Grandma's House on BBC2

Since Simon has left Never Mind The Buzzcockes, I haven't had any chance to see him on TV, but now he's back. It's planned only six episodes though, it's better than nothing.

Amstell's in the house
Simon Amstell takes on his first acting role in Grandma's House, which starts on BBC2 on Monday. The acerbic presenter talks to Lisa Williams about playing a version of his ‘idiotic' self, why he needed to leave Popworld and Never Mind the Buzzcocks, and why his mum will love the new show

Published: 05/08/2010

SIMON Amstell's mum might be cross to see that he hasn't eaten his greens. Instead, he has left them in a neat pile at the side of his plate and, as I walk in to meet him, he greets me saying: “Hello. Would you like some spinach? Or a mushroom?”

It's that kind of oddball humour which has made him famous. Sacked from children's channel Nickelodeon for being too sarcastic, in 2000 his superbly sharp tongue found a happy home on Channel 4's Popworld.

He and co-presenter Miquita Oliver broke the mould for TV interviews at the time by refusing to ask guests the standard questions about their music, preferring instead to tease the pop stars, and make them take part in silly stunts. Simon's ranged from the childish (asking Britney Spears to lick a battery, offering Gwen Stefani a piece of cheese) to the more controversial (flirting with reggae star Beenie Man), and some acts, such as The Kooks, refused to return to the show.

After six years on Popworld, Simon became the host of pop quiz Never Mind the Buzzcocks, taking over from the similarly acerbic Mark Lamarr and taking with him Popworld writer Dan Swimer.

While Never Mind the Buzzcocks was a new format for him, Simon found the cutting humour was the same (he made Preston of The Ordinary Boys walk out from filming after joking about his then wife) and quit after three years.

During our meeting, the most offensive thing about him is his vegetable dodging, otherwise the 30-year-old is gentle and self-deprecating, looking out cautiously from a mop of dark curls.

He was there to promote Grandma's House, a new family sitcom which he has co-written with Swimer. Set in a family house in Gants Hill, the suburb on London where Simon grew up, and exploring the eccentricities of a close-knit family, it will draw inevitable comparisons with the Manchester-set Royle Family.

“Will it?” asks Simon.

“It's probably just because it's in a living room the whole time, but we venture to the driveway as well, you do see a driveway,” he jokes.

On a more-serious note, Simon says the shows are quite different because Grandma's House has “more conflict and probably more story", but he acknowledges that a comparison with the Bafta-winning Royle Family is not such a bad thing.

“It was probably one of the last good ones, right? Or am I leaving something out?” he asks.

I mention Outnumbered and My Family.

“No, The Royle Family is the last good family sitcom in my mind,” he says mischievously.

Simon plays himself in the series, but he's not saying how closely his on-screen relatives resemble his own.

“I don't want to go into specifics because I quite like the idea of people wondering,” he says, thoughtfully.

In the first episode, he announces to his mum, played by The Thick of It's Rebecca Front, that he wants to leave his presenting job on an unnamed vitriolic television show to pursue something more meaningful.

The comedian admits that this reference is thinly-veiled.

“With both Popworld and Buzzcocks, I felt we were about to start repeating ourselves,” he says.

“Is this the more meaningful thing? I suppose so; I've always wanted to do something like this. Also, I realised I'd been taking the mickey out of pop stars for about eight years or something and I slowly realised that every time I was really just having a go at myself or my father or something. It feels a lot better for the soul, actually, attacking yourself rather than attacking innocent bystanders.”

Simon swears that the version of himself in Grandma's House is “quite close to me ? upsettingly so.”

He goes on: “When we were writing it, we realised we needed to take everything that was awful about me and put it into the show and so it's essentially me. Even when we'd finished it and I bought some new clothes and I thought ‘I won't be that idiot any more', I'm still that idiot.”

Some of the “idiotic” behaviour we witness in the show includes him refusing to warm to his mum's new boyfriend, Clive, played by Rebecca's The Thick of It co-star James Smith, and saying “what are you telling me for? I'm only 12,” when his grandad tells him he's got cancer.

His grandad, poignantly, is played by Geoffrey Hutchings, who died last month from a suspected viral infection.

Simon has only fond memories of Geoffrey, describing him as “very funny, and a fine actor”.

“I tended to shout and scream a lot if I was doing an emotional scene, or I'd meditate a bit to try to relax myself, and I saw, in one of the rushes when we were editing, Geoffrey saying to one of the guest stars: ‘Yeah, that's going to help',” he recalls.

Geoffrey's experience as an actor and the talent of the whole cast, including East is East actress Linda Basset, who plays Grandma, was helpful for Simon, as he admits he was nervous about taking on his first acting role.

“It was very scary and that's one of the reasons why I needed such a good cast, because then I'd be good at it maybe, with them around, or they'd detract from my ungood acting,” he says.

It would appear that Simon's self-effacement is also, like his onscreen cockiness, an act. But he claims that, in Grandma's House, in which he whines about being lonely and offers his thoughts on being Jewish and gay, he is his true self.

“I don't know if you could get much closer to exposing who I am. I think it's all there. There's nothing missing, to the point that I got a new therapist the other day and I thought of just sending her a few DVDs and telling her not to ask me any questions,” he says, joking, or at least, I think he's joking.

Watching Grandma's House will certainly be interesting for Simon's family, too, who might spot some of themselves in the stories on screen.

Simon's mum is a fan already.

“My mum likes it, but my mum likes anything on television, so she would have liked to see my face going ‘ra ra ra',” he says, pretending to growl.

But just wait until she finds out about the greens.

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