Rob Brydon as Keith in Marion & Jeff Photo: BBC
In the original series Journey, Rob Brydon, playing a fictional version of himself, is served a fancy meal with foam. — Did you have a lot of foam? — Emma's assistant (Claire Keelan) asks. “His life is full of it,” replies Steve Coogan. Rob Brydon agrees: «I've made a career out of it.»
This is Brydon having fun with his easy-going, fun-loving personality: the face of lovable Uncle Bryn from Gavin & Stacey; the voice of various high-profile consumer products (including P&O Cruises, Bounty and Nut Crunch Flakes ); and host of the leading primetime panel show Could I Lie to You?, currently airing its 17th episode.
On February 19, he also embarks on another Night of Songs and Laughter tour with his «fabulous band» — a crowd-pleasing selection of show tunes, sing-alongs and stories. “I’ve always had pretty broad tastes,” Brydon said when I spoke to him in 2020. “What I ended up doing was little of anything I ever enjoyed.”
This may confuse Gavin and his friends. Stacey fans will see Brydon's dark and groundbreaking comedies: Marion and Jones; «Jeff» and «Human Remains» Now Finally Available to Stream Online — Marion & Geoff on BBC iPlayer and Human Remains on UKTV Play.
Brydon admits that his audience now is people who know him from films such as Would I Lie to You? – might be shocked by its roots in dark comedy. “I think people will probably be surprised,” he told me.
In Marion & Geoff Brydon plays Keith Barrett, a divorced taxi driver whose glass is too full to realize that he is actually having a nervous breakdown. In the parody series Human Remains, Brydon and Julia Davis — the dark mother of the British blacker-than-black comedy — play six different couples in six episodes. Each is a portrait of quirks, foibles and dangerously dark themes: domestic violence, depression, dead children, terminal illness and a sordid sex life.
Marion & Geoff and the Human Remains first aired on the BBC 24 years ago — in September and November 2000 respectively — after years of Brydon trying to break into big time. Brydon has competed for acting roles and worked as a voice artist. He hosted the Saturday teatime quiz show on Welsh television and moved to London to host a plum show on the shopping channel. (You can see YouTube footage of Brydon using a Black & Decker lawnmower. “It's very, very maneuverable,” he insists.)
Brydon had a brief break playing a beaten traffic warden in Locks, Stock and Money. «Two Smoking Barrels» in which none other than Jason Statham was injured. Brydon's name was featured in Empire magazine due to his short stint in Lock, Stock and he grabbed a nugget of good press. He filmed character sketches and pasted a review of Empire on it. “I think the line was, 'Robert Brydon is a very unlucky traffic warden,'” Brydon laughed.
Julia Davies and Rob Brydon in Human Remains Photo: BBC
Among the sketches was Keith Barrett, who talked to the dashboard camera in his taxi. “Keith was the best on the record,” Brydon said. “But for inexplicable reasons, I put him last!”
One by one the tapes came back, pushed back through Brydon's mailbox and plopped onto the floor. By chance, Brydon ran into an old college friend in the corridors of BBC Television Center — writer, director and producer Hugo Blick — and gave him a copy of the recording. Brydon and Blick then co-wrote the scripts for Marion & Jeff together. Blick will also direct and produce. Meanwhile, Brydon's girlfriend Julia Davis passed the tape to Steve Coogan. Coogan's company Baby Cow picked up the series.
Brydon had previously played Keith Barrett on radio in a sketch about Keith and his best friend Tony, who everyone but Keith realized was sleeping with Keith's wife, Marion.
“The whale has been cuckolded,” said Brydon. “But he was blissfully, comically unaware. He drove around in a taxi all the time, so he was never at home. He thought he had a perfect life and didn’t realize he was being made a fool.”
Brydon and Coogan recreate Odysseus' journey home from Troy. Photo: Andy Hall/Sky
In the television version, Keith's marriage problems worsen. Marion left him for Geoff and took their sons with her (“My little killers,” as Keith calls them). Keith, now replaced as a husband and father, is left driving alone in his minivan, lingering outside Marion and Jeff's house, bringing gifts for the boys that are invariably rejected, and missing out on the chance to see his crushes through some cruel twist of fate.
