Prose interviews man of many talents: Doc Brown

We have a treat for you Prosers this week. We got to talk to the very talented Doc Brown, otherwise known as Ben Bailey Smith, who describes himself as a grafter, a father, and a lover. Twit Twoo. You may know him from stand up comedy, acting, directing, rapping, adult and children’s TV; and now a children’s book — I Am Bear.

Ben proves generous with his time, so we get to ask about all things wordy, acting, writing, rapping and Ricky Gervais. But first, about that rap. Can you tell me, how you really make your tea?

I don’t really give a shit whether people put the milk in first, I don’t really care, as long as it’s strong. The only thing I care about, the one thing I can’t abide is a weak, nondescript, cup of tea. That’s it. People take what I said [in the video] as gospel, but I don’t really care, I just wanted to start a debate because I thought it was funny. It has, however, been scientifically proven that putting the milk in first doesn’t allow the tea to brew in the same way.

Grafter is definitely the word for you. After doing more research on you, we discovered just how many things you’re involved in, and we’d like to know how you fit it all in. How do you find the work life balance?

Everything I choose to do and everything I have chosen to do in my career I’ve done it for enjoyment. There really isn’t an issue. I just do what I enjoy and what I love, it doesn’t feel like work, if it did the balance would be an issue. I don’t procrastinate and I don’t spend time talking shit about what I am going to do on social media. So the majority of people I know who struggle to do the things they do without the additional things such as children it’s huge levels of responsibility and contractual obligations; all I can imagine is that they’re wasting a lot of time. There is no time like the present.

You say within a comedy sketch that you rap to your children. Do you rap to them, what do you rap?

Well that was just a sketch, and I wouldn’t rap that to them. I don’t really rap to them, but I rap around them. In my studio I am rapping all the time, and they pop in sometimes. The younger one performs with me at book events, I have just launched a children’s book [link here], she raps the book. [adorable], I wouldn’t say I rap at them, but they are very much involved, they’ve seen me perform all of the songs at various festivals and stuff, it’s just a part of who I am, isn’t it? So I can’t hide it from the kids.

What made you decide to get into doing the children’s book? I know you’ve done children’s television, is that a natural progression?

Yeah, very much so. When you have children you spend an inordinate amount of time reading to them at bedtime, so I suddenly realised I’d done a decade of research into children’s books and I enjoyed so many of them, but some of the others I thought were hogshit. How have these been published? So you know, different days I have different emotions that I put down on a page and they can be in the form of scripts, jokes, songs, poems, pictures and I just started writing a couple of stories for kids that just popped into my head really. I had one about uncontrollable hair, and it was a bit wordy, a bit humourless. Then purely by coincidence an old friend of mine sent me sketches of this bear and he said “there is something about this character that I have come up with. I love him, and I feel you are the best guy to put some words to this thing.”

I saw the sketch and I was like, this is awesome and I started writing to his pictures, in the same way I’d write to a beat and it came out of that. I thought, I am going to pitch this, and I pitched it to a couple of publishers and the next thing I knew, there was a four way battle going on between four of the biggest publishers in the world and we chose our favourite and that was that.

You’ve had such a diverse career already, what for you is the best part of it? I know they all revolve around words and the way that words relate to people, what aspect of your career do you prefer?

It really depends on my mood. Right now I can’t imagine ever doing another stand-up gig, but I will definitely be back at some point because as I said before, there’s some days that you wake up and think this is how I want to express myself today. I tend to flip. Sometimes when I am doing stand-up I’m like this is it, this is the thing I am enjoying the best at the moment and then after a while it gets really lonely, and it’s tough, it’s emotionally draining, and I’m going to put this to one side for a bit, which is what I have done this year. I’ve not done any gigs this year. I’ve been mainly making movies and TV, and the acting process is completely opposite to the stand up process, you are not necessarily performing your own words, you are in a big group, there is a lot of camaraderie, teamwork, totally, totally opposite and that is what I am enjoying right now. But, you know, next year will be something different. So I don’t think there is really one that outways the other I just think every six months I get itchy feet and I put the thing aside and I move on to the next thing. As much as people see me as a jack of all trades, actually I am just a writer performer that does one thing at a time, rather than spreading myself too thin and being shit at all of them.

From what we’ve seen, and your acting performances, your production skills, your stand-up, your music, I think it is safe to say that actually everything boils down to the words and the arena in which you decide to perform those words just changes.

Exactly.

