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As he reminisces about his concreting days, it’s clear he loved it. “I worked seven days a week, 12 hours a day, and it was good money in those days, the early 1980s. I’d work as a builder for six months, earn a bit of money, then go off travelling abroad and bum around until the money ran out. Then I’d come back and do the same again.”
He loved the unplanned randomness of it all. Herding goats for three months in Creuse, in central France, was one of his walkabout jobs. “It sounds idyllic, and it was for a while, then I started going a bit crazy. I was literally talking to the goats in the forest all day, telling them stories and things. I realised I had to get out of there. It was good experience, though, and good for the old CV. It meant when I came back home and signed on I could put ‘goatherd’ as my occupation, and they had to find me a job as a goatherd. Funnily enough, there weren’t any openings in Woking.”
By the age of 24, he realised it was time to think of a career. “I wanted to perform, so I decided I’d become an actor,” he says. Despite never having acted before, not even in a school Nativity play at St John the Baptist School, Woking, he was amazed to get a place at the Drama Centre in London in 1986. “Maybe they weren’t that fussy or fancied a bit of rough trade,” he shrugs. “I don’t know how I managed to get in. I just thought, how hard can it be? It’s not like trying to get into medical school.” Yet he soon realised that he hated it. “I only lasted a year, because I wasn’t very happy. But I couldn’t leave because that meant paying back my grant and fees, and I didn’t want to—it was about £7,000. So I thought I’d get thrown out. I tried acting badly, but that didn’t work. My next resource was drinking… I thought I’d really drink and be asked to leave, and it was nice to know I was drinking with a purpose for once.”
He organised a “student insurrection”, dragging classmates to the pub when they should have been building sets for an end-of-term play. The others trickled back to class, but Sean was eventually found “absolutely plastered” in the pub by his tutors. “It was like my resignation. That was it, I was thrown out.”
It was back to the building site—until that fateful visit to the Hackney pub. “I was laying concrete floors for £25 or £30 a day, and then going into a pub in the evening and getting £15 or £20 for talking rubbish for 20 minutes. I remember thinking once, you shouldn’t be doing this. You should be sitting at home writing jokes. So that’s basically what I did.”
His parents—who retired to Lymington 10 years ago, where he regularly visits them by train—are proud of his success. Had they ever worried about his earlier ambitionless drifting? “Yes and no,” he says. “I don’t think I was a very easy person to rationalise with, to steer or guide, so I don’t think they worried too much. They left me to do what I wanted to do.” Then he adds with half a grin: “I’ve never been discovered—I’ve been put up with.”
Sean Lock Live 2008 tour dates include the Playhouse, Epsom, on Monday 5 May (01372 742 555; epsomplayhouse.co.uk) and the Hammersmith Apollo on Saturday 10 May (08448 444 748; hammersmithapollo.net).
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