Have I Got Hughes For You

With the return of Sean's Show to Channel 4, Ireland's most successful funny man (he'll love that - Ed) is back in the spotlight. But behind the obsessive, neurotic, insecure, angst-ridden exterior of the show's central character, is there an obsessive, neurotic, insecure, angst-ridden individual? Here Sean Hughes worries over religion, dreams, sex, drugs, family and ... Christmas (aaah!). Interview: Joe Jackson.

Sean Hughes is a pervert. You fly into London to meet him for an interview and are told to proceed immediately to St. Mary Le Bow Church in Cheapside. Suddenly, atavistic fears crawl through the recesses of your lapsed-Catholic soul as you hope he doesn’t want to do the interview in a confessional.

Then, thinking of the nature of the questions you intend to ask, you change your mind and hope he’ll allow you to sit in the priest’s seat and listen, with head bowed, and mumbling, “yes, my child, go on,” as he discloses his deepest darkest secrets. Maybe he’ll even admit to a murder and you can tell him to say three Hail Mary’s and to lay off sex for an hour. Or, at least until he leaves the Church.

No such luck. The Church is just a venue for a pretty weird lunchtime gig, with Sean and Vicar Vic occupying opposing pulpits and taking part in the great joke-your-way-in-to-heaven competition. Or, in Sean’s case, into hell. He’s hardly likely to make it into that other mythical space when the heathen actually stands in this hallowed hall and recounts how he once nervously walked off a stage when someone heckled him, by saying “a woulda fuck off.” Nor is he likely to get an invite to the Pope’s post Christmas Day-message party when he talks about working class people being “shat upon by the system.”

A half hour later, he’s tucking into a cheese and tomato sandwich in a room near his London representative’s office and thinking about these venal, maybe even mortal sins.

“Upstairs before the gig, the vicar was saying ‘bollix’ himself!” he says, laughing. “So, even though I’m an atheist, I’m really beginning to like the Church of England! I remember the first time I walked in there to do a poetry reading last summer I said ‘God, this is like an ex-altar boy’s wet dream!’ Great place for a gig, wasn’t it?”

With Morrissey or the Cure, perhaps? In a poem in the recently published, Sean’s Book, Hughes writes that ‘The Cure tends to be the soundtrack to my life’. Like Robert Smith is he really a manic depressive personality himself, a man “half in love with easeful death,” to quote that other young, wounded romantic, John Keats?

“The point is that I don’t actually pay much attention to Robert Smith’s lyrics and I know he hasn’t written a lyric for ten years because he’s happily married for so long,” he says. “But, yeah, the music really works for me on the level you describe – it’s manic, dark, even suicidal. I love something like ‘Just Like Heaven’, which is one of my favourite songs of all time, ‘show me how you do that trick/The one that makes me laugh, she said’. Great stuff. And we have him on Sean’s Show in the last episode, where Robert Smith plays my mother! But I do think their last four albums have been brilliant.”

Digging beneath the humour in Sean’s book, there is a lot of anger, angst and anxiety about love, family, religion, sex. In that is he merely pushing his television persona or revealing something central about himself, maybe for the first time?

“There is nothing of the TV character in the book, to tell you the truth,” he says, carefully. “But when you say isn’t there anger and angst, I can only answer that if I knew exactly what was in there then the book wouldn’t exist. The book contains poems and stories and articles, many of which reflect the way in which writing helps me come to terms with these things. But often, not in a conscious way. So I can read back over something and ask myself did I write that? Did I reveal that about myself?”

Sean pauses. “A lot of the time there is this battle going on in my head,” he reflects, “like today about the fact that I realise I want to live on my own but I don’t want to be lonely. I need that space. And I’m actually writing a new poem about this. It’s not together yet but it deals with how if I have a heart attack and ‘two weeks later my body will be the same colour as my eyes/The eyes that have deceived many a lady/And also one ghostly soul’. Writing is my way of coming to terms with the world.”

Wouldn’t this poem suggest that Sean is indeed ‘half in love with easeful death’? Or why is he contemplating death at this point in his life?