So, you are a craftsman in terms of wordsmithery, as such, and you just decide which channel you are going to use to express yourself when you want to.

That is exactly it. People get very frustrated, especially in the mainstream press, because they can’t seem to place me in a category, and they are very incredulous about these endeavours which to them are just like how can you jump from this in to that? To me it’s like dude I’m not going from rap to ballet, to me everything I do, they are all pretty much similar, or directly transferable skills. They’re all writing performing tasks, you know, from the days of improvisational rap to serious rap, to writing and performing comedy, I don’t find that so different from writing and performing rap. And then writing a performing drama, and then writing children’s books. I don’t see that much of a massive difference between any of those things. And when you look at the acting, standalone, I was acting from the first time I got on the stage and rapped, I was acting as a performer, these are all transferable skills. I see it as very different from conceptual dance or landscape painting or some of the other forms of art; opera, singing, stuff that for me is untouchable. I’m not going to try and do that, I totally respect it, there are these other elements that I personally feel yeah I can do that, why not, why should I be restricted to this one thing that someone else wants me to be? I am just going to express myself how I feel fit, and if people don’t like it, it’s really easy to not watch me, watch something else.

Looking around, on the internet about you, and trying to decipher what makes you tick, I came across Bust-A-Gut productions, which I think is really cool, could you explain to me the emphasis behind what you do with Bust-A-Gut?

In 2009 I had an idea for a children’s television show, which I eventually sold to the BBC, and It was called the 4 o’clock club and it ended up winning two baftas, two RBS’s and it is still going strong into its fifth series, and I don’t think it is ever going to end. It is one of the most popular children’s TV shows in the UK. It was very difficult for me, I was brand new to television, I’d never worked in TV before, and frankly, the BBC, without going into too much detail, I don’t feel like they really respected the ownership of the idea and it really stung me. The fact that my ownership of that program, coming up with it, conceiving it, writing it, the fact that my ownership is still so minimal it stung me at that time, so the following year I set up Bust-A-Gut so that I would have a company, so that rather than some kid bringing some idea to the BBC it would be this idea belongs to this company and if you want a part of it then let’s do some proper negotiations. It was initially just about ownership but over time it has become a conduit for me and for a wide array of diverse alternative and underground talent, in the long-term I want to be a conduit for a kid with an idea somewhere who doesn’t have any other way into the industry, but for now it functions as a way for me to develop my ideas and the staff here at Bust-A-Gut. So I have a development producer, Charlie Anderson, who focuses heavily on factual content, documentaries and stuff like that, he pitches a lot of stuff for us. I’ve also been writing a sitcom with him and one of my writers Luke Arrowmore; and then I have a drama development guy called Deshawn Lincoln who is developing and pitching ideas for television, dramatic stuff, and then I have got Mikis who produces all the music that you would’ve heard from stand-up, and he produces all of the music for the 4 o’clock club as well, and we place music into TV and Film as well. We did some music for the film Attack The Block, and for the Dustin Hoffman movie Quartet. And some stuff for the HBO series called Hunted. That’s it, so it’s music, TV, and it’s growing bit by bit but it’s still very much a cottage industry and a family business that I hope will grow and eventually give a voice and a presence in TV and film for people largely from a working class background.

That’s the dream really because I don’t feel like that area of the UK is properly represented on screen. It goes beyond trying to get black faces on TV, it’s Indian faces, it’s Chinese faces, and its working class voices. I think all of those things are missing, and when we talk about diversity, in media it does seem to be very much like yeah there should be more black faces or black voices, and I agree 100% but there are more voices than just that, this is the UK you know? We never see the diversity of this reflected on screen.

In terms of cinematic film production, Cheerio on your Bust-A-Gut website was incredible (below). How do you portray such a deep story without using words? Because all of the words are intrinsically behind the scenes and aren’t used on screen.

I think ultimately, a lot of the time, a picture, an image, or a sound can speak volumes and you can trace that back to the dawn of time, every time they uncover one of these caves, in Africa where they’ll see primitive artwork, from the very start, images were so so powerful, so you approach it in exactly the same way when it comes to filming something without dialogue, you approach it the same way you would to filming something more traditional with dialogue going back and forth, to a song with lyrics, you approach it in exactly the same way, it requires storyboarding, the story is everything, character is everything.

