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Craig Children and Martin Baine-Jones, Times Online's exciting new cultural
commentators, are examining, a little blankly, it must be said, a canvas
hanging on the wall of Tate Modern. Untitled by Jannis Kounellis, is
examining them back. Craig eventually breaks the silence. “I feel,” he
begins in an accent one might call Estuary Lite, “terribly confronted and
challenged. Well, it's not so much the art. I was expecting that. But that
there are so many people here on a bloody Monday morning. Has nobody got a
job?”
Craig dresses in a little pork-pie hat and a bad shirt - less FCUK, more a
half-hearted FU to these day-trippers. He is known for his forthright
commentary.
His colleague, Martin, is less confrontational, his North Country vowels
expanding expansively over difficulty. His outfit - pinstripe jacket,
flowery shirt, plastic rain hat - is a bit Hunter S. Thompson, a bit
deckchair. He ponders a pair of harpooned pigeons stuck to the sky above the
drawing's townscape. “This reminds me of Cock Robin,” he says. “Who killed
Cock Robin? I, said the Sparrow, with my bow and arrow.”
“Well, I'm glad,” says Craig. “They are clearly pests.”
We pass a skeletal, headless Giacometti: Femme qui Marche, bronze, cast 1966.
“Size zero,” mutters Craig and leads us to David Smith's welded steel
sculpture, Agricola IX, an anthology of bent tools. “There is no way it is
going to plough a field,” he says. “It'd surprise a few moles,” jokes
Martin, unafraid of meeting these complexities with humour.
A Jackson Pollock detains us, one of those splodge-and-dribble jobs. “If you
stand far enough back you can sometimes make something out,” Martin insists.
“Yes, yes, I think I can see my wife's mother peeping out.”
Craig chooses profundity. “I think it is really clever. Really clever. Like
everything in here. I feel very challenged. I feel like I have been put on a
cultural gangplank and prodded right to the end of it, and if I'm not
careful I am going to fall off into a boiling cauldron.”
It is funny he should say that, for it is into that cauldron we fall next as
we enter a problematic video installation by Paul McCarthy featuring a naked
man boxing his own head, another man, in a blond wig, washing himself
obsessively and a woman smearing her breast with tomato ketchup. “It is a
bit like I have been abducted and I am about to be killed,” moans Martin
gently. Perhaps, I suggest, there is a case for banning this sort of stuff?
“It is not banning,” he says carefully. “It is not showing.”
It is 20 years since Craig and Martin first burst upon the art scene, cultural
gurus on Sounds, Modern Review, The Daily Telegraph and The Independent on
Sunday. You may remember them from brave, early appearances on BBC Two's The
Late Review, keeping Tom Paulin and Tony Parsons's chairs warm. Now they
have been snapped up by Times Online, where they will podcast. Not only the
technology has changed since we last met them. Martin has unexpectedly
become Lord Leaminster (pronounced “lemster”) and owns a Shropshire estate,
Down Hill. Where once he enjoyed scaring fellow road users by listening to
gangsta rap very loudly in his car, he now admits to hating it as much as
everyone else. He is married to an American feminist called Daisy Stern, who
writes an excruciatingly explicit blog about their sex life.
Craig remains unmarried, neurotic and insecure. He is in a stable relationship
with his cat. His father was a Chingford cab driver. He had a less easy
induction into the media than Martin did on Sounds, working on the Modern
Review where they didn't pay. My suspicion is that his career was helped
quite a bit by Martin. The fateful meeting happened on Wakefield Railway
Station during a power blackout that coincidentally followed their
attendance at a concert by a band called People Who Walked in Darkness.
We're outside now, beneath a work of licensed street art currently adorning
the Tate Modern's walls. Craig and Martin gaze up at a naked yellow man
painted by Otávio and Gustavo Pandolfo, two graffiti artists from Brazil.
“This is disgraceful,” says Craig solemnly.
“Any information, any lead at all, please contact Times Online,” his other
half pleads. “Anyone who knows who has done this must come forward. I'm
sorry to say this, but to paint that droopy penis is just so needless. And
why so yellow?”
Whether this pair are idiots savants - wise men donning the guise of idiocy -
or savant idiots (which would be the reverse) is for listeners to Craig and
Martin's podcast to decide. Let the debate commence. But it may help to say
that Craig and Martin are actually a fictional double act invented by the
real-life comedy double act, Armstrong and Miller.
Craig is played by Ben Miller, 42, married, father of one, best known,
perhaps, as Howard in The Worst Week of My Life, and to your children as the
man from the ministry in Primeval. Blustery Martin is Alexander Armstrong's
creation. Armstrong is 37, also married, also has one son. He was all over
the telly at Christmas, as the vicar on the ITV comedy drama at Christmas at
the Riviera and in BBC One's revival of To The Manor Born. His Pimm's
commercials, in contrast, form part of British summer. Their sketch show,
Armstrong & Miller, ran for four years from 1997 on Paramount and
Channel 4, disappeared for another seven and then returned triumphantly last
year on BBC One. With its takes on a lavatorial Flanders and Swann, a
certain Russian football club owner, divorced fathers and forgetful prime
ministers, the new Armstrong & Miller series surprised with its sheer
quality. And everyone fell in love with their Second World War RAF officers
who spoke exclusively in teenage street talk. (“I've only got one leg now.”
