Rufus Jones interview
If you watch any amount of British comedy, you'll likely have seen Rufus Jones a number of times across different TV comedy shows and films. Now he is set to debut his own sitcom. Home is about "a very middle-class English family who go on holiday to France in their quite spacious Audi. They have a lovely holiday and come back, but when they open the boot to unpack and there's a Syrian refugee. After the initial shock, Katy, and her son John, welcome the refugee into their home with open arms." However, as Rufus explains, "my character Peter, who's Katy's relatively new boyfriend, does nothing of the sort."
The scene is set for a comedy that mixes laugh-out-loud moments with some subtle points about the benefits of tolerance and the issues of immigration. BCG phoned up Rufus to find out more...
Hi Rufus. Home started life as a Comedy Blaps pilot a couple of years ago. How long have you had the idea?
It takes a long time to develop things these days. I first wrote certain drafts of the pilot in late 2015, which was when the refugee crisis in Europe was really at its height. And it was just when [Brexit] referendum campaigns were beginning to strike up and immigration was a main topic.
Without sounding too grand, it's kind of more of a humanitarian show than it is a political one, I think. But certainly the nearest political impulse at the time was actually something that's slightly forgotten now: that David Cameron, at the height of the crisis, promised 20,000 Syrians to arrive here by 2020. This was at the time where Angela Merkel was allowing hundreds of thousands of Syrians into Germany.
20,000 didn't sound a lot then, and it doesn't sound a lot now. 20,000 doesn't sound like much of a moral obligation, it sounds like QPR versus Brentford on a wet Wednesday evening! I wondered what had happened there, because we as a country sort of have quite a fine history of opening our doors to people in international crisis, especially such a horrifying one as the Syrian War. So I wanted to write that, really. That's where it's all emerged from...
It's always interesting to compare a pilot to a series. What did you learn in the process of making the test episode?
I learned that we could cook up the right cast. That's trite, but of course when you do a pilot you never quite know whether everyone you've given the roles to are gonna work.
We all came away feeling we had a very special dynamic that would serve six episodes. So that was the big moment from the pilot; that we were casting it correctly.
And we had a lot of feedback on the pilot actually, it was great. One of the nicest things is that our main consultant on the show is a Syrian refugee himself, he's called Hassan Akkad and he won a BAFTA a few years ago for Exodus which was an extraordinary documentary where refugees chronicled their own journeys across Europe on Go Pros. It was amazing...
Anyway, Hassan told me only a few months ago, after we'd wrapped, that not only had he seen the pilot, he'd seen it long before he was involved in the show and him and some refugee mates passed it around and loved it. That meant a lot because it suggests we were punching in the right direction and the comedy radar was operational.
Your character Peter is the conduit for which viewers get to see the scepticism parts of the country has to immigration. Essentially you've written yourself as the character that initially the viewers aren't going to like, necessarily.
Well, I guess it depends if you share his opinions or not!
He is part of sort of fine line of comedy racists in sitcom. Pete is not of Rigsby proportions or Alf Garnett proportions though, certainly.
I was thinking the other day quite when Pete sort of sits in terms of his views. I think he is someone who probably ten years ago wouldn't have said the things he says, but since immigration is such a burning issue now, people feel freer to talk about their fears and their opinions. Pete is one of those. He probably doesn't necessarily believe half of what he's saying, but he's full of received wisdom. And it's really a reflection from his own inadequacies.
I don't know if you remember, there's a bit in Fawlty Towers, I think it's the Germans episode, when Basil is in hospital... He's treated by a black doctor. And there's a moment where he turns around and sees the doctor for the first time, and he just sort of slightly ducks at the shock and surprise that someone of colour could possibly be a doctor. And he's trying to hide his prejudices. But, in hiding them, reveals them more starkly than anyone possibly could. I think there's a touch of that in Peter, that even when he tries to say the right thing, it's almost more insulting than if he were just honest in saying that this person scares him.
You've written before, but this is your first long-form series, is that right? How did you find that process of writing a six-part show?
It is.
