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WBefore his 13-year-old twin daughters didn’t study at home, or his twenty-year-old son didn’t live at home, Vic Reeves may not have noticed the closure. Life, he says, has not really changed. Every day, as always, he gets up at 6 in the morning, has breakfast, then goes to his studio to paint and leaves around 4 in the afternoon. “We really didn’t go out much,” he says by phone from his home in a Kent town.
He is planning his next painting, a “still life” with a Renault 4, the German electronic band Kraftwerk, a goldfinch and a pineapple. “I love pineapple,” he says in his soothing Northeast accent. “You know, pineapple is excellent in ham, and alone, and in a drink.” The slightest perfect pause. “It is a very versatile fruit.”
I don’t know what to call it. He is famous as Vic Reeves, for his gloriously absurd and anarchic comedy comedies. His mother calls him Rod (his middle name). In the 1980s, he would appear at parties as Jim Bell, one of his many stage characters. His wife, Nancy, and his comedy partner, Bob Mortimer, call him Jim; His real name is Jim Moir, which is what he wanted to be billed like in The Big Flower Fight, the new reality show he presents. But despite his years of efforts to escape Reeves, it has not happened. Reeves is.
The Big Flower Fight is Netflix’s answer to the used format of taking a healthy hobby and doing strenuous competition. It’s not about flower arrangements, it’s about giant floral living installations: In the first episode, the 10 creative couples make giant insects decorated with a full plant nursery. There is a lot of chicken wire and moss. The winning team will have a sculpture installed at Kew Gardens.
Reeves, who presents the show with comedian and actor Natasia Demetriou, is seen primarily as an artist. He thinks of this as an art show, rather than gardening. “I love to see people create,” he says. “He’s watching people who are passionate about doing, and there’s also a lot of drama there. I’m not saying a hit, but words were said.” It’s not about making a bunch of dolphins look good in a vase. “You have big metal frames and welding. So the beauty that comes out at the end is amazing. It’s pretty brutal sometimes. Things go wrong. When things collapse, it’s heartbreaking, but a great drama.” He laughs delighted. Have you ever seen yourself hosting a reality show? “I mean, it’s really easy. If you really like it, which I was, then you just get excited.”
Reeves, 61, appears to be partly an adorably grumpy old man and a childish jester. It does not have a computer or email. “A few years ago, I started sending postcards to people, because I thought it was a very good thing. And I got text messages from people, which is horrible, right? “But the other day I was” desperately trying “to do a handstand (and failed:” I think that probably has more to do with the immense volume I’ve accumulated over the years “).
Reeves and Mortimer brought their surreal comedy to television with Vic Reeves Big Night Out, which began on Channel 4 in 1990. Through a varied show of sketches, songs, and general oddities, he introduced Reeves, “the best light entertainer of Great Britain “, to the nation, along with Mortimer and his lab coat partner, Les. They moved to the BBC in 1993 with The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer: The bigger budget meant less of the chaotic DIY charm, but even more baffling insights from their imaginations, and then, in 1995, the parody panel featured Shooting Stars.
His work was unlike anything else (unless he was a Dadaist hanging around the Cabaret Voltaire in the 1910s in Zurich). This was in part because Reeves didn’t see any of his comedic peers: “That’s what made him unique, because you do it from a totally naive point of view.” He grew up in Darlington, on the outskirts of town. He spent his childhood running through the fields and collecting bird eggs. Her first double act was formed at school with another boy named Rod. “We create our own comedy. From what I remember, we made it up. I didn’t really watch TV, so there was no influence. I like to attack subjects without any prior knowledge of anything. “
If he wanted to watch television, he had to present the case to his parents, who would decide whether it was worth it or not. You never sat together watching television? “Saturday night’s entertainment was just as horrible as it is now,” he says with a smile. After school, Reeves began a mechanical engineering apprenticeship in a factory. He wrote in his autobiography (volume one, he says he intends to do volume two) that the older men there “seemed to fall into a kind of boredom-induced madness.”
Reeves left in the 1980s, moved to London and started running clubs in pubs and bars: one was a classical music club, “which was a terrible failure”; another, in the West End, seemed to consist of celebrities doing egg and spoon races (remember Boy George was involved). When asked by a friend if he wanted to take over his comedy club, Reeves agreed. Instead of reserving the acts, he thought he would act himself “to see if he could get away with it.” Do you remember the first show you did? “I had a cardboard box with a picture of Sylvester Stallone taped to the front.” He laughs. “It was really like a performance piece.”
It was here that the character Vic Reeves emerged. “I think my idea was that I was going to play a sort of north men’s club competition from work, that sort of thing. I thought a good name was Vic Reeves, who was like Vic Feather, the head of the union then [he was general secretary of the TUC from 1969 to 1973]. “Within weeks, Jools Holland had seen him and got it on his TV show The Tube. He moved to a bigger place, Goldsmith’s Tavern in New Cross, South London, which is where he met Mortimer, Then a lawyer, who had come to watch the show. “It was kind of like a wrestling, so I had Bob do things there.”
