Boosh, Julia Davis from Nighty Night, and this agent from ICM
called Conor McCaughan (who actually ended up signing me, miraculously enough). Both my parents were there too, and Matt’s mate Rick nearly got in a fight with my dad when he tried to stop the pair of them screaming at each other. It was one of those nights when everything feels like it’s broken.
I decided that a confrontational agitprop approach was the right one to take to this audience full of people I knew and/or hoped to work with. I came on two hours late, having got home-234
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less people to sit outside the venue collecting money from the crowd as they arrived at the venue, so when the gig finally began I could bring them onstage, tip the money out, divide it by the amount of people in the venue and go, “So that’s all you can manage, is it?”
Even—perhaps even especially—when I was at my most self-indulgent, I remained very politically engaged. I was always eager to blame the audience for society’s ills, demanding insurrection and revolution, and damning them as “passive Nazis”
and (somewhat more poetically) “a lazy cluster of atoms.” Th is
almost suicidally militant tendency within my work would eventually reach its peak in a horrendous incident at the 2002 Edinburgh Festival.
On the day Ian Huntley was charged in the Soham murders case, my interpretation of the concept of collective responsibility caused me to berate the audience with cries of “You killed them little girls.” I then got in a fight, put my leg through a plate- glass door and had to be hospitalized as well as arrested (for criminal damage to the door). The doctors told me if the laceration I’d incurred had been an inch to the left, my leg would’ve had to be amputated.
Not content with damaging myself physically, I had already set about dismantling my career with a series of strategic acts of recklessness. The most celebrated of these—and one of the most notorious stories of my addiction (if only because I’ve repeated it so many times)—was the encounter between Gritty and Kylie Minogue.
Gritty was the main drug dealer I used to get heroin off at the time I worked at MTV. I’d met him through that strange androgynous character I mentioned earlier. He/she . . . actually, I think I’ll go with “they” for ease of reference—they weren’t actually a dealer, they’d just ride round Camden on their BMX
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scoring drugs for me (and probably ripping me off a little bit) with their mad eyes and mad teeth. Once they’d introduced me to Gritty, I moved up the ladder a bit, and dealt with him directly.
I liked the fact that destiny had allotted him the name
“Gritty.” Just as Ned Ludd, leader of the Luddites who opposed the Industrial Revolution, would have struggled to make such an eloquent case against the spinning jenny had his name been Fabrizio Zodiac, so that name seemed well adapted to the needs of his profession.
He seemed a nice sort of man, though. He had quite a caring side to him, for a drug dealer. On one occasion when I was buying drugs off him near Camden Bridge, having just sold me my two £10 bags of smack and two £10 rocks of crack—dropping them into my palm down by the water—he gave me a sincere look and said, “Be careful with that, won’t you Russell.” I was thinking, “What do you mean ‘ be careful with that?’ They’re drugs. What does he think I’m gonna do with them?” “Oh no, I seem to have taken them. Why didn’t I heed Gritty’s pro phesy?”
By this time I’d graduated from wanting to be Jim Morrison to wanting to be Andy Warhol—my life will be art, the streets shall be my canvas. So when Gritty asked me once if he could bring Edwin, his eight-year- old son, into MTV to have a bit of a look round, I said, “Sure, why not? What could possibly go wrong? ‘Bring Your Drug Dealer to Work Day.’ ” The date that the inaugural BYDDTWD happened to fall upon was September 12, 2001, the day after (as is typical with the Gregorian calendar) September 11, the day after the destruction of the World Trade Center—an incident which I was referring to at the time by a series of sarcastic observations about international 236
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violence being a two-way street and it being impossible to oppress people endlessly without consequence.
Th
is stuff goes down a bit better now than it did at MTV on September 12: “Come on guys, get over it. It was yesterday.
We’ve got to move on. We cannot grieve forever.” I should add that on that day when I’d gone into work with Gritty and Edwin, I was dressed in a white Muslim tunic with matching white bottoms, a camoufl age fl ak jacket, a false beard and a tea towel on my head, held in place by a shoe lace.
I’d been aware of Osama bin Laden for about a year. He wasn’t someone who people of my age group generally knew about, but he’d been involved with some other bombings and he was top of the FBI’s most wanted list, and I was fascinated by that sort of stuff . That day, I was going to present this program called Select, where kids phoned in and chose videos for us to play, and pop stars would come on to flog their rec ords. Th at afternoon our guest was to be Kylie Minogue. Me, Gritty and Edwin went into the toilet and the two older members of our party smoked some crack—Edwin didn’t have any. He was just a little boy, and seemed quite upbeat about life anyway. Children don’t need drugs, because they have sweets.
We blearily swaggered out of the disabled toilet door. On the other side of the foyer—with its round console, its vast banks of TVs, its trendy turnstile, its endless parade of beautiful young people of both genders and every sexual persuasion trundling in and out—I saw Kylie Minogue, all famous and everything.
Somewhere in my mind, the artist within me—the situation-ist within me—thought “I can create a moment here. When am I ever going to get an opportunity like this again?” Before I knew it, I’d walked across that foyer, made a kind of “woo-ooh”
noise—in a mum across a neighbor’s fence sort of way—and 237
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said, “Kylie, meet Gritty.” Then I just stood back to watch it unfold.
