Sean had that rare knack of truly great comics to be able to take audiences with him on ever more tortuous and often quite dark routes, yet such was the warmth of his personality and easy manner that crowds happily followed along, and his reputation grew. We both put in a lot of miles getting to gigs during this time, our friendship forged over many late-night stops in motorway service stations. It was brilliantly, darkly funny and gave full rein to Sean’s finely tuned ear for absurd dialogue, for his comic invention and well-wrought scripts.ĭuring the 90s Sean’s comedy career went from strength to strength, culminating in him winning best live comic at the British Comedy Awards in 2000. Sean played a downbeat swimming pool attendant, Vince, who lived in a tower block and was convinced his neighbours were up to all sorts of strange behaviour. Its success led to the making of 15 Storeys High, a sitcom he wrote for BBC TV. His talent for comic writing really hit its stride in Fifteen Minutes of Misery, a series of shows he wrote and starred in for BBC Radio 4. Sean's standup sets were delirious, dizzying journeys down endless rabbit holes, that left you helpless with laughter For all the low-budget larkiness, there was a lot of good writing in Rock and it garnered some favourable reviews, which I think Sean really appreciated. Sean would bemoan the fact that he didn’t play an instrument, but for that particular performance he threw himself into learning the bongos.įor the same show, we wrote a prog-rock pastiche, The Leg of Time, during which Sean danced around me holding a fake leg with a clock gaffer-taped to it – production levels were quite basic in those days. The show ended up touring around the country, culminating with a slot on the comedy stage at the Glastonbury festival. We had a custom smoked-glass stretch shopping trolley made (our shows always seemed to feature trolleys), in which Sean wheeled my character around. The following year we wrote a show called Rock, where Sean played a faithful roadie to my old rocker character trying to make a comeback. Filming with Harry Hill, we took the whole caboodle out on to the streets of Edinburgh, where we fell foul of a pub landlady who thought we were trying to sell pie outside her pub. In 1993 we took a show to the Edinburgh fringe, which featured a sketch where I hid as “a pie” in a dessert trolley – my head poking through a hole in some plywood, garnished with lettuce – which Sean pushed on to the stage, offering the audience a slice of “pie… fresh off the head”.
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