<http://schema.org/articleBody>
" Marc Wootton first came to our attention on My New Best Friend, a comedy game show in which contestants had to convince their friends and relatives that a grotesque, truly offensive character, played by Wootton, was a long lost chum of theirs. He then created Shirley Ghostman, the flamboyant medium who brought Princess Diana, Marilyn Monroe and Colonel Sanders back to life on High Spirits. And now \u2013 no rest for the wickedly funny, it seems \u2013 he&amp;#039;s bagged his own &amp;quot;character comedy&amp;quot; show on BBC Three. We gave him a call to find out what he&amp;#039;s up to on Marc Wootton Exposed. How did you come to make a &amp;quot;character comedy&amp;quot; show? &amp;quot;Well, roughly 18 months ago I hired a small theatre in London and I put on a show involving some characters that had been in my head for a while - I wanted to get them out! That was the way it all started - quite organically, I suppose. Then, a few months later, I did a second run of the same show at a slightly bigger theatre, and I invited the BBC commissioning team along to the last show. They commissioned Marc Wootton Exposed off the back of that.&amp;quot; Where does the inspiration behind your characters come from? &amp;quot;Well, when I&amp;#039;m tied up with a project, I end up writing down little bits and bobs in the spare moments. All my characters are based on people I&amp;#039;ve met, so it&amp;#039;s normally when I start to see someone I hang out with or a family member in a different light that the characters start to come. It could be something really small - a little turn of phrase perhaps.&amp;quot; So who&amp;#039;s your psychotic schoolboy Ian Jackson based on? &amp;quot;Actually, he&amp;#039;s partly based on my niece! That probably sounds awful, but she&amp;#039;s just got a fantastic rhythm to her speech that I&amp;#039;ve used for Ian Jackson. Then there&amp;#039;s a singer-songwriter called Daniel Johnston, who&amp;#039;s basically this really influential crazy man. He was a really great talent until he lost the plot, and he&amp;#039;s had some really schizophrenic moments along the way. Once his dad was flying him to a gig in a little plane, and he took the keys out of the ignition and threw them out the window because he was convinced he could fly and Casper the Friendly Fhost would help him. Anyway, that&amp;#039;s where the madness came from.&amp;quot; Ian&amp;#039;s a survivor from High Spirits with Shirley Ghostman, your last show. Is he a character you&amp;#039;re particularly fond of? &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s very close to my heart. Me and the guy I write with went to school together, so a lot of the school element came from our own experiences growing up.&amp;quot; Where did Candy, the gobby American comedian who doesn&amp;#039;t actually have jokes, come from? &amp;quot;Well, one day I was mucking about in the shower, trying to make someone laugh by undermining the point of jokes in a really Candy way. At that point, she was quite a Roseanne Barr-type character. Then, a few months later, an agent sent me a stand up DVD featuring a women&amp;#039;s comedy night, and there was one woman who really wasn&amp;#039;t funny and she kind of stuck in my mind. I based a lot of Candy on her.&amp;quot; Why do you think Candy rings so true as a character? &amp;quot;The basic thing about her is she doesn&amp;#039;t get the soul of the gag - she&amp;#039;s quite sad really. On the way home from one of her awful gigs, she convinces herself that people didn&amp;#039;t laugh because she was so shocking and so outrageous. Actually, a lot of the show is about people deceiving themselves. That&amp;#039;s why I use the photography motif throughout, because when someone takes a photo of you, you tend to fake it a bit. We all smile when we&amp;#039;re feeling a bit glum, you know?&amp;quot; In the past, you seem to have made one series a show, and then moved on. Why do you think that is? &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s interesting actually, because I&amp;#039;ve just signed to an agency in the States and I&amp;#039;m in discussions about doing a few things out there. The trouble is all the networks want run upon run upon run of a show, and I have to be honest and say &amp;#039;Unless it naturally comes, that&amp;#039;s just not me&amp;#039;. It&amp;#039;s like an album with me, and musicians don&amp;#039;t release another eight tracks in a similar vein after they&amp;#039;ve just released an album, do they? That&amp;#039;s why I like film - because it&amp;#039;s all done and dusted afterwards.&amp;quot; Have we seen the last of Shirley Ghostman then? &amp;quot;Well, I&amp;#039;m actually in talks to do a Shirley film in America, but I&amp;#039;d have to change the name, because I think people would go on the internet and find out about him. I&amp;#039;ve been talking to [Austin Powers and Meet The Parents director] Jay Roach, who&amp;#039;s very interested in Shirley, and the South Park lot are interested as well. Because of the success of Borat, there&amp;#039;s a real appetite for the fake character in the real world thing over there.&amp;quot; Do you miss playing Shirley? &amp;quot;When you create a character, it&amp;#039;s never over, but often I just think there&amp;#039;s no need to do anything else. It would be different if there was a narrative to the things I do, but I haven&amp;#039;t yet created a sitcom, have I?&amp;quot; Would you ever make another series of My New Best Friend? &amp;quot;I suppose I could do. Actually NBC are interested in a similar idea, which I&amp;#039;m not allowed to talk about because it&amp;#039;s secret.&amp;quot; Can you give us a little tease? &amp;quot;Well, it&amp;#039;s a bit more extreme than My New Best Friend, because it&amp;#039;s a lot more to do with the family. It&amp;#039;s called My Long Lost Son, so I think you can imagine the sort of thing it might be.&amp;quot; Marc Wootton Exposed begins Sunday at 9.30pm on BBC Three. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.digitalspy.com/tv/interviews/a84014/marc-wootton/>