Rob Newman

There was a Mexican wave of hot flushing when I told my female friends I was interviewing Rob Newman. No, not THAT sort of hot flushing (how rude! We’re still in our early 40s). More of a… swoony gibbering.

You see back in the early 90s, when we were in our youthful prime, Mr Newman was something of a heartthrob. Star of BBC comedy hits The Mary Whitehouse Experience and Newman & Baddiel in Pieces, he had a distinct whiff of the rock god about him, what with his chiselled cheekbones and floppy hair. In fact it was thanks to Newman and Baddiel that comedy was branded 'the new rock'n'roll': they appeared on the cover of NME and even (famously) sold out the 12,000-seat Wembley Arena, the first comedy act ever to do so.

But if you're not around the 40-mark and haven't heard of Rob Newman, you're forgiven. After that Wembley gig they (famously) fell out. Baddiel teamed up with Frank Skinner and barely left our screens while Newman shrugged the limelight, settling instead on a quiet literary career.

But now he's coming to Cambridge with his first stand-up show in seven years, Robert Newman’s New Theory of Evolution. He's performed it about 80 times so far, with Cambridge the penultimate venue: “I was hoping to end the whole tour here,” says Newman. “But for some reason I’m ending in Maidenhead which, with all due respect to the Berkshire town, does feel like a bit of a comedown.” Well quite.

Born in 1964, Newman grew up in a small village just south of Stevenage, harbouring dreams of becoming a writer. But after messing up his A-levels, his educational future hung in the balance: “I got turned down by nine universities, and my English teacher at the time said ‘You’ll either be accepted into Cambridge or nowhere’. So I did the Cambridge entrance exam and I got in.”

He duly arrived at Selwyn College but, having spent a gap year working in the warehouse of a chemist’s, the hallowed halls came as something of a shock. “I found it quite alienating,” he admits. “It was the first time I’d met posh people, like public school people. You know the way they look through you? They’ve got this way of looking at you like you’re dirt on their shoe, and they always seem so confident. They’d all stand in a very confident way.” How did he stand? “Sort of shuffling around in a shoe-gazing way.

“I remembered the other day that some Old Etonian pointed a gun at me,” he adds, laughing. “If it was some inner city kid it would be a major incident, but you think ‘Oh well, that’s what posh people do! Silly japes, let’s not be a bad sport’…”

So he didn’t enjoy his university days? “I've got fond memories of Cambridge, but no, I didn’t. I loved the lectures, and there were some nice people, but I didn’t really get the hang of it until about the last 12 weeks.”

A solitary chap (“I shared a house in Mill Road with people I didn’t know”), Newman nevertheless took an interest in comedy - although not the kind you might expect. “There was a TV room at Selwyn, and I made a point of watching this show The Comedians every night, with all these northern working class old boys with all these one-liners, and really liking that. And I remember trying to tell my professor how good I thought ‘Allo ‘Allo was.”

He began “sort of writing sketches”, but not performing them, “just showing them to friends. I always liked making jokes, but I didn’t think of it as a career.” Nor - unlike his fellow Mary Whitehousers Steve Punt, Hugh Dennis and David Baddiel - was he a member of the Footlights. “I wasn’t involved in it at all, but I remember going to see Footlights and thinking 'That looks like fun! Why didn’t I do that?'”

The comedy bug didn't really bite until 1987 when Newman, then 23, started doing impressions in rooms above pubs. “I used to do Rick Astley, because I liked his dance. I used to do Tom Cruise, Top Cat, Ben Elton, Woody Allen... I still occasionally put a Ronnie Corbett in the show, just for the hell of it.” Was he any good? “I think so, and other stand-ups used to get cross because I'd get encores. They’d say 'Oh, that’s just because you’re a speciality act; if you’re a stand-up you actually have to have proper jokes'.”

Before long he was writing for radio, and bumped into David Baddiel on Radio Four’s Week Ending. They'd met briefly at Cambridge when Baddiel, who was at King’s, needed an actor for a film he was making (“not even a comedy film”), but this time they clicked and decided to pair up.

It was a good decision. By 1990 the duo, along with Punt and Dennis, were performing The Mary Whitehouse Experience on Radio One; it transferred to BBC Two the following year.