Without those two things you can’t tell a story with words or without words. I suppose the only additional thing is that you probably think a little bit more deeply about each frame because every frame has to say something, whereas if you got dialogue you can hold on an edit while the character says, or the song lyric says what you’re trying to get across. So there is probably just a little extra thought about every frame, how it looks, think of it as a series of beautiful photos. Why do you take a photo? You want to convey something that you believe, or an experience that you are having, that’s why you take the photo. The photo means something to you even if you are just posting it up on Instagram, so within a short film like cheerio, every photo has to be there for a reason.

That’s really how we approach it, and a lot of that, I have to say, was down to the director Shawn Butcher, who really had a vision for the story that TJ (who produced the song), The Last Skeptic had. It was really Shawn who pushed it forward and brought that creativity to it.

We do a feature to get people reading more that’s called Books Before You Die. Given that you write a lot, do you read in equal amounts?

I’ve had a rule in my life, since I was a little kid, to always have a book going. I learnt that from my sister. It’s a bit like, when you just sense that you are overeating and not doing any exercise, that you should just do a little something everyday. It’s kinda like that. If I haven’t got a book on the go then I am really flagellating myself until I read another one. I tend to have them stacked up, I don’t think I have been without a book since I was about 8 years old.

There are a million recommendations I could give you, if you want something factual to start off with I would recommend London The Biography by Peter Ackroyd. It’s a mammoth task, but you don’t have to read it in one sitting, you can read it over the course of a few years, it’s over a thousand pages, but it is absolutely riveting, fascinating, the deconstruction of everything he thought he knew about London. It’s incredible and I’d recommend it to non-londoners as well.

For fiction, which is what I really enjoy, I would go for The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt which I am sure at some stage it will make an incredible movie. It’s about two brothers who are hitmen in the old west and they are on a bit of a path of personal and emotional discovery; it’s brilliant, it’s funny, it’s dark. I would also recommend, ah man, there are so many, I like a lot of graphic novels and I am reading a series called Chew at the minute which is a lot of fun about a Chinese American detective who has the ability to have total recall of the story behind food by taking a bite out of it, so if he bites into a beef burger, he can picture exactly how the cow was killed, and he uses this to solve crimes. It’s a really cool story. Novelists blow me away, it’s another one of those things, like fine art or ballet, that I would never pretend to be able to do because the levels of research, preparation, and time, required to write one, you’re talking about years, that you are putting into one idea, which is a huge gamble, most of the stuff I create is short form so that if I lose faith in the idea, it’s okay, I’m moving on to the next idea anyway. To put all your eggs in one basket, this is the idea and I’m going to research it for two years, and spend four years in total writing it, how on earth do you get three years in and think I don’t know how good this idea is. The insecurities you must have. To retain that level of confidence throughout I think is awe inspiring. Novelists just blow me away, they really do.

I was watching a speech that you did (below), through being an ambassador for Great Men, with school kids, about women’s rights. What struck me was the way you spoke to these kids, you were relatable, you didn’t talk down to them, which portrays your message so much better, than coming across as an authoritarian. Tell us about this.

They stop listening when they feel like they’re being taught a lesson, it’s what makes teaching such a fine art. I really have the utmost respect for the individuals who are able to really engage young people, it’s not easy, especially when you are not one of them, age difference is a big big deal, even if you are in mid-twenties. Trying to speak to a 15 year old, it’s not straightforward. I wouldn’t confess to knowing what every 15 year old is going through but I understand that their problems are real no matter how much we mock somebody else’s issues because basically we went through them 15 years ago and so everyone is an idiot when they’re 15 or 16, but they’re not, and it doesn’t mean the problem isn’t real. It’s similar to a situation where we might look at Kim K, or a multimillionaire who’s feeling suicidal or having problems, and saying their problems aren’t real, “I’m living in poverty, I’ve got nothing, this is real shit that I am dealing with, that’s bollocks”.

If someone is a multimillionaire and has had everything handed to them on a plate, does that mean they can’t be depressed? They can’t have suicidal thoughts? Of course they can, it’s nonsense, the human state is fragile, it’s very fragile. There’s no hard and fast physical form of happiness that you can purchase or achieve it’s all within and it can be a life long search that we never complete. So you’ve got to look at every human being as another fragile creature who requires the very basics, love affections and appreciation, and unfortunately we live in an age where so much of that is dwindling, the ability to be cruel and negative is just so easy, it’s just so much easier than being positive, it’s almost seen as crueler, to be negative, to be cynical, and you see that reflected on social media, but my feeling is that human beings are connected in a very strange and spiritual way and it’s prehistoric, man. We are constantly fighting it, because we want more than the next man, there’s a sense of greed and selfishness that is tearing apart so many societies in 2016 that you can’t avoid that. Looking at that video it’s crazy to me because I just walked in and said what I said and apart from the rap that I use was completely unscripted and unprepared, but I just spoke honestly about how I felt, and of all the things I’ve done in my entire career, that has created the most vitriol and the most abuse that I’ve got, and that says a lot, I think, about where we are at.

