Jamie Demetriou has just remembered why he has strong feelings about the Friern Barnet Co-Op.
When he was 15, six boys jumped him outside the shop front, hoisted him in the air – “like it was my wedding or something” – and took him across the road.
“They threaded my arms through some railings and then all took turns to punch me in the face for a while.” He was pretty badly beaten up, but help arrived.
“Someone stopped, leaned out the [car] window and went, ‘Oi! If you don't stop in the next five minutes, I'm gonna call the police.’ I was like, ‘Five minutes?!’”
Fortunately the gang pegged it and Demetriou stumbled into the Co-Op, knocking over a magazine stand. “And I remember being on the floor, and the security guy came over and was like, ‘Mate, I saw the whole thing. I've seen it all. I'll tell the police’. I was like, ‘Again, this doesn't feel like concise, communal help.’”
Breath rising in front of his face, he digs his chin into his jacket. It’s a dazzlingly bright early February morning in this unremarkable wedge of North London between Finchley and New Southgate where Demetriou grew up. The Stath Lets Flats creator is giving me a tour of his childhood home, which isn’t a place which tends to pop up on influencers’ top picks in the capital.
It’s not on the Piccadilly Line like Southgate, and it’s not really, really fancy like Muswell Hill. It is, like a lot of bits of concrete North London, absolutely fine. Margaret Thatcher’s old constituency is next door, all lower-middle-class up-by-the-bootstraps striving. “But we were sort of more this end and…” He looks around. “You can't really define it by anything.”
His new Netflix special, A Whole Lifetime with Jamie Demetriou, plots a human life from birth to death in songs and sketches. Today we’ll potter through his whole lifetime so far.
Demetriou grew up with his English mum, Cypriot dad and extremely talented comedian sister Natasia. Jamie, now 35, moved back to Friern Barnet after university in Bristol. It emerged during his degree that his place came thanks to a clerical error, as he had no A-levels. A tutor advised him to keep it to himself.
He only left Friern Barnet for Holloway at 25, and some of the earliest bits and pieces for his endearingly moronic estate agent character in Stath Lets Flats – the Channel 4 sitcom that brought Demetriou three BAFTAs in 2020 – were written at his parents’ house. They still live nearby, and will be picking him up later.
“The thing is,” he says, “I realised that the pillars of this area to me, like provocative memories, are places I got mugged. It was quite a beaty-uppy area.”
He did stand out a bit as a kid. “I remember knowing it was a bad idea, but I loved the Spice Girls and I kinda confused that love for wanting to be them,” he says. “My mum asked me what shoes I wanted and I convinced her that the school would allow me to wear platform Converse. And I was already the tallest kid in school.”
The school did not allow him to wear platform Converse, primarily for his own safety. “It's not really like, oh man, I come from a rough area. I would never say that. It's not.”
He doesn’t really know if it’s anything else either, though. “It’s just a place that I never hear people talking about.”
In a café, we sit with coffees as the TV plays a YouTube compilation of Turkish pop. Demetriou is a keen and thoughtful talker, so thoughtful that he chases his answers round in circles and frequently lands on “basically, I don’t know”. His early writing inspirations were The Apprentice, X Factor and Big Brother.
“Just seeing those characters breathe and stuff, I think it absolutely makes up a huge percentage of my foundation for wanting to write characters.”
He leans forward conspiratorially. “Do you remember what Harry Styles said to Matt Cardle when he won X Factor? ‘You're gonna get so much pussy.’ On telly. Mad. And look at him now. He's the kindest boy in pop.”
The characters in A Whole Lifetime are all over the map. There’s a monstrous South African tech whizz who bollocks an old man, a man who can’t stop trying to throttle his mates when they talk about their kids, and Demetriou as a sort of ghost-puppet-man-thing who sings a song thanking his body for its service after he dies.
It’s all charged by an anxiety about whether one is wasting one’s life, but Demetriou’s specialism in characters who are basically baffled and incapable and fall over is intact. (Nobody in British comedy falls over quite like Jamie Demetriou, limbs all fighting different battles, face shocked that nobody is coming to help.) And it’s very, very funny.
