Here Comes the Clown

by Dom Joly

  So we got all dressed up and set off on our first adventure in ligger-land. Soon we were in the bowels of the imposing V&A amidst the great and not-so-great of London literati, plus a handful of random famous faces not much linked to literature but tucking into the free champagne and adulation. Not for the last time in the past fifteen years, Stacey and I felt out of place. We wandered around like small-town folk, nudging each other whenever we saw someone famous. There was very little reason for us to be there and we knew it.

  We went out into the garden, where fire-eaters and men on stilts meandered aimlessly through the guests. It was then that I spotted Charlie Higson. He was one of the brains behind The Fast Show, one of my all-time favourite programmes. More importantly he played Ralph to Paul Whitehouse’s Ted in the pathos-strewn Ted and Ralph sketches in which Ralph, the nice but dim country squire, desperately tried to establish a relationship with Ted, the monosyllabic estate worker. It was a series of sketches that nailed so much about Britain and the class relationships that still tether it to the eighteenth century. Best of all, it was pant-wettingly funny and I could quote every one verbatim.

  ‘It’s Charlie Higson . . .’ I mumbled to Stacey.

  ‘Who?’ she replied.

  ‘Charlie Higson . . . Ralph from The Fast Show.’ She looked mystified but was pleased to see me so enthused.

  ‘Well go and say hello then,’ she urged.

  ‘I can’t, I’m embarrassed.’ I was pathetic.

  ‘Oh, come on. Tell him you like his stuff, say hello. What’s the worst that could happen? Imagine if someone did that to you. You’d love it.’ Stacey, being Canadian, is not only sensible and kind but never really gets the British fear of public interaction. Nevertheless, spurred on by her enthusiasm, I gingerly approached Charlie Higson.

  He was in the middle of telling a story to two people and so I half-joined their group and laughed along a little too hard at what I soon realised wasn’t a funny story, but something about someone whose wife was leaving them. Higson finished the story but nobody paid me the slightest bit of attention, and I was left hanging like a lemon as they started talking about something else. It was crunch time – I had to either slip away in shame or say something. I made the wrong choice.

  ‘Mr Higson . . . Excuse me, Mr Higson . . .’

  Charlie Higson turned to look at me but in a way that implied he didn’t really want to.

  ‘I just wanted to say that I’m a fan. I even have a single by The Higsons.’ My nerves had forced me to start making things up. I knew that Charlie Higson had been in an indie band called The Higsons at university and so, rather than just say hello, I was trying to impress him with my knowledge of his work. I was lying, I’d never heard a song by the band but I was desperate to separate myself from the common hordes that must normally harass him in public.

  He looked at me as though dealing with a simple relative. His tone was not appreciative, as I’d assumed it would be. It was not even that friendly.

  ‘Oh really, which one do you have?’

  I could feel the blood rushing to my cheeks. I was speechless with ignorance. There was a long, awkward silence. To me it felt like a minute but was probably only a couple of seconds. Finally I said something.

  ‘All of them . . . I’ve got all of them . . . Really good . . .’ I longed for a hole to open up and swallow the entire V&A. Admittedly it would have been a blow to the London literary scene but it would have made my life a lot more comfortable at that moment.

  Higson looked at me for a second as though checking for a concealed weapon. He then turned and resumed talking to the two people, and I was cut adrift. I stood listening for a couple of seconds before pretending that I saw someone I knew and slinking off. They didn’t even notice.

  ‘How did it go?’ asked Stacey.

  ‘I need more drink,’ I replied with a distant look in my eyes.

