EP.250 - JONNY SWEET

I added one more podcast to the giant podcast bin.

Now you have plucked that podcast out and started listening.

I took my microphone and found some human folk.

Then I recorded all the noises while we spoke.

My name is Adam Buxton.

I'm a man.

I want you to enjoy this, that's the plan.

Hey, how are you doing, podcats?

It's Adam Buxton here, reporting to you from a hot farm track in East Anglia, UK.

I'm here with my dog friend, Rose.

How you doing, Rose?

The summer is Obama.

That's the spirit.

Rosie is strongly unimpressed.

by the change of temperature

and she much prefers to be lying in the shade or on a hot patio stone

but not really wandering around the fields at the moment I don't think.

Is that right, Rosie?

Are we going back yet?

Don't worry, we'll be going back soon.

It is hot.

It's just past the middle of June 2025 and the last few days have suddenly got really boiling.

Alright let me tell you a bit about podcast number 250.

I suppose that's sort of a milestone, isn't it?

I'm not really a numbers guy.

The important thing is that this episode contains some enjoyable rambly waffle with English writer, actor, comedian Johnny Sweet.

Here's a few sweet facts for you.

Born in Nottingham in 1985, Johnny attended the local independent Nottingham High School before earning a place at Cambridge University to read English at Pembroke College.

While studying at Cambridge, Johnny met Joe Thomas and Simon Bird, with whom he performed in the famous Footlights Theatre Club.

After graduating, the three shared a flat together, performing in a sketch group that they called the House of Windsor.

Johnny also performed stand-up solo after university, and in 2009, he won the Edinburgh Comedy Award for Best Newcomer.

That was the same year that Tim Key won the Edinburgh Award for Best New Show.

Johnny, Joe, and Simon continued to work together, co-writing and starring in the 2013 sitcom Chickens, set in a sleepy English village during the First World War, where three young men have managed to avoid serving in the war and consequently have become social outcasts.

In 2015, Johnny wrote and starred in the BBC sitcom Together, a romantic comedy about a young couple embarking upon a new relationship.

That was based on a Radio 4 series Johnny had written in 2011.

And I really recommend tracking that one down too.

I think you can see it on Amazon Prime if you have access to that.

Also starring British comedy luminaries, Vicki Pepperdean, not Dine, come on, Katie Wicks, Nick Mohammed, Liam Williams and the aforementioned Tim Key.

In addition to numerous acting roles in TV shows like the Channel 4 comedy dramas Babylon in 2014 and Loaded in 2017, Johnny Johnny has appeared in films including Greed from 2019 directed by Michael Winterbottom and 2024's Wicked Little Letters directed by Teia Sharrock.

That film was also written by Johnny.

Hello, fact-checking Santa here.

The name of the director of Wicked Little Letters is actually pronounced Theia Sharrock.

Not Teya Shirock, only an idiot would pronounce it like that.

2024 also saw the publication of Johnny's first novel, The Kellerby Code, K-E-L-L-E-R-B-Y.

Says the blurb: Edward Jevons is living in a world he can't afford and to which he doesn't belong.

To camouflage himself, he has catered to his friend's needs, fetching dry cleaning, sorting flowers for premieres.

It's a noble effort, really, anything to keep his best pals Robert and Stanza happy.

To paraphrase Sam Leith's review in The Guardian, it's a lurid black comedy come thriller about social climbing and murder in which Brideshead revisited and PG Woodhouse are referenced and further back in the mix are the great Gatsby, a dab of Patricia Highsmith and a lick of Martin Amis.

I listened to the Kelleby Code on audiobook before speaking to Johnny, as you will hear, and loved it.

Really recommend it.

This podcast contains not one but two conversations conversations with Johnny.

Our first took place face-to-face in London towards the middle of November 2024, less than a week after Donald Trump was elected for his second term.

And as well as talking about Johnny's early days in comedy, we spoke about class, shame, not feeling at home in your own skin, and other themes in the Kellerby Code.

The second part of our conversation was recorded earlier this year, in April 2025, when we reconvened to compare notes on the challenges of book promotion and ailments.

And I regale Johnny with a story about an unsettling shiatsu experience.

By the way, I've since looked up the actual definition of shiatsu.

It's a Japanese body work therapy that involves applying pressure to specific points on the body, similar to acupuncture, but without needles.

It's based on the concept of restoring balance and energy flow within the body to promote overall health and well-being.

But before all that, let's travel back to November 2024, with me claiming that I knew Donald Trump was going to get back in a year earlier when his mugshot was published following his arrest in the state of Georgia in August 2023 on charges of having plotted to overturn the state's 2020 election results.

In case you're interested how that went, as of June 2025, no trial has begun and no trial date is set.

Back at the end for some bonus music waffle from me about the place that the late Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys held in my heart.

But right now, with Johnny Sweet, here we go.

Ramble chat, let's have a ramble chat.

We'll focus first on this, then concentrate on that.

Come on, let's do the fat and have a ramble chat.

Post on your conversation, hope to find your talking hat.

I called Trump's victory last year, 2023, when the mug shot came out.

Yeah, you thought that appealed.

And I thought, look at him in that mug shot.

He looks brilliant.

Handsome.

He's gonna get in.

Yeah, he has.

He just looked...

Do you remember he had the kind of he was glowering?

He was glowering, he had a certain charisma, let's be honest.

He really did.

And I thought, oh no, the certain charisma.

I hoped he'd lost that.

Yeah, yeah.

So you're reeling.

I'm reeling a little bit.

I feel as though

I agonized the week that he got in

when the podcast was due to go out.

I felt like it was one of those times I felt like I had to acknowledge what was going on in the world.

Do you know what I mean?

Which normally I wouldn't.

Normally I feel like you don't know when people are going to listen to the episode.

It might be a few weeks from now.

It might be years from now or whatever.

So it doesn't necessarily have to be topical.

Also, it's not about the news, the podcast.

It's got a deep political undercurrent, but it's not.

It's not explicit.

It comes up.

I don't want to block out the outside world.

But that one just felt like...

Yeah.

Oh, I think that's going to be on everyone's mind.

It just hangs in the air a bit, doesn't it?

But then I thought, well, how do I acknowledge it?

And in the end, I did a short impression of Anthony Scaramucci

on the

rest is politics.

He's a time away.

He's got a great...

I wouldn't mind hearing that, actually.

Well...

As I was doing the impression, it felt good.

But then when I listened to it back, I thought, that doesn't sound like Anthony Scaramucci at all.

I once did a, um, I remember doing a, an audition to play an Irish person during the Troubles.

It was a very dramatic role that I'd been put up for, sort of, I think purely, probably by accident by my agent.

And I spent a week nailing the

accent on YouTube.

doing it every single day and then I got into the audition and sort of heard it for the first time and I started to kind of corpse to sort of giggle essentially and the auditioner started to giggle and it was a really sort of sweet moment where we both kind of giggled together and then she sort of pressed stop on the record and said well you know bye then

and then afterwards I thought oh that was absolutely terrible so I can feel your pain basically and now when I have auditions people say could you try that in a slightly more could you do it at sort of Newcastle yeah and I'll just have to go that that'll be a no I'm afraid can't do it so yeah yeah do you want to try that again but better yeah how I want to hear the accent now though I don't think I can do it without

offending a large number of

the whole of Ireland and not a particular place in Ireland.

My producer, Seamus Murphy Mitchell, is Irish.

Yes, I know.

And I think that he would really love to hear the accent.

I don't actually think I can do it.

I honestly don't think I can.

I think it would be a really bad move for me.

I like the beginning of it.

Oi.

That's good because

it's sort of generic enough that I think.

Yeah.

How are you doing though?

How's life like?

How was it this year having your first novel being put out into the world?

Are you someone that

follows the responses to the things that you make once they're in the world?

I'm fairly...

I try to not follow anything.

I try to bury my head in the sand.

Sometimes my parents will kind of call me and they'll say they read something and I'll say, well, just remember that I don't read anything.

And I try to keep it out.

And they'll say, well, I think they're really unfair to you too guys.

Like okay no but I yeah I keep my head down.

I basically avoid everything as much as possible and avoid sales.

I still like my first reviews when I was doing Edinburgh still stick in my head.

When I was 18 I got one saying that I was a Michael Portillo lookalike and with a stupid grin plastered across my face.

