Simon Amstell

From The Sunday Times

July 29, 2007

Stand-up Simon Amstell

Never mind the pert one-liners: Buzzcocks presenter Simon Amstell is set to tear strips off himself, not nervous celebs

Stephen Armstrong

Simon Amstell is in a photographer’s studio in north London. The previous night, the Never Mind the Buzzcocks presenter was on television, comprehensively demolishing the thuggish, half-pint, Sid Vicious punk wannabe popster Danny Tourette. Amstell outplayed, outfought and outmocked Tourette, dancing around him like a ninja taking on Robbie Coltrane in a tickling competition. So I’m slightly nervous, expecting a verbal jousting match in which I’ll come off a poor loser.

Everyone comes off a poor loser when jousting with Amstell. For five years on Channel 4’s Popworld, he tore apart celebrities from Britney Spears to the Strokes with pert questions and excessively inane demands. After slipping into the MC’s chair on Buzzcocks in 2006, he’s somehow raised the ante, throwing out one-liners that are funny enough to conceal the barb. Just. Like when he told Anthea Turner to relax: “Your career’s not at stake.” Or when Amy Winehouse turned up drunk, causing him to quip: “This isn’t a pop quiz any more. It’s an intervention, Amy.” Or when the Ordinary Boys’ singer, Preston, stormed off after Amstell read passages from the woeful autobiography of his Big Brother-winning wife, Chantelle.

Yet, today, he seems curiously reflective, unpicking comedy’s heart and laying the tissue out for analysis, discussing why stand-up is such a powerful medium for painful truths. These questions are not academic, they’re about survival. His show at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, No Self, is as close as you can get to a man emotionally and philosophically disembowelling himself on stage.

“There’s an assumption with me doing stand-up that I’m going to start mocking celebrities,” he says. “But I’ve got a forum for that, where the celebrities are actually there. I wanted to write a positive and inspiring show, but then I split up with my boyfriend, who I’d lived with for years, and ended up trying to work some of that out, too. And that is how one of the lines in the show is – ‘Is there anything worse than being alive?’ ” He breaks off and giggles irrepressibly, almost falling off the high stool he has wrapped his gangly frame around.

The split is raw and recent, and he feels extremely uncomfortable discussing it with a journalist – far more so than with an audience. “It’s such an odd thing. Saying stuff on stage, I’m out there making people laugh, like they’re not the only ones feeling miserable. Here, it feels like marketing, so it’s tacky to talk about ultra-personal things. I feel much safer talking about them with a mic in my hand.”

Yet surely performers preparing to take audience money on the premise that they will embark on an emotional journey have a responsibility to prove their qualifications? If an artist is to make people revisit their own suffering, it feels cheap if they’ve felt nothing themselves – as if they’re tricksters playing with our pain. “Good point,” muses Amstell. “But it’s not really a question.” Is the show therapy? “There’s a need to do it,” he nods cautiously. “It’s a way of getting all the stuff out. If people laugh, you feel they see something of themselves in you and in your struggle. When people have the courage to expose themselves on stage and tell you the most personal, embarrassing and intimate things, then that is a proper show. More than just a witty one-liner.”

And so I bring up his parents’ divorce. It is a low blow, but we are talking about pain. His father, who owned a courier company, went, in Amstell’s words, “through a bit of a midlife crisis”. They split when Amstell was 13 – at 14, he was doing stand-up.

Presumably there is a connection?

“Look,” he explains gently, “I feel uncomfortable talking about this in print, but I feel especially uncomfortable talking about anything if there isn’t a laugh at the end of it. So, if you want to know how I get on with my parents, there’s a bit in the show where I talk about getting a new satellite-navigation system in my car, one where you can choose the voice. I went with the male voice, because that was the default, but I realised it was too judgmental: ‘At the end of the road, turn left, but you should know this, Simon.’ So I switched to the female voice – which was more like my mum – and it would say, ‘At the roundabout, take the third exit, or whichever one you want, my famous son.’ ” He smiles, delighted at my laughter. “So that is how I get on with my parents.”

Whether the split caused the stand-up or not, he proved good at it, tearing through the heats of a BBC comedy competition and becoming the youngest person to make the final. “I think I only made the semi-final, but final sounds better for publicity,” Amstell confesses with elegant charm. Flushed with success, he started sending out tapes to broadcasters while doing his A levels, and secured a presenter’s gig on the children’s channel Nickelodeon – he was later fired for being too sarcastic. Of a recent award, he says: “You’d think it would give you some security, but all it does is show that you were funny at one point. There’s no reason why you should ever be funny again.” All these downbeat quips are delivered with such sparkle, it is only on transcribing them that you realise how low-key his words are.

Perhaps the interview isn’t his ideal medium. He has said he feels most alive on camera: “It’s the same with a microphone. If you talk to someone and say life is meaningless, they’ll either get concerned or not want to hang out with you any more. If you say it to an audience, then they laugh.” We pause for a second, staring into the pot of misery that he has just lifted the lid on. I feel honour-bound to ask: are you happy, Simon? “No,” he laughs. “No, actually I think I’m fine, I’m just thinking too much.” He sighs and leans back in his chair. “Gahd, I’m exhausted. I mean, I’m 27! I should be taking drugs and having sex. That’s what I’m going to do when I leave here. But, before I do, if the photo looks ridiculous, you will write that I didn’t choose it, won’t you?”