He is the star of a sitcom that has captured the attention of a generation of students much akin to the awkwardness and insecurities of the sixth form common room. He has earned widespread critical acclaim, a British Comedy Award, a host of nominations and has now begun a nationwide stand-up tour of Britain’s universities, all at the age of 25. But no one seems more surprised at the sight of this impressive CV than Simon Bird himself.
“It has been a bit of a fluke really. Damon (Beesley) and Iain (Morris- writers of the Inbetweeners) saw me and Joe, who plays Simon, do a show in Edinburgh, liked it and asked us to come and help write on a radio show, so we did sketches on that for about a year whilst they were doing auditions for the Inbetweeners. We kept asking whether we could audition and they kept saying we were totally wrong for it, but with a week left they still hadn’t found anyone and I think they were getting a bit desperate so they scrolled through their phonebook and came crawling.”
That Beesley and Morris overlooked him for so long seems to beggar belief, for in Simon Bird lies a comedy actor steeped in the prestige of Cambridge University’s Footlights Comedy Club, previously home to such comedy giants as Eric Idle, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and David Mitchell. He reminds me however that Footlights “by no means guarantees a free ticket into a comedy career”.
“I think in a way some people are very much anti-footlights. In a weird way you have to try and get over those prejudices, so you find that those who have come out of Footlights in the last 15 to 20 years try and mention it as little as possible.”
This seems true of Simon himself. Just the mention of Footlights and he responds in an exhaustive tone, as though the thought of being known solo as the former President of Footlights who got a job at Channel Four because of it frustrates him. His ambition is the first thing that comes across when talking to him. He is not the kind of actor who is likely to live off Will MacKenzie for the rest of his career. Simon has been writing his own material since the age of 16, and he admits that he “won’t really feel at home amongst comedy’s big names until he has written his own sitcom”.
“We’re writing all the time. I write with Joe and our friend Jonny because we were all in Footlights together and we spend basically all year writing sitcom pilots or sketch shows. The Inbetweeners isn’t anything like me or Joe have ever written before. I think our sense of humour is slightly more sillier and slightly more serial, anything we did would be totally different to be honest.”
Bird and Thomas are no different to the current generation of students in the comedy favourites. “Growing up I loved The Office, Seinfeld, Arrested Development, Peep Show, The Thick of It, those the ones really did it for me. I guess when your sitting down your not thinking “how are these shows influencing me” but I guess they must influence what we write in some way.”
And there is no denying his writing talents. He co-wrote and appeared in two National Tour Shows whilst a Footlights, wrote the Harry Porter prize-winning play Daddy’s Dead and was a finalist in the 2006 National student comedy awards. But his quick obvious quick wit and comedy talents were to get him into trouble in 2007 when he was disqualified from the student comedy awards.
“The competition that year was sponsored by Revels and they’d instituted these rules for the contestants which I would describe as quasi-fascist. You weren’t allowed to talk about Revels, not only were you not allowed to talk about revels you weren’t allowed to talk about any sort of confectionary in your act or for 3 months after the competition. It didn’t seem to be ironic or anything so I thought this was so ridiculous that I had to mention it. The joke was just how long I could go on talking about Revels really. I don’t remember exactly what I did but I remember it involved me giving the audience every type of chocolate bar I could find expect for revels.”
One imagines the set of the Inbetweeners, dominated by young, talented comedy actors, to be a fantastic place to work, but with huge success has come a lot of pressure for such a young cast.
“I think it is definitely the case that we have less fun on set now, but that was a deliberate decision we all made. We had so much fun making the first series because we didn’t really know whether people would like it and we kind of thought it could be a one off. But with the second series because we knew that people liked the show and we saw that the scripts for were so good, for me personally better than the first series, we kind of owed it to ourselves to make something really good here if we put a lot of effort into it. But I think that’s a good thing.”
We have seen Simon Bird the “briefcase wanker”, now we look forward to seeing Simon Bird the sketch show writer in York this Sunday, but what can we expect?
“I’ve just done a pilot for BBC 3 of a comedy game show that I wrote, I haven’t heard whether that’s getting made or anything yet but its basically like a live version of that, I’m just trying some stuff out. It’s very silly and hopefully funny.”
Shedding the skin of Will MacKenzie will undoubtedly be tough for Simon, but it is challenge that you can tell he is relishing.