And that sort of stayed with me sufficiently that I've tried to avoid tried to avoid it ever since.

Yeah.

So you don't read, like, did you read?

I'm not going to stop quoting all your reviews at you.

Don't read the bad.

But did you read Brian Logan's review of Together when it came out in The Guardian?

I think I probably would have read.

Very positive.

Was it?

No, I didn't remember that then.

That's good.

Very positive.

Good on him.

Says Brian.

I would add only as an observation, not as a criticism,

which is something you don't get in many reviews.

It's not fairly soft pedaling from Brian.

that it's not a role, i.e., your role in Together, or a show that trades on the type of comedy Sweet used to perform live.

He's toned down the campness,

the slyness, and the oddity of his stage persona.

This is a trad rom-com that requires him to be more or less normal, an everyday feckless man-child, baby-stepping towards love and adulthood.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's a fairly interesting analysis of my transition from stage to screen.

No, it's true.

I mean, I remember doing, when I did stuff live, and I loved it, the thing I struggled with was a limitation in my performance persona.

Weirdly, I could only be an extremely camp.

I mean, I love that he picked out camp, extremely camp, extreme, anarchic person.

And I would write stuff that I would want to perform and think, the only problem with this bit of writing is the performer who's meant to be doing it because he just can't, like the Irish accent, just can't get there.

So I always wanted to write different sorts of stories, but after together, I think I again found some issues with the lead actor and started to kind of split what I wrote and what I performed.

And so I would write stuff for different people to act who were better at it and, you know, keep everything else sort of separate.

But it was weird that time because I remember I I got to a point with live comedy where I just stopped wanting to do it and found that it wasn't everything I wanted to do, but I do miss it.

And that kind of review does make me think, does make me remember that it was such weird, fun stuff in an age where everything was kind of exciting and new, and the people I was performing with were kind of my good friends.

Why did it suddenly become less appealing?

I think because I felt like ultimately, I think I wanted to write and tell stories, and I felt like I didn't quite have that need.

Like friends of mine who do live comedy, still like Tim Key and Nick Mohammed, who were really close friends, I really feel in them that they absolutely just love, just love, it's how they kind of refuel is performing live.

And you can feel that when you watch them.

But I was more of a sort of person who would be vomiting very much vomiting beforehand, sort of, and sort of wondering why I was doing this.

And then when I got a show right, I would love it.

And that was the best bit.

Doing a sort of Soho theatre run after in Edinburgh, when everything was kind of sorted out was good.

But the sort of 15 months before that, where I'd go to the British Library and sort of stare at my kind of dim reflection in the laptop wasn't worth it.

That's when you're writing, you're not just sitting there not doing anything.

Well, what I was doing at you, what I was doing was sitting there not doing it, but I was, yeah, I was trying to write and sort of right, okay.

I mean, I love it, I actually feel as though I have a kind of affinity with comedians, and I love comedians.

I think I am, I think I am basically a comedian, but I felt that live comedy wasn't ultimately my kind of bag.

But then after that when I stopped doing that it then did take me a while to start writing the sort of thing that I wanted to write and felt like kind of interested me.

Like I wrote a film that was out this year too and Wicked Little Letters.

Yes.

And the book The Calibrate were sort of things that I

could try to be sort of funny and also compelling and interesting at the same time.

But I do miss when I watch live comedy part of me is fairly kind of

a little bit jealous and quite sort of, and probably also a bit competitive.

Like I would quite like to go.

But

it was just one of those things where I felt that when I went to bed at night, I wasn't desperately wanting to kind of work out how to do my next set.

I was trying to think of other stuff.

The hunger had gone.

The hunger, the hunger.

Yeah, and it was almost like a dog.

I mean, when I was at school,

I wasn't desperately into comedy there.

And then at university, I just got fully deep into it and got obsessed with it.

And now, I think I try and do a bit of both.

Yeah.

So, what were you like when you were young?

Where do you come from?

You're Nottingham.

Nottingham.

Yeah.

My son is at Nottingham University.

Okay, that's good.

Yeah, yeah.

He's a great university.

Hard town.

It's supposed to be.

Two universities.

Two universities.

Great.

Yeah.

And when I was growing up, it used to be you'd go out, there'd always be a couple of fights in the streets when you came out of the bars.

It's like a fun.

I mean, I'm not saying your son's in physical danger, but yeah.

Just saying he should try it.

Yeah, just do it once.

Try a punch-up.

It's acceptable.

Yeah.

And what did your parents do?

Are they still with us?

They are still with us, yeah.

They're plugging on.

So they were.

My dad was a solicitor.

My mum was a chemistry teacher in Saint Form College.

Academic?

Yeah, types.

Fairly academic, definitely academic-minded for me.

They were definitely sort of make sure you do well at school.

But home life was very, I think it was very sort of stable.

And I almost don't think I had, sometimes I think I don't think I had an emotion until I was about 28 or so.

Like I was quite sort of repressed.

Not for any particular reason, but it was a very stable existence.

I was a scholarship boy at a private school, which is very similar to the Calabri Code.

And so, yeah, to some degree, I was in a school where other people came from maybe a slightly different financial background to me.

Was that a full scholarship you'd got or something like that?

No, it wasn't, it was a part scholarship.

Yeah.

I was on and my parents were very left-wing.

I remember my parents saying that when they decided to send my brother and I to that school, they had friends who said, I hope your children grow up to hate you

because of that decision to kind of betray their left-wing roots.

Did you ever talk to them about that after the fact?

Yeah, I think we've talked about it a lot actually, because I think, you know, it's something you don't choose, you don't choose where you go to school.

And I really liked the stuff I studied.

I got really into English.

I loved it.

I wanted to sort of be an academic.

So I felt that they had tried to give me that opportunity and that was quite positive.

But I think the thing about those schools is often they have these odd kind of ideologies attached to them, which aren't to do with getting a good education.

But what do you mean by that?

You mean more about a kind of way that a person should be in the world?

Like toughening people up and all that sort of thing.

Yes, or a value system, how you value someone's kind of worth or dignity, what you encourage them to do in their life that's worthwhile for them or for society.

What constitutes a worthwhile life?

Are you asking me that?

No, I'm just saying

that's the kind of thing that

is being shaped.

Exactly, yeah.

But I had loads of great friends who were not like that.

But also, I mean, if you want to tell me what constitutes a worthwhile life, I'd love to.

I wasn't really considering.

Has it got anything to do with podcasting?

It's A, it's podcasts.

Okay.

B,

scaramucci, get your Irish accent right.

And that's.

And then call it quits.

You're done.

Yeah, power down.

Good.

But actually, I wasn't really aware of that stuff massively when I was there.

It was a very, I would think I had a very lucky childhood.

And did people say,

why aren't you speaking with the proper accent, sweet, you absolute oik?

No, No, no.

Forcing you to cultivate more upper class tones.

No, I think I did that at university because I'm just a people pleaser and I think I just mostly unconsciously, but probably, you know, you're never completely unconscious of these sorts of changes.

It got a bit posher.

And then in my early 20s after university, I was really like, what have you done?

That's a bad, you've got a bad voice for like the whole of the rest of society.

Everyone hates this kind of voice.

But then it was sort of stuck and I I don't really care now, but definitely there was a sort of series of small identity crises that I was, because I was so emotionally repressed, I wasn't really aware I was having, I saw later.

So that was Cambridge that you went to?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And what did you get into study there?

English.

And you met Simon Bird.

Yeah.

And Joe.

I met Joe Thomas on my first night there, and I did sort of almost immediately fall in love with him and think,

I'll try and have you.

Yeah.

He's got a nice vibe.

He's just got such a great great vibe.

Yeah.

And then yeah, then I met Simon not long after that.

And then we were all kind of friends and competitors.

Yeah.

Nick Mohammed as well was doing a PhD.

Yeah.

Wow.

He was a bit older, but he,

I remember him sitting on the stairs for a footlights audition and him showing me this script for something.

And I remember thinking, yes, fine.

And then I saw him on stage and it was very fun to meet those people who were all kind of, we were all just doing lots of Ricky Gervais impressions,

masquerading as our sort of new original voices.

And then, yeah, and then going straight to Edinburgh with Joe and Simon was almost like you were just on this kind of exciting track.

