Eddie Izzard news and features

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Eddie Izzard’s special gift to victim of Mumbai terror

FUNNYMAN Eddie Izzard gave a private performance of his current sell-out show – to a Hampstead man who was badly injured in the recent Mumbai terror attacks.

Will Pike, 28, is currently recovering from serious injuries and is bed-bound in a south London spinal unit. He had two tickets to see the comic over Christmas but had to return them: and when Izzard heard why, he showed up at Will’s bedside and did the entire 90-minute show.

Mr Pike had been at the end of a holiday with his girlfriend Kelly Doyle when they checked in to the Taj Mahal hotel. The pair had tried to escape the terrorist attack by climbing out of their hotel window on an improvised rope made of bedsheets, towels and curtains. Tragically, it unravelled as Will clambered down – his girlfriend had made it safely to the ground – and he fell nearly three storeys, breaking his back.

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Eddie Izzard on his latest role in Nazi thriller Valkyrie
By Alun Palmer
23/01/2009
mirror.co.uk

For a self-confessed “action transvestite”, Eddie Izzard is taking himself seriously these days. He has moved to Los Angeles to become a serious actor and landed a starring role alongside Minnie Driver in TV drama The Riches, which he co-writes. He also fancies standing for election as a member of the European Parliament and today stars in the wartime drama Valkyrie alongside Tom Cruise. But to remind people he is also seriously funny, Eddie has just completed a five-week stand-up run in the West End.

“I like entertaining people and I like doing drama,” says 46-year-old Izzard, “but I want to do politics and hopefully put something in there that’s useful. I get paid to do the entertainment, but I try to do as good work as I can.”

In Valkyrie, Cruise plays aristocratic officer Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg who led a plot to kill Hitler in 1944. Izzard is Nazi General Erich Fellgiebel, head of communications at Hitler’s military compound, the Wolf’s Lair. Eddie says it was his keen interest in history as well as contemporary politics, which drew him to the film.

“I am quite an encyclopaedia when it comes to the Second World War,” he admits. “In my stand-up I talk a lot about the history of the world, religion, sociology, what we are doing on this planet. I think I study history because people keep screwing up in the same way. So you kind of make a prediction about where humanity is going by looking at the past.”

Izzard is fluent in French, almost so in German and Russian, and is looking next to Spanish, Italian and Arabic. He fights for causes as diverse as a minimum wage around the world or eradicating dictatorships such as that of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe.

“I do gigs in French in Paris and I’m going to do them in German in Berlin, and then Russian in Moscow,” says Eddie. “I’m the only idiot who’s going to do all that, so I may as well find out what they’re thinking in different countries.”

And as to his cross-dressing...

“I don’t have to wear a dress all the time,” Eddie explains. “I just wear what I want. Anyone who has a problem with that can get stuffed.”

[SpursFan1902]

Crap, now I have to go see Valkyrie...I was going to avoid it because of Cruise and I heard that it was off base historically, but now I am going to have to invest some time and money just to see Eddie.

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Hollywood to House of Commons?
Having worked in stand-up, TV, theatre and films, the "transvestite with a career" comedian is considering turning to politics
Stephen Armstrong
timesonline.co.uk

Eddie Izzard sits astride a stool at the back of the Apple store on Regent Street, London. In front of him is a crowd of eager fans who have queued for hours for this iPod Q&A session, chaired by the compere of Never Mind the Buzzcocks, Simon Amstell, and they are pushing him on the widest range of topics — from the second world war through the nature of rebellion to the timing of any possible economic turnaround.

Izzard seems unfazed by the German kid who hands him photos of family members in uniform, or by advice on investing in Anglo American, the mining conglomerate, until a girl asks him if he’d prefer a screw-off head or teapot arms. He opts for the head, and she warns him people would run away with it, which he complains changes the question just a little, and then asks for a different questioner. He delivers his replies so affably and honestly — instead of searching for old semi-relevant routines to get quick laughs — that he’s able to make the low quality of 1980s motorway service stations as casually acceptable as his argument that capitalism needs complete restructuring. “I’m a creativist,” he tells the crowd. “I want money so I can create things. I think that’s always been the way. That’s what global trade has been about for thousands of years. Somewhere, the capitalists came along and wanted to create things just to make money. Then they started that entire bookmaker dealing that nobody understands. So no, I wouldn’t say I’m a capitalist.”

These are difficult times, so maybe it’s only to be expected that worried people would offer up their woes to Izzard rather than ask him to repeat the old Death Star Canteen routine. He handles them well, but like a serious-minded entertainer, rather than a meet-the-people politico handling a town-hall meeting. Yet that, the politico, is the direction in which he’s heading. After conquering street performing, stand-up, the stage, television and now the big screen, with a hefty role alongside Tom Cruise in Valkyrie, he’s turning his attention to democracy.

