COMEDY: The Little Waster

When I was 14, and wearing one of my father’s old shirts back to front in one of those secondary school Art lessons that facilitate conversation more than they facilitate artistic endeavour, I was in the middle of a monologue, when a friend interrupted me. ‘Scott,’ he said. ‘You sound just like Hugh Grant.’ I was pleased, until he added, ‘Too bad you don’t look like him – or you’d be pulling girls like crazy.’  

My accent – a sort of sub-standard Hugh Grant-Henry Higgins mash-up, certain to enchant Americans but equally certain to mark me out as irrevocably middle class to anyone with even the most distant upper class origins – is not shared by my maternal grandmother. She is, as my late grandfather was, gloriously and, despite decades living in the Midlands, un-dilutedly Geordie. Grandma grew up in Newcastle, and married and gave birth to her children there, but she and my grandfather moved to Warwickshire when those children were very young, in order that Granddad could find work.