I met Mark Watson once and shouted at him. Not in a fangirly way or anything – not that I’m not a fan, I hasten to add. As I was crowd-controlling the hoards of people outside a Fringe gig this summer, Watson appeared at the door and asked innocently if he had found the right queue.

“Yeah, it is,” I bellowed at him, “But you need to join at the back!” I gesticulated wildly towards the queue, which snaked around the corner, and he scuttled off.

“That was Mark Watson!” remarked some ladies nearby, in hushed tones.

“Yes, I noticed that,” I said, wondering where he had gone. “Do you think I should have asked him if he was on the guest list?”
Fortunately, when I interviewed him about his latest novel a month later, he didn’t recognise me. The same can’t be said, unfortunately, for when I saw him later that evening, however, standing in the guest list queue, with all the other high-profile comedians.

Recognition could easily be an issue for an ex-Footlight like Mark Watson, yet he manages to stand out from a crowd of other white, male, Cambridge-educated comedians. This is not least due to the versatility of his work; not only is he a successful comic on stage – experimenting with new formats such as a 24-hour-long marathon show during the 2004 Fringe – and radio and TV panels, he also owns a production company, Impatient Productions. He presents his environmental consciousness to the public: at the 2007 Fringe, Watson delivered Earth Summit, a discussion of pollution and global warming, and a year later published a book about his own attempts to minimise his carbon footprint.

Watson’s new book, The Place That Didn’t Exist, tells the story of an advertising executive, Tim Callaghan, in Dubai for a project. “At first he really likes it in Dubai,” Watson explains, “then somebody dies and things get complicated. I hesitate to describe it as a murder mystery, although I probably should because those are highly successful commercially.”

“Anyway,” he continues, “the title, and the core of the book, comes from Dubai’s unique atmosphere: it’s spectacular and a bit alienating all at the same time. It’s been set up – with huge success – as a tourist paradise and business hub, and it’s got everything you need… but it’s a bit too much, somehow. And that feeling produces an atmosphere which is just right to set a murder mystery in.”

Despite his literary qualifications (Watson graduated with a First in his English degree) and the success of his first five novels, Watson’s status as a household name is perhaps more of a result of his prominence in stand-up and panel show circuits. At the Edinburgh Fringe in 2006, the two came together in his innovative interactive comedy show Mark Watson, And His Audience, Write A Novel, which aimed to write a novel over the course of the month entirely on the basis of audience suggestions. I ask him if he considers himself to be primarily a novelist or a comedian:

“The writing came first. When I was at Cambridge, I was already writing fiction (not very well), and it had been the thing that most attracted me for as long as I could remember. I sort of fell into being a comedian, and the two – overlapping but separate – interests have coexisted, sometimes quite uneasily, since then.”

For Watson, the process of writing fiction is “a matter of shutting yourself off, working to a plan.”

“I suppose where they [writing stand-up and writing fiction] intersect is that both processes involve an act of improvisation, groping around in the dark. But with stand-up, you know pretty much instantly whether it's worked or not; with a book, you remain in the dark for a long time.”

Watson regularly performs at the Fringe, having been nominated for the prestigious Perrier Best Newcomer Award in 2005. What he describes as his “16-year (ongoing) love affair with the festival” began when he first went to the Fringe with a play he’d written at Queens’.

Although he performed with the Footlights in his final year, Watson says: “I was never really known as being 'in' comedy while I was [in Cambridge], until the very end.”

He is refreshingly frank about the quasi-legendary comedy troupe: “The Footlights mystique was quite off-putting, so I really only dabbled in it for most of my time at Cambridge. It wasn't till the last year that someone encouraged me to audition for the tour show and I began to get properly involved.”
Unlike many aspiring writers, he did not always have his heart set on Cambridge: “I didn't think about it until it was almost time to apply; I had no idea what university was 'for', really, and no notion of where to aim for. I was encouraged to go for Cambridge by one of my English teachers and I was drawn in by the (vague, but fairly accurate) idea that it was a home of creativity.”

“I was a bit surprised to get an offer, and spent at least the first couple of terms not really making the most of it, because I had an awe about the place and felt like a bit of a fraud.”

He explains how he struggled to make the most of his time until he found a ‘hunger’, for both his degree and extra-curricular work.

“For the first half of my time at Cambridge I struggled to get into the English course (because it was so huge and perhaps because nobody was looking over my shoulder, the way they had been at school), and undersold myself in terms of social activities too,” he says. “Then for the second half I started doing everything at once. People say that the busier you are, the better you get at organising yourself, and that's how it was for me.”

He concedes that his experiences at Cambridge prepared him for the real world – to some extent. “It gave me lots of the skills I needed (both for comedy and life), and showed me the path – roughly – that I wanted to take. But as everyone is aware, any uni is a bubble, and Cambridge even more so. There are lots of aspects of 'the real world' that no educational establishment can prepare you for.”

“The main thing I wish I'd been told, when I left at 21, is 'things are much more complicated out there than you realise. Take your time.’”

Mark Watson will be signing copies of The Place That Didn’t Exist at Heffers in Cambridge, from 1pm to 2pm on Saturday 1st October. In the evening, he will be performing the set from his stand-up tour ‘I’m Not Here’ at the Corn Exchange.

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