“I’m going to stand for something in about 10 years’ time,” he says when we meet before the gig. He is dressed down today, in trainers and a tracksuit — clearly in full “boy mode”. “I’m just going to get more and more political. I have no mandate, but I have a platform, because I export British comedy around the world. Hopefully, I can come up with a commonsense attitude, being a transvestite with a career. I don’t know whether it’ll be a Schwarzenegger place, where you actually hold power, or a Bob Geldof place, where you protest and organise.”

He considers for a minute. “I might be able to do more by staying outside, because you get locked into a constituency and you really want to help your constituency as much as possible. And will I have to dump all the work I’ve done to date — my creative work? I might be able to keep stand-up, but it’s taken me almost three decades to get here. . . ”

He trails away. You sense he’d like to have every string to his bow. Could he really walk away from his three decades of trying, from Covent Garden street act through years of honing his stand-up until Edinburgh, the West End and finally Broadway beckoned? Then his careful targeting of Los Angeles — “because Hollywood is the hub from which everything flows around the world” — which is paying off, after years of cameos in slick flicks such as Ocean’s Twelve, his television drama The Riches, pulled after the writers’ strike but critically praised, and finally with Valkyrie, which he’s proud of because it’s the first film British and German kids can watch where they’re both out to get Hitler. “It is weird seeing my face on the poster on Leicester Square Odeon,” he smiles. “Now I just need to get my name higher up.”

It’s hard to see Izzard letting that work go completely, and you sense a half-hope that, having defied every rule so far — from transvestites becoming sex symbols to stand-ups joining Cruise in war films — he can pull this one off as well. Is he angling to be a character from a dream sequence: the politician with stage and screen within easy reach, who can finish his speech on the floor and slip into the limo for the gig at the O2 before shooting starts with Brad and George tomorrow? He shakes his head. “I don’t know. But I’m just going to get more and more active, and more and more up to speed on the intense detail that there is in any argument.” He nods firmly. “I have emotional or commonsense arguments, I can think about things from a logical point of view, but when you get right down to policy, there’s so much more information you need to take into your brain to understand it and argue it.”

It’s clear, Izzard says, that the Labour party is his natural home. He has recently donated thousands, and went toe-to-toe over Europe with Eurosceptics at the party conference. “We didn’t end on bad terms. With one I said, ‘Where are you on Europe?’ And he said, ‘I like it for certain reasons and not for others.’ Then he said, ‘There’s a joke about a Frenchman, a German, an Englishman and an Italian going into a pub. . .’ I said, ‘You’re not going to tell me that joke,’ and I just talked loudly over the top of him.” Then he bursts out laughing. “Nobody’s allowed to tell comedians jokes.” He shakes his head. “People go, ‘Here’s a joke you can use’, and I say, no. It’s a really strong rule. It’s legal. If someone tells me one, and I do anything like that in my act, I could be sued.” I’m not entirely sure I believe his legal point, but decide to let it pass. “Anyway, we’ve heard everything and judged everything — and I get very judgmental.”

Again with the Europe, Eddie. It’s been his drum for such a long time — for almost 20 years, through no-votes to referendums and currency rejections, through anti-euro campaigns and low-turnout elections. Why does a man born in Yemen to a travelling BP auditor, who, while at a British boarding school, mourned his mother’s untimely death (hiding porn mags under the mattress and vodka in a piano stool), and has climbed America’s stairway to stardom, still think he might give it all up for this fractured continent?

“Because the stakes are so high — if we can do it, there’s hope for the world,” he says in a flurry of earnest energy.

“We used to kill each other. Two and a half thousand years.Alexander the Great to the second world war. Every 50 years, we’d stop and say, ‘We haven’t had a murderous killing spree for ages — let’s kill these people. What hats do they wear? Let’s kill the blue hats.’ Then we’d make the spinning jenny, and roads, then we’d kill people again.

“Politically, I’m more driven towards the European level. I mean, about 100 people in France know I exist, a few people in Scandinavia know I’m there. Some people in Germany. It’s not like I’m really well known there, but

I keep intending to ramp that up. It’s not like everyone wants to jump into the European political spectrum — the no arguments are so much easier than the yes arguments — but if you take it from the world level, or really the human level, then it all makes sense. We do want a world where everyone has a fair go. If you want to do that, why not give it a go in Europe? And Europe has to be a good thing, because otherwise why are we here on earth? I don’t think we were given a reason, I think we have to find a reason, and the reason should be to try to have a good life and make something fulfilling out of this.”

