Comedy
Interview
Michael Spicer loves vaporwave
Get to know the sketch-loving satirist ahead of his new live show, Hope All's Well
When Michael Spicer pressed ‘post’ in his first The Room Next Door sketch, he thought it’d enjoy a short and modest burst of attention as some of his other videos had in the past. But the difference this time was that 2020 was around the corner, and with it a slew of chaos that provided one car crash interview after another – a seemingly endless resource for a format that saw Spicer pretend to be the subject’s political advisor reacting from another room. “It just kind of landed in my lap,” reflects Spicer. “Cabinet ministers and people were making regular mistakes during live interviews, and it was very easy to jump in at particular points and not only highlight a particular awkward moment, but also to highlight what they should be saying, what the narrative should be at this particular point and how they were so terrible at their jobs.”
Within a year, Spicer’s videos were so popular that he could quit his day job, landing acting roles and his own BBC Radio 4 show No Room. But later this year, Spicer steps out of his recording booths and fictional rooms to translate his sketch and satire style to stages around the UK. “I am basically talking about the state of the world at the moment and hitting on all those things that we’ve been talking about in the last sort of two or three years, about American politics, British politics, AI billionaires, all those sorts of things will be covered in sketch form.
Ahead of Hope All’s Well, touring September – November, we got to know Spicer better, covering everything from vaporwave and VHS to Simpsons sketches and dinner parties with Steve Coogan.
Who would you most like to be stuck in a lift with?
I did think about this, and I didn’t know whether to be funny or not, but ultimately, if it was, if I’m being honest, I’d really like to be stuck in a lift with Peter Cook, because he was such a major influence when I was young. He seemed like such a character of contradictions but also just so unbelievably funny, so naturally funny, that it would be nice to spend time there with him in order to find out what he’s really what he was really like, what he was really about, what really motivated him, and also just, just so he could make me laugh until we got till he got rescued.
It’s so curious, really, because a lot of his stuff, the stuff that wasn’t wiped, was not particularly well polished either. It’s just that he seemed to have a certain aura that other comedians just bowed down to and were totally in awe of him. Whenever he was on in chat shows, which was a lot, really, because a lot of his, you know, a lot, a lot a lot of things that he actually did were either not very good or he couldn’t get off the ground either, so he would just kind of chain smoke his way through Parkinson and Wogan and Clive Anderson, yeah, and but he would always be just so incredibly sharp and so funny. For some reason he just really spoke to me, and it wasn’t really necessarily the satirical aspect, it was just the way his comic mind works. I feel like it, it has really bled into my character as well growing up. I’m currently re-listening to his improvisational interviews with Chris Morris, two incredible comic minds essentially sparring with each other.
Who would you least like to be stuck in a lift with?
I think I’d least like to be stuck in a lift with the Prime Minister, our current Prime Minister, because, because the weird thing about him is that when he was in opposition, he started following me on Twitter. That did happen a lot in terms, lots of conservatives following me, but there had this kind of very misplaced energy of, Oh, I wonder if you’re going to do me next, that would be a badge of honour, not understanding, really, that I didn’t think that it was a game. I thought it was actually really serious, what they were doing.
So you had responses like that, from the people you were mocking?
Yeah. Every time I did Matt Hancock, you wouldn’t get him replying or anything, but you’d get secret likes and things, which annoyed me really. So out of nowhere after doing one of these room next door, Keir Starmer follows me, and now he’s implementing the worst policies. I mean, I’ve got a theory, which I don’t think is very popular, but I actually think they’re worse than the Conservatives, because the Conservatives always knew that they were villains, like comic book villains. They always had this little twinkle in their eye to say, well, yes, I mean, this is a really evil, mean spirited policy, but we’re the Conservatives, come on. You know, you know, it’s us, it’s us, isn’t it? Like Boris Johnson would always go, “Come on, it’s me, isn’t it? What are you going to do?”
