Sean was maybe a year ahead of me on the London comedy club scene and already had a reputation among comics as one to watch. He was really original and exciting and I wanted to be his friend. Physically tough, comfortable in himself and cool like Steve McQueen was cool, he was great company – very bright and naturally witty. He didn’t have to try too hard; he wasn’t one of those comics who was full of nervous energy and felt the need to be permanently “on”. We ended up sharing a flat together in Edinburgh for the festival. On his poster that year he billed himself as “The Natty Rebel Returns”. I liked that: “The Natty Rebel.”
I had an old 70s suit that I’d picked up in a charity shop – navy blue, pin striped, massive lapels and flared trousers but it fitted me like the loose cover on a secondhand sofa. Sean saw it and tried it on and it looked like I’d hoped it would look on me: dead smart but also just kind of odd, like he’d just got out of prison having been banged up in 1974. Although it broke my heart, I gave it to him to wear on stage and it became his look for a while.
We were sat in the kitchen one night after our gigs and I asked his advice. I’d been struggling with a very patchy run of gigs. “Some nights I storm it, other times I die on my arse!” I opined to the Natty Rebel. “It’s concentration,” he said with a shrug. “I’ve seen you some nights before you go on, you’re chatting and mucking about – you need to concentrate on the job in hand.” He was right, and after that little pep talk I took his advice and never looked back. He saw things very clearly and brooked no bullshit.
He was smart enough to marry Anoushka [Nara Giltsoff], who is more than his equal, because I’m sure at times he needed firm handling.
Professionally, he worked hard at being funny, and woe betide anyone who didn’t match his high standards. On 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown – which became a great platform for his brilliant mind and brought him to a wider audience – he’d laugh like a drain if he liked what you’d done, but occasionally I noticed that the camera would cut to him looking stony faced. I tackled him about it. “Why don’t you just fake a laugh?” I asked him. “It would make you look better.”
“I don’t want to encourage them,” he replied with a grin.
I don’t tend to do panel shows but he encouraged me to do that one; “It’ll be the easiest money you’ve ever earned Harry!” he said. I always insisted on being on his team because, truth be told, I was only there because I liked seeing myself on TV sat next to the great Sean Lock.
The last time I was on a standup bill with him was at a benefit for some good cause or other. I hadn’t seen him live for a while and made sure I stood in the wings to watch his act. He had a crazily funny routine about winning a night out with Madonna: a beautiful bit of material which involved Sean scuttling about back and forth on stage – he was a lovely mover. I was laughing so hard, literally doubled up. I looked round and all the comics on the bill had come out to watch him. We don’t do that for just anyone. If you tell jokes for a living it’s hard to enjoy a comedian in the same way that a punter would, because you know all the tricks, you can see where a gag is going and often arrive at the punchline long before the comic telling it. Not so with Sean, that’s why we comics loved him. Often I had absolutely no idea where he was heading with a routine.
“So I was killing this pig with a hammer …”
“I remember getting my first bra …”
At his best, Sean reminded us all what we loved about a great gag and why we got into comedy in the first place. That’s why he was so often called “the comedian’s comedian”. He took his illness in typically dry style. I heard he was in a hospice for a bit of a rest. I called him up. “Wow!” I said. “A hospice, what’s that like?” “It’s OK,” he said “… and the sex is amazing.”
People are tempted to pigeonhole him as dark or surreal but he was more than that. He had a playful side; a wide-eyed wonder at the world.
Back in the 90s I used to carry a camcorder with me everywhere I went. One of my favourite videos of Sean is backstage at the Norwegian comedy festival. Neither of us fared particularly well – I mean, we struggled sometimes with English-speaking crowds. We were playing a theatre in Stavanger, Sean had been on, and in the video I’m walking from the wings backstage towards the dressing room. In the distance you can hear the faint tinkling of a tune, something that sounds vaguely like a nursery rhyme. As the camera gets closer to the dressing room the tune gets louder, then it turns the corner and there’s Sean on his own, with his back to us playing a child’s toy xylophone. You hear me call his name: “Sean!” He turns towards me and smiles, then the camera cuts out.
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