The episodes are just nine minutes long and, when they aired in 2000, were tucked between the raunchy drama series Affection and God Gracious Me. Marion & Jeff quickly gained acclaim (“the funniest British comedy in years,” said the Evening Standard), although if you had simply stumbled upon it while flipping channels, you might have asked, with a homemade air and a bittersweet tone, “What is this anyway? It looked like a quirky, cheap curiosity that seemed to supplant late-night TV programming and fill alternative content quotas in the 1990s.
Sitting in his car for most of the series, Keith talks to the dash cam about his sons, his marriage, and what a great guy Jeff is. “I don’t see it as losing my wife,” Keith says. “I look at it as making a friend.” The one-man-and-his-machine setup seems simple—as simple as poor, naive Keith himself—but the scripts and Brydon's performance are deceptively complex: a series of monologues built around an unseen dramatic irony. This is a look at a tragic, emasculated soul.
In one episode, Keith remembers going to Portugal with Marion after a «difficult period.» The holiday saved their marriage, he says, and now he sits alone and is in the midst of divorce proceedings.
Indeed, Keith is an eternal optimist and empath — a man who rejoices when Michael Owen scores a goal, but is always thinking about the goalkeeper — and cannot read between the lines. When the kids draw pictures of him being shot in the head, he replies, “I think that’s how they see me—like an action hero.”
“He’s the one who gives it a little shine,” Brydon said.
Keith is oblivious to the crushing despair behind what he says, and often behind the fact that he doesn't know what he's saying. For the viewer, all this is completely obvious: Marion never truly loved him; her affair with Jeff took place under Keith's nose for a long time; and one of the little robbers is not actually his son. When Keith's eyes glaze over or he pauses in the middle of a joke, we are forced to visualize depressing scenes of his life outside the minibus.
“When I filmed it, it was optimistic — I was living in him to see things through his eyes,” Brydon said. “But I was, of course, aware of the gloom. When I watched it, it seemed dark to me.” There is, in Brydon's words, a «painful sadness» in all this.
In one brilliant moment, Keith sits outside Marion and Jeff's house with a family heirloom rifle and takes aim at the happy couple's bedroom window. «Good morning, Jeffrey!» — Keith says, taking aim. No malice, but he's still a borderline stalker with a gun.
In the most heartbreaking episode, Keith follows Marion, Jeff and the boys to Euro Disney, where he plans to surprise them by dressing up as a waiter and asking, «Avez vous… is your real father?»
We never see the horror that occurs when Keith ambushes his estranged family at Disney — only the aftermath when he returns home through the Channel Tunnel. Clutching two stuffed Winnie the Pooh toys — another unwanted gift for his two little robbers — he puts on a puppet show with Tigger and Eeyore playing the roles of his broken emotional state. “Why are you sad, Eeyore?” — asks Tigger. “Just me,” Eeyore replies. The scene is strangely, painfully tender. “It’s really grim,” Brydon said. «Very dark indeed…»
Julia Davis as Michelle and Rob Brydon as Stephen in Human Remains Photo: BBC
Marion & Jeff emerged as part of a wave of boundary-pushing, conventional comedies that favored realism: the kitchen sink sitcom, The Royle Family; parody series “People Like Us”; the mockumentary about Bolton, «Peter Kay's That Thing,» which became the precursor to «Phoenix Nights»; and — most successfully — The Office. Pathos and tragedy were nothing new in British comedy. But the darkness of Marion & Jeff felt somehow fresh.
“Word of mouth spread because it was so unusual,” Brydon said. «I've had people tell me from all over the spectrum, from Steve Coogan to Michael Barrymore [referring to Brydon's exact impression of Barrymore muttering praise for the series].»
This was followed in 2001 by a special — a home video of a family barbecue — where Marion and Geoff's romance was first discovered (Geff is played in brilliant casting by Steve Coogan) — and a second series in 2003, with episodes lengthened to 30 minutes and Kate now working as a chauffeur.
