Posted: Sun Jun 08, 2008 3:06 pm Post subject: Reeves and Mortimer
This really is no laughing matter Vic and Bob, Soho Revue Bar, London By Julian Hall
Wednesday, 4 June 2008
(Rated 2/ 5 )
Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer are the latest in a clutch of household comedy names to play the monthly night BBC Comedy Presents, following appearances by French and Saunders and Noel Fielding of The Mighty Boosh. Tonight's return to their live roots saw the pair hosting a show that included a wide variety of acts encompassing stand-up, character comedy, musical comedy and the lately resurgent fusion of comedy and magic.
If the acts thought they had hit the jackpot in terms of the choice of MC, then to a less than fanatical observer, such as myself (who always thought the duo less comedy dynamite, more comedy Marmite), this was the best way to see Vic and Bob – in small doses and sandwiched between acts that, in turn, took the burden of laughter away from them or made you want them back on stage. It's possible to argue that there was no time for the pair to get into their stride but their rhythm has never been about building, more lurching from one mania to the next.
Three years ago, when they played a small one-off gig to promote their DVD, Vic and Bob paraded characters from their hit early Nineties television show Big Night Out. Tonight, the main raiding of the character cupboard was a reprisal for the odd folk duo Mulligan and O'Hare from The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer.
The croonsome twosome had taken over editorial duties at Heat magazine, and their particular spin on celebrity obsession was to spot celebrities shopping at hardware or furniture stores, and so seeing "Jennifer Aniston outside Carpet (Tick) Right" was high on their news agenda. The speculation on whom she might be buying the carpet for was their ludicrous take on celebrity obsession and it was as close to social comment as it gets from a pair rightly accused of heralding the de-politicisation of comedy in the Nineties and signalling catchphrase culture for scores of apolitical students to hide behind.
The plus side of Vic and Bob was the idea that they had somehow re-invented the tradition of British variety. Of course, they had to kill it first, and Bob Mortimer's joke tonight: "Do you remember those two terrible Winters we had? Mike and Bernie" is a suitable admission of guilt and, ironically, a rare moment of actual material. It's not that they can't write gags (Vic Reeves, after all, is the owner of "bird flu, man walk"), but when they do use them they are like get-out-of-jail-free cards to vindicate the vacuum that has gone before rather than added value to a sketch.
Amid the rest of the goofing around is a sketch about Bob bringing his letter-box contraption to heat up cold mail to Dragons' Den and trying to convince Vic's pipe-smoking Duncan Bannatyne of its virtues, and a riff on plastic surgery using potatoes and cakes: "I learnt it from the Nip/Tuck manual," says Vic, now a qualified surgeon.
It's all nonsense, of course, and what's wrong with that, you might wonder – this is comedy, after all? But laughs can't live off lunacy alone; they can feed on timing and delivery but they have to strike some kind of chord, a gag, an aside, an observation that gets to the heart of something. Double acts, in particular, live and die on charm; but charm alone cannot sustain them and all too often Vic and Bob, and more latterly The Mighty Boosh, have lived on the basis of riffing close to the wind and flying by the seat of their pants. There might be a joke along in a minute; then again, there might not.
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It's been coming for a good few years and I'm surprised they tried to recreate what they had, but I wouldn't mind seeing the show to check for myself... though I might leave in tears by the sounds of things!
Comedian Vic visits the Isles sporting Harris Tweed suit 16 January 2009
By Donnie Macinnes
www.stornowaygazette.co.uk
WELL known comedian Vic Reeves visited the islands to take part in a film about Harris Tweed….and ended up with having a piece of material woven for him for a three-piece suit!
