Up West
With her Essex background, stage-school training and lad-mag appeal, it would be easy to dismiss Denise Van Outen as just another cliche. But her lightning wit, comedic gift and stage success are at last making critics sit up and take her seriously. Now Andrew Lloyd Webber has retailored a musical for her. By Andrew Anthony.
Denise Van Outen sits down next to me and peels a banana. It’s a straightforward procedure but the potential for innuendo is, to say the least, palpable. All the same, the comic significance of the moment is destined to remain notional because her only visible interest in the fruit is nutritional. No jokes, no winks and no stroking. Is this an example of her much-trumpeted new maturity?
Certainly her appearance would confirm a refashioned, less outre image. Not only is she not displaying her cleavage, she isn’t even showing her neck. Throughout our interview she is hidden, like some fundamentalist mod, behind a knee-length parka and an enormous winter scarf. Gone, apparently, is the ladette who turned flirting and flatulence into a spectator sport, the Basildon babe with a singular gift for the double entendre, whose personal motto was ‘When in doubt, whack ’em out’.
Then a little while after I meet Van Outen, I speak to her former co-presenter on The Big Breakfast, Johnny Vaughan. ‘We always have a laugh about these pieces that talk of her supposed reinvention, her “new sophisticated look”,’ he tells me. ‘Whenever one’s published, I call her the next day and it’s the same old Denise: absolute filth.’
So much for the tasteful make-over story. There are two seemingly contradictory truths to Van Outen. What you see is what you get, and also there is a lot more to her than meets the eye. Strikingly pretty, with a naturally perfect set of teeth, her features bear too much character ever to compose themselves into alienating beauty. There’s warmth enough to put you at ease and, at the same time, a hint of toughness around the soft edges, an irreducible Essexness, that keeps you on your toes. She can look unbelievable and, simultaneously, worthy of trust. By her own reckoning, she’s a walking stereotype. ‘I’m a typical Essex girl,’ she once observed.
‘I like naff pop music. My brother’s a hairdresser.’ Her father was a docker from the East End of London (the surname comes from a distant Dutch ancestor) who moved his family out to Basildon. ‘That’s why, as Johnny Vaughan used to say, no matter what I put on I always manage to make it look cheap,’ she quipped. Her accent is undiluted Estuary and, although the hair tint is no longer platinum, she has no fear of the dye bottle. Yet she is plainly much more than the sum of her cliches. Far from a celebrity bimbo, she is smart, acutely self-aware and blessed with a wit that isn’t so much racy as lightning quick. ‘I’ve never known someone who knows funny like she does,’ says Vaughan. ‘She can spot a catchphrase in an instant. She’s got incredible intuition.’
With Vaughan, she formed on The Big Breakfast probably the best live-show double-act on television. Theirs was a rapport full of mad risks and mutual respect. To appreciate how good Van Outen was at handling Vaughan’s brilliant stream of consciousness, you only had to see some of her unfortunate successors. Vaughan marvelled at how she could turn her hand to anything. He thought of her as a kind of throwback to a previous generation of entertainers who had been properly trained in every aspect of stagecraft.
Nevertheless, most people, including her advisers and ultimately herself, tended to focus on her lewd appeal and not the comedic gift that underpinned it. As a result, she was taken only slightly more seriously than Caprice.
Obviously, it has been necessary to do some growing up, if only because Van Outen was 22 when she first came to prominence on television, and now she’s 28. But in truth her changed profile probably has more to do with getting back in touch with her childhood. Or rather her rediscovery of neglected talents — old-fashioned stuff like singing, dancing and acting — that she had spent six years at stage school learning to master. ‘I think I forgot what I was capable of,’ she says. ‘I started to believe this whole thing I had created for myself, that I was just a nudge and a wink.’ What forced her to recall her theatrical training was landing the role of Roxie Hart, the fame-hungry heroine in the West End musical Chicago, back in 2001.
The job arrived just when her own life had taken on the plotting of an updated MGM musical. The Big Breakfast had come to an end and she found herself without any decent work offers. Her two previous forays away from Vaughan — a sitcom called Babes in the Wood and a smutty late-night game show by the tell-tale name of Something for the Weekend — had both been minor disasters.
‘I hit a bit of a low point and I thought, careerwise, I’m washed up,’ she says of that period. She even joked that she was just weeks away from working for the Fantasy Channel. At the same time, she was also dealing with the tabloid-splattered end of her relationship with Jay Kay, the pop singer, friend to milliners and enemy of the paparazzi.
The couple met at Silverstone grand prix circuit, where Kay, who possibly has more sports cars than he has hats, challenged Van Outen in a celebrity race. She moved into his Buckinghamshire mansion, although as he was away touring a lot of the time, she effectively continued staying at her small flat in Islington where she still lives. A little recklessly, she went public with her emotions by repeatedly declaring that she wanted to marry Kay, raise a family and more or less give up showbusiness. ‘I’d never been in love before and it was the only time that everything else came second.’ There’s an easy candour to her conversation that looks melodramatic in print but sounds matter of fact in person. ‘I really was in it for the long haul. I thought this was it, I’ll settle down, a baby under the arm. And then it finished.’
