One of the reasons I’ve found it easy to forgive him for this is that I wouldn’t have been doing that show without him. Because John Noel also looked after Davina McCall and Dermot O’Leary, he was quite powerful in the Big Brother set up. When he found out they were planning a new debate show to accompany it—Efourum, it was called—he put me forward for it. Th e
people making the program knew of my work and my reputation, and were therefore cynical.
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I had to go for an audition where they showed me a bit of footage from a previous Big Brother and I just had to say what I thought about it and muck about with researchers pretending to be guests or audience members. That went really well, but they were seeing lots of people for the job—I think the excellent brown-eyed chum of mine Simon Amstell was one of the final few—and before they would finally off er it to me, John had to sign a personal contract guaranteeing that I’d be no trouble.
John says he always has to convince people that I’m not mad.
This is because I am. A bit. I was first diagnosed as depressive when I was still at Grays school, and our GP said I ought to take some kind of mood-stabilizing drug. When I got arrested and cut myself in the course of that cannabis-farming episode, the police made me see a psychologist—as they always do when you’re self-harming—and he said, “Yeah, you’ve obviously got some form of mental illness.” Then I saw some kind of counselor at drama school and he said I was manic-depressive.
I’ve never had a sustained period of medication for mental illness when I’ve not been on other drugs as well. It’s just not something that I particularly feel I need. I know that I have dramatically changing moods, and I know sometimes I feel really depressed, but I think that’s just life. I don’t think of it as, “Ah, this is mental illness,” more as, “Today, life makes me feel very sad.” I know I also get unnaturally high levels of energy and quickness of thought, but I’m able to utilize that.
I think that’s one of the reasons I adore Tony Hancock so much—not just for his hubris and
self-involvement, but
because there’s something so truthful about the melancholy of him. There’s an episode of Hancock’s Half Hour where he’s talking to Sid James (who I also really love, but not in the same way—just as I’ve always favored Peter Cook over lovely Dudley Moore, who was born at roughly the same time as my dad, and 328
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came from the same place. I suppose I must be more strongly drawn to the romantic Don Quixote archetype than the San-cho Panza realist), and Hancock says, “Oh I might as well do myself in—I might as well just hang myself ”—and, in the end, he did.
When he’s talking about how depressed he is with that hangdog expression and those beautiful glassy eyes—“Oh, stone me”—that is so En glish and so beautiful to me. I’ve always had the analogy that people who are depressed are often funny in the same way that En gland is a seafaring nation because we’re an island; because you adapt to your circumstances, and if you’re miserable you’ve got to become funny to fucking keep afl oat.
I took Ritalin (the stuff they use to calm down hyperactive kids) for a while when I was still using other drugs, and that was awful. The analogy I generally employ for the way it slowed my mind down is that instead of the right word being readily to hand, I’d have to go up in the attic to look for it, but in fact it was more dramatic than that. What it was really like was severing the tendrils from the heavens that connect me to creativity.
When I’m onstage or on TV, and everything’s going well, I feel like there are these electric, celestial tentacles dangling from on high and I can swing on them, like Tarzan on his creepers. But Ritalin severed those tentacles—just lopped them off .
So when I’d finally got myself all clean and free of drugs of all kinds and I finally got that Big Brother job, it looked like a chance to prove myself. It was four shows a week for nearly three months, and it was quite a lot of exposure, not to mention money.
Nik and John filmed me when they told me the news; they’d created such a lovely nurturing environment for me—taking me on daft skiing and snowboarding holidays, even though I can’t do either and bloody hate the cold. They had a camera set up to 329
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record the moment, because they thought I’d start whooping and yelping and leaping about. They were so proud and excited for me, and I just went, “Oh, that’s good.”
When I started doing that Efourum, I always thought I was going to say something mad on air. This anxiety was born of a long history of saying ridiculous things in public. Like that time at the Edinburgh Festival where I’d gone onstage and said odd things about child abuse, expressing complicated views about societal as opposed to individual responsibility: views which when I was on heroin I tended not to express very succinctly, so it came out all aggressive and ill-conceived.
Happily, the first series of Efourum was relatively uneventful, except for when Kitten came on, who was a supposedly radical lesbian anarchist character in the house. Kitten had been thrown out in the first week, and people had told me I needed to watch her. When she came on the show she was being all boisterous and sulky, but I really controlled her, and when she got in a bit of a strop and stood up and walked off the show, I just made a joke about it and carried on.
One thing that’s been a great advantage to me in doing live TV is that after all those years when everything was so heightened and berserk, and I was always getting into fights and sticking Barbie dolls up my arse, there’s not much that can go on in a studio that is really going to shock me. I have this feeling when I’m on TV that I’m resting. I’m not having to operate at maxi-mum capacity, so if something mad happens, like someone being rude or walking off, then I actually quite like it.
I did get told off by the program’s makers on that occasion, though, and I had to apologize. Oddly, given what happens to a lot of housemates, they do have a sort of paternal attitude toward them. Phil Edgar-Jones, who’s the overall boss of Big 330
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Brother, said, “You’ve got to be a bit respectful because they’ve given so much to the program.”