Despite being a comedian, his antics didn't make weaver Donald John Mackay of Luskentyre laugh too much – for he had to spend the entire night weaving the cloth before Vic left on the plane the following morning! But that didn't really bother Donald John
Said Donald John: "Harris Tweed is Vic's passion and he was wearing a tweed suit while here. He was on the island to take part in a documentary that was being filmed about Harris Tweed but didn't know much about the process. He said he would like a three-piece suit in Harris Tweed and went to Harris Tweed Textiles in Carloway and saw the whole process from start to finish. The warp was taken down from Carloway to my shed and I gave him a shot on my loom. He wove a few inches of the material that will be part of his suit."
But Donald John went on: "He was supposed to be down in Luskentyre at 2 o'clock in the afternoon, but didn't arrive until 8 o'clock in the evening – and he was wanting to take the cloth on the plane in the morning as his tailor in London was going to make him a Harris Tweed suit. It will be a nice suit when it is finished – it has a Lovat green warp with a red heathery mixture on the weft.
A ceilidh was arranged in the Anchorage in Leverburgh where Vic enjoyed the entertainment – and a dance or two to the music of ceilidh band Roineval, which includes Donald John's brother Neil. Said Sally Lessi, who runs the Anchorage, "It was a really lovely evening and Vic was very friendly and relaxed. He spent the evening here dancing and chatting to everybody. He was explaining all about the tweed he was wearing and how he designed the cloth himself. He had seen the island in the dark mostly, so he is returning with his family in the spring to see just how beautiful it is."
She went on: "He was beautifully dressed and was a real gentleman, interested to find out about those at the ceilidh. He was part of it and really enjoyed himself, although he was a bit confused with the Strip the Willow. I'm pleased that so many came to the ceilidh, despite their colds and flu, to help him have a good time."
Regarding Vic's visit to Harris Tweed Textiles in Carloway, production manager Alex Mackay said that the comedian was in good form watching the whole process. "He is a very funny man – and very interesting as well. He owns as many as 20 suits made from Harris Tweed and wanted to know how it was made. In fact he came off the plane with a really mad yellow suit he had done himself in Harris Tweed. He designs his own colours. We made a piece for him and that piece went to Donald John who wove it for him. The film company shot the process step by step and spent more time on the island than they planned."
Alex, son of the mill's general manager Steve Mackay, added: "Vic said he enjoyed his two days on the island so much that he was planning to take his family on holiday here in May and would pop in to see everyone he had met here." So TV viewers will be keeping their eye on the box to see if Vic is wearing the new Harris Tweed suit made from the cloth he chose in the islands.
Jonathan Ross is just a bully... We are quickly becoming a nation of bad-mannered bullies, says Vic Reeves By Rebecca Hardy
6th February 2009
Vic Reeves doesn't find Jonathan Ross funny. He thinks he went over the top making his obscene 'prank' call to Andrew Sachs on Russell Brand's Radio 2 show, and believes he should have known better. 'Jonathan can't control himself sometimes,' he says. 'Picking on people is not my sort of humour, but I think there's quite a lot of it around. We're slowly turning into a nation of bullies; manners have gone out of the window.'
Vic is a stickler for good manners. He has two-year-old twins, Lizzie and Nell, with his second wife, model Nancy Sorrell, and is forever reminding them to say please and thank you. 'I'm telling them off quite a bit at the moment,' he says. 'You do it at this stage, to get them on the right track. You feel a bit rotten because you're saying, "No, don't do that". Lizzie's the worst. I'll say, "Don't push your sister", and she'll say, "No, I will". I end up saying, "No you won't and I'm the boss"'.
Vic dotes on the twins, conceived using IVF, as he does his children - Alice, 15, and Louis, 11 - from his first marriage. He says they're a 'big happy gang' and all 'get on really well'. The day before we meet, he took the twins for a long walk. 'We were walking across this heath and it was quite cold and windy,' he says. 'Lizzie was funny. She was saying, "No, no", pushing the wind away. She was having a fight with the wind.' Vic laughs. He has a quirky, surrealist humour that not everyone gets, which he finds very funny.
