BTJ: Which came first, your voiceover career or your acting?
MB: I did Dark Place and it just went from there. I did two episodes of The Boosh then IT Crowd and the voiceover work came along around then too. I didn’t give my career any kind of thought. I just did what I thought was stupid and it went from there. I was working in the London Dungeon week before Dark Place, there was no plan. You’d be the judge in the morning and Jack the Ripper in the afternoon.
BTJ: You front a band, The Maypoles, too. How do you juggle all these balls?
MB: They are all huge interests of mine, I didn’t know how much I’d enjoy acting until I did Dark Place. I just got lucky.
BTJ: Is it correct you purposely made a boring album, Music for Insomniacs, to cure insomnia?
MB: Not intentionally boring. I suffered from it and there was nothing for it. If you spoke to anyone you were prescribed whale song or pan pipes which was no use whatsoever because I was just thinking why is this so bad? I wondered what would work and I spoke to Andy Nyman about BPMs for heartbeat. We had these long conversations so we put that into it.
BTJ: Was it funny?
MB: It’s not a comedy album. I’m not making comedy albums, that’s too much effort for one joke.
BTJ: How did you get together with Arthur Mathews?
MB: We worked together on Snuff Box. I wanted to work with Arthur but I had no form, then we did a thing for R4 called I Regress and then this, which is five years old.
BTJ: Who is Steven Toast?
MB: He’s a bunch of different people. There isn’t anyone who would be so despicable and pompous as him but there are people I’ve worked with that go to make up Steven Toast…
BTJ: Steven Toast is a classic comic failure really. Like Steptoe, David Brent.
MB: He’s always a gnat's cock close to making it. You take him to the door but don’t let him in.
BTJ: It was a pity House of Fools was axed. Your character Beef was excellent.
MB: I loved it. It was an excuse to work with Jim (aka Vic) and Bob. I’d do whatever they wanted. This thing about it being cancelled, I never heard that, there was no thing about it being cancelled. I think they were too busy with other things to do more.
BTJ: You went to art school and wanted to be a painter didn’t you?
MB: I was told constantly that painting is the most difficult thing to make money out of unless I paint people’s families. It’s a bloody hard thing to make a living out of.
BTJ: Where did you grow up?
MB: Bromham, 45 minutes from London, a satellite town like Milton Keynes, I got out as soon as I could but now I look back I think you just want to get out of wherever you were born. Well I did. But the countryside influenced a lot of things.
I came to London and signed on and stayed on people’s sofas, I knew this was the place to be. You can’t do any of that now. I did telesales, all that…never studied acting…definitely fell into acting but I loved it. I took to it, I wasn’t fazed by the cameras and thought ‘this is good. There’s something I can do with this…’
BTJ: Are you a tortured artist?
MB: No, I just got very lucky. And touch wood I’ve had the same thing since.
BTJ: Where do you live?
MB: I live in Rotherhithe on the Thames. I can see Tower Bridge, it’s part of an old warehouse. The arm of the wharf thing is built onto my flat. I love that area and London history. It’s where Danny Baker writes about in his books. Michael Caine is from there.
BTJ: Will there be more Toast?
MB: We are not sure yet but we do like doing Toast, we both enjoy it. It’s not about waiting for C4, it’s got to be interesting for us. We’ve always got ideas. I think Toast could step out of his world, Toast in the States, Toast on Broadway. He’s a real character, there’s always someone who is irritated that they are not as successful as they think they should be. The fact that he’s an actor that’s just because I know that world.
Toast, C4, Wednesdays, 10.30pm.
