Rob Brydon

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Rob Brydon: who are you calling nice?
Rob Brydon is best known as funny Uncle Bryn in Gavin & Stacey. Does his stand-up reveal a sharper side?
Amy Raphael
timesonline.co.uk
28th April 2009

It’s Friday so it must be St Albans, the commuter town that, in 2007, replaced Mayfair as the most expensive square on the board in a special edition of Monopoly. Cities don’t come more middle-class than this. Not that there’s much sign of affluence deep inside the grandly named Alban Arena. Several flights of municipal concrete stairs lead to an absurdly unglamorous backstage area.

A sign on the dressing-room door, written in permanent marker, announces the presence of “Harry and Dobbin”. Inside, however, is a sleek MacBook with its screensaver of a family having fun in the sun, a bottle of water and Rob Brydon. He’s frowning at the harsh, unforgiving lighting. He flicks the switches on and off to find “mood lighting”. It suddenly goes dark. “That’s a step too far,” announces a disembodied Welsh voice sternly.

Brydon gives up with the lights and we sit instead on nasty tartan sofas in a communal area. He has been doing a stand-up tour of Britain since February and next month he’ll be taking up a two-week residency at the Apollo Theatre in London. This is the first tour under his own name. In previous outings he has appeared on stage as Keith Barret, the pitiable cab driver whose wife Marion has run off with Geoff. Marion and Geoff, which was initially broadcast on BBC Two in 2000, quickly became a cult classic and won a handful of comedy awards.

It made sense for Brydon to exploit the success of Marion and Geoff, which is why he has often taken him out on the road. Disguised as Barret, Brydon was able to push the boundaries of audience interaction. He once got away with calling a woman morbidly obese because “part of the joke is Keith’s insensitivity”. On his current tour there’s nowhere to hide.

Although venues have been selling out — as Brydon himself says, his role as the eccentric, camp Uncle Bryn in Gavin & Stacey swept him into the mainstream and recently gave him a second Bafta nomination — some critics have yet to be won over. A review in this paper suggested that “Brydon is a consummate performer who hasn’t really found his stand-up voice”. Other reviews have pointed to a half-written show.

A cynic could argue that the show is a series of sketches and as such lacks a coherent voice. The 90 minutes are still dominated by audience interaction. In St Albans, the overwhelmingly middle-class audience roar with laughter as a man panics when addressed by Brydon. His age drops from 78 to 58, while the young woman next to him is first his girlfriend and then his niece. Brydon is a great impressionist and his skit about a phone being lost at the bottom of a woman’s cluttered bag is particularly memorable for the “small voice” he does — it sounds exactly like someone at the other end of a muffled mobile.

I suggest that the show is like a one-man version of Britain’s Got Talent. Brydon laughs. “You can say anything you like, I can take it. Really, I don’t mind. I am richly rewarded — I have a pretty damn good life — and so I have to put up with criticism. Although I’m not always this stoic about it.” He reaches for a grape and points out that two of his friends have been critically mauled recently. “Steve Coogan got an absolute kicking on his recent tour. But he’s still Steve Coogan, one of the most talented, gifted people I’ve met. And James Corden has had a kicking too, but he’s still a very talented boy. I’ve always thought he was going to be the next Orson Welles.”

Brydon watched Corden’s fierce commitment to the first series of Gavin & Stacey fade by the second; by then he’d become a tabloid fixture and appeared more interested in his new lifestyle than in work. “I took James out for lunch around that time and asked him what he was doing, told him he was going to throw it all away. James was very young, very hungry, very ambitious. He wanted America. He was elevated by the media incredibly — he couldn’t have been hotter — so there was only one way to go. It was unlucky that both his film [Lesbian Vampire Killers] and his sketch show came out at the same time and created a shit storm. I watched Horne and Corden and it’s not for me but the kids love it.”

Brydon points out that nobody likes to be publicly criticised. “I’m sure it hurt Steve and James and it hurts me too. So shoot me. Stand-up comedy really is the most subjective art form — if it can indeed be called an art form — and so it’s almost impossible to review. What I do is this: go out and entertain my audience for 90 minutes. That’s all there is to it. I entertain them by whatever means I can.” And he’s not going to change his show to please the critics.