'We've always had people who don't understand our humour,' he says, talking about his Shooting Stars co-host, Bob Mortimer. 'Once, a woman in a shop said to me, "I don't like your show." I asked why not. She said, "Because it's rubbish."'
The good news for fans of Shooting Stars is that, after the excellent ratings of the one-off Christmas special, it looks likely that the BBC will be commissioning another series. Vic says he's crossing his fingers, but it's 99 per cent in the bag. 'What you get is Bob and me doing what we do,' he says. 'I think it's quite good humoured. It's not as if we're picking on people. We're basically poking fun at ourselves. We call ourselves idiots. We play the fools.'
Vic - real name Jim Moir - is known for his wacky dress sense, and today he's wearing a tweed suit and quirky Alexander McQueen shoes. The suit is very much in keeping with his next job, presenting an episode about tweed for UKTV's new series My Brilliant Britain, in which celebrities travel around the country looking at life in the UK.
Vic opens the series with a trip to to the Hebridean island of Harris, where he discovers how the material is made. 'The crofters used to fix the colour in tweed with urine, so you can always tell an old tweed suit because it smells like pee,' he says. 'Someone asked me, "Is it sheep’s wee?" But how do you get sheep's wee? Do you follow it around with a pot? It's probably easier to use your own. So, no, I think it's crofter's pee.'
Vic has enjoyed being away in Scotland, but he likes being at home with Nancy, sharing a bottle of wine with her in front of the TV. Since the twins, they rarely go out - and it seems to suit him. He-s just celebrated his 50th birthday, but his forehead is as smooth as a baby's bottom. I wonder if he's had Botox. But no, he uses moisturiser; eye cream, too. 'I wear girls' perfume,' he says, 'and I moisturise every night - over the face and around the eyes. I've got a big jar of it by my bed. The eyes are starting to get old, though. No matter how much cream I apply, it still doesn't seem to help.
'You can be a really terrible actor - I won't mention any names - but, as long as you're good-looking, you can get by with it. Okay, Keanu Reeves. He's a diabolical actor, but he still looks good. Television's always looking for younger faces. It's a young man’s game, or a young woman's, which is probably why everyone had a go at Ulrika (Jonsson) when she was on Celebrity Big Brother.
Ulrika, a team leader on Shooting Stars, and Vic have been close friends for years. They speak regularly to each other on the phone and text one another. Not, though, the sort of sexually charged texts Ulrika exchanged with Sven-Goran Eriksson when he was manager of the England football team. Despite rumours of an affair, she and Vic were never lovers. 'I don't know why she did Big Brother. I would have thought that she would have wanted to be at home with her new baby. I didn't see much of the show - I saw the first couple of shows, which were rather dull and I got bored - but I don't think she's done herself any favours. When she was in the house she kept saying she didn't want to be there, which doesn't come across that well, does it? If I had been Ulrika, I'd have run away. I think she must have done the show just for the money.'
Vic says he doesn't like watching reality TV shows, but Nancy does. They've appeared in several themselves, including I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! - and admits it was for the money. He hasn't been earning quite so much since Reeves and Mortimer fell out of fashion a year after they were voted the ninth best comic act ever by fellow comedians and comedy writers. He says, 'I think everyone has to have some kind of hiatus at some point, if only for people to get nostalgic and remember. Then it comes back with a bigger bang. In the meantime, you have to keep busy doing other things.'
But why did he and Nancy do I'm A Celebrity!? 'There's not enough money going round now. I think it's a good thing to keep you on your toes. While I was there, I spent my time doing my art projects, which I'm very proud of. But that’s not what people want to see. They wanted to see Nancy and me having a row. They didn't get it.' Recently, they both appeared on Dale Winton's Saturday night show Hole In The Wall, in which celebrities, clad in shiny, tight bodysuits, try to force themselves through various holes in a giant moving wall or end up head first in a swimming pool. 'It's one of those things you agree to occasionally and then think, "Why am I doing this?"' he says. 'I like Dale. He fancies me. He told Nancy that I was hot, which is an odd thing to tell a man's wife. I was flattered, but it's strange coming from a man.'
