Griff Rhys Jones needs to be on stage. ‘I love, love, love being funny in front of an audience,’ he says. ‘I adore it.’ Only illness will keep him off it, like the time he started vomiting gherkins in the wings before Charley’s Aunt. He’s even gone on squiffy, though only once and never again (we’ll get to that later).
Right now, Rhys Jones – Olivier award-winning actor, comic, author and presenter – isn’t on stage. He’s at a table in a swanky London boutique hotel. So he simply does his stand-up set sitting down. Much of it is about the vagaries of getting on a bit. ‘My generation aren’t ready for being older, at all,’ he says. ‘They don’t want to be 65. They’re silver beavers, or is it silver nomads? Anyway, they’ve all tried Viagra.’
We’re meeting to mark the start of a UK tour that promises to be very funny and occasionally very rude, especially about young people: ‘I don’t like them,’ he says. ‘They can f*** off.
Even with a grey-white goatee and maze of laughter lines around his eyes, it takes some effort to believe the exceptionally animated Griff Rhys Jones is 65
He’s joking, I think, but the emphasis is definitely on senior’s concerns. ‘It’s like a Neil Young tour, I’m talking to ageing hippies. I don’t really do much about girlfriends, it’s more what do you do when your children haven’t left home.’
But there is also a slight sadness behind the bravura, and when he stops performing and starts to talk, Rhys Jones emerges as a man who isn’t quite as bushy-tailed as the millions in the bank, the West End house, and a string of easy-going travelogues for the BBC might suggest.
For one thing, he misses his old comedy partner Mel Smith, the friend who helped make him rich and then died young. And when he compares himself to other Cambridge Footlights veterans, like Emma Thompson and Hugh Laurie, Rhys Jones feels he should have achieved more in his life. ‘I think of myself as not contributing very much really,’ he says. ‘I haven’t done enough.’
Even with a grey-white goatee and maze of laughter lines around his eyes, it takes some effort to believe the exceptionally animated Jones is 65, but it really was 40 years ago when he first appeared alongside Mel Smith, Rowan Atkinson and Pamela Stephenson in Not The Nine O’Clock News. The late Seventies sketch show paved the way for the Eighties alternative comedy boom, and led to the television double act Alas Smith & Jones with Smith who, Jones reveals, could be demanding company.
You’d join Mel [Smith] for a drink and that was it – you’d disappear down a black hole, partying in wild clubs until five in the morning
‘You’d join Mel for a drink and that was it, you’d disappear down a black hole,’ he says. ‘You’d say goodbye to all your other friends, your girlfriend and off you’d go, partying in wild clubs until five in the morning every night for days. Then you’d finally wake up wondering what had happened. I know people still alive who went “Oh! I can’t do this any more.” Some of them went through rehab. Mel would just move on to somebody new.’
The two set up the television production company Talkback in 1981, and launched Brass Eye, I’m Alan Partridge and The Day Today among many others. When they sold the company in 2000 both men became wealthy, Jones walking away with over £20 million. Then, in 2013, Smith had a fatal heart attack aged only 60. ‘I’ve had a lot of friends who died,’ Rhys Jones says. ‘But there’s something genuinely terrible about Mel going young.’
Rhys Jones, who has just returned from a bungee-jumping adventure in New Zealand, looks remarkably healthy. Unlike Smith, he stopped drinking in 1983 after going on stage following a boozy lunch. ‘I wasn’t particularly sober and I remember the look in some of the other actors’ eyes,’ he says. ‘I thought, It’s no good, I won’t drink anymore.’ Then, newly sober and starring in Charley’s Aunt in the West End, Rhys Jones found himself vomiting in the wings. ‘I thought it was all the gherkins I’d eaten,’ he says. ‘But my GP sent me to hospital. I had hepatitis.’
Rhys Jones recovered, came back and won his first Olivier Award (the second was for An Absolute Turkey in 1994), but the liver disease gave him extra impetus to stay dry. ‘The first year is just agony,’ he says. ‘You can’t go out. You can’t see any point in going to a party. You no longer want to be around people who are still drinking.’
In the late Eighties and Nineties he was possibly the only sober man in the Groucho Club, a position that gave him an unwanted advantage poker table, playing alongside other actors and chefs. ‘If you’re stone cold sober, you can just play the odds and walk off with the money that you won. People were giving me little IOUs. They could hardly write.’
It wasn’t always easy being the sober one around the Cambridge comedy set, especially when they gathered in the Scottish Highlands for house parties. ‘It was called the Snake Pit. People like Hugh Laurie and others I’d known in university were there,’ Rhys Jones remembers. ‘I loved the walking during the day but at six o’clock they’d all come in and they’d had a snifter, something to get them going. There’d be a lot of talk about single malts and that was the moment I thought, f*** this. I didn’t think I was wrong. I thought, I’d quite like it if they all stopped.’
The Not The Nine O’Clock News team (from left), Mel Smith, Pamela Stephenson, Rowan Atkinson and Griff Rhys Jones, in 1982
Does it bother him that Thompson and Laurie are such successful worldwide stars?
‘I found it quite depressing being nominated for a Bafta or whatever, and seeing Emma Thompson standing up winning,’ he admits. ‘You couldn’t throw a stick at anybody in Cambridge without finding out later that they’d become an international thing. You’re talking about unbelievable achievements. Everyone becoming a Hollywood star. Extraordinary! I mean, Hugh was the most successful American television series actor ever in House, and you go, well, he was just a bloke in a Footlights review. But he’s a very good actor. Takes it very seriously and he is handsome and he went to Eton. If you go to Eton and you decide you’d like to be an international film star, you become one.’
There might be just a touch of jealousy there. Rhys Jones went to Brentwood, a less prestigious public school in Essex, before reading history and English at Cambridge, but he’s hardly been treated badly by life. He was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s birthday honours this year and there are projects on the go including a British children’s sci-fi movie, Future TX, planned for a 2020 release.
More importantly, he is lucky to be alive. In 2009, Rhys Jones was nearly burned to death (or eaten by sharks, depending on which newspaper report you read at the time) when he was on a group diving holiday in the Galapagos Islands with his wife Jo and the yacht they were on caught fire. ‘We were woken up in the night and told we had to go on deck,’ he says, slipping, I suspect, from general conversation into performance.
‘We found a 120ft column of flames coming from the middle of the boat and a deafening noise from the blaze, so we jumped in the water and swam for a buoy, which we hung on to apparently surrounded by hammerhead sharks. Some people were very stoic, some were emotional – there was a lot of crying. But I got quite cross.’
Why? ‘Because I was in the middle of shark-infested waters, and I didn’t have a television crew with me!’
For tickets to Griff Rhys Jones’ new UK tour ‘All Over The Place’, visit socomedy.co.uk/griff-rhys-jones