However, he admits that, once he’d decided he no longer wanted to tour as Keith Barret, he had to force himself to book the current tour. He wasn’t sure who he should be on stage. Brydon’s background is not in stand-up comedy and so he’s never had to slog around the circuit and learn the hard way. He started his career as a DJ on BBC Wales, earned a pot of money doing television voiceovers, broke through with Marion and Geoff when he was in his mid-thirties, struck comedy gold with Gavin & Stacey.

After Humphrey Lyttleton’s death last year, Brydon, Stephen Fry and Jack Dee will be taking over as joint hosts of Radio 4’s long-running comedy panel game I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue in June; Brydon has also taken over from Angus Deayton as host of the new series of Would I Lie To You? But while the panel shows are going extremely well, Brydon freely admits that he is still trying to find his stand-up comedy persona. So how close is the onstage Brydon to the real Rob Brydon? “If you give too much of yourself away in this business you risk becoming an open wound. So you show what you want to show. It’s amorphous, it’s always shifting. I portray myself on stage as being insensitive — turning the television to mute, for example, as my son Tom is being born — but if anything I’m oversensitive in everyday life.”

Brydon is widely seen as a nice guy. “Well yes, I can see why people would say that. But I can also be quite petulant; I can be short tempered and I can also be a bit of a shit.” He also stops just short of being cruel on stage. He’s more Barry Humphries than Russell Brand but then Humphries can be sadistic. “Yes, but for my taste Barry Humphries’s is a sharp cruelty on a bed of warmth and compassion. For my part, when I ask an audience member about being divorced, I’m celebrating life’s failings, from which we all suffer.”

He certainly isn’t shy about finding humour in his own failings, including his own divorce almost a decade ago and his second marriage, to Claire, a few years ago. I mention his reference to Claire in the current show — “I got famous and got a younger, blonder wife” — but he jumps in before I finish. “It’s entirely ironic. It’s interesting; I said it at the start of the tour but then I stopped. My ex-wife ended up with a female journalist on her doorstep asking her how she felt about it. She just laughed and said: ‘That’s him, he’s a comedian. It’s what he does. It’s a joke.’ My lovely ex-wife declined to give her side. I was very proud of her. It was the response I suspected she’d give but you never know . . . I was really, really pleased.”

He insists that he didn’t drop the younger wife line because of the journalist. “A few friends who came to see me pointed to a few moments that jarred. The younger wife joke was a slight on me — that I’d be shallow enough to do something like that — but perhaps it’s too subtle in the end. It goes back to finding what your persona is. As I said, I’m the nice guy. My panel-show style is not particularly shocking. I can enjoy Never Mind the Buzzcocks and 8 Out of 10 Cats but I wouldn’t fit into those environments. They are much harsher, more gladiatorial. I prefer something that’s a bit more gentle but just as sharp.”

It may all sound rather sedate but then you have to remember that Brydon has had his dark days. When he co-wrote Marion and Geoff with Hugo Blick, an old college friend, he was separating from his wife and was in a desperate place; he also co-wrote Human Remains with Julia Davis, a brilliant television series about dysfunctional relationships. Almost a decade on, he’s married to Claire (who, for the record, is eight years younger than Brydon, who’s about to turn 44) and they have a child, Tom, who is 1. He has a good relationship with his ex and sees his three older kids at weekends. “Things,” he says, stuffing a chocolate éclair in his mouth, “have never been better.”

Rob Brydon has never wanted to be like Russell Brand; since his divorce he’s craved stability in his life. Comedy is not the new rock’n’roll for Brydon, it’s the new MOR. Nonetheless, he enjoys huge respect from edgier comedians. I once asked Steve Coogan, whose production company Baby Cow worked on Marion and Geoff, and who co-starred with Brydon in Michael Winterbottom’s film A Cock and Bull Story, what he made of Brydon. He enthused about him having comic skill “in spades”, then remarked that he was “on” all the time.

