Charlie Higson sits down with Yahoo UK to share insight into his life, career and his defining influences.
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00:00 Hi, I'm Ruxy from Yahoo UK and this is Origin Story.
00:03 Today I'm talking with Charlie Hickson.
00:05 He's a writer, comedian and podcaster.
00:07 Welcome to Origin Story, Charlie.
00:12 Lovely to meet you.
00:13 Lovely to be here.
00:14 I wanted to ask you first of all, the start of your podcast, of course.
00:19 Right.
00:20 And first of all, I wondered, you know, how did your love of history first begin
00:23 and why did you want to make a podcast around the British monarchy?
00:28 I grew up and first went to school in the 1960s
00:31 and history was taught very differently then.
00:35 It was in a way that now is considered quite old-fashioned.
00:38 It was a very narrative approach.
00:40 It was kings and queens, battles, great men, inventions.
00:47 And it was, you know, you would start at the Romans
00:50 and kind of move forward through Anglo-Saxon and then through the monarchs.
00:53 And at the time I learnt a rhyme as a way of remembering all the British monarchs
01:01 from William the Conqueror to Elizabeth the First.
01:05 Sorry, Second. I'm not that old.
01:07 Elizabeth the Second was on the throne.
01:09 So, and the rhyme is Willy Willy, Harry, Ste, Harry, Dick, John, Harry,
01:15 Three, One, Two, Three, Neds, Richard, Two, etc.
01:17 And it sort of stuck with me and I found it very interesting
01:22 when my kids went to school that history now is taught very, very differently.
01:26 You get sort of intense studies of different bits of history,
01:30 like the Egyptians and American Civil Rights Movement,
01:34 the Romans, the Tudors.
01:36 And so they know a lot about those things,
01:40 but they don't necessarily know in what order those things happened
01:43 and how we got from one to the other.
01:45 Because it is this extraordinary story.
01:49 And I, you know, being a dad,
01:54 I do a lot of dad-splaining to the kids.
01:57 And, you know, I realise that most people younger than me
02:00 don't have that narrative thread through history.
02:04 And for a few years I've been doing events
02:07 at a fantastic history festival in the Chalk Valley,
02:10 where I host a kind of comedy history quiz,
02:13 but I've also been doing talks.
02:14 And people seem to have enjoyed my talks
02:17 and like everybody else in COVID,
02:20 I thought maybe I should start a podcast.
02:23 But it was a couple of years before I got round to it.
02:27 And my final impetus was the coronation of King Charles III,
02:32 because there was a lot of talk about the monarchy
02:34 and why is this man on the throne?
02:36 What right has he got to be our king?
02:38 And a lot of people talking about the history of the monarchy
02:41 and most people didn't really know much about it.
02:45 So I thought that was a perfect time to launch it,
02:47 for the coronation.
02:49 Let's go to your life, your career, everything.
02:54 And I wanted to start first with your comedy beginnings,
02:58 because that was obviously your early start.
02:59 And I wondered, when did you kind of first realise
03:01 that comedy was your calling?
03:04 My calling? Gosh.
03:06 I mean, it was never a career move.
03:08 You know, being at school in the '60s and '70s,
03:12 you know, you weren't taught media studies
03:15 or anything like that.
03:16 The idea of a career...
03:17 ..in the media, in TV, in comedy,
03:24 was not something that crossed my mind.
03:27 But when I went to university in the late '70s,
03:30 I met a few people who sort of altered the course of my life,
03:35 I suppose. One of them was Paul Whitehouse.
03:39 Another one was Harry Enfield.
03:41 He wasn't at university with me,
03:43 but his best friend was.
03:45 And likewise, Vic Reeves.
03:47 So I met all of those people at that time in my life.
03:51 But back then, for me, in the late '70s,
03:56 if you wanted to kind of show off to your mates
04:01 and arse about on stage
04:04 and try and get off with girls, you formed a band.
