Firm of grip and twinkly of eye, initial impressions suggest that Tony Slattery is amiable, forthright and charming- a decent chap. He's taller than you might expect, stocky (currently two stone overweight, he says, but fresh off the gym where he's trying to work it off) and puppyishly attractive.In fact, he is the sort of man you'd be indecently keen to take home to meet your mother.
So why is this master of the ribald improvisation, this all-singing, all-dancing star of the new variety baring his soul to a homosexual publication? Could it be that, after years of carefully guarded privacy (he lives alone, speculation fans), he's about to break down and tell all about the mad sex romps in his two-bedroom flat in south London's Stockwell?
"No."
Slattery declines to discuss his sexuality in the nicest possible way, so let's get that out of the way first. "I know a lot of people think I'm gay, a lot of people think I'm straight, a lot of people think I'm bisexual. I don't really care what people think. Since I became sexually active at the age of fourteen, I never considered it to be anybody else's business what I do with my genitalia because I don't really want to know what they do with theirs."
Evasive as this may seem on the page, it's said so ingenuously that it's hard to disagree. But surely Slattery, steeped in the theatre as he is, must enjoy a bit of salacious gossip as much as the next old trouper?
"I really don't. I don't go in for sex gossip. I find sex funny, in a surreal sort of way that comes out in my work, but I'm not one for photographic realism. I don't sit around with my friends discussing who's done what to whom. It's to do with my schooling and my family; I just think that there is a side of life that is private, that I don't want to talk about. This is only my point of view. I'm not being proscriptive. Some people talk about their private lives loud and clear, but I've never felt the urge."
So revelations are not to be the order of the day. Surely, however, this renowned publicity-seeker is aware that his mysterious sexuality (unmarried at thirty-four, no conspicuous dates), his hefty good looks and occasional bursts of queeniness make him a focus of considerable interest for gay men- many of whom think he's a nice bit of totty.
"Do they?" he exclaims, in apparently genuine surprise. "I didn't know that. I don't feel uneasy about being fancied, but it's a surprise, hand on heart. Still, if it makes people come to see a show, great. It's depressing to play to half-empty houses, so if they come for that reason, it's a bonus."
This is cool talk from a man who, both on stage and on television, has appeared naked, most memorably at a fundraising 'improvisationathon' at a London theatre. "That's got nothing to do with sex! If someone shouts out 'Danish porn!' during an improvisation game, I feel honor-bound to go for it until someone says stop or pulls the curtain. I've done a lot of improvisation, particularly on Whose Line Is It Anyway?, and sometimes through sheer nerves I say something filthy. That's where my salacious reputation comes from. But that's only about ten percent of what I do; there's a lot of other good stuff that doesn't get remembered."
If it's the naughty Slattery, the black-browed imp making testicle jokes, that gets the most attention, that's not because the man is idle. Indeed, he has earned the rather unwelcome soubriquet 'ubiquitous' for his regular appearances in films, plays and TV shows.
On leaving university in 1982 (he studied Medieval and Modern Languages at Trinity Hall, Cambridge), Slattery also departed the warm glow of the Footlights for the harsh glare of adverts, 'lite' current affairs shows and daytime soaps. But after he joined the Whose Line... team in 1988, offers of work flooded in. The spin-off series with Mike McShane (S&M), the movie review show (Saturday Night at the Movies), quiz shows (The Music Game, the ill-advised etiquette game Ps & Qs), sitcoms (That's Love, Just a Gigolo), West End musicals (Me and My Girl, Radio Times), even a film with old Footlights buddies Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson (Kenneth Branagh's Peter's Friends)... The list goes on. The Independent called him 'a telly tart who can't say no'.
Although he resents the implication that, workwise, he's an easy lay ("I turn down far more work than I accept, and goodness knows with three million unemployed I am very lucky to be able to do that"), Slattery seems to have a definite quality control problem. Is he simply grabbing every half-decent job that comes along, thus spreading himself thin because he doesn't have any confidence in his long-term staying power?