I remind Brydon of this and he raises an eyebrow. “Yeah, compared with Steve, who is off all the time. Let’s have some joy about whatever gift it is we’ve been given! Steve has this peculiar gift and yet he rarely wants to play.” Brydon is clearly bored by Coogan’s reluctance to do impressions (which he does at least as well as Brydon) and be silly with friends. The two rarely see one another these days; Brydon is much closer to Little Britain’s David Walliams, who was an usher at his wedding. Whenever they talk on the phone, both pretend to be affronted about something or other and enjoy camp frippery.

Yet, despite his famous friends — who also number Ricky Gervais and Steve Merchant — Brydon is never going to be cool. But although he may possibly be so uncool that he’s actually cool, he is perfectly happy being the kind of comedian made for St Albans. He did, after all, ask the co-creators of Gavin & Stacey, James Corden and Ruth Jones, to remove unnecessary swear words from their script. And he’s clear about his own agenda. “I’m not political. There isn’t a unifying thought to the show other than wanting to make the audience laugh. If my show has a cabaret element to it, then guilty as charged . . .”

Yes, but does he wish he was cool? “I’ve got to be realistic about who and what I am. I’m not a Noel Fielding. I’m not a Mathew Horne. I listen to Paul Simon, James Taylor, Bruce Springsteen. I went to see Billy Joel with Peter Kay. We had a fantastic night. Billy Joel is a brilliant song writer so I don’t care [what people think of him]. Evidently I’m in the uncool segment of the Venn diagram. But you are what you are.” And it’s probably no more complicated than that. Rob Brydon — comedian, actor, father, husband, possibly in reverse order — is happy and nothing else matters.

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Rob Brydon on his amazing career
Nov 28 2009
Steve Hendry
dailyrecord.co.uk

IF you see Rob Brydon in the street, it's perhaps best to avoid blurting out Gavin and Stacey catchphrase 'what's occurin' unless you have spare time on your hands. The Welsh actor, comedian and presenter has just returned to TV screens as Uncle Bryn in the award-winning BBC comedy series but he's also got his on-going stand-up tour, which has played to more than 100,000 people, to think about.

Then there's the DVD of the live show which is due for release on Monday, the next series of the comedy panel show Would I Lie To You, which he hosts, an appearance on the next series of Live from The Apollo in the can and the Christmas TV adaptation of Julia Donaldson's best-selling children's book The Gruffalo, in which he provides the voice of snake. Throw in the fact the 44-yearold father-of-four's youngest child is just 18 months old, and it's fairly obvious there's a hell of a lot occurin'.

It's been that way for the last decade, since he made his breakthrough in the dark comedy Human Remains with Julia Davis in 2000, and followed it up with the acclaimed Marion and Geoff and it's spin off, The Keith Barret Show. He is grateful for all the success he's achieved and, clearly, still grafting away to make sure it continues.

He says: "It wasn't always this way and I think the danger is you take it for granted if you don't stop and smell the roses. It's happened gradually for me, it's not like it's been a sudden thing. It must be very nice but I've never been fashionable. It's never been wow... it's Rob Brydon time! It's just built up very nicely over time and I hope that means it will be more sustainable in years to come."

One thing which won't be sustainable is Gavin and Stacey. The popular sitcom, which is written by stars James Corden and Ruth Jones, has grabbed a massive audience and bagged four British Comedy Awards, two Baftas and a South Bank Show award, not to mention spawning the 'what's occurin' catchphrase. But despite all the awards and acclaim the third series, which has just returned to BBC1, will also be its last.

And while fans of the show, which follows the fortunes of young married couple Gavin and Stacey (Matthew Horne and Joanna Page), will be disappointed the end is nigh, Rob, for one, believes it's the right thing to do - even if it does mean the end for Uncle Bryn, a character who has seen him nominated for a Bafta and claim a number one single for Comic Relief with (Barry) Islands in the Stream, in which he sang alongside co-star Ruth Jones and Welsh legend Tom Jones.

