Jon Gaunt Interview ……………………………Part Two

GAUNT: “HOW I KICK-STARTED CLIVE OWEN’S CAREER”

16-01-2008

Jon Gaunt is best known as Britain’s leading “shock jock” but the former Birmingham University graduate has an intriguing past as an award-winning playwright.  Ahead of his live show in the city next month, he tells us how he made a star of Clive Owen.

First we’ve got to back track a few years to the early 1980’s, when Gaunt – proud owner of a drama degree, but not a job – was walking past the old Triangle Arts Centre in Gosta Green.

“I was there with a mate” recalls the Coventry-reared broadcaster, “and he pointed to an ad for a competition to write a play.  He said I was going to win.

“I don’t know why he said that because I’d never written a play before but I borrowed his typewriter, and did something about my time in care as a kid.  It was basically a 45-minute shout of pain.

“To cut a long story short it won, and although I had wanted to be actor suddenly I wanted to be a writer.”

Puffed up with success, Gaunt started developing work with a group of mates from Coventry – including someone he describes as “a scabby, spotty doley”. 

This, of course, was Owen – now known as the BAFTA winning, Oscar nominated star of “Closer” and “Children Of Men”.

He became a regular cast member as Gaunt’s writing career took off - after winning an Edinburgh Fringe First for his play “Hooligans” he created touring shows and ended up scripting for Emmerdale.

Gaunt was also developing a shrewd entrepreneurial sideline by hiring venues during the Edinburgh Festival which he sub-let (at a sizeable profit) to other performers.

“I then went back to Coventry – this was around 1982 or 1983 – with the aim of doing another play,” he says.

“When I’d gone off to University everybody had a job, when I came back no one did, including Clive and about six other mates. 

“So I wrote a play called ‘Only I Escape’ which was about Clive’s life, which at the time involved getting a dole cheque, putting it all in a fruit machine, then spending the next fortnight scrounging.”

The idea won a grant of £1,000 for West Midlands Arts – cash which Gaunt and several of his pals borrowed and used in turn to qualify for the Enterprise Allowance Scheme.  This meant they all qualified for a £40 a week allowance and come off the dole.

Owen was part of the gang, and was there at the birth of the brilliant but ill-fated Tic Toc project (described by Gaunt as “Coventry’s Bauhaus where people could experiment and still see great bands”).

Along the way, it became a serious business and the crunch came when Gaunt was given another grant to write a play called “Meat”.

“Clive Owen should have been the star of that” he says.  “But at the time there was too much drinks and drugs around, and I said ‘enough – we’ve got to clean up our act’.

“Well one day Clive came in and he was out of his box.  We had a big row and away he went.

“I didn’t hear from him again until three months later he left a message on my answerphone saying, ‘you fat bastard, I got into RADA.’

“He hides what happens in Coventry, but I reckon I gave him the kick up the backside he needed.”