A Cock and Bull Story

As part of my literary ‘education’, I was asked to read Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, or The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman to give it the correct title, one that gives a flavour of the deliberate long-windedness of the 1759 book. It’s an elaborate cod-autobiography that never gets far beyond the birth of its titular character, and that’s the joke. In Michael Winterbottom’s film, where characters are often pictured reading and discussing the text, it’s described as ‘post-modern before there was any modernism to be post about’, or rather, it belongs to a strain of comic literature that exists outwith such categorisations. It’s a nonsense of a 500 page book, un-filmable on any practical terms, and that’s why A Cock and Bull Story wisely doesn’t even try.

The action of Sterne’s novel occupies about half an hour of the film, early on, and otherwise we stick with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon, playing similar version of the Steve and Rob they play on The Trip. Millions enjoyed The Trip, and they should keep patience when the film deliberately replicates the exasperating stop-start nature of the novel. Beyond that, we settle into another of the dark, personal episodes that The Trip often hinted at; Coogan has some hotel room scandal to cover up, and a tabloid newspaper wants to do an interview which they claim will be positive, and replace the impending publication of the in-digression. Coogan has been in constant turmoil with the tabloid press for decades via the Levenson inquiry, and this account feels accurate in the way it depicts how someone’s privacy can be violated by veiling threats in a friendly, helpful disguise. But this is, as someone notes in passing, ‘meant to be a comedy’, and A Cock and Bull Story successfully mines that bitter-sweet clowning in The Trip as the men ruminate on age and the passing of time while barely able to restrain their passion for amusing each other, and the audience, with a variety of impressions of Al Pacino; in fact, there’s a full Pacino-off in the final credits.

A Cock and Bull Story is a tricky proposition; fans of The Trip need to take the promise of a single opening scene that this isn’t going to get lost in the labyrinthine permutations of Sterne’s Yo-Yo Ma-style quite literally ridiculous levels of virtuosity. A Cock and Bull Story is also one of the more accurate films about the process of film-making, and reflects a subtle conflict that constant on-set writers can create. It’s as good as film as could be made from this particular book, and pulls together such disparate elements as Dylan Moran, Gillian Anderson, Michael Nyman and more to create a proper modern palimpsest of Sterne’s original work, co-scripted by Winterbottom and Frank Cottrell-Boyce.

Bonus story; I had to interview both Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan for this film, somewhat excessive for a 650 words feature, but right for a proper two-hander movie like this one. Coogan’s call was repeatedly delayed, and when it finally came through, I was waiting to speak to a group of school-kids in Cumbernauld who were just about to arrive in the classroom. I had to climb into a cupboard to hear Coogan speak over what was a terrible, crackly line, and only got back into a busy classroom once the interview was over and the kids were waiting patiently. At the end of the talk, the first, long-gestated question was ‘What were you doing in our cupboard?’ quickly followed by the not-unreasonable ‘Why would Steve Coogan be in our cupboard?’