He says: "Of course I'm sorry to see it go but they have done the right thing because they are going to go out leaving people wanting more. Very few shows capture the public imagination the way Gavin and Stacey has. I think anyone who says they aren't surprised by that level of success is a bit of an oaf. I knew it was very, very good but you can never predict it is going to catch on as it has. They could have gone after the Christmas Special last year but they have come back for a third series and I think, if anything, these episodes are even better than before. They have moved the story on and the ending is both poignant and lovely."

When the show goes out , Rob might just be able to catch it. He has got a rare night off between gigs on the final leg of his current stand-up tour, Rob Brydon Live!, which heads to the Edinburgh Playhouse on December 6. It's a stand-up show which has grown organically, starting from a relatively humble tour of Wales before morphing into a massive undertaking, including a three week run in the West End.

He says: "We started the tour last year in Wales and it was going to be a certain number of dates. It went well, so we put on about 30 more and they sold, simple as that, so we added some more... and it's ended up now with 87 dates. I was in the West End for three weeks in June and July and then we filmed a DVD at the beginning of October. I do stop sometimes and think 'wow, a year tour'. I think we've sold over 100,000 tickets. That's a lot of people. But the thing is, I really like it. That's the main reason for doing it.

"I look upon myself as someone who has built up an audience and you really want to keep that audience happy. Stand-up is very important to me because it's very pure and you are in charge. It's a fine and noble tradition standing up and entertaining an audience. It's a great feeling when you can do it and pull it off and it's very self-sufficient. You are not going to a TV company and saying what do you think? With stand-up, you book a venue and if people come to see it and like the show you have succeeded. I like the simplicity and purity of that.

"I've played Glasgow twice on this tour and, inevitably, they've been some of the liveliest gigs on the tour. I really am very, very fond of Scottish audiences in general. I'm looking forward to the Playhouse as I love Edinburgh. I did Keith Barret at the festival some years ago but it wasn't classic rites of passage. I was staying in a swish flat and having lunch at Harvey Nicks. I loved it. It was like having a Las Vegas residence."

Rob's pet topics on the current tour include becoming a dad again at 42 and the horrors of home birthing but while he's clearly a devoted family man, he admits to it doesn't always gel with a tour of this size and magnitude which is why he's factored in days off, and kissed goodbye to any notion of comedy being the new rock and roll.

He jokes: "There's no sex, drugs and rock and roll. My tour is nice food, good hotels and investigating the local golf courses. The tour has been scheduled to make sure I'm not away from home too much. The structure of the day doesn't gel that well with a young baby but no complaints - it's my job. I've got to get out and do it."

His next job is providing the voice of Snake in the much anticipated Christmas TV adaptation of The Gruffalo, which also features the voice talents of Robbie Coltrane as the eponymous monster with terrible teeth, terrible claws and a poisonous wart on the end of his nose. It's much more family friendly and was a real labour of love given Rob is a current expert on the book.

He says: "I've seen a nearly finished version and it looks absolutely fantastic. The animation is gorgeous and they have a wonderful cast with the likes of Robbie Coltrane and John Hurt. It was a treat for me to play Snake in Gruffalo because I read it most nights to my baby." It's also family viewing, something he's made a conscious effort to involve himself in. He says: "I think it's partly because I got so many kids. I've done stuff which I hope is still very sharp but I tend not to swear on things, just because I feel awkward if my kids are watching and dad's effing and blinding. I don't like them seeing that. There's a bit of bad language in the live show but it's the form of a character and I don't mind them seeing that because it is dad's work. I suppose I might sound like a wishy washy liberal but I grew up when families did watch TV together. Most of the stuff I do, I think families could watch."

Rob Brydon Live! is on at the Edinburgh Playhouse on December 6.

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My perfect weekend: Rob Brydon
For comedian Rob Byrdon weekends are about playing Monopoly, eating chocolate biscuits and being cosy round the kitchen table.
Yvonne Swann
22 Jan 2010

I live in Strawberry Hill, a desolate, barren no-man's-land between Twickenham and Teddington in Middlesex. We've been here for a few years. I always look forward to weekends with my wife Claire and the children. They are a pretty full couple of days and we have a sort of routine now.

