Nobody knows about Bruiser. Even the people who were involved with the 2000 sketch show seem deeply surprised to be asked about it as its 25th anniversary rolls around.
“It’s one of those things that’s just disappeared,” says Bruiser director Nick Jones. “I don’t know anyone who’s watched it. Do you know people who’ve watched it?”
I do not. I’ve been banging on about it to comedy fan friends for a while, though nobody else seems to have discovered its slightly manic, intensely off-beat, lo-fi charm. But all six episodes of the sketch show’s single series are on YouTube, and a quarter-century on, it now looks like a Year Zero moment for a new school of soon-to-be-massive British comedians, actors and writers.
The cast’s pedigree is ridiculous: Oscar winner Olivia Colman (known as “Colly”, back then) joined her Cambridge Footlights contemporaries Robert Webb and David Mitchell (also on writing duties), and Matt Holness, who would be nominated for the Edinburgh Fringe’s Perrier award (for cult character Garth Marenghi) six months after Bruiser aired on BBC Two. Martin Freeman, fresh from brief appearances on The Bill, Casualty and This Life, stars too, along with then-Watchdog presenter Charlotte Hudson.
The sketches came from a pre-Office Ricky Gervais and a pre-anything Richard Ayoade. Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain, still four years away from the arrival of Peep Show, chipped in too, plus Becky Martin – then a young runner, and since, a director on Peep Show, Succession and Veep. There was also writer Bathsheba ‘Bash’ Doran, who went on to do Boardwalk Empire, Masters of Sex, and a series of well-regarded plays.
It slipped under the radar at the time, though, broadcasting after Newsnight at 11.20pm on a Monday night. And it’s remained under the radar since. It’s now a curio, a kind of time capsule which helps make sense of where the burst of originality and fresh blood in British comedy came from. But it’s better than just being a piece of comedy archaeology.
In an alternate timeline, Bruiser turns into another Fast Show or Little Britain (massive success, arena tours, characters spinning off into their own shows, tie-in PlayStation 2 game), and people get misty-eyed about the first year of the new millennium as they quote Matthew Holness’s “pussy on a stick” catchphrase at each other until they cry. “It was on the cusp of something at the time, I think,” says producer David Tomlinson.
Watch the show and you’ll see what he means. Freeman and Colman’s sketches as a bickering couple – him in a Spurs shirt, her permed to within an inch of her life and absolutely sick of him – are beautiful little vignettes that draw more from nascent reality TV than other sketch shows had before. And Webb’s poison-obsessed character (“Do you do rat poison? What’s it made of? What does it do? Why do they die?”) feels like a bridge between the leering, macabre The League of Gentlemen and the more knockabout weirdness of Little Britain.
It all started after Tomlinson and Jones had some success with another sketch show – 95’s Six Pairs of Pants, featuring a young Simon Pegg, Sanjeev Bhaskar and Jessica Hynes – for ITV. The recipe of a young cast and bare bones production had seemed to work, and they asked the Absolutely Fabulous producer Jon Plowman if they could do it for the BBC.
“We shot entirely on location,” says Tomlinson. “No studio stuff, no studio audience, no laugh tracks. And all for thruppence ha’penny. We said, ‘Can we come along and probably find some new young talent, and do it on the same kind of shoestring budget?’”
The idea was to make something fresh with a cast of unknowns – think more Marion and Geoff than George and Mildred. And they were put “in a cubbyhole” in the BBC comedy department, to begin trawling the UK for comedians and actors who’d fit into a scratch sketch ensemble. They spoke to The Mighty Boosh’s Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt – but “they clearly had started to get their own vibe together”, says Tomlinson. Peter Kay was in the frame, too. “But he already had his own stuff under way and, as a personality, he was probably too big to be part of an ensemble that he wasn’t personally responsible for generating.”
David Mitchell and Robert Webb were the first locked in. On recommendation from Benet Brandreth, Giles Brandreth’s son, Tomlinson and Jones saw Mitchell and Webb performing in two-man sketch shows in Edinburgh and London, and on meeting them Tomlinson found them “very relaxed, very accomplished already, very witty”. But as funny as Mitchell was, it was Webb who seemed the more obvious TV star. “ He put me in mind sometimes of a blond Rowan Atkinson,” says Tomlinson. “He’s got that kind of rubbery malleability.” So Mitchell got the boot.
Yet, during the pilot, which also starred Mackenzie Crook (The Office) and James Lance (Ted Lasso), something wasn’t quite working. “The chemistry didn’t quite gel, despite all the individuals being great,” Tomlinson says. Mitchell was drafted back into the cast, and everything started to make sense.
Matt Holness – who had tried to get together with Mitchell to write while at Cambridge, only to find Webb had pipped him to it – was added too. But Tomlinson and Jones thought they needed some proper actors to round out the troupe.
The first time Tomlinson saw Olivia Colman act was when she invited him to a showcase in 1998, where each hopeful performed two monologues, one comic and one dramatic. Colman’s comic piece went down well, then she started on her dramatic reading.
“ There was this sort of mesmerised silence throughout the auditorium,” Tomlinson says. “When we were in the green room afterwards, she’d received a multitude of agent offers by the time she made her way across the room to me.”
Jones found Martin Freeman by fluke, when seeing a production of Pierre de Marivaux’s The Dispute in 1999. “He didn’t really say anything or do anything,” says Jones. Still, Freeman reminded him of a young Lee Evans. “He was doing all this face-pulling and slightly weird, off-kilter acting. I thought, ‘You know what? That’s really funny.’”
Freeman and Colman brought “an ease of performance that was just really naturalistic,” says Tomlinson. “I didn’t have to tell them what to do, they just got it.”
Their work wasn’t lost on Ricky Gervais. Gervais’s sketches included an immature pimp who can’t stop giggling at the lewd things his clients ask for, a James Bond spoof with Mitchell as a deeply inept Q, and Holness’s psychotic pedant who victimises his house guests for things like forgetting that Frankenstein is the name of the scientist not the monster. There are shades of David Brent in the latter.
“ It was basically him [David Brent],” Jones says. Freeman, Holness, Colman and Mackenzie Crook would all go on to be involved in The Office the following year. Holness would even rework a character from Bruiser, a permanently foul-mouthed and contemptuous IT guy, for The Office‘s second series. (“You know Bruce Lee’s not really dead, don’t you? Yeah, it’s in a book.”)
The Office was in the periphery already. “Ricky said he’d been working on this thing, and could he bring in the tape to show us,” says Tomlinson. “He brought in a cassette, and it was about five minutes of The Office.” They watched as Brent bantered awkwardly with a disinterested receptionist, while Gervais asked if they thought it was any good or not. “ It was clearly something special.”
Yet despite the cast and coterie of writers who would go on to great things, Bruiser didn’t make anyone a household name. The reception wasn’t red hot at the channel, either. “The BBC didn’t want to do another one,” says Jones.
So, it drifted off into the ether while its stars and crew went on to Baftas, Emmys, Marvel movies, an Oscar, and general world-conquering. Still, Tomlinson is pleased it has its own cult following: “It would be lovely if people rediscovered it. It’s one of the few things I can look back at without wincing too much.”
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