Vic says Nancy, 34, is his soulmate, and that they've never had a row. After meeting in 2001, during the making of the BBC's I Love 1990s, in which celebrities recall the TV, films, fads and fashions that made the decade memorable, Vic asked her to make a guest appearance on Shooting Stars. He proposed to her at the trendy Groucho club in London's Soho at 22 minutes past ten on the 22nd of the second 2002. Their wedding rings are inscribed on the
inside with '22.22.22.02.2002'.
Having twins seemed weirdly inevitable. Vic is, at heart, a devoted family man who was devastated when his first marriage fell apart in 1998 after his wife, Sarah, fell in love with her personal trainer Julia Jones. Vic desperately missed his kids and continues to find it hard not waking up to them each day. When Nancy failed to conceive a year into their marriage, they started IVF. 'It wasn't hard, because there wasn't much wrong. I don't know what you call them, the clamps that keep the eggs in position (the follicles) weren't holding onto them, so Nancy's eggs were just floating away and not maturing properly. So it was quite an easy thing, and it just worked straight away.' The twins were born naturally in May 2006 and featured in a Hello! magazine spread, partly for the cash and partly because Nancy likes appearing in glossy magazines. It's not really Vic’s sort of thing, but it seems that he likes to keep his wife happy.
The product of a contented childhood, his mother was an amateur medium and his father a typesetter, who practised funny walks and worked nights so he could spend the day with Vic and his sister, Lois. He shares a birthday - 24 January - and a name, James, with his father and grandfather, who liked to make the family happy because that made them happy. 'My dad would have loved this tweed show, because he liked anything British,' says Vic. 'When I was little, he used to like shooting and fishing because he liked that Englishness.'
His father died from prostate cancer five years ago, and Vic misses him. 'I read that you can take these little pills, which, if you start at the age of 40, keep prostate cancer at bay,' he says. 'They're made from pumpkin seeds. They sort out your prostate, but are also nature's Viagra, so I've read. I've got a pot full of them by the kettle, so I just put my hand in and help myself.'
When Vic was recording the Shooting Stars Christmas special, Matt Lucas, who play the show's scorekeeping baby, George Dawes, told him that Johnny Depp considered him and Bob to be the godfathers of British comedy. He says, 'I think that's nice - that people are aware of us.' But what makes Vic laugh? 'The only shows on telly that I find funny are Harry Hill's TV Burp and The Simpsons.'
We can only hope, then, that it won't be long before he's back with his comedy partner Bob Mortimer for a new series of Shooting Stars - and then we can all enjoy a laugh.
Time out profile: Vic Reeves A bizarre encyclopaedia featuring his wife’s bottom has helped to put the comedian back in the limelight Damian Whitworth
timesonline.co.uk
Vic Reeves is eager to show me his wife’s bottom. I have just commented that his new book, a bizarre encyclopaedia that he has illustrated himself, is not as rude as I thought it might be. “There are plenty of bottoms,” he retorts. “My wife’s bottom is in there somewhere.”
He leafs through to the section on the human circulatory system. For reasons too surreal to go into, it features a collage of pert butts. And one of those belongs to Nancy? “All of them,” he says proudly. “I did that with an iPhone. That’s a bit of iPhone art.” He pauses as a thought starts to grow. “There’s a thing. An exhibition of iPhone art . . .”
Throughout our meeting Reeves tries to portray his life as a round of chores and normal family behaviour. But inevitably the less mundane side, such as using his phone to photograph his wife’s derrière from every angle, is exposed. He is, after all, Vic Reeves — some of the time, at least. Reeves is his showbusiness persona, a pseudonym adopted for his double act with Bob Mortimer that has filled our TV screens with faux naive zaniness, weird gags, meaningless catchphrases and clever wordplay for the best part of two decades. His real name is Jim Moir and he expects to be called Jim when you meet him. But just because he is Jim Moir from Darlington in his private life doesn’t mean he is a serious fellow. You can take the man out of The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer, but you can’t take the smell of Reeves and Mortimer out of the man.
