On the cover of NME’s November 13th, 1993 issue (available these days on eBay for £10.44 or best offer) appears the pin-up du jour: a long-haired, leather-clad Robert Newman, along with his then-collaborator, David Baddiel. The pair were comedy’s “new hipsters”, on the verge of becoming the first comedy act to play the 12,000-seat Wembley Arena and deemed “probably more popular than Your Favourite Band”. (Teased on that same cover: a review of a Nirvana gig.)
More than three decades later, Newman appears on a video call, bespectacled, neatly coiffed, navy shirt and gilet in lieu of his 1990s leather jacket. We’re here to talk about his new novel but have landed on the topic of active travel. The 61-year-old doesn’t own a car and hasn’t really driven since his first Reclaim the Streets meeting in the late 1990s.
“I think I’m the only stand-up who tours entirely by public transport,” he muses. He’s been thinking about how car-friendly hard landscapes of tarmac and asphalt are built “for the climate of the past” and believes a more modern version of the future consists of “soft landscapes, green spaces and high-density places”.
“The floods in Valencia showed how dangerous it is living in towns and cities designed for the climate of the past,” he says. “You saw how the flood waters weaponised a lorry park, turning vehicles into torpedoes that tore through people’s homes, killing them where they slept.”
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Newman is a deep thinker, well informed and socially conscious (though “politically homeless” of late, he says). Still a performer as well as a writer, he’s purposely adrift from the kind of celebrity he once held.
Having started on the comedy circuit soon after graduating from Cambridge, he found mainstream fame as part of The Mary Whitehouse Experience, a sketch group comprising Newman, Baddiel, Steve Punt and Hugh Dennis. The four also had success as part of respective duos, the former pair delivering a popular spin-off show – Newman and Baddiel in Pieces – and embarking on a sell-out tour. But that Wembley Arena gig would famously end up being their last together.
“I was really enjoying fame and then I wasn’t so I stopped doing it,” he says simply, when asked what happened.
He disliked the transition from stand-up to television his career seemed to be going through and had no desire to be swept away by ambitions that weren’t his own.
“With regret, I’ve watched really good stand-ups decide to be mediocre actors,” he says. “And I think, ‘what you were doing before was art; what you’re doing now is really nothing’.”
The tedium of television work had set in fast.
“I used to get very bored sitting in a makeup chair and would curse myself for having written a sketch with someone who had a beard, because now I’ve got to have someone glue a beard on . . . Some people must feel when they first walk into a TV studio like this is it, this is home. But for me, live performance in all sorts of venues – that, I really love. That felt like home and is something I still get a tremendous buzz out of. So, I’ve just carried on doing stand-up.”
As a solo act, his routines evolved to a more scripted structure, taking on big topics such as capitalism, imperialism, evolution, neuroscience, philosophy. At the same time, he turned his pen to novel writing, publishing his first, Dependence Day, in 1994, and going on to release several nonfiction titles along with four further novels, Manners (1998), The Fountain at the Centre of the World (2003), The Trade Secret (2013) and now Intelligence, published this month by Serpent’s Tail.
“Because writing comedy came easy to me, I thought writing novels would come easier than it did,” he confesses. Nevertheless, his background in light entertainment stood to him when it came to the editorial process.
“When the editor suggests losing a scene, because I’m from light ent, I want to say: I’ll lose a whole chapter, I will lose that character and put a new character in, don’t worry. I think you want to show that you’re a bit less precious because you’ve had to write scripts.”
I was able to sneer at Led Zeppelin, who obviously shivered like a salted slug under my withering punk-rock sneer
— Robert Newman
Beginning in 1938, Intelligence centres upon a group of young Oxford philosophers whose theories and debates around right and wrong are put to the test as war becomes a reality around them. Friends Medora and Ida are pulled in different directions – Medora, like many others, towards intelligence work, while Ida, the Texan outsider, remains in academia, looking for palaeontological evidence of “prehistoric goodness”. Then she stumbles upon secret Nazi information that could radically change the direction of the war, if she can capture the attention of her male superiors.