What were these two gonna talk about? It’s September 12, Kylie and Gritty are having a sort of awkward chat, with Gritty trying to be polite and Kylie asking “What do you do?” Sort of like the Queen would. And there’s me standing beside them, still dressed as Osama bin Laden.
I thought, “It don’t get any better than this.”
And it didn’t, ’cos they sacked me about two days later. V
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My stage performances had become mental breakdowns for the handful of shocked spectators. I was steadily getting sacked from all my jobs. My girlfriend had left me. My heroin use was incessant. And the only reason I hadn’t made a serious attempt to kill myself was because I just thought, “I’ve not done anything yet.”
Luckily, UK Play—a now defunct satellite channel—had decided that this was an appropriate moment (a decision which perhaps throws some light on their subsequent financial col-lapse) to give me a quarter of a million pounds to make a TV
series about whatever I wanted. On American MTV, Tom Green was a really big deal at that time. He did lo-fi, spazzing out in public type of comedy; he’s very funny. I originally in-tended to do something like that.
I’d already got together with Martino, and I told Matt I wanted to carry on working with him, and made him leave MTV at the same time I did. UK Play weren’t just going to give us all that money to spend on our own. So we made the program with Vera, who I mentioned earlier in relation to my cheeky lunch breaks. Vera stands for Vivien Clore, who’s Rory Bremner’s agent; Elaine Morris, who was one of the executives—a stern, tough sort of woman; Rory Bremner was the “r”; and 239
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Geoff Atkinson, a lovely man who Matt said was like a big talcy baby—he’d worked on Spitting Image and written for Th e Two
Ronnies—was the “a.” Th
eir offices—in Margaret Street, just off
Oxford Street in London—was a cozy, woolly liberal, Guardian-reading kind of place, but quite sort of stuffy as well.
I was really fixating on street people and those who lived on the fringes of criminality. It wasn’t long before me and Matt were cluttering up Vera with lap dancers, rap crews and the homeless. One abortive show starred this berserk lap dancer I was larking about with. I was sucking one of her boobs while holding up this little puppet wearing a Bill Clinton mask to the other one, then we all jumped on Rory Bremner’s desk going
“Ooh ’ello I’m Rory Bremner”—the hunter had become the hunted.
When we came to work the next day, Elaine was watching the tape. Elaine was the most austere of the Vera bunch and we thought, “Oh fuck, this is not gonna look good for our TV program,” but by that time they’d committed to the project, so there wasn’t very much they could do about it.
Six months roared by without us getting anything done. Th e
main problem was I had too much status and not enough discipline.
Geoff Atkinson was forever drumming his sausage fingers on his barrel chest with his jolly, Father Christmas–like chuckle and saying, “Come on Russell, what are you going to do today?”
Just sort of humoring me really, and I’d be all full of acrimony and revolutionary bile—furious at society, but ultimately furious at myself.
In the end, after months of dicking around with all sorts of ridiculous behavior, we just thought, “We’ll hire a camper van, live in it, and tour Britain, getting in adventures.” Vera had set things up for us all over the country, and our first appointment 240
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was to go down to Cornwall and interview these Cornish separatists. I didn’t really care about Cornwall’s historic struggle for independence, I just wanted to capture insanity on screen, that’s what it was about for me. I was up for having a mental breakdown on television.
I wasn’t at all famous. I had a very limited appeal based on the stuff I’d been doing on MTV. And my stand-up was getting increasingly bizarre. Although I was very nervous and delicate and fragile, I wasn’t so self-effacing or self-aware as now, so the way I came across to audiences was very angry and conceited. I would overcompensate for my lack of preparation by being really aggressive, clambering through audiences, getting into fi ghts, and inadvertently insulting people who turned out to be mentally ill.
I once stuck a sheathed Barbie doll up my arse onstage at the London Astoria to make some point about consumerism that I can no longer remember.
There’d been another ridiculous incident at the Edinburgh Festival in 2001, the year before I got that leg injury, where I provoked a near riot by stabbing myself with a broken vodka glass and covering myself in fake blood, until Sean Hughes, a comedian I really respect, had to usher me out of the back of the building to escape from the baying mob. Embarrassingly, when I met Sean again a couple of weeks later, I failed to remember the entire incident.
My main problem was that I’d started to allow my capacity for self-flagellation and destructiveness to dictate what happened to me onstage. When it comes to your career, you must always try and allow the positive aspects of your character to dictate what happens to you. Be led by your talent, not by your self-loathing; those other things you just have to manage.
At MTV’s suggestion, I had got rid of Nigel Klarfeld when I first signed up to do Dancefl oor Chart, in the belief that I needed 241
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management that was more attuned to TV presentation than live comedy. The agency I joined, KBJ, was run by all these lovely sweet middle-class women, who just didn’t understand the full extent of the nightmare they were dealing with. Our director, Will Knott—a handsome, capable, straggly-haired dog-basket of a man—wasn’t the sort to get involved in trying to set me on the straight and narrow.
