Jack Dee interview

Hidden away at the back of a third-floor office somewhere in deepest central London, ShortList sits in a completely blank room. A small window looks out on to the brick wall of the neighbouring building. There are no books, no pictures on the walls, not even a clock. In fact, the only item of any note is a laptop, closed, on a white table.

The thought of spending 1,280 hours in here makes us want to weep. One man managed it: Jack Dee. Not in one shift, mind you. Working for 40 hours a week over eight months, Dee sat in this room hammering out his autobiography, Thanks For Nothing. And he's finished.

Jack Dee interview taken from Shortlist magazine, out Thu 29th October.

Suddenly, as if he floated in, silently, on a grey cloud of despair, Dee appears at the doorway. He forces something resembling a smile, his crestfallen expression making us audibly chuckle. The nod of forgiveness he offers leaves us pretty confident this happens to him all the time. He must get tired of people laughing at his face, but it's difficult not to. We just want to pick up his droopy features and mould them like Play-Doh into something less despondent, less forlorn. He offers us a drink, goes to make it, returns and suggests we go somewhere less dull – the room next door. It's almost identical...

That's a pretty uninteresting room, back there.
Tell me about it. In there, there's literally nothing you can do but write. And sometimes I've sat in there for four hours straight without writing a word thinking, "What the f*ck am I going to do now?" Then suddenly an idea will begin to emerge. And then the last two hours of the day I'm writing like a mad man and you think, "Yeah that was worth it." You think, "Well it's only two hours, but it's two hours I wouldn't have done if I hadn't sat there for four doing absolutely nothing." [He picks up a copy of ShortList and flicks through completely expressionless] Very nice-looking magazine.

Thanks, you can keep it.
Thanks.

What else have you written in that room?
I do all my writing in there, including Lead Balloon. I like being able to separate my life and my work so that I go from one place to the next, physically. There's something psychologically helpful about going to work and thinking when I get there I start and when I leave I finish. It's nice to have that structure otherwise you think, "I'll get down to it, after like, the dishes and then a walk and a sodding croissant, or something." Do you want something to eat?

I'm good, thank you. Why does the book end 25 years ago?
Because the story I wanted to write was about how I ended up going into comedy. I quite like the fact that there's a cut-off point, to be honest. There's a before and after to that moment. Everything changed at that point so it needed to end right there.

Is it a warts-and-all account?
Well it's about my life but there's nothing about me, you know, sh*tting in a bed or anything.

Read the rest of this interview at Shortlist.com