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Tony Slattery - July 2017 Telegraph interview

Returning to the Fringe for the first time in 33 years, Tony Slattery reveals to Dominic Cavendish just how lucky he is to be alive.

It’s an August evening in 1981 and in an Edinburgh church hall, a gaggle of bright young things take their bows before a cheering audience. Then there’s a big surprise, a token of good times to come.

On to the stage bounds Rowan Atkinson, who announces that this year’s festival is ushering in an exciting new award for “best comedy show on the Fringe”, sponsored by Perrier, “the bubbly water people”, and that Cambridge “bloody” Footlights have scooped the inaugural prize. Click-click go the cameras, yielding a classic “before they were famous” group photograph: Hugh Laurie, politely reaching for the cheque; Emma Thompson, looking on delighted; Stephen Fry, wearing a bow-tie and wary grin; and, behind him, a handsome young devil by the name of Tony Slattery.

Fast forward a decade and Fry, Laurie, Thompson and Slattery have become household names – reuniting in the hit 1992 British rom-com Peter’s Friends, about old college revue chums meeting up, 10 years on, to reminisce and recriminate over a boozy yet sobering weekend. Jump ahead to today, though, and while the first three have gone from strength to strength (even national treasure status), Slattery, who once hoovered up work on stage and small-screen – so ubiquitous that he was lampooned for it (in Private Eye, Viz and on Spitting Image too) – has been notable by his absence. Last year, hailing Peter’s Friends as almost “his favourite British film ever,” the late AA Gill asked: “Yes, where is Tony Slattery?”

Living, in turns out, in a rented two-up, two-down in Edgware, north London and still in recovery from a mental breakdown in the mid-Nineties that left him with a shattered career, crushed confidence and few friends. Oh, and a bank account almost empty from binge-spending on drink, drugs, impulse buys, charitable flurries and exploitative acquaintances, and years of medical help to tackle a condition belatedly identified as Cyclothymia, a form of bipolar disorder.

The man who greets me in Soho is, though it pains me to write this, a pale shadow of his former debonair self: grey-haired, with haunted brown eyes. Smiling sweetly and jittery as anything, Slattery’s speech, slightly breathless, throws up a skittering collection of heart‑stopping anecdotes, abstruse diagnostic details and such tentative expressions of hope for a fresh start to his career it almost brings a tear to your eye.

Now 57, he next month is going to brave the gladiatorial boards in Edinburgh for the first time in 33 years. The challenge? The stage‑version of Whose Line Is It Anyway? the Channel 4 improvisation show that helped make him a comedy kingpin in the Eighties and Nineties. When the call came for him to take part, “I didn’t waver for a moment. I was so excited and surprised. A bit of me thought: ‘Someone must have dropped out. They must be desperate!’ It’s a risk, I know that. What happens if the words don’t come?” He giggles. “I said to myself the other day, in a sense I’m playing the ‘F--- me, I thought he was dead!’ card”.

In the most immediate sense, it’s a minor miracle he’s even sitting here. In the past two years, he has been rushed to hospital twice. The first time, “I realised I couldn’t get up from my chair, and managed to call 999”. It turned out he had pneumonia, one lung clogged with pus, plus related sepsis. Two months on, he found himself rolling around on the floor – “There was so much pain in my stomach, I couldn’t speak”. He collapsed in A&E, and was on the operating table in 20 minutes. “Part of my lower bowel had knotted so they took out a section of my gut. I lost three stone in four weeks.” On top of that, he caught super-bug, C difficile.

All that, though, is but the stinging chaser to the life-threatening cocktail of calamity that beset him during his annus horribilis of 1996, when he cut himself off from the world in his Thameside flat in Wapping, refusing to see friends, ignoring calls, ceasing to wash, letting post pile up, and heedless of the bailiffs who hammered at the door. “I felt I had used a lot of myself up, in the wrong way, and I had had enough of it, really. I felt I had become a light entertainment construct – there was an intense feeling of waste, and self-hatred,” he says. He concedes the bitter truth of the sneering Private Eye cartoon that depicted his telephone answering machine as giving the outgoing message: “Yes, I’ll do it!” “I did a lot of rubbish. I was a scampering puppy. I didn’t take holidays. I wasn’t born into money [he grew up on a Willesden housing estate, the youngest of five, his Irish father on the production line at the Heinz factory]. So I kept saying ‘Yes’. I think people started to think ‘Oh, not him again!’ And so I stopped.”

At the “lighter” end of his behaviour during his period of turmoil, there’s the surreal incident, recounted in a documentary about bipolar disorder that Fry (the most supportive of his Footlights chums, he says) recorded in 2006: the time he tipped his electrical goods into the Thames, “with the river police shouting at me from their loudhailers”. At the darkest end, there’s a nadir he hasn’t made public until now. “For some reason, one night I took all my clothes off, then went down to [my block’s] underground car-park and lay under a car. I got bitten on my feet by rats while I was lying there.” When he managed to get to a hospital, in addition to being given antipsychotics, he was tested for plague. “I think I must be the only person in showbiz who’s been tested for plague! I thought you’d laugh at that,” he adds. I try. It’s hard.

Does he envy his fellow famous Footlighters? He claims not. “They were always in a stellar world”. He does admit to crying watching Peter’s Friends, though. “Yes, I do,” he says. “It was such a charmed time.” He’s broke now. Was he once a millionaire? “It’s possible,” he replies. “I’m terrible with money.” Was it the case he could spend £4,000 a week on cocaine, as has been claimed? Yes. “At the peak, I was taking 10g a day. A specialist said ‘You must be exaggerating, you wouldn’t have a nose left’. But I think I was snorting so much, so fast, it didn’t have time to touch the sides. That’s the only reason I’ve still got a septum.”

A bright kid – an all-rounder at school, winning an Exhibition to Cambridge to read modern and medieval languages – he dabbled with ambitions of entering academia: “I wanted to be a crusty old professor with the keys to the port cellar.” But he answered the call to become an entertainer instead, and still doesn’t regret pursuing that path, for all the troughs, not least because it enabled him to meet “the love of my life”, actor Mark Michael Hutchinson. The pair fell for each other in 1986 while appearing in the West End in Me and My Girl and have been together ever since, although Hutchinson was busy performing in the US during Slattery’s darkest times. While their relationship was common knowledge in the profession, it’s the first time he has let it slip to a journalist.

“I’m not coming out. I was never in,” he jokes. “I’m happily described as gay. I was never hung up about my sexuality. At university, I played for both sides and I think until 1986 I was unsure. But what has always mattered to me more than sex was finding someone to love. What is important isn’t someone’s body, it’s whether their smile reaches their eyes.” For all his various sicknesses, his outlook seems remarkably healthy. “What will survive of us is love,” he says, quoting Larkin.

“If all I am destined to be is a footnote in comedy history, that’s fine,” he adds. And if nothing comes of his Edinburgh foray this time round, he’ll cope. “I’ll carry on. Please don’t write that I’m a ‘survivor’,” he says, in a parting shot, cringing at the clichéd thought of it. Yet that’s exactly what he is. And he should get a prize for it.

[imeldasoe-blog]

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