#rj: mathew baynton

[reluctantjoe]

I have had a most rare vision. I had a dream past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was... And methought I had... But man is but a patched fool if he offered to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was. I will get Rita Quince to write a ballad of this dream. It shall be called "Bottom's Dream" because it hath no bottom; and I shall sing it at the latter end of our play, before the Duke. Peradventure, to make it the more gracious, I shall sing it at the death.

MATHEW BAYNTON as NICK BOTTOM | A Midsummer Night's Dream — 2024

[reluctantjoe]

On my radar: Mathew Baynton’s cultural highlights

The Horrible Histories and Ghosts star on the joy of dissecting popular songs, class-driven comic novels and the scarcity of vegan treats

Born in Southend, Essex, in 1980, Mathew Baynton is the co-creator and star of award-winning television shows including Horrible Histories and Ghosts, in which he played lovestruck Regency poet Thomas Thorne. His television roles include Gavin & Stacey, Peep Show and Vanity Fair, and he has starred in films such as The Falling and Wonka. He lives in north London with his partner, film historian Kelly Robinson, and their two children. Earlier this year, Baynton made his Royal Shakespeare Company debut as Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which will be at the Barbican, London, from 3 December to 18 January 2025.

1. Art The Crossing, Ken Currie at Flowers Gallery, Cork Street

My partner and I have been obsessed with Currie’s work since we stumbled across it in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh in 2013. He is an incredibly prolific artist and yet most of his paintings look to me like a lifetime’s work. This collection is mostly people or animals at sea. His images are often uncanny, sometimes nightmarish, but soulful too. There is occasionally black humour at work, like in the image of two legs protruding from a boat at an angle that can only be possible if they are not attached to a body at all.

2. Podcast Song Exploder

I love Song Exploder, in which artists discuss the writing and recording of a song from their catalogue. Having spent my teens and 20s in bands, I get a vicarious thrill out of these stories. I find these tiny details fascinating, like Björk describing (in Stonemilker) why she cuts the reverb at the end of the line “and who has shut down the chances?” to reflect the lyric sonically. I always find that by the time the song is played in full at the end of an episode, I have a deeper appreciation of it.

3. Comedy Weer by Natalie Palamides at Soho theatre

Extreme commitment to stupidity is probably my favourite thing and this show is certainly that. Part romcom, part hyper-tragic doomed toxic love story, the conceit is that she is playing both the guy and the girl, split down the middle. It’s the kind of idea you’d think someone would get a sketch out of and would be out-staying its welcome beyond that, but Palamides clearly revels in pushing every idea to its extremes. By the end of the show she’s had physical fights, giddy dances and athletic sex, all with herself – and the stage is absolutely trashed.

4. Book The Kellerby Code by Jonny Sweet

This is a brilliant debut novel about a lower middle-class guy who has allowed himself, out of shame and awkwardness, to become a kind of unofficial butler to his rich friends. He is both besotted with them and disgusted by them and is terrified that deep down, he has a brutal nature. It’s tightly plotted, with a propulsive narrative of snowballing mistakes and disastrous consequences. The voice of the narrator is so funny – that really English thing of being outwardly obsequious while internally seething.

5. Music Brown Horse at Moth Club

We went to see Brown Horse, having discovered them at the End of the Road festival this year when they covered a Jason Molina song after a screening of a film about him. We’ve always loved watching bands on their way up, in small venues, before they hit big; that feeling among the crowd that you’re all in on a secret. The band seemed genuinely bowled over by the reception they were getting. Paul Gilley is a standout on their debut album – an instant classic. I can’t wait to hear what they do next.

6. Food Miranda, London N8

London is weirdly short on vegan places compared with some cities. My life would improve tenfold if I could get a good vegan pain au chocolat somewhere in town. But I digress: Miranda is a plant-based cafe in Crouch End run by a lovely couple, and the food is excellent. I often go in with the intention of trying something new but I always order the Latin breakfast, which is delicious and very generous too. Cornbread arepa, black beans, plantain and guacamole is a loaded but perfect forkful of food.

[reluctantjoe]

Mathew Baynton: ‘I sometimes think the culture wars only happen in people’s minds’

As he prepares to play Bottom at the RSC, the Ghosts star talks about why making comedy in the UK is no laughing matter

Before I meet Mathew Baynton I’m half expecting to encounter a version of the Regency poet he played with such expressive romanticism in the BBC’s exquisite hit sitcom Ghosts. Or the flamboyant rapping Charles II, just one of the many historical characters the collective reimagined with antic gusto in the children’s TV series Horrible Histories. Or even the fabulously reptilian Mr Fickelgruber from the recent blockbuster hit Wonka. In other words, surely an actor renowned for playing delicious Technicolour caricatures would be a bit outsized himself?

Instead when we meet at the RSC rehearsal studios in Clapham, Baynton slides along the wall as though trying to disappear into the paintwork. “I don’t like entertaining people socially,” he says apologetically. “At a recent wedding I was too shy to dance. I’d have no hesitation dancing my socks off in a show and looking very silly, but not at a wedding thank you very much.”