“Because it’s a valid fear when it comes to the question of living alone,” he says. “But unlike Keats or Byron I see no romance in death, or in suicide. There are times, as I’m sure it must be for everyone, when you say ‘I’m not for this world because it and I seem to be on different wavelengths’. But you always push on, thinking something good is going to happen. It would be too much of a cop-out to kill yourself.”

Did Sean Hughes ever come close to killing himself?

“No. But I’ve had really gloomy depressions,” he says, contemplatively. “And they come on very quickly. Even during the making of Sean’s Show, one night I was in this cab coming home from a rehearsal and, as with Dublin, I noticed that when I got the car in the centre of town people were bright and cheerful but the further you drive out of town the more people get poorer and poorer and uglier and uglier. And at one point I saw this Greek guy come out of a betting-shop and he was saying ‘fuck it’ and tearing betting stubs and throwing them on the ground. And I said to myself ‘oh fuck, his wife’s going to get beaten up tonight because he’s in such a foul mood’ and that tiny incident soon had me, with my head in my hands in the back of the cab, trying to keep myself together, saying for fuck’s sake, Sean, hold onto it. You can’t let things like that throw you so easily.”

So why is Sean Hughes so raw, emotionally, so open to depression that seems to spin in with the flip of a coin? How long do such depressions last, moments, hours, months?

“When you’re at a low ebb things do come at you like that, at least they come at me like that,” he says. “And part of the reason for this is that I used to suffer from anxiety attacks years ago and what happened in the cab was the beginning of an anxiety attack. But they don’t last that long, as long as you learn to busy yourself for a couple of hours with physical activities, exercise. It’s like when you’re extremely hung-over and you suddenly regret being alive. It’s that kind of feeling.”

There are people whose anxiety is so crippling that they can feel: ‘I have one second to get out of this room or I’m going to die’. Does Sean ever have that kind of experience? And if so, did he ever use medication to deal with the problem?

“I used to feel like that, definitely, but don’t anymore, to that degree,” he says. “And that’s when I used beta-blockers which slow the heart down but aren’t tranquillisers – so sadly, you never really get off on them! But, yeah, I used them for a couple of years.”

In what kind of experience were the original anxiety attacks rooted?

“It came from when I was 19 and had a terrible acid trip,” he says. “Well, actually, the trip itself wasn’t terrible. But then about two weeks later in a cafe, having a cup of coffee, I sipped my cappuccino and got a rush and immediately thought God, I’m having a flashback. And I had a major anxiety attack. That part of my life then became the most desperate I’ve ever known. I’d be thinking: this is it, I’m going to spend the rest of my life under my bed. That’s when I decided to move over to London. That’s how I was when I first moved here.”

Had Sean just been prey to the usual network of teenage and adolescent anxieties?

“Very much so. But that experience was definitely a trauma and traumas either destroy you or help build up your character. Mine destroyed me at the start and then I rebuilt everything, as much as I could. And, now I’m very glad that happened. I’m also over that kind of anxiety, to a great degree, but I obviously still get depressed. Not over things like reviews or whatever people say to me, it’s more little incidents I see, like that one at the betting shop.”

If one is to believe Sean’s Book Sean Hughes also suffers more than his share of anxiety in relation to women. It’s something which, it must be said, he also causes in the lives of the women he knows . . .

“If I really spent a lot of time thinking about relationships, at this level, I’d probably get even more depressed,” he says. “Maybe that’s why I’m also trying to jump into the next relationship, quickly, thinking ‘this one hasn’t worked out, time to go’ rather than stopping to analyse why it hasn’t worked out. I’m sure this does cause as much anxiety to the people I’m with as it does to me.”

Does Sean accept that this kind of skipping-in-and-out-of-relationships is either pretty infantile or indicative of a heart that has been poisoned by romanticism, always driven to seek out something, or someone better?

“I’ve no argument against that,” he says, laughing. “And it is both. Part of it, for me, is that I have always been that kind of romantic. As a teenager, when everyone else was going out, playing at being couples, I refused to because I knew it was a game. I used to sit at home and think ‘no, I’m going to meet the perfect person’. And maybe that’s okay. That kind of quest does keep me alive.”

