After a breakthrough year, Catherine Tate talks to Lucy Mangan about comedy, co-star David Schwimmer and being a lazy control freak.
A starstruck actor is a funny notion - funny peculiar and, in Catherine Tate's hands, naturally funny haha. She wrote a piece for the London New Statesman magazine about the difficulties that had arisen from her desire to control her excitement at working with ex-Friends star David Schwimmer in the new Neil LaBute play, Some Girl(s) in London.
"I was so wary that everyone would see how ridiculously happy I was and . . . deem my behaviour inappropriate to the workplace. I was just dying to ask David about Friends, but I knew he was keen to move on from that, so I just played it cool." The facade served its purpose for a while, "but two months down the line, I may have reached the point of no return. I've got a funny feeling I'm just being rude. It's as much as I can do to smile at the man." Alas, in isolation - and only in isolation - the last line can be read as proof of undying enmity between the co-stars and some newspapers, ever-eager for a Schwimmer story, duly splashed it about as such.
Tate is part amused, part really not, by the whole affair. "On the day the 'feud story' came out, I said to David, 'Why don't you go on stage tonight with a black eye, and I'll come on with scratch marks on my face.' And I noticed that evening that more people were looking at me during the curtain call - usually they focus on David - as if the mask was going to drop suddenly and I was going to start spurting bile all over the stalls. But to be honest, I was quite thrown by it initially, because the press didn't misinterpret the piece, it was deliberately spun.
"But David, who's been a very visible celebrity for 11 years and can't be shocked by them any more, rang me in the morning and said, 'Please don't be worried about any of this - that's just what they do.' He's been lovely." She launches into effusive, genuine and very funny praise for Schwimmer and her other co-stars, and I have to drag her back to talking about herself and the new series of The Catherine Tate Show. The first won her a Best Newcomer Award at the Comedy Awards ("I couldn't believe it - I'd booked a cab for about one minute after the ceremony so I couldn't do any standing around doing any 'my God, I've won!' stuff. Though I did have some Kettle Chips"). It also earned her a Bafta nomination, though she was pipped to that prize by the favourites, Little Britain. How is she feeling about the second series? "Partly it was stressful, because of the expectations - the first series had come in under the radar and there was no bar to match apart from the one I set myself, whereas with this one you naturally want to meet the first and provide something else and take it further on. But in other ways it was easier because the audience was coming to see it knowing the show and knowing the characters. With the first we'd been in the position of having to sing for our supper a little bit; having to go: 'Ah, well, we do think this is funny and we hope you will too.'" The name thing too is causing her fewer night sweats this time round. "Right at the beginning I said I wasn't mad about calling it The Catherine Tate Show, from the coward's point of view, because if people don't like it they're just going to look at the title and go: 'That show's shit and so is she.' But you can't have something without my name on it and then me get all the best parts, so we had to use it. Obviously, when people like the show, the spotlight does go disproportionately on me, but that's the chance you take."
It strikes me that appearing in someone else's play must be quite a change of gear for someone used to the solitary world of stand-up and to writing and starring in her own series. Doesn't she mind the necessary relinquishing of control?
"It's like the grass is always greener for me," she says. "When I've had the responsibility of doing my show I often daydream about the joy of just being handed a script and asked to turn up for rehearsals. And then the weeks [of the play] go by and you forget about the stress and strains of doing that because you're in a position where, however open and helpful everyone is, it's not my show, it's not my gig. Although," and she starts to laugh quite hard, "Neil LaBute rang me when I got the job and said: 'I'm really pleased you're doing it, let me know what you think of the script, if you've got any ideas.' Like I'm going to! Like I'm going to ring him up and say: 'Listen Neil, I think we need a couple more gags here - think you've missed a trick there, Neil boy.'"
Does she invite suggestions about her own scripts? "I think I'm a bit like that. But I'll say - do whatever you want with the script as long as it's exactly the same as that, OK? You know, play around with it but obviously do it exactly as I've done it."
Tate says this and many other tongue-in-cheek lines almost in character, although the character is a kind of heightened version of herself.
DOES SHE KEEP keep as firm a grip on life as on her scripts? "Well, I don't drink, smoke or do drugs and I think that comes from the same place. I think it's something to do with the fear that if I do them, I won't be myself."
What does she do for kicks then? "I eat," she says instantly, and her face glows with the light of the true enthusiast as she embarks on a paean of praise to American overconsumption. "I went into a grocery shop in New York once," she says. "Just an ordinary shop. And. It had. A wall. Of yoghurts. I couldn't have legislated for it in my head. I could feel my heart racing. And that's just yoghurt! Healthy! Although knowing the Americans, it's probably got cake added to it or something. God knows what I'd be like in an ice cream parlour. I can't go back to the US until I'm dangerously thin." She pauses. "But I hesitate to call myself a control freak because if I am I manage to combine it with being desperately lazy. That's just the worst kind to be. Because it's only to go my way, but I can't be bothered to make that happen."
On the "bothered", I catch a glimpse of my - and, an extremely unscientific office survey suggests, most people's - favourite character, Lauren, the distilled essence of teenage belligerence, whose sole response to life's vagaries is "Am I bovvered? Am I bovvered though?" It gets us talking about schooldays, which for Tate meant attendance at a local primary school in Bloomsbury, north London, where her grandmother and mother had also gone and was filled with Tate cousins, followed by a Catholic secondary school. She was happy at both, save for the burden of having red, curly hair - "I used to blow-dry it straight and then sit with a riding hat on my head, weighted down".
She left school a few months before taking her A-levels because she knew by that time she wanted to act and, almost more gloriously, that you didn't need A-levels to get into drama school.
"Then I tried for four years to get in. Central [School of Speech and Drama in London] used to get me down to the last four every year and I was just about to go, OK forget it, when they let me in." That was in 1990. She left three years later with a job in the long-running TV police soap, The Bill, which was followed by enough employment in the first year, including jobs with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre, to prevent any A-level-related regrets.
In 1996 she started plugging the increasing career gaps with stand-up, which led to taking part in Lee Mack's Perrier Award-nominated show, New Bits, in Edinburgh in 2000, and her own show the year after that. As a veteran of the circuit, then, what does she make of the notorious rarity of the female stand-up? "I do think audiences judge you perhaps a bit quicker if you're a woman, but I don't think you should be put off it. You have to have a bit of a male attitude towards it because women are more sensitive and if you do get a succession of rough gigs it does take a lot to go: 'I am going to carry on doing this, they are not going to get me down.' Though you do need to be very clear that if you are dying on your arse it may be just because you're not that good at it. To be honest, I think there's a little bit of pussyfooting around when people make excuses for women or women make excuses for themselves because whether you're male or female, if you're not funny, you're not funny. I don't think making people laugh is a particularly gender-specific thing."
It's great fun talking to Tate, but whenever she listens to the next question, I keep worrying that I am offending her in some way because she does not look happy. She rushes to put my mind at ease. "My face in repose," she says, "is one of abject negativity. People often think I'm really brooding over how I'm going to exact revenge on someone, but usually I'm actually thinking what I would have as my desert island dessert - meringue or Häagen-Dazs ice cream? It takes up a lot of my time." Her face falls again but now I know not to take it personally. She's probably just paying mental obeisance to Baskin-Robbins. - (Guardian Service)
The Catherine Tate Show, Thursdays, BBC2. Some Girl(s) is at the Gielgud Theatre, London, until Aug 13