30 April 2006
Finding her own space in the world
JESSICA Stevenson has brought us much TV happiness, but no one could
call her instantly recognisable. Even in person I'm not quite sure
that this fine-featured, rather nervous brunette before me is Cheryl
from The Royle Family, even though just days earlier I'd seen her
play a policewoman who first humiliates then rather likes Derek
Jacobi's wily old tyrant in Pinochet of Suburbia.
She's certainly prettier, but also less gathered than most of the
screen characters she's played until now, and yet Stevenson and
Tim-from-The-Office Martin Freeman are the best-known faces in new
big screen mockumentary Confetti.
Directed by Debbie Isitt, the film follows three couples who enter
a magazine competition to stage the most original wedding. The
tennis fanatics want to play a match while celebrating love-all,
the nudists want a setting that is short on dresses but high on
heating, while Stevenson's character is keen to have a wedding in
the style of an MGM musical - despite a few handicaps, such as a
clumsiness that verges on physical dyslexia.
"It's not that far from the truth," says Stevenson. "When we were
doing our Busby Berkeley stuff, I found it really hard to keep the
steps in my head. The dancers were getting a bit exasperated with
me towards the end."
Confetti has a premise designed to make the heart sink like Rik
Waller in concrete boots: it's a comedy where every word is
improvised by the actors. There's a reason why Whose Line Is It
Anyway is no longer on television, and it's because improv comedy
is difficult. At it's best, it's a sign of excessive energy and
intellectual surplus.
So for someone who spent three years co-writing two series of Spaced
in her own blood, sweat and tears, isn't the idea that you can
spitball a 100-minute movie on the spot just a little galling? Yet
Stevenson demurs mildly, and says diplomatically: "I think actors
often improvise in character in a scripted film, so it's not that unusual."
"But it did make it really exciting to come to work because you never
knew what was going to happen. At one point Martin's character went
storming out of the house after a row with my mother - and for a while
I really wasn't sure I was going to win him back before the wedding."
But improvised or otherwise, Stevenson's bride has a ditzy good humour
that often crops up in her characters. "I've been told," she confidently
confides to the Confetti camera at one point, "that if I wasn't tone
deaf, I'd actually have a good voice."
Stevenson's own wedding four years ago to the father of her two
children was a very much more low-key affair than her onscreen
nuptials. "For instance, the dress I wear in Confetti was exactly
how you would imagine your wedding dress to be as a little girl.
It's not at all what I wore for my wedding in real life. Before
that, the closest I'd ever got was sneaking into Laura Ashley
as a teenager to try on all the puffy meringue dresses."
Originally from Brighton, Stevenson left home and school at 18. Her first
sortie into live comedy, in which she and comedienne Katy Carmichael
played Manchester transvestites who dressed up as twin Liz Hurleys,
was a little too recherché for some audiences. Or to put it another
way: "The first time we did it we were booed off the stage."
It took another kind of dressing up to make her name - in a fatsuit,
as Cheryl, the permanently dieting next door neighbour who existed
mainly as the butt of one-liners in The Royle Family. "You don't
want to be missing your tea, Cheryl. You'll be wasting away,"
quipped Sue Johnston as Barbara Royle in one episode.
STEVENSON WENT ON TO appear in Channel 4's cult comedy Spaced, and
moved on to more "best friend" characters in Bridget Jones's Diary 2,
Shaun Of The Dead (with Spaced co-star Simon Pegg), and Bob and Rose.
BBC1 finally gave her leading lady status in According To Bex, but in
the predictable role of a woman drowning in a world of men-related
confusion. In the first episode she had to track down a pair of
prosthetic testicles for her boss's dog. Stevenson umms and ahhs about
this, but perhaps According To Bex will not feature too far up the list
in the career highlights when she looks back in 30 years.
Spaced, on the other hand, is sometimes overlooked simply because it was
part of a comedy renaissance around the time of The Fast Show, Brass Eye,
Father Ted, Goodness Gracious Me and Shooting Stars. Also, the basic
premise of Spaced sounded pretty unpromising: two mismatched strangers,
both suddenly homeless, pose as a professional couple in order to rent a
flat in London. But the house-share, thankfully, was just a springboard
for some surreal flights of fancy, particularly aimed at film buffs.
Spaced was one of the few programmes on television to acknowledge popular
culture's importance in people's lives. The telly generation knew that
Daisy typing to the music of Murder, She Wrote, or she and Tim pretending
to be Shaggy and Velma from Scooby Doo, weren't in-jokes but a recognition
of some endearing truths.
"We'd write the references in," she says, "and then our director, Ed,
would immediately film it in just the same way that Kubrick or Lucas
or Spielberg would have done it. He'd understand the language that
each director would use in those films, and then apply these grand
techniques to our funny little sitcom."
Yet although Spaced was smart and funny, it also had the capacity to
be moving, especially on the characters' search for something closer
than mates. "Ahhh," says Stevenson, "Simon has much more of a propensity
for sentimentality."
Stevenson's frequent ducking and diving of credit where it is due is
intriguing. There is a school of thought that women lack the vital
drive to get to the top of comedy, and certainly Stevenson doesn't
push her successful CV in interviews and is generous with crediting
others' contributions.
And although Stevenson co-wrote Spaced with Simon Pegg, it was Pegg
who grabbed much of the attention. TV executives apparently feel more
comfortable promoting a male "brand", even though Stevenson had also
written for Channel 4's Smack the Pony. Even now Stevenson is widely
perceived as Pegg's sidekick.
You have to look beyond stand-up - the 100 metres of comedy - to the
TV character work of Caroline Aherne, Victoria Wood, Jennifer Saunders,
Lucille Ball, Roseanne Barr and Meera Syal for women who seems to map
a route around a gag. It's certainly noticeable that female comics
seem to prefer working as characters rather than stand-up.
As Cheryl in The Royle Family, Stevenson had plenty of character. "I
feel so lucky to be a part of the show," she says. "Sometimes I
couldn't believe I was in that famous living room."
She's set to reprise Cheryl in a one-off special of the show later in
the year, although the script is still being tweaked obsessively by
Caroline Aherne, while further in the distance, there is also a strong
hint that the Spaced characters may also have their futures resolved
in a one-off special.
But just as Spaced may have to shift its ground, there's a feeling
that perhaps Stevenson has to look for a more singular, less
chameleon-like direction rather than the everywomen she's so good at.
"Maybe when Simon has finished filming his movie Hot Fuzz I'll grab
him and see what we can come up with," she says. "We've got lots of
ideas for it, but we'd have to explain the time lapse and Daisy and
Tim's advancing ages. They couldn't be flat-sharing student-types for ever."