After several years of lower-profile projects, Reeves and Mortimer are back on our screens with a new series of Shooting Stars. The decision to revive the show, last seen in 2002, was a surprise. Reeves (for simplicity’s sake, let’s stick with the stage name) says that in the past couple of years YouTube had brought their old shows to new audiences, and after a 15th birthday Christmas special last year the new series was commissioned. “It really shouldn’t have gone in the first place,” he says. There is talk of another series and more mockumentaries involving the double act, including one on Steve Coogan. So at the age of 50, after years of sporadic appearances — I’m A Celebrity, documentaries about pirates and Jack the Ripper — he’s back in the limelight. It is not quite the same level of exposure that Vic and Bob had when they became famous.
“I think a lot of it is down to looks. In our thirties we had the right look and it was like rock’n’roll then. We used to get hundreds of kids outside hotels clinging to the side of the bus. But as 50-year-olds you don’t get the teenage adulation. Rolling Stones don’t get girls throwing themselves at them, but they get hats doffed by passing workmen.”
His encyclopaedia, which started out as a children’s book but was restyled a “family book”, is unsurprisingly odd. Reeves’s son called it “strange” and he’s not wrong. The compendium of completely made-up facts, half-truths and oddball observations covers “whatever I was inspired by when I woke in the morning. It wasn’t particularly planned.” The letter K, to take one at random, covers K2, King Kong, Billie Jean King, knights of the road, Kraken attacks and krill. Reeves went to art school and some of the illustrations are accomplished, others less so.
In the entry for celebrities he suggests readers should award themselves points for each famous person they spot. The examples he offers are Pliny — apparently the Elder — and Dizzee Rascal, the rapper, both illustrated by woodcuts he made. Pliny,who died in the 1st century AD, “would be a really good spot, but you only get 5 points; 15 for Dizzee Rascal. So you can see it’s not that accurate.” He assesses himself as being worth 10 points. And Bob? “Well he would be an equal 10. Maybe 11.”
Reeves and Mortimer live in Kent and write from about 10am until 4pm at their office in Maidstone, pacing around suggesting jokes to each other and dreaming up ways to humiliate the guests and team captains, Ulrika Jonsson and Jack Dee. The cardboard tubes that they play like didgeridoos in Dee’s face were found in a skip outside their office.
“It’s a small democracy in our office. If one of us doesn’t like it, it doesn’t go in,” he says. They get competitive only about lunch. “I started taking packed lunches and then Bob started bringing them in. His were a lot more elaborate than mine and his wife made his and I made mine.”
Reeves thinks the word “surreal” is overused to describe their comedy. “I would say probably more ‘oblique’. You have to dig out the punchlines. Don’t lay jokes on a platter, they have to be dug up like the recent Saxon hoard.”
He is off then on a digression about the haul of treasure found by a man with a metal detector in Staffordshire recently. “He must have been pleased with himself. I’ve done a bit of that meself.” Beat. “It’s quite dull. Once dug up bits of tractor. He’s probably been doing it for centuries,” he adds, a touch enviously.
That treasure-hunting should appeal to Reeves comes as little surprise. His working life is all about unearthing new idiotic phrases and pranks, and he has tried his hand at all sorts of hobbies. He says that some of these are erroneous: “I keep getting told what hobbies I’ve got.” I had read that he was a keen birdwatcher. “I did when I was young. I know what birds are. I go out occasionally and will spot a bird and tell the kids: ‘That’s a blackbird. That’s a seagull, but I might be wrong.’ You could say that I was an aircraft-spotter and I know motorbikes.”