Surely Sean may one day get to a stage where he has to accept that this form of romantic ideal doesn’t exist, and that he’s wasted years seeking it and should just settle for less. Or settle for whatever comes his way?

“I’m getting to that stage already,” he says. “But then you start to think, ‘okay, what else is there in life?’ And, let’s face it, if you think about these things too much you will kill yourself. So you don’t. Or, at least, I haven’t been. That’s probably why I’ve gotten out-of-my-head too much over the last couple of years. In fact, I made a decision about a week ago not to do any more drugs, for example, not to run away from things that way.”

In one poem in his book, ‘Wrecking the Wreck’, Sean writes about ‘putting shit up my nose’. Did he make that explicit reference to cocaine use to shake off his hero-to-kiddies image?

“Very much so. I’m not saying I did many drugs, but I have been known to take a little bit of nose powder,” he says. “And in terms of the hero-bit I could never lead a life where there is such a pretence, in that you’re shaking hands with kids or with their parents, who are saying ‘Isn’t he such a good example to children’ while you can’t wait to break away to go into the toilet to get high on coke, or whatever.”

So, how much shit did Sean stuff up his nose?

“Never a major amount. It was mostly for recreational purposes. I never bought any in my life! It was more that a couple of people I’m with were always doing it, so I went along with that.”

It has been suggested that the newer breed of younger comics use, if not coke, then amphetamines to help them perform on stage. Is that true? Did Sean ever do that?”

“I never did, no. And even in the business I think it’s used more at a recreational level,” he says. “And the point is that cocaine is also for people who haven’t got much else going on in their life, as in a group of people who just hang out together. I know from a couple of my friends that it now is a way of life for them, which is a bit frightening. And I know they do it just to keep going on a day-to-day basis but I certainly never need anything like that for a performance.

“Partly because I’m hyper enough,” he adds. “And nowadays I simply don’t do as much live work as I used to. I used to do five nights a week, but now it’s just major tours. And one reason for cleaning up my act in terms of drugs is that I’m 28, not as young as I used to be. In fact, I’m not really young anymore. So I thought I don’t enjoy it so I’ll cut out the drugs, I’ve even cut down on drinking and smoking. I’m not saying I’m giving up booze or cutting out smoking completely, which I’d like to do, but I am cutting out drugs. I just don’t like that way of life.”

What about the suggestion that Sean should also contemplate giving up smoking because that definitely is a bad influence in terms of his young fans?

“Sure it is, but I don’t want to give up smoking, because I really like smoking,” he says. “Leave me with some vices! I’m smoking 40 a day, so I’d obviously like to cut down but, at this stage that’s all I can do. Someone said to me ‘if you could see your lungs you’d give up smoking’ and I said it’s a bit fucking late at that point, isn’t it? If I’m looking at my lungs, sitting there in my hands, it’s obvious I’ve got two seconds to live! Yet another element of all this is that nothing really excites me anymore. Certainly not fame, having more money, reaching bigger audiences.”

“My response to fame in the broadest sense is like – so fucking what if I have TV show?” he says. “People do tend to think that once you ‘make it’ you’ll be somehow immune to all the problems that beset everyone else. Of course you won’t be. With me the first TV series was great. In fact I couldn’t understand how anyone didn’t like it. I’d say: what do you mean you don’t like it? I’ve put two years of my life into that! Now, it’s just a TV show, a gig. And fame probably can be more fulfilling if you play the game – which I don’t.

“Okay I love what I do, I love sitting down and writing and I love performing but I see through the rest of all that shit. At times I wish I had a different type of personality. For example, I’ve turned down ads from which I could make a lot more money and I could sell T-shirts that are a lot more expensive but what’s the point? What would I do with the money? As you can see, I’m basically a cheese-and-tomato person.

“It’s not like I’m interested in designer clothes or in going to the fanciest restaurant. I’ve no fucking interest in any of that. But sometimes I wish I did. Mind you I have just bought my own three-bedroom house in North London, which is obviously the greatest extravagance of my life. But that’s just an advantage because it means I’ll have more privacy.”