Which brings us to his second big decision of the past 12 months — that, after many years of doubt and questioning, he has announced he is an atheist. When we spoke two years ago, he talked about his mother dying of cancer when she was only 41, and how Hitler had lived into his fifties. “So if there is a God, he’s a bastard,” he’d said. “You rack up all the deaths we’ve had — stackloads. That’s one bastard of a God if he’s up there. And why doesn’t he ever shave?”
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His new stand-up show, Stripped, which starts a UK tour this autumn, began life, as many of Izzard’s shows do, with heavenly characters: God, Jesus and Noah often appear in his live performances, bumbling their way through trying to convert dinosaurs and working out how to persuade ducks to enter the Ark. He approached the show “hedging around an agnosticky kind of place. A lot of people stick with agnosticism just in case He turns up and says, ‘I was here the whole time.’ So you say, ‘Oops, and I said I didn’t believe in You!’ And He says, ‘Yep, you’ve got to go to hell for ever.’ And you say, ‘Where is hell?’ And He says, ‘Well, it’s just south of Croydon.’

“I was warming the material up in New York, where one night, literally on stage, I realised I didn’t believe in God at all,” he says, almost conversationally. “I just didn’t think there was anyone upstairs. Which is good, because you have to be with faith to get elected in America, but without faith to get elected in Europe.”

Post-conversion, much of Stripped is an elegant argument for the nonexistence of God. Izzard delves into history — via, he freely admits on stage, the good offices of Wikipedia — and tries to tell the whole story of everything without a God. “It’s not as bleak as that,” he counters. “I’m a spiritual atheist. I’m saying, don’t believe in God, believe in humans — is there a practical difference? I have faith and belief in people, and if there’s anything spiritual above that, it’s goodwill. I’ve seen ill will in action, and it leads to Hitler. He kidnapped a country, the leaders of its government destroyed freedom of speech — well, you know. . . ”

Which brings him back to the idea of doing gigs in Germany and Russia. “I’ve been talking about playing in Germany for so long that it feels like I’ve done it, but this tour is definitely the one. I even have the club booked.

I know the dates, I know the place — it’s called the Quatsch club, in Berlin, which translates as ‘nonsense’. There is a different sentence construction in German that might screw me up — but I believe I can sort it. Anyway, it must be possible, because the world record for live stand-up is a young German comic called Mario Barth at the Olympic stadium — 70,000 people. Pisses all over us.

“After that, I want to take Stripped to Russia — all they hear is threats from us. And I think this is the right show to spread around the world. I’ve been through the Bible Belt in America with it, doing these Q&As after each show. The socially progressive people were saying they literally didn’t know there were 2,000 other like-minded people living nearby. They’d expected that if they brought up being an atheist in public, it would cause trouble. Then to come back here for the London run and have the press say, ‘You can’t talk about God like this’. . . I’m trying to get a world perspective on this, really: a show you could play anywhere in the world, or anyone can log in to.”

This, after all, is Izzard’s unspoken mission — or, as he describes it, his job. “My job is to go around the world, talk and come up with ideas, put them into an entertainment thing — that’s what I like, that’s just for me — but also to tell people in Europe that the Americans, Asians, Africans, they’re all the same as us. Their problems are the same problems. Love is the same thing. You hear stories about people who have done things in the name of love around the world, and they’re exactly the same.”

What about you and love, I ask him? He is notoriously reticent on the subject, has no official and squirms when romance is raised. “Well — I mean. . . I’m still in the Daniel Day-Lewis position of not talking about things. I’m sure you’ll find out about things at a certain point. Daniel Day-Lewis got married, you know, and nobody knew about it. And even when they did know about it, he still didn’t talk about it. That’s the continuing situation in my life, and no matter what happens, I’ll keep it relaxed. I always ask the people in my life if they want me to talk about them in my show, and they almost always say no, which is one of the reasons I don’t do much relationship stuff.

But I do talk about the people in my family who are happy to be talked about, like Dad — and Dad is the only one, actually.”

Izzard makes the same point at the Apple store. “There aren’t many girls who want to be the girl \ in the show,” he says, although a quick glance at the women in their twenties and thirties who make up a good 50% of the audience proves that particular point is wide of the mark. “We love you, Eddie,” they shout as he finishes up and leaves the stage. Now all he has to do is switch that round a little and have them yell “Vote Eddie!” instead. Then we’ll have something of a first for our battered continent: a charismatic populist politician who can hold a rally or a room delivering a humanist message. Just don’t tell him any jokes.

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A Triff-ic role
Izzard to star in Triffids remake

Eddie Izzard is to star in a new BBC adaptation of The Day Of The Triffids. He will play Torrence, the leader of a squad of soldiers who tries to round up survivors after the killer plants take over Britain.

Dougray Scott, Joely Richardson, Brian Cox, Vanessa Redgrave, and Jason Priestley will also be appearing in the two-part drama, now being filmed in the south-east of England. The high-definition filming is due to end in April, and the show will air later this year.

Executive producer Justin Bodle said: ‘We are enormously excited to have secured this stellar cast for The Day Of The Triffids. Together with its amazing effects and iconic locations, it will deliver the drama mini-series event of 2009.’

The series is the second time the BBC has adapted John Wyndham's 1951 science-fiction novel for TV, following a classic series in 1981. The Day Of The Triffids has also been made into a radio drama three times: in 1954, 1957 and 1968.

