Steve's Interviews

[uwwedoogie]

Can anybody rip this for non UK members?

[Paute]

Can anybody rip this for non UK members?

It's our stigma.

[Extras]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0O-fwg1aJqQ

They also ask Steve if he has any involvement in Derek.

[Brent Hogwell]

Steve on Danny Baker's 5Live show right now.

[Brent Hogwell]

Only caught the end of it, he told an extended version of the passport expiry story.

[Robyn]

Nothing earth-shattering, tho I did titter when he mentioned his "core, cult following" in America.

[MikeB]

Apologies if this has been posted before.

Stephen Merchant Moves From Gervais's Shadow to Stand-Up - NYTimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/15/arts/television/stephen-merchant-moves-from-gervaiss-shadow-to-stand-up.html?_r=1&ref=arts

LONDON — The first thing Stephen Merchant does in his new stand-up act is seize the elephant in the room and wrestle it to the ground.

“Any money I make,” he tells the audience, glinting happily, “I don’t have to share with you-know-who.”

We all know who you-know-who is: Ricky Gervais, Mr. Merchant’s writing partner and the familiar figure fronting their many joint projects, including “The Office,” British television’s most successful comedy export in years. Although Mr. Merchant has sometimes appeared in front of the camera, most memorably as Mr. Gervais’s dumb-as-a-brick agent in “Extras,” he has always seemed happy to hover in the background while his friend soaks up all the credit.

Not anymore. Mr. Merchant strode out on his own this autumn and is just finishing playing to sold-out crowds in a 42-city, 80-date “Hello Ladies” stand-up tour across Britain. The tour, which is to move to Town Hall in Manhattan on Tuesday and Wednesday, his stand-up debut in the States, is actually a return to something: Mr. Merchant had made a modest name for himself on the stand-up comedy circuit before meeting Mr. Gervais in 1997.

Mr. Merchant’s comedy routine is gentler, less spiky and less meant to provoke or spread uneasiness than that of his prickly, controversialist friend. He lampoons his own extreme stinginess (“If you go on a Steve date, there will be no popcorn”); his extreme height (he’s 6 foot 7; “I spent a lot of my youth leaning”); and his extreme haplessness, as when an attractive woman in a crowd at Trafalgar Square asked him to wait for her, “because my friends and I have arranged to meet back at you.”

The audience loves him, and so do critics. “Where Merchant excelled over his accomplice was by avoiding the sneering narcissism that has crept into Gervais’s manner since success has encompassed him,” Paul Rowland wrote in a review in The Western Mail this fall.

In a recent interview backstage at the Hammersmith Apollo theater here, where he was set to go on in an hour or so, Mr. Merchant proved to be tall and reedy even beyond expectation. He has been compared to a “telegraph pole with a head,” an “elongated Cheshire cat” and a “giant albatross hopping on stilts.” (That was meant to describe him dancing.) But what he really looks like is Mike Teavee from “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” post-stretching.

Mr. Merchant, 37, goes out of his way in the act to present himself as inept, verging on hopeless, and as being thwarted at every turn by Mr. Gervais’s brighter star. He shows the audience the first photograph of him ever to appear in a British newspaper. Here, projected on a giant screen above the stage, is the “Office” team at the Golden Globes in 2004, and there is Mr. Merchant proudly standing behind Mr. Gervais — with his head mostly cut off. He then displays an early Guardian article about the partners, in which he is referred to, even in the headline, as “Stephen Mitchell.”

“The idea is that I’m secure enough to play an insecure person,” he said of his onstage persona. “A lot of stand-up comedians are actually very insecure, and they come on slightly battling the audience. They want to be the superior person in the room, sneering at the world. That can be very funny. But to me what’s more interesting is that the world is on my shoulders, and it’s pushing me down.”

He said he did not feel so pathetic in reality, though he was coy when asked about his true-life romantic situation. “I’m not going out with anyone,” he said, “but I wouldn’t tell you if I was.”

Nor is he consumed by actual jealousy or resentment toward his more famous colleague. Having Mr. Gervais star in “The Office,” a show they created and wrote together, was completely natural, not a case of “Rick, let’s make you a star, and then in two years I’ll be a star,” he said. “It was, ‘Let’s make a TV show.’ We were just amazed we got something on TV.”

The show emerged from a short film about office life that Mr. Merchant made while on a BBC training course he had enrolled in to seek gainful employment after hosting an alternative-radio program with Mr. Gervais. “They gave me a camera team for a day and said, ‘Make something,’ ” he explained. “Everyone else did a real documentary, and we did a fake one. We went to Ricky’s old office and got some actor friends of mine to do some improvisations and cobbled this thing together, and his performance was off the charts.”

Even as Mr. Gervais has been propelled forward, Mr. Merchant has been doing stand-up quietly on the side, ducking into clubs and practicing little snippets. “So there was a little bit of downtime and I thought, ‘Oh, I’ve never really nailed it, and wouldn’t it be interesting to try again and see if I could be good at it?’ ”

For a performer Mr. Merchant has an unusual attitude toward performing, he says: he can take it or leave it.

“I’m weirdly unmoved by the applause,” he said. “I don’t feel like: ‘This is me at last. I’m only myself onstage.’ ”

And he would like to make it clear that he is not as aggressively parsimonious as the character he purports to be onstage. “I’m not mean and cheap about splitting a bill at a restaurant, but my thought is: That guy’s just had three courses and I’ve only had a starter?” Mr. Merchant said. And just the other day his accountants asked for four free tickets to his show. “I thought, ‘O.K., but you’re not going to give me free accountancy,’ ” he said. “I’m happy to give them tickets. But my mind is still telling me what a generous man I am.”

He does not know yet whether this will be the start of a new long-term career; he has found that the tour has become more grueling and the hotel rooms less thrilling than they used to be.

“I thought that sheer bloody professionalism would help carry me through, but at the moment I’m saying this is both my debut tour and my final farewell tour,” Mr. Merchant said. “Although stand-up is a little like malaria: you think it’s passed, but it’s there in you forever.”

[CantSayBien]

He said he did not feel so pathetic in reality, though he was coy when asked about his true-life romantic situation. “I’m not going out with anyone,” he said, “but I wouldn’t tell you if I was.”

I find it hard to believe he's still single ... he's much more confident and less "lanky goggle eyed freak"-esque than he used to be... not to mention a lot more rich

[DasLankyGogglEye]

He is naturally awkward though.

The newspaper descriptions of Steve's appearance just get more and more funny and bizarre. XD

[Jools Holland]

Steve will be on Opie and Anthony TODAY

It will no doubt be online soon after

[Iago]

Really looking forward to that O&A interview.

Simon Pegg is on too!
http://yfrog.com/obnumjyj

[Robyn]

Put it up on soundcloud, the full 35 mins or so.

http://soundcloud.com/tallbabyblog/stev ... anthony-19

[Iago]

Robyn - you are a golden god.

[Jools Holland]

Maybe i'm crazy, but Steve dosent seem as close to Ricky as he perhaps has been in the past
Ricky didnt even go see steves show
And they brought up Ricky on twitter, and i sensed a bit of angst towards the whole thing

[Anti_Nora]

Maybe i'm crazy, but Steve dosent seem as close to Ricky as he perhaps has been in the past
Ricky didnt even go see steves show
And they brought up Ricky on twitter, and i sensed a bit of angst towards the whole thing

They probably are a bit sick of each other at the moment. After Cemetery Junction, An Idiot Abroad and LTS it's time for a break and a rethinking of why they started writing together in the first place.