First of all, thanks to all of you who have signed up to this newsletter. I will do my best to repay your faith. The New Nimble will be mainly about my work taking improv to business. But how did I get into improv in the first place?
In the mid-Eighties, I was doing a show with my ex-Cambridge Footlights pals at the Gate Theatre, a very small venue above a pub in West London. Mike had heard of the Footlights because half of Monty Python had come from there. So he knocked on the door of this low-rent pub theatre and asked if he could help. (He had only just moved to London so knew nobody in showbiz.) They had him paint our set and sell tickets for us.
I will tell the whole story elsewhere, but soon we were doing a double-act (called, shockingly, Mullarkey & Myers, https://www.allthatmullarkey.com/doubleacts.html). Mike told me all about improv, especially about where he had learned it, https://www.secondcity.com, where he had been part of the troupe touring Canada.
Soon we had started The Comedy Store Players https://comedystoreplayers.com. We still perform improv every Sunday, in the centre of London.
Mike returned to Canada after we’d done a sell-out run of our two-man show at the Edinburgh Festival. This video is wrongly labelled 1985 …
In it I play Dr Wicked. He’s invisible, so has to wear a tea towel over his head.
Mike and I have kept in touch ever since, doing our show in Toronto several times, him guesting with the Players, or asking me to help write on a movie and a television show he’s done, plus my two cameos in Austin Powers movies.
I am eternally grateful to him, not least for introducing me to improv.
Tonight you will see Mike featured in a commercial during the Super Bowl. He told me he’s very pleased with how it’s come out…