It starts on Saturday morning at whatever time my son Tom wakes up. He's 19 months old and likes to get up bright and early to get a head start on the day. I admire him for it. He grasps the day with gusto at the time of his choosing and we all fall in with him. If I'm feeling particularly angelic or looking to build up brownie points, I'll take him downstairs and give him his breakfast, so my wife can sleep on. But that's very rare and we often find ourselves staggering down together at 5am. I'll usually give Tom his breakfast while my wife goes for a run.

I have three children from my first marriage. They live with their mum, just a couple of miles away. They spend most weekends with us, so my next job is to pick up my eldest son, Harry, 13, from football training. Then we both go to have a golf lesson together at a local golf club. This is a new tradition. Harry has started to really enjoy golf and I'd been playing it badly for a while, so we have our little lessons with our teachers in separate bays at the driving range and then we meet to compare notes. Next we pick up Amy, 10, from drama club. My eldest daughter, Katie, is 15 now and she is very much striking out on her own. She seems to have lots of things to do and tends to make her own way over to the house, at her own pace.

Once we're all assembled I like us to sit down together for lunch so that we can catch up on everyone's news. The meal is usually light – bread and cheese or a home-made soup – and then we might go to Bushy Park, or to the farmers' market in Richmond in the afternoon. My wife is a fantastic cook. Recent wonders have been a delicious smoked haddock soup, a beef and ale pie, a chicken pie and a passion fruit cheesecake. When I wake up I often find she's been in the kitchen for hours and made a cake.

Saturday evening varies. I've been touring with my one-man show a lot this year and sometimes one of the kids will come with me to a venue on Saturday night to see it. My son quite enjoys sitting in the wings and watching the act. He'll give me notes about what he thought worked and what didn't. It's nice to give them a glimpse of what I do. If I'm at home on Saturday we'll have the television on in the background. Then we might settle down to play a game. We play Monopoly, Balderdash, charades and give-us-a-clue type stuff and we can get quite competitive. Certain older male members of the family have often been subject to (well-founded) accusations of cheating.

On Sunday morning Tom will decide when we wake up. If I've had a show the night before, my wife's very considerate. She'll feed him and let me sleep. The older children surface at various intervals throughout the morning. After breakfast they'll get on with their homework. Sunday lunch is the focus of the day. We'll eat out in the garden in summer, but in winter it's all about being cosy around the big kitchen table. We often have family or friends over to join us. Last weekend my parents came up from Wales. We'll have roast beef or lamb and all the trimmings. I'm particularly partial to parsnips. The wine flows and I make a point of being silly and trying to make the kids laugh. They usually roll their eyes in despair.

The merriment might be interrupted by a cautious visit from the cat from two doors down. We are slowly gaining its trust. In about five years' time I honestly believe he'll let us stroke him. So that's an ongoing project. In the afternoon we'll go for a walk to get a breath of fresh air. We are lucky to live close to Richmond Park, or we might amble along the river to Teddington Lock.

After tea I'll run the kids home and we'll put Tom to bed. Supper will be light – cheese on toast is just right. Then I'll settle down to read the Sunday papers with a glass of milk and a big pile of chocolate biscuits. I love milk and biscuits – it's all part of my rock and roll lifestyle. Then off to bed. I work hard and no day is the same, but I'm someone who loves Mondays. I love the sense of it being a fresh start.

MY FAVOURITE THINGS...