But I think I sort of fell into it as well.

And when I was doing it, I would often be thinking, I don't feel exactly like...

the real kind of comedians.

But now I feel like there's a bit of a balance.

And

yeah, it was very exciting.

And did you feel like...

Because there's a kind of rhythm and a delivery delivery that I associate with you and Tom Basdin and Tim Key,

and you know, I love it.

It's very appealing.

The timing of it, it's a weird combination of

slightly Jeeves and Worcesterish, PG Woodhouse-y

stuff plus ordinary everyday lingo, kind of slightly twattish bants that you would do in the office or whatever.

Yeah.

I don't mean the TV show, but just at work, you know.

Yeah.

No, No, totally.

Yeah, I mean, I think that started with Cowards, that sketch group.

Who was in Cowards?

So that was Bounston, Tim Key, Stefan Golozziewski, and Lloyd Wolfe.

They were doing stuff.

Just when I got to university, they'd just left university.

So they were kind of here.

I mean, I was freely here worshipping them.

And when I used to bump into them, I would find it difficult to kind of string a sentence together.

And then I think, oddly, I think the PG Woodhouse stuff, I remember it I went to India with Tim for about a month and we were reading PG Woodhouse and there was a lot of sort of you know how he kind of says he ruffled the bee there's a lot of that that kind of crept in quite a lot what's ruffling the bee well like ruffling the brow would you say ruffle the brow the bee is also the bean which is the brain So there's all these, there were all these kind of abbreviations that kind of fell in.

And I think the Woodhouse Argot, which I don't really, I'm not that familiar with.

Like I know it superficially, but not much.

I got into it late.

I got into it in my mid-twenties, and I got out of it quite quickly as well.

But I did, it is fun.

It is just very silly.

Did you all happen to be on the same page as far as the Woodhouse stuff?

There wasn't one person who was like, right, I demand you all read P.G.

Woodhouse.

No, and also we're all really doing separate stuff.

It was just, I think Tim got me into it.

Because superficially, I suppose it is...

It's an unfashionable thing to be into because it is so bound up with the British upper classes.

And so for people who don't know much about what's actually in those books, you sort of think, well, why would I care about butlers and wash people and aristocrats?

That's how I felt, actually, was that he was, it's kind of unfortunate because I think he's an amazing writer.

But with the Calabi Code,

part of where the Calaby Code came from was I was reading the Code of the Worcesters.

and finding myself just wondering why I had this image of sort of Jeeves getting into bed at night and just imagining bludgeoning Bertie to death with this sort of hammer or something.

Yeah.

And at the time I was tutoring for really rich kids in Chelsea.

And some of them were great and they were lots of nice kids, but some of them were just complete pricks.

And Edward, the protagonist in the Kelleby Code, is also a tutor.

Yeah, yeah, that was definitely autobiographical.

And I did meet a lot of difficult.

I was treated basically like a butler.

I was often sort of being given jobs that were not tutoring, just like hanging pictures and stuff.

They were just like, can you like do this?

There's just a bloke in the house.

Yeah.

May as well make yourself.

So there's this one family who, they were very unusual and obviously like they lived in this absolute mansion on the King's Road.

And I went in and she had, the house was covered in portraits of her, the mum, that she had commissioned of herself.

in different sort of tones like a big Andy Warhol type one of her and one of her because she self-made country albums so she did some with her with her like foot on a hay bale and stuff and it was really weird and her son who was about nine when I went to teach him he turned around to me and said just say no if I don't like you I'll have you sacked and it was shocking because I immediately then did sort of just do what he told me even though I was sort of 15 years older than him so then I was reading Cody the Worcesters and I did feel that really I felt that it was so funny but it's a shame because I find all that world really icky and what would it be like to to write a story like that

when we kind of include the feelings we have about those power structures now and I did think is there a kind of version of a comedy Woodhouse novel that's funny and sort of silly in the way it is but also incorporates that darkness and that anger too

it was really good I really enjoyed the book I listened to the audiobook yes it's it's good isn't it read by Jack Davenport isn't he good he's very good.

I auditioned for that audiobook, by the way.

Did you?

Yes.

And you didn't get it.

No, no.

And I was in it, and I was fairly like,

I see.

Can you not insist that you read your own audio?

But that's not in my kind of wheelhouse.

But and then, and then when I read, when I heard it, I was like, oh, thank God for that because he is so good.

He is very good.

Yeah, yeah.

There were so many things that I enjoyed and were funny and also unsettling and challenged some of my thoughts and ideas.

It was like the perfect reading experience in that way.

No, that's very kind.

Thanks.

Thank you.

Honestly, it was great.

And how did you tackle it though?

Like, I'm interested in the actual nuts and bolts of writing a novel like that.

You know what?

When people ask about it, I often say what I said to you earlier, which is that I was reading the Code of the Worcesters, and then I had this image of Jeeves bludgeoning Bertie,

which was true, but that wasn't the genesis of the book.

Really, with the book, I started writing some scenes.

And just to be sorry, I feel like I've got to pick up for people who are not familiar with Woodhouse.

Jeeves is Bertie's butler.

Oh, yeah, I should have said that.

And Bertie's a kind of amiable goof.

Yes.

Right?

He's like a decent guy.

Oh, yeah.

He's amiable.

Yeah, he is amiable.

He's a nice fellow, and Jeeves clears up all his messes for him.

Right.

And he's a kind of fairly large man whose face doesn't move much and just deals with everything yeah

and they don't explore any of the kind of dark underside of the master servant dynamic in the woodhouse books really do they exactly and that was very much what I thought it would be funny and fun and interesting to do so it took a while but it was very enjoyable and normally when I'm writing something there are moments of kind of deep existential crisis and self-loathing and with this

there wasn't really and you know it's a funny book to talk about because it's easy to find yourself especially in interview situations trying to make a case for it like it's a guardian column or politically or in a nutshell but really it is about itself it's about that character and there's a kind of atmosphere of shame around him that i wanted to kind of work out and i just wanted it to be entertaining and and compelling and for it to be a character people kind of felt for, felt the pain of.

But through doing that, it does kind of ricochet off political arguments that persist.

And I also think Saltburn really affected it as well because when it was published, that was the kind of topic of conversation.

So, so it didn't affect the writing of it because you'd finished writing by the time Saltburn came out.

Yeah, in fact, I'm Emma Finnell, who made Saltburn, is a friend, and she was in Chickens, which was a sitcom I did with Simon and Joe, the aforementioned Simon and Joe.

So we went for lunch, and she was just getting her film together, and she just cast Barry Kuhn.

And I asked what her film-how'd you pronounce it?

That's why I don't know.

That's why I grimaced.

Oh, I was thinking, like, I didn't realize it was a grimace.

I thought it was a look of triumphalism.

Like, I can pronounce his name.

I bet you're going to go for Keogen or something.

No, I was apologising to you, but so the listeners wouldn't know.

Keon.

I think it's someone's told me.

This is what Google's here for.

Keun.

Pronunciation.

So you're going for Keon.

Keown.

Keown.

I mean, originally, you

know, you sort of made us denoy.

At least I flinched afterwards.

I would go for Kyogon,

just, but I wouldn't even, yeah, because I wouldn't even bother.

Yeah.

You know, you'd be like, well,

I'm sorry, I'm English.

I'm going to go for Keogen.

Here's the pronunciation.

Keogan.

Oh, you're joking.

That's horrible for me to hear.

Barry Keogan.

Kean.

So it's Kyogan.

Kyun.

When you say

my version was saliva-rich and sort of...

No, it was more breathy, your one.

It was just like a breath.

Can you do something musically with my Kian in the interstitial...

Put it on a beat for crying out loud.

Anyway, so she had just cast Mr.

Kyogen.

Yeah,

and I said, you know, what's it about?

And she basically pitched my book back at me.

And

was really disappointed because her film was coming out way before my book I hadn't got a publisher at that point and I just felt that it would have more profile anyway but in fact I think it was quite useful for the book I think it was quite useful in publishing but but it I did your heart drop though when she said like yeah no I was absolutely devastated I was annoyed with her right and then I said but then we swapped I gave her the Calibi code and she gave me the script.

And they were sufficiently different in my,

I didn't have to worry.