It also involved Demetriou and everyone in the wardrobe department frantically shaving his entire body with razors – “pubes, everything” – to shoot scenes of Demetriou as a foetus in the womb in exactly four minutes at the end of a day’s filming. In a final indignity, his modesty pouch had to be cut off by some poor assistant to leave him totally nude, and covered in KY Jelly.
It was, he thinks, worth it. “I'm me though,” he says, “so I'm gonna be reluctant to say, ‘You gotta check it out ‘cause it's wicked.’” (You gotta check it out though, because it is wicked.)
The pavements outside are frosty. Demetriou, wearing a big black puffer jacket and corduroy cap, takes me along Woodhouse Road, toward the house where his old indie-boys-with-cardigans band used to practice. Demetriou yearned to do big, soulful R&B ballads.
“We were called The Alphabeat,” he says. “And then Alphabeat came along, so we broke up.”
We head towards Demetriou’s old school, a collection of anonymous three-storey newbuilds. It’s a lot bigger than when he went. “I definitely don't feel like I learnt anything, uh, academic. I mean, that's partly my fault. I'm not a sponge for that. But I think socially it was very useful. If a big percentage of it [my comedy] is reality TV, there's another big old chunk that belongs to the Compton Technology College.”
There was a big mix of kids there. “There's no desperate pressure to leave this area. And there's also no reason to stay. I dunno what behaviour that creates, but there's definitely a lot of funny stuff.”
For instance: one day at school, someone asked if a boy in Demetriou’s class was his best friend. “I was like, ‘Not one of my best friends, no. I like him though.’ And they were like, ohhhhh. I was ‘Like, what, what?; And they were like, ‘Nah, nah, nah, nah – that's out of order.’”
Word got back to the not-best-friend. Demetriou tried to explain: “It would just be so weird if I'd said that I was one of your best friends, because you've never even been to my house.”
“So he followed me home” – Demetriou fights to get the story out through disbelieving laughter – “and punched me all the way home, and then waited outside my house for me to let him in, to complete that transaction so we could be best friends.”
We turn up a street of semis separated by concrete-posted fences, past an impractically slanted playing field.
“Just thinking back at how fucking thick we were, we found a can – not far from here actually. We were like, ‘Oh, what's that smell?’ And there was this can, and it absolutely stank. We went, ‘Oh my God, we've gotta take that into school. Because it stinks.’”
Compton Technology College lost its mind. “Everyone was talking about this can at school. Like, ‘Oh my god, have you heard? Jamie and thingy have a can that stinks.’”
Nobody could place the smell. Excited by this mystery, Demetriou took the can to the teacher he got on best with – his drama teacher.
“She was like, ‘Jamie, what are you doing?’ I was like, ‘No, no, it's just, you don't understand – it's this can.’ And she was like, ‘What's in it?’ I was like, ‘I dunno, but it stinks. It’s a smell I've never smelled before.”
The drama teacher had a sniff. “She was like, ‘I think it's piss.’ And I was like, ‘Do you think? It's sort of more chemical-y than that, isn't it?’ She was like, ‘I don't know, but whatever it is, why the hell is it here and what are you enjoying about this?’”
So what did it smell like? “I'm gonna say… Um. Hmm. Someone had pissed in a can of like, of like, um… petrol. Or something.” He thinks for a minute or so. A blackbird hops into the hedge behind us. “I don't think it is piss and petrol,” he says, sheepish. “I just wanted to give you an answer.”
At the junction there’s a squat cream building. This is Woodhouse College, the place everyone wanted to go to after Compton because it was really close.
Those teenage years, when “you just lose days because something just got you,” are something he still draws on. One memory stands out.
“It really epitomises what I find funny. This guy, when we were signing our leavers’ book for Compton – again, didn't know him that well, nice enough guy – wrote: ‘Hey man, great getting to know you over the years. Thanks for the laughs. I guess I'll see you around Woodhouse.’
“And I said to my friend who knew him better, ‘He thinks I'm going to Woodhouse, but I'm not.’ And he was like, ‘Yeah, neither’s he.’”
