Article by Ian Watson taken from Deadpan.

Motor Mouth

EDDIE Izzard is doing what he does best - talking bollocks. Lounging on a simple wooden chair in the corporate confines of the BBC's Paris Studios on Lower Regent Street, the thirty two year old comedian is spewing forth a stream of convoluted nonsense for the entertain ment of a few hundred quietly chortling Radio 4 word games enthusiasts. He's meant to be retelling the life story of James The First for a new show called Missed Demeanours but as the words tumble out of his barely smirking lips, all sorts of surreal biographical crimes are perpetrated. Historical record certainly seems to gloss over the incident with the rollerskating cows and the aide with the bizarre sexual pastimes, not to mention the hapless Scot's clandestine involvement with the racketeers who sold black market oranges outside popular theatres. As for the business with the chickens... well, let's just say the Palace is concerned about the leak. Five days later, the master of misinformation is spluttering into his sugary coffee as he looks fondly back on those precious hours of complete and utter indulgence.

"I love those fucking things," he says, with a manic glint in his eye. They're top bollocks games. And they're easier than stand-up, because with stand-up someone's shouting at you, 'Fuck off, you cunt', and you're going, 'No, no I'm funny, hold on.' Whereas with this you just sit round talking crap and the game is your safety net."

"Just A Minute is the classic," he continues, as the inhabitants of his agent's plush Soho Square office brace themselves for another clutch of casual expletives. "And apparently the guy who devised it 25 years ago, types out the categories in his house in Switzerland and sends them in. It seems bizarre, but each week he's going 'erm... socks... sherbert... cows, no, not cows...oh, there you go.' You could do a random computer generator for that. But no." Three minutes into our conversation, and the remarkably open Izzard is already bringing to bear the lateral thought processes that prompt thousands of comedy fans to regularly don metaphorical wet suits and surf his raging wave of lunacy. A mere sixty seconds on, however, and Eddie has let slip the other side of his character, the personality trait that transforms what is essentially the Gift Of The Gab into something far more sinister. "The thing is, I actually get ridiculously competitive," he admits. "I was a terrible loser when I was a kid. I once threw a table tennis bat through a window because I lost a game. It was a tournament and a kid called Brewer... Neil Brewer, I think... and he wasn't very good at table tennis and I thought, 'Well, I'll beat him and get through to the next round.' And he beat me! I was furious. I screamed 'Fuck' and hurled the bat through a window. But at some point I chilled out. I like to compete against myself now. I find that very satisfying."

WHAT do you know about Eddie Izzard? That he's unnecessarily funny, perhaps? The kind of man who hijacks the dot-to-dot puzzle of your psyche and scrawls a variety of side-splitting Gary Larsen cartoons over it? Or maybe you think of him in terms of his sexuality, the infamous transvestite who'll happily wear a twin set and pearls throughout an extended West End run, but still refuses to appear on the box? The TV who hates TV. Then again, you might've heard about Eddie's strong head for business: the split with his former management team in the middle of a carefully laid out five year plan; his production company, Ella Communications, which produces and markets his videos; and Ella Records, Izzard's indie label and home to The Wasp Factory, a band fronted by his ex-girlfriend. It's certainly no secret that the cuddly comedian is a fearsome commercial force. But is all this information anything more than surface glitter? One suspects that the real Eddie Izzard lurks somewhere between these many extremes, furiously treading water so as not to be dragged down by any of his obsessions.

Consider, for example, this notion of "competing against yourself." Any other comedian would be worried about keeping things funny, but not Izzard. He's done funny. He practically owns it.

"I've got to make my material harder," he says. "My best bit of material was talking about being TV. And that was really hard to do, because I was analysing the fear at the root of coming out as gay, lesbian or TV, trying to keep it accessible, and keeping in as many laughs as I could." "And I managed to do that by talking about going into a sweetshop and people losing it and going into meltdown. I ask for a packet of crisps and they say, 'Quick everyone hide, put a hat on, sellotape all the newspapers together, what what what, who are you?' Because I've seen that happen. And to do that, that was my proudest bit of material. William Cook said in The Guardian that I should do more on that, and I really agree with him. I've got to push into these hard, hard areas."