I didn't think about Saltburn once when I was reading the Calabi Code no that makes sense I had seen it by that point you had seen it yeah that makes sense but in kind of the most basic facts you could see why a kind of two sentence synopsis might

be troubling but I do think it meant that when it came out a lot of the press I did I found myself talking a lot about politics of class which obviously the book does touch upon and I sort of use P.G.

Woodhouse in that way.

The obvious thing to ask, of course, is to what extent it's autobiographical.

I mean, there are obviously certain elements that are autobiographical, as you've already said.

So I had a list of like some of the particular themes.

Yeah.

And I've got some specifics, yeah.

I'd love to hear the list.

Okay, well, sort of general areas that the book touches upon, which I was wondering, like, how much of this stuff were you writing and sort of weeping at the memory of the feelings you have on these subjects?

The obvious one being class.

When did you start to become most aware of of that and feel uncomfortable about it?

Or did you ever?

No, I think weirdly the way I describe it is it was a sort of jokey satire of myself in a weird way.

It wasn't deeply traumatic.

Something I think was closer to home was kind of social anxiety, people pleasing, a sense of that I think is very common when you start to talk to people about it.

A sense of kind of not feeling at home in your own skin.

So, all of that, I felt that especially I think in my, I think it's very common in your 20s.

And I started writing it probably at the start of my 30s.

So, the book certainly felt like it was about that in some way.

And the idea of Kellerby House and that kind of whole fantasy was partly a class thing, and it was partly just the idea of a fantasy, of somewhere where you feel at home.

And Kellerby House is the stately home that's like the focus of everybody's ambitions in this book?

Yeah, yeah.

And

that's where Stanza is going to end up, right?

That's her family

pile.

Yes, exactly.

And there are little Seinfeld references scattered throughout the book.

Are there?

Yeah, I think so.

Edward does a commentary about Seinfeld for Stanza quite near the beginning of the book.

Stanza

is the object of Edward's affections, unrequited love.

And he is, I think, getting on well with her at one point and they have a convo about Seinfeld and then it occurred to me maybe she's called Stanza after George Costanza.

That's a great

I love it.

I absolutely love it.

No, I wish that were the Easter.

Okay.

No, in fact she was called Helen

and I didn't ever feel like that was a good enough name and then I just went for dinner and there was someone called Stanza there

and I just liked the name and took it.

Yeah, it's a cool name.

But George Costanza is is a big part of my kind of emotional universe.

Yeah.

Would it be weird to ask you to read a little bit, a passage?

Yeah, okay.

Bearing in mind, I didn't get the audition to do the audiobook.

It was just a bit that I was on a plane and I was listening to it.

And this bit came along.

I thought, wow, that is...

a great piece of writing and he's really put his finger on something very minute that I feel as though I have felt in various ways.

That was very kind.

That is the passage highlighted there.

Do you remember the bit?

I think this is when they've gone to the seaside.

This is Edward and Madge.

Madge, who is the.

She ends up being his girlfriend.

Yes, and she kind of offers a version of the world and himself, which is kind of palatable.

And in a way, he likes her because she skewers him and kind of sees him for the kind of doormat he is and makes fun of him.

And she's had a hard time, and they've gone to the seaside.

And also, Jeeves was often called away from a seaside holiday to go and sort out Bertie's messes.

So I'll read it.

I haven't practiced this, obviously.

He looked off at a distant tanker and felt cavernously empty.

The summer had been too long.

The rage came and went.

Sometimes he thought it emerged merely because of hunger or tiredness, but really it derived from unknowable energies within him, thick reservoirs of hatred of himself, presumably, of the nation, the impossibility of living here today

without, by definition, being in the wrong, and this wrongness being no less meaningful because of that.

A hatred of his friends, his friends' enemies, of the things they all said in person, on Twitter, everywhere.

Yet Madge smelt so beautifully of rose and oud that even as he bristled at the general falling short, the insufficiency that carpeted the world, he was compelled to grasp at this fugitive moment of simple, unmildewed pleasure.

Thank you for choosing that bit.

That was a bit that I kind of did feel actually when I wrote it.

And what was the feeling, though?

It was that.

I mean, it was a sort of uselessness, a feeling of uselessness and

uselessness as a part of society.

Yes.

Or just.

Perhaps more widely than that, but a kind of difficulty in connecting to society and finding a worthwhile route through it.

And also a sense of kind of being in a in a world of opinions and feeling that all of it's bullshit and that all of it is true as well or there's truth in it but that the way that it's expressed leaves you feeling dissatisfied and and I think that sense of things falling short that the you know just the word insufficiency I think was was something I was trying to get to the heart of but I stumbled on the bit that you put in bold and read oh sorry yes the bit I put in bold and red was the line, the impossibility of living here today without by definition being in the wrong and this wrongness being no less meaningful because of that.

And I suppose what that meant to me was whoever you are, wherever you are, one way or the other, you are in the wrong as far as a large part of the world is concerned.

Yeah.

You're not doing the right thing with your life.

You don't have the right opinions.

You haven't been honest with yourself in the right way.

Yeah.

And if you continue to function within a society that is already unjust, and you have to function in that society because otherwise you're going to go and live under a sort of tree somewhere.

Yeah.

So you have to, by definition, be complicit in it.

Yeah.

Other thing, how many of Edward's internal struggles have you experienced?

Is my heading for this little list?

About class, about the torture of unrequited love.

Did you have to mine some personal experiences for that?

Probably, but no, that wasn't mine.

No, that was more part of, I think, the unrequited something else.

Yeah.

And not to say I've had a sort of 100% record.

Haven't smashed every single time.

Haven't smashed every record.

I'd never seen Together before

until a few days ago.

No way.

Oh my god.

I really loved it.

Did you, Ashley?

Yeah, it was really funny.

Together, I think, is a, is contributed to

my period of sort of existential crisis because I really didn't enjoy the process of making it.

Aha.

Alex McQueen plays your dad in the show.

Yes, very close to

the real Mr.

Paul Sweet.

Oh, well, I was going to ask.

Really, is it?

At one point, the phone is ringing.

He's lying down on the couch and he doesn't want to get the phone.

He's waiting for someone else in the house to answer it.

And he just shouts, Telefonico!

That's very much verbatim.

Very much verbatim.

Where's Telefonico?

Telefonico, there are loads of things that I grew up with thinking were kind of fairly, not fairly normal.

Telefonico, yeah, I had a friend who met my dad and he said, now I understand why you say chow chow.

That's why I used to say chow chow, thinking it was just like an ordinary sign-off.

My dad would also ask me to put his yoghurt in the microwave for seven seconds on low to take the chill off.

That's in there, that's astonishing.

So yeah, it was about my parents, that show really it was mainly about what sort of unbelievably sweet and odd people they are um so why though was it a frustrating process do you are you reluctant to rake over it or

no what what I would say is that I don't think I was quite on top of it it felt like it was slipping away from me and being eroded

and maybe I needed someone, some writing help or it's a lot to write and I spoke to you during during that actually after a gig and I was so remember saying to you oh it's a nightmare and you said I've got one piece of advice just try and enjoy it

oh my god that is the trying stupidest thing I've ever heard it was good because I was like I should try and enjoy it and then after it finished I was like I failed to enjoy it

try and enjoy it I was that at the pub we met with Tim King yeah but it was very nice actually the way you said it it was sweet but I don't think I succeeded in meeting that and I just think maybe I should have gotten more people to help write it just to get it going.

I think I've got a photograph of that evening.

Have you?

Maybe I'll put it on the blog.

That would be lovely.

That would be lovely.

Yes.

And afterwards, I just thought, you know, there's something about something being filmed and edited and finished and it not being quite right,

which is fairly painful.

Yeah, yeah.

Were you able to enjoy any aspect of it?

Absolutely not.

You know, I got so, honestly, I got so stressed out about it.

And then I got this got this weird ulcer at the back of my throat that was so big, the doctor thought it was cancer.

And then I had to get a biopsy on my ulcer in my throat.

And I remember this moment where the specialist said, how's everything in the moment?

Is work okay?

And I remember being like, feeling almost too embarrassed to say, it's just because of a sitcom, which is piss or pathetic.

But yeah.

I'm doing a fun sitcom.

Yeah.

It's so silly as well.

I mean, that's what's so funny.

It's a really silly sitcom.

