Geek made good

Me and Simon Pegg go back a long way. Back to September 1999 in fact, when I watched the first episode of Spaced at my cousin’s flat in Highgate, which was only yards away from the Shepherds pub that features so prominently in the latter chapters of Pegg’s memoir Nerd Do Well; a minor example of the theme of circularity and synchronicity that dominates the book.

I must admit I wasn’t anticipating this book to be so enjoyable, thinking that it might be a bit of a self-congratulatory backslap from a man whose career has certainly been meteoric in recent years. Whilst Spaced is one of the most memorable comedies of the last decade or so and Shaun of the Dead is an entertaining homage to the zombie genre, Simon Pegg has been a slightly overexposed talent recently, culminating in a somewhat incongruous appearance as Scotty in the recent Star Trek film.

But, and it’s a big but, he is a genuinely likeable person, and that quality is evident in Nerd Do Well. He’s humble, seeming as surprised as anyone than a nerdy guy from Gloucester who only a few years ago was plying his trade on the Paramount Comedy Channel is now hobnobbing with the heroes of his youth. Most of the book focuses on his pre-fame life as a precocious schoolboy and student and his early brushes with the popular culture that has so informed his later career. You can’t help but smile when he reminisces about seeing Star Trek - the Motion Picture at the local ABC in 1979, and how he wishes he could go back in time to tell his younger self that thirty years from now Leonard Nimoy will be looking into his eyes and saying the line, ‘You are Montgomery Scott.’

And it’s not just Star Trek, he’s appeared in Doctor Who, a George Romero film, talked movies with George Lucas, run around a cemetery with Quentin Tarantino and played one of the Thompson Twins in Steven Spielberg’s Tintin, and in each case he reflects on the circularity of the events that have brought him to where he is today, not just professionally but personally. He obviously doesn’t quite believe it either and from a more arrogant man it might come across as insufferable, but if he has ‘sold out’ you can’t begrudge him, he’s living the geek dream; as he says, 'it's exciting enough to meet actors you have long admired, but to be transported into a fictional universe that you have witnessed countless times from afar is really something else.'