I tell her I had read that Kay thought that they had split because she had not been sympathetic enough about his problems with cocaine. Most celebrities would respond to a statement like that with a diplomatic no-comment, but Van Outen, without a hint of calculation, replies as if she were gossiping across a garden wall. ‘Erm, I probably wasn’t but, I don’t mean to be awful, that’s not my problem,’ she says, slipping into the unfinished business of the present tense. ‘I’ve offered before to give up my career and be there, stupidly, but the problem with anyone in that state is there’s nothing you can do to make them happy. I don’t understand how you’re supposed to be sympathetic, what you’re supposed to do, when I’m live on air. Say to the whole audience, “I’m sorry, I’ve got to go now”, you know? That’s basically what it must boil down to.’
She goes on to say that both she and Kay have said things in the wake of the relationship that they did not really mean, and she emphasises that neither partner behaved badly. ‘We just didn’t get on. That’s all there was to it.’ At the time, though, it didn’t seem as simple as that. ‘I wasn’t aware that I had another life inside of me,’ she says.
At which point, with a keen appreciation of dramatic timing, the producers of Chicago made their move. Van Outen had turned them down a couple of years previously because, she self-mockingly admits, she thought the theatre was ‘uncool’. Now she was desperate. And in the time-honoured tradition of the heartbroken starlet, she threw herself into the role.
At first she panicked, unsure if she could bring it off. ‘I don’t know how I physically did that show. I had two weeks’ rehearsal, I’d just split up, I wasn’t sleeping or eating. I was so small, a size 6; I lost so much weight. I was going home and spending all night in bed crying. Like a drama queen, I was getting into bed with the duvet and saying, “The audience loved me,”‘ she says, adopting a cod-diva voice, “but he hates me.”‘ The critics also loved her. As did their counterparts in New York, when Chicago transferred to Broadway the following year. The New York Post called her ‘a knockout’. ‘I was,’ she says, ‘on top of the world.’
Dropping only slightly in altitude, she is about to return to the West End in the one-woman show Tell Me on a Sunday. A success for Marti Webb two decades ago, the musical about a single woman’s travails in New York has been retailored by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Don Black to suit Van Outen’s more ebullient style. It’s what might be called method casting. Van Outen spent a large slice of last year, when she appeared on Broadway, playing the part of a single woman in New York for real.
She says she loved going out at night, after a show, sitting in Sardi’s or the bar of the W hotel on her own with a cosmopolitan cocktail or two for company. ‘In London you couldn’t do it because you’d get, “All right darlin'”. But I didn’t get any of that in New York…’ pause, laughter. ‘I was sort of disappointed.’ She says she did not get round to dating, although a number of people tried to set her up. ‘I had a couple of agents who wanted to meet me and it soon became apparent when I met them they weren’t interested in my talent.’ One of the agents, apparently well known in New York, even went so far as to tell Van Outen that he could set her up in her own chat show on American television. ‘I was bored and I thought I can have a bit of fun with this,’ she sniggers, ‘so I was pretending to be sucked in. I was saying, “What shall I do about my flat in London? Should I sell it?” And the whole time he kept on going to the toilet, so I knew he was doing coke. Of course he did so much he was starting to believe this show was real. So it was really funny.’
Lloyd Webber had the idea of reviving Tell Me on a Sunday after Van Outen sang one of its songs, Take That Look Off Your Face, at the 2001 Royal Variety Performance. She tells me that at the time she thought it was from Evita — ‘Isn’t that awful.’ But if she wasn’t overly familiar with Lloyd Webber’s canon, the composer-impresario has no doubts about his leading lady. He first spotted her when she appeared at 15 in a production of Stop the World I Want To Get Off. Even then, he says, she stood out.
‘I thought she had a very good voice to listen to. A very true voice.’ But what really impresses him is her ability to play to an audience. He talks about the way Van Outen knew exactly how to deal with the press at the launch for Tell Me on a Sunday. ‘The photographers adored her, of course, and right at the end she turned to me and gave me the most knowing wink. I thought, that girl didn’t do The Big Breakfast for nothing. She’s got it.’
A veteran of dance classes and the audition circuit when she was still in single figures, Van Outen enrolled at Sylvia Young Stage School in London aged 12. ‘I think I was probably ambitious from a really early age,’ she says. ‘I was never pushed; my brother and sister are completely different to me.’
She was always excited about the money, she says, and she still recalls the thrill of earning £300 for her first commercial. Dreaming of a life like that enjoyed by the characters in the television show Fame, she begged her parents to let her go to theatre school.
Her father, who had become a security guard at the High Court, cautioned her against getting carried away with the sudden riches and insisted she concentrate on schoolwork. Eventually she won the argument but her father’s financial advice stuck. She was rumoured to be earning £10,000 a week in Chicago and it appears as if a sensible portion was invested in property.
