Ben Miller and Alexander Armstrong are taking their BBC One sketch show on the road. Ahead of their Dundee performance this week, Jack McKeown caught up with one half of the Bafta-winning double act.
Ben Miller met Alexander Armstrong while the two were students at Cambridge University in the early 1990s. They performed their first full-length show at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1994 and returned two years later, when they were nominated for the Perrier Comedy Award.
In 2001, Ben starred in Steve Coogan’s first feature film, The Parole Officer, and, in 2003, he played Rowan Atkinson’s sidekick in Johnny English, a parody of the James Bond films with the tagline He knows no fear, he knows no danger, he knows nothing.
Since then he’s featured in the romantic comedy The Prince and Me and starred as James Lester in the ITV sci-fi drama Primeval. He has the further distinction of looking uncannily like the Welsh comedian and actor Rob Brydon.
When The Courier catches up with him, Ben is combining a filming schedule for Johnny English Reborn, which stars Atkinson, Gillian Anderson and The Wire’s Dominic West, with taking The Armstrong and Miller Show on the road.
“I only got one hour’s sleep last night,” he explains. “So excuse me if I don’t make any sense. I like being busy but this is a case of be careful what you wish for.”
The show has a custom-built set that is transported from venue to venue. But all of the technical wizardry would be for naught if it weren’t for Armstrong and Miller’s ability to keep coming up with characters and situations that make people laugh.
“In terms of the creative process, it’s all about people we used to know and people we meet,” Ben says. “A lot of the characters are composites of friends and acquaintances of ours. We’ll say ‘you know how so-and-so does this, well how about they also did that’.
“And, of course, there are teachers. The teachers you had in high school are one of the greatest comedy resources, probably not just for us but for most of the comedy community. As a teenager you spend all this time with a neurotic adult who’s given control over a roomful of young people. It’s quite terrifying.”The Armstrong and Miller Show is in the Caird Hall, Dundee, on Thursday, October 21, at 8pm. For tickets, call the box office on 01382 434940 or visit www.cairdhall.co.uk