Alistair McGowan

[faceless]

Alistair McGowan fights Heathrow expansion plans
He tells Rosie Millard why it’s not just a middle-class battle
Sunday Times
2008-01-18

He’s come to the end of a tough six weeks playing Baron Hard-up in Cinderella at the New Wimbledon theatre, but the comedian, impressionist and eco-warrior Alistair McGowan has clearly not allowed the role to distort his priorities: last week, he slammed down an undisclosed sum to buy part of a small field running along the perimeter of Heathrow. The field is important, for it lies across Heathrow’s proposed third runway, which last week was approved for construction.

“There is a spirit of the Ealing comedies about it,” croaks McGowan, 44, who is nursing a throat infection while stretched out on a lopsided single bed in his dressing room. “We are standing up in quite a clever way against the machinery of government, and I think there is something romantic about the fact that we have bought a piece of land which is right in the middle of a runway.”

Yes, but won’t somebody simply slap on a compulsory purchase order and bulldoze it any-way? “Well, we will delay them by fighting it in the courts as much as we can,” cries the impassioned baron. McGowan’s co-purchasers include Greenpeace, Zac Goldsmith and Emma Thompson, who has suggested she might like to use her smallholding as an allotment.

What will McGowan do with his? “I’d like to put a tennis court on it,” he says. “Or we could have drinks parties on it.” He shakes his head, as if somewhat bewildered that it has fallen to him, a balding television comic famed for his Richard Madeley and David Beck-ham impersonations, to defend Planet Earth.

“Celebrity is almost a byproduct of what we do. You can use it to get free tickets for things and get pissed and stagger around taking drugs. Or, if you want to use your celebrity a different way, you can talk on behalf of the Inuit Indians. Or the people of Tuvalu.”

McGowan has hosted envi-ronmental award ceremonies, and worked for the likes of Keep Britain Tidy and Friends of the Earth. “You people,” he says, meaning me, I suppose, or possibly even you, dear reader, “won’t listen to people in South-all.” This time, he means the population of the downmarket suburb directly below the Heathrow flight paths – and his point is fair. It’s easier to create a stir if you are famous.

Yet has he got in with the wrong sort of fame? Goldsmith, a multi-millionaire heir, and the Oscar-winning Thompson (who presumably flew to the Golden Globes in Los Angeles last week) are rather grand. With all this talk of allotments and tennis courts, the overall campaign has more than a whiff of Marie Antoinette. Is the antiHeathrow lobby in danger of becoming the preserve of people who can afford to take time off and complain?

“It’s not a middle-class thing!” cries McGowan. “If sea levels are rising and you have a £2m house, forget it! Everyone is affected by it. And, yes,” he continues, referring to La Thompson’s air miles, “I’m sure Emma flew to the Golden Globes. This is the sort of thing which riles me!” he says, riled. “Every time small companies such as Greenpeace campaign about something, people say, ‘How did you get there? Did you fly? Did you go by car?’” He groans at the clichéd nature of it all.

“We are not saying no one should fly, ever,” he says patiently, as if to a child. “Flying is an inevitable part of modern life. But the government has said it wants to reduce carbon emissions. And if the government is going to meet its targets, it cannot expand the aviation industry.”

As far as he is concerned, we should all sit down and watch An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore’s award-winning polemic about climate change. Under compulsion, if necessary. “I would make people watch it in a Big Brother way. Orwellian, not Davina McCall,” he says, helpfully ironing out any possible misunderstanding. “Gore’s film should be watched at the same time by everyone around the world. It’s the truth!”

McGowan evangelises as one burdened with the problem of being a modern-day Jeremiah. He admits he nags people constantly about lights, jumpers, recycling and so on. I start to wonder what living with him must be like. Yes, you’d enjoy listening to his jokes, or hearing his voice exercises (he’s a good singer), but woe betide you if you turned the heating up – or even on – or failed to recycle a plastic bag. He even urges me to name and shame a house down his road that apparently leaves two spotlit rooms illuminated all day and all night. “I see it when I cycle into work. Seven miles, there and back,” he says pointedly.

But what about all those carbon emissions in America? Or China? Surely a couple of halogen-lit rooms in Barnes are not going to prove the tipping point? “Somebody has to lead the way,” McGowan insists.

Furthermore, we citizens just don’t know the full picture: “Ordinary people don’t know what’s going on. If you go into the estates in Peckham and say, ‘What is climate change? Do you know what icecaps are? Do you realise by leaving your lights on, you are having an effect on people in Kenya?’, they will probably say, ‘No’!”

McGowan got turned on to the green cause nearly 20 years ago when he read that McDon-ald’s had saved no end of plastic waste simply by shortening its drinking straws by 2in. In terms of a baptism, this was total immersion.

For him, saving the planet has become a bigger cause in his life than his career, on whose altar he freely admits he used to sacrifice all, particularly relationships. After stepping out with Ronni Ancona, his co-performer in the television hit comedy The Big Impression, he then lived with the screenwriter Jess Williams. He now lives with “a girlfriend” who apparently shares his preference for woolly jumpers over heating, but about whom no further details must be divulged. He recently decided not to have children. “I didn’t want to bring them into a world with such an uncertain future,” he says.

A graduate of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, he had always focused solely on performing, he says. “Always. But I can’t put my job before the survival of the planet.”

Now he feels everyone should feel the same way. Jobs and the credit crunch are short-term problems, he thinks, compared with the long-term crisis facing Earth. He may well be right, even if small tremors down the McGowan career edifice are nothing like the seismic shocks many others will suffer in the coming months.

This may account for the loftiness with which he dismisses the employment opportunities arising from the proposed Heathrow extension. “When people go on about the creation of jobs, the 25,000 which will be created [actually, the stated number of new jobs is 65,000], well, they might as well give those people a gun each and take them to the Arctic and let them shoot every polar bear in the head.”

Does he think polar bears are more important than people’s livelihoods? “Yes, I do.” He glares at me. “If we lose polar bears, it is because the icecaps are melting. If that happens, and sea levels rise, we will lose all the islands and beaches that people want to fly to for their holidays anyway. Gone. By 2030.

“Huge areas of our land which provide food for our country will disappear. The same will happen across the world. We will all end up on a tiny hill somewhere, living off what? Walkers crisps!”

At some point in our conversation it dawns on me that there is no place for dissent either on McGowan’s field or indeed in McGowan’s world picture. “Radio and television particularly, they insist on balance,” he shudders. “If you have any debate on the environment, there must be someone on from both sides, they say. But there is no argument! Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Littlejohn, they talk about envi-ronmentalists wanting to knit their own jumpers out of mues-li, and other objectionable phrases. But it’s not about privation and hair-shirtism!”

Going without heating on for all but an hour a day sounds a bit like privation, I murmur. “Having no heating is not privation!” cries McGowan. “It’s much healthier for you. All that hot air, with microbes flying around,” he says, swatting away invisible viruses as he speaks. “It’s just about cutting down and not being wasteful.

“I’ve been using this for about six weeks!” he says, proffering a small plastic mineral water bottle. “I refill it every day from a tap.” That’s probably why you have a throat infection, I tell him. He looks at me as if I am guilty of heresy.