When people discover that the new Robbie Williams biopic Better Man presents the star, without explanation, as a chimpanzee, they usually have the same reaction that Steve Pemberton’s mum had. “What? He’s a monkey?” he mimics in a broad Lancashire accent. But when Pemberton was offered the role of Williams’ wayward dad, Peter, he got it immediately. “I didn’t question it. I thought it was genius. Phrases kept coming into my head: the monkey on your back, the performing monkey, the cheeky monkey… It’s such a bold choice.”
Prior to filming, Pemberton had met Williams only once, very briefly, when Matt Lucas introduced them at the Groucho Club about 25 years ago. “Matt Lucas was slightly more rock ’n’ roll in his connections,” he says. “The only club I was a member of was Archway Snooker Club.” Lucas was a bridge between two realms of fame. Pemberton was finding cult TV success as one quarter of the League of Gentlemen (with Reece Shearsmith, Mark Gatiss and director Jeremy Dyson) while Williams was the biggest pop star in the land — and probably the unhappiest.
In the film, Williams (played by Jonno Davies behind simian VFX) quotes the old observation that a celebrity’s emotional maturity is frozen at the age they become famous. For him that was 16, when he joined Take That. “What I admire about Robbie is how open he’s been,” says Pemberton. “Probably he was an arsehole to a lot of people, by his own admission. He talks so openly about all the different things in his life, whether it’s the relationship with his father, the drugs, the depression. It’s all there in the film.”
Pemberton, by contrast, was almost 30 before he became recognisable, and part of a group that “had each other’s backs”. “We didn’t need to do all the partying and drug-taking. We were very much a cup of tea and a Tunnock’s teacake.” He wasn’t even trying to be famous. “I always felt like I want people to know the characters I’m playing. I don’t need them to know anything about me.”
Pemberton is grabbing lunch in his dressing room at Jacksons Lane arts centre in north London. Just minutes ago he finished the first run through of Stage Fright, the imminent theatrical version of Inside No 9, his improbably long-running BBC anthology show with Shearsmith. If you’ve seen him navigate myriad ages, classes, sexualities, moralities and wigs in the show, it’s a little strange meeting him as himself: a genial, silver-haired, 55-year-old father of three.
Pemberton owes his role in Better Man to Inside No 9. Peter Williams left his family when Robbie was young to pursue his cabaret dreams under the alias Pete Conway, and regarded his son’s later success with a cocktail of pride and envy. Damon Herriman, who plays Machiavellian Take That manager Nigel Martin-Smith, urged director Michael Gracey to watch “Bernie Clifton’s Dressing Room”, a classic episode of Inside No 9 about the tense reunion of an old-fashioned comedy duo called Cheese and Crackers. Pemberton brings to Peter a similar needy flamboyance — something brittle behind the ingratiating grin and corny patter. “Robbie found fame corrosive,” he says, “and Peter couldn’t understand how once you’d got your dream it could be anything other than golden and wonderful.”
Pemberton loved dressing up and performing with his younger brothers as a kid on Chorley (“we had a well-rehearsed little Christmas show”) but his family had no showbiz aspirations whatsoever. His dad, a high-end car salesman, and his mother, who taught secretarial skills, never went to the theatre or saw acting as a viable career so they were nonplussed when he wanted to pursue drama rather than business. “I don’t know where my love of performing came from,” he admits. “I’m a bit of an anomaly. I suppose it was the opposite of what Robbie had. I didn’t have someone competing with me in terms of entertainment.”
He remembers attending a Christmas party with some of his dad’s friends and talking about taking the League of Gentlemen to the Edinburgh Festival. “The first question was, ‘How much do you get for that?’ And I said, ‘It’s not a question of how much I get, it’s how much I’m going to lose.’ There was shocked silence and then they burst out laughing.” But when the League won the prestigious Perrier Award and a Radio 4 commission in 1997, the penny dropped. Pemberton’s dad didn’t live to see the TV version but he loved the radio show. “He was so proud and loved bragging about it. My mum’s still going strong. She loves Robbie, as most mums do.”
In Better Man, Williams’ nostalgic comfort viewing is The Two Ronnies. Corbett and Barker were foundational for Pemberton, too. (Pleasingly, Corbett was one of the League’s first celebrity cheerleaders.) Pemberton was a child of four-channel television and that strange jumble has fed into everything he’s done: Tales of the Unexpected and ghost stories mingling with Are You Being Served? and Victoria Wood. “You had no choice really,” he says. “You watched what was on.”
He has no beef with streaming (you’ll see him next in Netflix’s Harlan Coben thriller Missing You) but he loved playing with the expectations of broadcast TV with Inside No 9 episodes like the Halloween special Dead Line, transmitted live with a fake technical hitch, and 3×3, which was cunningly advertised as a new Lee Mack quiz show. Viewers had to work out what was really going on in real time. “We never wanted to dump six episodes in one day – talk among yourselves,” he says. “It’s never sat right with me.”
Inside No 9 was an improbable hit. It began with a hasty pitch when Pemberton and Shearsmith realised that their black comedy mystery Psychoville would not be renewed, and proposed an anthology format – each episode stands alone in terms of plot, characters, genre and tone – that conventional wisdom said would give viewers no reason to keep watching. But season by season, it grew into a beloved cross-generational fixture. “We want people to have those memories of our show like we have of the things we watched when we were younger,” says Pemberton. “We hope it will be remembered in years to come.”
It’s certainly shown how much he can do. After playing darkly comic grotesques in The League of Gentlemen, the cast initially struggled to be taken seriously as actors. Pemberton remembers one casting director saying, “Oh, you act as well, do you?” The mainstream parts came eventually (Benidorm, Happy Valley, Doctor Who) but Pemberton and Shearsmith created their own opportunities with Inside No 9. In one decade, they raced through a career’s worth of roles and collaborators. Alison Steadman, who plays Robbie’s grandmother in Better Man, is one of them but then it’s hard to find a British film or show without at least one Inside No 9 guest star in the mix: Keeley Hawes, Jenna Coleman, Derek Jacobi, Eddie Marsan.
While promoting the final season earlier this year (the ninth of course), the duo were matter-of-fact about saying goodbye, so it’s reassuring to hear that Pemberton got emotional while shooting the finale. A meta-fictional extravaganza containing Easter-egg references to all 55 episodes, it unfolded at a wrap party featuring dozens of former guest stars. “It was so moving to walk into that room,” he says. “It was like your life flashing before your eyes. Everyone had come to Manchester just to be there for us. I teared up a bit the first time we watched the montage in front of that crowd. It felt indulgent, but in a good way.”
Following the recent wrap-up documentary The Party’s Over, Stage Fright will finally close the door on Inside No 9, though not their partnership. Pemberton laughs when I tell him that one of the questions in Google’s “People also ask” box is: “Are Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith friends?”
“We wrote that nasty argument in the last episode and a lot of people were quite upset when we were filming it,” he says. “We are friends in real life. You cannot work with someone for 30 years otherwise. When we’re in a room together writing we laugh a lot. It’s such a joyous thing. We have quite a fluid working relationship but it’s not over.”
Over time, the pair realised that their friendship was Inside No 9’s secret emotional throughline, though at first they experimented with not appearing in every episode. “We didn’t want it to look like, ‘Hey, look at us dressing up every week! We’re the big stars of the show!’ But the longer it went on, the more we became the USP.”
It was a nice revelation for someone who was never desperate to be the main attraction. “From me saying earlier on that I just want people to watch the characters, I kind of get now that people want to see me and Reece.”
‘Better Man’ is in cinemas now
