Nerd Do Well (8 page)

The San Diego Comic-Con is an annual event, where almost half a million comic-book/sci-fi/movie fans gather together to buy cool stuff and see their favouriteactors/writers/artists/directors talk about their work and sign autographs over a single weekend in late July. It is one of the most shamelessly enthusiastic celebrations of all things fantastic in the world and I love it. People dress as their favourite characters and walk the convention floor without fear of ridicule or cynicism. Indeed, they are admired, complimented, even regarded as celebrities by other attendees.

Since much of my work has dealt with the nerdier side of popular culture, either being about the kind of people who attend Comic-Con or being the kind of film people who attend Comic-Con are into, it’s safe to say that the kind of people who attend Comic-Con are my demographic. I never feel more known than when I am there.

As an actor or writer or whatever, you hope deep down that those who witness your output enjoy and appreciate it, or better still connect with it on a personal level. You also hope to achieve some confirmation of that, not just through box-office receipts or viewing figures but by personal interaction. Receiving positive feedback is as eternally gratifying as enduring negativity is devastating. There is a pleasure in knowing you have made someone happy by sharing an idea or telling a story, and you can experience that pleasure only if the happiness is somehow relayed back to you.

I don’t understand how any artist can reject positive feedback as if it is an annoyance or, worse, a burden. A friend of mine told me a story about seeing a popular British soap actor approached by a fan in a shopping centre car park and rejecting the admirer’s request for an autograph with a resounding ‘Fuck off!’ We all have days when we want to be left alone, but even when you don’t want your photo taken or have the time to stop and chat, you must surely decline with patience and good grace. Even if you have been approached a hundred times in an hour, whoever is approaching you is doing so for the first time and is probably nervous. The least you can do is acknowledge their good-natured bravery and respond with a smile, even if you don’t have time to talk to their mate on the phone or allow them to lick your face.

It’s not always the case that people’s intentions are pleasant. I get shouted at a lot by people who simply want some facile interaction. Others will approach you specifically to tell you they don’t know who the fuck you are, even though their coy mate, standing apologetically at the bar, does.

I hate being asked to list my celebrity credentials to rude, ignorant people who believe I owe them some sort of justification for my existence. Some people assume fame results in deafness and stupidity and, on recognising you, will point and stage-whisper, as if you’re not there, ‘Who? Where? It’s not, is it?’ as if they hope you will spare them the indignity of acknowledging their awareness of you, by holding your hands up in surrender and saying ‘You got me’. In those situations, I tend to play deaf and stupid. This is why I generally try to make my figurative knickerbockers as inconspicuous as possible. Not because I don’t appreciate affirmation from those who enjoy my stuff, or that I am even forfending against people who get a buzz from being nasty (fortunately the latter are rare), but more because persistent focused attention is actually exhausting whether it is positive or negative.

People who are super-famous have to live bizarre, rarefied lives, far removed from any accepted notions of normality, simply because a regular existence is prohibited by their enormous, unmistakable knickerbockers. I’m not complaining by any means; I don’t suffer the weirdness that others do, people for whom the spotlight has become blindingly intense. I keep my head down and wear a hat. I try not to hang out in places where famous people hang out, although it’s nice to take my mum to the Ivy once in a while, and every now and again a premiere invite will land on my doormat that is way too fun to ignore. I reject 99 per cent of the social invitations I receive and as such don’t get photographed that much (I was once snapped picking up Minnie’s morning bowel movement but didn’t feel too invaded since technically I was setting an example to other dog owners).

At Comic-Con one year, determined to walk the convention floor freely, without having to make too many stops, I purchased a Joker mask from a
Dark Knight
promotional stand and moved across the floor unnoticed. The irony being that it was necessary for me to wear an actual costume in order to disguise the figurative knickerbockers my profession had inculcated me with. It was an act that represented a huge gulf of experience between me and my seven-year-old self, scurrying through the crowd in the Cambridge Theatre foyer, with the specific intention of drawing attention.

With the aid of the
ESTB
I might have nipped back and solemnly directed myself towards the backstage toilets. Although perhaps not. Perhaps I would be depriving myself of a valuable lesson about the consequences of fame. Besides, as a naive little seven-year-old, enjoying his first brush with show business, I would probably have looked into the eyes of the 38-year-old time traveller and asked, ‘Why so serious?’

