to play the lead. It's a Tales of the Unexpected sort of show, only about eight or nine minutes long, a bit of a twist in the tail - they made it with everybody giving their time for nothing, and they've been touting it round the short film festivals. It just occurred to us, if I'm going to bring this DVD out, why not pop it on there, hopefully that will give it a little bit of exposure. It's on YouTube, it's called Lot 13.

I interviewed Stuart Goldsmith a few months back, and he said that the Comedian's Comedian podcast began because he went for a chat with you about comedy and wished he'd taped it.

I didn't know that, that's nice of him to say. Those are very good things that Stuart does, and he's a very engaging chap.

Are you aware that you're seen as a stand-up guru?

Well, I've survived in the business for 18 years and I keep the family fed, so I suppose that's something one shouldn't take for granted. I obviously wouldn't call myself a guru, but there comes a point where you have to accept that you have achieved a degree of seniority just by virtue of experience and age.

But there's a lot to be said for freshness. I judged a BBC New Comedy Award heat the other day and I was astonished by how inventive and fresh these guys were. It's a bit of a wake-up call, you realise that there's loads of new talent coming through all the time, they have new interesting ideas about how they want to present themselves, who they want to be the victims of their jokes. It's very easy to get complacent, 'I know how to do this now' - but you never really know how to do it.

Presumably you need to change things to keep yourself interested, too?

One thing I've tried to do, and I don't want to blow my own trumpet, but I do try to approach comedy from different angles. You won't just get a load of 'rule of three' or surrealism, or shaggy dog stories, one liners or puns, you've got to be constantly trying to work out the different ways that you can surprise people. Otherwise you will just rewrite the same joke a dozen times, and the audience will pick up on it even if you haven't yourself.

There's one deceptively clever bit on the DVD show, just after the interval, where you take a classic gag structure, then deconstruct it, then use it to lead into other material - real comedian's comedian stuff.

That to some extent slows me down in a way, it takes a while to write material like that, and it can only come through performing it many times: every so often a new line or opportunity for a callback or twist or a connection occurs to you. Some people probably turn over a lot more material more quickly, whereas I do tend to tinker with it until it's just right over a long period of time. So yes, you have to bury the art so people don't spot what's going on.

This might sound bad, but I imagine people watch you and think stand-up is a lot easier than it is.

No, that doesn't sound bad at all. The kind of vocabulary and turn of phrase that I've always favoured is actually quite off the cuff, I like those old mess room kind of phrases, how [columnist, broadcaster, father of Giles and Victoria] Alan Coren used to speak, plus a little bit of Anglo Saxon, quite rough and ready, tongue-in-cheek golf club language in a way.

Somebody like Alexei Sayle for instance, a brilliant comic, he got a lot of humour out of using unnecessarily verbose descriptions for quite mundane things, whereas hopefully mine would be the other way round. I think an inappropriate level of verbosity is always funny, whether it's too verbose or insufficiently so, for what you're trying to discuss.

I'd be fascinated to see some of your early stand-up. Presumably the gravitas came later?

When I started doing comedy I never expected to be perceived as I have been, as a bit of a toff or whatever. I think you have to listen to how the audience and your peers hear you, and reflect that back - you get further more quickly if you embrace what it is that other people perceive you as. There's that old poem by Rabbie Burns about how wonderful it is to have the gift to see yourself as others see you, and I think that's one of the privileges you have as a stand-up, that you are told how others see you, and it's fascinating. I don't think I'd have been as aware of that otherwise.

But I think part of it... I was from a lower middle-class family. My grandparents were working class, my parents were the first ones to drag themselves up to fish-knives and doilies, then I was the first to go to university. But at university I studied law and most of the other people in my faculty, who became my friends for most of my 20s, a lot of them were privately educated, and I think a lot of my comedy came from an awareness of them, how they made me laugh and what I found funny about them, even though it wasn't quite who I was.

It's quite a distinct persona.

I did that thing for a while where I came on and said 'you may be struggling to place my accent - it's educated' and that always got a big laugh. People clearly did think I was privately educated, and I think that was a kind of mask. Now I think I'm getting closer to who I really am. The latest show, the tour show, is a bit closer to expanding on who I am now. But I think also it's a more honest notion of myself, rather than a cartoon brigadier.

Has moving from London to Brighton changed your style? Or is it more about getting older?

It's partly getting older, but if I'm honest there's one thing about moving to Brighton that I didn't really anticipate: I do feel quite strongly at times that I'm in exile, a lot of my life, my work, is in London - even though I tour quite a lot, I do feel like Brighton is out of the loop a little bit. It is an odd feeling and a slightly unnerving one, on a nice sunny day you walk along the beach and it's gorgeous, lots of people sitting outside the cafes drinking lager and you think 'I could just give up and do that', but I really can't. So it's a bit of a bittersweet experience. Brighton is quite creative, but when you've spent 20 years living in the grittier parts of London, you do miss the pressure.

You still do a lot of TV and radio writing - would you have any tips for how to get started?

Getting into it, I've been lucky, and the only tip I can give you is to make friends with people - be friendly, keep contacts open, don't be pushy, but always be available and aware. A lot of my TV writing came from being friendly with Lee Mack, I ended up writing on Not Going Out for him quite a lot, and that got the ball rolling.

Other stand-ups that I knew, Jimmy Carr asked me to write for 8 Out of 10 Cats, and I think someone spotted me doing stand-up in a club and asked me to write for the Big Breakfast - that got me a lot of work early on: I don't think I'd go back and do it again now but it was very welcome then.

So my one tip would just be to be clubbable, be nice to people, don't be cliquey, don't be unapproachable.

Do stand-ups have an advantage when it comes to TV writing?

If you're a stand-up comedian, then people will believe that you can be funny: they see that you're willing to put your own reputation on the line by standing there and doing this material, that makes them trust you a lot more than if you're just a writer. And always do the very best you can at any gig, because you don't know who's in the audience. There might be five people, you might go 'sod it, I can't be bothered,' but one of them might be a commissioner. It is just possible.

Simon Evans' debut DVD, Live at the Theatre Royal, is out now. Buy

For more on Simon and his tour, visit www.simonevanscomedianetc.com