Young Once: A Life Less Heavy Nigel Planer: The real life of Neil the hippy
Young Once: A Life Less Heavy by Nigel Planer (John Murray £22, 352pp)
Charm is an evanescent quality: look at it too closely and it vanishes into dust. But charm is also important: it oils the wheels, particularly of comedy but also of straight theatre, of musicals, of film and television, all areas in which Nigel Planer has made a sizeable impact. This, his memoir, oozes charm and likeability. He seems a thoroughly good egg. Charm, you see. You can’t really do without it.
Nigel Planer as Neil the Hippy
Planer’s core skill has been to infuse with charm characters who should, by rights, appal and repel us. Neil the hippy in The Young Ones, more than 40 years ago now, was a character we would have loved to have hated, had anyone else played him, and we probably would. But in Planer’s hands this hopeless, timid, cowardly turd became the breakout star of a TV show that made a few reputations and launched a whole generation of comedians to stardom. Later on he and Chris Douglas – now probably better known as Ed Reardon on Radio 4 – created Nicholas Craig, a hopelessly vain luvvie actor who gave so-called acting masterclasses on BBC2 and a series of brilliant, hilarious books. I don’t think Douglas has written anything better than Nicholas Craig. But it took Planer’s charm and skills to turn this borderline monster of a character into comedy gold.
Planer is the middle of three boys. When Neil the hippy was huge, Planer had shoulder-length hair and a beard, as he was understudying for David Essex as Che Guevara in Evita. But his younger brother Rog had long, lank hair, and in restaurants people would approach Rog thinking he was Nigel and ask him for his autograph. Rog always obliged.
And unusually for the mad comedy world, Planer has been with the same wife, Roberta, on and off, since 1977 (although he had two other marriages). Between them they have four children, seven grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. He has won Celebrity Mastermind and a Brit award, and his single (as Neil) Hole In My Shoe spent weeks at number 2 in the mid-Eighties, behind Frankie Goes To Hollywood. He has written novels, plays and poetry, he has voiced Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books and, for Channel 4, he has written and narrated more than 100 episodes of The Magic Roundabout. It’s been a busy life.
And this book is very good, full of terrific stories. He’s particularly good on all his old comedy confreres at The Comedy Store and the Comic Strip.
Arnold Brown, for instance, ‘trod that dangerous line between being perhaps completely rubbish and perhaps a comic genius. It always seemed as if he had no idea what he was doing, yet sometimes he could make an audience helpless with laughter just by saying “Why not?” His pauses and fumbles were surreal, always in the most unexpected places. “Hello, I’m Scottish and Jewish” – long pause – “two racial stereotypes for the price of one.” His put-downs to hecklers were obtuse: “In ten years’ time, they’re going to have educationally streamed supermarkets and you’ll need four GCSEs to buy a pound of sausages… And you’re going to starve.” ’
Did I mention that this book will make you hoot with laughter on public transport?
Planer, then, has become the historian of early 1980s alternative comedy: as Neil would say, somebody had to be. You soon realise that Neil isn’t a character he used to play but a constituent part of Planer’s own, somewhat eeyore-like personality. This is a spectacular memoir chronicling a life well lived. Anyone of a certain age and temperament who opens it will be delighted by it.