Whereas the Labour Party are totally gaslighting us and telling us we’re doing this for you. Oh, are you? And Keir Starmer is almost like a kind of traitor, but at the same time, he’s so unbelievably lacking in personality and character and principles, everything and every now and again, I just think, why is this guy following me when I criticise him virtually every single week? And I guess for that reason, I wouldn’t like to be in a lift with him, because I feel like, I feel like we get into a slanging match, to be honest.
What’s the weirdest interaction you’ve ever had with a famous person?
This is actually quite an interesting story. A bunch of comedians were asked to go to David Schneider’s house. Do you know David Schneider? He was in The Day Today. This was literally a month before lockdown and Extinction Rebellion wanted to their version of Comic Relief, and they didn’t know what to do. They didn’t know whether to do a stage show or a TV show or whatever. And they just basically invited a load of comedians to come to David Schneider’s house and chat about it. He lived not far from the old Arsenal stadium, and I got there really early and thought, Oh, well I’ve got to arrive fashionably late, obviously. But it was raining and I was getting soaked, and I thought I can’t just walk around Highbury getting soaked, I’ll just go to his house. It started at six, and it was literally six on the dot, so I knocked on the door, and of course, I was the only person there, except, except for Extinction Rebellion, David Schneider and Steve Coogan. So I walk in and just Steve Coogan’s there in the kitchen on his own. So David Schneider said, Oh, come in, there was nice vegan spread. He said, “Oh have some food – this is Steve.” Oh, is it? Yes. So I was lucky, really, because I had 15 minutes with Steve Coogan before anyone else arrived.
We were talking about at his new podcast that was coming out at the time. I said, you know, what’s that like? How are you going to do it? Blah, blah, blah. And then he he explained, and then told me about a funny bit, which was extremely funny. And the tears were rolling down my eyes because I was laughing so much. But he was actually doing Partridge to me in David Schneider’s kitchen. It was probably like the only moment where I just thought, is any of this real? Is anything that’s happened to me in the last six months real? Yeah, because it’s got to this point now, and I can’t really explain what’s going on. So it was really amazing, but it was just so bizarre, and I had nothing to I had nothing to say back to him. I was still, you know, still doing my job at that point. I’m sure he didn’t want to hear about what it was like to be a copywriter for a shipping company.
As I say, I was in such a mess, because he really, he really nailed it, the tears were rolling down my cheeks. Paul Sinha was there as well from The Chase, and as we were all getting ready to leave, he said, I can’t see anything really happening anyway, because I think we’ll be in lockdown very soon. And he was spot on: nothing did happen. Nothing did come from it.
What work of yours didn’t get the attention that it deserved?
I’ve always had an itch that I’ve wanted to scratch, I guess Peter Serafinowitz has done it too, which is to try and recreate programs and television from my childhood. He did it with Look Around You and some other things. I just love the attention to detail of replicating that. I’ve tried it twice, and both times the YouTube views were extraordinarily low compared to everything else I’ve done, but I absolutely love entering a world, so I’ve created a I created a fake TV channel called Coldhaven, and I’ve done three videos, and the amount of effort I’ve put into it… it takes such a long time, and I get no reward whatsoever. But I absolutely love it. I love it so much and I love creating that world. I suppose it would be kind of like, Do you know The Prisoner? If you can imagine that having its own TV channel, it’s kind of similar to that. It’s got this sort of, it’s almost got this sinister, dark edge to it.
I went down a rabbithole on YouTube once with these, these creators who’ve kind of got Blair Witch vibes, but it’s not particularly horror filled. It’s just got forgotten TV stations you never knew about, forgotten children’s shows and things like that. Do you know Creepy Pasta? I love all that and I don’t think British television has ever really tapped into that. I mean, you’ve got Adult Swim and American creators that are doing it, but you don’t get any British you don’t get British creators doing that. It’s the idea that you’ve found a tape, you found a tape in the loft, and you’ve played it, and now it’s kind of completely unedited, and you’ve just put it on YouTube. I like the idea of found footage, I guess.
What did 12-year-old you imagine that you’d be doing now?
