The actor and author on his mother’s death, meeting David Mitchell and why being funny is the best way to slide under men’s emotional radar
I meet Robert Webb at Ham – a restaurant named not for any staple piggy fare, but for Anglo-Saxon etymology (“home”). We are, obviously, in north London. In a private attempt to marry the two concepts implied by the name I choose a cooked breakfast, while Webb is seduced by the waitress’s upbeat talk of what varied and happy lives Ham’s chickens have led before finding their way into today’s special. He’s been here a couple of times before with his wife and fellow comedian, Abbie Burdess, and their two young daughters – and more often in a previous incarnation when it was called Brioche, and Bill Nighy was to be seen reading the paper. Today, the hottest April day since Daily Express headlines began, we are surrounded almost exclusively by ladies who brunch. Being blokes, at least in our subterranean lizard brains, we reflexively mumble about whether we would be better off in the moody-looking boozer across the road, before beginning a conversation about masculinity and its discontents, the subject of Webb’s memoir, How Not to be a Boy.
The book started out, he suggests, as a bit of a sociological treatise, with chapters on style magazines and Top Gear. Fortunately he abandoned that and wrote mostly about the two men he probably knew best, at least in his formative years, himself and his father, Paul. The latter was a man’s man, in the sense that once Webb met a stranger in a local bar who confided to him: “If you’re going to Woodhall, look up Paul Webb. You won’t find anyone better for drinking, fucking and fighting.” At the time, Webb was home in Lincolnshire from university at Cambridge where he had become a star turn with Footlights. His parents had divorced after his drunk and violent father had walked out when he was six. He was back living with Paul in the holidays, though, because his mum had died of cancer the year before. In a Footlights pantomime – his first time on stage with David Mitchell – Webb had created a character called Frank Spaniel from Wood Dyke village: “I’m Frank Spaniel and I have three boys and one of them is an actor and a queer but we don’t talk about it …”
I don’t want men only going around saying exactly what they feel and bursting into tears
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