I first became aware of Simon in the 1990s when we were both working at Scottish Television. He was quite a striking person – a really stylish, handsome bloke. There were not loads of people like that in Scottish TV in the 90s, so he really stuck out. He was very immediately charismatic.
He was a writer and performer back then. He had this character, Terri McIntyre, who was the owner of a Glasgow sunbed salon. BBC Three had just launched and it was looking for different, bold content from people outside the normal comedy set. Terri McIntyre ended up being one of the first comedy series that the channel commissioned, I ended up being the show’s producer and that was the first project we worked on together.
In the early 00s, we had a lot of false starts. We made a couple of shows that didn’t get past the first series. It was all a bit intermittent, so we would be scrambling about for other work. He was a TV researcher, he worked in admin, secretarial stuff, worked in a cafe, did some acting and performing work. There was a point that Simon talked about where he felt that a career as a TV writer was not going to work out – that it had gone from his grasp.
But I always wanted to work with him. I really believed in him – he had a real voice. I would read scripts and see other performers and Simon was as good as anyone around.
He had this real gift for capturing voices and people that he had observed. He was an absolute natural at storytelling, for creating characters and making dialogue. It was exceptionally good. He was a brilliant mimic, too. He could pick up people’s voices and mannerisms immediately – and he was naturally funny with it.
You see scripts and acts that are technically good, but don’t have that little bit of magic to them – that little bit of insight and humanity. But he absolutely had that. He had an amazing memory and understanding of how people behave, and he could recall things with amazing clarity, from family conversations from when he was a kid, to parties, to things his gran used to do or say. It was incredible.
Simon was always worried that he didn’t have the right credentials. Or that he wasn’t smart enough, because he didn’t go to Oxford, or write sketches for Radio 4, or do the standup circuit – all those things that everybody else in the comedy industry seemed to have done. But even though we weren’t in those circles, he was really driven to meet people. He would open doors. He was really responsible for us a lot of our early opportunities in that period because he just thought: “Look, why not? Why should this be something for other people? Why can’t we do this?”
When Two Doors Down started to take off, ultimately, its success was down to the comedy of recognition. It was people seeing the truth of the characters and recognising people from their own life in them. It was really all about the depth of character and its lightness, its cheeriness – what Simon was amazingly good at.
It was so much fun to write that show with him. I’ve never laughed so much in my life as I did in those rooms when something was going well. There were afternoons where we’d both be on the floor. It was such an incredibly joyous thing. It was the best of times.
As the show went on, he really grew in confidence as well. It started very under the radar and just gradually picked up an audience from series to series. I think he really liked to get feedback from people, that was a really big thing for him. And you could see him getting creative confidence as well from doing a show that was so well received, and which had the support of the network. That really allowed him to flourish creatively and he went from strength to strength in those years. He just got better and better as a writer.
He never took anything for granted, though. He was always just really thankful, and when we were nominated for awards he never believed we’d win. He turned up on set to every single day of filming, and it was always the daft things that he’d find funny. There was one day the mobile toilets broke down and the assistant director had to find somebody to clean a load of shit off the floor, and it just really, really made him laugh.
One of the sad things about working in comedy is that because it’s not seen as a serious genre, you’re not always given the respect you might be if you worked in drama. I think that’s a shame. Simon was a serious person. He was really politically astute. He was a really emotionally intelligent person, was outraged by unfairness and always had a clever, analytical take on world events. I don’t think he ever got the credit for that, but that’s just the cost of how his comedy was perceived. He was a really, really thoughtful, smart person.
It’s been a really difficult couple of days. But hearing what people have been saying about Simon, I’m really grateful that he’s been recognised for his talent. I’m also really glad that he’s been recognised for being such a collaborative person. He was just always so generous with his time. If he’d ever get sent a script, he’d really, really look at it and provide extremely detailed feedback. He just always tried to help people, and he was always so good at putting their voice first. He’d never go into a room like: “I’m going to make your show for you!” He would always say: “This is your story, and your voice. Let’s see if I can help you to tell it how you want.” He was just a natural collaborator. The way he got involved in those scripts meant that he ended up working as a script editor as well, on shows like Benidorm, Bad Education, Kathy Burke’s sitcom Walking and Talking, as well as creating Changing Ends with Alan Carr.
There are not many people like that in the business. He was really smart and generous with how he went about collaborating. I just think it’s lovely that he’s now got that recognition. It’s very, very well deserved – even though it’s in these awful circumstances.