Eddie remembers first feeling the desire to wear a dress when he was four; and even then he had enough to suss to think, "Don't tell anyone about this. Keep it on a back burner. Do some research before you promote this idea and put leaflets out. 'Eddie Izzard - quite interested in wearing a dress.'"

Oddly, though, despite having such a distinct memory of this formative period, he can't recall the precise moment he first slipped into a frock. "It's all got a bit lost, because my mum died when I was six and so I went to boarding school. It was a high risk area. The idea of having to go to school and sleep overnight and then have people realise you were TV, it was much too much ammunition. So there was no way I'd wear a dress at boarding school. At home, I had opportunities, but it was all very furtive."

Did you have any odd reactions from girlfriends? "No, but then I didn't lose my virginity until I was 21. I lost it twice, in fact. I thought I'd lost my virginity with this woman and she said no. It's confusing to me. The sex was kind of brief, I think. The next day I said, 'Well that's the virginity thing sorted', and she went 'Excuse me? Who with?' So apparently it didn't happen."

"Also my first relationship wasn't very good because I was a tad on the possessive side," he continues. "That was all to do with my mother dying. Y'know, sexual relationship with a woman and then the woman getting in the way of the mother figure and then it all gets confusing. I flipped back into making her a surrogate mother figure. I was too clinging, which isn't very good for a relationship. I didn't want that person to go away again."

Do you find it easier to sustain relationships now? "Yeah, but I don't fall in love very easily. I'm extremely wary of that. Because it can really screw you up, if it isn't requited. I don't know what it is, but there's definitely a chemical released where you flip over from being in control of a situation to an uncontrollable state, which I don't really like. Being a control freak, it is not a place I like to go."

IN the grand tome of Comedy Clichés that sits gathering dust in the Castle Of Chuckles somewhere in Valhalla, the only childhood anecdote worthy of gold leaf is that of telling jokes to avoid bullying. Scan through any comic interview and you'll inevitably chance upon one of many variations on the same theme, but with Eddie Izzard this tried and tested tradition grinds to an undignified halt. He didn't get into comedy to save his skin, he got into comedy because of it. "Up until 13, I was a real kiss chase heart throb," he grins. "I got the best women, I was right up there. I was also a really athletic kid, very good at football, so that helped me pull. But then I moved to a school where they didn't play football, and then the acne came in, so I lost all of my self confidence. And that's when I turned to comedy." "I knew then that I wanted to be an actor," he goes on. "But in all the straight plays, you have the love interest, where the lead character gets off with a woman. And I knew I couldn't act that, because I couldn't do that in reality. But I could do a comedy version of it. I could go... darling... the light in your eyes, the fish in your trousers, the banjo... I could do all that bullshit. So I thought, I'll do comedy. It saves me all that stuff, and also I wanted to pertorm because it was more sexy. I thought I could pull easier that way. It saved my dull sad life."

Think it through and this attitude connects perfectly with Eddie's account of his fairly disastrous love life. Robbed of sexual self confidence to the point where being chatted up at an 18th birthday party was a terrifying experience, he used acting to forget about his shortcomings. On stage, he could be the focus of everyone's attention without actually having to talk to them, and given this responsibility-free sense of power, the East bourne schoolboy rapidly developed a flair for show stealing.

"I starred in A Comedy Of Errors when I was 15," Eddie recalls. "And I had this Cromwellian helmet with a visor and a bobble on the top. And because of this round loop on the top, I could tie some cotton through the loop, down the back, and then pull the visor up and down and it would appear to lift up and down on its own. I did this bar scene, where nothing was really happening, and I'd pull this thing, the visor would go up and I'd have a drink and then it would go back back down again in a very casual style. The audience went mad. I got good parts after that."

