Grumpy glory

10:37am Thursday 13th November 2008

Jack Dee tells Kate Whiting that the US is keen to look at his sitcom, Lead Balloon, but he has no intention of trying his luck in America.

IT’S a common misconception that comedian Jack Dee is the grumpiest man on the planet. But at the launch of the third series of his BBC2 sitcom Lead Balloon, the 46-year-old is in a buoyant mood and playfully pokes fun at his grouchy TV persona.

“I was in Norfolk filming in an episode of Kingdom a couple of weeks ago and I rang home and Charlie, one of my ten-year-old twins, said ‘what are you doing?’ and I said ‘I’m in a TV show called Kingdom’ and he said ‘oh yeah, are you playing a grumpy guy again?’”

Dee has a lot of reasons to smile. Rather than going down like the proverbial lead balloon, his self-penned sitcom has won positive reviews as well as a British Comedy Award nomination last year.

The third series has been given the 10pm slot, normally occupied by the likes of Graham Norton – and there’s a 40-minute Christmas episode on the way.

Lead Balloon is also crossing the pond to be shown on BBC America this winter and a US production company is buying the format to make an American version.

“It’s being accepted in the industry over there – a lot of people have really loved it and been in touch. I’ve got no intention of going over there to try my luck, though I’m far too old. The thing about America, it’s bloody miles away, I have a family and I don’t want to travel that much,” he says.

For those new to the show, father-of-four Dee plays Rick Spleen, a hapless stand-up comedian in London who faces an embarrassing situation every episode.

His life revolves around his relationships with his wife Mel (Raquel Cassidy), daughter Sam (Antonia Campbell Hughes), cowriter Marty (Sean Power), cafe owner Michael (Tony Gardner) and Eastern Eiropean housekeeper Magda (Anna Crilly).

Dee came up with the idea in 2005 and started writing the show with frequent collaborator Pete Sinclair.

“Originally I was very interested in the process in a writing room backstage where you have a presenter or a comedian with writers,” he explains.

“The dynamic always interested me and how the presenters could take the jokes and tell them and then take credit for them. And the atmosphere is quite amazing, people are vehemently rude to each other but don’t take offence. So we thrashed the idea into something with a domestic background.”

This series sees Rick land the lead role of Eddie in a BBC series called All About Eddie, uncover some unwanted truths about his family in a show called Where Are You From? (a clone of Who Do You Think You Are?) and appear in panto.

The inevitable question is how much of Jack Dee is there in Rick Spleen?

“I like to think it’s not me… then other people say ‘nah, we think it’s you’. But Rick’s not a very good comedian.

“My wife Jane says it’s like me, but the relationship between Rick and Mel is quite different from mine and Jane. I don’t think I’d get away with half the stuff that Rick does.”

Will we ever see Rick become as successful as Dee though?

“He nearly becomes successful in every episode, it keeps him going, and that’s one of the things I like about him – he gets so excited at the slightest morsel of hope that comes his way.

“There’s an episode where his daughter Sam and her boyfriend form a band with some success and it’s quite poignant because he’s so proud of her in one way but at the same time he’s trumped at everything he does.”

WITH the likes of Lead Balloon, The Office and Extras leading the way for charmless situation comedies filmed without a studio audience, does Dee think we’re seeing a sitcom renaissance in Britain?

“It’s very hard to judge those things until later, but I don’t think any of us were conscious of doing a show that was in the mode of the other ones. I just love comedy that doesn’t tell you when to laugh.”

Dee was brought up in Winchester and at 21, found himself working as a manager of a pizza restaurant in London.

Then, on the eve of his 25th birthday, he did a five-minute spot at an open mic night at the Comedy Store and has never looked back.

“It’s a funny thing, because I think if I hadn’t given it a try in the first place, if I’d bottled it and thought ‘what am I thinking, I’m not going to get on stage, that’s stupid’ then maybe nothing would have happened.

“But in any career that’s vocational, or involves something you have a talent for whether it’s writing or acting, I think it finds you in the end, it hunts you down if you’re not going to do it yourself.”

“For me, it’s just like being a schizophrenic and hearing my name whispered around my ears, but it’s worse for my wife, because if she’s walking behind me in the supermarket, she gets all the comments.

“It’s happened a couple of times where someone will nudge her and say ‘do you know who that is?’ and she says ‘no’,” he says in that deadpan delivery.

The comedian has turned his hand to writing a book. “It’s not really an autobiography, it’s more the world as I see it and how I came to talk about the things I talk about on stage. I’m sick of people laughing at this stuff, I want them to know the pain behind it,” he says, giggling.

■ Lead Balloon, BBC2, today, 10pm