Reeves and Mortimer were part of the comedy explosion in the 90s. “The phrase was” Comedy is the new rock and roll, “and we were always on the cover of the NME,” says Reeves (they were on cover two. times and appeared in the magazine regularly). “Because we were referring to modern pop culture, we were the favorites of independent children.” They even became pop stars: Reeves’ version of Tommy Roe’s Dizzy, recorded with Wonder Stuff, reached No. 1, while Reeves and Mortimer (and EMF) reached No. 3 with a version of Monkees’ I ‘to Believer. . On the tour, he says, “you would be in a hotel, like in Liverpool, and outside the hotel there are about 300 children screaming and yelling.”
What was rock and roll like? Was there a drink? Drugs? “Oh yeah. All of that,” he says. He smoked weed, but he was mostly drinking. “Lager, that was our main vice. Lager and fags, very working class. Is it true they took a gun on tour (Mortimer told the comedian) Richard Herring did this when he appeared on his podcast)? “Yes, we did. It just had blanks, but we used to … He laughs. Every time they crossed a border (or sometimes a county line), “we would shoot a gun.” When we went to Scotland, he was fired several times. ” Why? “I don’t know. Firing a pistol with blanks is a lot of fun.” The weapon came from a military fair, he thinks.
“We used to get dynamite too. I don’t know where that came from. I remember we had an office with Jools Holland in Greenwich and we launched a rocket. He flew, went crazy, and went in through Billy Idol’s dad’s bathroom window. “The combination of events is so strange, so Reeves, I don’t know if he’s making it up. But we both laughed.
Did your antics, drinking, foolishness ever get out of control? “No, I don’t feel like drinking that much,” he says. Reeves and Mortimer came back on tour a couple of years ago and barely drank. “In the 90s, you had a drink and then the next day you felt horrible and then you had a drink to feel better.” It was pretty depressing, really. You get older and it’s brilliant, you go: “Let’s go and turn to this pork pie shop.”
He has seen comedians become superstars and sell arena tours, but he hasn’t been envious. “There are two things about people who make arenas,” he says. “They like money and they like worship. And Bob and I are not one of those people. They did a show in Leeds “and I thought: we really aren’t in contact with anyone here,” he says.
Mortimer has said that Reeves is quite shy and that it was difficult to meet him at first. It’s okay? “We both are,” he says. If he went to pop psychology, it could suggest that Reeves, the cheeky ringmaster of anarchy, was a bit of an outlet for his calmer creator, but Reeves disagrees. “Vic Reeves is not a character as I would like to be. It started out as a sort of boastful northern club competition and then ended up as a really worm-free idiot. Vic and Bob are pretty stupid; Vic is a little more stupid than Bob. “
The rubbing of Reeves’ thighs in the direction of the female guests in Shooting Stars was always awkward, but these days it seems inconceivable. “Yes,” he says. “I don’t even know what it means. I think it was some kind of lewd anticipation of something.”
When she appeared on Celebrity MasterChef in 2017, many people on social media were incredulous that Vic Reeves was not her real name. “Some people think it’s really me doing Shooting Stars and Big Night Out and that’s what I like,” he says. How much of your personality is on Reeves? Absolutely none. He is the anti of what I am. “
His double act and Mortimer’s have survived, he says, “because it is completely democratic. If an idea is suggested and it falls silent, it is cast aside without regret.” They have never fallen. “We are the most non-argumentative people in history.” They are supposed to make a movie together in October, something they wrote about 10 years ago about Michael Jackson’s white glove, “which is the holy grail for collectors. It’s like looking for the holy grail, but we know where it is and we have to get it. It’s about celebrity memories like religion. ”
Reeves has taken acting jobs: He was on Coronation Street, which never gets lost, for a few months, but says he never had the ambition to become a solo comic. “I could never stand alone in front of an audience and talk to them. It would be horrible. I couldn’t bear to do it.” Her voice rises. “It looks scary. With Bob and me, we simply perform small plays. ”
It still doesn’t follow comedy, or the politics surrounding it, like the idea that there are some things you shouldn’t joke about. “When people say you can and can’t say things, I don’t know who has the authority,” he says. “As long as you’re nice, as long as you don’t bother anyone. But that’s a natural thing, right? I would never do anything if I thought I was going to bother someone.”
He wants to return to his painting. The one with the pineapple came to him when he was in a dream state. “I wake up in the morning with a new idea: this is how my paintings actually exist, in the middle of a dream.” Sounds amazing, I say. “Is!” he responds, sounding delighted.
The Big Flower Fight will be available on Netflix on May 18.