Why? Why would you get so much abuse from something so pure and well intentioned?

Because certain people who feel entitled, have a serious problem with anyone looking out for anyone else. So for example, If you decry racism, they’ll always be some white guy who says what about us? Dude, I’m not saying “fuck white people”, I’m just saying to look at this racist situation, I’m raising awareness and so this huge backlash I continue to get, it’s been 2 years now, is all the same shit, what about men? I’m not saying screw men, I’m saying “this is going on and it’s quite fucked up so let’s get together and sort it out”. I don’t understand why when you raise awareness of a minority, or a situation of prejudice, these other people feel attacked, surely that says more about them than it does about you. Why are you feeling attacked, perhaps you have something to hide? This is not an attack on anybody, it’s a raising awareness about something that people aren’t talking about enough, that’s all it is.

So, if your daughters were sons of yours, what would you say to them about how they should view women, and treat women, as they grow up?

Well I’d like to think I’d be the same but the truth is I wouldn’t have as much input I think, I think having girls has opened my eyes a lot to my own behaviour and other peoples. I think if I had sons it would be easier for me to just crack on, but that said I was raised by women, I like to think at the very least that my sons would know how to treat their female counterparts. For every dickhead there is a good guy, it’s just that the dickheads are always louder.

You just got to have a steady growth of information, you can’t Clockwork Orange a kid, and throw everything negative in the world at them. It’s tough, parenting in this new age is difficult, but there is always sunshine, there’s always an option that you can take that will lead to a positive outcome, and even if you can’t see that you have got to believe that because without that we don’t really have a lot.

You’re in a time machine, you get to a dystopian society with no books, what do you say to them?

Hmmm. Yeah, I mean, it’s an interesting question, and I don’t know that it would be fully dystopian because, of course, there are cultures as of right now, that don’t necessarily have access to books, and create instinctively in history, people are passing stories down, passing songs down, and I would imagine that in this scenario that you have painted, there would still be some level of human interaction, so I guess the first thing would be to get everyone together and hear their stories, you know? One by one, and all I would say, is “how are you?”

I have seen how much of a football fan you are, huge. That’s soccer to our friends across the pond.

Yeah, I am obsessed. There is no long and short of it, I am obsessed, and it’s kind of embarrassing because the football world is not something I am particularly proud of, it’s a bit of a mess, it’s full of money, it’s full of bullies, it’s full of all sorts of negative things, but the game itself is beautiful and I’ve been addicted to it for as long as I can remember. I still play, I watch my team, I watch a ridiculous amount of football, that’s the only reason my career is not on a higher plane is because of how much time I spend watching men kicking a ball of leather around, you know?

Is there anything that you think the football society could learn in life based on the lessons you’ve already learned throughout your career?

There are beautiful things within the culture of football, just last weekend a man died of a heart attack mid-game and both sets of supporters on acknowledging it got their scarves out and they all sung you’ll never walk alone in tribute to this dude, and it was just a moment of 40 to 50 thousand people all coming together with no organisation. It just happened, an outpouring of love and respect. It is there, it’s just the tribalism I think that seems to spur negativities, you look at rugby and they don’t have fan sections, they all sit together, they all drink during the game, football during the game you are not allowed to drink, and they are sitting amongst the other teams’ supporters, so there is kind of a tribalism within football that whilst it can create an amazing atmosphere, it can also create a lot of aggression, and negativity. So I guess my thing would be a combination of two things, cause it’s a two way street, let’s not treat all football fans like animals, because if you are constantly treated like an animal you eventually will become what they want you to be out of frustration. Secondly let’s just step back a minute and look at how ridiculous some of our behaviour is as football fans, Arsenal and Tottenham fans, you know, there was a lot of violence after their match last week, why do you hate each other, like genuinely, because that team over there’s just up the road? That’s not a good enough reason. So I would say to channel the aggression, so it becomes more about atmosphere, in the stadium, that would be good, I’d love to see that.

It’s also about testosterone, you know, you’re talking about tens of thousands of young men, drunk and goading each other, and that’s only going to go one way. It is what it is, but it’s still a lot better than what it was. I take my kids to the Palace, it’s fine. They’re both avid Crystal Palace fans. The littlest one gets as frustrated as me.