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I remember the 1981 version and thought it was excellent, even for the time, so here's hoping this new version is as good. I seem to remember the 1981 version was quite a few episodes though, so hearing that this will only be 2 episodes isn't the best news.

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EDDIE IZZARD LAUNCHES GET OUT TO VOTE CAMPAIGN
2nd March 2009

Eddie Izzard has visited Manchester in an effort to galvanise voters as fears spread of wins for the BNP in the forthcoming European parliamentary elections. Analysts are concerned that low turnouts during local and European elections could allow well-organised far-right groups to win important seats under the radar.

"If young people get active and learn about the subject they want to talk about and get involved in politics and that's fantastic," Izzard said. "At these elections it's very important because if people don't vote then the BNP will get in. You have to get people when they're young and the more young people that get involved the better, just like Barack Obama's campaign. A lot of [the] youth were involved in that so that was very exciting."

While in Manchester, Izzard met with culture secretary Andy Burnham and Labour candidate Lucy Powell, who he recently gave £5,400 to help fight the Withington seat – currently held by Liberal Democrat John Leech. He then performed a gig to "pay for it all".

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Here's Eddie on today's Paul O'Grady show

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Eddie Izzard reveals political ambition after marathon
16.09.09

Eddie Izzard confirmed plans for a future career in politics today as he met Gordon Brown after completing 43 marathons in 51 days. The 47-year-old posed with the Prime Minister and Sarah Brown outside Number 10 to mark his achievement. He finished the 1,100-mile-plus run at London's Trafalgar Square yesterday in pouring rain. Today, Foreign Secretary David Miliband also stopped in on Downing Street to congratulate Izzard.

The comic said: "I've said I will stand as an MP or MEP at some stage in 10 to 15 years, I like to make long announcements. But at the moment I've spent so long trying to get my career going I don't want to throw it away."

He put his running success down to "relentlessness" and said he felt good after the seven-and-a-half week challenge. He went on: "I've made it back, I think psychologically stopping has been good so I feel okay. I feel really good. My legs hurt, my body hurts, I'm very tired. I lost my toenails, had blisters and stuff, but to finish, it's kind of like science fiction in a way."

Izzard, previously better known for his surrealist sense of humour than athletic ability, added: "I just had to keep going, I just get determined to do strange things." The double Emmy Award winner said he will carry on clocking up the miles. "I do have to wind down but I want to keep a couple of long runs going a week, I don't want to throw it all away."

Holding the four flags he took on his epic trip - English, Welsh, Scottish and a "made up" one for Northern Ireland featuring a peace dove - he said all the running has not made him lose weight: "You put on weight because of the muscle, but I've changed shape."

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Here's Eddie being interviewed by Frank Skinner for 'Chain Reaction'.
download 11mb mp3

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'Believe: The Eddie Izzard Story'
Sarah Townsend's comprehensive documentary uses home movies, interviews and performance footage to sketch a heartfelt portrait of the comedian-actor and the early tragedy that still drives him.
October 9, 2009
latimes.com

Sarah Townsend's "Believe: The Eddie Izzard Story" illuminates the life and career of the protean, gender-bending comedian-actor through an astonishing collection of footage. Beginning with home movies from Izzard's childhood, the film moves through years of performances on the street and in small clubs to a triumphant West End debut, at which time he declared himself a transvestite, to his international acclaim as a stand-up comic and as a stage and screen actor.

This fine documentary, understandably years in the making, commences with Izzard's humiliating experience in being accused of using old material in a new show and unfolds as he launches a British workshop tour of his 2003 comeback, "Sexie," as a prelude to a world tour that culminated later that year in London's vast Wembley Arena, where he played before 44,000 fans over four days. Townsend's extensive interviews with Izzard backstage and elsewhere frame the performance footage as well as encounters and reminisces with friends, colleagues and fans.

Izzard spent his early childhood in a pleasant Belfast suburb, his happiness cut short by the death of his mother. Later, he was thrown out of Sheffield University because he was so obsessed with performing in the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. For years, Izzard was sustained by iron-willed determination.

He is a short, chunky, rugged man, and when he assumes drag he goes for androgyny. It's a look he finds comfortable, and it also frees him from gender in the wide-ranging commentary that underlies his comic sense of the absurd. His easy, unapologetic acceptance of his onstage transvestism allows his audiences to respond in kind. Only once has he been physically attacked, in a Cambridge street, and he stood his ground in the ensuing fight. Although the film implies that Izzard is heterosexual, it does not delve into his private life. Townsend saves her most poignant moment for near the end, when Izzard, reflecting upon his mother, says, "Everything I do is trying to get her back."

