Today we speak to Paul Rose, aka Mr Biffo, award-winning screenwriter, journalist, teletext cultmaker, patio stormtrooper, female impersonator and Sooty’s mouthpiece. We wanted to plug his new book because we think it’s funny. But it was also kind of an excuse to get him on the site because frankly, we like the cut of his jib. We asked him some questions about what it feels like to dress up sexy and play with men’s hearts…
So how did you get started pretending to be a lady on the Internet?
I stole my idea from another book. No, not really. But I did get an email from some guy yesterday accusing me of having done so. Apparently, he self-published a book along similar lines about 5 years ago. It sold 200 copies… therefore I’m bound to have seen it.
Nevertheless, there was me, being all smug, going, ‘It’s such a good idea I can’t believe it hasn’t been done already’.
Smug no more.
We heard a story once about you duping a friend of yours on some chat site. Could you clarify, please?
It’s not something I’m massively proud of, if truth be told. But here goes…
Many years ago (and we’re talking 15 years or more here) I had a falling out with this mate. With hindsight, we were probably terribly mismatched as chums, but when you’re that sort of age it’s all about quantity rather than quality.
The row was over something stupid and petty – he probably spilled Babycham on my shoelaces, or looked at my hair the wrong way – but I, as you do at that age, harboured a grudge for years. I say grudge, but that’s basically another way of saying he’d hurt my feelings.
Anyhow, after we fell out, I remained friendly with his brother, and through him I learned this guy’s email address.
It was so long ago now that I can barely remember what prompted me to do this, but I went online one day – this was when the Internet was still a relatively new thing – pretending to be a desirable young schoolteacher called Lisa. I basically hung out in chatrooms where I knew he’d be, and let nature take its course.
Of course, this became a bit of a sport between my friends and I for a while, and we strung the guy out for weeks, building up the relationship, and whatnot. We kept dropping hints, hoping that he’d twig, but he never seemed to.
As I say, looking back on it, it was a horrible thing to do. He didn’t deserve it, and I’m embarrassed that I felt the need to do something so spiteful and immature.
Certainly, compared to some of the victims in my book, he was pretty much a perfect gentleman, and nowhere near as seedy as most of the blokes I’ve chatted to online. I eventually, in a half-hearted sort of way, semi-confessed who I really was, and – as you’d expect – he didn’t take it terribly well.
Anyhow, I think I was probably drunk one evening, many years later, during a particularly strange period of my life, and in lieu of something better to do, I resumed the persona of LoopyLisa.
It was all quite mercenary, sadly – I just thought it would make a good book. Obviously, I have all my best ideas when I’m drunk, and going through strange periods.
So to speak.
The conversations you have in the book turn to come to a halt when you send a picture of yourself. Did anyone still say they’d like to meet you after they’d seen a photo?
There was only one, I think. Oddly, it isn’t in the book, and I don’t know why. I must’ve left it out by accident when I submitted the copy.
I kept sending increasingly masculine pictures to the guy, and he kept coming back with stuff like ‘I bet you’ve got a lovely chest’ and ‘I bet your tits are massive’. It was most bizarre; he wasn’t looking at the pictures, and it was enough for him that a woman was sending them to him, regardless of what she looked like. I’ll dig it out for the sequel.
The thing I found is that in most cases these blokes have already decided what ‘Lisa’ looks like before we’ve even started chatting. A couple of times I’d send them my picture, and – rather than acknowledge that I’m a bloke – they’d accuse me of messing about, and sending a picture of my brother, or someone.
There’s one guy who claimed to have fallen in love with me. I don’t think he was kidding either. In another life I’d have clearly made a very desirable transsexual.
Did you ever put a profile on a dating site as LoopyLisa?
No, alas. I’ve got a blog, and a homepage, but I’m not actually the most Internet-savvy person, to be honest. I did sign up to MySpace, but don’t really know what I’m supposed to do now that I have.
I did have a chat profile, though, which was the bait that lured my victims (he says, acknowledging that I sound like Dennis Nielsen). It didn’t really say much; just enough for them to fill in the blanks, and want to send me an instant message.
I’ve got a few ideas for a sequel, should I get a chance, and it involves getting a bit more elaborate with the deception. The photos seem to be the most popular aspect, so they’ll certainly feature heavily.
When you were writing these things, did you ever get aroused? Be honest now.
Oh, good heavens no! I mean… Jesus… no! It was just horrible. I felt seedy pretty much the entire time, knowing that these blokes were often playing with themselves while I tried desperately to discourage them.
From my side of it there’s nothing remotely sexual about it. If you look, Lisa never leads them on, and never really discusses anything sexual. She doesn’t even swear, and that was a very conscious decision from the start.
She’s an innocent, and the whole point of the book is to see how long those dirty perverts will spend trying to get off while she continues to spout utter guff.
Donning my pseudo-intellectual cap for a moment, I’d like to think that the book demonstrates some sort of profound truth about default male behaviour.
But I’ll let others decide what that truth may be.
Was there ever any sense in which – while you were pretending to be Lisa – you actually ‘became’ her?
Yeah, very much so. She did become very real for me at points, and I got quite protective of her. The chats in the book are arranged in roughly chronological order, and you can see that towards the end there is more of ‘me’ starting to surface, and a bit of weary cynicism creeping in.
I started to feel really quite unpleasant about the whole exercise, and I really had to force myself to continue to subject Lisa to it.