You and your sister have both achieved great things, is there any sibling rivalry between you both?

We have never had sibling rivalry, it’s never been there, it has never existed, there’s probably more with my younger brother because we were both rappers. With me and Zadie (Smith), it’s never been there because we have never done the same things. I think that’s where sibling rivalry comes from when you both want the same thing and you can’t see how it’d be shared equally. I think because we have always been on such different planes, that it’s never been an issue.

You all have this baseline of words, and you have all chosen different paths to use those words. Creativity is something we should encourage, where do you think this came from?

You can’t underestimate how profound being creative is for a child. I think people possibly assume that our parents were professional wordsmiths or artists, or academics, but my dad dropped out of school at 12, my mum at 15, there’s no grounding in academia or art or anything like that, but when I look back, I think it was those days where my mum would dig into the ground in the garden until she hit clay and we’d make shit out of clay. It was the encouragement of our creativity that was the key. It wasn’t necessarily handed down, it was just like children are natural artists, every single human being is an artist, until they become fearful of what they’ve created, or become embarrassed of their own voice, or their image, or the things they create and then they stop being artists. But from the start, every child is an artist so, it’s just whether we encourage it or not.

How did you go from school, into the underground rap scene, to stand-up, to where you are now? What was the catalyst that started it all off?

I think seeing breakdancers, graffiti artists, and constantly seeing kids rap battling in the playground, on the street, to me was just fascinating. It was like seeing Mozart, or magic, hand related tricks. It’s really hard to describe, but it just struck me, it made me start writing rhymes, soon as you’re old enough, you just want to go to the nights where it’s all happening. I just started going to watch rap battles, and rap shows, you see it and think I want to do that, or you think I could do that, I can do that, I can do that as good as them, and then the fact that there were competitions where anyone could enter, that was just screaming out for someone to say, let me have a bash. And it began and that journey has just continued on, new challenges have just popped up and I’ve thought yeah I can have a go at that, why not? I’ve been fortunate in a lot of ways in terms of opportunities that have come my way, but looking back, I think you create your own luck. You create a situation where that opportunity could arise in the first place. I see myself as fortunate and not lucky.

With regards to your music tastes, do they vary?

When I was growing up I would listen to all my parents’ music, my dad was into jazz and folk music, and my mum was into 80’s soul and R&B but also a massive amount of reggae. So I had all those 5 musical forms, from there, but as soon as my sister and I were old enough to buy 7 inches which we’d do every Saturday with our pocket money, we’d get a pound pocket money and 7 inches were 99p, we’d just buy pop, it was a while before something would hit us that had more depth. For my sister that was probably Prince and for me that was indie music and I still listen to a lot of indie music today, yeah it was indie first and then I started getting into these songs like 808 breaks in it, we’re talking about the 1990’s here, so stuff like the Happy Monday’s, Stone Roses, they have your traditional rock songs, but they’d also have these songs with 808 breaks in them, like you listen to Stone Roses Fools Gold and you can rap to that, similar to a lot of the stuff that Happy Mondays were doing, and you could rap to a lot of their backing tracks. I bought a 7 inch called Tom’s Diner, Susanne Vega, the remix, and the beat, I just couldn’t stop listening to it, I still love that song to this day. That was the beginning of my interest in hip-hop and then with the musical upbringing I had, I was also fascinated by where a lot of the samples and the ideas within hip-hop came from, that pushed me into the world of old stacks, Atlantic and Columbia records and the great soul artists, and it’s been the same ever since, totally eclectic. Hip-hop will always be there as the genre that really moved me.

In terms of hip-hop, where do you see it going, because it has evolved over the years a lot. Where do you see it evolving to?

I think it’s essentially cycles, you know? It got so futuristic and then it went the completely the other way, it started sounding like it was 1985 again, and then every now and again someone will come along and elevate it again. You look at what Kendrick Lamarr is doing at the moment, his stuff is so multilayered and textured, with various meanings, it’s hard work for a lot of kids to understand. You always have different types that reflect the need for a different type of listener. It will always surprise you, it gets written off every year since it was born, it’s not going anywhere, and it will keep evolving.

Have you got any advice for any of our users who are looking to get themselves heard within the TV and Film industry with their scripts?