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Eddie Izzard: 'I keep thinking if I do all these things she'll come back'
The death of Eddie Izzard's mother when he was aged 5 haunts him. He reveals why it still drives him
Caitlin Moran
timesonline.co.uk

We’re four rows from the front of the MEN Arena, Manchester. With 13,000 people sitting behind us, these are pretty much the best seats in the house — yet, still: we can’t see Eddie Izzard’s eyes. Well, more specifically, there’s no time to look at Eddie Izzard’s eyes while he’s humming and buzzing across the stage, like some super-bright sunshine kid in full-on “delight” mode. You have time only to register his grin — like a predatory Cheshire cat — as the characters fall out of his one-man phantasmagorical ensemble pieces.

Here comes a traumatised squirrel from Brooklyn; a raptor in a pork-pie hat being pulled over for speeding; a Persian soldier very slowly impaling himself on Spartan spears at Thermopylae. Caring sharks. An entire swarm of bees. You simply presume that Izzard’s eyes are twinkly, warm, Father Christmas-style eyes. You know what I mean. Tom Hanksy. Like the dog you loved the most from your childhood. So the jolt when you meet him in the flesh is all the more intense.

“Hello,” he says, at the aftershow, appearing at your shoulder — and, up close, the eyes are glittery, hard; like a silver clockwork owl. The thumb-smeared kohl and eyeliner — sigils of glamour and possibly decadence — merely underline how ferociously present he is. He has eyes like guns. This contrast between ostensible glamour and decadence, and the true purpose beneath, is echoed in the room we’re standing in. Somewhere in the intestines of the MEN, a room has been swagged to look like a harem. But who is here? It’s not the usual line-up of hangers-on, surly local scenesters, dealers and birds. Instead, it’s just Eddie’s cousin-in-law, Johnny Vegas’s manager, and the heavily pregnant Lucy Powell — Labour parliamentary candidate for Manchester Withington.

I’ve been interviewing Eddie Izzard for 16 years now. Not continuously, obviously — that would be weird. No, I just pop in every couple of years and see how he’s getting on; plug his new thing. As an invention — a boy in heels as charming as a robin and as remorseless as gravity — I think Izzard is amazing. I like watching what he does. Nearly every time I meet him, however, I make a total arse of myself. At a wedding we both went to in 1997, I offered him a cigarette — and then another, with the words “If one is cool, then surely two at the same time would be even cooler. It’s like a . . . circle of coolness.” Ten seconds later — after he'd walked away, looking bemused — I realised that was pretty much word-for-word a routine he was famous for doing at the time. I think I even did it in his voice, a bit. But then, most people who meet Izzard come away reporting that they end up talking to him in his voice — going all “Um” and “Ah” and “Yeah but”. His speech-pattern is insanely catchy. There’s practically a Survivors Support Group of people who have done an impression of Eddie Izzard to Eddie Izzard, then cringed themselves into next Christmas at the memory.

Today, at the Manchester aftershow, I had been amusing myself by showing my sister a trick I learnt off Audrey Horne on Twin Peaks. In a pivotal scene in the drama, she gains employment in a local brothel by displaying how she can tie a cherry-stalk into a knot, using only her mouth. Prompted by my sister’s goading that I couldn’t, yet stymied by the lack of cherry stalks in the room, at the point where Eddie finally comes over to say “Hello”, I have just tied a strip of frisée lettuce into a knot in my mouth, and triumphantly spat it out into my palm. It is covered in saliva.

“Hello,” Eddie says, all pewter-pupils. I explain to him what I have done. “And is that . . . useful?” Izzard asks, looking bemused. I am so mortified I make my excuses and drag my sister away from the aftershow.Leaving the aftershow, for a taxi, we go through the arena’s loading-bay. There — lined up like the start of a dinosaur Derby — are six, huge, articulated lorries. Each has the official “Stripped” tour shot of Eddie on the side: Izzard in a dinner-suit, torn open to the waist. His eyes are smudged with glitter and he’s sexily kissing his fingers. As a convoy, the trucks must look pretty spectacular whenever they hit the M6. This immense, “sexy truck”, European and US tour will eventually play to 380,000 people — including 20,000 at Madison Square Gardens alone. He really has not wasted the past 16 years at all.

It’s become beyond a cliché to refer to comedy as a “serious business”. Clearly, the business here is huge — even at an Izzard-stipulated non-screw-over £35-maximum a ticket, Eddie isn’t heading back to Covent Garden — where he spent the 1980s performing on a unicycle, for pocket-change — any time soon. But the seriousness is the interesting thing. In a year in which he’s conducted a massive technologically innovative sell-out arena-tour, marketed as the thinking-woman’s pin-up, Izzard also ran 43 marathons in 51 days, and then — on the last day of running, at a reception in Downing Street — announced that he suspects his eventual future is in politics. He will stand — presumably for Labour, to whom he is a major donor — in either two or three elections’ time. When, the next day over breakfast, he talks admiringly about Barack Obama’s technique with large crowds — “He does this . . . big intimacy” — it’s not only as a showman admiring the chops. It’s as a future statesman studying the form. His ambition is inexorable and amazing. “I’ll have to kill my career for it. But sometimes, you just have to . . . stand up and be counted,” he says, shrugging in an excitingly determined manner. “Because if you don’t do it — who will?”

