“We don’t stay in posh hotels in London,” says Jon Richardson. In a posh hotel in London. “We’re not celebrities really, are we?” adds his wife, Lucy Beaumont. “We’re just us. We don’t really hang out in London and go to premieres.” She pauses. “Like the one we’re going to tonight.”
What’s this? Have I trapped Britain’s best-loved comedy couple in an instance of rank hypocrisy? Richardson and Beaumont, for those unfamiliar, are standup comics (and in Richardson’s case, panel show royalty as an ex-team captain on 8 Out of 10 Cats) who also co-host Channel 4’s Jon & Lucy’s Odd Couples, casting judgment on other celeb relationships from their lofty celeb-relationship pinnacle. They are also stars of the hit mockumentary Meet the Richardsons, which chronicles their married life – or a fictional version thereof.
That show majors in the tension between their fame and their glamour-free domestic life – and it’s the VIP launch of its new series that justifies all this current London luxury, albeit for one day only. If the show is to be believed, they’ll soon be back in the north of England squabbling, being parents, being neighbours and trying to catch a break in the rough and tough entertainment world. But is the show to be believed? “None of it is real,” says Beaumont. “But we enjoy making it seem as if it is.” Another pause. “But then some things are.”
The series started life when its producer saw Jon and Lucy grumbling at each other on a TV show called Married to a Celebrity. He proposed a mockumentary following the couple around at a particular moment in their shared lives. “We lived in a little village in West Yorkshire in the middle of nowhere,” says Beaumont. “Neither of us worked much. I was getting back into things after having a daughter, and you [Jon] were doing bits. But we were cut off. And we were hanging out with our neighbours.”
Those neighbours were cast in the show alongside Beaumont’s larger-than-life mum (the playwright Gill Adams), and a roster of celeb pals (Rob Beckett, Johnny Vegas, David Tennant) appearing as themselves, while Jon and Lucy made hapless efforts to rebuild their TV careers. What has emerged over four series is a show that’s carved out its own comic niche in the same ballpark as Curb Your Enthusiasm but with added talking heads, droll cutaways and moments of “unadulterated documentary”, says Richardson, amid the semi-scripted larks. Most importantly, it’s “a high gag-rate comedy show”, he says, and when he’s filming, “if I can see the crew aren’t laughing, it’s not in the show. They should be laughing.”
Beaumont agrees: “I was getting annoyed with comedy-drama. I felt like sitcom needed to get back to making people laugh every three lines.” It is Beaumont – also the co-creator of the recent Channel 4 comedy Hullraisers about her home town – who writes the show, alongside Peter Kay’s Car Share co-creator Tim Reid.
Richardson’s role, he tells me, “is to be humiliated and look embarrassed”. Meet the Richardsons provides him with ample opportunity, as he bursts into flames at a children’s party while dressed as a monkey, or – in the new series – disappoints his comedy hero, Ben Elton. Is it right to assume his haplessness and Beaumont’s career anxiety are all exaggerated for comic effect (she has, after all, been nominated for a Bafta for her performance)? “That’s Lucy’s skill as a writer,” says Richardson. “To understand that sitcom is driven by a need. If we’re successful and happy and calm, you lose that fundamental element of comedy.”
That said, “we went to Center Parcs recently,” says Beaumont, “and a lady in the toilet said to me: ‘Isn’t it nice that your husband’s let you be on telly with him?’ And you’re just like: ‘OK, I can now go away and write a scene.’” Even in real life, she says, “I very much still feel like the jealous wife who’s hungry for a career.”
But she also feels – much to the consternation of the show’s publicist, within earshot – that Meet the Richardsons is becoming too career-focused. “The new series is too work-based,” she says. “It’s my least favourite.”
“You liked it in series one,” shoots back Richardson, “and you haven’t liked it since.”
“We’re missing a bit of dock pudding,” says Beaumont – referring to the show’s second episode, when the duo judged the (real, not fictional) World Dock Pudding cookery competition in Hebden Bridge. “I was like: this is exactly what I want to be making,” says Beaumont. “I like it less when the show recreates a celebrity thing we’ve been to – I like it when we’re interacting with real people.”
Watching the show, you can’t help but wonder how it affects the couple’s real-life relationship, and whether there might be aspects of their private life they’d prefer to keep behind closed doors. Richardson says not really. “In series four, I shit myself in the car. So it’s difficult to know what I would veto.”
For Beaumont, it’s not an issue – because their lives in Meet the Richardsons are separate from the private reality. (Their TV house is not their real house. Their TV daughter is an actor.) Not that their fans see it that way. “Because we’re playing ourselves,” says Beaumont, “I do think people come up to us more [in public] and assume they know us. Definitely.”
That’s not a bad thing, she says – and Richardson too can see upsides to their unusual televised lives. “Every couple argues,” he says, “but we have an end product for our arguments. We hone them then put them on TV. And then it’s like: ‘Oh, perhaps we weren’t arguing – perhaps we were just working on a routine.’”
Are they concerned about becoming more famous as a couple than as individuals? “As long as I can do standup, which is such a pure selfish moment, I don’t mind,” says Richardson, now celebrating 20 years as one of the UK’s finest comic curmudgeons. “As long as I can tour, and that’s just my voice – well, that’s such a privilege.” Beaumont, too, nominated best newcomer at the Edinburgh fringe back in 2014, is embarking on a standup tour. Its title, The Trouble and Strife, suggests no great desire to slough off the Richardsons connection.
This first foray into standup in a decade has raised old demons for Beaumont, which her new career as a successful TV writer has yet to slay. “I know now,” she says, “that what put me off standup was the horrific misogyny that I suffered.” Only a decade ago, she says, promoters still didn’t want to book female comics; comperes introduced them with an apology and “you’d get on stage and the audience would instantly look embarrassed before you said anything. Or they would use you as the time to go to the toilet.”
It led to her convincing herself “that I don’t belong here, I’m not good enough, I’m not funny”. Four series of a hit TV show later, she says, “I still have all that in my head whenever I do anything. And it’s really frustrating that men don’t. So my thing with the new tour is I just want to make it” – like Meet the Richardsons before it – “the funniest thing it can be.”
Meet the Richardsons starts 6 April, 10pm, Dave & UKTV Play.
