Eddie Izzard: happy 50th!

Eddie Izzard, who turned 50 last week, has never taken a conventional route in his acting or his stand-up. William Cook asks what's next in this life of surprises

The first time I saw Eddie Izzard, in 1989, at the Edinburgh Festival, the audience was so small that he met us in the bar beforehand and bought us a round of drinks. Barely ten years later, he became the first solo comic to play Wembley Arena. And even more implausibly, today (7 February), he turns 50.

Along the way, I met him a good many times and saw him perform on countless occasions, but nothing revealed as much about him as that first gig, in an upstairs room in front of a sea of empty chairs.

Faced with an audience of single figures, most comics would have hidden backstage before the gig, rather than come out and face the music. They would have shuffled through their set, then slunk off into the night. Izzard led us upstairs, disappeared behind a makeshift curtain, then bounded on as if he was playing a sell-out show at the London Palladium.

On my way out he collared me (I was scratching a living as a tyro critic) to ask me, politely but firmly, when he could expect to see my write-up in the paper.

I’d like to say I saw the future of stand-up comedy in that room that evening, but the truth is I didn’t know what to make of it. It was the strangest stand-up show I had ever seen. Izzard’s boundless self-belief carried (almost) all before it, but his material was bizarre. It was like a monologue by an amiable madman, full of surreal twists and turns.

He only told one proper joke, about serving in Vietnam – as a waiter. The rest was a tangle of conceptual leaps, a one-man version of Just A Minute, awash with deviation. (Hesitation and repetition were entirely absent from his act, even then.)

Shameless chutzpah

I might never have written it up at all if he hadn’t tracked me down a few days later – another example of his shameless chutzpah – to ask what had become of my review. Keen to get him off my back, I rattled off a fairly positive (and faintly patronising) notice, and dismissed him as one of those harmless eccentrics who turn up in Edinburgh one summer and are never seen again.

Deep down, I knew that lukewarm review was a cop-out. Izzard was either brilliant or terrible; I just couldn’t work out which. However, over the next few years, as he kept cropping up on London’s growing stand-up circuit, I began to realise it was the former not the latter. So did a growing band of fellow fans.

Izzard had been knocking around for several years, initially as a street performer, which explained his rhino-thick skin. But his act only came together when he started compering his own club night, called Raging Bull, in Raymond’s Revuebar, where the Comic Strip began. On the face of it, this was a strange choice. Comperes are usually expected to keep it short and snappy (two words alien to Izzard’s vocabulary) and the punters at this red-light venue were more hardboiled than those comedy trainspotters on the Fringe. Performing several times a night, week after week, honed his stage persona.

In 1991, back in Edinburgh, I was on the panel that nominated him for the Perrier Award, the top prize in British comedy. His improvisational style had become smooth and self-assured. Izzard had arrived.

“Being white, male and middle class is useless if you’re a comedian,” Izzard used to say, “so thank god I’m a transvestite.” A lot people (including me) used to think this was just a joke – indeed it was one of the few one-liners in his repertoire. Now we realised he was serious.

“Eddie, you’ve got a dress on,” said stand-up Mickey Hutton, the first time Izzard played London’s Comedy Store in women’s clothes. “You look awful in it. Even I wouldn’t wear that, and I’ve got the figure for it.”

Hutton wasn’t the only one who took the mick, but it was all very amiable, and the publicity did him no harm at all. It gave journalists an angle: he got a lot more column inches in a skirt.

His own agenda

The other outlandish thing Izzard did was refuse to appear on television. Ironically, it was this, more than anything, which transformed him from cult hit to stand-up superstar. In those far-off days before the internet, TV was just about the only way a comic could reach a wider public. Most comedians were desperate for the exposure, and most of them got dumped on in the process. Only the most conventional comics tend to prosper on TV, and Izzard was smart enough to realise that his freeform shtick was incompatible with the rigid constraints of the small screen.

By shunning a medium which initially wasn’t all that interested in him anyway, he acquired an underground reputation. The fact that you couldn’t see him on telly gave him counter-culture status, and greatly enhanced the commercial appeal of his live DVDs.

This counter-intuitive approach typifies the savvy way Izzard propelled himself from obscure wannabe to national treasure. There are lessons to learn from his daft triumph, whatever line of work you’re in. When trawling the comedy clubs during the 1990s, I saw plenty of comics who seemed more talented than Izzard, but I never met anyone with a better sense of how to become a brand.

“Eddie always had his own agenda,” comedian Simon Bligh once told me. “Eddie seemed to be the first person who actually took control.” For my money, Simon Bligh is just as funny as Eddie Izzard, but I doubt he’ll be playing Wembley any time soon.

The other thing we can all learn from Izzard is that perspiration pays. In the early days he was stout and pasty; I would never have thought he’d become a multiple marathon runner.

He is equally single-minded about his act. When I was working at the BBC, on a chat show hosted by Ruby Wax, we put together a show about Europe, with Izzard as the star guest. At one point Ruby decided she’d rather do a show with him about something else, but Izzard was adamant. Unless it was about Europe, he didn’t want to do it. Whatever you may think about his Europhilia, he’s certainly sincere.

It was much the same story with his acting. In 1994, he asked me to come along and see him in his theatrical West End debut. It was a pretty high-profile show for an actor with such sparse experience; a David Mamet play (The Cryptogram) co-starring Lindsay Duncan. To my surprise, Izzard held his own. I didn’t know whether his acting career would last, or where it would lead him, but by now I should have known better than to bet against him.

Five years later, his hair dyed jet black, he was back in the West End playing Lenny Bruce, and last year he appeared in another Mamet play on Broadway. From The Secret Agent to The Avengers, from Velvet Goldmine to Ocean’s Twelve, his film career is also taking off. Still can’t picture him as a big Hollywood star? People used to say the same thing about Dudley Moore.

So where does Izzard’s determination stem from? Some people (including him) have cited his mother’s death, when he was still a child, but I would have thought such a tragedy was just as likely to crush an aspiring comic as drive him on. Alan Davies also lost his mum at an early age, but Davies is a very different comic, dedicated but not as driven.

Izzard is a charming interviewee, always courteous and helpful, but I’ve never found his hinterland. We always end up discussing how he’s managed his career.

In many ways he remains unknowable – a man outside the mainstream – yet his influence on British comedy has been immense. Stand-up used to be a gag-based medium; Izzard turned it into a sort of jazz.

But his biggest legacy has been to professionalise the business of stand-up comedy. When he started out, most club comics were dreamers, drop-outs, refuseniks. Nowadays, it’s hard to find a stand-up comic who hasn’t got a five-year plan.

So what fresh challenges lie ahead during Izzard’s next half-century? Saving the Euro? Running from Cairo to Cape Town? Or compering a working men’s club, cracking a load of mother-in-law jokes?

Whatever he decides to do, you can bet it’ll be unexpected. Because, unlike some other 50-year-old comedians of my acquaintance, the best thing about Izzard is that you never know what he’ll do next.

 

 

William Cook has won several prizes for his travel writing, mainly for the Independent and Condé Nast Traveller, including the Johann Strauss Gold Medal for his writing about Vienna. He has written for the Guardian, The New Statesman and The Spectator. He has had eight books published, most recently Morecambe & Wise Untold and Kiss Me, Chudleigh: The World According To Auberon Waugh. He is currently writing a biography of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. His biggest scoop was revealing (exclusively, in the Mail on Sunday) that Gordon Murray, who created Trumpton, burnt all his creations (including Windy Miller) on a bonfire in his back garden.