Griff Rhys Jones is apologetic. He’s not his normal effervescent self, he says, because he hasn’t had his morning caffeine fix. Or breakfast. Or, come to that, lunch.
‘I’ve been told not to eat or drink anything except water. I wonder if I could have fizzy?’ he muses, eyeing a bottle of sparkling covetously.
He’s off for a scan – ‘Something to do with cholesterol,’ he says vaguely – hence the fast. As it turns out, Griff – comedian, actor, writer and TV presenter – is anything but lacklustre.
Lob him a question and he responds with a story that ambles amiably, circuitously and often hilariously to its conclusion so long after you posed it that you forget what you asked in the first place.
In a chat that roams from his late comedy partner Mel Smith to Griff’s teetotalism via political correctness, he is the master of the rambling anecdote. His riffs about Hollywood segue into affable grumblings about old age. He turns 70 in November.
As he approaches 70, Welsh comedian Griff Rhys Jones discusses how he went teetotal and shares tales from his days working with his late comedy partner Mel Smith
‘Being 60 was such a shock. 70? It’s going to be an absolute disaster!’ he grimaces. ‘But my mother’s 98 so I could squeeze in another 30 years. My wife’s mother Pat is 100. Completely compos mentis. 100 is the new 70! 70 is the new 50!’
It’s hard to believe he’s in ‘old person’ territory: he’s lean, with a hipsterish beard, prolific silver hair and statement specs, and his energy is unflagging. But he is ‘a bit of a hypochondriac. I have this thing about nipping things in the bud. I like to get everything checked out.’
Such as? ‘Well, I started to get flaky bits on my eyelids. The optician said, ‘There’s a tiny gland that produces oil and you haven’t got any more. You’ve run out.’ I asked if I could take a tablet. He said, ‘No, you’ve just used up all the available oil.’ It’s the first thing that’s broken down.’ He sighs melodramatically.
Couldn’t he just use moisturiser? ‘That’s not the point! My body isn’t working,’ he shrieks. The histrionics are for comic effect.
Such reflections are his comic stock-in-trade. They form the basis of his fourth tour, The Cat’s Pyjamas, in which he promises witty observations, funny stories and improvised interaction with his audience.
The Not The Nine O’Clock News team – Mel Smith, Pamela Stephenson, Rowan Atkinson and Griff
His subject matter varies from night to night, ranging from dog-sitting to meetings with celebrities to burning boats – he recounts, with macabre relish, the drama of how in 2009 he and his wife Jo were holidaying aboard a boat that caught fire in the middle of the night and had to leap for their lives into the sea off the Galapagos Islands.
Sometimes members of the audience find themselves embroiled in his stories. There’s the time when, performing in Tring, Hertfordshire, he left his stage jacket in the car. Traipsing through the car park in a rainstorm to retrieve it, he realised his only way back into the theatre was via the auditorium.
‘And on my way through the audience were coming in and this woman says, ‘Oh, it’s him,’ and I say, ‘Yes!’ and she replies tetchily, ‘Well, I hope it’s going to be worth it. The difficulty we had parking here.’ The audience generally find that very funny.’
Mel was a party person. I thought at first that I could keep pace with him, but he was inexhaustible
Griff first burst onto our TV screens in the late 70s in the ground-breaking comedy show Not The Nine O’Clock News, then teamed up with co-star Mel Smith for Alas Smith And Jones.
The sketch show was most famous for the mock-philosophical head-to-heads between a dim Mel and an even dimmer Griff, and ran until 1998. Arts and travel documentaries followed, as did theatre roles, and Griff has two Oliviers, two BAFTAs, two British Comedy Awards and an Emmy.
I ask about Mel, who died, aged 60, in 2013, and Griff says they were ‘chalk and cheese’. ‘Mel was a party person. When I met him I thought I could keep pace with him. People used to fall in love with Mel.
‘I had my falling in love with him and suddenly you’d be in his world, which existed mostly at night. He was inexhaustible. He partied until, unfortunately, he could party no more. He’d go to the Groucho Club, then on somewhere else, then a group of us would go to his place and watch The Godfather for the 500th time, then everyone would stagger home at 5am.
‘I thought, ‘This is amazing,’ but after about three months you think, ‘I just can’t keep up with this rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle.’ Shortly after, I gave up drinking altogether.’
It was actually a bout of hepatitis A that meant Griff was told by doctors not to drink for a year to allow his liver to recover, and he never went back to it. ‘Mel had a habit of replacing you with someone else who had an extraordinary capacity to have fun,’ he says. ‘And I had to find new friends.’
Griff has been teetotal for 40 years, and he looks back with affection on Mel’s foibles. ‘When we were touring, I’d have got up, had breakfast, gone running, visited a couple of galleries, packed up and be sitting on the tour bus by the time Mel emerged.’ Did he perform drunk? ‘No, if he drank it was afterwards.’
They took it in turns to have the star’s dressing room whenever they went on tour. ‘And when it was my turn, I’d only be there for five minutes before Mel would come in, sit down, take off his shoes, eat the sandwiches, drink the beer, light his cigar and spread all his newspapers out.
