The comedian Jamie Demetriou was slumped in a chair, trying not to look. He was at a cast-and-crew screening of his new Netflix special, A Whole Lifetime with Jamie Demetriou, in which he takes viewers on an off-centre-sketch musical journey through life’s stages, from womb to grave. (The grave, in this case, is a hospital wheelie bin.) Earlier that day, Demetriou had arrived late for lunch – a nervous wreck, he’d been delayed by several visits to the toilet. And though audience members at the screening laughed cheerily in the right moments, Demetriou couldn’t bring himself to watch. “You know when a horse bolts?” he says, when we meet one mid-morning in an east London café. “Apparently it’s blind and deaf for the entire race. I kind of felt like that. Like, I didn’t hear or see anything.”
Demetriou is best known for writing and starring in Stath Lets Flats, the Bafta-winning Channel 4 sitcom, in which he plays the titular character, a dim-witted, almost likable lettings agent. Stath features several comic actors with whom Demetriou often works, including his sister, Natasia, or Tash, who is also a successful comedian. While making the series, Demetriou became “incredibly reliant on the relief of the ensemble,” he says, because then he “gets a rest from my own face when I’m in the edit”. The new special features several of the same actors, but here Demetriou stars prominently in every sketch – as a screen-addled teenager begrudgingly attempting sex, a best man getting it wrong, a pensioner witnessing the moment after his own death – and he seems apprehensive about the attention. At the screening he worried, “When is the lull going to kick in? And how painful is that going to be?” When I ask why he has been feeling this way, he says simply, “It’s 53 minutes of my head.” And then, tutting: “Like, this is hardcore my head.”
As a performer, Demetriou is willingly grotesque. “I’m a believer in grotesque being the only way,” he says – the uglier or dumber or more incoherent his characters the better. But in person Demetriou is self-deprecating and self-effacing. When I tell him I enjoyed the special, he says, “Thank you, you’re the first person I’ve spoken to who isn’t obliged to say that,” before catching himself and adding, “Or maybe you are?”
Demetriou is 35. The Netflix special follows a decade spent writing and appearing in sketch shows and sitcoms big and small, in the UK as well as the US and, lately, the occasional film role. (Stath emerged from a series of Channel 4 “comedy blaps”, at a time when Demetriou was developing several characters. My six-year-old son, who has not watched Stath, knows him from Paddington 2. You might recognise him as Bus Rodent from Fleabag.) It also follows an important period of self-reflection. Now he is no longer very young, he has been considering his future, how his life might resemble or differ to that of his children’s, should he ever have any. “My dad’s in a bit of a bad way with dementia and stuff,” he says, by way of explanation. “And I kind of, I don’t know… I guess, witnessing the finish line of something makes you think about it all a lot more.”
Demetriou has spoken of an “invisible umbilical cord between my writing and my connection with my dad.”
I ask if we can discuss his father.
“Sure,” he says, sipping coffee, then warning, “There may be a limit before I start sobbing.”
I ask, “How is he?”
“I mean, it’s difficult,” he says. “Dementia is such a downward trajectory that it’s difficult to be, like, ‘It’s like this, but at least there’s…’” He pauses briefly to enact searching for a silver lining that doesn’t exist. “It’s definitely worse than it was yesterday,” he goes on, “and it’s way worse than it was a month ago, and it’s infinitely worse than it was before he had it… He’s very sweet. It’s great hanging out with him. But Christmas was definitely spent meeting him. There were a lot of introductions.”
“You had to introduce yourself to him?” I ask.
“A few times a day, yes,” he says. “Which is a bit of psychological heavy lifting.” Demetriou’s father was born in a small village in Cyprus and migrated to England alone, aged 11. He arrived without shoes, was briefly homeless, and later owned a north London café, where his son sometimes joined him. “Characters filled our lives,” Demetriou recalls. “Going to work with him at 6am to give tea to a guy who wore trousers and braces and nothing else – that’s surreal. Or telling someone, no, they can’t have a shower in the toilet.” Demetriou grew up mostly comfortable. He describes his father as coming from “a different planet” and as “an unintentional surrealist”. (His mother, who worked as a nanny among other things, and is now retired, is from London.) As a child, Demetriou worried his parents would never fully understand him. “We couldn’t have had more different upbringings,” he says. “So you feel like they don’t know who you are.” But the dementia has put things in perspective. “Now I think, ‘Ah, I wish he didn’t know who I was in that way again.’” And then: “I’d love to be on first-name terms with him, basically.”