“Random.”)
In the members' room of Tate Modern, Miller and Armstrong tell me how the idea
for Craig and Martin was born, almost 20 years ago. (They don't need to say
how they were christened: Michael Craig-Martin is the conceptual artist
credited as godfather to the Young British Artists). It was the late 1980s,
the magazine Modern Review had started, the broadsheets were beginning to
treat pop culture seriously, and the Late Review (now Newsnight Review) was
hip.
“You got people doing quite grown-up articles for really quite childish
magazines and then people writing rather childish articles for grown-up
publications,” Armstrong explains. “The broadsheets suddenly became the
place where people like Craig and Martin could just bang on about the Pet
Shop Boys if they wanted to.”
They were launched on the real world in 1997 in a show Armstrong and Miller
did for MTV called So 90s and progressed to Children's Hour on Radio 4 with
Armstrong and Miller. An arts blogger on a rival paper (actually, it's The
Guardian) credits their appearances on Channel 4 series for preventing him
turning into someone like them. (Although that's for us to judge, David
Bennun; I don't like the look of your hat on your picture byline).
“Craig makes a great song and dance of his kind of working-class roots,” says
Miller, who points out the irony that Craig's father was a taxi driver and
therefore also banged on about things to people who did not necessarily want
to listen. “At the same time he's one of the most snobbish, aspirational
social climbers you'd ever meet with a very strict sense of entitlement. He
is affronted by anything so unjust and iniquitous as having to join a queue.
He expects a ticket and a tip in an envelope just for turning up at events.
Although, now they are on The Times they have been promoted to that sort of
journalistic nirvana where it is no longer necessary to actually attend
events or do any hard work of any kind. They're solely buoyed by opinion.”
In the years since Craig and Martin were born, Armstrong and Miller have been
buoyed not only by marriage and parenthood but professional success. Miller
particularly has had an extraordinary few years, even managing to star in
the one near-hit of ITV's road crash of a winter season, the comedy Moving
Wallpaper, in which he played the crazed producer of a failing soap opera.
The soap itself, Echo Beach, is not coming back but Moving Wallpaper is. It
is quite big of Peter Fincham, ITV's new controller, since Miller partly
bases the awful Jonathan Pope on him.
“On his voice a bit, yes. But Peter likes it. It is funny. It is a very
peculiar thing. People never recognise themselves.”
Armstrong and Miller met at Cambridge in 1992 in the Footlights, part of a
shimmering circle of talent. Armstrong, the chorister, abandoned plans to be
a professional singer and Miller, the physicist, forsook his pursuit of the
novel quantum effect in quasi-zero dimensional mesoscopic electrical
systems. They first performed together professionally in a Notting Hill
comedy club. Their double act ineluctably led to MTV, Radio 4 and their
Paramount/Channel 4 sketch show. By 2001 they thought they had worked
together enough for one lifetime. Then, three years ago, they did a one-off
gig at the Groucho Club in Soho and discovered what they had been missing.
They were lured back to sketch-show television by the production company Hat
Trick, which assured them that if they got good people in to write and
produce it, it would not be much work.
“Then we looked at the pilot and it was rubbish,” says Armstrong. “It looked
like a lot of those awful BBC One comedy shows that are just churned out and
we thought, ‘No, no, no.' So we then said ‘Look, if we're going to do this
we've got to do this like we have always done it. We need to be in the
office every day for seven months.”
They are about to film another series but after an unfortunate to-do over the
royalties for the DVD of the fourth they are no longer taking any chances
and have set up their own production company. It is called Toff.
“We think it's best to get that one dealt with right up front,” says
Armstrong, bravely owing up to his toffness. From rural Northumberland, he
is posher than Miller, the son of a Birmingham Poly lecturer, but Miller is
catching up, having married the daughter of a Queen's equerry. “Belinda is
hilariously posh,” he boasts. At first on the circuit, the ex-Footlighters
felt resented by the working-class stand-ups but were not going to hide
their Cambridge pasts.
“I mean, who cares, anyway? It is only an issue if you make it one,” says
Miller.
“One of the mistakes that people sometimes make when they send us unsolicited
sketches is that they send us stuff about toffs. We don't find them funny or
have any interest in them really,” says Armstrong.
It is interesting, nevertheless, to see how the issue plays out in the class
tensions between chippy Craig and patrician Martin. “So much of what we do,”
says Miller, “is extremely structured. We've found something that's a bit
more sort of jazz in these podcasts. It's a bit more improvisational, it's a
bit more, sort of, you know... it's a bit more happenstance, isn't it?”
Happenstance. I think. That is a very Martin Baine-Jones word. These two are
beginning not only to think like each other but like each other's alter
egos.
To be continued. Online.