This. I can’t remember a time where I didn’t want to do this. I’ve got cassette tapes from when I was about 10, where I’m just making up my own shows, my own sketch shows. When my parents got me a camcorder when I was about 13, I would just make TV shows. I’d make my own stuff, yeah. And the weird thing is, of course, is that you had nowhere to show it. You couldn’t post it, not like children now, they couldn’t put you post it on YouTube. But I had nowhere to put it, so I would just get my family to sit in the living room.
What’s the worst advice you’ve ever been given?
don’t think I’ve ever got any advice other than, other than my history teacher telling my parents that I’d make a great accountant a parent’s evening. Yeah, and that was a real sort of eye opener in terms of the disconnect between my education and me. They simply had no idea who I was.
I’m assuming you were more into subjects like English?
Yeah, I failed maths. I literally failed maths. It was all about storytelling for me and acting and performing, and I suppose that that that did carry on into my work, so people at work had no idea what I was doing or who I was. It was strange actually, because towards the end, I was getting so much coverage that people were like coming out to me at my desk and saying” You were on the news, on the news! I said, “Oh, well, I’ve got a tour coming up, and they wanted to interview me.” Why have you got a tour coming up? I don’t understand?” I’d tell them “You need to go online and see what I’m doing, although I’d rather you didn’t, because that would make this office life very awkward.”
What’s the worst job you’ve ever had?
I worked for a website that tried to style itself as an alternative to Time Out, basically. And the whole business model was: let’s feed the Google algorithm with search terms and metadata so it’s actually unreadable to the human eye, but Google love it so it ranks really high. This was back in the days when something that ranked highly on Google, you could sell for 100 million pounds. It was kind of around the time of the dot com bubble bursting, but people could still sell their website, their idea for hundreds and hundreds of millions of pounds. And this was just a completely unreadable, horrible garbage website. Rather than write, like a writer would do, I just had to make sure it was full of search terms, like an Amazon product page, just absolute crap. And we had to write about London, which is one of the most beautiful, thriving cities, and do it in this totally awful way that was only designed to appease the Google overlords, and it was just utterly awful. And everybody was just committed to this because they knew that 10 years down the line they would sell this website and make millions of pounds. Of course, they didn’t realise that the credit crunch would happen and I’d be made redundant, and the company folded. It was just a disaster.
If you had to have a song playing every time you walked into a room, what would it be?
I think this actually taps into what I was talking about found footage, because what I also really like is vaporwave, which kind of accompanies it because it’s, it’s got that VHS sound. I really like anything that’s got a VHS hiss underneath it. I like weather channel music that’s been ripped and sounds distorted and strange. There’s somebody who does like video game menu music as well, I love all of that. One of my favourite, one of my favourite tracks of all time, if not me, my favorite track, is a song called ‘Visa Delta’ by a guy or a group or a woman – I’ve no idea – called Clinton Affair. I think it is just a video game menu music track, and it’s not very long, it’s just a loop. But for some reason I love that song more than anything else.
I mean, that is very random but unfortunately, that’s the way my mind works. I can’t really think of anything funny to say, but it does tap into my view of the world. I’m not saying this a pompous way, but I just don’t listen to pop music. I just like really strange, weird tracks. I love using this kind of music for comedy sketches and things like that; for some reason, it really accompanies it very well.
What’s the skill that no one else knows that you’re great at?
My son’s got into The Simpsons recently. He’s only 11, and he said, “Can you do anyone in The Simpsons?” When The Simpsons first came out, and I was a boy, I tried doing all of their voices. I was obsessed with all the characters and doing all their voices. I just love doing voices. Love doing characters, and I love the fact that most of Springfield is just two men, so I was kind of obsessed with that. So I think I’m pretty decent at doing impressions of most of Springfield’s residents.
Unfortunately that won’t translate that well into this article…
Haha no. But perhaps on top of that, as well as being obsessed with the voices I was also quite good at art when I was a boy, and I perfected the drawing of them as well. I can draw Homer Simpson in six seconds. And the only reason I know that is because I did it. I had a Vine account, if you can remember those, they were only six seconds long. And for a time, I was trying to draw Simpsons characters in that six seconds and then just filming it and posting it for for the gratification of about 11 people.
Now that is article friendly. I wonder if you can draw me one?
Absolutely…
