We were having the best fun, and I thought: 'I can't believe it, here we are doing this.' We both loved that we could do this for a living, making people laugh and somehow it would sustain us.” “It was like we were riding this wave together. Bailey won best stand-up at the 1999 British Comedy Awards Lock took the award home the next year. “He said to me: 'You need to treat it like a job.' And it worked.”įor Bailey, when their careers began to take off in the late Nineties, it was a thrill to find success alongside his best friend. Once, Hill asked Lock for help when his set had bombed. “We both really appreciated being able to do it for a living,” notes Hill. He was interested in so much: philosophy, art and food.”Īnd Lock could be sharp with those who he thought weren’t taking the business of comedy as seriously as he was.
I always found the fact he had worked on building sites really hard to fathom because he was so smart and well read. Hill says: “A lot of our contemporaries had come straight out of college. His style was to kick off with something outrageous and weave it into something brilliant.”īoth Lock and Hill had had previous careers – Lock was, among other things, a labourer for a decade Hill, meanwhile, had trained as a doctor. This shared experience brought them closer. With Sean, you’d think: ‘Christ, where’s he going now?'. “With most comedians you know exactly where the set is going to go. “When we met he was probably a year or two ahead of me on the scene,” recalls Hill. Hill first met Lock in the early Nineties, and they shared a flat together at the Edinburgh Fringe when Lock and Bailey were performing their hit stand-up show. Hill also remembers Lock’s dedication to the craft of comedy. You were always on the brink of hilarity.” He had that ability that all great comics have – you would start laughing as soon as he got on stage. He really cared about words – he was almost like a poet in that regard. He wrote all the time, constantly writing, constantly thinking. He saw humour in the most unlikely of subjects. “He had this strange, brilliant but almost playfully innocent way of approaching everything. “I remember just laughing helplessly,” explains Bailey. “When you’re gigging, you travel up and down the country together, and that’s when friendships are really forged. “We immediately hit it off, we had a very similar sense of humour,” says Bailey. That was when he met Bill Bailey in the late Eighties, another wet-behind-the-ears comedian who would become a household name – and Lock’s oldest friend. Like many comedians, Lock, who has died aged 58, did his apprenticeship on exhausting, circuitous tours of the UK, hopping from gig to gig. He was a quiet hero of British scene: one of its funniest performers, but also one its hardest working. It is telling that Lock's friends remember not only his wit, but also his graft – his willingness to dive deep into the mucky grind of comedy, and get stuck in.
#Sean lock tributes how to
“He told me he did a gig for the scaffolders’ awards, and he said: ‘I just wrote 25 jokes about scaffolders – why don’t you give scaffolders a long lunch break? Because any longer and you’d have to teach them how to do it again.’” “He took great pride in doing the hardest gigs," says Harry Hill of his friend and fellow comedian. For most comedians, the paycheque is their only compensation. Corporate gigs are the dark underbelly of comedy – unsexy, uncelebrated, and punishingly hard to nail.
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