The book grew in part from conversations with the late philosopher Mary Midgley, who ignited Newman’s interest in Oxford wartime philosophy.
“I just liked that world. I don’t know why. I didn’t study philosophy. I wasn’t at Oxford.”
Owing to male conscription, it was a time when female philosophers had a chance to flourish.
“The balance of the sexes was at a level, in 1941 and ’42 in universities in Britain, that wouldn’t be seen again until the 1980s or ’90s,” says Newman. “I knew all these stories through [Midgley]. And once I had Ida and Merry [Medora] as the central relationship in the book, I thought it had its own force.”
The opening of the book features young philosophers teasing out moral quandaries in university rooms. These quandaries hang over the novel as events proceed. What does Newman think is the purpose of philosophy in a world at war?
“Ida says it’s the only place in the world where error is in retreat. The philosophy they’re part of was the ordinary language philosophy – that’s one reason I like it, because I can understand it – it’s about seeing things for what they really are and being able to spot a false and hollow statement and things that aren’t true.”
He brings up the philosopher Philippa Foot, famous for the trolley problem (a bystander must decide whether to do nothing as a runaway train heads towards five people tied to a track, or pull a lever to divert the trolley to another track, with only one person), who provided inspiration for the character of Medora.
“When she first heard reports of some of the Nazi atrocities and the Holocaust, it was very fashionable to say: well, there isn’t an objective good or bad, there’s just what you think is good or bad. And she said: that cannot be true. If you cannot say that this is evil, what are words even for?”
This seems pertinent at the moment, as wars rage around the world, yet ideas around morality are fragmented and the trend for anti-intellectualism seems to be growing.
“I agree. I actually talk a lot in the newest material I’ve written in stand-up about philistinism . . . Writing the book was a great way to escape the ugliness of the present into the relative tranquillity of the second World War. I liked the characters being bright, sparky intellectuals, but who aren’t in an ivory tower. They’re still very switched on and aware.”
Raised in a small village in Hertfordshire, Newman has memories of a “free-range” childhood. He worked for the farmer who owned the field that hosted Knebworth Festival and recalls climbing over a corrugated fence to see “all these naked hippies waiting for the Stones to come on”.
“I was able to get in backstage when I was a 13-year-old, not-very-scary punk rocker. I was able to sneer at Led Zeppelin, who obviously shivered like a salted slug under my withering punk-rock sneer,” he says.
These days, Newman lives in London with his wife and two children. Writing takes place around ordinary domestic routines of school drop-offs and pickups.
“From five until seven in the morning is when my brain works, before the children wake up,” he says. “That’s my happy time. Even before I was writing the book, when I was reading, that’s the really good time . . . I think I start off with a bit of a brain and I just become a moron by midday.”
At wobbly moments, he tells himself: “Don’t get it right, get it written.”
He adds: “I remember hearing George Michael talk about when he wrote Jesus to a Child, he was at the piano […] and said he was just doing really stupid work – nonsense. And then this one phrase popped out and he knew where he was.”
Newman has no plans just yet for the next book, working instead on new stand-up and pitching a radio series, but if all goes well with Intelligence, he’d like to write a sequel.
“I want to sort of see what happens,” he says. He believes in the concept of “creative forgetting”, that is, taking yourself away from the work while it gestates.
“Sometimes it’s quite good when the writing is going well, to think, oh damn, I’ve got to go and do a series of gigs now, or I’ve got to go and look after children for a week because it’s the holidays and I won’t be able to write. At first, you’re very frustrated. But actually, when you come back you think that was really good because you can look at it with fresh eyes, you can see where you were going wrong. I think that wasted time can be actually quite useful.”
Intelligence by Robert Newman is published by Serpent’s Tail.
