Miller, 44, is flustered for a very
different reason. He recently sepa- rated from his wife and co-star in the ITV1 sci-fi caper Primeval, Belinda Stewart-Wilson. This morning he was in single-parent mode and had to take their four-year-old son Sonny to school. “I have him half of the week. It takes some getting used to,” he explains, “but humans are infinitely adjustable.”
But the tension soon diffuses and it becomes clear that they get on extremely well—gently teasing each other during the interview and breaking off to swap congratulations on gags they sent each other late last night. It’s often been said that a double act is like a marriage—and Miller agrees. “When we started out, we’d spend
20 hours a day together,” he says. “There was never any time off. You’d be in the pub relaxing, but if someone said a funny line you’d be grabbing a pencil and writing it down. Life as a duo can be hard. There’s a honey- moon period, then a difficult period, then you enter a period of negotiation and definition. You either find your own roles and begin to understand how the thing works or you split up.” In fact, after the fourth series of
their breakthrough Channel 4 sketch show Armstrong and Miller in 2001 (most famous for its “Nude Practice” vets spoof), they stopped working together. Armstrong felt he needed to prove himself as a solo performer and received mainstream attention
as a regular host of Have I Got News for You and the “Pimms O’Clock” man in the TV ads. Miller, mean- while, had a hit with BBC2 sitcom The Worst Week of My Life. By 2005, they were back together and soon more popular than ever, with the hit BBC1 show starting in 2007. What keeps them together, says Armstrong, is that when it comes to writing comedy, they agree about 99.9999998 per cent of the time. “But you should see how hard we argue on those 0.0000002 per cent of times we don’t agree.” Not that their close relationship
extends to talking about their feelings. “My take on it is that men don’t discuss such things because they don’t need to,” argues Miller. “People labour under the misappre- hension that it’s good to talk, but it’s never worked for me. I function much better bottling things up. The good thing about being a bloke is that you just get on with it. I’m getting divorced, but we just get on with life. That’s how it works.” I ask them what they think of the theory that while women talk face-to- face, men do so side-by-side, because
“I function much better bottling things up. The good thing about being a bloke is that you just get on with it”
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