Slattery: My two year breakdown The Electronic Telegraph 1-24.1998 The actor and comedian talks for the first time about the clinical depression that has kept him off stage and screen. Elizabeth Grice reports. THERE are two versions of what has been happening to the actor, comedian and game show host Tony Slattery during his long sabbatical from stage and screen: his own and his psychiatrist's. His version requires a few moments' quiet concentration. According to Slattery, he suffers from endogenous clinical depression - the kind that "comes from nowhere and hits you like a wall of shit". The latest and nastiest manifestation, he says, produced an unusual sleep disorder. "There were narcoleptic episodes - in which there were irresistible days of sleep - followed by phobic episodes, when sleep was utterly impossible. Hypervigilance, I think it's called. It's ruinous. That was followed by a period of social withdrawal, apathy and self-questioning." His psychiatrist expressed himself more baldly: "Yes, well, I think you've lost it - big time," he told Slattery. Whichever diagnosis you prefer, it was the culmination of two years' distress, during which Slattery shut himself up in his vast unfurnished domain near Tower Bridge, staring at the wall. Or, as he puts it: "I would sit on my own in a dark space, howling at the moon in a pool of self-hatred and utter emotional and physical stasis." He stopped opening letters and bills. When the bailiffs called, mystified that he was neither bankrupt or insane, he would apologetically write them a cheque and shut the door again until the next time. He cut himself off from all his friends but managed to visit his much-loved elderly parents once a week so they wouldn't be worried about him. "When I walked up that garden path, I was determined not to let them see the change in me. I was pretty good at it, but I think they began to suspect in the end." The public, however, did not. One columnist kindly assumed he had "gone into that interesting limbo where stars go after a period of over-exposure". For a decade, he had rarely been off the screen, appearing in Whose Line is it Anyway? with Clive Anderson, Saturday Night at the Movies, The Music Game, S & M, That's Love, Ps and Qs, and Kenneth Branagh's film Peter's Friends. "People do not forget Tony Slattery any more than a boxing crowd forgets the fighters in a fight between rounds," said the columnist. "Mr Slattery is just between rounds, that's all." Actually, Mr Slattery was sagging heavily on the ropes and, towards the end of last year, he was out for the count. Just before Christmas, a tabloid newspaper reported that he had been admitted to a London clinic suffering from "booze and cocaine addiction". "If only it were as simple as that. If only I'd had enough fun to merit that," he says, furiously combing his hair back with his fingers and staring into a cup of black coffee. Meaning? "Too many central nervous system stimulants, prescribed or otherwise. "What are they?" "Drugs. Not street drugs." "Where did you get them?" "You can get them through doctors. They used to be called slimming pills. I was taking them at toxic levels, so I was awake night after night. After days of acute sleep deprivation, I was beginning to hallucinate. It wasn't for pleasure or partying, like getting high at Stringfellow's club every night, but to perpetuate a sense of utterly isolated self-loathing." So you had a nervous breakdown? "It's easy journalese to describe it as a nervous breakdown," he admonishes. "But I think that pretty much describes it, yeah." That is Slattery all over. One minute indulging in the most exotic psychobabble, the next minute collapsing into basic vernacular and allowing a self-deprecating grin to ripple over his stubble. Long exposure to medical and pharmacological journals - for many years, he has read little else - has rubbed off, giving him an obsessively clinical approach to his condition. Sometimes, he seems to be laughing at his textbook erudition; other times, he plays the plain layman. "Clinical depression is a cunning little bastard; it's protean and it can change," he says. "You think you know where you stand with it, and then the next time you wake up and the clouds are there, it can have a couple of other mood disorders up its sleeve." He lays the blame on exhaustion and stress. "Imagine a box of fireworks; eventually they all burn out. I had been working non-stop since leaving university. After years of being the cheeky, chirpy chappie, light ent., suddenly I became derailed." It seems astonishing now that Slattery surfaced from his bleak phase long enough to accept a part in a new film, Up 'n' Under. The director, John Godber, had been impressed by his performance in the West End play, Neville's Island (1994), and invited him to be Reg Welsh, the oily, vindictive manager of a West Yorkshire amateur rugby side. "Welsh feeds on his own weakness and bitterness and blackness," says Slattery. "That's why the part struck a chord with me; I recognised I could do it properly." He hopes that the film will mark the