"I've been on a run of luck for a few years and it may evaporate at any time," he admits, "so I'm making hay while the sun shines."
But even for such a keen worker, Slattery has been in a few dogs. This smacks of desperation. The etiquette quiz Ps & Qs was embarrassing, S&M was a let-down and Just a Minute sucked. He defends them all stoutly, pointing out that S&M won a Special Jury Prize at Montreaux (after which it was promptly dumped by Channel 4). Even Slattery admits that Gems, the daytime soap opera he wrote and appeared in in the mid Eighties, was "awful". (Interestingly, it was chock full of gay characters and references.)
"I wasn't getting any acting work, so I ended up writing myself a part, and to show you how crap I was feeling at the time I gave myself a really naff role. It was a nightmare."
Will he feel the same way in years to come about some of his recent ventures?
Slattery defends himself by attacking his critics. "In Britain, there's a sneering response to anything that isn't perceived as high art. But in my book, a good edition of The Generation Game is far better entertainment than some leadenly produced drama by Strindberg."
It's all very well to turn on the critics ("sour and bitter because nobody gives a toss what they think") every time he gets slated, but the fault cannot lie entirely with them. Slattery's restless flitting from job to job suggests a lack of anything really satisfying to to get his teeth into. At the moment, he is most enthusiastic about his next job, a play by Tim Firth (Neville's Island) which has played to full houses in Nottingham and, he hopes, will transfer to the West End later this year. Also in the pipeline is a starring role opposite Ian McKellen in a new film, To Die For, in which Slattery plays the (straight) friend of a dead drag queen come back to haunt her lover.
He insists it's not the frequency of his work that irritates people, but the diversity. But could it not be the disappointment of seeing a man so obviously talented wasting himself on too many dodgy jobs? "I like doing lots of different things, and that pisses them off. It irritates them that I don't just read the news, or do straight plays, or sing, or whatever. They want to categorise me and they can't."
Slattery's most entertaining run-in with his critics involved the unlovely Gary Bushell. The Sun's overbearing TV reporter had had it in for our Tony from an early date, calling him 'classic Channel 4 man: smug, self-satisfied, and middle-class'.
Slattery hit back on the industry's in-joke, the Bore of the Year Awards, with a splendid stream of invective against his bearded persecutor. Bushell followed that by appearing on GMTV, and Slattery decided it was time to sort him out.
"I bit the bullet and set up a meeting through a Sun reporter," says Slattery, who then featured in 'The BIG Bushell Interview', photographed comically brandishing his fists in Bushell's face. Contrary to expectations, the two seemed to get on well.
"Ironically, he was terribly charming. The problem with Gary Bushell, apart from his rabid prejudices, is that he's got a very good mind and he's doing a third-rate job, and that must be uncomfortable for him."
Clearly, the wounds have not entirely healed; Bushell, after leaving Slattery alone for a while, has recently started attacking him in print again.
What smarted most was not the accusations of smugness ("That's his subjective opinion and he's entitled to it"), but the 'middle class' bit. Slattery is from a big, working-class Irish family; he grew up, one of five children, on the Stonebridge housing estate in Willesden in north London. Nor is he a paid-up luvvie; the association with Mr. and Mrs. Branagh, Fry and Laurie (which began at university) is for work only.
"We're not in and out of each other's houses for tea all the time. Occasionally our paths cross but we all live separate lives. Making Peter's Friends was the first time I'd seen any of them in ten years. Generally I keep out of showbiz circles; that life doesn't suit me. I've got a close circle of friends, mostly from school and university, and that's it. I don't go to all the openings. I'm not Lesley Joseph."
Slattery genuinely shuns the spotlight- at least when he's not working. On stage or screen, he can seem can be the most outrageous, attention-seeking ham, even when he's obviously unhappy about his material (witness his appearance on the lame TV version of the radio panel game Just a Minute). This all changes as soon as the curtain's down. It's a strange sort of schizophrenia. By rights Slattery belongs in the pages of Hello! magazine, talking about his bathroom suite and his soft furnishings, but his love of privacy (the cruel might say secrecy) is all-pervading.