04:07 It being 1977, my first band was a punk band,
04:11 and then I went on to another band called The Higgsons,
04:14 which was a sort of scratchy indie white funk band.
04:18 And so when I left university,
04:19 I did that for a few years as a singer,
04:21 but I kept in touch with Paul and Harry and Vic Reeves.
04:27 And, you know, I saw this very interesting trajectory
04:32 that, OK, comedy was a thing you could do.
04:37 Harry, being that much younger than us,
04:40 he had started to do it at comedy.
04:42 He had a double act...
04:43 Started to do it at university. He had a double act there.
04:46 And Vic Reeves was kind of...
04:48 ..plugging away at the circuit and getting a name for himself.
04:53 So...
04:54 ..it started because Harry needed people to write material for him.
05:00 So Paul and I, we were living close to each other in Hackney,
05:04 and I'd always been a writer. I'd enjoyed writing.
05:07 So I'd managed to save up to buy an early Amstrad computer.
05:13 Terribly, terribly clunky things.
05:15 Kids today, they don't know what it used to be like.
05:20 And I had that, and basically Paul said to me,
05:22 "Look, I want to write some stuff for Harry.
05:25 "You've got a word processor and I haven't. Let's do it together."
05:28 And we'd always made each other laugh.
05:31 And I had the discipline of being a writer,
05:33 and he was a great performer and mimic,
05:37 great at doing characters and voices, and we really liked doing that.
05:41 So we started writing for Harry
05:43 and we started doing little bits of performance for Vic Reeves
05:46 on some of his...
05:48 ..doing The Big Night Out before it was on the television.
05:51 You know, obviously, you enjoyed some success with the Higsons,
05:54 which I think is a different band to your punk band.
05:57 Yes, the punk band didn't last very long.
05:59 In the proper spirit of punk, it kind of imploded within a year.
06:02 Mainly because most of the rest of the band were thrown out of university,
06:06 including Paul, for not doing any work.
06:08 HE CHUCKLES
06:10 But, you know, the great thing about university
06:13 is it's not so much about the degree you get or the academic side.
06:16 I mean, it can be if you want to be a doctor or a lawyer or something,
06:19 but I was doing English and American literature and film.
06:23 What was so fantastic about it is the people you meet
06:27 and the connections you meet,
06:28 and all those people go on to do interesting things,
06:30 and your kind of lives intersect as you go through.
06:35 Mm-hm, yeah, for sure.
06:37 And I wondered, you know, was there a specific band
06:40 that kind of influenced the Higsons and the music that you made with them?
06:42 We, although we vehemently denied it at the time,
06:45 we were very much trying to be the English talking heads.
06:48 And in interviews, we'd say, "No, no, we're nothing like them."
06:52 But looking back, we were trying so hard to be like them.
06:56 And obviously, speaking of music in more general terms,
06:58 I wondered what was the first single album that you bought?
07:02 I was a slightly nerdy teenager.
07:06 Um...
07:07 I thought of myself as being above pop music.
07:12 So I used to listen to a lot of classical music and jazz
07:16 and a lot of world music.
07:18 The first album, I think the first album I actually bought with my own money,
07:21 was a Fats Waller album.
07:24 So make of that what you will.
07:27 OK.
07:29 I love it.
07:30 And I wonder if you could choose one song to define your life,
07:33 which would it be?
07:34 God, to define my life?
07:35 Yeah.
07:36 I mean, all the songs I really love tend to be the ones
07:40 which are so far removed from my life,
07:45 which is kind of why I like to listen to them.
07:48 I mean, you know, when I was in the '70s,
07:51 my older brother had the first Velvet Underground album,
07:55 and I used to listen to that obsessively,
07:56 particularly the track Waiting For The Man,
07:59 because it was...
08:01 I was in a little sort of commuter town in Kent.
08:04 I had a very nice life,
08:06 but it was quite straight and quite dull in many ways.