In Sean’s Book poems like ‘Shaking Cream on Christmas Day while listening to ‘Mary of the Fourth Form’ by The Boomtown Rats’ and ‘Dad’s Version’ suggest a less than gleeful landscape in the Hughes household. Was that Christmas an exception or was it representative of the tensions in his family life when he was younger?

“In that poem I was trying to make life seem a little bit better by giving my dad his point of view but, yeah, at the time, it was far from joyful,” he says. “You can imagine how bad it was. I went in to play me record and because it was the Boomtown Rats I was shaking away and the cream went all over the place so he came in and smashed my Christmas present. And I remember one birthday where he locked my stereo in the wardrobe because I’d done something wrong.”

Sounds like a typically Irish father-son relationship.

“It was, in ways,” says Sean. “I feel sorry for my dad in a lot of ways. He’s mellowed to a great degree now. But, because I’m a Scorpio, I tend not to forget things and I recall too many incidents like that in my childhood. Another time we were on holidays in Cork and someone had bought my brother and I an Easter Egg and my dad came up with the Easter eggs and gave them to our cousins, Tommy and Christy. That was him being ‘hey, I’m your uncle, right, here you go’. And I’m thinking ‘you cunt’. And the reason this all gets to me is because, as we talked about in the first TV series, you get frightened of turning into your own father.”

These days, has that tension between Sean and his dad evaporated?

“In terms of my relationship with my parents, though there is a love there, there’s no understanding whatsoever,” he muses. “There’s more love from my mother but with my dad it’s more ‘I wish him no harm and love him to a certain degree and that’s as far as it goes’.”

Did Sean Hughes originally have to leave Ireland to get away from this aspect of his family life?

“To get away from the whole thing and particularly, as I said in the Church earlier, the soul-destroying repetitiveness of working class life. Like my parents are hard-working people who have to get up early every day, work till they collapse before the fire, watch television then go to bed and start all over again. That’s their life in a nutshell. And I never wanted that. And that’s why I don’t like going back there. At Christmas I will and I’ll go into my local bar and everyone will be patting me on the back and the whole thing will just make me so disheartened.”

In the poem, ‘My Hometown’ Sean pushes this theme further, saying that when he returns to Dublin “sober with success” he finds that his friends are ‘no longer my friends/Just reminiscing machines’ who ‘know their place/And I know mine’.”

“That’s how it is,” he says, sighing. “There is that distance between us. Even between myself and my best friend, who I thought would be my best friend for life. It’s like a sex relationship that’s gone sour. I don’t want to talk to him now because it can’t be as good as it was. We’ve got different interests, to a great extent. And he’s still doing the same shit, like what I talk about in that poem, and I’m saying ‘okay, count me out of this, I’m not living this life anymore’. So we do, as I say ‘drown our sorrows/And I depart/Again’.”

Does Sean have intimate friends in London who take the place of these lost friends from home?

“I do. But I’ve just written another poem about this subject which relates to living alone, again,” he says. “It’s like when you have friends and they’re usually in relationships and all they want of you is a distraction from their lives. So although there is a love there among myself and this bunch of people, I know I’m only a distraction to them and I go out with them but just end up coming home with my girlfriend. We’re all just buffers, really.”

So does Sean feel fundamentally disconnected – whether from his family, his old friends and the new ‘buffers’ in London?

“Yeah, completely,” he says. “I’m really close to my younger brother. He’s my lifeline to that life. In the book I have a poem, called ‘The Brothers’ and that’s about my grandmother’s funeral about ten years ago, which made a vivid impression on me in terms of the relationship between my father and his brothers. Seeing a dead body for the first time really upset me but I looked across at my dad and saw that he wouldn’t cry. “The other brothers would cry a bit, but not much and the whole thing struck me as such a tainted family image that it has stayed with me since. I was there saying ‘cry, cry, why aren’t you all crying’. I couldn’t help but cry, thinking about my own mom dying yet they weren’t, even though there in the grave was their mother.”

Sean refers to his own mother quite often in his book, including one reference about how he constantly mourns for her ‘every unhappy waking moment’. Is that line a truthful reflection of her life?