But that was actually a moment where I was like, I'm not going to get like that about, you know, work again.

There are some bits I do look back on and they were great fun.

But I think I

think I was at that period.

And now when something isn't perfect, especially when something that you film, because there's so much contingency when you film something and so much can happen that you're not in control of, that now I really make it about

enjoying it, the process, and trying to have an atmosphere of kind of, this is great that we're doing this.

And that's how I feel.

And when things aren't quite perfect, I genuinely am quite philosophical about it.

And I think I had to slide.

In fact, I have a very, another piece of advice I got during that period was with Vicki Pepperdine.

Do you say Dine or Dean?

I say Dean, but you'll probably Google it and say Dine in a minute.

No, I think you're right on that one.

Vicki Pepperdine,

who I had done some takes and I was stressing out, and I was just saying to her, Oh, I just think I fucked it, and I was getting really overwrought.

And she said, You know, I think sometimes you need to get, you need to, to a certain extent, you need to, you need to get over yourself.

And it was great because it was good advice.

It really is good advice, but it's so hard.

It's like me glibly saying, Oh, try and enjoy it.

It's one of those bits of advice that is true.

Try and enjoy it, get over yourself, just relax, all those things.

Yeah, that's all good stuff.

Be yourself is the other one.

And it's like,

I don't know if you've noticed, but I am being myself.

Myself is the problem.

Yeah, sadly, that's yeah.

I took a trip down the river of time.

I took a trip, took a trip down the river of time.

I packed some things for my trip down the river of time.

I packed some things for my trip down the river of time.

I took a camping chair and a fancy camera so I could sit and take pictures from my chair of the river of time.

Of the river of time, time, time, time, time.

I also made sure I had my laptop there so I could use my photo manipulation software and tweak the river of time.

Time, time, time, time.

Oh,

the river of time.

Do we do

the river of time?

Ooh, la la la.

It's long and covered in slime.

To be you,

the river of time.

Suddenly, you find us, what is it, four, five months later?

Yeah, it's about that.

It's five months later.

I'm probably wearing the same thing.

And wow, things have changed.

Oh my god.

The first part of our conversation was recorded in mid-November 2024.

Donald Trump had just been elected president for the second time.

That's right.

Did we even mention that?

No, we were trying not to mention it.

We started off by me saying that I'd done an Anthony Scaramucci impression by way of addressing the fact he'd been re-elected.

Yeah.

And then

we talked about your book and all sorts of other stuff.

But on that day, I think afterwards we both felt that we were sort of discombobulated.

Yeah, yeah.

Is that fair?

That is fair.

I think what you were saying before we recorded was it just sort of, it started fine, but sort of ended poorly with us feeling a little bit boring and edgy.

The bit that listeners have just heard was the good bit from the beginning.

And that was all fine.

That's good because there are bits in that where I, I mean, I have this with every interview I ever have.

Yeah.

And especially if in general I felt as if it could have been better.

There were bits where I feel like in retrospect I was saying saying almost anything that came into my head and stuff that I didn't even really think.

That's just an interview.

I know that's true.

It's a normal interview.

Yeah, yeah.

But it's very hard, like you, again, you were just saying before we recorded, when you have a book and then you find yourself justifying it or making arguments for it and you're kind of like, I mean, often you're just lying.

Because really why you wrote it was you felt it would be nice to write it or it's enjoyable.

Whereas often I find that I'm sort of accidentally painting myself into a corner where I'm a kind of class warrior,

railing against

lots of power structures.

I find myself using the term power structures quite a lot, which just never really enters my vocabulary otherwise.

So yeah, so maybe I had a little bit of that, a little bit of sort of feeling like I'd been, probably out of social awkwardness, being disingenuous as well.

Oh, it didn't come across that way.

Good, that's good.

But you'd also had a stressful time around then, anyway.

I think we were both stressed out, right?

Yeah, we were both going through

I had some fairly stressful family stuff which I needn't go into but I was not sleeping and it's funny how when you're especially as a parent when you're stressed you sort of just keep plugging away and it may take a podcast to alert you to the fact that you need to kind of get some sleep and sort stuff out at home.

So maybe that was that was certainly playing into it.

And you were too.

I don't know.

Yeah, while I was talking to you, I mean, I was stressed anyway because I was trying to finish my book.

Oh, yeah.

So, that was the main thing that was happening.

This is a book that had taken so long to write.

I'd missed so many deadlines.

And the latest one at that point was September last year, so missed that one as well.

And that was supposed to be the absolute final deadline from the publishers.

They were saying, if you miss that one,

well, it's going to be sort of difficult for us to make it fit with everything else, i.e., we may just not publish it.

That's what they said to me at one point.

Really?

So I was really stressed.

And

then I started getting a bit run down.

And while I was talking to you during that conversation, which was a really fun conversation, by the way, and you wouldn't know it to listen back.

That's good.

I hope listeners will agree.

But while I was talking to you towards the end, maybe the bit where it started going off the rails that people haven't heard,

my face started going weird.

That is bad.

You don't want that.

No.

You know, I mean, it is a little weird anyway.

I was going to say, yeah, no, look at it.

Yeah, it's good.

It's aging.

It's a good face.

And also, nobody's face is fully symmetrical.

But my face started going fully asymmetrical.

And I started feeling like I couldn't properly close my right eye.

And it felt like I had a bit of a twitch or a bit of a weakness in my

right side.

So I was thinking, oh, I'm going to have a stroke.

It's such a good interview.

Yeah.

That I'm stroking.

Johnny Sweet has given me a stroke with his all good writing and insights about class.

And now I'm having a stroke.

Wow.

So that is scary.

That's really scary.

Because you told me that afterwards.

I think you'd felt it coming on.

Yeah.

And I, again, I had not guessed that you were stroking in the interview, but that is awful.

That is terrifying.

Well, it wasn't a stroke, I'm happy to say.

But afterwards, maybe I'll post the picture of us that we took on the day

because you can actually see in my face, it's a little on the wonk.

Really?

Yeah.

Really?

And it wasn't massive at all.

But anyway, I went to the dock after you'd left, and she said pretty quickly, oh, I think it's Belle's palsy.

And

she said, I don't think it's a stroke, and I don't think it's anything more sinister than that.

And it's still very unstilled quite hard.

Well, I was happy with Belle's palsy.

yeah i was like

as you know any yeah because i'd heard of it before yes and actually i had heard of it with people who got it quite severely and never quite got over it because it can be very severe yeah like your face can go completely asymmetrical it just sort of um relaxes completely on one side and you can't really control it i'm examining you at the moment and it seems

that's lovely yeah adam's smiling i'm doing a range of expressions yeah no it's gorgeous but there were a few that I couldn't even do for a while after I got it.

And I mean, Bell's palsy.

I looked up the definition just to incorporate some actual facts into the podcast.

This is a condition, listeners, if you're not familiar, that causes temporary weakness or paralysis on one side of the face, usually due to a problem with the facial nerve.

The exact cause is unknown, but viral infections or autoimmune disorders may play a role.

Symptoms typically appear suddenly and include facial dropping, could happen during a podcast, maybe after the conversation has peaked.

And it might be an indication that a second podcast session is required four or five months later, it says here.

Difficulty closing eye on the affected side, potentially problems with speech and taste.

I noticed that I was making some pretty off-colour

gags towards the end, which I've had to cut out.

I've got in in my health thing, I haven't mentioned this to you, but I was almost going to have to ask you if I could do this interview from a reclining position.

Oh no.

Because I've got a, well I think I have a leaking spine.

Whoa.

Which is actually, I feel like that's a similar sort of genre to Bell's palsy for some reason.

And it sort of cures itself apparently.

Apparently it's quite common.

But the treatment is that you have to lie completely flat.

and drink as much coffee and take as many caffeine tablets as you can, which sends you absolutely mental because you can't really move, but your head is sort of wired.

And they also say you've got to get out of bed, I think to maintain a lateral position, you're supposed to log roll out of bed, which I found too difficult.

And you're also meant to, if you're going to cough, you have to cough with as wide a mouth as possible, which my wife obviously finds really sort of repulsive.

So as not to put pressure on the spine.

I think so.

I think so you don't sort of jilt.

I didn't really do those things because they felt too sort of of ridiculous.

And sneezing is a no-no.

Sneezing wide-open mouth.