Demetriou stops to cackle. We go past the stop for 134 which took him into Camden during his cravat-wearing indie fop era, up towards the big square roundabout in North Finchley. Demetriou worked for the Arts Depot here.
“I'm so bad with admin. I worked on the desk and I tried to take one booking and I nearly had a panic attack. I just couldn't, literally. The guy on the phone's going: ‘THREE TICKETS! TO FUNGUS! AND THE BOGEYMAN!!’. And I was like, I know, I know, I know. I just can't. I froze. I couldn't do anything.”
It was one of a string of jobs which suggested he wasn’t cut out for anything practical, including stints at Waitrose (“I remember being asked who the president of the pineapple picking division was. And I was like, it's gotta be me”) and a café where he accidentally grated quite a lot of his own blood into the cheese sandwiches.
“I told the guy who was running the cafe, and he said, ‘Don't worry about it. They’ll think it’s ketchup.” He tried to escalate the bloody cheese incident. “And even the people I complained to were like, ‘Oh, it's just a bit of cheese.’ I was like, it's not the cheese I'm worried about. It's the blood.”
Basically the only thing he really wanted to do was acting. His mum tells a story from when Demetriou was four or five. “She heard me crying in the back of the car and she asked why. I said, in my few words I had, ‘Because I want to be an actor.’” He shakes his head. “What an idiot.”
He does comedy, he thinks, because “it feels like a good way of owning my physical shortcomings”.
“The opposite of sports is comedy, I guess, in a lot of ways. Growing up I was so shit at football.” Nobody was into it in the Demetriou household. He defined himself by not liking football. Then coronavirus came.
“I needed something new that I want to invest some thoughtless joy into, and I'm now a fanatic season ticket holder.” (He declines to say where, as he cannot be bothered trying to do football chat with people.)
“I mean, the truth is,” he says, “I love every team.”
Other passions include drawing (“my calm thing”) and eggs, which he discovered at 24. “What else is like an egg? There is nothing. It's incomparable. What does an egg even taste like? I couldn't write down what an egg tastes like. It tastes like a feeling.”
We head down the high road out of North Finchley, to a standard-issue entertainment complex with a gigantic car park by the North Circular. It’s all here: Vue cinema, Hollywood Bowl, Ask Italian, Pizza Hut.
We settle in McDonald’s. After Paddington 2 and Cruella, Demetriou’s next big screen gig is in Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach’s Barbie.
“I'm a very, very small role in it. Very small.” A very small rollerskating part? With Will Ferrell? In Los Angeles? “I mean… people have seen the photos.”
It’s a bit tricky talking around Barbie without really being able to say anything about Barbie. “It was kind of like attending a festival of creativity,” he tries, umming and aahing and dunking his Vegetable Deluxe in barbecue sauce.
“It's very reassuring,” he goes on, “to see all those people who are considered the top of the industry and be like, yep, that's correct. They're brilliant. Everyone there was. Greta: extraordinary.”
Occasionally he gets overawed. Nathan Fielder and David Sedaris had that effect. He might try another sitcom, and he’s definitely going to have a swing at a film at some point. The end of the last series of Stath Lets Flats felt like it could be a full stop.
“I'm not finished with it, but I also don't know what I'll do next with it,” he says. He, Kiell Smith-Bynoe and Al Roberts did a shoot for Stylist in character as Stath, Dean and Al a few months ago which made him pang for it.
“But at the same time, I only want to do it if the idea’s right. Because I definitely blew everything up at the end. It’s like when Rodney and Del became millionaires, I was like: leave them as millionaires?”
It’s not a no. “The one thing I know is that if I was to do more, I don't want to reset. I want to kind of make it feel like it's moving forward.”
His phone rings. “Hi mum. Are you by Nando’s?” He gets ready to head back to Friern Barnet and the many places where he got beaten up. The day after that Co-Op ambush Demetriou went to the chippy, where one of his assailants politely asked him to pass the ketchup.
“It always felt like an anomaly and not something that I needed to be scared of all the time,” he says, before taking a pause.
"Then again, it did happen quite a lot. So I don't even know what I think about that.”
A Whole Lifetime With Jamie Demetriou is available on Netflix from 28 February.