First of all you’ve got to focus on your truth. The vast majority of stuff that I read that people submit, I just don’t believe in it because it just doesn’t sound like their voice. It sounds like you’re trying, and trying way too hard, to create a reality that even you don’t recognise, you don’t believe in it yourself. It’s not something that you relate to, you just think it would be something cool to write about, that’s not how art works. Art is the extension of you, I need to feel your fingerprints on it, and I need to hear your voice in it. So first and foremost you have to focus on your truth and that’s absolutely how important that is. And then secondly once you’ve got that, and that is a huge ask, once you’ve got that truth and you believe in it and you show your friends and they believe in it, then the next step is to try and get it out there and that is equally as hard. But I would suggest you simplify the idea, in other words, say you’ve written an entire script, squish it into one page, with key characters, and the synopsis, and pass that around, protect yourself as well, if you think it’s a great idea, then write up a really simple NDA, a non-disclosure agreement, that whoever you show it to, signs it, and they can’t just steal the idea and run with it.

It’s slightly troubling, people send me entire scripts, that’s just not the way the industry works, you’re never going to write a script and then that script is going to be the movie or TV show, the way Movies and TV shows work is it all begins with a line, for example aliens attack earth, or aliens attack the white house, that’s it. Then from there, it’s a really intense process where the producers, the people who actually put the money in and make it, are just involved as you are as a writer. I bet you could count on one hand how many situations there have been where somebody wrote a script and it was so fucking amazing start to finish that they made it just as it was written. I would say utilise your time better, don’t spend years writing something that you’re not going to be able to make on your own, you can’t make it on your own, you need hundreds of thousands of pounds and input from a lot of different people; don’t waste your time sat on your own writing an entire script. Just write one page.

How do you stand out from the crowd with your synopsis?

There’s no idea that is original right? The only thing that is original is the human being themselves, your voice, and your fingerprint, no one has your fingerprint. Nobody has your voice, nobody has your exact body shape. Not even your twin, so when you choose to get a tattoo, you think you’re being original, but actually, someone else somewhere on the planet has got that tattoo or some appropriation of it, and immediately you’ve made yourself stand out less. In your mind you’re standing out more because you’ve got a tattoo, so essentially what I am saying is, if you can find the connection with your inner truth, a genuine reflection with who you are within your work, then it will stand out, and when you are pitching it, you will be more passionate about it, because you won’t want to sell yourself short.

And how do you deal with rejection? How do others deal with the amount of rejection they may get from trying to get their work seen?

I suppose from the outside looking in, people would think I haven’t experienced it because I am constantly working, but the only reason that is the case is for every one idea I have on the ground, there’s another 30 that have been ignored or thrown back in my face. You’ve got to be very determined, you’ve got to be very thick skinned, and most of all you’ve got to believe very deeply in whatever your idea is, because if you don’t, deep down you don’t really believe your idea is going to touch the world, nobody else will either. That belief is absolutely key, and unfortunately, that belief is constantly eroded by rejection, and I don’t have any advice on how to deal with that, that’s down to the personality of the individual. For me, I can say that stand-up and rap battles really helped me deal with rejection, because losing a rap battle is painful, and dying on the stage in stand-up is unbelievably upsetting, emotionally, once I’d been through those, did I really care if I auditioned and I didn’t get the part? Nah, there would be another audition tomorrow. Do I really care that they don’t like this synopsis for a TV show? Not particularly, because I’ll do my own little neat video and prove that I can produce something. So you know, it’s really a personal thing. It’s brave sharing ideas, but what is the worst, somebody can say?

What’s next for you?

Well, the book has just come out in hardback in the UK and the States and Australia. There’s going to be a bit of a press junket mixed with children’s events that I am going to continue doing, including the Edinburgh Book Festival. I’m going to New York and doing the same over there. Whilst I am doing that, I am just finishing shooting this six part drama for ITV, it’s called Brief Encounters. That’ll be done in a month’s time and that’ll be released, in the summer, by which time I will be promoting my first movie, Life on the Road, which will be released on August 19th, a movie I have made with Ricky Gervais, and then in the autumn it’ll be a full scale return to serious music, I am making a comeback as a rapper, which I am very excited about, and then 2017, it’ll be back to stand-up.

“I wake up and choose what the hell I am going to do.”

Thanks to Doc Brown/Ben for his time, honesty and generous answers. You can follow him on Twitter where he is @DocBrown88 — his website is docbrown.co.uk and please also check out Bust-A-Gut productions here. Please also stop by the Great Men site and show your support.

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Originally published at blog.theprose.com on March 23, 2016.