Why did marvellous Miriam Margolyes make Matthew Perry feel so uneasy?

This week, Victoria has been watching Miriam Margolyes on The Graham Norton Show

In my list of “amazing Australians I’ve met”, a few weeks ago, I realise too late that I could have included Miriam Margolyes! That marvellous lady took Aussie citizenship a decade ago, alongside her original British one, as the natural step in a 55-year romantic partnership with Heather, an Australian academic who specialises in Indonesia and lives in Holland. Although she and Miriam are usually to be found at their home in Italy. My word, Covid restrictions must have been a challenge for those two.
Any of the above might be wrong. I’m remembering it from Miriam Margolyes’s delightful autobiography This Much Is True, in which she walks a delicate line between celebrating a half-century’s happy alliance and protecting the privacy of a partner who doesn’t want the spotlight. Miriam is honest about her feelings – the emotional bonds between a reticent scholar and an actress who’s happy to show the world her Professor Sprout – but guarded about the details. I will be very impressed if it turns out one day that Heather is actually Daphne, a roofer from Wrexham.
This Much Is True sold so many copies that the publishers begged the author for more; I’m currently reading the resulting sequel Oh Miriam! And that is what led me to this week’s viewing experience, The Graham Norton Show on YouTube. 
Regular readers will know that I’m not brilliant at keeping up with modern media. I still bang on about “scheduling”, have long forgotten my TikTok password, and need to consult a long set of handwritten instructions every time I want to find Apple TV+. But I’m determined to change these habits; nothing dates one like watching “the main channels” on an actual television set. 
So I’m delighted to report that, this week, I watched nearly a whole hour of YouTube. It was series 18, episode 15 of Graham Norton’s long-running BBC chat show, which originally aired in 2016.
Miriam Margolyes was a guest. So was Matthew Perry, who played Chandler in Friends and died a year ago this week after taking too much ketamine and getting into a Jacuzzi (which is either much less glamorous than it sounds, or much more, depending on how you think it sounds). In Oh Miriam!, our heroine describes the encounter as “one of the few times I didn’t quite mesh with another guest”.
I was surprised to hear it. Matthew Perry’s bestselling memoir Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing is, despite its Oxford comma, a wonderful book in which the author, like Miriam Margolyes herself, combines great fame with remarkable frankness. I would have expected them to hit it off like a career on fire.
To illustrate my point, let me share a few bits I remember respectively from This Much Is True and Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing.
Miriam Margolyes tells a story about being en route to record University Challenge as a young student at Newnham College, when she and her team mates noticed a flasher in the carriage. “My masterstroke was to offer him a peppermint,” remembers Miriam, “whereupon he rapidly detumesced.”
At a similar age, Matthew Perry reveals that he went to a strip club in Las Vegas hoping to pay a girl for sex. He spent $1,600 on champagne, then $1,200 more for himself and three friends to enter a cubicle with a lap dancer each. When Perry’s girl demanded yet more funds, he discovered that he was “thoroughly out of money so, with tears in our eyes, four losers began the long walk back to our motel”.
Miriam Margolyes had an agent, whom she happily names as Bryan Drew, who was only offering her voiceovers. “So,” reveals Miriam, “I thought ‘Well, maybe if I suck Bryan off, I’ll get better work’. And he must have said yes, because I did. But it didn’t bring me any more work. Put that one down to experience.”
Matthew Perry tells a story about his colon exploding due to excessive alcohol and drug consumption, which put him on a ventilator in ICU, which he then vomited into, which I think I will spare you by not quoting in full. But he’s an INTERNATIONAL STAR. And his COLON EXPLODED. And he TOLD EVERYBODY.
How could these two people not get on? Both so clever and talented, both so instinctively funny, both so astonishingly open. What went wrong? By the power of YouTube, I tuned into 2016.
I saw the problem immediately: Matthew Perry was still hiding in a cocoon, not yet metamorphosed into his frank and open self. He was being all careful. Very Hollywood, very “on message”. No jokes. He was there, wearing a serious pair of spectacles, to promote a West End play that he described three times as “perfect for the Friends generation”.
Margolyes, meanwhile, discussed lavatory problems and “creaming my knickers” at the sight of Laurence Olivier, then promoted The Real Exotic Marigold Hotel by way of a joke about herpes.
Matthew Perry said: “I don’t think I’ve ever been more uncomfortable in my life.”
It’s a fascinating watch. It’s like one of those Jane Austen novels where the characters exemplify varying amounts of sense or sensibility, or pride or prejudice, to illustrate the Burkeian conservative ideal. Matthew Perry is far too careful. Miriam Margolyes is probably not careful enough. Between them, Graham Norton is perfect. Twinkly, unshockable but feigning shock, he shows his greatness as a host. He and Margolyes should do a podcast together.
Rest in peace, Matthew Perry. And God save Miriam; long may she reign.