Bob Mortimer, the shorter half of Reeves & Mortimer, has made a fortune out of being daft. He and Jim Moir, Vic Reeves' alter ego, have become famous for making clever and surrealist comedy that looks very similar to two blokes whacking each other with frying pans, farting and wearing inside-out footballs on their heads. They have been labelled childish, silly and rude and stand guilty as charged. But even Bob was shocked when he realised his comic genius was too immature for his four year old son, Harry.
"The only bit of Reeves & Mortimer my son has ever seen is us hitting each other with frying pans," Bob says with a sigh.
"He got really upset. He said, 'Why is he hitting you daddy?' I said "Well, its just being funny." Harry looked at him with disdain. 'Hitting people is not funny,' he told his dad.
"The funny thing is that me and Jim have never had an argument, ever," Bob says. "We spend half the time on TV smacking each other and arguing. But we've never had a real argument."
The pots and pans are polystyrene and most of the props are balsa wood, but he and Vic still injure each other. "When we did Big Night Out we were terrible," he says of their first TV venture. "We're rubbish at pretend punching and hitting and there were no retakes so we just had to punch each other." He winces at the memory. "In one bit, Jim had to rip off half the lid of the desk and smack me on the head with it. One half was balsa wood and the other was proper wood. He picked up the wring half!" Bob mimes being attacked by a heavy wooden desk. "It looked fantastic on telly," he adds proudly. "There's stuff coming out of my nose..."
Harry, you reflect, wouldn't be very impressed. But then Bob knows keeping millions of TV viewers amused is child's play compared to entertaining his kids. When he's not filming, he's a full-time dad. "It's shattering," he admits, rubbing tired, pinprick eyes. "My kids are three and four and in the mornings it gets to 11am and I think 'I've been entertaining the kids for five hours already."
The comic never knew his own father, who died when he was six. "My father's death was probably the defining moment of my life. Which is strange in a way because I don't remember him. The only thing I can remember is him walking out of a door."
He looks sad when he says this. "When me dad died he was a salesman, selling Fox's biscuits."
He was insistent about the type - crumble crunch - and the brand, Fox's. It seemed eccentric but it suddenly makes sense. He's maintaining a link to the father he can't remember.
"I don't know if he would be proud of what I do," Bob continues. "He might disapprove - I never knew him to know what he liked." "I don't want to be dull about it. I don't miss him because I don't remember him, but I do sort of know that his death made me the person I am."
What sort of person is he? "I'm a compulsive helper - that's probably what a shrink would diagnose. I always want to help."
"I tried to be strong for me mam when my dad died. It was selfish, I suppose, because I knew that if I lost my mam I'd have nothing. That's what I'm like. I try to be nice to people so they'll need me, so they don't f*** off".
In all the years since he was 12, 41 year old Bob has never been out of a relationship. "I've been with my girlfriend, Lisa, 10 years now," he says.
Comedy may be the new rock and roll, but Bob's a domestic animal. Even his face is sleepy and cat-like. "Even before we had kids, we weren't exactly wild," he says. "Most of our time was spent sitting on the settee watching the box, going to Ikea, getting up late on Saturdays..."
His mum was a cookery teacher and spent the war "at the Ministry of Food showing people what to do with powdered eggs."
Her son makes a fine ox-tongue, he says. "I can do all those tricky things. I can do all the jams - and I love my vegetable patch. The first time you actually plant something and it grows is magic."
Seeing Bob on the TV, zipping about like a hyperactive kid on high E numbers, it's hard to picture him making jam and tending to cabbages. But it's even harder to imagine that he was once a grey-suited solicitor, the sort of bloke that no one noticed.
"They must be gobsmacked if they've seen me on telly," he says of his former colleagues at Southwark Council's legal centre. "Nobody noticed me there at all."
One night, on the way to the pub after work, a man suddenly came up behind him and held a knife to his throat. "It happened dead fast," recalls Bob. "I thought, 'I'm being mugged!' but all of a sudden he put his knife back in his pocket and said 'Oh hello Mr Mortimer, I didn't know it was you.' "It was one of my regular clients. I'd represented him in court about 15 times. He was a professional mugger."
Apart from the near mugging, life carried on quietly and Bob might have continued being invisible, except for a chance meeting at a pub in South London... with a man performing a comedy act with a ladder and a lump of lard. Bob started heckling from the audience and Jim Moir invited him on stage. There was a clap of thunder somewhere in the comic heavens and Vic & Bob were born. From then on, every Thursday, he and Jim performed their irresistibly bizarre double act.
"When I first met Jim, Thursday nights were a bright spot in my life," Bob admits. "Working with Jim cracks me up and no one can make Jim laugh like I can."
Their pub act was spotted by Jonathan Ross's brother Adam and, on his recommendation, Michael Grade signed the pair up for Channel 4. In a hangover from those days, the duo always drank four weak pints of lager before performing a show. "We always drank," says Bob. "In the pub in New Cross we wouldn't be on until 11 O'clock, by which time we'd have had four pints. Now I'd be scared not to...
"People think we're mad because we need four pints of lager, under 3.4% proof. Four pints of strong lager and we'd be drunk. It's a fine line. You need to get that familiar feeling but it would be terrible if you were actually drunk," he laughs. "I have to admit that we were very drunk on Jonathan Ross's New Years Eve Special. I can't remember what we said. I don't even know if they showed it."
When Vic and Bob were first on telly, Bob lived in a homeless shelter in South London. He'd left his native Middlesbrough to work at the council and had nowhere to live. The best the council could offer was the shelter and, as far as Bob could see, it had everything a young man could need - a roof, a bed and a decent pub nearby. He stayed there for five years.
"When we'd just become famous I used to think I'd love to be on Through the Keyhole," Bob says. He impersonates Lloyd's weird vowels and imagines him walking around the hostel: Whoo liiives heeere??"
He only left when the place went up in flames. "One of the nutters who lived there burnt it down one Easter," he says matter-of-factly. "I came back from me mam's at Easter and had nowhere to live. So I got a council flat instead."
He scratches his chin. "You know, I wouldn't like to be one of those comedians straight from university," he says, thoughtfully.
"I don't know how you get any perspective on it when life's always been as lovely as that. You haven't had a real life. How can you be happy?" Bob screws up his face and contemplates the present. He lives in a beautiful house Kent with Lisa and their two children. He and Vic are planning a new comedy series and have also been given lots of money for a film script which they keep forgetting to finish. A new series of Shooting Stars starts this month, with added sketches and the inspired choices of novelist Will Self and comedian Johnny Vegas to replace Mark Lamarr.
Comic quiz shows abound but Vic and Bob remain masters of their genre. Who else would have Debbie McGee abseil across the studio or have Michael Winner sniff out "dirty boys" using an elephants trunk? It is utterly, plainly, deliriously daft. But then, Reeves & Mortimer have made daft an art form.
"If you've nothing to compare it to it's not that much of a laugh in the end, being on the box," says Bob, seriously. "But I tell you something - it's absolute heaven compared to working with a council."
The Mirror