In the documentary Believe: The Eddie Izzard Story — which has just done the international film festival circuit, and gets a limited theatre release here from December 11 onwards — there is a key “Oh! now everything makes sense!” moment.

Over the past 15 years, Izzard has scarcely been reticent about discussing what a big impact the death of his mother, when he was 5, had on him. Aside from mentioning her onstage and in interview, he named his production company Ella after her. We know about the young Eddie Izzard losing his mother in the same way that we know about Madonna losing hers. In the documentary, however, the director Sarah Townsend — Izzard’s ex-girlfriend — keeps pushing Izzard on why he seems so driven: taking 15 years of rejection before becoming a successful stand-up; then learning French so he could gig in French; then relocating to America to pursue a film career. In response to her questioning, Izzard finally says, in an uncharacteristically desperate burst: “I keep thinking that if I do all these things, and keep going and going, then . . . she’ll come back.” And then he starts crying. Today Izzard recalls the shooting of that scene. “I didn’t know I was going to say that, because . . . I didn’t know I thought it. That’s why it’s weird. That’s why I start crying.”

Breakfast is black coffee, Special K and toast. Izzard is in a rather beautiful blue borderline-Mod suit, and wearing glasses, which he’s needed since the beginning of the year. “Shall I show you a picture of my mum?” he asks. He gets his iPhone out and starts scrolling through the pictures. When he finds the shot, he holds up the phone: it shows a blithe woman with a chatty, wonky-looking mouth and soft dark curls in a cotton-print dress.

“She’s pregnant with me, there,” Izzard says. There’s a pause. We look at the picture. He continues, with immense gentleness: “She was a singer. She sang with amateur opera groups. There aren’t many pictures of her. I’m trying to find them all. Last year, a Swedish family contacted us with footage of the entire family just sitting there, having a holiday. That was . . . amazing.” Izzard scrolls through the few pictures he has — his mother and his brother in Yemen, sitting in the garden of their house. His mother on stage, dressed as a ballerina in tiny, tiny shoes. “I have small feet, too, like her,” Izzard says. “Six and a half.”

He looks at the photograph again. It’s an odd sensation — looking at a photograph of someone’s mother, with someone who knows not a huge amount more about her than you do. “Most of the memories I have are from the cine-film and photos,” Izzard says, still looking at the picture. You see that the awful thing about losing a parent at such a young age is not that the memories unsettle you, but that there are no memories at all.

In Believe there’s a moment when Izzard finds a letter his mother wrote, where she refers to him as “Edward”. Until that point, he hadn’t even known what she called him. It reminds me of something that occurred to me the night before, as I watched Izzard onstage: that his material and demeanour — slightly woozy retellings of history, science and Nature — is that of a bright primary-school child coming home, and telling his mother a phantasmogorical version of what he learnt that day; just to delight her.

Izzard is scrolling through the rest of his pictures. “This is me in my football team!” he says, “when I was 12. I’ve just started playing again — because you should reclaim all the things you enjoyed from your childhood. I really believe that. I’m training to be a striker, because — I’m a striker in everything else I do. I like to attack things and push, push, push. Because anyone can do anything, can’t they? World War Two showed us that. Bankers were made into commandos. Women were taken from Cheltenham Ladies’ College and put on anti-aircraft batteries. Everyone can do way more than they think.”

Izzard loves the Second World War. As things stand, he is still the only person to play two speeches by Churchill on prime-time Radio One. A fan comes over to get her breakfast menu signed — she is shaking with nerves. Izzard gives her his big T-Rex beam and scrawls away.

Breakfast finished, we wander round the back of the hotel, to Izzard’s tour bus — “And there it is!” Izzard says, triumphantly, pointing at a skip. Next to the skip is a massive, sky-blue tour bus. Inside, Izzard cruises through the lounge area, past a healthy dish of roast seeds and then stiffens when he sees a plateful of Milky Ways and Love Hearts next to them.

“Where did they come from?” he asks, almost peevishly, pointing. “Someone left them here,” Sarah, his tour manager, says vaguely. Izzard sighs, as if burdened. “Is it a problem?” I ask. “Weeeell,” he says, already looking pre-defeated by them. “If I could, I would just sit down and spend the rest of my life with a straw stuck in a 15kg bag of sugar, sucking. They just . . . mmmm.”

“Is that why you ran 43 marathons?” I ask. “So you’d have an excuse to kick back and stuff your face with Haribo every evening?” “I ran 43 marathons,” Izzard says, pertly, “so I’d have an excuse to live to 183. I’m thinking of my peak fitness age as being 90. Do you want to try one of my gels?”