“I think so, yeah,” he says, sadly. “I think most working class people have that kind of life and that’s why religion is so important to them. People still think earth is hell and heaven, after death, is what we should be living for. It’s ridiculous to me but I respect what religion is, for people who believe, at that level. My mother just buried her own brother here in London last week so I went to another funeral and went through the whole thing again.

“The priest came up to me afterwards and I said ‘look, I don’t believe in any of this shit and I don’t want to talk to you’ because I think he had plans to come away for a week, on a retreat with me! He was saying (adopts Irish brogue) ‘I left the Church as well and then I was watching a horror film one night and I suddenly believed again’ and I’m thinking nice one, let me out of here, quickly!”

How do Sean’s parents feel about him writing his poems and publishing them and thus revealing family secrets, particularly the sadness and tensions in their lives?

“Any of their friends who would pick up on the book probably wouldn’t pick up on the things you’ve picked up on and they themselves try not too think about these things,” he says. “And I know from anytime my dad has commented on my work he just doesn’t understand what it’s all about. My younger brother is Martin, and he was saying that my dad snuck a look at the copy of the book I’d sent him – I didn’t give a copy to my dad – and my father’s response was ‘ah, he’s fucked in the head, that fella’. The other thing is that the book is all about moments that are supposed to contradict each other and he said ‘he tends to contradict himself here, all over the place’. But then I still haven’t forgiven my father for coming up to me after a live gig once and saying ‘you’ve got a great rap-aport with that audience’. And when he read another interview I did recently, in which I spoke about shoplifting in Easons he said ‘you shouldn’t talk about that, it’s a bad reflection on us’. That’s all he’s concerned about and I’m thinking: ‘oh, get a life, for fuck’s sake’. What else can I say?”

Does Sean’s mother also think he’s ‘fucked in the head’?

“She just keeps saying ‘Look, don’t be going on about God, come on Sean’. That’s her major worry about my head!”

Sean Hughes seems to have a profound lack of faith in the family unit, past, present or in terms of any future he may have. Is that fair to say?

“Yeah. It works for some people but it could never work for me, as an ongoing thing,” he says. “I certainly don’t intend to bring kids into the world, a process I described somewhere as ‘people trying to give meaning to their meaningless lives’. That’s my view to a degree, for me.”

What if Sean falls in love with a woman who demands that they have children – will he say no way?

“Yeah,” he says, unhesitatingly. “Because you do hear that, someone saying ‘let’s have a kid’. And I understand why people want to have children but I don’t believe that crap about the best way for a man and a woman to express love for each other is to have a kid. I don’t see any logic in that at all. I find the whole idea that a child is the natural consequence of love to be completely bizarre. But then I don’t even believe that sex is the best way of expressing love, either. I just wrote an article for Elle magazine, in which I say that modern sex is press-ups for the generation too frightened to go to the gym on their own.”

Is that Sean’s definition of being a romantic?

“What has sex got to do with romance?” he asks. “Sex is a nice, physical act but little more. I’ve made love once in my life and I even think I was kidding myself at that point. You know where you let go because you believe you are madly in love with the person and you do go onto a different plane. That only ever happened to me once.”

Let’s get this straight, Sean: when you say ‘I’ve made love once in my life’, presumably you’re drawing a sharp distinction between ‘making love’ and ‘fucking’? You didn’t only have sex once in your life, surely?

“Certainly not!” he says, laughing. “And I am making that distinction. I can’t get into bed with someone and say ‘right, I’m going to stick my dick into your vagina because that’s how I want to express my love for you.’ That’s just not what sex is about for me.”

What about the women he fucks (with?). To put it crudely, do they all accept that a ride is a ride is a ride and nothing else – certainly nothing to do with love?

“Yeah. I never lie, I’d never be saying to someone we’re making love now,” he says. “And yet, at the same time, I can say to someone I do love you so let’s have sex but the two aren’t necessarily related to one another. That’s why sometimes I just don’t like having sex. Sometimes it’s fun. But sometimes it’s just not the right thing to do.”

