The Innes brand of offbeat humour can be enjoyed again in a new six-part series. The cringe-worthy characters you love to hate return - Nobby Normal, nauseating Nick Cabaret with a host of songs to squirm to, and many new identities. Here Neil Innes reveals a more sedate aspect of his character to Pete Matthews.
Innes ElementIsolated 16th-century farmhouse/cottage; own 1 1/2 mile drive, suit harassed politician/businessman/pop star seeking seclusion. Reading this small ad over tea one Sunday morning last summer was all it took to make Neil Innes - musician, slightly harassed family man and self-effacing star of The Innes Book of Records - think about moving from London to Suffolk. Eight creative years in Lewisham had seen him recover from the collapse if the zany Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band to write this, his second BBC television series, via poetry and music with Grimms, country rock with his band Fatso, the stage show of Monty Python, co-writing Rutland Weekend Television, and becoming one of The Rutles, RWT's send up of The Beatles. So why move now?
'I've always wanted to live in a place where I can go to work by simply stepping out of my front door, and I saw the potential of the place at once,' explains Innes, turning his Land Rover off the main road towards the house. Hunched over the wheel in Parka and gumboots, cheerfully puffing on an untipped cigarette, the creator of such oddballs as Nobby Normal and Nick Cabaret seems quite at home in his new environment, and is already indistinguishable from the local farmers he greets on the way.
"I must admit,'
he adds, 'that before I even saw the house I fell in love with the lane:
when there are leaves on the trees it's like a long, green, time-tunnel that
whisks you to the top of the hill into a garden full of flowers.' Now, however,
the winter winds rattle the bare branches as Innes heads straight for a torrent
of water hemmed in by high banks of earth. 'They forgot to mention,' he chuckles,
'that for several months of the year the road becomes a tributary of the
local river.'Innes proudly points out the barn, outhouse, ponds, and free-range chickens before diving indoors to make lunch for a flu-stricken family: his wife Yvonne and baby Barnaby are confined to bed, leaving Miles, 13 , and Luke, nine, to fend for themselves. Appetites taken care of, he heads for the new study, packed with the tools of his trade - piano, synthesiser, guitars, tape-recorders, a shelf of dictionaries - and, as befits a fine-arts graduate, objects d'art that include a pair of boots with feet painted on to the uppers, and two chunky tailor's dummies which he is in the process of painting to resemble Rubenesque - naked torsos. But there is method behind the madness: 'These are my new backing singers,' he grins gleefully.
'I haven't written anything proper since I've been here,' he adds, 'because the music for this series had to be recorded last June - viewers might be surprised just how long these things take to put together.'
The
new series is notable for its use of animation, as well as Neil's rapidly
expanding range of characters - including a brilliant impersonation of Charlie
Chaplin, aided by some false teeth - but he emphasises that the free-wheeling
visual aspect of these 'songs and pictures about people and things' is crucial:
'After five years in "rat school" I tend to think like that anyway; I write
the songs and assign the characters to them, then Ian and Andrew (the producers)
take those elements and come up with a location and the fine detail. After
all, the purse-strings start to rattle when you go out of the studio, and
singing a number under the Jodrell Bank radio telescope isn't the sort of
thing that comes to me out of the blue.''In the end we spend six-and-a-half weeks on location in Buxton to make the series - and it wasn't until we got there that we realised it has one of the highest annual rainfalls in the country. Fortunately we were blessed by the weather, but everyone was on their knees by the end of shooting the equivalent of two feature length movies. I suppose we were doing more than we should in terms of our schedule, and when it takes a year to get the finished project you're never totally happy with what you've got - you wind up saying things like "if only we had 500 Mongolian horsemen coming round the corner it would have been great' - but the crew put in so much effort that it probably makes up for the occasional thin production.'
Apart
from writing such gems as a chorus for 'Mr. Eurovision Song Contest Man'
that goes 'bing bang bong, inky pinky parlez vous, wunderbar, ooh la la,
ole', Innes enjoyed doing his own stunts this time - like diving into a freezing
lake as Tarzan - although he suffered an attack of vertigo while filming
a ditty called 'Paranoia Can Annoy Ya' while perched on top of a very unstable
40-foot pile of cars in a junkyard: 'I had to sit there and recite "Mary
had a little lamb" until I felt better.'Next on the agenda is a trip to America to make cable t.v. programmes with Eric Idle, but in the meantime Neil Innes is determined not to let his work interfere too much with his life as a whole: 'It's worth trying your best, but there's no point in putting huge importance on it, or you become mad or obsessed. I don't think you can take yourself so seriously that if one of the kids comes in with a split lip you can't take an interest.'
"I liken what I do to plumbing sometimes. I have a huge admiration for plumbers. I always think I could do what they do, but I invariably have to call one in and I am invariably impressed by what he does. I'd like people to think of my work in the same way."