The jet lifted into the air like a big black aeroplane as the roof of Pegg Manor settled back into its mock-Tudor splendour, so that people passing on the A1 wouldn’t know that billionaire philanthropist Simon Pegg had a heavily armed stealth bomber in his loft conversion. Canterbury, Pegg’s faithful mechanical companion and butler, completed a number of pre-flight checks, flicking various switches and surveying an ellipse of readouts on the hi-tech dashboard.

‘Shouldn’t you have done that before take-off?’ enquired Pegg.

‘You seemed quite eager to leave, sir,’ explained Canterbury. ‘I thought I might do it on the hop.’

‘I like your initiative,’ mused Pegg with a small but devastating smile, which gave Canterbury a thrill even though he was a robot. ‘And you’re right, I was eager to leave. We have to get to Morocco and find the Scarlet Panther before it’s too late.’

‘That does sound awfully urgent, sir,’ chirruped Canterbury, a note of concern in his synthetic voice. ‘What will happen if we don’t find her?’

‘Well, you can kiss your metal ass goodbye,’ Pegg returned with a gloomy heavy sigh. ‘Not just your ass but all our asses, every ass on the face of this planet.’

‘Go on, sir,’ said Canterbury, encouraging Pegg to deliver much-needed exposition.

‘Two nights ago, I received a mysterious tweet that I simply could not ignore,’ confided Pegg.

‘I thought you were switching Twitter off until you finish your book,’ said Canterbury honestly.

‘Yes, well, I was just having a look at it one last time before I started in earnest. I wasn’t pontificating or anything.’

Canterbury said nothing.

‘Look, the point is,’ said Pegg heatedly, ‘last week the Scarlet Panther broke into the Museum of Egyptian Antiquity in Cairo and stole the Star of Nefertiti.’

‘Is that the thing that makes all the exhibits come to life?’ enquired Canterbury.

‘This is reality, Canterbury!’ roared Pegg. ‘The Star of Nefertiti is a magic diamond that when slotted into the lost tablet of Amenhotep IV fires a laser into the heart of the Sun, causing a solar flare that heats up the Earth’s core and destabilises the tectonic plates that hold the very surface of the planet together, bringing about the end of days.’

‘Like in that film
2012
?’ offered Canterbury.

‘Worse,’ said Pegg with enormous seriousness. ‘This makes
2012
look like
2001
in terms of action and excitement. We’ve got to stop her!’

‘But what of the tablet of Amenhotep IV?’ enquired Canterbury helpfully.

‘Its whereabouts are unknown,’ conceded Pegg grimly. ‘It used to reside at the estate of Colonel Barnabus McCartney in Surrey but when the Colonel died mysteriously in 1994, his possessions were distributed privately according to his will. It could be anywhere.’

‘Forgive me, sir,’ said Canterbury, facilitating the divulgence of further information, ‘but if the Scarlet Panther knew the whereabouts of the tablet, why would she want to bring about the end of days by combining it with the Star of Nefertiti? She’s just a gorgeous cat burglar/nemesis, with whom you have a passionate and complex on-off relationship.’

Pegg’s eyes became unfocused as his mind drifted elsewhere followed by his penis.

‘I see it!’ Canterbury exclaimed.

‘What?’ said Pegg, adjusting his trousers.

‘She doesn’t want to destroy the world. She probably doesn’t realise the true power of the Star of Nefertiti. She simply acquired it and someone paid her very handsomely to do so.’

‘But whom?’ mused Pegg.

‘Who?’ said Canterbury very quietly.

‘That’s what we have to find out, old friend, it could simply be a diamond collector or it could be someone who knows the whereabouts of the tablet of Amenhotep IV and wants to bring about the end of the world or else threaten to as a means of extorting money from the world’s most powerful economies,’ said Pegg without breathing. ‘Set course for Marrakesh.’

‘At once, sir,’ replied Canterbury, snapping into important mode. ‘You will need to return to your quarters before I fire the special stealth retros.’

‘Can I just sit here for a bit?’ enquired Pegg casually.

‘No, sir,’ returned the faithful automaton. ‘The thrust in the cockpit would prove too much for the human body to endure without a flight suit.’

‘All right,’ said Pegg. ‘Give me a minute.’