* My wife's smoked haddock soup
* Golf lessons with my 13-year-old son
* Playing Monopoly, Balderdash and charades
* Watching an international rugby match
* Milk with a big pile of biscuits

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Rob Brydon on 'Desert Island Discs'

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Rob Brydon: the interview
The beloved uncle from Gavin and Stacey is moving on to a new incarnation as the king of chat. Rob Brydon talks about life on the road with Steve Coogan, being homesick in LA and why his lack of ambition has been his saving
Carole Cadwalladr
The Observer,
12 September 2010

There's a bit of a standoff going on when I arrive to interview Rob Brydon. The photographs are being taken in a working men's club in east London, and I'm standing with Brydon saying my hellos when out of the corner of my eye I see the photographer advancing towards us, a sequined jacket in his outstretched arms. "Oh here it comes," says Brydon in a voice that sounds as if it has seen it all before, showbiz highs, showbiz lows, the passing of several geological ages. "The novelty jacket. I can see where this is going."

It's momentarily confusing since Rob Brydon shares the same mellifluous Welsh sing-song as his most famous character, Uncle Bryn from Gavin and Stacey – a man with such a joyous enthusiasm for life that even reciting a shopping list he can sound like he's just discovered the secret of eternal life. "Now you've probably never seen one of these," he explains in an early episode as if he's about to unveil the control deck on the Starship Enterprise. "It's called a SAT NAV!"

Brydon, on the other hand, sounds like the headmaster who's just discovered that you cheated in your chemistry exam: knowing. And just a bit disappointed. Still, he puts the jacket on, ever the professional. "Come on then!" he says and strides towards the set.

The standoff has passed. But Brydon has such a reputation for being "nice" – he's never received any bad press, scarcely even a dud review – that it's quite illuminating to know that he's not entirely without edge. Because, of all the funny men on TV, there's no one who seems purer or more childlike than Rob Brydon. He radiates a sort of old-fashioned innocence. And not just because of Uncle Bryn – it was a trait shared by Keith Barret, the melancholic Welsh cuckold who was the star of Marion and Geoff. Even when he's playing himself, the Rob Brydon who crops up on programmes like QI, he has the joy and enthusiasm of a Welsh border collie.

It comes across, too, in his new BBC series The Rob Brydon Show, a mixture of chat, music, audience interaction and jokes, and while there are no novelty jackets, there is something of the old-fashioned variety host about the 45-year-old Brydon: the gentle humour, the courteous way he treats the audience. Even the set has a slightly old-fashioned air – there's a comfortable armchair, a pot plant. There is, and there seems to be no other way of saying this, a certain Bryn-ness to it.

But then he's never been one to deny his inner Bryn. "All the people I know who play characters become known for them – Peter Kay, Ricky Gervais, Steve Coogan – and sometimes they'll do something and you think: 'Ah, that's just like Brian Potter. Or Alan Partridge.' I think that what they do is recognise things in themselves. And that's what you do, without sounding pretentious – you sort of paint with that. I don't really lose myself in a character. I just try and see where the character and I meet up. I'm not that interested in trying to dazzle you by being unrecognisable. What I am interested in is telling a story effectively."

Ruth Jones who, with James Corden, wrote the part of Bryn for Brydon in Gavin & Stacey, has known Brydon since she was 15 and they were at Porthcawl Comprehensive in Bridgend together. "The thing you have to remember with Rob," she says, "is that he loves entertaining people. And it's not that it's necessarily an ego thing – he just absolutely gets a thrill from making people laugh."

He really does have what used to be called the common touch. During our interview I'm treated to jokes, stories, anecdotes – it's a relief, frankly, to meet a comedian who's funny in real life – and this will-to-entertain also comes to the fore in The Trip, a three-part series for the BBC directed by Michael Winterbottom (Winterbottom is also cutting it as a feature film and will show it at the Toronto film festival). It reunites Brydon with Steve Coogan in the form of an improvised road trip around the Lake District and continues their relationship from A Cock and Bull Story, a dramatisation of Laurence Sterne's "unfilmable" novel Tristram Shandy, also directed by Winterbottom. In that film Brydon played a character called Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan played a character called Steve Coogan. It's the same conceit this time: Steve Coogan is Steve Coogan, who's taken on a job as a celebrity restaurant reviewer (for the Observer, no less), and Rob Brydon is Rob Brydon, his friend. The result, says Brydon, "is quite a lot of uncomfortable moments".

