Rarely does the passé phrase “multi-hyphenate” make so much sense. Now that Blondey McCoy seen the breadth of his domain, does he weep? Are there any more worlds left to conquer? Sir! delves into his Fantastical world the only way we could the Blondey Way

In the autumn of last year, Blondey McCoy unleashed a six-part scripted series into the wilds of the internet. Entitled The Blondey Way, the show follows a semi-fictitious version of the 27-year-old Londoner as he attempts to get his sketch comedy show Life on Earth on to the BBC – and his subsequent butting of heads with a co-writer and run-in with the Spanish law – all the while juggling a young family and work commitments. Meta passion projects like this rarely land, but The Blondey Way hits different. It’s funny, it’s incredibly well shot, and it’s genuinely quite touching – with echoes of Nathan Barley, Patrick Keiller’s London, and that great meta comedy vehicle, Seinfeld.

“I’ve wanted to do ‘it’, broadly speaking, for such a long time,” Blondey tells Sir! a few days after our Soho shoot. “I don’t remember ever not wanting to do it.” You get the sense that whatever “it” is – although in this case, it’s making the leap into writing and acting in your own situational comedy – Blondey will always end up doing it, one way or another. He shot to fame at the age of 14 as the skateboarding face of streetwear brand Palace. Then, some seven years later, the New Malden native surprisingly left the company to focus on his own brand, THAMES, which today produces the sort of easy British post-skate cool that takes in signet rings, work jackets and, of course, suits. “Vivienne Westwood said in the 80s, once Punk had truly gone off the boil, that the most subversive thing a man could do at the time was wear a suit and tie, and that, conveniently, they'd always look good”, McCoy says. “I think the same could be said today, and that there's a lot of fun to be had with that notion.”

There’s a similar playfulness in all of his multifarious projects – which include collage, installation art, and modelling, as well as fashion collaborations with artists including Francis Bacon – as he goes on to explain: “Using classical music in skate videos, skating in cricket whites, using Latin in newsletters… and the people who can’t cope with the ambiguity of it all, they’re an essential part of that fun.”

You can tell he had fun with The Blondey Way, even if the filming process was “chaotic”. The series saw him travel to the south of Spain for episode five, but a trip to the Costa del Sol wasn’t even the most taxing aspect of the shoot for a man with his finger in several pies. “Just between shooting and releasing the thing we had four adidas shoes plus apparel, Hunter Boots, a Gilbert & George project, and a very special Mark Gonzales project,” he tells me. Then, of course, there was the business-as-usual at THAMES, plus the building of “the shop, and another shop-in-shop in Tokyo; I filmed a skate part with the other most chronically overcommitted person I know, which was my highest standards at my least practised; and then, of course, there was my four young children and wife.”

McCoy married his partner, fashion consultant Jenn, ten days after the final episode of The Blondey Way aired, in a stylish London wedding which made it into the pages of Vogue. Balancing a young family with a plethora of work projects is, occasionally, a struggle, he admits. When he’s at work or at home, he’s “really there, and I’m able to be so because I’ve really been at the other place. I don't always get it right… making the show, for instance, exhausted me much more than was necessary for me to properly sit down, but you live and you learn.”

One always wondered when watching meta comedy shows just how much of the characters are grounded in reality. Is Steve Coogan really a jaded, professionally unhappy man as he is in The Trip? Is Larry David really as stubborn-minded as in Curb? For Blondey, the answer is simple: “I am not quite so terrible in reality — and scenarios were reordered or reworded, but fundamentally it's all quite true”, he says. “It's not easy, losing oneself in oneself, and I’m sure the others who had to do so also found themselves wishing we were doing Hamlet instead, at times. But that’s what was required of us.”

In March, Blondey premiered his second proper scripted comedy, a shorter piece entitled Len Bowles Makes Good. It’s essentially a vehicle for THAMES, as the titular Len Bowles (played by McCoy), a foul-mouthed wheeler-dealer who looks like a Covent Garden statue, delivers a champagne-coloured Daimler to a THAMES jewellery customer and competition winner in Weston-super-Mare. Blondey was going to head down to give the prize away himself, “if only to prove we’d actually come through,” he says. “I wrote a script that afternoon, we filmed it the very next day on the Canon 5D we use for product shots and put it up on YouTube just a couple of weeks later.” It’s a completely different character to the one he plays in The Blondey Way, but it’s just as compelling viewing.

So what does the future hold for Blondey? He says he “absolutely” has plans for more scripted comedy, but beyond that, he’d “like to see Australia. If you're reading this, and you can give me a good reason, please do!” A series two down under might not be the strangest thing that could happen.