Wide-open mouth.

I think you can.

I assumed when I read it that you also couldn't cover your mouth.

I think you probably can cover your mouth.

But I just imagined people in lifts kind of coughing with a wide-open mouth at people.

And the caffeine is to encourage the blood flow, is it?

Yeah, I think it stimulates growth

of the fluid or something.

And the economy as well.

It does, it's good, yeah, it's really good.

It speeds everything.

It's like a Rishi Sunak scheme.

Exactly.

It encourages writing.

Yeah, so it does.

It gives you a buzz.

So you're writing a new book.

I'm writing a new book.

You've finished your book

in the intervening months.

Never going to write another one.

That's it.

No more books.

You forget how painful it is, though.

I think that's like having children.

You forget how difficult it is.

Well, women are always going on about how painful it is to have a child.

They do, actually.

I forget.

And those are the ones that have never written a book.

That's your Bell's palsy coming back.

Yeah.

That's right.

It's affected my taste.

I have not finished my book.

I am still often in bed, highly caffeinated and slightly jittery, wondering if I will finish it.

I actually enjoy it.

I'm plugging away.

I'm just kind of taking it ages.

So I'm in the thick of it.

You know what it's like.

I can't wait to feel like you feel.

It's great, let me tell you.

Yeah.

The sun is out.

I mean, it's a beautiful summery day.

Not for me.

For me, it's snowdrifts out of the list.

It's so light.

I'm so happy.

I'm not that badly affected by the news.

You know, every single thing doesn't bring me down.

You're warming to Trump.

You're coming around to his new way of doing stuff.

He's shaking things up.

Yeah, he's fun.

Things needed to shake up.

Exactly.

He's not so bad.

No, I sympathise so badly.

Writing is terrible.

And it's physically bad for you.

It gives you all sorts of, as we have seen, it gives you all sorts of leaky spine, Bell's palsy.

Don't write.

Yeah.

But

I do enjoy it.

Did you enjoy the process when it felt like you were writing something and thinking,

yeah, that was a good bit.

Occasionally.

Yeah.

Because the attraction of the whole thing is to be able to make sense of the world in some way.

Exactly.

To be able to set down your thoughts and organize them the way that you would like them to be shared with the world rather than what normally happens, which is you go on an interview and you just blither.

Yeah, but this is going to be your life in a heroic arc.

Yeah.

Kind of, yeah.

And it's escapism.

I find it escapist to be writing about something else that isn't real life.

But I guess yours is a memoir, so you are

trapped in your own dreary reality of my life.

What's the new book about, can you say?

If it's published, it will be about a string quartet.

And kind of

those sorts of people who commit every gram of their energy into art and aspiring for an unrealizable perfection at the cost of much else, and kind of ambition, competitiveness, and how toxic creativity can be.

So it's quite pertinent to this discussion,

to how we feel.

So it's.

How did you arrive at that subject then?

Did you meet some people in String Cortex?

Have you ever been in one?

No, I've never been, but I was, I'm quite, I think I was attracted to it really because it sort of felt as though it was a good area where you can kind of penetrate really dramatic, beautiful ideas, but also it's a bit of an outsider zone.

You know, a quartet would be named for one person often, and then the other three were kind of in and out and no one really cared.

But increasingly, kind of mirroring democracy over the 20th century, it became more democratic and everyone would have an equal say.

But even then, it's clearly not the case.

There are louder voices and some people just go with the flow.

Well, that's the dynamic in rock bands as well.

Even though a lot of the time, you know, the bands aren't operating at the same level of technical virtuosity.

Some of them are.

Sometimes, yeah, yeah.

I watched the Led Zepp documentary the other day.

Great.

And I'm not a big Led Zepp fan, I have to be honest.

But there are definitely moments, some incredible archive clips there, where they are locked into each other.

They are so in the zone.

And they're able to just go wherever they want.

The combination of that drumming and

John Paul Jones on bass and Jimmy Page's incredible guitar.

And then suddenly you've got Robert Plant who can do all that stuff with his voice.

And it's like, whoa, they are firing on all cylinders.

And you can see that they love journeying with each other.

And they're all staring at each other.

On these tiny micro cues that they're giving each other.

And that's why it's so seductive for so many music fans because they see that and they think, imagine having that in your life.

Imagine being able to go to those places

with other human beings.

Yeah, exactly.

It's a rarefied mental state.

I've certainly never, I don't think my concert band at school

when I was playing the flute

ever ever hugely felt like that.

But comedy can feel like that sometimes.

I agree.

I did Kyle Smith Bino's improvised night the other night.

Oh, great.

I wasn't improvising.

I was just being the MC.

Right, right.

But watching them and his team on stage improvising, they were brilliant.

It's an amazing thing to watch when people really improvise and you feel their joy at doing it.

Yeah, I was reading someone the other day talking about drawing saying the thing people don't talk about enough about drawing, like pencil drawing, is that the line is guiding you as much as your brain is, or something like that.

I love that idea.

And I think that's the same with playing.

That sounds like with playing and with improvisation, you're kind of all locked into something that you're not entirely, no single person is entirely in control of it.

That's the dream, especially for me as an overthinker.

Yes.

Because for me, the line never gets to dictate where it's going because my brain gets in the way.

Well, there are different sorts of writers as well.

I mean, I was listening to an interview with somebody who was saying, you know, some writers say, I just listen to my characters.

I can't control everything that happens.

And I think most people do a bit of both, but they quoted Nabokov saying that he's in such control that the characters quiver when he approaches the typewriter.

And he said, whole forests of trees shed their leaves in fear when I approach.

I love that idea.

That's confidence.

I am the opposite.

I am shaking.

Whole forests sit down and have a ciggy when Buckles approaches.

Put their feet up and roll their eyes.

Good luck.

These little secateurs.

We're all gonna die because this guy wants to tell people about the arguments he's had with his wife.

Attention.

As part of my attempt to improve my mental and physical lot towards the beginning of this year, I went and saw a shiatsu guy.

What's that?

Hmm, I was hoping you would tell me.

i mean it was

he's just sort of doing physical manipulation yeah so it's like um

intense massage with a kind of slightly possibly therapeutic mentally therapeutic angle to it maybe yeah

and this guy was a monk ex-monk wow so he was the real deal and some of my friends had seen him and they'd said you've got to see this guy you know so one of my friends had an injury um and her arm was knackered.

She'd fallen down and really hurt her arm badly a few months before.

She saw the guy.

He manipulated her for an hour or something.

And the pain literally went.

She's like, I swear to you, I'm not a woo-woo person, but it was literally miraculous.

Wow.

And I think it's at least worth a go.

Anyway, so I go along.

And I'm thinking, here we go.

So I've had some sciatica

to add to my list of

physical problems.

No, sciatica, not too bad.

Down the left side, though.

So I was thinking, oh, well, see the guy.

Maybe let's start with the sciatica, see if he can do anything about that.

Surely that'd be like a walk in the park for this guy.

Yeah.

Anyway, he starts talking to me about my life.

Also, his English wasn't great.

So there was a bit of a barrier of understanding between us, a little bit.

And for him, it was good because it contributed to a sort of gnomic persona.

Ex-monk, doesn't say much,

deep insights,

speaks in kind of aphoristic, mysterious sentences, short sentences.

But I immediately was nervous.

I immediately felt like I was being assessed.

He was asking me questions about what do you do?

I said, I'm writing at the moment.

What sort of thing do you write?

He said, journalists dealing with the truth often require extra deeper levels of physiotherapy.

Wow.

And I said, Yes, well, I'm writing a memoir.

And there's a lot of truth in this, mother.

He said, hmm, yes, interesting, interesting.

Lie down, please.

And then he starts manipulating my legs and kind of rolling them around a bit.

He's saying, just relax, just relax.

He kept on saying, just relax.

I was like, oh, okay, I'll just relax.

Okay.

I'm doing my best to relax.

I'm trying to relax.

It's impossible when someone says

to do it.

But I was really trying to relax.

I was like, okay, okay.

Let go, just relax, relax, relax.

Anyway, long story short, at the end of about 50 minutes of manipulation of my head, my legs, everything in my body, he sort of gave a deep sigh, folded his arms, and said, How do you feel?

I was like, yeah, it was a little painful towards the end.