The script is almost wholly improvised. Winterbottom just gave them a subject – Coleridge, or missing their kids – and they talked. "We distance ourselves a bit," Brydon explains. "For example, in it I just have one child who's six months old and he had two teenage kids, whereas in reality he has one teenage daughter and I have four children of varying ages. So we wanted to make that distinction, but nonetheless we are Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon.

"What you do is you exaggerate things. I do impressions all the time to annoy him," he continues, "where in reality I don't do that. If I did that, I'd be a lunatic, so some things are heightened. But some things aren't changed very much at all."

There's a brilliant bit in the first episode where Brydon and Coogan have an impression-off, vying to do the best Michael Caine. And although he doesn't do these voices the whole time I'm with him (I wouldn't mind if he did – "A broadsheet journalist called my impressions 'stunningly accurate'!" he shouts at Coogan in The Trip, and actually they are), he does slip into accents whenever he has something slightly awkward or contentious to say. Talking about his kids, for example, he slips into comedy Welsh. And he does treat me to a blast of his Richard Burton, richly vowelled and camply theatrical ("Oh, what a piece of work is a man!").

In an interview with Steve Coogan, Coogan said of Brydon that he's "always on". "Well, I'm certainly more on than Steve is," says Brydon, "but Steve is remarkably not on. You would not think that he is who he is, except on the rare occasion when he wants to make you laugh. I like witty people, people who can be witty on the spot. And when you're with Steve he won't often try to make you laugh." Their relationship goes back years. Brydon is usually referred to as "Coogan's protégé", although he says that he hears that less these days. "But it wasn't unfair. He championed Marion and Geoff and Human Remains and got them made."

It was Marion and Geoff that provided Brydon's first major role back in 2000, a show that he wrote, with Hugo Blick, and in which he played the only role, Keith Barret, a taxi driver whose wife has recently left him. Coogan was the one who saw the brilliance of it, wasn't he, I say. Did that change your life? "Oh yes, yes, yes – 100%. Absolutely. I was doing voiceovers and stuff at the time, and I used to watch him and think: 'That's exactly the work I want to do.' And then I kind of went on and did it."

Brydon's never struggled in the true actorly sense, however. He's always made a very solid living, first as a DJ on Radio Wales in the 90s and then doing voiceovers. You've probably heard him a thousand times and not realised it. He's been an English-accented continuity announcer for the BBC, the voice of Toilet Duck, of Sainsbury's. He's done adverts in a Scottish accent in Scotland, in an Irish one in Ireland. The voiceovers kept him afloat, but it wasn't the success he'd always dreamed of. Growing up in Baglan, just outside Port Talbot (a vast panorama of the town's steelworks forms a backdrop to The Rob Brydon Show), which has produced both Richard Burton and Anthony Hopkins (and more recently Michael Sheen, with whom he's friends), it was impossible not to notice that acting could be a very good career indeed.

Did it inspire you? "Oh yes, absolutely. Because you think somebody who's come from here has done it. You read a lot of stories about people who grew up in Anonymousville who say: 'Nobody from there had ever done that.' Whereas I always had encouragement from my family. I never had: 'Oh you want to be an actor, ugh!' I always had: 'Oh you want to be an actor? Brilliant! Go for it.'"

Every year the school put on a big production musical, and he and Ruth Jones were always the leads. And there was never any doubt in anyone's minds, she says, that he'd be successful. However, his break was a long time coming. "For years I thought it would happen; I believed it would for a long time," says Brydon. And then you lose faith." When it finally did, the timing could not have been worse: just as Marion and Geoff was taking off his marriage broke down.

He had three young children and he doesn't talk about his divorce because "the children are all of an age", but Keith Barret's hapless melancholia perhaps provides an inkling. In any case, the experience is still, he says, "a huge, huge part of my life".

And why, perhaps, he's so unbothered these days about pursuing ever greater "success". "That is probably true. Because there I was at that time the most successful I'd ever been, but I wasn't happy. I think this is the thing. I'd just been up to get the comedy award and I was worried I was going to burst into tears. And nobody knew. It's made me think that being successful in your career is not the route to happiness."

