Everybody seems to love Rob Brydon. Tom Jones has his supporters and Gareth Bale a dwindling number of superfans but Rob has a legitimate claim to be the most popular living Welshman. Over the past two decades he has appeared in some of the funniest shows on television. However for all his undoubted successes, in my opinion his isn’t even the best character in any of them. Then again, would any of his prime programmes be the same without him? I think not.
At the start of the millennium, I probably heard him in assorted adverts – he’s voiced anything from Tango to Tesco, Pot Noodle to Fairy Liquid – but, being an Essex boy, I missed his teeth-cutting Nineties work on Radio Wales. I also failed to watch his BBC2 comedy series Human Remains and only tuned into Marion and Geoff after word of mouth recommendation. Better late than never.
At first these took the form of ten-minute fillers on BBC2, in which Brydon delivered in-car monologues by naïve taxi driver Keith who took a while to realise his wife Marion was having a long-standing affair with the aforementioned Geoff despite the obvious clues he was drip-feeding the viewers. It took a few instalments for me to appreciate the dark humour but the show revealed the qualities that Rob has been demonstrating ever since. It was a Baby Cow production, continuing a Steve Coogan thread which hasn’t really stopped.
In series 3 of Little Britain, Rob had a small but regular role as the hen-pecked ‘ex’ of the grotesque Matt Lucas character Bubbles de Vere but it was three years earlier, sharing the same bill with Little Britain’s David Walliams on Friday Night with Jonathan Ross, that I first became aware of his extraordinary gift for impressions including the unique 'small man in a box'. From Brucie to Tom Jones I couldn’t stop laughing, and his singing voice wasn’t bad either.
Like Sir Tom, the boy from Baglan is a proud Welshman and when on QI in 2008 launched a well-deserved attack on casual Welsh racism which has somehow been allowed to pervade comedy for donkey’s years. When Brydon ‘does’ icons of his homeland such as Jones, Hopkins and Burton he does so with wit and respect and in his early days of national fame he was an ideal chat or panel show guest, although you were left wondering what the real Rob Brydon was like. When he took over as host of Would I Lie to You in 2008, his days as mere bit player were quickly consigned to history.
In the early days I considered it a so-so show, not quite in the same league as Have I Got News For You? However, I now consider the celebrity fib-telling half-hour to be one of the most consistently hilarious on the box. Much of this relies on the brilliant quips and exchanges between David Mitchell and Lee Mack but I love the moments when the chairman has the chance to show what he can do in the final edit. Naturally Would I Lie To You? offers opportunities to show off those impersonations but at times he can rival the team captains for anecdotes and personality quirks which also emerge from his ‘stand-up’ gigs.
However, his talents don’t stop there. My only encounter with Rob Brydon in the flesh, as it were, was at a special BBC Radio staff day. I forget whether it was an anniversary of the Beeb or Broadcasting House but one session I signed up to was an interview by him. I forget the interviewee but it’s Rob’s questioning I do recall. It obviously proved a useful audition because some years later he was given his own BBC TV chat show. Amiable enough but not ‘appointment to view’.
Another of his greatest hits – possibly THE greatest – is, of course, Gavin and Stacey. Launched quietly in 2007 on BBC3 this latest Baby Cow production has grown from inauspicious beginnings to become the most popular sitcom of the 21st century. I didn’t cotton on until the second series but re-runs have ensured I’m au fait with every episode, especially since moving to Wales where all children probably have to take exams in it. Writers James Corden and Ruth Jones take the best lines as Smithy and Nessa but amongst the splendid supporting cast, Rob Brydon’s Uncle Bryn is one of the most likeable characters. With his rigid side-parting and natty line in sweaters or cardigans, Bryn isn’t the most exciting member of the Barry-based West clan but is arguably the most eccentric. His non seqiturs and rambling stories are legion and yet he has the ability to conjure a surprise or two.
The show has yielded a few musical set-pieces over the years but none have surpassed the rendition of ‘Islands in the Stream’. I can’t stand line dancing but the notion of Nessa and Bryn as Dolly and Kenny just had to be a winner. Roping in a real-life Bee Gee (Robin) and yer actual Tom Jones, it even rocketed to number one, assisted by this all-time classic 2009 Comic Relief film. Even after umpteen viewings it still makes me titter. Last year Angie and I paid homage in a couple of lockdown front garden performances. Angie’s costume and make-up made for a splendid Ruth Jones but donning plastic cowboy hat and neck-scarf doesn’t make me Rob Brydon. Not even with my chin!
Performing ‘Islands’ in character gave no sign of Brydon’s own vocal capabilities. They did, on the other hand, surface occasionally during one of the surprise comedy gems of recent years, The Trip, alongside old mucker Steve Coogan. I first saw them starring together in a TV screening of Michael Winterbottom’s film-within-a-film, A Cock and Bull Story. It was a clever idea but the humour derived from the part-improvised dialogue between Brydon and Coogan playing exaggerated versions of their media persona: Steve as a vain, egotistical womaniser and Rob a starry-eyed family man with a crush on Gillian Anderson.
It wasn’t the greatest movie in the world but when Winterbottom and the two actors took the best ingredients and cooked them in a different setting, they were on to a winner. The first series wasn’t all laugh-out-loud stuff. Much of it was bittersweet, touching on love, loss and relationships, played out in a series of posh restaurants and grey Lake District landscapes as the duo became food critics for a broadsheet newspaper. That wasn’t the funny bit. What made me cackle were the incessant competitive impressions involving the pair as they munched and sipped their way through expensive menus. My fave from the original The Trip has to be their enlightening duel of the Michael Caines! Their inventive scene with Ray Winstone was also hilarious, albeit a bit rude.
As their culinary travels expanded to reach the gorgeous coastal scenery of Italy and Greece (I missed The Trip to Spain, when it was poached by Sky), their relentless rivalry took in prestige of awards won, knowledge of Ancient Greek legends and more mimicry, from Godfathers (Trip to Italy) to Demis Roussos and even each other. The first episodes of The Trip to Greece were particularly satisfying, and I could empathise with Rob and Steve as they contemplated the ageing process.
Coogan’s frequent assertions were correct: he is a better actor than Rob Brydon. However, when it comes to an actor who is equally at ease doing sitcoms, panel shows, voiceovers, stand-up and slightly darker material, the Welshman has the edge. Not sure, though, if I’d want to spend a day with him driving around Europe…
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