Sylvia Young echoes Lloyd Webber when she talks about Van Outen’s ‘special gift’, while Vaughan struggles to pin down what this star quality might be, before finally settling on a rather charming definition. ‘On and off screen,’ he says, ‘she’s got a real bit of sunshine about her.’
‘She was a genuine all-round talent,’ Young remembers. ‘There wasn’t anything she couldn’t do. She was very bright academically too [she skipped GCSEs for a stint on a children’s television show in Newcastle]. But to my mind she was primarily an actress, although she had an exceptional singing voice.’
Fellow Sylvia Young students included Dani Behr, Danniella Westbrook and Keeley Hawes. Van Outen stays in touch with a group of them, as well as old friends from Essex. A few times she’s been turned over in the tabloids as a result of former friends selling a story, but, as Vaughan notes, she invariably forgives them. Of Hawes, the star of a spate of recent television dramas, including Tipping the Velvet, she says, ‘She was always a really brilliant actress at school and I’m really pleased it’s happened for her because the good thing is she hasn’t gone that typical lad-mag route.’ Which is precisely the path Van Outen embarked on.
She says it was narrowly missing out on a part in Grease when she was 16 that made her determined to raise her profile by any means necessary. At 18 she signed up for a girl pop duo named, with the kind of literalness that said much about the creative mind responsible, Those Two Girls. She was enticed by the £10,000 advance, not realising her contract was for five years. ‘The other girl had a great voice and she did all the lead vocals,’ she says with characteristic self-deprecation. ‘They got a session singer to do mine and gave me a dead mike. I wasn’t even allowed to speak. I did that for about six months. It was a great laugh.’
Shortly afterwards, her slinky looks brought her the job of weather girl on The Big Breakfast, but it was her sassy personality that led to her presenting alongside Vaughan. ‘The first time I met him,’ she recalls, ‘I didn’t sleep because I really fancied him and I found him really intimidating. I thought, oh my God, he’s really funny and he doesn’t stop talking and I can’t get a word in. Of course, nothing changed but I came out of my shell and I really got on with him. Still do — he’s my best mate.’
At the same time she began to grace the pages of various men’s magazines in the type of photo-shoots in which clothing is seldom essential. With her newfound status on the stage, Van Outen could be forgiven for taking the opportunity to lament how women are forced to disrobe to make a name for themselves, or for reminding you that she was very young at the time. But not a bit of it. ‘Oh, I don’t regret it,’ she says unperturbed.
‘I think really because of the way I look, and how I like to look, it’s slightly unavoidable. I’d like to think now I’m gaining respectability through my work, but I don’t regret it.’
Would she do the same thing again? ‘Yeah. Not to the same extent, but I would do a sexy photo shoot. There’s no reason really why I shouldn’t. In fact, I’d feel less of a cheat now. What would be nice is for people to go, “Oh, she’s really good and she’s quite sexy”.’ I wonder if it is important to her to be thought of as sexy. ‘Yeah, it is. Because I think as a woman there’s nothing better. It’s nice to be complimented. I think when women get dressed up to go out on a Saturday night, you’re not dressing for your mates or yourself. You’re dressing for attention.’
But on the street, I say, at least you get to see heads turn. In magazines, it’s about some bloke sitting on his own saying, ‘Phwoar, she’s all right’. ‘Yeah,’ she replies, deadpan. ‘Truck drivers. I like to think I’m making them happy on their journey. Some people tell me that for their young brothers or cousins I was their first crush. And I think that’s really nice. I think, wow, their first little sexual experience has been about me. That makes me feel quite good. Because it lives with them for ever. Yeah, I like to think that there are a few out there who have…’ she trails off and says smiling, ‘We’ll leave it there.’
What she would really like to do now, she says, is work with Vaughan again. They are developing plans for a Saturday night show. Neither of them is prepared to talk about it just yet, but Van Outen wants to ‘bring back The Big Breakfast and make it bigger’. Fastidious, not a little camp and an aficionado of bubble-gum pop music, she used to complain to Vaughan that she was a gay man trapped in a woman’s body. ‘That’s good,’ Vaughan replied, ‘because I’m a lesbian.’
She refers to Vaughan as her ‘TV husband’ but outside the box she has a new boyfriend, Richard Travis, the owner of Brown’s nightclub in Covent Garden. They are looking to move in together, she says, although her long-held goal of a family is not yet in the plans. ‘I’ve been broody for years,’ she acknowledges. ‘I wouldn’t do it now because I’m in a new relationship. Although if it did happen to me now, if there was an accident, I wouldn’t be disappointed. But,’ she adds, eyeing the discarded peel, ‘I’ve got my banana skin, so I’m protected.’ Lloyd Webber was right. She knows precisely how to give an audience just what it wants.
‘Tell Me on a Sunday’ previews from April 4 and opens on April 15 at the Gielgud Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, London W1 (box office: 0870-890 1105)
By Andrew Anthony for The Telegraph.
(Source: telegraph.co.uk)