  That was pretty much it for my first night out as a ‘celebrity’. I dimly remember trying and failing to say something intelligent and funny to a rather gorgeous Zadie Smith before Stacey hinted that it was time for us to go. I went for a pee on the way out and found myself standing at the urinal next to Dave Gilmour from Pink Floyd. I spent the entire Seventies being weaned on Pink Floyd through my elder brother and sisters. I’d listened to Wish You Were Here driving through the Syrian desert. I’d gone to sleep every night of boarding school listening to Dark Side of the Moon. I even loved ‘Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict’. I loved Pink Floyd and wanted to tell Mr Gilmour but I had already learned a valuable fame lesson from Charlie Higson. Play it cool . . . Maybe Dave Gilmour was a Trigger Happy TV fan? Maybe he’d say hello to me? Maybe we’d become friends and hang out together and he’d teach me to play guitar? I could be his new Roger Waters? I was thinking so hard that I was unable to pee and the more I worried about this, the less likely it was to happen. It was male stage fright. There I was standing next to Dave Gilmour, with him peeing away and me just holding my penis and staring at him. It was quite a traumatic night. Years later I would embarrass myself in front of another member of Pink Floyd. I was invited to Jeremy Clarkson’s fiftieth birthday party at his house, a party so over the top that I assumed somebody had spiked my drink. Everywhere I looked there were famous people – Bryan Ferry, Steve Coogan, Harry Enfield, Jemima Khan, oh . . . and Richard Littlejohn.

  There were tributes from Simon Cowell, the prime minister and Ozzy Osbourne before a wall was lowered to reveal the entertainment for the evening, Squeeze supporting The Who. It was insane. As I stood, quite pissed, watching The Who, I noticed a Sloaney-looking man standing next to me. It was Nick Mason, the drummer of Pink Floyd. Again I was tongue-tied but finally managed to stammer:

  ‘Are . . . you not playing then?’

  Nick Mason looked at me like you would a simpleton.

  ‘Clearly not . . .’ He walked off. I really was rubbish at talking to Pink Floyd.

  The Higson incident (as it came to be known in my household) was quite an oddity for me. Most of my heroes tended to be musicians and not comedians. History had shown me that meeting comedians was rarely a pleasure.

  Shortly after Trigger Happy TV was out I was asked to perform at the Secret Policeman’s Ball in aid of Amnesty International. A big honour. I’d seen the earlier ones with people like John Cleese and Python performing alongside Sting doing a stunning acoustic version of ‘Message in a Bottle’. This was the big time and I didn’t spend too much time worrying about what I’d actually ‘perform’ or that I’d never, ever done anything live in my life.

  The list of performers sent to me was impressive – U2, Radiohead and Woody Allen were a few of the names mooted. I was too green to check whether these names were confirmed, however, as when I eventually got to Wembley Arena, the headliners were Tom Jones, Stereophonics and the host was Eddie Izzard. Not to take away from these good people but it was not quite what had been originally promised.

  I got there very early and wandered round the empty arena marvelling that I was going to have my very first live performance here. As I was trying to find my dressing room I spotted Harry Enfield talking to Paul Whitehouse. Harry and I shared an agent. He was very pleasant, said hello and I hung out with the two of them as they chatted. Harry was obsessed with my DVD sales and kept telling me I was a ‘lucky bastard’. I couldn’t argue. Eddie Izzard arrived and greeted Harry and Paul warmly. He nodded vaguely in my direction. He invited us (well, them) into his dressing room and we entered a suitably vast space, where I sat quietly while the three established comedians swapped banter. I couldn’t believe that I was there. How the hell had this happened? A man came in and told Harry and Paul that they should sound-check. They left and I felt that I should go with them but, like an idiot, I didn’t. I sat in Eddie Izzard’s cavernous dressing room while he put on a particularly garish, shiny costume and studiously ignored me. I finally spoke to break the awkward silence.

  ‘Thank you so
much for having me on the bill . . .’

  Izzard looked up at me dismissively.

  ‘Oh . . . I had nothing to do with that, you’re not my choice . . .’ There was another long period of awkward silence before I mumbled something about finding my dressing room and I slunk out. Suffice to say that I shall not be voting for him for London Mayor.

  Come the actual show and I’d decided to go ahead with a drunken idea I’d had about doing a Stars in their Eyes pastiche in which the joke was, ‘Tonight, Matthew, I’m going to be Black Box.’ I would disappear into smoke and reappear stumbling around dressed as a big black box to the sound of ’Ride on Time’.

