New show drove Boosh star 'insane'

Noel Fielding said he took on so many comic characters for his new E4 show that he ‘erased his own personality’.

The Boosh star said he went so ‘insane’ playing up to three characters a day that he forgot how to be himself.

In a new interview to promote Noel Fielding's Luxury Comedy, described as a psychedelic mix of sketch, animation and sitcom, he said: ‘Some days it was three different characters.

‘Then we went to the studio to do the stuff, where I was sort of playing a version of myself, and on the first day, Nige [his collaborator Nigel Coan] went, “What are you doing? You're doing something weird. Just be yourself.”

‘And I went “Which one am I again?”

‘I'd slightly gone insane. I'd been doing the weird voices for so long that I'd forgotten what I was. I erased my own personality. It was well weird.’

Fielding said he enjoyed a closer sense of humour with Coan – an old art-school chum than he did with Julian Barrett, but insisted he would work with his Boosh co-creator again.

He said of Coan: ‘We went to art school together, we've known each other for 15 years, and we've always had the same sense of humour. We've lived together and been best mates for years.

‘Me and Julian have got similar senses of humour, but me and Nige have a really similar sense of humour. It's really specific, it's much more surreal and weird. Me and Julian were much more interested in story and plot, whereas this is much more what a show would be like if Salvador Dali had made it.’

‘The thing with me and Julian is we had 13 years together doing stuff, it was like a marriage. We did need a break, and I started working on this, and he started doing his other stuff, and before you know it, you've been working for 18 months to two years on something.

‘But I do want to work with Julian again in the future, definitely.

Click here to read the full interview.

Published: 11 Jan 2012