08:11 So listening to these songs about weird people in Manhattan
08:17 buying drugs and having strange sex
08:19 seemed like an impossibly glamorous world out there,
08:23 but I kind of aspired to getting out of Sevenoaks
08:27 and into the wider world, and I ended up in Norwich,
08:32 which, again, was probably even further from Louride in Manhattan.
08:36 But, I mean, it doesn't define my life on any level,
08:40 but it defines, I suppose, my aspirations of wanting to be
08:45 in a bigger, more exciting, more glamorous world.
08:48 And I wanted to ask you about Young Bond, of course.
08:52 Yes. Your wonderful book series.
08:54 And I wanted to ask, obviously, you had great success with that,
08:58 and also on His Majesty's Secret Service,
09:00 and I wondered, you know, how did you first get into Bond?
09:03 Well, the first film that I remember going to see in the cinema
09:07 when I was quite a small boy was Thunderball, in the early '60s,
09:12 and I remember being absolutely blown away by it.
09:15 You know, I'd sort of seen things on TV
09:21 with sort of old-fashioned types of heroes,
09:23 but James Bond was this completely new type of hero,
09:26 as far as I could see, who did some terrible things,
09:28 and I thought that was quite interesting.
09:31 And, you know, as soon as that opening music came on,
09:35 the Bond theme, and he turns and fires at the camera,
09:41 I just thought, "This is just amazing."
09:43 I mean, again, going back to what I was talking about,
09:45 being taken into a bigger, more glamorous world,
09:48 I mean, you can't... (CHUCKLES)
09:51 ..you can't do better than James Bond for that.
09:53 And...and...
09:55 And so, yeah, you know, for me, going to the cinema in the '60s,
09:58 was going to see James Bond films.
10:00 And then later on, as I started to read a lot of crime books and thrillers,
10:06 I thought, "Well, I really ought to get around to reading
10:09 "the Ian Fleming/James Bond books,"
10:11 and so I made my way through them.
10:14 And so, yeah, I've always been a big...a big James Bond fan.
10:19 And then, in...
10:23 Gosh, it's about 20 years ago now.
10:26 I was... Well, actually, I'll just backtrack a little bit,
10:29 because in the early '90s, I started writing my own crime books.
10:32 I wrote four crime books in the early '90s,
10:34 and I had a fantastic editor called Kate Jones.
10:38 And...
10:40 ..ten...at least ten years later,
10:43 she approached me and said, "I've got a new job now.
10:48 "I'm not in publishing. I'm working for the Ian Fleming Estate."
10:51 And they very much want to remind the world
10:56 that James Bond started with Ian Fleming.
10:59 You obviously got to write the 007 book for King Charles's coronation.
11:04 Yes. And I wonder, what was that experience like?
11:07 Well, it was quite interesting,
11:09 because when the Fleming Estate first approached me back in the day
11:12 and said, "We're looking at someone to write some new James Bond books,"
11:16 they didn't say at that point that it was Young Bond immediately.
11:18 And my initial reaction was, "God, where would you start doing a new adult Bond
11:23 "that hasn't been done in all Fleming's books,
11:25 "in all the other continuation novels, in all the films?"
11:29 And they said, "No, this is Young Bond."
11:30 And I had to say, "Oh, there was room for me."
11:33 But having done that and written the Young Bond series
11:36 and so totally immersed myself in the world of James Bond and Ian Fleming,
11:41 I was kind of itching to do an adult one.
11:46 I had to wait for Anthony Horowitz to finish, to get out of my way.
11:52 But it all came together very quickly for the coronation.
11:56 This year, 2023, is the 60th anniversary of the publication of Casino Royale,
12:02 the very first James Bond book.
12:05 And also, this is the first time that the Fleming Estate, Ian Fleming Publications,
12:11 are publishing all of Fleming's books themselves.
12:13 So they've just relaunched a whole beautiful new collection with new covers.
12:19 And they... So it's a big year for them.