“I have vivid memories of watching an episode from season two,” Brydon said. “There was a gap between the shooting and the release of the film, and you forget everything that is in it. I remember sitting down to watch it on TV and the impression I had was: Oh my God, we beat this guy—we really beat him.
All these years ago, Brydon is still curious about how and why he created such a tragic character. “By then, I think I had two children, but I wasn’t estranged at all,” he told me. “This is a very interesting thing. Why invent such things? He cites Woody Allen, Barry Humphries and Victoria Wood as his influences. But Brydon also admitted, quite eloquently: “I’ve always found relationships fascinating.”
Indeed, in Marion & Jeff and «Human Remains» with Julia Davis, relationships that often involve people who don't love each other are a unifying theme.
I think a lot of 'Human Remains' is about the couples thinking they're normal and everyone else being weird,» Brydon explained. “It’s a representation of how couples live. The way they behave is normal for them, but for everyone on the outside, it is very peculiar, very specific.»
Brydon and Davis created the characters through improvisation, recording and developing them on videotape (which you can also see on YouTube — and it's funnier than Brydon selling a lawnmower).
“They started with the voices,” Brydon recalled of the characters. “Voices offered different perspectives and stories began to suggest themselves through improvisation. During these writing sessions, tons of dialogue just came to us—it just fell out of the sky. It was a very time consuming scenario. Collecting the material took a lot of time and labor.”
He became completely immersed in the writing process. “I had nothing but a voiceover,” Brydon said. “I went and said: “Bounty, try exotic,” and then wrote [Human Remains]. I had a desperate need to be seen. I wanted people to see what I could do.»
Rob Brydon appears in Children In Need with Tom Jones in 2015. Photo: BBC
As comedy fans know, Julia Davis' shows, while brilliant, don't make it any easier to endure. In Goodnight, Davis falls prey to wheelchair-bound, multiple sclerosis-stricken Rebecca Front (to get her claws into Angus Deighton, no less). In «Camping,» she turns a middle-class family vacation into a drug-fuelled sexual nightmare. In Sally4Ever, she peppers a lesbian romance with coprophilia and sadomasochistic levels of discomfort. “Dear Joan and Jerika,” her agony aunt podcast with Vicki Pepperdine is truly harrowing. “She doesn’t hold back,” Brydon laughed.
It's easy to imagine improv with Julia Davis leading into increasingly dark territory. «I think we've always been a good balance for each other,» Brydon said. “I may have pushed her a little more into the mainstream and she may have pushed me to the edge. It’s not that it wasn’t in Julia and that it wasn’t in me. After all, I come from Marion & Jeff “I’ve earned the title of dark comedy.”
He added: “Every successful partnership I've had — whether it's Julia or Steve Coogan — I always say it's a Venn diagram. Our outer extremes are very different, but where we meet in the middle, true harmony arises.”
The standout episode of Human Remains is “All in My Glasses,” about Welsh guy Stephen and his pregnant fiancee Michelle, nicknamed “Spindalero!” – lanky, thick as mince, obsessed Princess Di.
Stephen is a brilliantly observed image of what we now call toxic masculinity: a wannabe alpha male suffering from little man syndrome; clearly harbors cheerful feelings for his best friend, but is outwardly homophobic; a man-child obsessed with Jean-Claude Van Damme.
«I've always said it's like a computer with a big hard drive but a small processor,» Brydon said. “I felt like he was with [Davis' character Michelle] because he could feel intellectually superior and that was important to him. His attitude and voice is something I experienced and heard growing up.”
Ultimately this is about an abusive relationship. “Steven has quite a temper,” Michelle says at one point, completely unprompted. Stephen repeatedly tells her that she is not as good as his previous girlfriend («Right or Wrong… I won't lie to you, Shell»). He makes a wedding seating plan so that he can sit next to his significant other rather than his new bride (“It’s my big day, Chelle!”). And he throws the pregnant bride-to-be into the air by her belly (“Take the baby to Alton Towers!”). He inevitably leaves her even before the birth of the child.