Matt has some capacity for self-preservation, but is also a naughty sort of person, an outsider like me. (Once the police got involved when he was childishly throwing peanuts out of the window of a hotel in Leeds, and Matt said, “Why do these things keep happening to us?” He seemed genuinely aggrieved, as if this turn of events was proof of the innate malevolence of the universe, rather than the direct consequence of our own action.) Martino—the producer—was probably the only grown-up among us, but he loved me, and didn’t have the capacity to curtail my lunacy.
This was probably why Elaine and Geoff insisted we take someone else with us on our proposed round-Britain trip, in case we went too mad. They appointed this guy Duncan, eff ectively to be our babysitter. He was a lovely bloke, but I remember Matt going, “Oh, Duncan ain’t coming is he?” Like his school trip had been tarnished.
We were supposed to meet up early the next day. By seven o’clock that morning, I had drunk the best part of a bottle of gin. By the time the MTV cab had delivered me to Notting Hill where the camper van was waiting, I was laughing and crying at the same time.
Matt, Duncan and Will had got there before me, and were busy packing up the kit and equipment, ready for our travels. I, on the other hand, became instantly fascinated by the vehicle we were supposed to be traveling in. “Wow, look at the van, man, it’s crazy,” I enthused, on finding out that this touring 242
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holiday home had both a shower and a TV in it, “let’s get on top of it.”
“Come on, Russell,” they chivvied benevolently, “we’ve got to get ready and go to Cornwall and meet these separatists by half past one.” At this point, I climbed up on top of the van and started shouting, “Come on, film me now. Film this! Film this!”
Duncan shouted, “Just get down—we’ve got to drive to Cornwall.” “You can still do that, just with me riding on top! Th is is
the show—I am the show!”
“Look,” I continued, the gin aiding me in concocting a remarkably plausible theory, “we’re supposed to be making a program about challenging people’s preconceptions and the conformity and conditioning that we find everywhere in society.
If you’re not the sort of people who are prepared to film me doing this, then there isn’t a show: we’ve got the wrong mentality.
I’m not getting off the roof of this van.”
Will ambled up the ladder. “Come on Russell, get down mate, stop being silly.” I think I was sort of in a panic, really. I could see Duncan thinking, “This isn’t looking good. We’re meant to be embarking on a month-long voyage, and ten minutes in, he’s already up on top of the van refusing to come down.” When he climbed up the little ladder to try and talk to me, things got worse. I started shouting, “You make me sick! You make me sick!” Then I stuck my fingers down my throat, and dry-retched gin fumes into his face in a sort of bilious gray cloud.
Duncan started to cry. One by one, a series of other people came to visit me on the roof, like I was some kind of bonkers sage, a lunatic guru or berserk swami—on top of a mountain, rather than a van. But in this case people would come not to seek advice, but to try and talk me down.
Sometimes I flick into this mentality where I think, “I’m just gonna carry on saying or doing this thing now, to find out what 243
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happens as a result.” Like on that plane, or wanking before I could cum, or drinking booze as a lad. At these moments, it’s almost like I’m observing my own life happening—not in a conscious way, but with the sense of detachment that I imagine I learned at an early age, as a way of coping with stress and trauma.
I thought, “I wonder what’ll happen if I just refuse to get down, and stay up here for as long as possible.” First Martino came and pleaded with me. Duncan didn’t make another attempt because he was frightened by the gin fumes. But Matt came up, sort of chuckling but trying to take it seriously, “Stop it, you’re being a dickhead.” Then Elaine from Vera called up.
They gave me the phone and she said, “Russell, what the hell is going on? We’ve got a schedule. We’ve paid for everything and
you’re not going to be able to do it.”
I was calm and reasonable. “Look, there’s nothing to worry about, there really isn’t a problem. I’m completely able to fulfill my obligations to Vera, and to you.” But even as I was saying this, I sort of giggled to myself at the realization that I was delivering this soothing message from the top of a van.
At that point, they canceled the shoot and took the camper back to the depot, and we all went back to Vera’s offi ces. Me and
Matt sat in the pub while other people just sorted through the debris and I said, “This is bad, isn’t it? What have we done?”
Matt resented the “we.” “Let’s just not tell our mums,” I said, like when you’re in trouble at school.
The upshot was that Matt was suspended, and poor, dear Martino was sacked. Geoff said, “We expect Russell to do things like that, but we also expect you to be able to control him.” Martino, who’d always encouraged and protected me, just drifted around after that—he’d rented a new house on the basis of the money he was earning from the show, and he had to leave it and go back to Italy. Everyone was really traumatized by this 244
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barmy incident—Matt had to move back to his parents’ and sign on the dole—and for a while it looked like the whole thing was falling apart.
Eventually, I was able to get Matt back on the payroll because at this stage I was incapable of doing anything on TV without him, and they kept Will on as well. They wouldn’t have Martino back though, as they were determined to give us a “proper” producer. We ended up with this ridiculous character called Sean Grundy. He was actually from Bolton or somewhere, but he looked like a portrait of an Irish leprechaun hung in a theme-park haunted house, with little brass buckles on his dolly shoes.
My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up Page 21