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Steve Coogan, Rob Brydon – Who Would You Rather Shag?

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Of course I mean “shag” in the sense of “have a drink up the pub with”, but if you insist on introducing vulgar carnality into an otherwise family-friendly post, that is (possibly unfortunately) your right to so do.

I kinda-sorta enjoyed the “Trip To …” series. I was a little baffled by the blurring of real life and fictional events, but I understood our merry mimics were largely playing themselves. I found Coogan a little hard to take. If he really sees himself as an AC-tor, and not a light entertainer/impressionist (not the painter kind – oh, you know what I mean) he is doomed to being dissatisfied with his lot, especially as he will be greeted by shouts of AH-HA! in the street until the day he dies. He is a mimic of extraordinary ability, but the targets of his mimicry (as Brydon’s) are increasingly irrelevant and obscure to anyone under fifty. Maybe sixty. His movie performance in the role of Stan Laurel was spookily accurate, but relied on his talent for mimicry. “Greed” was supposed to be his big breakthrough, but it was something of a disaster. I can’t see his agent getting him any work on the back of that.

Rob Brydon, though – a happy man. Perfectly content with being a light entertainer, he’s not as clever an impersonator as Coogan, but he’s essentially a funnier man. And he’s charming in an unabashed, old-fashioned T.V. entertainer way. He’s easily up to balancing the mercurial talents of Mitchell and Mack on WILTY (the best quiz show, like, ever), and unlike Coogan, can take a joke at his expense. Their differing views on their Art And Its Historical Standing were nicely summed up in this exchange:

COOGAN: You can’t go through life treating it as if it was a Radio Four gamesh-
BRYDON (cutting in): BZZZZT! (mimes pressing buzzer) Oh yes you can.

So that’s one vote for the plucky Welshman and his fight against Male Pattern Baldness.

(If this topic has been covered before, accept my apologies, I’ve been away and in a very real sense still am.)

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Comments

  1. Nor let us forget Brydon’s beautifully pointed performance as Uncle Bryn in the otherwise iffy Gavin & Stacey. Oh, and this:

    And yes, WILTY is supreme, a beautifully collaborative and generous yet competitive show, unlike the jostling-for-gags nonsense elsewhere.

    • They both do, don’t they? And amplified their least likeable qualities for the Trip series. For Coogan it was his brittleness and defensiveness, with a large dash of debauchery, for Brydon is was his general creepiness and emotional intrusiveness.

      I liked the first and even the second Trips, and I watched the others but with an increasing conviction that no two men who were as consistently precise in targeting the other’s buttons would send any more time together than they absolutely had to.

    • I beg to differ. If it’s simple fun in the pub you want rather than bland conviviality, Coogan would be more likely to start a massive argument with the bloke next to you, lob beer mats at the back of someone’s head, brazenly approach unavailable women, and end the night in a huge free-for-all in the car park before dropping you back home in his blood red Ferrari 488. Sounds good to me.

      In the sack, there’d be no contest; I strongly suspect Coogan is particularly filthy, whereas it’s quite easy to imagine Brydon as essentially asexual.

      I need a cold shower.

  5. But the slightly fragile ego / inability to laugh at himself thing with Coogan, isn’t that down to the quality of the script and performance? I am with you at the blurring of fact and fiction inherent in the show, but that’s what elevates it above the average comedy.

  7. Now if you’d asked Bob Mortimer or Paul Whitehouse that would have been a better question cos good though The Trip was, Gone Fishing was much, much better.
    And you have got it Wrong again – Brydon is a better mimic than Coogan and Coogan’s performance in Stan & Ollie deserved an Oscar (as did the film).

  8. I suppose Steve Coogan will always be Alan Partridge, a character he’s been doing for nearly thirty years, but to me it took a long time to work. I haven’t watched all of his shows, but in the early ones where he was a chat show host, Steve Coogan was too young to look the part, and it never seemed likely that someone that gauche would be on mainstream TV.

    Where the character came to life was in the move to Norwich. There was a real eye for the mundanity of it all, and the characters around him were much funnier, particularly Michael the Geordie. Partridge having to correct himself from calling the radio station Norfolk Digital, to North Norfolk Digital caught his thwarted, but still hopeful, ambition.

    The series last year where he was on an early evening One Show magazine programme was disappointing. Again, it seemed unlikely that the character would have got that kind of job. To play the comedy of embarrassment, the circumstances the character finds themselves in have to be convincing. I thought the Trip was very funny, but I could have lived without the supposed serious parts about the affairs and families.

    Slightly off the point, I recently watched Judd Apatow’s long, but very interesting, documentary on Garry Shandling. Wasn’t the Larry Sanders Show where this idea of celebrities playing supposedly self-mocking versions of themselves came from? Celebrities may have played characters with their own name before that, but I don’t suppose anyone thought that Hancock, for example, was based on Tony Hancock’s real life.

  9. Coogan’s humour is far too studied, having long ago inserted himself up his own bottom, whereas Brydon is distractingly Welsh, but no less funny for that. He unreservedly gets my vote.

  10. I loved the Trip – all of the series. The meshing of real and fictional and the melancholic edge plus the lovely Michael Nyman soundtrack. Very brave to essentially exaggerate the less likeable aspects of theIr real selves or should I say their perceived selves.
    Some of the best TV of the last few years (IMHO of course!)

  11. I think the OP has been a bit disingenuous about Coogan’s acting career. Greed was certainly not his chance of a big breakthrough, given that he had previously appeared in the Oscar nominated Philomena. He has never been short of film work.

    • In the course of my in-depth research for this piece I had my intern print out his IMDB filmography. He’s certainly had the work, and he’s made a good living for himself, and hooray for that. But I think it’s disingenuous of the OC to suggest that it’s been as artistically successful as even Coogan himself would like.

  13. Coogan: multiple successful series and films, both comic and straight. Clearly a complex and interesting individual with something to say. Brydon: a likeable chap who’s made a little go a long way. Ronnie Corbett impressions and a man trapped in a box. WILTY is a lot of fun but that doesn’t have a great deal to do with Rob. A bit but not that much.

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