  I asked Harry Hill (whom I loved) to be Matthew Kelly for me. Despite him going on to present a revamped version of the show in 2015 he was clearly not keen on the idea back then as he declined. I then asked Jonathan Ross, who said yes immediately before killing any vestiges of humour in the thing by over-egging his role. This was the first of many random showbiz meetings with Ross. The one common factor of all these meetings was that he would always ask if I played tennis? I would invariably reply in the affirmative and he would tell me that I should come and play doubles at his house with David Baddiel and Les Dennis. I would accept, thinking that this was a weird experience too good to miss. I would then never hear from him again. I heard Jimmy Carr telling the same story about Ross on the radio (although I think he actually played there) so this is clearly his default showbiz conversation starter.

  I like Jonathan Ross. Like Piers Morgan and Simon Cowell he is peculiarly un-British in his pursuit of showbiz hegemony. He’s certainly a veteran – I used to leave messages on the answering machine of his first chat show, The Last Resort, when I was still at school. When we were filming stuff in the days before Trigger Happy TV, we found his distinctive Union Jack-painted Vespa parked in Hampstead. I left a note under the seat. It read:

  To the owner of this bike. By chance you have painted it exactly the same colour as the television presenter Jonathan Ross. We want to drive it into a shop window, take a picture and then try to sell a false story to the tabloids about Ross being drunk and indulging in some ram raiding. If you are interested then call this number.

  I rather hoped Ross would take the bait and ring us himself but he never did. Ironically, when I came to try and insure my own Vespa for the first time as a ‘performer’ the premium tripled. When I asked the broker why it was so expensive the reply was that in my line of work I could be riding around with Jonathan Ross on the back and, should I then crash, the insurer would be liable for him as well as me. I didn’t really follow the logic and asked if I could negotiate a clause that rendered me liable should I have any crash in which I had a celebrity pillion passenger. They weren’t interested.

  Years later, when the first series of Fool Britannia aired, I was a guest on The Jonathan Ross Show. There was a very curious moment when I was on the set but we were off-air as they showed a VT of Fool Britannia. Ross took the opportunity to lean forward and whisper to me in a really creepy voice: ‘You’we on fire, you weally want it, don’t you? I can smell it . . .’ Now, an innocent observer might think that he was hitting on me. Not at all. I’m pretty sure that the ‘it’ he was referring to was success, fame, showbiz status . . . He was asserting his own showbiz status and letting me know that this was my chance to return from the entertainment wilderness. At least I think this was what he meant? Maybe he was hitting on me? I’ve never been good on signals. Whatever, for the first time there was no mention of tennis but he did tell me about his up-coming Halloween party and that ‘you must come’. Predictably, the promised invitation never came.

  I didn’t mind what happened in my encounter with other comedians. As far as I could make out, no comedian could ever really be friends with any another. Comedians being friends with each other is a bit like an open marriage – it’s doomed to failure, as inevitably one will be getting more action than the other and it will start to tell. The exception to this rule for me is Jenny Eclair, whom I adore.

  With musical heroes, however, it was a different matter. As a teenager I had two: David Bowie and Robert Smith, lead singer of The Cure and the ‘Gothfather’ to slightly chubby, depressed teenagers around the globe. I have met both with varying results.

  The very first thing I did when I got to London was to find Heddon Street and have my photograph taken recreating the cover photo of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Unfortunately I was wearing black and white spandex trousers and sporting a badly bleached ponytail. It would be fair to say that it’s not a great photo. I had every Bowie album, knew every lyric, had a collection of his appearances on much-watched VHSs . . . I really liked David Bowie, OK?

  So, when I spotted him sitting at the bar of a little place in Geneva airport, I couldn’t believe my eyes. I walked past him about three times, trying to look inconspicuous, but he spotted me and looked almost amused by my incompetent stalking. On the fourth pass I swooped. I walked up to him and proffered my hand. He shook it. My mind went blank. I should have left it at that but I couldn’t. For what seemed like an interminable period of time we stared at each other. I took in his distinctive odd-coloured eyes, the result of a childhood knife incident. I looked at his teeth, once the principal exhibit in an American trial of the state of British dentistry but now almost too white, too shiny, not rock ‘n’ roll enough. Bowie continued staring at me with an amused smile appearing at the corner of his mouth. Finally I was ready . . . but as I opened my mouth to speak, David Bowie got up, said, ‘Excuse me,’ and walked away . . . fast. It took me five or six years to be able to tell this story without weeping at my social incompetence.