This subject often manifests itself in Sean’s Book, in the stories ‘Hell Is Other People’ and ‘Date With D.” Indeed, in the latter the narrator writes of the self-hate that follows a ‘sexual explosion’ that wasn’t right, an orgasm that was a waste of time.

“I’m very proud of ‘Hell Is Other People’ because, in answer to your question about a woman knowing what’s going on, that story is about a guy who’s thinking of all these women he saw earlier on in the day while he’s fucking the woman. Then her image comes into his mind and that destroys him. And you have the twist at the end of the story where she says ‘I want a divorce’. And I don’t want people to feel sorry for this Kenton guy. I want to highlight how it’s all from his point of view and not for one moment do we think of the woman, until that last line.”

Is Sean Hughes Kenton? As with his hero, does he ever see a woman in a bar and immediately perceive her simply as a fuckable object?

“It’s not really me, now,” he says, hesitantly. “There are, of course, times you see someone and think ‘I’d love to shag her’ but, in my case, not in the way Kenton does. He’s based on four people and I’d be one of them, that’s for sure.”

‘Hell Is Other People’ is derived from Sartre, who basically viewed sex as a power game, a struggle for domination. Is that also Sean’s view?

“No,” he says, a little self-consciously. “I’m basically looking for spiritual love rather than physical love. But I’ve accepted that I’ll never get that form of love via sex so I’m looking for the spirituality that’s there in the Buddhist ideal, of being on your own and reaching your own Nirvana in that sense. But just because I’m saying I can’t reach that state of being through sex, hopefully other people can.”

Even fans who get to fuck Sean Hughes? How often does he avail of the opportunities that arise as a result of his image as a teenage sex symbol?

“That’s just one aspect of the whole thing that the tabloids have picked up on,” he says. “Occasionally I will shag people and let go every so often, in this sense, of course. But nothing too excessive.”

Following his gig earlier there had been a couple of women hanging round. If they had been fans, hoping to fuck him would that have seemed like an attractive option, in a Church?

“Definitely,” he says, shaking his head at the idea. “But I don’t know how many of those fans really want to sleep with me, though obviously some do. I think most just want to straighten me out, or maybe comb my hair! And I don’t get approached sexually as often as people might think. I got a weird letter recently from a woman who obviously is crazy about me and she was telling me that she’s met someone else and how she thinks of me when she’s sleeping with her husband. In relation to the new guy, though, she says that in terms of her sexual fantasies, she can now give me a rest for a while.”

Is Sean involved in an ongoing relationship? When he referred earlier to going home with his girlfriend, was that someone specific?

“No. When I say girlfriend I could just as easily say boyfriend,” he explains. “But no, I haven’t got an ongoing relationship with anyone because I don’t believe in ongoing relationships. There are ongoing relationships. But what happens with me is that I fall in love really easily and then I become a real bastard because I will say, when I meet someone ‘look, I think you should know that in a couple of minutes I might well tell you that I love you then tomorrow morning I might not want to see you till whenever’. Most people say ‘I love you’ to someone then get into the kind of relationship where they begin to see each other six times a week. Instead, I go ‘I love you’ but now I have to go.

“That doesn’t mean I don’t love someone but loving them is not necessarily wanting to be with them that often. So I couldn’t commit to an ongoing relationship in that steady sense. I couldn’t even commit to someone for a week. And I certainly couldn’t live with anyone, ever. I like when I see someone and they stay over but there’s never any point at which I even think ‘we’ve been seeing a lot of each other. Let’s move in together’. Never. One reason is that when it comes to creativity – whether that’s writing or whatever – I want to be on 24 hour call. Not every partner understands that.”

Sean pauses, as if debating whether to continue along these lines. He does.

“For example, I see someone every so often and she’s attempting to bring me along to places for no apparent reason. And she seems to want to share everything with me, which I can’t understand. Like she phones and tries to talk about the kind of day we had and I’m going ‘I don’t care what you did today, I have to go, bye’.”

Has Sean ever considered that he might be a latent homosexual and that maybe he finally will find he wants to share his life with a man?

“I probably am, yeah,” he says, smiling. “I do have homo-erotic dreams. I had one about Morrissey the other day and met him a day later and he was really charming. But, needless to say, I didn’t mention it to him, like go, ‘Hey, I had a big wet dream about you the other night, what’dya think about that?’”

