Rob Brydon's Hay Homecoming

The Gavin and Stacey actor and comedian was met with a huge cheer from the audience of more than a thousand people at Hay, giving Brydon a homecoming to remember. He started to read from his autobiography Small Man in Book, but kept trailing off to explain and elaborate, leaving the audience in stitches at tales of his early years as a drama student in Cardiff, to his celebrity run-ins in his recent career (his Tom Jones impression in particular is formidable, for which Will.I.Am is now his biggest fan). 

 

Brydon’s act consisted mostly of his impeccable impressions, from Al Pacino to Michael Cain – but Brydon said he doesn’t like to be known as an impressionist because “it’s a bit meh….I was always drawn to actors who vaguely resemble myself, so short, dark, sexually dynamic actors: Pacino. De Niro. Corbett.”

 

His love of theatre started as a child; he hated his first week of secondary school, and his mother said he could go back to his old school if he still didn’t like it in a week’s time. But then he discovered the drama club. The same school and drama club, incidentally, as Ruth Jones attended. The pair became firm friends and acted in all the school’s productions together. “I said to [Ruth], in 25 years’ time if you write a play set on Barry Island can I play the uncle?”

 

Catherine Zeta Jones was an old schoolmate too, but Brydon said their paths only crossed several years later at a Bafta awards ceremony in London, when he humiliatingly queued up to congratulate the actress on her win only for her to lapse into a thick Swansea accent and tell him how she’d only seen their old headmaster the other day.

 

Brydon’s success was probably the most slow-burning of his Welsh classmates, with a non-starter career in local radio followed by a shopping channel. Gavin and Stacey was his big career break; the part was written for him by Jones and her co-writer James Corden. Brydon said his favourite episode of Gavin and Stacey was probably when the Wests and the Shipmans visited the beach, “because I got to rub sun cream into Larry Lamb’s chest”. 

 

His lovable character Uncle Brynn was based on somebody James Corden met at a wedding, and led to further television appearances, such as The Trip with Steve Coogan, in which the two toured pubs and restaurants around the Lake District. “We ate every meal three times,” Byrdon said. “Steve’s very clever – he pushes around the plate, but I just ate it all.”

 

And no, he wouldn’t disclose what happened on that fishing trip. 

 

Small Man in a Book by Rob Brydon is published by Michael Joseph