He's since remarried and had another child, Tom, two. And he's an obvious homebody. He tells me how he did the LA thing, flew out to "meetings" – "And I remember I stayed at the Mondrian on Sunset, and I just got quite depressed. Because the kids, the time difference – I felt so far away, and I didn't like it. My Welsh friend, the actor Steve Speirs, he was out there and he came round to the hotel, and I had this beautiful room with floor-to-ceiling windows and I'd just bought this Neil Diamond album which was quite introspective and Steve came in and said: 'What the fuck are you doing? Stood by this window, you've got this depressing music on, you're telling me you miss your children. Good God, man! It's not good for you.' So we went to Universal Studios and did the tour together."

There's a definite Odd Couple aspect to the Coogan-Brydon pairing; onscreen they riff, they compete, they put each other down. Is that what you're like in real life? "No, onscreen there's very little warmth, which there is in real life. Also, we don't spend that much time with each other really. I don't see him from one year to the next often. But when we do see each other we slot in very easily and it's very nice. We're not the big buddies that we are sometimes made out to be. But when we are together we do have a nice rhythm and empathy with each other, and it works."

It's interesting, I say, his take on your career. All that stuff in The Trip where he's irritated by you doing panel shows. Is there an element of truth in that? "There is an element of truth in his disdain for that. But it's very exaggerated. I would imagine in life that he doesn't care that much. But he doesn't do those shows. He would never do those shows. But whereas in The Trip it irks him, in reality he'd go: 'Well, that's Rob's choice.'"

Because as well as The Rob Brydon Show and The Trip, he also has his own BBC panel show, Would I Lie To You?, currently in the middle of its fourth series. And you do it because you enjoy it?

"I always say it's not what you do but how you do it. A good panel show is a perfectly valid thing. And I think Would I Lie To You? is a perfectly good, warm-hearted, sharp, funny half-hour's entertainment when you've had a hard day and you're sitting down in front of the television. But many panel shows are appalling, with people who aren't funny, who aren't witty, who are confident and loud and that's about it… But I did make a conscious decision four years ago that I would just do what I liked."

What did you do before then? "Before that you slightly think: 'Well, what will people think? If I present a show, they won't accept me as an actor.' And I stopped thinking that way: your tastes change, and what you want changes."

What do you want now, then, that you didn't want before?

"When you're a kid, I think you want to be a film star. And I'm not as enamoured with that any more. The reality of that life is a lot of travel, and a lot of being away, which is impractical because I have four children, so I don't want to be away that much, not the other side of the world away. And when you experience the reality of making films, you realise that they're not all that." It's a persona he plays up in The Trip. That he is the devoted family man, happy to be doing what he's doing, whereas Coogan is the frustrated Hollywood wannabe.

There's something quite refreshing about Brydon's lack of ambition. He says the sorts of things that most people won't actually say, even if they're true. That he's been "a bit of a money whore". His reputation in his family is that he works all the time and does loads of corporate gigs "because I got divorced, and that had certain financial implications". And how he doesn't seem, well, as bothered about work as some of his contemporaries. He shrugs, and on his face is the sort of slightly quizzical expression that Uncle Bryn might use when confronted with the limitless mysteries of the universe. "I just don't seem to care as much."

It's a masterful statement. The opposite of almost everything popular TV stands for: an affront to the MasterChef "passion test", an insult to the entire ideological framework of The X Factor. And the type of thing that no one has ever said to me in an interview, ever. Celebrities are not meant to be lackadaisical. "Go, Rob!" I want to say. Or, you know, put your feet up and have a nice cup of tea instead. Whatever.

The Rob Brydon Show is on BBC2 on 17 September, 10pm

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Rob Brydon - 2011-11-30 - Front Row

[SquareEyes]

Maybe it's just me, but Rob Brydon seems to have tighter, more plasticy skin and thicker hair on top in the latest ep of "Would I Lie to You". Has he been under the knife?