Chris Addison: Back in the Thick of it

It was in 1995, at the age of twenty-three, that Chris Addison first became aware that there was a greasy pole named fame, and that in small, incremental grabs, he was ascending it. Two days after winning North-West Comedian of the Year in Manchester, he was walking down Oxford Street with his friend Carl when a man shouted out his name.

“It was utterly bizarre,” he recalls. “By sheer coincidence, he’d been at the competition gig. Of all the 300 people in the world who’d seen me at that point, one of them happened to be walking down the busiest street in London. Carl spent the next 10 minutes going: ‘Fuck off, you set that up...’." 

Thus began Chris Addison’s uneasy relationship with the Limelight. One film (In The Loop), two sitcoms (Lab Rats and The Thick Of It), three Perrier nominations and 15 years later, the idea of being famous is one that still makes him squirm: “The idea that people know who I am is incredibly new. It only came after the last series of The Thick Of It. That was the point. People were coming up to me in the street in a way that’s never happened before.”

And now, after a five-year gap, Addison is returning to Edinburgh. To be able to do so with a reputation and a name that sells tickets on its own is a rare luxury. He doesn’t have to do this, of course. There’s a slot on Mock the Week, a new series of The Thick Of It due to begin filming next year and the usual trickle of Radio 4 curios. Not to mention 34,000 Twitter followers to keep satisfied. But there’s something about Edinburgh that draws him back.

“Edinburgh doesn’t look like anywhere else on Earth,” he says. “It’s like MC Escher built it. There’s a feeling at this time of year that millions of people are in the same thing together. Also, haggis suppers with salt and sauce. Fucking brilliant. One of the reasons for not going for the whole month is that I’ll cut down the number of haggises I eat by about 14.”

He does this a lot, Addison. Goes off on tangents. Indulges flights of fancy. Addison has earned a reputation as a cerebral comic, his previous shows tending to orbit a central theme – civilisation, evolution, chemistry. But there’s a difference between sixth-form smart-arsery and genuine intellect. Addison may have traded to great acclaim in the former, but in reality he’s made of the latter.

Is there an element of risk in returning to that same Edinburgh crowd with a raft of populist material about school gym classes and Easyjet. “Edinburgh always feels like a risk,” he says, “but the only reason is because you can lose thousands of pounds, and this is the same for absolutely everybody. In the first few years, even if I sold 100 per cent of my tickets, I would lose £5,000.”

But you’re a star now.

“The sense of risk is always the same. So if I don’t sell any tickets, for some reason...” He tails off. 

Maybe he's spent a few moments worrying about a few empty seats in the Assembly Rooms, but he gives voice to no doubts about his material. 

To understand Addison’s appeal as a standup, you have to encounter him in person. As brainy and sesquipedalian as he is, he’s still more artist than artisan. Take this joke from one of his shows:

“My father’s family were Viennese Jews, and my mother’s family were Lancastrian Anglicans. Which means I believe I was personally chosen by God, but I don’t like to make a fuss about it.”

On paper, it’s fine, all right; no more than that. But on stage – with the accents, with that hint of a stoop he employs to impersonate his mother, with that screwy little face – it’s a different prospect altogether. His show this year will be a condensed version of the 90-minute set he toured earlier this year, and constitutes a marked shift in impetus from the conceptual to the personal. 

“The last few shows have all had a big theme – a broad umbrella subject on which to hang daft jokes,” he says. “But you can paint yourself into a corner writing about academic subjects, and I’ve avoided doing anything remotely personal. It’s been five years since Atomicity. I’ve become a parent and my view of myself and the world has changed a little bit.”

Addison is one of those people who’s clearly more comfortable speaking in the abstract. Specifics – whats and wheres and whos – are absent-mindedly omitted. He’s modest to a fault; fastidiously anxious to avoid pomposity, arrogance, gracelessness or any one of a thousand other middle-class sacrileges. Talking about himself, you sense, does not come naturally to him.

Essentially, Addison is the nice guy who got famous, which is always an awkward clash of fates. And he’s still uncomfortable with the level of recognition he generates. “I did Have I Got News For You,” he says. “Tom Baker was hosting, and I was comically rude to him. And this bloke sent me an e-mail literally saying: ‘You’re a cunt. How dare you talk to Tom Baker, the finest Doctor Who, like that?’ Now, I’m the biggest fan of Doctor Who, but it’s just a programme. The finest Doctor Who is like the nicest Quality Street – it doesn’t matter.

“I think, basically,” he continues, warming to the theme, “people need to grow up. We allow people to get away with phenomenal stupidity. I got into a debate with somebody on Twitter about homeopathy. Now, 140 characters is not the place to have this debate, but... you stupid fucking idiot! The refusal to believe that they could be possibly be wrong. The internet provides a cartoon version of people. You’re insulting someone’s avatar and not them.”

At this point, he pulls a book out of his bag. “Have you read Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces?”

No.

“It’s about how all stories conform to a particular structure. It’s about how all of the myths, all of the religions, have the same basic idea to them. Factually, they’re completely inaccurate. But once you take them away, you completely take away the structure of how people live. What do we replace it with? Maybe that’s what rock star worship is. That’s not good, either. It is good for ticket sales, I suppose.”

Clearly, Addison’s is a brain with fuel to spare. “I lose ideas to the air all the time. I’m just too lazy and ill-disciplined. I used to buy little thin notebooks and carry those around with me. It was like when you decide to start a diary, and you end up with about four diaries all charting the first week of every year. I’ve got countless notebooks where the first three pages are filled in, and then nothing. Ridiculous. It’s the same reason my house is untidy.”

So there you have it. It has been a while since Addison’s scattergun intellect and paper-cut sharpness graced the cobbled streets of the Old Town. “Now I’m coming back after a five-year break, I feel a slight guilt, like I’ve stayed out all night and I’m coming back to my parents. Edinburgh’s a bubble, really. You can build an audience there that doesn’t translate to any other part of touring at all.” Whether he has kept it, of course, is very much up to you.