When I went to go and say sorry to Kitten, she was in her dressing room eating a McDonald’s—even though she was meant to be an anarchist. I said, “Look, I’m sorry about that, I didn’t mean to upset you,” and she goes, “Oh no, it’s all cool.”
Then there was a pause, which I felt duty bound to interrupt with the words, “I see you’re eating a McDonald’s there,” and she goes, “Yeah, they got that for me,” as if she had no choice.
There’d been a kind of fallow period for a while, but as work began to pick up, I started seeing different women again, quickly acquiring a harem of about ten, whom I would rotate in addition to one-night stands and random casual encounters. When I first came into the public eye, I wasn’t quite as guarded as I ought to have been about these activities, but the things I’ve said have always been quite general. Once I started to feel a bit more confident, and realized there was now a great gaping hole in my life that wasn’t filled by drugs and booze any more, my tendency to pursue women—which had always been quite rapacious—somehow became enhanced further. Because so much of my previous behavior was now prohibited, I pursued the one thing that was still allowed especially relentlessly.
As I got better at stand-up, I started to have loads of encounters after gigs. As my sexual appetite grew, I found myself engaged in an increasingly desperate quest to satisfy it. I became so open to suggestion that when someone asked me if I’d like to go to an orgy, I didn’t think twice before accepting this invitation.
The word “orgy” is undeniably an evocative one. It conjures up sumptuous images of delicate muslin drapes being teased by a breeze, Turkish music playing everywhere (in fact my whole 331
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orgy scenario seems to have been lifted pretty much wholesale from a Turkish Delight adve
rt), nubile Nubian women entwined about each other like a Henry Moore statue, people decadently devouring grapes. I thought there’d probably be a sort of Swiss bloke with no irises or pupils in his eyes as well, just kind of staring. But that ain’t what I got in a tower block in Hackney.
The demolition of my fantasy was achieved in stages, but was ultimately no less complete than the more explosive end that seems to await so many of that hard-pressed borough’s high-rise buildings.
When I arrived and got into the lift, there were already two blokes inside it, and I thought, “Oh fuck, I hope they’re not going to the same orgy I’m going to—I don’t feel that comfortable in a lift with them, and would be positively alarmed at the prospect of a cuddle.” Fortunately they got off—and I’m talking about alighting—at an earlier fl oor.
So I continued my journey upward physically, downward spiritually, till eventually I was disgorged into this endless, long, anonymous, Kubrickian corridor. It may well have been home to twin girls in floral frocks. And perhaps a little boy on a trike whistled by. Had there been a tidal wave of blood, I would have turned back.
Either way, I did not have the confidence to swagger into that orgy like a Viking narcissist—“OK, meet the boys . . . let’s orge.”
My innate nervousness caused me to project more of a delicate Alan Bennett sensibility (at this point, readers are advised to call upon their very best Alan Bennett internal monologue):
“Oh I don’t think you should be going in there, Russell, look at the curtains.”
So I’m standing at this door, kind of half knocking and half not-knocking—my own recalcitrant hand unwilling to do my bidding, like a disgruntled Rod Hull tribute act. Eventually I 332
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take the plunge, and wait in silence—or what was that? Did I hear squelching?
At last, the door was opened by this . . . well, woman I s’pose you’d call her. She filled the frame of the door, and I had to crane round her to check the orgy didn’t consist of only her.
“Well, dear, there will be oral in the crook of me arm, water-sports in the nape of me neck, and you don’t want to know what’s going on round the back.”
She told me that her name was Coral (I would imagine to evoke the exoticism and beauty of a coral reef, as opposed to the sheer fucking scale of one). “Do you wanna come in, love?” she asked in a friendly voice, and I stepped inside. As soon as I was over the threshold, I landed in this world of livid, lurid sexual conjunctions. It weren’t like them nubile, Nubian Henry Moore women I’d imagined earlier. People who looked like they were made out of Ready Brek, swathed in Clingfi lm, were waddling back and forth with towels about their waists.*
The thing is, I went to that orgy to escape from humanity and mundanity, but you can’t escape humanity if you’re human—it’s everywhere. And mundanity’s just the same. So all that filth was going on in the foreground, but out of the window I could see a motorway flyover, and trundling over it was a Sunblest bread van, making deliveries.
There was too much pathos at that orgy. I don’t want pathos at an orgy—I get enough of that at home. And this was like an orgy directed by Mike Leigh. Everywhere there was this intangible sadness. This woman came bustling out of a doorway when
* Ready Brek is an instant oatmeal–type breakfast cereal made by adding hot milk. It is advertised by a boy with a radioactive- style orange glow round him having eaten some of the cereal. It’s one of those things that people always go on about—like the Native American who cries a single tear in that antilitter commercial; it found its way into the national psyche.
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I first got there—she reminded me of my mum, which didn’t help—and said, “Just done my second . . . better go and rinse my mouth out,” a visible halo of sperm around her face.