We go through to his bedroom, at the back of the van, and sit on the bed. It’s unbelievably tidy. Not a single item has been left out. It looks like either borderline compulsive behaviour, or that he just removed everything before the journalist turned up, to prevent prying. Personally, I favour the compulsiveness theory — when he sees that I’m holding a small piece of rubbish, he holds his hand out for it, silently, to put it in the bin. He also seems mildly distressed about shoes on the bed.

Izzard brings a bag of energy-gels out of a cupboard and we sit there sucking them. They taste like orange spaff. I gag on mine. Izzard knocks his back in one, like a tequila-shot. Izzard survived on these during his still-unlikely sounding 43 marathons in 51 days, for Sports Relief. As a country, I think we’re still in denial that these marathons ever happened. David Walliams swam the Channel — once — and we didn’t hear the end of it. Izzard, on the other hand, spent the whole summer holidays running a 26-mile marathon pretty much every day and everyone kind of went, “Er, yeah, um . . .” and changed the subject. “It was a bit surreal,” Izzard admits. “I think it was like saying I’d eaten a car. ‘I’ve just eaten a car. I’ve eaten a whole car.’ People just wouldn’t believe me.”

Izzard would pass the time imagining the history in the places he was running through — at the Battle of Nazeby, he tried to work out just who was fighting on behalf of the Royalists, “since the Parliamentarians were, like, the people”. He would get sudden, unexpected company on sections of the run — one woman who appeared at his side had driven all the way from Slovakia, just to lope along next to him. “I feel like I own the road now,” he says, “in the same way I feel like I own the stage. In that visceral sense. I can turn it up, turn it down. I get it.” Two days after the last marathon, Izzard was booked to appear on Tonight with Jonathan Ross. He ran all the way from Piccadilly to the BBC studios. “It was nothing.”

For all his talk of “killing his career” for politics, he’s still got at least a decade of comedy left in him yet: not least his recent idea for a comedy festival — a big one, like Glastonbury, or Glyndebourne. “Rain and comedy don’t work, so we’d have to work out how to cover it. And we’ve got to nail the sound — if you miss a word in comedy, that could be a whole build-up screwed. Maybe headphones or a drive-in thing, where you could sit in your car. But then we can’t hear the laughter and we need the laughter. Perhaps people could flash their headlights, for a small chuckle . . .” he muses. “Or we could mike the car park and people could wind down their windows and laugh in a designated direction . . .”

But he’s still restless — a restlessness that it’s borderline disconcerting to be around, when you consider the weekends off, and non-marathons, and quiet compromises of your own life. “The thing about the realisation in Believe,” I say, “is that if you really are, ultimately, doing all this to bring your mother back, there is, obviously, no end to it all. It is infinite. There is no . . . satisfaction. I don’t want to be satisfied. I don’t want to get there,” Izzard says, reasonably. “Do you know what I mean? You’ve got to be four steps ahead — because if you’re just one step ahead, that’s very close to standing still. Or even going backwards. You stop for a week and . . .” he splays his hands.

And he goes to put his trainers on, and run the seven miles to that night’s gig, where 13,000 people have paid to watch him think.

[Colston]

I'm seeing him in Cardiff on Thursday... I'll try and get some photos.

[faceless]

Eddie Izzard interview
As his Stripped tour continues, comedian Eddie Izzard discusses running marathons and siding with Gordon Brown.
Dominic Cavendish
17 Nov 2009
telegraph.co.uk

There’s an awful moment in a swanky hotel lounge in Amsterdam when it suddenly looks as if Eddie Izzard is about to suffer a nasty case of concussion – and it is, indirectly, my fault. I’ve been firing questions at him – demanding to know the gruelling details of his recent epic run around the UK, asking for clarifications about his Labour-supporting politics, probing his childhood, inspecting his stand-up comedy career – when – ouch! – as he leads us off in the direction of another lounge to continue the conversation, he walks straight into an internal glass-door, smashing his head.

That sounds dumb of him but it’s a glass-door so sleek and shiny and five-star that it just looks like air. So there we all are: shell-shocked hotel-staff, one of Britain’s best-loved comedians clutching his head and me, feeling somehow guilty as hell. But then Izzard straightens up, grimaces, and, mustering his best sang-froid, says in that calling-card posh drawl of his: 'It’s OK. I’m fine. You really should think about putting a sign on that door.’ It’s as if he has decided to kill the pain through a superhuman act of will.

The incident is emblematic of Izzard’s whole mind-over-matter shebang at the moment. Are men of 47 supposed to embark on a 1,100-mile marathon involving 43 runs in 51 days with hardly any training? Surely not. Few would have bet on a fairytale outcome for his charity fund-raiser but he made it, without ever being stretchered away in humiliation.

The lunatic ambition of that escapade is of a piece with his live comedy, which not only darts off in all kinds of daring surrealistic directions but is currentlyendeavouring to give us a whistle-stop, Wikipedia-inspired tour of the Earth’s entire history.Izzard deliberately uses universal rather than local references in his act, a big-tent policy designed to maximise potential audiences.