But would Sean like these wet dreams about Morrissey to turn into flesh – specifically Morrissey’s flesh?

“No. Because, again, the mere physical act of shagging a man doesn’t appeal to me,” he says. “The closeness of being with another man and cuddling and stuff is something very close to my heart. I love that. And it’s like when I’m with a woman, sometimes what I want with them is to be close and cuddle and then you start to think ‘oh, we’ve been here for an hour, we’re getting aroused’ and you end up shagging. Whereas with a man I can’t imagine a point where we’re cuddling and I go ‘ah, now turn around, move over a bit, whooo – there you go!’

“But I wouldn’t discount the idea. I might well have a homosexual relationship. And I’m very much a supporter of homosexuals, politically, because they do get trod upon and are marginalised. But at the same time though many of the gay people I know are very nice, you also have those gay clubs where there are the kind of people who annoy me so much, because they are too camp and you just want to say to them: relax.”

As in the song by Frankie Goes to Hollywood?

“No,” says Sean, laughing “More, just ‘do you have to put on this show’? But then maybe the rest of us don’t know what it’s like to live the rest of your life in such a repressed way and then find someplace to just express everything with other people.”

Does Sean have many homo-erotic dreams?

“No. In fact, I wish I had more. Because my dreams are usually so trivial, that was quite a nice one, for a change!”

Is the fear of AIDS ever-present in Sean Hughes’ life when he does fuck? Does he practise safe sex?

“No, I don’t really worry about it, I’m afraid. And though I do practise safe sex, it’s only when I remember to,” he says. “I couldn’t say I’ve got a completely clean whistle, if you’ll pardon the pun. But I don’t know why that doesn’t concern me, ever, At the same time I haven’t had a test and have no intention of having a test. (pauses) But Jesus, I’ve just remembered – I really regret shagging that green monkey!”

Was the monkey from Africa?

“I didn’t ask him, it was just a one-night stand!”

Come on Sean, show a little more respect for the seriousness of the question, and the issue of AIDS. Let me put it another way. Do you have a condom in your wallet as we speak?

“Why? Are you thinking we could have a quick fuck? We’ve only just met, Joe and I only had one homo-erotic dream, for Christ’s sake! Give us a break! (laughs) But no, seriously I don’t carry condoms around on the off-chance that, at lunch time in London, I’m likely to get a shag! But, to tell you the truth, if I have to use a condom I’d rather not have sex at all.”

Isn’t that highly irresponsible?

“Yes, I guess it is and I will wear a condom, of course.”

If his partner insists?

“Yes. Because some people are really terrified about AIDS. And we all do have to bear the responsibility for our own life and for the lives of others. But you know from reading the book, that I expect the old ten ton truck to come down on top of me at any minute. That’s the presence I live with.”

So is Sean saying that because he half expects death he willingly courts AIDS?

“Certainly not. I’m just trying to rationalise to myself why I don’t worry as much as I should about AIDS, because you asked me the question,” he says. “But it’s not something I’m unaware of, in any way. I do a lot of work for the Terence Higgins Trust. Yet the point is that I don’t expect to live forever. I probably expect to be dead within ten years. Not that I’ve any serious illness. It’s just that that’s a thought I constantly live with. And part of it is that things have happened too fast for me. I always wanted to do things with my life and I seem to have done them already. So I’d be happy with another ten years.”

The final prose section in Sean’s book is entitled ‘The Object Of Your Affection Becomes Distorted After Use’. Does he ever worry that long before the next ten years are through the British public in particular may say something similar to him and shunt him off into the wings?

“No, because I’m not courting the fame thing,” he says. “I’m off centre and while half the public knows me another half doesn’t. That’s why it’s better never to be number one, because if you do become flavour-of-the-month you will be shafted by the public. Angus Deayton and Paul Merton and all them are so popular now that they have to spiral down.

“But I really don’t worry about that. And though I’d like to do a film, for example, the most I really aspire to is the next thought, and trying to articulate it. That, and maybe, eventually, a little peace of mind.”