Demetriou thinks of his childhood as “unconventional” and “chaotic”. While making Stath, producers sometimes worried that certain scenes were too outlandish for audiences to consider true to life and Demetriou would inform them that they were drawn from his experiences as a boy. “If those years were formative,” he says, “and now I’m doing what I’m doing, well, I can only consider them good. But they definitely weren’t route one.” He reels off a few examples. Once, he watched a driverless car roll along a north London high street. When it stopped, in the middle of a large crowd, he discovered his father in charge of the vehicle. The driver’s seat had broken so that it lay flat; Demetriou’s father didn’t know how to fix it, so just carried on. On another occasion, while holidaying in Cyprus, Demetriou’s father drove the family car on to a beach, where it sank. Eventually a crane was hired to recover it. “So many times I would be walking down the street and I’d notice something mad happening,” Demetriou says, “and my dad would be at the centre of it.”
Though Demetriou’s father regularly found himself in remarkable situations, he never considered them unusual. After the high street incident, he announced, “Agh, the chair’s broken,” rather than what Demetriou thinks would have been a more appropriate response: “You won’t believe the story I have.” After their car was retrieved from the beach in Cyprus, the Demetrious went to dinner with members of their extended family. “He didn’t bring it up,” Demetriou recalls. “Me and Tash were, like, ‘We’ve got something here. Surely we should be sharing this!’” When the siblings eventually did tell their tale, “Lo and behold, no one cared. We got questions like, ‘What kind of crane?’”
Demetriou imagines his characters as being the opposite of himself. While he is considered and alert to the world, his characters are filled with a blithe confusion. “They don’t mind that they’re desperately getting things wrong,” he says. “They just plough on.” Because he is 6ft 3in, Demetriou has learned to bend his frame to better blend into his surroundings, which he feels is opposite to the way his characters might act. He describes Stath and several characters from his special as “people who step out of their door and don’t look over their shoulder at the trail of carnage behind them,” which he indicates is not unlike how his father behaved. In one episode, Demetriou’s character falls asleep while driving, remains unconscious in the middle of a road for four hours and then goes about the rest of his day. When, later in the episode, he meets with colleagues, he doesn’t mention the event, instead focussing on the fact his sister, Sophie, played by his real-life sister, is “wearing a really nice jacket”. When I say his Cyprus story reminds me of this episode, Demetriou nods. He goes on, “There’s a fish-out-of-water quality to them.”
I wonder aloud about the ways in which his father is the same as he used to be.
“The essence of him is there,” he says. “One thing he always did, which definitely forced me into a love of language contortion, is he aspired – and was successful a lot of the time – to be weirdly poetic in the things he says. And now, with even less ability with the English language – bearing in mind he never went to school in England and barely went to school in Cyprus – he is left with this kind of insane word association to demonstrate any kind of thought or feeling. It’s a roller coaster. Me and Tash are mesmerised by it.”
I ask, “How’s your mum?”
Demetriou’s parents are separated, but live together, and they remain close.
“She’s so good with him,” he says. “But she’s just… You know, it’s funny. Because of the mad stories about my dad, he’s always in the spotlight. But my mum, my mum is just a vehicle for love.” He sighs, then begins to cry gently. “Sorry,” he says. “God. Well, there you go, that was the moment.” After a pause he goes on, “She’s just incredibly selfless. And with zero complaint has just taken on the role of…”
He searches for the right word.
“Caregiver,” I suggest.
“Yes,” he says. “But I don’t like calling it ‘caregiver’. I think of her as a transcendent friend.”
While making A Whole Lifetime with Jamie Demetriou, its director, Andrew Gaynord, sometimes referred to it by a working title: Thick Town. “Every character I play has a kind of glazed look in their eyes,” says Demetriou, “which is at the heart of everything I like to do, performance wise. It’s a kind of absence – that’s the thing I find funniest.”
Though in person Demetriou is bright and articulate, for a long time he has referred to himself as thick. “Deep down I think I’m operating on a lower level than most people, based on my education, shoulder chip, blah, blah,” he says. “I’m like, ‘I need to work doubly hard to maintain this,’ because I don’t have the kind of mental infrastructure, or diligence, based on how I was growing up.” Demetriou struggled at school. He didn’t get A-levels and he failed at auditions to various drama schools: “never understanding the texts, never getting a callback.” Partway through his second year at Bristol University, where he studied drama, he discovered he had been offered a place due to a clerical error. “I was de-rigging a stage with one of my tutors and we had a heart-to-heart,” he recalls. When Demetriou mentioned he hadn’t taken any A-levels, the tutor was stunned. “He said, ‘No, no, you can’t get in without A-levels.’” After the tutor checked Demetriou’s paperwork, he said: “Never. Tell. Anyone. This.”
