Nerd Do Well (41 page)

Fear leads to aggression . . .

KENOBI

Yeah, yeah. If I had a credit for every time you wheeled that one out –

YODA

Up shut!

MON
MOTHMA

Really, this bickering is pointless.

YODA/
KENOBI

Sorry.

KOTA

Doesn’t keeping his name defeat the object of hiding him?

MON
MOTHMA

Yes, what if Vader vanity surfs?

ORGANA

Mon Mothma is right. He may have a Galactanet alert attached to his name. What if he checks to see what people are saying about him and happens upon an article about Luke winning a spelling competition or a pod race or something?

KENOBI

Never gonna happen.

KOTA

Very well, if you’re sure.

KENOBI

Hey, have I ever let you down?

YODA

Anakin Skywalker, did you train?

KENOBI

Oh, throw that in my face, why don’t you!

KOTA

Silence. General Kenobi, we will abide by your wisdom . . .

KENOBI
makes a nah-nah face at the holographic
YODA
.

KOTA

But you have to go and live on Tatooine.

KENOBI

WHAT?

KOTA

You have to go and live in a little house on Tatooine and keep an eye on him.

KENOBI

Oh man! It’s boring on Tatooine. And what about all the sand-people? You have to make that funny noise to scare them off and I can’t do it because I’ve got a deviated septum.

PARATUS

You’ll have time to learn.

KENOBI
looks sulky
.

KOTA

It’s either that or we change his name and hide him somewhere less obvious.

KENOBI

All right then, I’ll go.

ORGANA

Good.

KOTA

Then it is settled.

PARATUS

Very well.

SHAAK
TI

Let us ready a shuttle.

YODA
fizzles out
.

MON
MOTHMA

I have a bad feeling about this.

Chapter 1

¹
I should point out that the reason I was dogless as a child was simply because we had cats instead; two beautiful sealpoint Siamese called Bonnie and Clyde, who lived well into feline dotage and whom I loved immeasurably. The whole ‘wanting a dog’ fantasy was simply a consequence of wishing I could take the kitties everywhere with me, a notion they would quietly laugh at were they able to understand the suggestion. Despite Bonnie and Clyde being incredibly affectionate and devoted, they were still cats and as such were possessed of that wonderful aloofness their species often projects. If you call a dog’s name, the response is ‘What?’ as in ‘Yes, what do you need? Where are we going? Shall I bring this sock?’ If you call a cat, if it even acknowledges you at all, the response is ‘What?’ as in ‘Are you talking to me?’ Clyde died in 1989 after losing a brief scrap with a tumour. I came home from university to say goodbye to him, knowing he was to be put to sleep the following week. It was the hardest door I ever closed. Bonnie followed not long after, such was their symbiosis – they were Siamese after all. I miss them even now.

²
Tonto was the faithful, monosyllabic Native American sidekick to the Lone Ranger. I had poseable, dressable action figures of them both. Tonto had pigtails and looked fairly feminine and stripping him naked gave me a strange thrill. I’m guessing this may have been an early indication of my sexual orientation, since I did not feel the same way about the Lone Ranger and he looked like a member of the Village People.

³
I remember being collected from one such event by a friend’s father, who stepped into the living room to discover everybody just lying around in silence, snogging. I myself was on the floor with my hand up the back of Ann Tickner’s T-shirt, having adapted very well over the course of the evening to the concept of ‘open-mouth kissing’. My friend’s dad coughed pointedly to break the spell (although I don’t remember any of the other revellers stopping what they were doing), forcing me to get up and sheepishly follow him and my friend out to the car. He never commented on what he saw, or informed my mother what I had been doing, but I’m sure things would have been wildly different if he’d had a daughter rather than a son.

Chapter 4

⁴
According to CNNMoney.com, adjusted for inflation, the Six Million Dollar Man would cost closer to $100 million today. I’m sure the price of a mint-condition Steve Austin action figure, Bionic Repair Station and Maskatron have increased just as prodigiously from the retail price in 1976.

⁵
The Unexplained
was published in the early eighties and covered every aspect of the paranormal. The pages were filled with grainy images of flying saucers, alleged ghosts, Big Foot and partially burnt pensioners, the latter being the supposed victims of
SHC
(spontaneous human combustion). Even as a child, I remember noting that in all the pictures, the charred body (usually complete with one intact, slipper-clad lower leg) would be lying next to a fireplace or a three-bar electric fire. Some years later, I saw a bizarre public service announcement, warning old people to practise care with their heating appliances as every year (and this is a hell of a statistic) an average of sixty old-age pensioners burnt to death as a result of negligence. I leapt up triumphantly and shouted, ‘Yes! I knew it!’ Then I felt bad that I had celebrated the annual incineration of sixty old people so enthusiastically.