I didn't find it hard, if I'm honest. I've had two scripts commissioned in the past, and stuff that never made it to series but nevertheless, it gets you match fit. Because this process has taken a couple years, as it tends to. When the greenlight happened and Channel 4 commissioned the series I was ready and I knew exactly what form it was going to take and what was going to happen. I knew the stories.
It happened very quickly, we were determined to film it as quickly as possible because it feels timely, and the longer you sit on this stuff and worry about it, the less of it's relevant. So I wrote it in about two and a half months. We got green-lit in May and we were filming in September, and delivered the show in December. It was very quick turn-around, but I think it benefited from that speed. It's that old thing about, you know, "it takes fifteen years to be an overnight success". I started writing this in 2015, so I've had plenty of time to work out the mechanics of the story.
It's interesting you mention fifteen years. We've followed your career since the start... it feels like in recent years you've been doing bigger scale projects - for example a starring role in Stan & Ollie. Do you feel like there's momentum building in your career?
I do, I do. The last kind of seven years, every year has been more interesting than the previous one. Sort of landmark shows I guess, when you look back on certain step changes you make.
Holy Flying Circus was one for me - about The Life Of Brian controversy - that was a real turning point for me.
And then with Julia Davis on Hunderby (pictured below), you know... she's such a genius. Just to be even tangentially associated with her is always useful. And I think the advantage of being involved in Julia's work particularly is that a lot of people in comedy love those shows. It meant that anyone who was considering you for a job had seen your work, which isn't always the case [with other shows].
So yeah, it's allowed me to do a lot of great and varied stuff. Yeah, it's been terrific!
Did you always know you'd head down a comedy route? How did you start out?
I was at Cambridge University. I was there with all sorts of people. Robert Webb and David Mitchell; Richard Ayoade; John Oliver; [Bond star] Naomie Harris. It was quite the time, but none of us got going till our late twenties, early thirties...
I actually gave up acting in my twenties. I just sort of bummed around until I was about 27 and, through preposterous luck, got a part in a TV show, so I acted for about six years and I didn't look back. Then I helped form a sketch group with Dan Skinner (who plays Angelos Epithemiou) and Jim Field Smith, he's a big director now. We were called Dutch Elm Conservatoire and we got nominated for the Perrier - that's what changed a lot for us.
And then, you know, you start getting little parts in TV, and that kind of built up. So it was quite a peripatetic career with a big break in my twenties...
Yeah, it's been... On the back on the last eight years, it's been very consistent. There was a healthy decade of penury before that though!
As you mention, you've worked with Julia Davis a number of times. As much as we're a fan of your work Rufus, we have to say we've probably seen a bit too much of you in some of her shows!
There was an unfortunate three year period where I was nude in pretty much every show I did.
Are you nude in Home too? It'll be your fault if you are in this!
You know, I'm planning the second series and I almost automatically wrote myself a nude scene before stopping to think "What the hell am I doing?"
Ohh, so a second series of Home is on the cards?
Yeah, I'm planning that. Channel 4 is very excited about this series and we're hoping that it does okay and we get to do it all again. I guess we'll find out sooner rather than later.
But next for me is a thing called The Barking Murders, which is not a comedy, it's a BBC One series with Stephen Merchant and Sheridan Smith about a real life serial killer case about five years ago in East London in Barking. A guy called Stephen Port killed a number of gay men and a mixture of police incompetence and general chaos meant it took a long time to get him convicted. So I'm quite out of my comfort zone, as I imagine Stephen [Merchant] is as well. We start filming in March/April. So that will be a bit of a gear-shift from the last six months for me!
We're talking as you've just exited the editing suite on Home. It must be nice to see some daylight?
It is. I sort of took myself out of it after a while. I suddenly realise my creative juices were spent. They say you write a show three times. You write it on the page, on film, and then in the edit suite. I suddenly just realised I'd said everything I wanted to say, and we have brilliant editors, a brilliant producer and I just thought I'd leave it to them to make the choices. You just... you become too close to it after a while, and I just had a Road to Damascus moment - pardon the irony - and thought "Ah, I'll let the grown-ups deal with the edit."