Baynton, 43, is about to play one of the silliest characters in the western canon, Bottom, the hapless, deluded wannabe actor in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the RSC. It’s Baynton’s first theatre gig in 10 years. The reasons he hasn’t trod the boards for so long are perhaps predictable – the combination of screen and family commitments, he says: he has two children, 12 and eight, with his partner, the film historian Kelly Robinson. But also perhaps because no other stage role until now has made him think that “if I said no, I might spend the rest of my life wondering if I’d made a massive mistake”.

He’s been relieved to discover the Mechanicals, the amateur acting troupe of whom Bottom is arguably the least talented, are not the “beer-swilling rotund yokels with West Country accents” he remembers from mediocre productions in his youth. “My feeling with Bottom is that someone once said to him he was quite good at acting, and that’s been enough to make a monster out of him. He has precious little experience but just enough to make him think he can do it all. My Bottom will be ridiculous. But there is a real sweetness to his enthusiasm.”

Baynton is very good at finding the sweetness in the patently ridiculous. It’s there in Ghosts (which he co-created) about a mismatched bunch of spectral beings trapped together in a crumbling old house and whose final episode after five seasons last Christmas attracted 6.6 million viewers. There was an endearing bumbling charm to his pathologically helpless Berkshire county council worker Sam Pinkett in the 2013 cult sitcom The Wrong Mans, which he developed with James Corden. Even Fickelgruber wasn’t too menacing.

Surely, though, he would have been even better casting as Wonka himself? “Er, I don’t quite have the global reach of Timothée Chalamet,” he splutters. “Although, a bit like Bottom, I always think: I’d have a go at that!” He adores the way the film embraces old-fashioned spectacular storytelling. “It’s lovely to see budget being used for big choreography and lots of people dancing in a town square, and not just explosions and fights which are usually the things budget buys.”

He deplores, though, how hard it is now to get original family blockbuster entertainment greenlit. “I grew up in a golden era of that sort of thing – ET; Back to the Future. These days you can’t do anything in that area that doesn’t have existing IP. You need to give the financiers a pre-existing brand. You can’t say ‘I’ve written this idea about this kid who is friends with a crazy scientist’ and hope to make it into a big film. And that is very sad.”

You can, though, just about, still pitch original ideas with cross-generational appeal to TV. Ghosts was a rare example of a TV sitcom that enthralled adults as much as it did their children. What’s more, it did so with almost surreal placidity. In a cultural climate that seems to trade on people being as loud and divisive as possible, Baynton’s faith in an inclusive gentle comic mayhem feels positively subversive.

“Everything these days is designed to agitate because agitation is the quickest way to get someone’s attention,” he says dispiritedly. “In season two of Ghosts, we had an episode featuring a gay marriage, much to the outrage of Lady Button. But eventually she realised that the unhappiness in her own marriage stemmed from her sexually repressed homosexual husband. Softly softly, there is a thesis there. Which is that if we could just put our f---ing phones away and sit down with each face to face and talk, then [these polemical attitudes] will loosen.”

Baynton grew up in Southend, the youngest of three brothers, and spent an awful lot of time watching Monty Python and Dad’s Army with his father. He attended Rose Bruford College and then trained in clowning at the Ecole Philippe Gaulier in Paris. His first major professional success was Horrible Histories, which ran for five years from 2009; around the same time he started working with James Corden. 

“We immediately hit it off,” Baynton tells me. “We were laughing at similar things,” Corden wrote him a part in Gavin and Stacey and Baynton then approached him with the idea for The Wrong Mans. A classic British sitcom pretending to be a Hollywood thriller, in which two jobsworths find themselves inadvertently embroiled in a fast-spinning web of crime and conspiracy, like much of his work it’s quietly radical.

“I had this bee in my bonnet about how comedy at the time was never allowed to have high production values. You had single-camera family sitcoms and you had brightly lit studio sitcoms but never anything that looked like a Coen brothers movie because the budgets are so low. So we thought, if we write something along those lines with James in it, maybe someone would take a punt. But the BBC said they couldn’t afford it. They said, either you rewrite it, or we junk a lot of it. So we went to America. In the end, it became one of the first America/UK co-productions [it was a co-production between BBC Two and the US streaming platform Hulu]. And that’s now become a widespread model.”

Baynton seems to be permanently busy: he’s currently writing a comedy film, which he can’t discuss, and this year will appear in the BBC’s forthcoming adaptation of Holly Jackson’s young adult thriller A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder. He worries, though, for the future of comedy on TV. “For the sixth year running Ofcom has labelled scripted comedy [at the BBC] to be at risk,” he says. “The amount being produced is at an all-time low. I know commissioners wish they could commission more, but for whatever reason they aren’t given the budgets. Which is mad when you think about how much comedy means to people over other sorts of programmes. No one puts ‘good sense of drama’ on dating apps.” Does he think comedy has become a casualty of the culture wars in which people are increasingly fearful of causing offence?

“You might think that if you only paid attention to the culture wars,” he says. “I sometimes think the culture wars only happen in people’s minds. Comedy is wide enough to accommodate many voices. And if you just get out there and go to a comedy gig, you will see brilliant people being funny all the time.”

[reluctantjoe]

this is canon now

[ID: a screenshot of half of UKTV Play's tweet from 9th July 2023. the text reads: "Matthew Baynton: the crown prince of being a silly little lovelorn guy who yearns for someone!" /end ID]