He's like, yeah, it was, wasn't it?

You are joking.

And I was like, huh?

And he's like, that's because you didn't relax.

That's because you didn't let go.

You can't let go.

You're like this, he said.

And he showed me balled up fists.

Wow.

And then he said something about

this was where the language barrier got in the way.

Because I think what he meant was,

if you carry on like that, you'll run into more problems physically and probably mentally too.

But what he actually said was, you will carry on like this.

It will always be like this, closed, can't let go.

And then there is a storm coming.

You are joking.

No.

So it became more of a fortune-teller vibe at the end and not with great, not with good news.

No.

And that made you instantly relax.

The idea of this storm, this coming.

Yeah, then I was fine.

Skipped out.

Sciatica cleared up.

Positive mental attitude.

Finished the book.

All good.

No, I was really polaxed by it.

Yeah, that's horrific.

I mean, the thing is that it was all, it was mainly my hang-ups that I was bringing to the table that I was using to translate translate what he was telling me.

I think basically he was just like, just chill, have a chill pill.

Yeah, yeah.

But what I was hearing was: you will never allow that line to draw itself.

Yeah, you're

a person, you'll get in the way.

You're terrible.

You're why Donald Trump got in again,

and why Western civilization is crumbling.

Now, fuck off.

Now, fuck off out of here.

And by the way, that's £150, please.

And can you relax?

Oh,

It was the opening night,

but I did not know my lines.

We had spent months and months painting sets and making costumes and posters for the play.

But we had not rehearsed the play.

I didn't know what I was supposed to say.

And yet the rest of the cast knew all of their words and their moves and the songs in the play.

And they were shaking their heads as the curtain went up.

And I was still asking what I should say.

And suddenly I knew what to do.

I sat on stage and did April.

So the reason we're having this kind of recap a little bit bit is because we both came away from our first meeting feeling slightly like, oh, we didn't wrap things up as neatly as we could have done.

And I'm not guaranteeing that it's going to happen this time.

But I really relate to that feeling, especially now that I'm doing bits of press for my book and suddenly going on more podcasts than I normally would and doing interviews and being asked like big questions.

It's like I'm never prepared for the big questions.

I should just sit down and think about them properly, right?

Some sort of of book or other.

But like yesterday, I did a podcast with Nihal Arthur Nayaka, who's really nice, thoughtful guy.

But he goes deep quite fast in his interview.

So he'll ask, he'll just say, what was the biggest thing this?

Or what was the most important time that?

He said, in what ways are you a successful father?

Things like that.

Serious.

Yeah.

And I'm like, oh, I don't think I am a successful father.

Inspirational.

Yeah.

But I don't want to go into all my hang-ups about why I don't think I'm a good dad, so I'm just going to try and roll with this question and be positive and think about the ways that I'm a good dad, but I don't really have any.

So you're just freeze time.

That is exactly how I feel.

Yeah, because what you really want is a kind of politician script that you accept is completely meaningless and you just trot it out at every...

I mean, I'm sorry to tell people this, but this is, I do think it's the only way to kind of stay sane, but also not end up talking for a sort of hour about you know, because that I felt that with the book.

I feel like I'm always trying to justify why I did it.

Um, in fact, the first ever Q ⁇ A I did, the first question was, So, why did you write the book?

And it's such an obvious, simple, nice question to begin with, but it completely flubbocks me because there is no answer to that question.

And really, you don't really decide

in a logical fashion, I must tackle the issue of country houses, or, you know,

it doesn't doesn't really work like that.

You just get a kind of inclination that you're going to do it.

But also, people need to have a reason to put you in a newspaper.

And so, often with Calabri Code, it's political, it's class, and or you know, I suppose inherited wealth, those sorts of things,

which is definitely part of the book, but also I do feel sometimes I end up being a bit disingenuous out of the sort of people-pleasey horseshit that the book is, you know, examining.

And so, I remember in our because you were, you were really so nice about the book and you had a bit that i read out yeah

and um i can't actually remember exactly what i said but i do remember thinking as i was saying it you don't think any of this really deep down

and thinking that actually that's just a character thinking that or that's i'm just imagining what the character sort of thinks but sometimes insufficiency was the word that's it it was a passage in which the main character's having a sort of meltdown and just an ecstasy of disconnection from society and frustration with his own shortcomings and

the way that the world works.

No, it is beginning to ring a bell, yeah.

Maybe it is how.

But yeah, that's right.

And actually, I do remember writing that bit and thinking, yeah, I've got some off my chest.

But I guess the difference I'm saying is...

It's not like I needed to say that about life definitively.

It's more that I...

It's just something you've written down.

That's right.

But then you get into a situation situation like this, like you're on a podcast or you're doing an interview.

Suddenly, someone looks at you and says, So, what's it all about?

What does it all mean?

What's your philosophy?

You're like,

My philosophy.

I know, there's a Heaven's Gates type feeling sometimes where you're like, account for your life.

Yeah.

That's how you sort of feel.

That's right.

And really, and I feel that especially when anything goes out or is published where you're like, you suddenly find that you have to stand by it as though it's your manifesto or your philosophy for all of existence.

Whereas actually it's okay to just say...

And I think you kind of, I think a lot of people do do this when there may be a few books in or whatever.

It's, I don't know, really, just plugging away, doing my best.

And normally, I mean, I wouldn't really normally mind that, but I remember thinking after that that you also don't, I mean, frankly, you also don't want to sound

too grand.

Because you don't feel like that when you're writing.

You feel like you're in your little laptop and you're just doing your best.

So that was probably niggling away for that reason.

People want answers, though.

People want insights and answers.

That's what all the podcast universe is predicated on.

That's why Joe Rogan does so well, because he's got all these blokes coming in telling you how to do it and how to work things out.

They've got their strong opinions.

And everyone's like, oh, yeah, great.

A strong opinion.

That'll work.

I'll do that.

Right.

Yeah.

And I find that so difficult personally.

The only chance that I have is to write stuff down beforehand and then read it out verbatim.

If I've been given the questions beforehand, then great.

Yeah, I was, the publisher said, I think they kind of intuited that whenever I spoke about the book, I started to blush

and sort of stutter.

They said, do you want to have media training?

And

I was mortally offended.

And then I did the media training, and it was actually transformative.

I mean, obviously, it didn't work, the fact that I was niggling myself over this but but it is good and it's actually quite it's almost therapeutic I found it because you start to see it as a product completely distinctly from the process of writing it and from yourself so you actually helped me to kind of flip into a salesman so I'd say to people yeah I'm just trying to fucking take down the poshos

and

it just I didn't exactly say that but it it sort of alleviated all of that angst about authenticity because you can't give in an interview an entirely thorough and comprehensively authentic global account of who you are you just have to kind of say something for a couple of minutes

give me the potted version of the media training so i don't have to do it oh yeah yeah well it's basically write down a few punchy sentences about it that you can learn okay but it sounds like you've done that and then you do them every single time yeah but i've actually and you don't feel self-conscious about the fact that because the thing in my head i'm always haunted by the specter of the person who goes and tracks what you do and then just go, ah, he repeats this in every single interview he does.

Yeah, I know, but I, and I had that, and I think there will be, you have to gauge the fact that there will be a certain degree of self-consciousness in any scenario.

Yeah.

But that I've seen other authors do that, and

I don't think anyone cares.

No.

At the end of the day, it's not that important.

No, exactly.

Especially the level I'm operating at, really.

What does that mean?

Well, the kind of things in my book, I mean, it's not world-changing material.

I can't wait to read the book.

It's pretty good.

When can we...

It's incredible.

This is better.

This is good.

It's very good.

It's very funny.

It's hilarious.

People keep putting the word hilarious into bits of blurb.

I'm like, I wouldn't describe it as hilarious.

But I mean, I think it's funny.

It's hilarious.

Yes.

And it's also very poignant at times

and vulnerable.

That's great.

It deals with the dynamics of friendship and ambition.

It deals with grief.

It deals with grief over the passing of time.

Grief in all its forms.

How about that?

That's great.

And the main message of the book is:

just relax.

That's fantastic.

It comes with a free chill pill.

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Continue.

Hey, welcome back, podcats.

That was Johnny Sweet.

Very grateful to Johnny for making the time to come and waffle with me.

You'll find a link to his book, The Kelleby Code, which I really recommend.