12:24 And they approached me and said, "Look, you know what we're doing,"
12:28 because I'd been involved in some of their events.
12:30 They said, "We've also realised that it is 60th anniversary
12:34 "of On Her Majesty's Secret Service, and there is a coronation coming up."
12:38 This is back in February.
12:40 And they said, "We want to do something for the coronation.
12:42 "We want to do a charity book,
12:46 "and all we've got is a title on His Majesty's Secret Service."
12:52 And so they wanted a contemporary Bond story
12:54 that had something to do with the coronation.
12:59 And they were looking at doing it with two of the royal charities,
13:03 with Prince's Trust and with Camilla's new literacy charity,
13:08 the Queen's Reading Room.
13:10 So they said, "Probably best not to do a story
13:14 "about trying to disrupt the coronation or assassinate King Charles."
13:18 At which point I thought... I said, "Come on!
13:21 "That's got to be the story.
13:23 "You're not going to come up with a better story than that."
13:26 They said, "Oh, right."
13:28 But I only had a month to do it, so they said, you know,
13:31 "Probably it would be a short story of some sort,
13:33 "and we'll pad it out to make it a thing, and it's for charity,
13:36 "so people would be a bit more charitable towards it."
13:39 But when I started writing it, I had all these years of James Bond
13:44 and the adult Bond sort of stored up inside me,
13:47 waiting to come bursting out, like James Bond in The Last of Martin.
13:53 And I started writing it, and I kept ringing them up,
13:55 saying, "I think this might be a bit longer than..."
13:57 Cos they'd originally said about 80,000 words.
14:00 And eventually it ended up as a kind of short novel.
14:03 It's about 45,000 words.
14:05 I wrote it in a month.
14:07 We turned it around in a couple of weeks,
14:09 doing all the sort of copy-editing.
14:11 Two weeks in Apprentice, and then it was in the shops
14:14 two days before the coronation.
14:16 So, um...
14:18 It was fabulous, cos I'm...
14:20 You know, we managed to sort of get in on all the coronation stuff,
14:24 so the bookshops were doing kind of, like, book displays for the coronation,
14:28 and, you know, James Bond on His Majesty's Secret Service
14:31 was the perfect one to put in there.
14:33 I was launching my Monarchs podcast, so it all fed in.
14:37 And, in fact, the research that I'd been doing for the podcast
14:41 made it into the book,
14:43 because it's about someone claiming
14:46 they have a greater right to the throne than Charles has.
14:50 What were the movies that you loved growing up,
14:54 and do you remember your first cinema trip?
14:56 I went to see Thunderball at a very young and impressionable age.
15:00 I loved going to see James Bond films.
15:02 I mean, in the '60s, also, there were some great Disney films.
15:06 Jungle Book was a perennial favourite.
15:10 So, yeah, Disney, James Bond...
15:15 Any sort of adventure films I loved.
15:19 War films, knights,
15:22 um...people fighting.
15:25 That kind of stuff.
15:27 - All the thrillers. - Yes.
15:30 I wonder, what was the first film to make you cry?
15:33 First film to make me cry? It was probably The Jungle Book.
15:36 There's a bit at the end where Baloo the bear -
15:39 this is a big spoiler here -
15:41 appears to die.
15:43 And I remember thinking as a child,
15:45 "That's a bold move from Disney."
15:48 But, of course, you know,
15:51 lots of Disney characters die in their films,
15:53 particularly the early ones.
15:55 Bambi has traumatised generations of children.
15:58 So, um...
16:00 You know, Baloo is apparently dead.
16:03 There's rain pouring on everybody,
16:05 so it looks like the whole world is crying.
16:07 And, yes, I cried.
16:09 And then he came back to life.
16:11 And, um...I cried even more.
16:14 I tend to cry at the happy things in films more than the sad things.
16:18 When people are nice to each other and that kind of thing.
16:21 When things work out well for people,
16:23 that makes me cry more than people dying.