The only couple in Human Remains who feels truly in love are churchgoers Tony and Beverly. They are also the most monstrous of them all: vengeful neighbors from hell who harass their local vicar with persistent phone calls and curly sausage casseroles, while refusing to believe that the vicar is gay. “He doesn’t have time to be gay… amen.”
“They are very unpleasant people, but they fit together very well,” Brydon said. “They are harmonious in their trouble. In fact, they seem very devoted to each other.
Rob Brydon and Julia Davis in the film «Human Remains» Photo: BBC
It is heavily hinted that Tony, the domineering Australian, pushed his ex-wife down the stairs and paralyzed her before leaving. “She made her choice, it wasn’t for me,” Tony says.
Tony is in poor health, but he lives life to the fullest: “I’ll tell you what, the stupid ticker didn’t stop me from leaving my family!” – and pesters Beverly with his sexual peccadilloes. “Like I always say, try it once and if you don’t like it, we’ll come back to it in a few nights.”
They get their comeuppance when Tony is diagnosed with testicular cancer in the final scene. “And things have gone quite far,” Beverly says in her final telephone conversation with the vicar, a devastating punch line.
Looking back on «Human Remains,» Brydon recalled some uneasiness about the use of the mockumentary format that would soon become a comedy standard (even though «Human Remains» predates «The Office»). “We agreed at the last minute that we didn’t want it to be documentary style,” Brydon explained. “People Like Us did it and we felt like it was going to be old hat. We fooled around for a while and toyed with the idea of making it narrative. I'm glad we didn't do that because it's not what it should have been. But we both felt a little bit like we were on some sort of bandwagon.”
When viewed through the lens of documentary filmmaking, some episodes seem strange and beautiful. Watch as Brydon's cheerful florist looks out to sea, convinced he and his wife are happy, choosing not to hear her calls for suicide. «If there's any weird beauty, it's because they're rubbing against each other,» Brydon said of the show's various couples. “They keep doing it. Like I said, we wanted to show people who thought this was their normal. He wanted to show weird little ways — and we all have them. And they seem very real. I believe in relationships. I believe these people are here to stay for a reason.”
Even behind the camera, Human Remains presented a unique creative challenge. Director Matt Lipsey explained that part of the idea was a series of six documentaries, each directed by a different director. “I became a different director for each couple,” Lipsey said. “I had a different name and to some extent I gained a personality — I became a third character. I tried to ask questions in this headspace. It was unlike anything I had done before. Full immersion».
Lipsey, who also directed Catterick, Little Britain, Inside No. 9 and Ted Lasso, recalled that Human Remains «scared the crew» with a lack of rehearsals and a lot of improvisation.
“We had one rule,” Lipsey said. “We needed to implement the script. But usually we would improvise a scene, write a script, and then improvise based on it. I would say a significant portion, perhaps 20-25 percent, was improvised.”
For Brydon, the black comedy Marion & Jeff and Human Remains opened up the world he was trying to penetrate. He remembered watching Steve Coogan and Caroline Ahern win comedy awards and feeling like the world was «locked in» to him. “I was very frustrated creatively, and then all of a sudden I was working with Julia Davis and Steve Coogan’s production company,” he said. “I can’t overstate how right this is. It was like I came home or something like, “Oh yeah, this is where I'm supposed to be.”
Brydon still has a penchant for the dark side of comedy. “It annoys me,” he said. “I always talk about this. Steve always advised me to make more characters. Julia and I have countless lunches where we discuss ideas. I would still like to do something like that – I’m sure I will at some point.”
Brydon and Davis discussed a potential second series of Human Remains on a recent episode of Brydon's podcast, Brydon & There was talk of reviving the show for its 20th anniversary, but as Brydon recalled, the BBC offered less money than the first time.
As Brydon told me back in 2020, they have a lot more characters and material to explore. Among his favorites are a couple of “staunch Republicans.” “Over the past 20 years, we've improvised a ton of stuff and written a lot of stuff,” Brydon said. “We have hours of recording.”
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