The aim of the Amsterdam dates – a stop-off for his latest vehicle, Stripped – has been to give Dutch audiences a taste of arena-sized stand-up for the first time, and embolden Eddie to 'crack’ the European market. This coming decade, he won’t just settle for Paris, which he has wooed in the past: he wants Berlin, Helsinki and Moscow too. He’ll try and learn the languages, if he can, he tells me, not just trot out his English material, as he has done in Holland. It’s harder to do stand-up than master a new tongue, he reckons.

To ask him about his cartilage-crunching marathon-run – and how on earth he thought he could succeed – is the same as inquiring why he approaches comedy with a 'could do bigger’ philosophy. He had no contingency plan for an injury sustained on the road, he reveals. Giving up simply wasn’t an option. 'And that’s the way I work. I need to impress myself. I set things up so I can’t back out of them. If I had got injured, I would still have got myself round it somehow. What you do is burn your bridges backwards and then the path of least resistance is forward!’ He grins.

Though at times it was agony, the run appears to have left him on an almighty high. He does half-marathons before breakfast, here in Amsterdam, without even thinking about it. Maybe one day he’ll just run from venue to venue, country to country, like an Olympic torch-bearer. In the meantime there’s the Eddie-mobile, a customised coach that puts one in mind of an election campaign battle-bus. Behind-the-scenes he has an entourage of 45 people. Seven lorries transport the deluxe set and technical necessaries for his £2m show. And all this for a comedian who hasn’t built up his audience using the conventional broadcast channels. Izzard is the TV comedian you won’t see performing comedy on the small-screen.

At one point, after the gig, which was duly met with a standing ovation, Izzard thumbs through his iPhone to show me the latest Tweets of his million-strong army of Twitter followers. I half-jokingly suggest that he wants to become the first world-comedian. He runs with the suggestion in all seriousness: 'I want to be a world-comedian? That’s it, absolutely!’ A child-like eagerness, never far from his stage-act, seizes him. Whatever the Rolling Stones or U2 can do, he wants to do too. Think big. Play hard.

'Why not? I was an ambitious kid. It’s in all the school reports, “He really does seem to be a determined little child’’. That’s my way. I’ve always felt we have a post-empire view of ambition which is that we tried it but it meant we stole other people’s countries – as if there’s no other form of ambition. I really hate that.’ He likes to call himself 'an action-transvestite’, although on this tour he’s not doing falsies and skirts, just a playful range of bloke clothing.

It would be easy to characterise Izzard as having evolved from a cuddly eccentric into a ruthlessly steely showman as time has worn on. When he dolls-up in drag – a proclivity part-attributable to his mother’s death when he was just six – he can look, well, slightly scary. Yet such a view rewrites the history of his success because being scatty and unfocused in the 80s, when he tried street-acts and the Edinburgh fringe, got him nowhere fast. 'I found it helped me to have a game-plan,’ he says, affable and open about it. 'Some people have this “everything just comes to me’’ attitude. That’s fine but I’ve noticed that with me, it doesn’t. So it’s better to have this endless grind.’

It’s not all about 'me, me, me’ – even if it might seem that way. Izzard’s line is that he’s just showing us what we’re capable of achieving. 'We can do way more than we think we can,’ he enthuses, 'perhaps five times more’ . His big thing at the moment is getting people excited about the Olympics: 'I want to encourage the entire country to go out and do something they used to enjoy doing as kids, whether it’s cycling or running or rowing – whatever the hell it is. It’s under a thousand days away. We should grab the opportunity – and go for it!’

In the meantime, he may be undertaking his most foolhardy mission yet: coming out fighting in support of Gordon Brown. He rallied round the Labour candidate Willie Bain ahead of last week’s Glasgow North East by-election, and is delighted by the ensuing victory. And he’s prepared to side with the deeply unpopular PM. 'When the times get tough, you stand up to be counted,’ he says. 'I still believe the Labour party cares about the many rather than the few. Have they made mistakes? Yes. Gordon Brown may not be the most relaxed person but he has strengths as well as weakness. If you get outside Westminster, you realise, as we’ve just seen in Glasgow, that not everyone wants the Tories back in. After 12 years in power, it’s right that there should be a fight but we will see what happens at the election.’ Given Brown’s hazardous position in the polls, it’s possible that Izzard – who describes himself as 'a radical moderate’ – will wind up alienating his fans, but if it all backfires horribly that may only hasten his own entry into politics, a career-move he has been contemplating for a while. He could still return to stand-up at a later date, he reasons.

Needless to say, he has got it all mapped out. 'When does your political career end? Say about 75? Well, we can live to 100 these days, so I could go back into comedy later. Groucho Marx played Carnegie Hall aged 82. I see that and think – that’s it! That’s the way to do it!’

[Colston]

[SpursFan1902]

Cool photo, Colston. I think I would be more annoyed with you if you were not laughing! Tee Hee I saw Eddie in June of 2008 and got to talk footy with him. Very cool...