"I've seen friends play the PR game because it's like being on the crest of a wave; they get all this attention, and at first it's great. They invite the tabloids in and say, 'here's my lover, here's us on the beach, here's a list of my ten favourite songs, here's my living room'. When they've had enough of that, when they feel they've been slightly tarnished by it, they want to slam the door shut but they can't. You can't move the goalposts halfway through the game.
"I decided from the word go that I wouldn't do it. If you're having a relationship and you talk about it, I think it makes it less special."
So, naming no names or genders, has he ever lived with anyone?
"Never, at least not since leaving home. I like living alone."
Has no one relationship ever teetered on the brink of cohabitation?
"No. It's never been an issue. If it's ever come up, I've always said no, because I just never wanted to."
So has there been a long-term, non-cohabitative, non gender-specific relationship?
"Well, one person's long-term is another person's fling. I know some people who think that three weeks is a long time. Other people say they've had an eight-year fling."
He's really not going to give anything away. But wherever he stands sexually, Slattery is certainly no stranger to the tres gay world of theatre and theatrical types. For Me and My Girl he learned to tap dance in three panic-stricken weeks; he relished the campness of his role in Radio Times and has recently recorded the fiftieth anniversary CD of Salad Days.
"It would be pointless with that type of show to deny that there's an element of camp," says Slattery, "and it's very enjoyable, sweet, optimistic, silly camp. I'm very aware of camp, aware enough to know that there's no definition of it. There's the straightforward drag act, there's a very sexual camp and there's the asexual camp of Keith Williams or Maggie Smith. It's not just tied to sexual orientation."
That's as maybe... But in case anyone should start reading too much in between the lines, there's just as much of the straight lad about Slattery as there is of the camp queen. At the age of fifteen he was in the British judo team and won a black belt. He has a broad streak of laddish humour (he's currently working on a spoof of Bulldog Drummond), his hobby is pharmacology (for relaxation he reads The British National Formulary and can easily tell you the difference between amoxicyllin and oxytetracyclene) and perhaps, most tellingly, he claims to hate shopping and nightclubs.
"I absolutely never go out to dance. I like to sit in a restaraunt and get quietly drunk with friends and talk, which you can never do in clubs. And I really hate shopping. If I'm doing a film or whatever, I just give the wardrobe people my measurements and let them get on with it."
After a couple of hours in Tony Slattery's company, a journalist starts to feel vaguely ashamed of the list of prurient, impolite questions that have been so pleasantly dealt with. he is so transparently honest and eager to please (within strictly-defined bounds) that it's impossible to dislike him.
But there lurks a persistent suspicion that behind the charm, the smiles and the firm handshake, there is a much darker, more complex character that nodbody else ever sees. Not perhaps in a Jekyll-and-Hyde sense- in fact his attitude to privacy is refreshing- but even Slattery admits that he's not sweet all the time.
"I'm generally pretty sunny by nature," he says, "but that alternates with periods of bleakness. If I'm doing a presenting job on television, I have to be a lot more sunny when I'm working, so I really need periods of being alone to compensate.
"Generally at home when I'm relaxing I'm very quiet and reflective to the point of utter lassitude. I'm moody, I'm up and down, but so are all of my friends. I don't care what mood someone's in, as long as they're honest with you and don't play games. I can accept anything in other people, except dishonesty, pretending that they're your best friend when it suits them and cutting you dead when it doesn't. That's my only benchmark."
All of which is honourable and delightful. But still, you can't help wonder about a man who, apropos of almost nothing, enthuses about the Nolans (must be the Irish blood).
"They were fantastic. Can you name their biggest hit? No? It was I'm in the Mood for Dancing, of course. Oh, but then they tried to get very sexy and wore those zipped-up spandex things and too much eye make-up. They just looked like a drag act."