The fact that Demetriou floundered academically, and later discovered he was not meant to have been offered a place at university, has cemented a genuine belief he isn’t intelligent. (During a telephone call after we met in person, he told me, “Isn’t it insane that I’m reluctant to say, ‘I don’t think I’m thick.’” When I say yes, I can almost hear him shrug.) “I think I’ve always had this thing,” he tells me in the café. “Like, going to the Edinburgh Fringe. All the good comedy societies are from Oxford and Cambridge, so my friendship group, they all came from those groups, they’re all insanely smart and talented.” He worries when he’s with friends he believes to be more intelligent or well read than he is that he will be in some way found out. “I’m always, like, please don’t bring up Chaucer.” He adds, “To be honest, I think my friendship group is bored of me thinking of myself that way. I’m hopefully shedding it. It definitely didn’t hurt getting some kind of recognition for Stath. It’s just the way I’ve felt for the longest time.”
Throughout our conversation, Demetriou admits to not insignificant embarrassment at being given the opportunity to make television. “I’m still jaw on the floor that I’m doing what I’m doing for a living,” he says at one point. “That I’m still able to, that somehow I’m allowed to.”
I ask why he feels so lucky.
“I wanted to go to drama school really badly,” he says, “but I’d never been to a theatre. I had no knowledge of Shakespeare. Never been in that world. I was just deeply unprepared for something that I really wanted. Which is reflected in Stath – it’s about having this thing that you want really badly but having absolutely no ladder in front of you. You’re literally going, ‘It would be great if that happened,’ and then just looking around and thinking, ‘Well, I’m going to keep hoping.’”
You could be forgiven for thinking of Stath as a proxy for Demetriou’s father. Of Stath’s physical presence, Demetriou says, “Every time he entered shot, I wanted it to be like someone had thrown a big bag of bones into the room.” In everything he creates, Demetriou is “heavily reliant” on slapstick. “I learned from doing live shows that I could use physicality to bandage moments that weren’t working very well,” he says. Whenever a joke failed to land, Demetriou could contort his body into some remarkable form, eliciting laughter. In the same way his fascination with ignorance and brainlessness stems from his own life, so does his interest in buffoonery. “I spent my life being shit at football,” he says. “Being, like, shit at running. Generally bad at computer games. Everything you’d associate with masculine prowess. If you were to say, ‘We’re off to do something really cool,’ I’d be like, “Whatever that is, I probably won’t be very good at it.’ So learning over time that I’m so bad at stuff, that it is literally funny…” He laughs. “It’s the weirdest calling card. People often say, ‘God, if I didn’t do this, I don’t know what I’d do.” Well, imagine what that’s like for me? In what other job is it useful to be really clumsy?”
In one of the Netflix sketches, Demetriou plays an office worker who repeatedly catches his bag on a door, causing him to stumble into his workplace in comical ways. When I ask if the special offers any specific commentary on the meaning of life, he says, “If there is a message, it’s kind of that it’s all fine. That’s the closest I came: that everyone’s just getting on with it, everyone’s saying stuff. And it’s fine.”
Demetriou has always been interested in the mundane things people say, and even more in the fact we deeply feel the need to say those things at all. At the end of the special, a group of actors breaks into song: “Everyone is saying everything,” one sings, “and we all can’t wait to hear what everyone has got to say.” “It’s like when you’re at uni and you’re in a seminar,” Demetriou says. “People put their hands up less because they have something to say and more because they want to say something. You know? There’s a drama game that people play. You stand as a group in a circle and you have to count to 10. Someone says one, someone else says two, but you don’t know who’s going to say it, and you have to get to 10. I was always struck by how many people would say two.” He laughs.
“It’s the intention of so many people to be the one who’s saying something. To have that quick reminder: that they’re here, they’re relevant. That they matter.”
A Whole Lifetime With Jamie Demetriou is streaming on Netflix from 28 February
Men’s fashion editor Helen Seamons; photographer’s assistant Bilal Bounit; fashion assistant Roz Donoghue; grooming by Sven Bayerbach at Carol Hayes Management using Daimon Barber; shot at Lordship Locations; retouching my Frisian Post