  Robert Smith on the other hand, well that’s another story . . . and quite a long one.

  While filming Being Dom Joly for Channel 4, I’d faked a back story in which I was a war reporter in Bosnia, had a nervous breakdown under fire, was hospitalised and subsequently married my Bosnian psychiatric nurse – following this so far? We wanted to fake footage from my marriage to said nurse at Marylebone Register Office, the place where I got married for real. While we were discussing the scene, I suggested that we should have a cameo role for a best man figure. Who could we get? I jokingly said, ‘How about Robert Smith?’

  So someone placed a call to The Cure headquarters. It turned out that Robert Smith was a Trigger Happy TV fan and agreed to take part in a day’s filming. This was insane. As the big day approached, however, I had a nagging concern. I hadn’t seen The Cure for a while. What if Robert Smith had grown old gracefully and cut off all his backcombed bird’s nest of hair and removed the badly applied make-up? What if he turned up and was unrecognisable? What if he now looked like an accountant?

  Then I had a brainwave. We contacted The Cure HQ again and asked whether Robert Smith needed a make-up person on the day.

  ‘No,’ was the message that came back. ‘He’ll do his own.’

  We were all relieved. He was still the Gothfather.

  The designated day came and I arrived at our offices on the Charing Cross Road very early. I was nervous and buzzing – life was good. I sat at my desk and tried to think of things to do while I waited for the great man’s arrival. Before I knew it, he was there. A runner came in and said the words: ‘Robert Smith’s in reception for you.’ I took a deep breath and walked out. There he was, it was bloody crazy – Robert Smith had come to see me. I tried to keep calm but this was so out there. I made what passed for polite chat and briefly ran through what we were going to do. He played it just right. He was cool, a touch aloof in a rock star way, but also very polite and friendly. You don’t want your heroes to be too normal – they lose their mystique.

  The crew was ready and we were going to set off to the location. Robert Smith had a large, comfortable, chauffeur-driven limousine and he suggested that I ride with him so we could chat. I nodded like this was normal but inside I was like a 19-year-old girl being given the key to John Taylor’s hotel room (for younge
r readers, please substitute sixteen for nineteen and Harry Styles for John Taylor ). I slipped into the back seat alongside Smith and we were whizzed through Central London inside our tinted showbiz cocoon. I can’t remember what we chatted about but I think I managed the journey without too much embarrassment. I remember Smith telling me that he and his long-term partner Mary divided people on the telly into two camps – Ronnie Barker and Ronnie Corbett. One category was the good guys and the others were the wankers. Sadly, I can’t remember which Ronnie signified which category.

  Back in the Cure limo we were now cruising down the Marylebone Road and I could see the register office just up ahead. Right outside the building was a little slipway off the main road, clearly designed for cars to stop and deposit or pick up soon-to-be or recently wedded folk. The chauffeur turned into the little spot and stopped. I was so relieved that I hadn’t behaved like an idiot. For once I’d played it cool – maybe I’d turned a corner? I opened the heavy door of the limo and there was an immediate, earth-shattering impact. I was hurled back into the lap of a very confused and startled Robert Smith. I got up as quickly as possible to see what had happened. I had opened the passenger door on the street side of the car, and in my excitement had not looked to see if anything was coming. A white builder’s truck had been coming . . . and fast. The truck had sheared off the whole passenger door of the limo before coming to a stop against the traffic lights ahead. The limo driver was out and staring at his vehicle in a state of some agitation. The builders were clambering out of the truck and had begun swearing at me. Robert Smith was sitting in the limo just staring at me in disbelief.

  ‘Is this a hidden camera joke?’ he asked in a tone that indicated that, if it was, it was not tickling his funny bones. I assured him that it was a genuine mistake on my part but I could see that he was not convinced. Once the angry builders had been calmed and the limo driver reassured that we had production insurance, we eventually commenced filming. I could see that Robert Smith was not quite the same with me after that incident and, frankly, who could blame him?