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CELEBRITY ARTICLE
Celebrity article – Robert Webb By Tim Saunders
COMEDIAN Robert Webb was born in 1972. A Channel 4 favourite, he stars alongside David Mitchell in Mitchell & Webb, in the Sony award-winning That Mitchell & Webb Sound and the Bafta award-winning That Mitchell & Webb Look. He is Jeremy in Peep Show. He grew up in Lincolnshire and according to him in his autobiography ‘How Not To Be A Boy’, published by Canongate, Lincolnshire “is a large and largely ignored county on the east coast of England, sufficiently far north to be considered Northern but somehow not Professionally Northern in the manner of, say, Yorkshire or Tyneside”. From where he grew up, it took about an hour to get to a major road, the A1 – “also known as ‘the Lincolnshire bypass’ – and it’s this sense of isolation that gives the place some of its character and beauty, as well as some of its problems”. Robert was born, to parents Paul and Pat (she hated Patricia), 10 months after the death of his eldest brother Martin (6) from meningitis and also had two older brothers, Mark and Andrew. His first home was a house called Slieve Moyne in the village of Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire. The house was fitted with double glazing “to
make up for the familiar scream of Tornados” because they lived “next door” to RAF Coningsby. “In later years I would think of the place as Tatooine, the planet Luke Skywalker imagines to be furthest from the bright centre of the universe. But for now it was the universe and one with which I was perfectly content. There was just one problem. When we first meet Luke on Tatooine, he has an issue with his mysteriously absent father. My father, on the other hand, was all too present. And his name might as well have been Darth Vader. “When people saw Dad walking down the
street in Woodhall Spa, they did not think: ‘Ah there goes Paul Webb, a walking powderkeg of repressed grief.’ Paul’s public face was beloved by more or less the entire village. Generous with his time, charismatic, cheeky, cajoling and straightforwardly kind, he didn’t so much live in that village as host it. He would walk into a pub and I would watch the whole room subtly adjust itself in his direction and settle itself in for a treat. They adored him. But then they didn’t have to live with him. Mum did.” Robert’s mum was “a working class woman who was certainly clever, but not clever enough to avoid getting knocked up before finishing her A-levels”. He recalls how she always had a part-time job as a school secretary, a hotel secretary or a bar-worker. Growing up, adults referred to Robert as painfully shy and quiet. His sense of humour gradually developed. He says: “Growing up, I was given the impression that Woodhall was one of the ‘nicer’ villages in the area. Certainly the Conservative Club, the Golf Club, the Tea House in the Woods and the Dower House Hotel – a stately procession of mock-Tudor buildings with horse-brassy fireplaces – lend the place an impregnable air of Tory respectability.”
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