His current “fad” is touring car-boot sales with his three-year-old twin daughters, Elizabeth and Nell. “I take the girls early on Saturday or Sunday morning. So Nancy gets a shower and chance to put make-up on while I am out trawling around the boot fairs with them, which they probably don’t like. Sometimes get a bouncy castle there.”
Reeves’s first marriage to Sarah, with whom he had two children, ended a decade ago. She had a relationship with her female fitness instructor and for a while the three of them reportedly lived together with the kids. He was subsequently briefly engaged to the actress Emilia Fox before meeting Nancy Sorrell, a model They were married in 2003. His 12-year-old son, Louis, and daughter, Alice — “16 going on 30” — live with their mother in York, but he sees them regularly. He is planning to meet up with his daughter at the Ilkley Literature Festival. “It’s amazing. I’ve got two three-year-olds and then I’m going out with my older daughter for a night out. Big happy family, yeah.”
Clearly Nancy is well used to his japes. “I constantly experiment on my family. I like to set challenges. I trick her with words quite often or facts. I just throw bogus ones in.”
He does all the cooking and recently decided to stop preparing meat without telling her. “It was an experiment to see how long we could go. It carried on for about two months. I wanted to see if we felt any livelier or lost any weight.” And did you? “Absolutely no difference.”
Reeves says that his wife approves of his personal sense of style. He has 15 tweed suits and on this autumn day is in a splendid three-piece, blue-check number that he designed himself. She is less keen on a nascent beard, about three days old. “She doesn’t like that. I thought I might get away with it. I thought I might go for the full English.”
She has also seen off his museum of home-made hoaxes. “Rags that Frank Sinatra used to wipe himself down after a performance at Carnegie Hall. An albino lapwing owned by Mick Jagger and used at Hyde Park. Mainly things I had found at auctions or junk shops and then with an old typewriter put titles underneath. It’s been dismantled but will exist again. I wanted to do a museum of piss as well. Just like test tubes [of famous people’s urine].”
He has three sheds in the garden to store his collections. When I explain that I face similar domestic resistance to my boxes of personal memorabilia, he starts plotting. “You need that box of photos and those early records! You need them there for your perusal.” He asks how big my garden is. Small, I say. He thinks. “Well there’s always underground. Dig a big hole, put a shed in it with a tunnel.”
He puts considerable thought into his weekend outings. “When I was a kid, I used to be taken round castles and historical sites so I do the same with my kids. It’s a tricky one this weekend because we’ve got visits,” he says unenthusiastically. He wanted to go to local stately home, Groombridge Place: “There’s a fairy day at the enchanted forest. I like to go to those things probably more than the kids.”
The girls are at nursery school — “you get that 12 hours from the Government free” — and he starts each day with his concession to exercise. “Get the girls in their buggy and tear up the high street to the butcher’s and get cheap meat.”
He says that the twins entertain each other but they get into trouble. He is struggling for a clear approach to discipline. “I try different methods. I’ll be strict, but I don’t really like to bollock too much because I don’t think it has any effect after a while.”
He rarely sees Bob outside the office or studio. “Neither of us socialises too much anyway. We never have really. Once you have kids you never go out, do you?”
In 2005, he was banned from driving for 32 months after leaving the scene of a drink-driving accident in his village. There followed speculation about how much he drank. “That’s tabloids,” he says. “We have a drink once a week. Once or twice.” Most evenings, after eating with the kids at 5.30pm and putting them to bed, he sticks his nose in a book — he has a collection of first editions that includes Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell — or watches TV.
He is scathing about the new generation of comedy shows. “I haven’t seen any decent comedy. It is quite foul now, isn’t it? I’m thinking: can’t you be a bit cleverer? It’s easy to swear, isn’t it?”
Reeves is delighted that Matt Lucas has gone on to great things from Shooting Stars and that he has returned for his cameo as George Dawes in the new series. But he is faint in his praise of Little Britain. “I liked it on the radio better. Not so keen on the spewing.”
He is working on a second book, a guide to Britain. He shuts himself in the shed, digs around in his personal archive for ideas, does some painting and occasionally emerges to take the odd cheeky photograph.