end of his dilettante image, and usher in a new era of serious work and personal stability. "This is me trying to get back into the swing of things," he says. "Some of my nastier symptoms have evaporated and I now feel more like the person I was about three years ago." Tony Slattery has usually come across on his chat and quiz shows as a bit of a rude boy, frighteningly fluent and funny but with a manic streak, and often pushing the boundaries of decency. In private conversation, he is rather proper, considerate and amusing, with a baroque use of the English language. "Words are loaded pistols," he is fond of saying. "You use them at your peril." He agrees that his reputation may have suffered from comparison with the careers of his three luminous contemporaries in the 1980 Cambridge Footlights Revue - Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson - but says he doesn't mind. "I've just gone on a different route. The gears have stalled occasionally, but it has been financially good for me. I have blown a lot of it, of course. But I feel lucky." He had a surprisingly happy childhood - though, being Slattery, he cannot help wondering what "can of worms" regressive psycho analysis might unearth if ever he decided to try it. He was the fifth and youngest child of Irish working-class parents who came to England seeking work after the war. The birth of his sister, Marlene, was followed by the arrival of triplets, Michael, Stephen and Christopher - and then Tony. Being outside the triplets' special circle, he spent a lot of time on his own - again, not minding. But he deliberately chose to go to a different school from theirs - Gunnersbury boys' grammar in West London - then run by Jesuits with a sharp line in irony. "The school was frozen in time. You expected Sexton Blake to come in at any moment and say: 'Boys, there's been a murder'." But what happened during his first religious lesson was far more dramatic. One of the Jesuits took his place at the front of the class with a handful of unconsecrated Communion wafers, flinging them to the floor and grinding them under his heel. "Hosts! They should have been in a chalice or a monstrance," gasps Slattery. "We were close to fainting. We thought it was some kind of Satanic ritual. One boy slumped forward." After a dramatic pause, says Slattery, the priest disclosed that the wafers were manufactured in a factory in Hounslow. No transubstantiation had taken place, therefore they were not the Body of Christ. It was intended as a lesson in independent religious thought and taught him to question the sheeplike following of Irish Catholicism. "That's a lot of psychological warfare to take in at an early age," says Slattery, who was awestruck by the sheer theatricality of the moment. "How could you, a 12-year-old, possibly relate such an episode to your parents when you went home for baked beans on toast for tea?" When he was 14, Slattery made his first significant journey away from the Stonebridge housing estate in north London - a school trip to Cambridge. He was fascinated by its calm and architectural splendour: no graffiti, no one urinating against the walls, people sitting on the grass and being nice to each other. "It was like going through the looking glass, it really was." He won an exhibition to read medieval and modern languages and, until he met the Footlights brigade, thought he might be an academic - his special subject being the religious ecstasy of Spanish poetry in the early 16th century. But "getting up on stage and hearing laughter took over." As a poor scholarship boy, Slattery is often assumed to have been out of his depth among a snooty Cambridge elite. But he says this is far from true. "Cambridge was a university of 10,000 students. At one end, you got Marxist separatists making petrol bomb devices in their bedsits and at the other end, beaglers from Magdalene who would go out each day and shoot deer in the head. There was everything in between." Now 38, he has been notoriously disinclined to form lasting relationships and has lived alone for a long time. One of his most rewarding female attachments is with the comedienne Helen Lederer, whom he met on a touring comedy show called The Happy Hour. It is a platonic friendship and he says they don't have to see each other to remain close. He answers with vague good humour when the subject of his sexual orientation comes up. "I've never talked about what I do with my external genitalia. That's all. It's not about girls or about being gay or bisexual or asexual. Perhaps there isn't a word for what I am, or perhaps my sexuality can be regarded as 'work in progress' and can change from month to month." He is more concerned to be exact about his psychological state. "I am coming through a bleak time and I desperately don't want to do any special pleading. Articles that start 'My brave battle against booze and drugs and depression' make me want to throw up." He believes the bad times are over. But after two years of "living just next door to Satan," he cannot be sure exactly how close he has moved to the angels.