Comedian Robert Webb has always had a 'bee in his bonnet' about the expectations that boys hide their feelings and play the tough guy. The Peep Show star writes about life, death and gender in the new part-memoir part-manifesto How Not to Be A Boy.
Photo: supplied
On his beloved mother
Lots of worse things happen to people all the time but I lost my mum when I was 17.
My dad and my stepdad were in the kitchen when I came home from school. I was in the lower sixth at the time, I came in - my dad had had a couple of drinks and he put it in a very blunt way: 'Your mum's poorly, boy, it's terminal.' And that was kind of that.
And he immediately started to talk to my stepdad about whether he might need to get a cleaner in. They wanted to transfer this conversation on to something they could handle.
This might ring true with other men, but when you say to a boy 'man up' or 'act like a man' or 'grow up' often what you're saying to them is stop feeling this fear, or stop feeling this grief, or stop feeling this anxiety or shame or embarrassment.
You are encouraged, as a boy, to shrug off, bottle up, ignore, switch off these negative emotions and it doesn't do any good. And often these emotions come out in some way and if they have to they often come out as anger - because it's boyish and man-like to be angry. It's one of the emotions that we feel acceptable in traditional masculinity.
So you get boys and men who get angry when they are ashamed, or embarrassed or they're angry when they're frightened. You pull all of this stuff through adolescence into a kind of half-formed adulthood and it leaves you totally unprepared for adversity.
The writing was on the wall - my mother had been in bed for a very long time she was getting weaker and weaker, and sicker and sicker but no one really actually said to me she wasn't going to get better.
When mum died I was surrounded by people. I was very grateful for their kindness, but they were saying 'if you want to talk to someone I'm here' and I was thinking 'Well, this is novel! What talking? What's talking? What, now you want me to talk?'
I'd been specifically trained not to talk, I experienced that as pressure … 'Just talk, just talk'. Well, what will talking do?
I did talk eventually, but it took me three years before I started talking about that pain and that terrible thing that happened.
I loved her, she was the rock in the middle of my life, and she died.
On his biological father
Mum and dad divorced when I was five. He was a very frightening presence when I lived with him but he became a person who trusted himself to be nice twice a year when I was growing up.
He was a man of his time - the mid-70s. He drank a fair bit, he punished his sons physically, but to contextualise that this was a time when there was still corporal punishment in primary schools in Britain.
You could still come at a nine-year-old with a stick and be considered a model teacher. It was a very different time and place.
My mother had had enough of it by the time I was five and she got rid of him - for that and other reasons. As I say, I tried to be fair to him in the book and I hope that it's a generous book.
[My father and I] came to an accommodation. We never quite saw eye-to-eye, but I learned to like him and find and appreciate the admirable things about him. He was a very generous man in many ways, and very charismatic, and everyone loved him.
He didn't so much live in that village as host it. He'd walk into the pub and you'd watch the whole room just subtly adjust its attention in his direction as if they were in for a treat. But they didn't have to live with him. That was the difference. I was very proud of him for being this popular guy and it wasn't just because he was funny, it was because he was straight-forwardly kind, he was a local businessman. He got easily bored and he'd do various different jobs he was a coal merchant then he opened a fruit and veg shop, he did people's gardens.
He would give stuff away to his friends for free all the time and the fact he was on first name terms with 80 percent of the village meant that he never made any money, and what money he did make he immediately drank. But that was his life.
On therapy
By that time I was at university [Cambridge] they happened to offer a free university counselling service. Something else went wrong that I got upset about, so upset that I didn't eat for a couple of weeks.
I thought this can't be right, it must be something else, and I turned up there and there was an initial assessment - a 'how mad are you?' assessment.
The guy said 'You've had a lot of separation in your life and I think you've got a problem and I think we can help'. I started to go along for an hour a week and it made all the difference, really.
Not because the therapist was there curing me particularly, but you knew all week long here's a particularly nasty thing in my head and I've been having suicidal thoughts again and this is something I can talk to Michael about on Thursday at 10am as usual.
On his comedy roots
Mum's death emboldened me. I knew I was funny, I did impressions of teachers and I would make up stupid songs or change the lyrics to pop songs.
By the time I was 13 - I had a terrific teacher who encouraged me - I was doing comedy sketches at school at the end of term I'd write sketch shows to raise money for charity. It was all in aid of charity but mainly to get girls to fancy me - it didn't work.
On parenting his two daughters
'The 'trick' is the family codeword for, frankly, the patriarchy. 'Patriarchy' is not a word I use in the book very often, because, you know, I want people to buy it!
[His wife] Abbie was looking at a catalogue about handbags or something, she was saying 'This is a lot of nonsense, trying to make women buy handbags because of the patriarchy'. It's that kind of family, she's not one to hold back with vocabulary like that!
Essie said 'What's the 'paytreecarcky?' It came back as the 'paytreecarcky' and became the 'trick'.
It's the way we refer to how boys and girls are expected to behave in certain ways because of the accident of their chromosomes.
Esme, who was about five at the time, was having a conversation with her mother, my wife Abbie, it was going to be a non-uniform day at school and she said 'If I go as Spiderman instead of as a princess will people laugh at me?'
Her mother said 'They might laugh, and if they do laugh what will you say?'
Essie said 'Shall I tell them they're laughing because of the 'trick' that makes men sad and women get rubbish jobs?'
Of course, boys and girls are different biologically. Of course, we have different contributions to make to a shared reproduction system. But over and above that, a lot of stuff about how we expect them to behave, what they're supposed to do for a living, their different attitudes to family life - a lot of that is made up, constructed and total nonsense and holds both boys and girls back.
It's something we're trying to get the girls to name when they see it, it's not interfering with biology - that's just a straightforward duty of care.
On gender
I've always had this bee in my bonnet about masculinity and about and how boys are supposed to be boys because I found it quite a tight fit when I was growing up.
I didn't want to be a girl. I didn't have a problem with my sex-assignment, but the gender that you put on top of sex - about how boys are supposed to be good at maths and science and running and jumping and climbing trees and they're cheeky and loud - I couldn't do any of that so I found it all quite a tough fit. So I've always been interested in it.
On rereading his teenage diaries for the book
There's [parts of the diary] that are hard and there's just embarrassed! The hard stuff was I happened to be keeping my diary while my mum got ill and died and so obviously those entries are quite tough.
The thing is I've had 27 years to get used to the idea that my mum died and I feel a responsibility to the reader to not drop that bombshell on them without a certain decorum and looking after them I feel this weird duty of care if you like towards the reader.
Most of it is just excruciatingly embarrassing. Me repeating this amazing cycle of falling in love with, or becoming massively infatuated with girls - and occasionally boys, actually, at the time - and finding they weren't interested and becoming extremely despondent and miserable. And repeating the whole thing again, and again and again.
What I wanted to do is go back to that teenager and tell him to get a bath more than once a week, that school blazer you've been wearing five days a week, three years running could probably do with a wash ... you know practical things … maybe have a mint.