‘He’d occupy the entire space. He was a great spreader-outer. So I gave up the idea of ever being on my own in the star dressing room.’
Griff tells the tale of how they once went to Italy to write a film script. By then their tastes had diverged completely.
‘We were in a farmhouse in a forest. Then Mel realised there was horse-racing a day’s drive away. That was his idea of a day out. He liked to bet and, between races, to drink. I didn’t want to do either. He never wanted to come on a nice walk with me.
‘But we got along very, very well. We never had a row. He was a very easy-going, forgiving bloke. And the truth is, we both laughed at the same things. We had an absolute rapport in terms of reading a script.
‘We adored working together on Not The Nine O’Clock News. Rowan [Atkinson] was a comic grotesque. He was dominant, fantastic. But Mel and I were two ordinary blokes and we loved being unshowy.
It’s amazing that my friends became stars. But Hollywood isn’t to my taste. Not enough galleries or pavements
‘Mel was just a fantastically relaxed, believable human character. We did Live Aid together [in 1985; they introduced Queen, dressed as policemen]. Very exciting. I missed my son’s christening for it. I left poor Jo holding the baby and rushed off.’
He’s off on a journey of reminiscence, recalling how he was sitting with Mel in the backstage café at Wembley when several men walked in on a recce.
‘First one came in, looked round, walked out. Then two or three more came in, looked round, walked off. Finally two or three more arrived with Elton John, then some more with David Bowie. A rock star couldn’t just walk into a café. Harbingers would arrive to find out if it was a suitable place first.’
In 1981, Griff and Mel founded TalkBack Productions, which produced such formative comedies as Smack The Pony, Da Ali G Show and I’m Alan Partridge. They sold the company in 2000 for £62 million, Griff pocketing £20 million.
Griff tells the tale of how they once went to Italy to write a film script. By then their tastes had diverged completely
He and Jo have a home in London, and a farmhouse near the Stour estuary in Suffolk, but his pleasures are low-key. While some of his Cambridge Footlights contemporaries, such as Emma Thompson and Hugh Laurie, have forged Hollywood careers, he has never yearned to follow.
‘Hollywood isn’t to my taste. Not enough art galleries or pavements.’ He smiles. ‘I’m not in any way regretful. It’s amazing that some of my friends from university became international stars. I just want my life to go on for another 50 years so I can do more of what I love. It would be great to do another play with a juicy part for an old man, like Molière’s The Miser.’ (He played the title role of the play in 2017.)
He met Jo, a graphic designer, while working for the BBC. ‘I was semi-naked [doing a photoshoot for Not The Nine O’Clock News] and she was throwing water over me,’ he once said. They have two children, George, 38, an architect, and Catherine, 36, a jewellery designer, plus a couple of grandchildren. ‘I wasn’t quite prepared for how much joy the grandchildren are,’ he says fondly.
I tell him I saw an Instagram post of him reading Roald Dahl to his grandson and ask what he thinks of the furore around the children’s author. Dahl’s work has been excised of words like ‘fat’, ‘ugly’, ‘crazy’, as they are now deemed ‘offensive’. ‘My daughter-in-law thinks it was a marketing ploy,’ he says.
‘She went out straight away and bought all the originals. Sometimes I’m pleased I’m not in that world, where sensitivity readers check every word. Everything was much easier when I started out; we weren’t politically correct.
‘I’ve never been cancelled; neither have I been invited to do a lot for the BBC recently. These days there’s a world of concern about what you can do and say. Life is complicated for people with younger children. They have to become vegans!’
He has a good-natured grouse about young folk, saying he relinquished his membership of the Groucho Club, famous haunt of actors and artists, when the fees doubled. ‘They said, ‘We need younger people so we’ve decided to put up over-40s’ membership fees to sponsor them.’
I said, ‘OK. Bye!’ Then a letter arrived, saying, ‘That was an error.’ But he wasn’t lured back. I wonder if he ever hankers after a convivial drink. ‘Not in the slightest. If I taste alcohol, even in food, I go, ‘Uurghhh!’
He is, however, a zealous conservationist and is leading the campaign to save the Victorian building of London’s Liverpool Street station. Fundraising doesn’t come easily, though. When he was campaigning to keep London’s Hackney Empire open, he tried to get a donation from The Rolling Stones.
Waved through to the ‘friends of the stars’ enclosure at a concert in Paris, he met Mick Jagger – and was too embarrassed to ask for money – then drummer Charlie Watts. ‘He said, ‘Hello, mate. What are you doing here? I’m a huge fan.’ It was the greatest moment of my life, but it was very difficult to ask for money after that.
‘One night we had a dinner and the people there were worth about five billion, but not one of them gave us any money. I realised then you have to be ruthless. You leave a piece of paper on everyone’s plate saying, ‘Will you give £500,000, £1 million, £1 billion?’ Lord Sugar, it emerges, donated £1 million.
And with that he’s bounding off, energetic, Tiggerish – and I’m left wondering if he could be any livelier, even with the caffeine.
As we went to press Griff was forced to postpone his tour ‘due to unforeseen personal circumstances’. A spokesman said, ‘Griff sends his sincere apologies and looks forward to seeing you all next year.’
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