Alumni Profile: Dominic Brigstocke

Dominic Brigstocke (Archaeology and Anthropology, 1979)

By Mark A. Walsh (English, 1997)

You may not know Dominic Brigstocke by name, but you will definitely have heard of his work. That’s a bold claim to make at the beginning of a profile, but it’s hard to imagine anyone growing up in Britain from the 90s onwards who hasn’t heard of Steve Coogan, or Caroline Aherne, or Dawn French, or Armando Iannucci.

Or Jonathan Ross or Clive James or Olivia Colman or Sally Phillips.

Dominic has worked with them all. His directorial credits read like a roll call of some of the most influential comedy shows of the past 30 years: Alan Partridge, The Mrs Merton Show, Smack the Pony, Green Wing, Horrible Histories … the list goes on.

Considering all that, you could forgive Dominic if he were somewhat full of himself. But it’s a beaming, friendly grin that comes through the screen when we connect for our interview. He has a comfortable, confident manner, though he does worry about the angle of his camera—not surprising for a multi- Bafta-award-winning director.

It quickly emerges that Dominic puts a lot of his success down to a kind of iron determination. Dominic was born in Nigeria in 1960, ‘One of the last children of the colonial era’, as he puts it. His father worked as a colonial administrator but it is his mother who seems to have given him his ‘pig-headedness’.

Dominic’s father bought an 8mm camera to film his mother disembarking from the plane in Nigeria (they had met in London). It would prove a fateful piece of fun. His mother took a shine to the camera and would film great chunks of the upbringing of her four children. ‘I found this fascinating. She let me use her old camera, so I started making films when I was 11. I’d always found film and theatre performances absolutely riveting. At a very early age I had an urge to do this and my parents planted that seed completely by accident.’

The family moved back to England in 1963, and Dominic was sent to boarding school at 7. He hated it. ‘I didn’t like a moment of it, but it does teach you independence and self-reliance.’ After finally knuckling down at school to get ‘much better than expected’ grades, he met with the headteacher about applying to read Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge. ‘He said, “I’ve had a letter from Girton; they’re taking men for the first time. Why don’t you give that a try?”’

That first year with men in the College was a fairly extraordinary environment, Dominic remembers. ‘Not all the women were pleased to see men admitted,’ Dominic adds. ‘A few obviously were a bit peeved that their bluestocking, pioneering women’s college had been ruined. And in a sense, it had.’

Dominic threw himself into College life. He joined the JCR Committee as Social Secretary, played for the first Girton men’s rugby team (players were so scarce they had to borrow footballers to make up numbers), helped run the Film Society, started a mobile disco, and staged a production of an Ibsen play. In fact Dominic’s extensive involvement in extracurricular activities drew the attention of his ‘extremely patient’ Director of Studies, Dr Joan Oates, who advised that he needed to make more of an effort if he were to obtain his degree.

Girton was not the only exciting place to be in Cambridge in the late 1970s. The likes of Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry, Tilda Swinton and Emma Thompson were all at the University. Dominic was starstruck. ‘It was inspiring, they were clearly stars at that age.’ Dominic wanted to be involved, but ‘it was far too intimidating’.

Instead, it was a chance meeting with a fellow Girtonian that gave him the necessary push. Sandi Toksvig sat next to him in a lecture one day and they started to chat. He told her he wanted to work in theatre or films. ‘She said, “Oh, funnily enough that’s what I want to do”,’ Dominic recalls. Toksvig invited Dominic to help with her show at the Edinburgh Fringe. He then worked at the festival every year for some six years, eventually running his own venue and gaining invaluable experience.

At the same time, he kept applying to the BBC. It would become another marker of his determination. After five or six failed interviews, he was asked what he would do if rejected again. Dominic told them he would just try anew. ‘They gave me the job! I think it was just to stop having to see me again,’ he laughs.

After completing an apprenticeship, Dominic left the BBC for the independent sector, eventually working with Jonathan Ross, Clive James and Barry Norman, and on The Crystal Maze. Then he got a call about a new project. It was to work with another rising young star: Armando Iannucci. The idea was to convert his radio show, created with an up-and-coming comedian, Steve Coogan, into a TV programme.

At first, Dominic demurred—he had already been offered the chance to direct an ITV sketch show—but he was about to get another piece of good advice. ‘They said, “I think you ought to do this. I think it might turn out to be quite good.”’. The programme, of course, was Knowing Me, Knowing You … With Alan Partridge. ‘It was the thing that made my comedy career,’ Dominic chuckles. ‘It’s a good job I was persuaded to do it.’

Iannucci and Coogan were commissioned to make a second series of the show, but after Alan killed a guest in the final episode there was some head scratching about how to continue—resulting in perhaps one of the greatest lost scripts in British comedy. As the story goes, they decided to do something different with Alan’s second series: a sitcom. ‘They spent six months writing the first script of I’m Alan Partridge, and by the end they were so bored of it, they threw it away,’ Dominic says. ‘But I read it, and it was genius. It was absolutely hilarious,’ he insists. ‘My biggest mistake in life was throwing the script away. It would be gold now.’

As it turned out, Iannucci and Coogan decided on an anarchic creation process for I’m Alan Partridge, with just rough ideas for the storyline of each episode and scripts emerging through rehearsal and improvisation. Dominic, the director, remembers moments of panic, not knowing the night before what would be filmed the next day. ‘Armando is relatively undisciplined, and I mean that in a creative and positive way; his methods of working are totally chaotic,’ Dominic says. ‘That’s why his work is always fresh and different and interesting.’

What emerged was a seminal moment in British comedy. Iannucci asked Dominic to give the programme a documentary feel and I’m Alan Partridge had what was for a sitcom a highly unusual four-walled set with handheld cameras within the set. Coogan would try to learn his lines while getting his makeup done; in front of the audience sometimes he’d lose his place and flip forward during a scene, throwing the other actors for a loop. ‘It had a sense of genuinely being improvised in front of the audience because nobody was absolutely sure what was going to happen,’ Dominic says.

Partridge was a triumph. Nowadays, the influence of the naturalistic, documentary-style comedy is clear to see in a wave of sitcoms that followed, including The Office and The Royle Family. Coogan and Caroline Aherne, already good friends, fed off each other. ‘The connection between Partridge and The Royle Family is very direct. They were watching each other’s shows.’ Dominic was also behind the camera for one of the most famous lines in British comedy, when Aherne’s Mrs Merton character asks magician’s assistant Debbie McGee, ‘What first attracted you, Debbie, to the millionaire Paul Daniels?’

By now Dominic was an established comedy director, working on a slew of critically acclaimed series such as Smack the Pony and Green Wing, and directing shows for Harry Enfield, Smith and Jones, Armstrong and Miller, and many others. In the 2010s, he was one of the masterminds behind adapting the Horrible Histories set of books, created by Terry Deary. ‘We were very ambitious from the beginning. We wanted to make something Pythonesque. We loved Life of Brian and The Holy Grail. We were inspired by comedy history of the past, so we looked at the stoning scene from Life of Brian and the leeches scene from Blackadder. And we showed it to the writers and said, “That’s what we want to do.” We thought we were going to have to make stuff up, but actually history is so ridiculous,’ he adds.

Dominic directed four of the first five series and was behind the camera again for the 2019 Horrible Histories film. Unlike other projects, where he was tasked with bringing into reality somebody else’s vision, this time Dominic was centrally involved in the development of the idea, much of it set in Iron Age Britain. ‘It was my baby, and I’m very proud of it,’ he says. ‘And it’s the first time I’ve put my degree to any practical use in my entire career.’