If anyone could impersonate Alfred Hitchcock, you’d think it would be Alistair McGowan. As you’ll know if you watched Spitting Image in the Nineties, or The Big Impression in the early Noughties, the 58-year-old’s powers of mimicry are quite uncanny. He can nail anyone from David Beckham to Richard Madeley, from Louis Theroux to Dot Cotton. But Hitchcock was not as easy as you’d think. When Edinburgh-based filmmaker Mark Cousins recruited McGowan to voice the jowly, lugubrious filmmaker for new feature documentary My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock, he initially found it a struggle.
“It was very difficult and the extra ingredient I used was my wife,” explains McGowan. His wife, singer and actor Charlotte Page, is a huge movie fan and knew exactly what Hitchcock sounded like. She had seen the director’s cameos in his movies and his appearances on his TV show, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and was able to tell her husband when his timbre rang true.
Listening to Hitchcock, the comedian noticed that the director of Psycho and The Birds sounded a little blocked up. Indigestion, he suspected, must have played a part in the way that Hitchcock spoke. When he met Cousins, the first question he asked the documentary director was: “Do you know if Hitchcock had any acid reflux?” Cousins responded that, yes, he thought he had read somewhere that Hitchcock was indeed on the dyspeptic side.
“That sort of voice he has, you can hear the breathiness, the bunged-up catarrh-y quality,” McGowan observes, slipping into a pitch-perfect Hitchcock imitation as he does so. He can’t resist quipping that when he says “catarrh” he is referring to chest and throat-related matters, not to the Middle East state where the World Cup was recently held. Hitchcock lived for many years in California, but you could always still hear that “slight London accent” in his voice. He was the son of an East End grocer after all.
Not that McGowan took his method-style research to extremes. He didn’t, for example, try to emulate Hitchcock’s diet in order to eat his way into the role. (Hitchcock’s daughter Pat published a biography of her mother Alma, in which she included many of the recipes Alma used to cook for her husband – among them Yorkshire pudding, beef Wellington and almond soufflé).
“I think perhaps if I had been portraying him on screen, I might have wanted to do that level of research,” says McGowan. “Often, when you are doing voices, you say: ‘Who does this person sound like who I already do?’, because each voice butts into another somewhere along the line. But actually Hitchcock was not really like anybody I’ve done before.”
That had its benefits. It meant there were no “vocal bunkers” he would end up falling into. McGowan remembers that when he used to do imitations of Hugh Grant, friends would warn him that he was beginning to sound like Prince Charles. If you’re the master of a thousand voices, it’s hardly surprising that one might bleed into another occasionally.
There was only one slight resemblance McGowan noticed with Hitchcock. “Once I noticed the London thing, I was very aware of the slight similarity, weirdly, to Michael Caine,” McGowan admits as he slips briefly into Caine-style Cockney before reverting to his deeper, more melancholic Hitchcock tones. “Rory Bremner once said to me one of the best things you can do, and he does this a lot, is just to see the face of that person in front of you,” he explains.
Where does McGowan’s genius for impressions come from? Was he born with the gift? He thinks his mother, a primary school teacher, may have helped. “She was very, very good at mimicry and she would mimic all the parents who came into her, she would mimic the other teachers and some of the children.” When he was growing up in Worcestershire in the 1970s, little Alistair was therefore treated to his very own version of The Big Impression.
“I used to love it. Dinner times were just a total joy. My father wasn’t brought up in this country [the UK]. He was brought up in India in an Anglo-Indian family. I think when he came here, he was fascinated by accents. He could not replicate them at all but he always noticed the differences in the accents. I think from a young age, I was being pushed toward the analysis and replication of speech patterns.”
Going to drama school and studying phonetics as part of his English degree at Leeds University gave McGowan’s skills an extra polish. As for motivation, there was also “a certain amount of wish fulfilment in doing impressions”. At times, he really felt he was becoming Jonathan Ross, or Gary Lineker, or the others whose cadences he captured so brilliantly.
Now that he is in his late fifties, McGowan is less interested in impersonating modern celebrities. “I get so appalled, as one does getting older, by the use of language, by the deterioration of proper English, that I no longer want to sound like the people I am hearing on television and radio… which is a terribly snobbish thing to say.”
Can he be more specific? “It’s the overall sound of the voice and the way people regularly drop their ’t’s” in the middle of words – so we talk about “communi-y”, we don’t talk about ‘community’,“ he explains. “They drop ‘g’s at the end of words. I just find it so ugly, and it leads to miscommunication.”
He cites one well-known BBC journalist he heard talking on Radio 4 about children during Covid who were told they couldn’t go back to school unless they did a ‘test daily’. The way it came out, though, sounded different. “I thought, ‘Hang on, they [the kids] have got to do an impression of Tess Daly?’” He admits it’s his “own grumpiness”, but he does get very annoyed when people don’t “speak properly”.
Some newer movies do still hit the mark – like The Banshees of Inisherin. “That is certainly not in standard English, but the rhythm and the beauty of what [writer-director] Martin McDonagh had written captivated me,” says McGowan. “I loved it and I just don’t hear that often enough now.”
Certain Hitchcock movies also have a “wonderfully romantic and playful use of language. The scripts are always so clear…it was a pleasure to be part of this film for that reason.”
It’s 20 years now since McGowan was “at his height.” In the Spitting Image days, no-one knew who he was – but for a while, when he had his own series and appeared on chat shows, he began to be recognised.
“It did get a bit too much at the time when it was eight million people and they were all shouting out: ‘Do David Beckham!’” says McGowan. At one point, he considered trying to get into Parliament in order to be able to campaign more effectively for the environment, another of his passions. “But then I realised that if I was an MP, and I stood up to make my maiden speech, someone would shout out: ‘Do Richard Madeley! Do Dot Cotton!’” he says. “So my brief half-minute thought of becoming an MP was curtailed.”
My Name is Alfred Hitchcock is released on 21 July.