A combination of stand-up, character comedy and sketches, the show is best-remembered for the delightfully silly History Today skit in which the pair, dressed as octogenarian professors, would hurl playground insults at each other (“See that Eddie 'The Eagle' Edwards? That's you, that is. That's your mum”). Newman and Baddiel then went it alone with their eponymous In Pieces series, which they duly took on tour.

Did he have any inkling that the TV series would be so huge? “Well it was and it wasn’t,” says Newman. “I think it was a large cult hit, because my memory from that period is of being chased around large venues because none of the security guards knew me from Adam.

“We'd have sold out a big posh venue, where maybe they’d had Joni Mitchell in the day before, and there you are, this scruffy person with long hair walking around eating some chips. They’d say ‘Who are you?’, and you don’t want to have to say ‘Don’t you know who I am?’” he booms, “so I just used to quicken my walk, and then they’d start chasing me, like a slapstick comedy film.”

He was, I point out, a bit of a heartthrob: did he have groupies chasing him around the venues too? “Erm. Er...” Newman pauses. “There was a story the other comics all loved. Someone who stage-managed a venue said they'd never sold less alcohol than the night we played, but they’d never sold more ice-cream. The other comics thought that was really funny – and indicative of the fact that weren’t a true comedy act, but were some sort of One Direction-type of sham operation.” Did that hurt? “It hurt at the time. Now I can see that it’s quite a funny thing.”

By the time they did the Wembley gig in 1993, Newman and Baddiel had fallen out. They were offered another TV series, “and we didn’t want to do it,” he shrugs. “We should’ve just maybe taken a holiday… But we didn’t have any ideas; we’d just be repeating ourselves. And then I got tangled up with book writing.”

So the literary dream finally came true - but wasn't quite as he expected. “I thought I’d be better at it than I was,” says Newman, candidly. “I was so confident! I’d had quite a lot of success in writing sketches and radio shows, so I thought how difficult can this be? But I found it really, really difficult, and I just got bogged down for years writing books that no-one read. My fourth book, The Trade Secret, has just come out, and only now I’m sort of getting the hang of it.

“But sometimes it’s a good thing to get lost,” he muses. “It’s frustrating, and you crawl through a gorse bush backwards and you tumble down a hill, but you actually come out in a more interesting place than if you hadn’t got lost. Even though you’re covered in leaves and rabbit droppings.”

In fact it was thanks to writing books, he says, that he had the confidence to start writing scripted stand-up shows again. Past tours have included the politically-minded From Caliban to the Taliban and Appocalypso Now, which aired on More4 as A History of Oil.

But Newman is particularly proud of The New Theory of Evolution, “which is quite nice because I’m 50, and you’re aware of lots of things declining, physically, so it feels very good to think this is the best stand-up show I’ve ever done.”

It revolves around how “a series of personal calamities” led him to stumble on a new theory he calls ‘Survival of the Misfits’. “It’s also a critique of the anti-Darwinists, like Dawkins, and looks at the new science like epigenetics. And there’s a couple of songs on ukulele as well.”

Turning 50 isn’t the only major event in Newman’s life. He’s recently got married and now has a 4-year-old daughter (“I wish I hadn’t left it so late, but I was very immature”), and also, rather shockingly, lost the use of his right foot: “I was in terrible pain and I had to have a couple of operations on my back, but I’m all good now.

“You hope that those things will make you less shallow, but I’m not sure they have,” he adds, laughing again. “I was in hospital after the operation, and I was in one of those floral gowns that don’t quite fully fasten up at the back. They’d given me this exercise to see if I could raise my foot, and I got it to go two centimetres off the ground, and there was this attractive woman walking by - and I gave her a look, like ‘Did you see that lift? Heeeey, pretty good!’”

Newman, it seems, is on a roll again. His New Theory of Evolution is being made into a radio show next year, “and possibly a TV series as well. And then I have to think about what to do the next show about.” Any ideas? “Not really. I might do a show maybe about the Romantics.”

Possibly involving dressing foppishly with huge cuffs, dandyish trousers and flowing hair again? Crikey, I'd better give my lady friends plenty of warning.

November 2014 (c) Cambridge News