Emma McAlpine attends the London screening of Sarah Townsend's Emmy-nominated documentary about Eddie Izzard, ahead of its DVD release.
Most of us probably know a fair bit about Eddie Izzard. Top comedian, famous for dressing in drag and veering off on stream-of-conciousness tangents about being raised by wolves and wondering how Darth Vader might interact in the canteen of the Death Star. Now a successful actor in the States. Recently ran 43 marathons in 51 days for Sport Relief, an astounding achievement probably worth a documentary in itself. But Believe:The Eddie Izzard Story isn't about his marathon running. It's about his upbringing and a life obsessed with performing. And it's likely that, on watching the documentary, you'll discover plenty more about Izzard that you didn't know.
Like the fact he spent years battling to win over the crowds of Edinburgh and Covent Garden, wriggling out of chains on a unicycle before he got into stand-up, or that while it is a well-documented fact that he performs gigs in French, he went into his first French-speaking gig knowing very little at all.
As a former girlfriend of the comedian, director Sarah Townsend has been able to piece together an impressive amount of old footage and coax revealing interviews out of Izzard and his nearest and dearest. As the film charts the stand-up star's history, from his birth in Yemen through to his sold-out Wembley gigs in 2009, it repeatedly cuts back to behind-the-scenes footage of workshop gigs for his 2003 tour Sexie, giving the story a climactic arc.
Accused of fraud by Watchdog in 2000 for using old material in 'new' shows, he quit live stand-up for three years before embarking on a comeback show. These workshops see Izzard improvising the shows from start to finish instead of working new material into old, a common practice on the stand-up circuit, which Watchdog astonishingly decided to make him a scapegoat for. As he remarks in the documentary:"It's like going to a rock 'n' roll concert and saying, 'We've heard the Stones. We've heard these f*cking numbers before."
In a live Q&A session at the end of the Believe screening, Townsend tells us she wanted to "create a proper dramatic story that wasn't fluff...with a point of catharsis." She certainly seems to have achieved her goal, as the film concludes with an emotional revelation from Izzard about just how much the death of his mother affected him. Yet for me, the most powerful part of the documentary comes when he recounts the advice given to him by fellow escapologist Paul Keane and how he made it his career mantra:
"He told me if you don't believe you can get out of the chains, you won't be able to get out. You have to believe. And I had to believe I could find a way through. I had to believe I could be a stand-up comedian."
Believe: The Eddie Izzard Story is out on DVD on Monday 22nd November
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