⁶
The Clangers
was a peculiarly atmospheric stop-motion animated TV series, which ran as part of
BBC
Television’s afternoon children’s programming from 1969 to 1972. It centred around a community of pink knitted alien mouse/elephants living on a moon-like planet in the furthest reaches of space. The Clangers were accompanied by a mechanical chicken, a horde of frog-like creatures appropriately called ‘froglets’, and a single-parent family of dragons consisting of a mother and son whose life revolved around the mining of soup from the depths of the planet’s core. The show had a unique ambience, which thrilled me as a child. The echoing whistle of the Clangers in the vastness of this magical model space, combined with Vernon Elliot’s oddly affecting score, would drive my infant self into paroxysms of glee, whenever it flickered from the television. Conditions had to be just right for viewing. The room darkened, my feet tucked up beneath me away from the floor. This is probably my earliest memory, since I cannot have been any older than three. Perhaps it was something to do with the endless potential of the cosmos that so inspired my euphoric enjoyment of the show; the boundless possibilities concealed in the blackness of the unknown; a metaphor for the future, played out jerkily with pink wool and tinfoil. I can still locate that sensation in the recesses of my memory and feel it still under particularly starry skies.

Chapter 5

⁷
Technically, that wasn’t the first time I had set foot on the bridge of the Starship
Enterprise
. In 2002, I attended the premiere of the last
Star Trek
movie before the one I was in,
Star Trek: Nemesis
. The party for the event took place at a
Star Trek
exhibition at Hyde Park in London, which featured a full set of the
Enterprise
from
The Next Generation
, which my sister and I ran around, pretending to be in
Star Trek
.

⁸
The decision to join
IMF
was an act of atrocious hypocrisy on my part. While doing press for the release of the
Shaun of the Dead
DVD
, I had said in an interview that I wasn’t going to desert the UK to go off and do, oh, I don’t know . . .
Mission. Impossible III
. What’s odd is that at this point I didn’t even know there was going to be a
Mission Impossible III
. It was an imaginary block-buster that I plucked out of the air to demonstrate my disdain for Hollywood ephemera and my loyalty to the British film industry. It turned out to be a naive comment on a number of levels. Firstly, the movie turned out to be a cracking adventure flick, wound taut by JJ’s flair for action directing and a characteristic all-or-nothing action performance from Tom Cruise, not to mention the rest of the cast, including me as a nerdy IT guy called Benjamin Dunne, which also happens to be the name of the man who commissioned me to write this book (this really is a labyrinth of coincidence, isn’t it?). Secondly, because you don’t have to defect to America to participate in the hugely prolific Hollywood movie machine, you can just as easily commute. We have an odd attitude towards our actors here in the UK, which condemns them to a sort of ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ limbo. Working in Hollywood is sometimes seen as simultaneously the pinnacle of achievement and the height of self-serving treachery. The truth of the matter is that Hollywood is simply a place where a lot of films get made, where there is a lot of money to make films and where there are a lot of people who want to make them. Any actor looking to work regularly in film and diversify beyond the limitations of their own creative environment is bound to want to go there at some point. Of course, I wasn’t of this considered opinion as I sat on my high horse and proclaimed my reluctance to cross the checkpoint into Tinseltown, never to return. A year or so later I boarded a flight to LA destined to work for two days on the movie and eternally render myself an enormous hypocrite.

