I met Rod 22 years ago this month. We had been selected as team-mates on a gameshow pilot, and, halfway through the morning’s filming, we went for a fag break. He said to me: ‘This is crap, shall we go to the pub?’ We scarpered and spent the rest of the day in a Covent Garden pub, working our way through the drinks list and chatting away like chipmunks.
He would tell me that all the best people treat their bodies like bins (and all the worst like temples)
I’d never been starstruck by anyone before I met Rod. However famous or talented actors are, their job is to say stuff written by other people. Rod, however, was a legend to me. I began reading his Guardian columns at university. Though I was studying all the greats of English literature, it was Rod’s writing which felt like a ribbon-wrapped gift, a treat, a joy.
His capacity to address dark, complex subjects with the lightness of a chef sprinkling icing sugar was dizzying. He was so profoundly funny, made each of his sketches look so easy, but beneath the deliberately pugnacious language a serious artist was at work.
I think I loved his language of insults the most: luckily, he issued forth a stream of them like a Middlesbrough Shakespeare.
I soon learned after meeting him that, beneath the merciless rapier-blade of his writing, nestled the sweetest man. A generous, sensitive, godly, honourable sweet-heart. He viewed the world through a loving and poetic lens, saving his acid for pomposity, falseness, injustice and hypocrisy.
He was also endearingly, maddeningly modest. I don’t think he had any clue how brilliant he was. I trusted him instinctively with everything, as I’m sure all his friends did, and he repaid me with thoughtful, funny, scrupulously honest kindness.
I think all his female friends would attest to how unusually wonderful and natural he was with women. He was complimentary in a heart-toasting, unpredatory way – ‘You’re a corker, Winkle-person’ – and pleasantly reassuring if I told him I was getting fat. ‘Don’t be such a mong,’ was always his response.
I worried about how much he drank and smoked – but then he’d tell me that all the best people treat their bodies like bins (and all the worst like temples) and to curtain-twitch elsewhere.
He was totally unjudgmental and always interested in everything, polymath that he was. When I mentioned becoming involved with the Big Issue, we chatted for a long time about how many homeless people had violent childhoods. He was passionately on the side of wronged people, wronged animals, wronged communities – a fighter for the forgotten, traduced and misrepresented like no other. Naturally he was also a gloriously lethal slayer of the jumped-up.
When he called to tell me he had cancer – ‘in my brain and lungs, so not too bad’ – he just wanted to talk about how wonderful all the nurses were. On the night before he died, his best friend Jez told me he was making all the nurses laugh.
A mighty oak has fallen. An oak in a black leather jacket, with a sweet, lugubrious expression and an accent that had curiously settled somewhere near the Midlands.
I will miss Rod painfully, as a friend both to me and to this troubled country which he loved so much.
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