Another thing which happened at that orgy that shouldn’t is a washing-machine repairman turned up—not as a guest, but to repair the washing machine. That’s bad scheduling, isn’t it? “Are you busy between nine and twelve on Wednesday?” “No, not really, well . . . I was planning to have an orgy.” People were being ushered into doorways, and I have an uncomfortable memory of some bloke brushing against my thigh.
Apart from anything else, I don’t like the idea of being at an orgy where the washing machine ain’t working. It seems a bit grimy. Most of the people there had a kind of guilty air about them—features dripping down their faces like candle wax, as they dragged their shame behind them like Jacob Marley’s chains. There was one bloke, though, who really seemed quite cheerful, and because he didn’t appear to have any pangs of conscience about the whole thing, it kind of made what he was doing seem more palatable. He was behaving as if he was at a Pontin’s table-tennis rally. In the hour and a half I was there (which was the minimum amount of time to do the necessary research) he fucked every woman there. And he did it in such a lovely way that there were times when I could have given him a high fi ve.
For those of a slightly more bashful temperament, there was the odd awkward moment. I did find myself at something of a loose end at one stage, and I’d like to offer that you don’t truly know loneliness until you’ve spent ten minutes in not-so- glorious isolation at an orgy—that’s when you’ll really start to feel the pinch of solitude. But I think the most tragic of the thousand tiny tragedies that occurred at that orgy was this one: Here and there about the room, someone—the woman who 334
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opened the door, I presume—had placed little bowls of nibbles.
That just made me feel sad inside. They were on paper plates.
Not standard white ones, but the colorful kind with pictures of balloons and streamers on that I should imagine might be marketed as “Party Plates.” I couldn’t help imagine the woman at Woolworth’s earlier that day thinking, “I could get the plain white plates. I know the Party Plates are 45p dearer . . . but little touches like that can really make or break an orgy.”
One particular plate was adorned with a forlorn selection of Minstrels. Apparently “they melt in your mouth, not in your hand,” but I did not want to test that theory on this occasion.
I did not enjoy that orgy, and I shan’t be going again, but at least it temporarily satisfied my spiraling appetite for distraction, which was evidently getting a bit out of control.
It was to rescue me from these kinds of grisly scenarios that John Noel sent me to KeyStone. The Chinese have a phrase,
“regulation of the affairs of the bedroom”: this means, “Watch it with the winky water,” which was mooted as an alternative title to this book for a while, by me; suddenly the publishers fi nally began to look favorably on “My Booky Wook.” While I was at Focus, counselors had concerns about the “how’s yer father”; the phrase that got bandied around was “blindingly obvious cross-addiction.” Knowing that Focus 12 had been fundamental in my recovery from substance abuse, John sought the advice of Chip. “He needs to go into a specialist treatment center,” said Chip, “but, the important thing is, he’s got to want to go.” I in-terjected: “I’m not going into a sex addiction center . . .”
Can you guess what John said? V
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And Then Three Come at Once
Here is an excerpt from one of a series of letters I was asked to write at KeyStone:
Russell,
You have fucked up every professional opportunity you have ever been given. Now that you’ve been given yet another last chance and are fi nally free from drugs and alcohol, you have already begun to tarnish your reputation at Big Brother.
All the things you profess to want—the absent dreams that constantly stoke your inadequacy— could already be yours, but for your slavish dedication to addiction . . .
Do you see how you are beginning to destroy once again the reputation that you and John have worked so hard to resurrect? . . . He forced you to go to KeyStone because he knows you are an inveterate self-saboteur,
and that without serious help and work on your part, you could once again be unemployable . . .
I was a bit browned off about being sent to KeyStone, not only because I knew it would mean no diddling, not even by my own porcelain hand, but also because of the unanticipated high num-336
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ber of pedophiles there. I don’t like to be judgmental; after the life I’ve lived and the tolerance I’ve been shown it would be unfair. It just seems to me that my problem, really fancying adult, human females, is distinct from the difficulties facing a pedophile. As is outlined in the first chapter of this booky wook, once I realized that I was expected to live the next month of my life sharing a room with a chap who’d run off with his thirteen-year-old foster daughter, I was on the old blower pretty pronto. “I’m living with pedophiles,” I told anyone who’d listen. In this case that was John Noel’s answer phone and Chip Somers’s ear hole, and I didn’t get much change out of either.
“Come on,” I reasoned, “I know I’ve been a bit excessive with the threesomes and the orgies, and by Jove, I’m prepared to change, but can I come home now please? I look unusually young for my years and I don’t want any R. White’s secret lem-onade drinker-style creaky floorboards as I lie quivering in my wretched institutional bed.”
But Chip said I should stay. So I stayed. And I’m glad I did, because if the purpose of the trip was to give me a newfound compassion for people with a terrible illness, it succeeded, and if it was to furnish me with some jaw-dropping anecdotes, it was also a triumph. Additionally it made me think “enough’s enough” on the old obscurity front, and the moment I was released from perv prison I focused on becoming successful and it took hardly any time at all. Here are some of the funnier diary entries from my month in that Philadelphian treatment center for sexual addiction:
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So here I am in this hospice for perverts . . .
My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up Page 29