This is too much of a digression to have put into brackets while I was in mid-flow above, but I wanted to share a memory of Debenhams that encompasses both Debenhams and the Wombles and is thematically linked to the events I have described. One afternoon, presumably to promote something or other, the Wombles visited Debenhams. They weren’t the real Wombles, they were tiny and fictional, although the success of Mike Batt’s
Womble
music did lead to the formation of a Wombles band for the purposes of appearing on
Top of the Pops
and the like. Just put ‘The Wombles’ into YouTube and you’ll be able to witness the bizarre spectacle of grown humans in furry suits miming to catchy pop standards in front of gambolling seventies teenagers. It isn’t all that weird, considering the Teletubbies had an unforgettable number-one single in 1997, but then Tinky Winky, Dipsy, Laa-Laa and Po (see?) weren’t presenting themselves as a jobbing band. Anyway, the Wombles band, which to some degree were the real Wombles (it was a complicated mythology), visited Debenhams, presumably for an album launch, and arrived in a van at the back of the store, visible to myself and my dad in the shop. At the time, soon-to-be briefly popular TV show band and Clap-o-meter victors, Pendulum had a number of Wombles songs in their Saturday-night repertoire and kept a Wombles costume in their dressing-up box, which also included a Telly Savalas bald cap for ‘If’ and a monkey outfit for ‘King of the Swingers’. On the day the Wombles came to Debenhams, Pendulum’s mischievous drummer, Paul Holder (he of the cock-in-the-hand incident) decided to don the costume, and crash the Wombles party, presumably to try and get into the
Gloucester Citizen
and drum up some publicity for the band (Pendulum, not the Wombles). I watched excitedly from my bedroom window as Paul, dressed as the timid, studious Wellington, crossed the road and intercepted Orinoco as he left the building. I remember Paul’s costume looked decidedly shabby and threadbare next to the real thing, which was plush and expensive-looking. There was an odd poignancy to the scene, as if Paul’s Wellington was an old friend, down on his luck, trying to derive some reflected glory from his more successful friend. ‘Orinoco, it’s me, Wellington. Do you remember? We used to hang out in south-west London and pick up litter? No? Come on. Orinoco? Fuck you!’ That isn’t what Paul said. Actually, it might have been, I was watching from some way off.

⁹
Letraset was a brand of dry rub-on transfers, which primarily provided lettering for posters and artworks, etc., before computer printing made it obsolete. Letraset also produced a number of action transfer sets in conjunction with various film and TV merchandising campaigns.

Chapter 6

¹⁰
While writing of my childhood love for Carrie Fisher, I remembered that I follow her (
CarrieFFisher) on Twitter and broke mid-flow to check out the list of people she follows, on the off chance she might be following me (
simonpegg) now that I’m more well known in America. She’s an intelligent and culturally savvy woman, I felt certain she would have a penchant for British comedy. Turns out I was absolutely right, except that she doesn’t follow me, she follows fucking Russell Brand! As if that immaculately scruffy Lothario doesn’t get enough love from the ladies, without snaffling the affections of my boyhood paramour. Damn you, Brand, with your charming and charismatic comedy stylings, damn you to hell!

¹¹
http://www.slashfilm.com/2007/02/11

Chapter 7

¹²
Popular manufacturer of spirit gum etc.

¹³
My love of robotic dancing eventually gave way to an interest in body-popping and break-dancing, after a item on
John Craven’s Newsround
left me gobsmacked by this new wave of urban street dancers who took the jerky movements of the robot dance to all-new levels of mesmerising fluidity. It wasn’t long before this dazzling means of easing tension in the American inner cities reached the lanes of Upton St Leonards, and although we perhaps lacked the tensions of habitualised gang culture, we did have a few spare bits of linoleum and a couple of ‘ghetto blasters’ between us. I spent many an evening down at Safeway car park, spinning on my back and rocking my body to whatever breakbeats we could record off the radio. We even formed a posse called the Galaxians, which consisted of me (Retroshock) and Sean Jeffries’s older brother Gavin’s best mate and fellow
Star Wars
nut, John Guy (Gizmo), who would occasionally throw down in the dining hall at lunchtime but mainly just sit around at John’s house during lunch breaks, watching the brilliant
Arena
documentary ‘Beat This’ from 1984, then attempt to do the ‘helicopter’ in John’s dining room where there was a small area of floor space. I buried my skills as a body-popper as I went through the intense goth period of my late teens during which I was much happier spending my leisure time listening to Sisters of Mercy and searching for the perfect leather jacket from the Oasis Centre in Birmingham. Eventually, as I realised that aligning myself with one subculture at a time was unrealistic (and when it became sort of cool again), I re-embraced my childhood dance skills and put them to use at work. My signature move, an arm wave, kicking off a double body wave, terminating with a reverse wave through the other arm and developing into a three-point float, can be witnessed frequently throughout my work, including the sketch show
Big Train
,
Spaced
,
Shaun of the Dead
and an appearance on the American chat show
Jimmy Kimmel Live
. I really need to get a new routine.