Focus on: Paul Putner

Paul Putner is used to being recognised, if only vaguely. British comedy's Zelig over the last quarter century, Spaced, Black Books, Little Britain, 15 Storeys High, Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle, Shaun of the Dead, Look Around You, The Peter Serafinowicz Show, It's Kevin, Alexei Sayle's Merry-Go-Round and Plebs are just some of the shows he's appeared in.

Perhaps best known as The Curious Orange in This Morning With Richard Not Judy, he's invariably been the go-to supporting actor for Lee and Herring, Lucas and Walliams and Harry Hill, the Kevin Eldon's Kevin Eldon for cult comedy devotees.

“I'm lucky to have been in some shows that have been liked,” he reflects. “I'm quite happy being a Zelig. It means people go 'hang on a minute. Was that Paul Putner in Downton Abbey?'. I'm just a jobbing actor.”

Delightfully, he's also a pop culture maven, an insider fan, brazen in asking famous co-stars and music legends about their most celebrated roles and career lowlights, semi-discreetly regaling with tales of Dr Who luminaries and shooting the film Paris je t'aime, with Bob Hoskins, Natalie Portman and Willem Dafoe.

A Nutty Boys nut, when he recalls how he came to set up a gig for Madness, it features cameos from Paul Whitehouse, Nigel Planer and Ian Dury, who recognised him from a previous gig. “You're the cunt who got everyone dancing at Tunbridge Wells!”

Forty years after the Two Tone label was established and Madness first entered the charts, Paul Putner's Embarrassment is a love letter to the ska revivalists and their impact on his life.

“I was obsessive,” he recalls. “I had all the cuttings from the music press, piles of badges, posters and memorabilia. One of the show's threads is that I went one step beyond being a fanboy, so to speak, and became this eighth member in my own head. A charity shop Chas Smash. I had Suggs' hair or a skinhead, wore the shades, the suits, the Crombie – that was pretty much my image through the eighties.”

Unlike the band, predominantly “chirpy cockney oiks” from single parent families, Putner was raised comfortably middle-class in leafy East Grinstead. But his circumstances changed, bringing him even closer to his heroes, after the release of The Rise & Fall album by Madness.

“That was a lot different to anything they'd done before, quite gloomy and glum, none of this driving in my car or buying condoms in 'House of Fun',” he recalls. "And of course I had 'Our House' on all the time. And my dad asked me not to play it so much. 'She's the one they're going to miss in lots of ways'. Yes, it was very poignant in lots of ways.”

Putner has never sought his own vehicle, never had the focus of peers like Matt Lucas and David Walliams, or belatedly taken top billing like Eldon. Despite acclaimed Fringe runs a decade ago in his sketch double-act with Glen Richardson, Inglorious Stereo, and as the hack US standup character Earl Stevens, he cheerfully admits that casting a spotlight on himself in an autobiographical piece is “out of my comfort zone". 

“But then you've got to challenge yourself. If Embarrassment goes well, I'd love to tour it around the country!”