Feature
Carry on, Clunes
by Diana Wichtel
Rubber-faced comic Martin Clunes is a laugh on and off screen.
Martin Clunes is to be found at the Stanley St Police Weighing Station, perspiring cheerfully into his character’s suit and tie as he helps lug around prop boxes. Doomed to be eternally known for playing quintessential British twat Gary in 90s sitcom Men Behaving Badly, he’s startlingly recognisable even togged up as a buttoned-down British museum man for local television co-production The Man Who Lost His Head. The visiting star refused a special trailer or any other special treatment, I’m told, as we wait for a lunch-break chat. Prefers to muck in.
Which is nice, considering Clunes’s status as one of British television’s more bankable crowd-pleasers and portable special effect. He’s done well for someone burdened with facial features clearly meant for a much larger man. They deserve a BAFTA of their own: Best performance by an astonishing pair of ears, supported by an unfeasibly mobile mouth.
Along with his Men Behaving Badly sidekick, Neil Morrissey, his was the perfect, inherently comical mug to launch the hail of masturbation gags that propelled the New Lad Movement. “Oh blimey. We got blamed for that at the time in England. It’s a half-hour sitcom,” he pleads, as we shelter in the caravan that’s the actors’ green room. “A newspaper would have a piece about estate agents, so they’d call the piece ‘Estate Agents Behaving Badly’ and have a picture of me and Neil. Who aren’t estate agents.”
That’ll teach him to go around capturing the zeitgeist. With infamy came tabloid scrutiny every time he popped out for a pint. “That’s sort of passed now, because I’m happily married, hard-working; where’s the story?” Well, he’s got a seven-year-old daughter, Emily: “Dad Behaving Badly”? “Yeah, yeah. Had that. But the novelty’s worn off. Now they’re reduced to ‘Actor Makes Programme’.”
Clunes didn’t get where he is today – which is trapped behind chicken wire in a concrete compound in the colonies, being blasted by engine emissions – without being expert at laughing things off. Most observations conclude with a short, reflex stage bellow of mirth. He is the actor, after all, who brought a light touch to Losing It, a drama about a man who loses a testicle – “A one-off production”– to cancer. It was … funny? “Apart from the having testicular cancer bit … I hope I wouldn’t be making a pun if I said I think we pulled it off.”
Attempts to be serious for any length of time are doomed. It must be hell, maintaining the constipated demeanour required for Martin Ellingham, the socially challenged medic in the British television comedy/drama Doc Martin. “He’s an isolated, terribly fragile house of cards. A lonely little boy who sort of made himself up on his own because he wasn’t very popular. His parents didn’t like him,” muses Clunes. “I shouldn’t laugh.” It’s easy to see how he handles things. “Terminally facetious,” he concurs obligingly.
It’s tempting to put this down to the usual sorts of things: early death of father – esteemed stage actor Alec Clunes; sent off to boarding school; lonely little boy who made himself up. A coping mechanism? “Probably,” says Clunes. “Boring, isn’t it?”
Although on reflection he thinks it’s more to do with being an incorrigible show-off. “I think most people who do what I do, we’re all quite needy of attention. Even Christopher Walken and Judi Dench.”
He had, he maintains, a happy childhood. “I had my mum and my sister.” Of the death of his father: “When you’re eight there’s such a queue of people being horrible to you, or it’s seen that way – schools and teachers … It’s just something else to deal with. I hadn’t thought of my father for ages but just after Emily was born I thought, oh, hello, here’s something else you missed.”
Clunes answers each question with practised efficiency then waits politely, fixing you with an expectant smile. It’s unnerving. When you inevitably falter under the amiable pressure, he’s infinitely polite and straight in for the kill. Talking about his father, I ask if he ever felt the need to prove himself on stage as well. “Um … I have,” says Clunes. Pause. Expectant, slightly dangerous smile. Oh dear. Of course he has. There was the National Theatre’s 2002 production of Tartuffe, which earned respectful reviews and the obligatory “Monk Behaving Badly” headline.
Tartuffe was his first play for 12 years. “It was all in verse. I thought of doing a runner.” What, to Belgium? “Yeah, I thought of Stephen [Fry]. He did a runner after the play had opened, and nobody sued him.”
The much-described face. It’s not at all peculiar in person. “I’ve got a lot of make-up on,” Clunes volunteers modestly. Yet critics can say such cutting things. That AA Gill! “Why,” purrs Clunes ominously. “What did he say?” Thus it falls to me to tell him he was called “the human lamprey”. And “a small-screen Jimmy Stewart crossed with an amorous haddock”.
You wait for him to laugh it off as usual. “Oh, they all have a go,” he sighs. Does it bother him? “Yeah, probably. You always wonder why somebody wants to insult somebody, especially when you’ve never met them. Especially when you have met them and they seem friendly.” There’s an awkward moment as we consider the incomprehensible treachery of journalists.
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