Sure enough, Eddie went on to star in a Trevor Nunn production with Richard Griffiths, Checkov's The Proposal, and even played a Nazi in Cabaret, for which he died his hair jet black and received a nomination for an Eastbourne Gazette local oscar ("some other bastard got it from another school," he says, through gritted, table tennis bat-throwing, teeth). A short spell at Sheffield University followed, where he directed a few plays, but after suffering the indignity of taking some "shite" sketch shows up to the Edinburgh Festival and being chucked out of University after only a year, the young Izzard moved to London and once again found himself without even the most basic self belief. "I came out as TV around then, and it took me a year to deal with that. I also started street performing in Covent Garden, and it took me a year of humiliation to learn that playing yourself is a key thing. I lost all of my performing confidence on that, but I slowly learnt a lot about energy and crowds and how to deal with them. You actually have to get an audience and hold them together with enough interesting stuff so they would stay. So it taught me a lot of intricate stuff that was very useful indoors."

IT was around this time that Eddie first developed the rambling delivery that's become both his personal trademark and an influential comedy style. In between sessions as a street escapologist ("I did ropes, chains and escaped from a pair of handcuffs while riding a five foot unicycle"), he started to compere at various comedy clubs and found that umming and ahhing bought him time to think of (or indeed make up) his next piece of material. "I found that dancing would keep things going," he remembers. "If you went [mimes dancing and hums vague elevator music], then people would think you were doing something, while you're thinking, 'What the fuck am I going to say?' It was a very odd idea, and it got to the point where I was just saying bollocks and people were starting to come to hear that." Apart from your transvestite routine, you do a lot of stuff on soft and very common comedy topics like cats and dogs and Star Trek. Why? "Because everything has been done. If you talk about sex or politics, everyone has covered those areas. it is purely your angles on the subjects that count. It would be nice to say, 'This whole show will contain topics which are very rarely covered.' I'd also like to have really difficult subjects, make them totally accessible and have loads of fucking laughs, but then you might as well commit suicide afterwards. I will drive towards the harder stuff, but I'll always get a dog with a bazooka coming in." Are you obsessed with animals? "No, I just like them. But I am a totally obsessive character. I'm addicted to sugar and television. I find it very difficult to switch off. I'm totally obsessive, which is why cocaine is a big problem." lost all of my self confidence. And that's when I turned to comedy."

Why? Have you ever taken it? "No, because I just know I'd be addicted to it. Cocaine and speed are my natural drugs. I'd be all over. I just can't go in there. Also, I think if I took drugs, I'd probably start selling insurance. It might flip me the other way. 'Hallow, would you like to talk about insurance. It's very interesting. Because the base rate's come down."' Have you ever taken acid? "No, I'm not a big drog user. You've got to let go when you take drugs, and I just don't like the idea of that. My brain has to be in control."

WITH a part in the forthcoming Martin Amis movie, Dead Babies, plans to play either Edward The Second or Richard The Third in the theatre, 58-date tour of the UK until April, two weeks booked in New York for the spring, a collaboration with Rapido's Antoines De Caunes on a French language TV show, and a West End run slated for October, it seems Eddie Izzard will have little time to let his brain slip into second gear in 1995. He's already renounced his no-television rule and is current gracing every imaginable chat show from Richard And Judy to Danny Baker, but his flirtation with the medium will become rather more concrete with the autumn screening of his sitcom, The Cows.

So it does finally exist then? "Oh yes," he smiles. "All cows start talking and moving. All the lead characters are cows, they're all played by humans in loose cow outfits. The cows started talking in 1927, just after the General Strike. They took all the turmoil of the country and started talking. And the show is about a family of cows who move into a street where there aren't many cows." "I'm not in it. And no one knows who will be. It's a big secret. Very hush hush. It's a bit like the secrecy that surrounded Jurassic Park." And once again, Eddie Izzard is doing what he does best. Talking bollocks.

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