I enjoyed it very much

in the description of the podcast.

And along with that link, you'll find the picture of Johnny and Tim Key back in 2015 at the pub in King's Cross when Johnny was in the thick of filming together and I was advising him to try and enjoy it.

There's also a picture of myself and Johnny after our first podcast waffle session in November 2024 where you can see that my face looks a little wonky which I later discovered was due to Bell's palsy.

That's what the doc said

and she prescribed steroids 10 days' worth, and that seemed to clear it up.

It turned out to be a fairly minor case of Bell's palsy, if that's what it was.

I know some people can be quite badly affected by it.

And now my face looks more or less normal for a middle-aged guy.

A little bit wonky, but then it always was.

Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys died last week as I speak on the 11th of June 2025.

He was 82 years old.

I loved a lot of his music.

It had been a big part of my life since my late teens.

When I was little, I always liked hearing Beach Boys songs whenever they popped up on the radio or on TV.

Fun, fun, fun.

It's called fun, fun, fun.

I mean, what's not to like?

Round, round, get around, I get around.

Help me ronda, help, help me ronda.

It was always uplifting, fun, summery pop.

Although when I became a music fan in my teens, you know, I was much more into David Bowie and art pop, and it never really occurred to me to go out and actually buy a Beach Boys album.

Then when I was a DJ at the Rock Island Diner in Piccadilly Circus, playing a lot of 50s and 60s music at the beginning of the 90s, I played a lot of Beach Boys songs as part of my job there.

I would stand in the DJ booth looking out over the restaurant, wearing a baseball cap with a record attached to the top, which I would wobble around as I pretended to be surfing.

To songs like Catch a Wave, All Summer Long, and Surfing.

Surfing is the only life, the only way for me now.

Surf.

Sounds like an anthem for robots who love to surf, that one.

Anyway, I knew from reading music magazines around that time that the Beach Boys 1966 album Pet Sounds was supposed to be their best and one of the best albums ever made apparently and eventually I bought it on CD when I finally got a CD player in the early 90s but it took me a while to get into pet sounds

because it was a lot more grown up I suppose and sophisticated than a lot of stuff that I was used to listening to.

I think initially it was was just the strings and the arrangements and all those kind of lush Radio 2 afternoon harmonies that made me just think, oh, I don't know if I like this, it's a bit stuffy.

I preferred fast songs with synthesizers and twangy guitars.

But Pet Sounds was one of those albums that I kept on coming back to.

And songs like Caroline No,

God Only Knows, of course,

and Don't Talk, Put Your head on my shoulder,

sounded the way that I felt about love and heartbreak around that time.

They captured the same kind of feelings of emotion that I had around those areas.

Feelings of emotion.

And I guess I would have been the same age when I was first listening to those songs that Brian Wilson would have been when he wrote them.

Which is a weird thing to consider, in his early 20s.

Some of them he wrote with Tony Asher.

and I think one of those songs was I Just Wasn't Made for These Times, which I really loved.

And that one captured a feeling that I sometimes had of being disconnected from people around me, like Joe and Louie.

You know, it seemed to me that they knew exactly what they were going to do with their lives in a way that I just didn't at all at that time.

In that song, I Just Wasn't Made for These Times, Brian Wilson, as far as I can tell, is essentially singing about feeling isolated by his genius.

He's too far ahead of his contemporaries.

I felt that I had the opposite problem, but the upshot was the same.

And the touchingly basic lyrics of the chorus, Sometimes I Feel Very Sad,

cut through everything.

I listened to that one a lot when I was feeling self-indulgently blue.

And then when I was at art school, in 1993, I got the Beach Boys box set, Good Vibrations, 30 Years of the Beach Boys, and that turned me into a Brian Wilson obsessive for a while.

Mainly because of the music on the second disc,

many of which were previously unreleased pieces that had been recorded during the 1966 to 67 sessions for the follow-up to Pet Sounds, which was called Smile, an album so ambitious and experimental that it was eventually abandoned and for many years was just this legendary lost album.

Some said it was because Beach Boys lead singer Mike Love thought the music was too weird and felt frustrated by Brian Wilson's collaboration with esoteric musician and lyricist Van Dyke Parks.

But Brian's fragile mental state was clearly a factor too.

He was eventually diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, a condition that can cause hallucinations, depression, paranoia, and mania, all of which may well have been intensified by Brian's abusive relationship with his father and increasingly frequent substance abuse in the late 60s and early 70s.

I've watched documentaries where people around him, including Van Dyke Parks, say that too much is made of his drug use around that time.

But even by his own admission, he did seem to be caning it fairly hard, which probably doesn't improve serious mental issues.

In the sleeve notes for the Beach Boys Good Vibrations box set,

David Leaf encourages listeners to imagine what the finished version of Smile might have sounded like and rearrange the fragments of tracks on that box set.

into their own version.

And that was something that I did a lot.

And so did lots of other people.

In the early 2000s, a band formed by LA musicians, also obsessed with the unfinished fragments of Smile, convinced Brian and Van Dyke Parks to organise the music into a final sequence that they would re-record for an album that came out called Brian Wilson Presents Smile.

I went to see Brian with this fantastically proficient backing band at the Royal Festival Hall on February the 24th, 2004.

They sounded amazing.

I've included a link to a live performance from the same year in Los Angeles, which gives you an idea of how good that band was and also how extraordinary a lot of the music on Smile was.

There have been loads of documentaries about the Beach Boys over the years, which include bits of SMILE footage.

I always liked one from 1985, which was called The Beach Boys and American Band, directed by Malcolm Leo.

As well as great footage of early TV appearances and some sad stuff in the final section about Brian's brother Dennis, who drowned age 39 in 1983 after years of alcohol problems.

There's a good section in the middle of this documentary about the band working on Smile.

You can see Brian Wilson wearing a fireman's helmet in the studio while they were recording an instrumental section called Fire,

which became a focus for Brian Wilson's anxieties around the album.

He ended up becoming convinced that there was something evil about the song itself.

Anyway, I've put a link to that documentary in the description of today's podcast.

For the moment, you can still see it on YouTube.

I Just Wasn't Made for These Times is also a good documentary directed by Don Woz

that came out in 1995.

I'd strongly recommend the 2014 biopic Love and Mercy directed by Bill Pollard starring Paul Dano.

He's particularly good as the younger Brian Wilson.

Last week I watched for the first time Long Promised Road directed by Brent Wilson, no relation, which came out in 2021.

And what makes that documentary worth seeing, I think, is the GoPro footage of Brian in his late 70s being driven around Los Angeles, where he lived and worked his whole life, by a journalist from Rolling Stone magazine called Jim Fine.

And he'd become friendly with Brian, earned his trust, and was able to ask questions about Brian's life in a way that was gentle and respectful of his delicate mental state, even though there's still moments where you do feel a little bit voyeuristic

and unsure of how

good an idea it is to be kind of prodding him for reminiscences at that point in his life.

I don't know.

Brian Wilson wrote so many songs that I love.

I've put most of them on a Spotify playlist for you in case you're interested.

Link in the description.

I was talking to my sons about favourite songs.

Nat said that his favourite was Don't Talk, Put Your Head on My Shoulder.

It's so strange and kind of soporific and almost psychedelic from pet sounds.

But I always loved Till I Die

from the album Surfs Up from 1971.

I think that was written at a particularly dark and fearful time for Brian Wilson.

And the lyrics, I'm a cork on the ocean, rolling over the raging sea.

How deep is the ocean?

They sound to me as though they're trying to evoke the feeling of being an insignificant speck in a pitiless universe.

But actually, to me, that song always

made me feel a little bit more at peace with insignificance and the temporary nature of existence.

But I don't know.

Maybe that's because I'm a cork on a not particularly deep ocean.

Anyway, thanks for the music, Brian Wilson.

Okay, that's it for this week.

Thank you very much once again to Johnny Sweet for his time.

Thanks to Seamus Murphy Mitchell for his invaluable production support and additional conversation editing on this episode.

Thanks to Helen Green for her beautiful artwork.

Thanks to everyone at ACAS for all their support.

But thanks most of all to you.

You listen right to the end.

Come here, summary hug.

Good to see you.

Until next time, please go carefully.

And for what it's worth,

I love you.

Bye!

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