Vic Reeves interview Simon Binns and his fellow North Easterner discuss cats, careers and art appreciation in a working class town.
03/11/2010
manchesterconfidential.co.uk
Comedian Vic Reeves – aka Jim Moir – was up in Manchester for the Buy Art Fair last week to display some of his paintings with Eyestorm Gallery. Confidential’s Simon Binns caught up with him.
Simon Binns: We’re from similar parts of the world and I remember telling my careers teacher at school that I wanted to do something creative – writing or art or some such. He told me I should work in a steel factory. Did you have similar experiences in Darlington?
VR: That’s what I was told. Exactly the same. No encouragement whatsoever. ‘We don’t do creative round here. You’ll go and work in a factory and don’t even think about any of that fancy stuff.’
SB: So why did you stick with it then?
VR: Because it was what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to work in a factory. Although I did for a short time, making parts of something or other to do with trains and railways. I didn’t like it.
SB: You weren’t inspired?
VR: No. But I think it’s a working class North East mentality – to do what you’re told; so I went and did it. When I eventually woke up at the age of 18 I thought ‘I don’t want to do this,’, so I went to art college.
SB: And that opened you up to a whole new world of possibilities?
VR: Well, that was already what I was doing. Other kids were playing football and drinking lager; me and my mates were sat under a tree reading Dostoyevsky and Camus. That’s what we were, and I thought: ‘I’ve got to get out of this place...(starts singing)...if that’s the last thing I ever do...’
SB: Do you go back up to the north east much?
VR: Not really. My dad died and my mam moved down south near me. So no, I don’t really have much call to.
SB: Have you been to the Middlesbrough Institute for Modern Art (MIMA)?
VR: No. Have you?
SB: Yes.
VR: What’s it like?
SB: It’s...all right.
VR: But with all due respect, nobody round there is really going to be interested in it, and if you are, people will just call you a ‘puff’. (Laughs) I wish they would give stuff like that a go outside the big cities. Do you go back to Middlesbrough much?
SB: Bits and bobs. Go and visit my mam. Watch the football now and again. Hardly at all when I was living in London...
VR: Ah! You’re ‘the puff who moved to London’! That’s even worse!
SB: You ended up on the telly. That must be worse surely? Are you going to convince a TV station to let you do a programme about art?
VR: No. They’re not interested. I’d love to though.
SB: Is college where you got seriously into performance art?
VR: I was already toying with it and playing around with daft stuff and that sort of grew into Big Night Out. It didn’t take the place of painting. I just wanted to get it out there.
SB: How did it go down with early audiences when you were playing in pubs?
VR: I’ve no idea. I didn’t really care what the audience thought. I was doing it for me.
SB: And did you try and make your paintings as surreal?
VR: I wasn’t really trying to fit into any category with my paintings. Again, I was doing what I wanted. Although I did walk into the Royal Academy with a load of my paintings and they wouldn’t hang them on the walls. Then someone told me that all they sell is paintings of cats. Apparently they fly off the shelves. So I’ve decided to start painting cats. I’m going to see if it works.
SB: And if it doesn’t?
VR: I’ll start painting dogs. I’ve started doing landscapes too. I’ve done one of my street where I live.
SB: So you’re cynically tailoring your paintings to what the masses want?
VR: (Laughs) I never think about it to be honest. I just approach each painting with an open mind, I never really know what I’m going to do or how or why.
SB: What about the sort of art that you like to buy or collect?
VR: What’s hanging on my walls? I like really classical stuff actually. Big bold traditional oil paintings are what I put in my home.
SB: Do you still have half a car submerged in your garden?
VR: That’s not my garden – it’s in Paul O Grady’s. I gave it to him. That’s never coming out. It’ll be there for years. Even if it’s just a big lump of rust coming out of the ground.
SB: What’s the most expensive piece of art you’ve bought?
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