At one point I got talking to a girl, and the sense of relief I felt was incredible. It was ‘At last! Someone I can talk with about girly things! Handbags! And diets! And shoes!’ But then she revealed herself to be a ‘bi-fem’, and it became clear that she was no more female than I am. You had the bizarre situation of the both of us pretending to be women, and her – as they always did – trying to get me to send her my photo.
I appreciate that all of this makes me sound completely mad, but half the book was written over the space of a couple of years, and the other half was put together in a matter of a couple of months.
That sort of concentrated exposure to the unshielded perversion of the internet made my head go a bit funny – especially when you consider that for every chat that made it into the book there were another 10 or so which didn’t.
I remain genuinely quite rattled by how quickly people – well, men anyway – are prepared to drop the façade of civility once they think there’s no way of any social comeback.
The book is hopefully very funny, and obviously very rude, but there is a point nestling away amid it all.
Someone described it as ‘funny, sinister, and quite sad’, which probably sums it up.
Did you enjoy dressing up as Lisa? Are you a transvestite? Maybe even a closet transvestite?
If I’m honest, I do like a bit of dressing up, but I think that’s the repressed thespian in me, rather than any sort of sexual thing. It’s not really about women’s clothes. Ghastly geek that I am, I’ve got a full size set of Star Wars Stormtrooper armour, a gorilla suit, and a Wolverine costume, in my wardrobe. I’m just a stupid man-child rather than some old tranny.
That said, my eldest daughter wandered downstairs while my other half was putting on my make-up for the photos. She shook her head, and said, ‘Other dads don’t do this’.
I bet they do, though. And at least I have the excuse of a book.
Do you have any transcripts that were a little too repulsive to go in the book?
There were a couple of transcripts that we decided to drop at quite a late stage. They were between me and a guy who worked at some marketing company – apparently quite a successful executive – who revealed himself to be a really horrible racist.
I sort of just sat back and let him hang himself with his inexplicable ranting, but ultimately it just wasn’t funny, and didn’t sit well with the rest of the book.
I was annoyed that I didn’t challenge him more, but – having grown up in a very multi-cultural part of North London – that kind of ingrained racism always shocks me. I think I was just too taken aback by his anger to know what to say. That doesn’t happen often.
There were plenty of other chats that petered out, and weren’t worth including, and a few with blokes who – frankly – weren’t perverts, and just decent, ordinary, probably slightly lonely, men who wanted someone to talk to.
There was another character I occasionally used online, and I have a whole raft of transcripts featuring him. He’s a sort of pre-op transsexual, who – in my head – looks and sounds like a young Prince, and is obsessed with ‘ass’.
I do like Lisa’s warmth and innocence, though. I’m not sure the transsexual feller works as well.
Tell us something about what else you’re working on at the moment. How did Biffovision go?
Biffovision went great, I think. Considering we had very little time or money to bring the pilot together, it’s probably the thing I’ve done that I love the most. Considering it was shown in the middle of the night, the online buzz was phenomenal. There are some very out-of-context clips up on YouTube if anyone is interested (nothing to do with me, I should hasten to add).
Of course, we’re now at the mercy of the BBC’s decision-making process, which moves at something of a glacial rate.
As for other stuff, I did a pilot last year for a BBC1 sitcom, and we’re moving forwards with that, featuring a slightly different cast. It looks fairly promising, but as with all things in TV you never bank on anything until you’ve seen it broadcast. It’s sort of semi-autobiographical, and that can feel a bit strange at times. I’m much more comfortable hiding behind pretend Internet personas.
I’ve got a few other bits and bobs in the pipeline, but nothing that’s really at a stage that I can talk about. The thing with being a writer for telly is that you have so many commissions that go nowhere, that you start getting paranoid of jinxing projects by talking about them too soon.
Another book is quite high up my list of priorities, mainly because there’s less input from other people than there is in TV. It’s part of why I love writing my blog; it’s the one thing I do where nobody can stick their oar in.
A bona-fide travel book would be nice, and I’m in the process of doing some early research into that. Something related to video games is another possibility I’m toying with, but part of me feels I’ve rather left that world behind (in a previous life I was a games journalist).
And I’m definitely not done with LoopyLisa yet.
You write for Lenny Henry too. Is it difficult to have to write stuff that is deliberately not funny? He’s awful, isn’t he, Lenny Henry? Come on, you can tell us…
Well, I’ve only just started writing for him, and thus far have only done one day on the writing team, so it’s difficult to say whether Lenny Henry is difficult to write for or not. Certainly, as you’d expect, he’s a fun bloke to work with.
*Pfffft.*
The thing people tend to forget about him is that he is immensely popular still – he’s an icon – but he’s popular among a very ‘un-cool’, mainstream sort of audience, that tends to get sneered at. Certainly, his last series got great ratings. I mean, my kids absolutely adore him, much as I did when I was growing up.
The plan is to make a show that plays to his strengths, and what people want to see him do. It’s a TV Burp-esque clips show with an Internet bent, but we’re trying to break away from the old bloke-behind-a-desk format, and do something a bit fresher.
At the same time, I don’t think Lenny has always been best served by his material, but in a career as long and diverse as his, that’s inevitable. On the one hand I wouldn’t be doing his show if I didn’t think I could bring something new to it, and I more or less said as much when I first met him.
On the other hand, any writer worth their salt writes to their brief. I don’t just like writing one type of thing.
Biffovision and Confessions of a Chatroom Freak are at one extreme of the comedy spectrum, and the BBC1 sitcom and Lenny Henry are at the other, but I enjoy doing them equally. You just tailor your writing to your audience.
Funny is funny.
First published March 2007