‘Of course, sir,’ said Canterbury, pretending not to notice the fact that his master was severely tenting.

When I wasn’t adhering to a ludicrously heavy acting schedule as a nipper, I was often splashing around in the local municipal.

However, I wasn’t a great swimmer when I was young. Nowadays, I can cut through the water like a buttered dolphin, but for a time I dreaded the weekly school swimming lessons.

It was a confidence issue more than a skill-in-the-water thing. You couldn’t keep me out of the sea on family holidays, particularly after I discovered the many and varied joys of snorkelling. On one particular excursion, no bigger than an adult seal (unbuttered), I drifted out towards the open sea while exploring a beautiful cove on the Devon coast. I only realised I was straying into the English Channel when I felt a tap on my shoulder and emerged from my aquatic reverie to see my terrified mother treading water, with the shore some two hundred metres behind her.

My problem was more to do with the whole package, rather than simply the water itself. There was something nerve-racking for me about swimming pools. Great big, chemical-stinking rooms filled with wet strangers, emitting echoing screams of euphoric joy or genuine terror (it was never an easy distinction to make) as I failed to avoid gulping down mouthfuls of the old municipal blue. This somewhat specific aversion can be traced back to three childhood experiences relating to swimming that affected me deeply.

Two of them happened at Gloucester Leisure Centre, where I eventually and somewhat ironically worked as a lifeguard. I don’t mean I worked in an ironic fashion – I didn’t permit people to splash each other, run on wet surfaces and drown – I mean that, in hindsight, it seems ironic to me that I was paid to work in the very place that, for a couple of years, you couldn’t have paid me to enter.

The first incident occurred when I was around six years old. As was our custom on a Sunday morning, I had gone to the public baths with my mum and my cousin Tim who was nine or ten years older than me. I had been confined to the learner pool, a smaller proposition to the huge, scary adult’s pool annexing it. Bathtub-warm and full of tiny screaming kids and probably tiny screaming kids’ urine (which explains the temperature of the water), I couldn’t help feeling frustrated. I wanted to be in the main pool with Tim and hang out with the big kids.

I’d been in the shallow end a few times under supervision and played ‘thumbs up underwater’ with Tim. That’s not some depraved game permitted in the seventies, a time when pool etiquette admittedly involved free rein to drown Rolf Harris (am I remembering that ‘learn to swim’ commercial correctly?), it was actually a game Tim and I had devised to road-test our goggles. We would stand opposite each other, count to three, then submerge ourselves into a corresponding position beneath the surface. We would then give each other the thumbs up until it was necessary to re-emerge into the light and noise to get air.

Whether it is the sea, the swimming pool or the bath, underwater is a fascinating place for kids. It is mysterious and other-worldly, rendering your surroundings in cool slow motion. We are guests of something awesome when we’re underwater. It is a place where we do not belong and forces beyond our control govern our tenure; our body either propels us to the surface for air or the water keeps us for itself. It’s alien and dangerous; it inspires our urge to explore, that primary force in evolution that conversely brought fishes from the sea to the land in the first place. Throw in an inevitable and arguably less subconscious uterine association and it’s a wonder we don’t spend our lives in scuba gear.

As a geeky teenager and finally rid of my phobia, I would dive to the bottom of the deep end of our school pool, during the precious ten minutes of free swim time permitted at the end of swimming lessons, and stand for a few seconds with my hands on my hips, pretending to be Superman. I would look around, as if in search of a Lois or Jimmy, then take off for the surface as if I was flying into the sky, and for twelve whole feet, I swear I could feel my cape flowing behind me. That was the other aspect of the aquatic world that appealed to me – the absence of verbal communication meant your internal monologue could fill the solitude with nerdy fantasy, unfettered. Even at the crowded Gloucester Leisure Centre in the mid-seventies, ‘going underwater’ was hugely exciting as it cut the pandemonium of the surface to a muffled silence in an instant. My frustration at languishing in the baby pool became too much to bear. I decided to escape through the verruca bath to the adjacent big pool, while my mother wasn’t looking, and join Tim in the serious water, not just for ‘thumbs up underwater’ but for other legendary pool games, such as ‘jumping off the cliff’, ‘caught by a shark’ and ‘can you tell that I’m relieving myself?’.