of the food was terrible. Inedible. Burnt and unchewable. Apart from James’s sprouts, which seemed to have undergone 40 per cent of the process of turning them into soup. The wine was expensive and like vinegar. We were sad. We’d wanted dinner.
‘We should complain,’ said James.
He was met with a cressy splutter from the rest of us.
‘Typical American!’ (James is half American) was our response. ‘Why add the nightmare of embarrassment to the horrors of the meal itself?’
But he insisted. And, very gently and politely, he asked to see the manageress.
Well, she wasn’t taking any shit. I think she was Russian. She was certainly cold and warlike. She wouldn’t accept anything James said and, from the off, implied that we were only trying to avoid paying. At some point, I saw red. I hate complaining, I hate conflict – I’d rather nod and smile and then bitch behind people’s backs. Or nod and smile and then ring my agent to get her to complain. But at one point James said something perfectly reasonable, and she interrupted and directly contradicted him.
This flew in the face of everything my parents had ever said about how you run restaurants and hotels. When people complain, you have at the very least to say sorry and accept that the complaint is sincere. So I sprang into action and gave this unpleasant woman what I remember as a devastating tongue-lashing. That is also how the others remember it, although it must be said that we were all a bit drunk.
I do know that I never raised my voice or swore. I merely contradicted the woman back and, when she tried to interrupt me, told her to be quiet and to listen to what I had to say – which was that she was running the worst restaurant I’d ever been in. To the last, she rejected all our complaints and refused to say sorry. Meanwhile, behind us, one of her staff started glumly hoovering.
We left feeling better for having had our say. But, ridiculously, we paid. In full. The manageress’s technique of accusing us of trying to get a free meal tricked us out of the only action that could have hurt her. She didn’t care about the argument or that we were unhappy, she had no hopes of repeat custom – that wasn’t the business model. She needed only to get our money once. The next day, there’d be another bunch of dupes to fleece. Well, at least we didn’t leave a tip. Still, we contributed to that miserable chain’s survival. For evil to triumph, all that is necessary is for good men to go to the Angus Steakhouse once.
Writing on Armstrong and Miller led to other work. Ben and Xander asked us to help write their radio sitcom, Children’s Hour with Armstrong and Miller, and Phil suggested us to the production team of The Jack Docherty Show, a Channel 5 chat show also made by Absolutely, as regular writers.
Meanwhile Nick Jones, the director we’d met in Edinburgh, had some excellent news. He’d finally got his name printed on his business cards. Also, he’d put together a BBC Two sketch show pilot called Bruiser with a producer and writer called David Tomlinson. Rob and I had written a fair bit of the material and Rob was cast as one of the performers. The BBC had sat on this tape for a few months before giving the green light to a full series. In February 1999, at the end of a writing day on Jack Docherty, David and Nick took us to the Hand and Racquet pub near Leicester Square to tell us about the commission, and to say that the only cast members they were planning to retain for the series were Rob and Mackenzie Crook (who subsequently dropped out to make the first series of The 11 O’Clock Show instead). They also said that they wanted me to join the cast and for Rob and me to head up the writing team. Suddenly, out of the blue, we had our own sketch show on BBC Two. Rob and I were so excited we immediately went to Pizza Express.
And we had yet another iron in the fire. Nick Symons, a producer at Carlton who’d seen our 1998 Edinburgh show, asked us to develop a sitcom with him. The idea was to pitch this to Channel 4 rather than ITV in the hope that it would initially be staged at the Channel 4 Sitcom Festival, where