Mr Bird is not amused - Simon gets serious

Poor Simon Bird, he so wants to be taken seriously, but for us he’ll always be the hapless geek we loved in The Inbetweeners. He talks to Laura Barton about fathers, diva fits and rethinking funny
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Laura Barton5 October 2012

Actually, I’m the new James Bond,’ Simon Bird says brightly. There is a pause, a slow blink behind his heavy spectacles, then he adds: ‘It’s just they haven’t announced it yet.’ Admittedly, as undercover operations go, sitting in a West London café drinking hot chocolate would be an unrivalled move for an MI6 agent. But in truth, Bird is here discussing the chiselled and daredevil roles he may need to seek out if he is to avoid being typecast as the perpetual geek, following his stint as Will ‘briefcase w***er’ McKenzie in The Inbetweeners, and more recently as the similarly nerdy Adam in Friday Night Dinner. ‘I’m under no illusions,’ he admits. ‘I’m not Philip Seymour Hoffman. I don’t think I’m ever going to be a great method actor, and I do just basically play myself. But I always get quite defensive, in case people say I can only do one thing.’

The casting is understandable: Bird is slight and faintly square, with a manner that at first appears introverted, and a little awkward. In real life, however, he is markedly more polished than either of his on-screen alter egos; he may make half-jokes about not really liking meeting new people, and he may have a penchant for discussing contemporary art, but he is also well-groomed and at ease, as well as pleasantly given to self-mockery — his inability to cook anything other than French toast, for instance, or his passion for Boggle.

Friday Night Dinner is Channel 4’s first foray into the family sitcom, and when it returns for its second series this month it will occupy a new primetime spot after Homeland — a testament to the first series’ success. Written by Robert Popper (Look Around You, Peep Show), each episode sees a return to the home of the Goodman family, congregating for their Friday night Shabbat dinner. The setting does not so much offer an exploration of British Jewish culture as the opportunity to subvert the traditional family sitcom — complete with foul nicknames, peculiar foibles and endless in-jokes, not to mention beef casseroles, locksmiths and the introduction of grandma’s new gentleman friend.

In many ways we can see Bird’s character as an evolution of the hapless Will McKenzie. As the elder son, now in his mid-twenties, Adam is the show’s focal point, and therefore often prey to the episode’s principal misfortune. This trajectory is not, Bird, 28, explains, entirely coincidental: Robert Popper had worked as script editor on the first series of The Inbetweeners, and the pair got along well. ‘So he cast me off the back of that,’ he says. ‘He wanted me to do a similar thing, which is really to be the voice of the writer, as I was really the voice of Iain [Morris] in The Inbetweeners.’

To Bird, reared on Fawlty Towers and Blackadder, the appeal of Friday Night Dinner lay in the prospect of working on a show that had an edge, yet remained essentially family-friendly. ‘I don’t like comedy that’s just weird for weird’s sake,’ he explains. ‘Stuff like The Mighty Boosh is just not my sort of thing. I do like surreal comedy, but I prefer something like Look Around You [an early 2000s BBC Two series co-written by Peter Serafinowicz], which managed to be totally bonkers but was really warm and charming and silly without being off-puttingly clever.’

Bird’s own family is, he insists, somewhat tamer than the Goodmans. Born in Guildford, he is the third of four children. His parents are both economics professors at the University of Surrey. ‘We don’t really have so much of the roughhousing that they have in Friday Night Dinner,’ he says. ‘But I definitely get that thing of going home and immediately reverting to being 13 years old again — just general grumpiness and assuming things will be done for me that definitely shouldn’t be.’

There are no terrible family nicknames, and his own father bears little resemblance to the show’s Martin Goodman (Paul Ritter), who insists upon roaming about the house shirtless and repeatedly asks his wife if they will be eating squirrel. His father is, however, prone to a good dad joke. ‘He’s an academic,’ Bird ex-plains, ‘and he takes great pride in the fact that he is a funny lecturer and he has great jokes. But he was telling me some a couple of weeks ago that he has had to cut because they’re now deemed politically incorrect…’ He glances at the Dictaphone guiltily. ‘I love my dad, for the record,’ he adds.

Bird was not, he tells me, the class clown. The best he can imagine is that his close-knit group of schoolfriends might have described him as ‘wry’. Instead he found his comedy footing at Cambridge, where he studied English at Queens’ College, and became president of Footlights, the university’s long-running sketch group, which has also nurtured such comic luminaries as Peter Cook, Eric Idle, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie. ‘The big myth is you have to be an extrovert to work in comedy,’ he says, ‘but I don’t think that’s true. Footlights has this reputation of being a bear pit and really elitist and a fight to the death of who’s going to win… But it was just ten 18-year-old kids who wanted to try out comedy.’ He remembers sketches that rambled on for eight minutes, and that fostered a ‘house style’ that was ‘very gentle, very wordy… we spent three years just trying to write good, interesting dialogue’. He laughs. ‘That’s why it was a massive culture shock for me to do The Inbetweeners, because it was broad and very rude.’ Last summer’s film took £45m, smashing Bridget Jones’s UK record for the most successful opening weekend ever achieved by a comedy film. He is still great mates with some of his Footlights peers — among them Joe Thomas, his Inbetweeners co-star, and the comedian Jonny Sweet. Recently, the three of them have been working on their own series, Chickens, which is scheduled to appear on Sky1 next summer. ‘It’s set in 1914 in England, when everyone has gone to war, and we’re the only men left in a village full of women, who hate us. So imagine,’ Bird says in a softly mocking tone, ‘the hilarious situations that spin off from that.’ Is it, I ask, a bit like Last of the Summer Wine? He laughs. ‘Well, we like the idea that it’s sort of rustic,’ he says. ‘And I think it will be quite gentle.’

For the time being he is perfectly content with his lot. He lives in Islington, devotes most of his time to writing comedy, and his closest friends are ‘basically the same people I met in my first two weeks at Cambridge’. Two months ago he got married to his long-term girlfriend Lisa Owens, who worked for publishing house Profile Books before leaving to focus on writing of her own, and whom he met at an early Footlights show. ‘She hasn’t,’ Bird adds, ‘ever performed since.’

His day-to-day life remains almost resolutely glitz-free. He recalls a recent trip to LA for an Inbetweeners Movie premiere, and occasional ‘bags of freebies’, as well as a minor diva fit over the quality of cake on the set of Friday Night Dinner. ‘But I don’t go to clubs in Mayfair or any of that stuff. I’m not a natural socialite. I’m happy performing, I love getting laughs, but then I’m happy not performing as well.’ He smiles. ‘I’m just happy.’ ES

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