Alistair McGowan immediately senses how tense and scared I am. As an impressionist, after all, it’s his job to observe. “Is it something in my voice?” I ask. “No, the body language,” he says. This doesn’t bode well. I’m here to learn how to be an impressionist with the two best in the business, McGowan and Rory Bremner. I’m only starting to realise what an ordeal this is going to be. A horribly public one, too, since my efforts will be filmed.
McGowan and Bremner had supplied me with a list of subjects. McGowan chose Andy Murray, Boris Johnson and Dara Ó Briain; Bremner went for David Cameron, Louis Walsh and Ant and Dec. I had spent a day researching on YouTube, running through their speeches and routines, but in truth I was hopelessly ill-prepared.
“Are you musical?” Bremner asks. “Are you a good singer?” I claim I am. “We can work with that,” he says gallantly. “If you can hold a note ... ” He never finishes the sentence, but I hope he means that if I can hold a note, I can do a perfect Ant and Dec.
McGowan, who trained as an actor, has had a career that embraces acting, writing, standup and music, but he still loves doing impressions. “The kick you get when you think, ‘Ah yeah, that’s that person’s voice coming through my mouth.’ There’s nothing like it.” He’s excited about Sam Allardyce becoming England manager. “He’s got a very unusual accent, Sam. He’s from Wolverhampton, but he worked in Nottingham, then Bolton, so he’s got a bit of all three.”
“You’re very forensic,” Bremner tells McGowan, clearly enjoying this chance to discuss their trade, on the eve of their Edinburgh shows. Bremner, who started doing impressions in comedy clubs while studying modern languages at university in London, says his approach is more instinctive. McGowan is fascinated by the shape of the mouth, the way it produces sound; Bremner will study a subject and aim to capture the essence without obsessing about component parts.
One danger they both highlight is “voice bunkers”: where one voice can slide into another that it resembles. “We used to find that with John Major,” says Bremner. “You’d suddenly lurch into Julian Clary. It sounds unlikely, but a trainspotter voice plus Julian Clary gives you John Major.”
It’s time to try some impressions. I choose to start with Dara Ó Briain, because I’ve been studying one of his routines closely and have a three-page script to work with. I launch in – fragmented sentences delivered in stage Oirish, with rapid hand movements to disguise the awfulness of the impression. McGowan, suddenly realising just how tough this is going to be, tells me to forget the three-page routine and concentrate on a couple of sentences. “You’ve got this incredible thing with Dara – he stretches out words,” says McGowan, demonstrating exactly that.
“Impressions are very closely related to caricature,” adds Bremner. “Cartoonists will pick out particular features and exaggerate them. That’s what you’re doing with the voice. You start off with exactitude, then you realise what people identify him with and concentrate on that. That’s the beauty of it.” The impression becomes more satisfying than the real person, because the essence is captured and intensified.
Bremner tells a funny story about the impressionist Chris Barrie, who did a run-through for an ad that was to feature TV presenter Russell Harty. The ad agency then got the real Russell Harty to come and read the script, but the clients weren’t happy. “That’s not Russell Harty,” they insisted.
The key with Ó Briain is the rhythm, says Bremner: the pace and the fact that his sentences never seem to end. McGowan brings his tongue to the front of his mouth to produce the strange, almost lisping delivery. I have another go – at least I have the physical bulk for the part – but it’s beyond me. We mark it down as a failure. I just don’t sound anything like him. I don’t even sound Irish.
The next impression seems more within my range: Boris Johnson. Again, I have the bulk, as well as a posh voice that lends itself to the part. “That’s very good – you’ve got the job!” says Bremner to my surprise when I read the speech Johnson gave immediately after David Cameron’s resignation. “You’ve got where the voice comes from.”
Bremner tells me to add even more “enthusiasm and irrepressibility”. McGowan points out Johnson’s peculiar love of the “ou” sound, and his strangulated vowels. The new foreign secretary is a gift to impressionists (and to British comedy generally). He has certainly saved my bacon today. This is going to be my party piece, and I hope it forms 95% of the video, with all the assorted disasters left on the cutting-room floor.
One good piece of advice is to keep a picture of whoever you are impersonating in your mind. I can just about do that with Johnson, but I really struggle with some of the others: Louis Walsh is especially underwhelming. I can neither see him nor hear him as I make my feeble attempt at yet more stage Oirish. I also struggle with Ant and Dec: what McGowan refers to as “the perpetual laughter in their voices” defeats me.
Cameron, another posho, is relatively straightforward. I find it helps to do him standing on tiptoe, rocking forward a little. He speaks as if he’s a home counties vicar delivering a sermon. The former PM was a Bremner speciality – how sad he must be to lose him. Bremner says he arrived at the voice by starting with Peter Mandelson and adding the slight rasp of the smoker (Cameron used to like a puff). He also points out a peculiarity: instead of saying “I think”, Cameron says something close to “Oink”. This amuses McGowan, who says he’d never noticed it before.
In truth, my Cameron is less effective than my Johnson. I start to tire: his voice is just too elusive. We move on to Andy Murray, whom I was convinced I could do as a kind of young Sean Connery. But when I attempt it, my mind goes blank. I can’t think of anything to say, and the voice sounds ... well, what? Not Scottish, that’s for sure. It might as well be Ant and Dec, or even Louis Walsh.
I run through my observations about Murray: deadpan humour, occasionally mocking, sometimes emotional. But Bremner says I’m approaching it too journalistically, that I should trust my ear. “Take a moment to picture him and hear him in your head,” he says.
McGowan, a tennis fan, shows me how it’s done: slow, sleepy, slightly cracked delivery, taking for ever to say: “Novak played really, really well today.”
“Just growl,” he advises. “Do it like you don’t really want to do it. He’s always defensive. It’s -almost as if someone is having a go at him, which they often are. ‘Why would you ask me that?’ is his attitude.”
I growl. “That’s practically the whole impression right there,” says McGowan. The growl – more an extended gargle – works pretty well, but when I attempt actual words, it’s as hopeless as ever. The impression dies in the air. I sound more like John McEnroe, with a hint of Dara Ó Briain. Something transatlantic anyway and nothing remotely like Andy Murray. Thank God for comedy Englishmen.
• Rory Bremner Meets ... is at the Gilded Balloon, Edinburgh, 13-19 August; Alistair McGowan is in Erik Satie’s-Faction at the Pleasance Courtyard from 3-28 August and 12th Impressions at the Gilded Balloon from 16-28 August (no show on 23rd). Box office: 0131-226 0000.
View all comments >