16:27 Particularly, like, you know...
16:29 That was another film I went to see when I was young.
16:32 Yeah, Where Eagles Dare,
16:34 where Clint Eastwood manages a massive body count
16:37 by using two machine guns at the same time,
16:40 one in each hand.
16:42 So, yeah, lots of people died in that and it didn't make me cry.
16:45 Was there anyone in your life or career, you would say,
16:48 had a defining influence on you?
16:50 Well, obviously the people I met way back...
16:55 through university -
16:57 Paul Whitehouse, Harry Enfield, Vic Reeves.
17:00 But actually probably the person that...
17:03 ..had the most effect in terms of my learning stuff
17:11 and knowing how to do things
17:13 was probably, I think,
17:15 the greatest television comedy producer of all time,
17:19 a guy called Geoffrey Perkins,
17:21 who I first worked with when we did Saturday Night Live.
17:24 Before that, he'd started in radio
17:27 and he'd been behind things like Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy
17:30 and a lot of those big hits.
17:32 He was also involved in Spitting Image and Saturday Night Live.
17:37 He was the producer on Harry's sketch shows.
17:41 And so, you know, I went in as a...
17:45 ..unqualified...
17:48 Not that there's any way you can be a sort of qualified comedy writer,
17:52 but, you know, this whole world was new to me.
17:54 And he was very generous with his time and with his advice
17:58 because, you know, a lot of people in that world,
18:01 you know, it's like we don't want writers around.
18:04 They're just annoying.
18:06 Keep trying to tell us, "Oh, you're doing it wrong."
18:09 And they keep your arms length.
18:11 But he said, "No, I like writers."
18:13 And he sort of took me under his wing.
18:16 So I learned everything there was to know
18:19 about making a comedy show, making a sketch show,
18:22 producing a sketch show.
18:24 And, you know, I would sit with him in the gallery
18:27 when we were shooting the show.
18:30 And, you know, he allowed me in the edit and everything.
18:35 And he had a very, very...
18:37 ..strong and clear ideas about...
18:43 You know, he was very good...
18:45 He was always trying to find new people and nurture them.
18:48 And train them up.
18:50 And that was what he loved more than anything.
18:53 And he was very good at spotting new talent.
18:56 You know, he was involved in...
18:59 ..with the Royal Family, with Catherine Tate,
19:04 with loads of things.
19:06 And it was only for having worked with Geoffrey
19:10 that Paul and I felt able to produce the Fast Show, which we did,
19:15 never having actually produced anything before.
19:18 The BBC said, "OK, if Geoffrey thinks you can do it, then do it."
19:22 Because he wasn't available. He was our first choice.
19:25 So, you know, it was cos of him that we ended up being able
19:28 to make the Fast Show in the way that we did.
19:30 And then sort of every comedy thing I worked on,
19:33 he was involved in some way in an advisory capacity.
19:37 And then, unfortunately, he died very suddenly.
19:42 About...it was about 10 or 15 years ago now.
19:46 And...
19:47 And I've looked back and I've realised
19:51 I haven't really made any comedy since he died.
19:54 Because I did rely very much on his advice.
19:59 If you could go back in time and give young Charlie any advice
20:03 to change his origin story, what would it be and why?
20:06 Well, I have a tendency towards smugness.
20:11 Um...and...
20:13 You know, I've been amazed at how...
20:17 how nicely things have worked out without any planning through my life.
20:22 I've met some fantastic people.
20:24 I've...I've been able to work on some very funny shows
20:27 and to make people laugh, which is a brilliant thing to do.
20:31 Um...and I've written books that I've loved writing and, you know...
20:37 Everything has gone well.
20:39 So I would probably go back and say,
20:42 "Don't make any plans. Don't change anything.
20:44 "Just let things happen to you."
20:46 Well, thank you so much, Charlie.
20:48 Well, it's been great fun talking about myself.
20:50 [MUSIC PLAYING]