Physique

A jog down memory lane

Rummaging around in the bowels of my filing cabinet recently, I happened across these snaps of my sex face, from the early 1990s.

Taken in a gym in Tufnell Park, North London, by the photographer Rena Pearl (her name is on the back of the prints she kindly provided me with), they show me working out in my favourite stringer.

It wasn’t a pre-arranged shoot, Pearl just happened to be taking photos that morning and asked if she could take some of me. I was flattered, but then there weren’t many others there that afternoon.

The gym had the slightly camp, Bob Mizer-esque name ‘Physique’. But it was a blokey bodybuilder gym – owned by a chap called ‘Manley’. It was my first proper gym – and the one I trained at for longest, from the late 1980s to the early Noughties, when I lived just up the road in Highgate. Physique made me the man I am today. It was my Dr Frank-N-Furter Lab, where I turned myself into my own dime store Rocky.

In the 80s-90s Tufnell Park was still a mostly working-class area, and Physique was popular with beefy, cheery, tattooed working class lads who wanted to be BIG. It also had gang showers.

I know, I know. The horror. But I guess you make do with what’s local and available.

The equipment was a bit makeshift by today’s standards. The benches and squat racks were welded together and bolted to the walls and floor. The bars on the barbells were very narrow and could feel like cheese wire sometimes. A former factory or workshop of some kind, it would be cold in the winter and hot in the summer, as it was essentially an uninsulated shed with a tin roof.

Of course, I loved the place.

Not least because the lads were very friendly, and there were lots of bants, and spots, and ‘work-ins’ to be had (no smartphones, no air buds, no Covid back then). One of the guys I befriended was Simon, a blond, blue-eyed, fantastically fetching farrier squaddie with the Kings Troop Royal Horse Artillery (mentioned in The Queen is Dead), with a body like a Greek statue. A lovely lad, I never sullied our friendship with sex – but admittedly I may have considered it.

Sexuality didn’t seem to be much of an issue at Physique. After I appeared on a C4 TV documentary about Pride in the mid-1990s (taking the piss out of it – but as a big homo), several lads came up to me the next day to tell me how much they’d enjoyed my appearance on their telly box. 

I guess they were trying to tell me that they didn’t mind that I was a bender, which was nice. Though back then, there was also a real thrill in seeing someone you knew, or just saw at the gym, on TV.

As a sign of the changing neighbourhood and eventually changing clientele, in the late1990s the actor Hugh Laurie started working out there, post A Bit of Fry and Laurie and pre his mega US TV celebrity. He worked out alone, definitely without bants, in a very determined fashion, doing a lot of bodyweight exercises. Mr Laurie didn’t want to be BIG.

His sex face was serious, and red. Sort of super-cross fit before CrossFit. He was the only person who actually used the pair of gravity boots Physique had for upside down ab exercises, a la Richard Gere in American Gigolo. It was a bit of a surprise since his Fry & Laurie persona was so silly and ineffectual. But at Physique, I glimpsed the steely, will-to-power resolve that no doubt helped land him the role of Dr House.

On one occasion he brought his chum Stephen Fry with him. But Mr Fry, you will not be surprised to hear, did not exercise in quite the same determined manner – and I never saw him there again.

Fry was however more about the bants than Laurie. At one point he went to use the leg curl machine straight after I dismounted. Looking at the where the pin was on the weight stack, he giggled and remarked to me, in character – I got the feeling he was always in character - ‘Ho ho ho, I couldn’t POSSIBLY lift the sort of weight YOU were lifting!’. And his large eyes gave me a quick look.

I laughed a bit too loudly – trying to suppress the awful self-recognition.