Here Comes the Clown

by Dom Joly

  Chapter 6

  Excellent Adventures

  In the words of my new best friend, Jimmy Page, I was a little dazed and confused. I had no job. I had no idea what to do next. So I sold my flat in Notting Hill Gate to Salman Rushdie, moved to the country and went on holiday to Iceland.

  Selling a flat to Salman Rushdie is a curious thing. Firstly, you become very paranoid at how lowbrow your bookshelves look. Admittedly this is probably not as paranoid as Salman Rushdie must have felt every time he saw a burka waddle towards him down the street, but I have to admit to binning Jilly Cooper’s Polo and a couple of Wilbur Smiths before his first visit.

  How I now regret not proceeding with the joke I told everyone I was going to do when I heard that it was Salman Rushdie, notorious recluse and hider from mad jihadis, buying my flat. I announced that I was going to re-tile my roof terrace before moving out. The new tiles would contain a pattern that you would only be able to make out from the air. It would have a voluminous target and the words ‘Salman Rushdie Lives Here’ in five-metre-high letters. The next time Google Earth swooped over London, the joke would be revealed to the world. I was very tempted and even got a quote for the thing to be done but in the end I thought it might just be going too far. He did, after all, still have a death threat over his head. It could have all gone spectacularly wrong. I’m not a complete wanker.

  The idea for moving to the country was so that we could get cats and dogs and allow our children to roam the lush, golden fields in some idyllic, Albion childhood scenario that UKIP could have filmed and used for publicity purposes. The reality was that kids get very bored and most are hooked on hard cider and glue by the age of fourteen, when they hang out in bus stops wishing that something/anything would happen. We liked it, though. It was perfect for my writing.

  I moved into a house in Quenington, in the Coln Valley, that I subsequently found out had been Anne Robinson’s. She had moved out into a new enormo-dome that she had built with her Weakest Link earnings. (Later she and Joanna Trollope announced that they were moving back to London because of interlopers like Alex James and me ruining the Cotswolds. I was rather proud of this.) The house had a very curious and large red stain in the corner of the main living room. We were never sure whether there had been some sort of murder or it was just that Robinson had had an accident while topping up the ginger in her hair . . .

  I became the new ‘village celeb’ and started to learn the rules: Liz Hurley ran the next village, Kate Moss was mistress of another, Gwyneth Paltrow was rumoured to be house-hunting in the area. It was crazy – this was what I’d left London to get away from. Things came to a head when some entrepreneurial fellow set up a ‘Tour of the Cotswolds Stars’ Homes’ in a coach. It only lasted a couple of months or so as it started by parking up outside Hurley and Winslet’s pads but quickly nose-dived by the time it reached me and Gary Kemp. I used to go out and throw stones at the coach until I realised that this was fast becoming a highlight of the trip.

  People in the area were pretty nice to us, but a bit bemused by my lifestyle. Several of them used to look at my wife with a pitying stare and I couldn’t work out why until I found out that they used to regularly walk past the window of the room in which I would play online Call of Duty. These games would get quite intense and the language I used on my headset when dealing with a cowardly Frenchman or a racist US redneck was particularly colourful. I make no excuses for this; these things happen in war. Unfortunately, my neighbours assumed that I was having regular arguments with my wife and were about to take action when all was finally revealed.

  My nearest big town was Cirencester which I frequented regularly, occasionally performing local celeb duties like turning on the Christmas lights. Things were good. Then, one morning, I drove into town to find it strangely quiet. People spotted me and would walk the other way and nobody would make eye contact. I couldn’t understand what had happened. Then I spotted a photograph in a shop window. It was of the bemused owner shaking hands with the TV designer fop, Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen. Slowly I realised that every window of every shop in town had a similar photograph. It seemed that overnight a coup d’état had taken place and he had conquered the town. I could do little but retire to my village and lick my wounds.

  I had started writing a column for the Independent on Sunday and this had brought me to the attention of publishers. A woman from Bloomsbury took me out for lunch and asked me whether I’d thought about writing an autobiography? I told her that I’d spent the last three years slagging off people who wrote their autobiographies when they were about twenty-five years old. It was stupid and pointless and greedy. There was no way I could write an autobiography at my age. She told me that there would be a hundred-grand advance. I asked her when she might need it by?

  I flew to Harbour Island in the Bahamas to write the book. Looking back, I’m not quite sure why I did this as my study at home would have been fine. I think I thought it would be quite a literary thing to do. Actually, I just got very sunburnt and was so badly bitten by mosquitos that I found it hard to type. I also came to the conclusion that I didn’t want to write an autobiography, despite having banked the money. So, instead, I wrote a pastiche book that, like my chat show, veered violently in and out of reality. To me it was clearly a work of fiction (the talking dog in the first chapter was a bit of a giveaway), but readers seemed confused. I was clearly having real problems equating my ‘Dom Joly’ character with the real me. I think that I can now see that I was trying to create some sort of division between the two. This is presumably why people like David Bowie become Ziggy Stardust and comedians become characters like Mr Bean or Ali G. This becomes a costume that you can put on and take off at will. I had no costume, or maybe I was wearing it all the time? I don’t think I could tell.

  I found it very difficult to divide the showbiz me from the one at home. My 4-year-old daughter, Parker, came back from school one day and asked me whether I was ‘Dom Joly’ as other kids had said that she was ‘Dom Joly’s daughter’. To Parker, ‘Dom Joly’ was what I went off to be in London. At home I was just ‘Dad’ and I felt a lot more comfortable with that. At least with ‘Dad’ I vaguely understood the rules – but my lives were very intertwined and this was a problem.

  I was a bit lost. I’d had my fill of comedy for the time being and I had a long think about what I wanted to do next. As I’d proved with my endless travel blags on the comedy shows, I definitely had a bad case of wanderlust. I think, analysing it now, I saw travel as an escape – an escape from the insecurity of fame and scary family responsibilities that I didn’t think I’d be up to. When I was abroad I could forget everything, be selfish, be anonymous. It was a temporary detachment from my life.

  I was running away and I was to become rather addicted to it for some years to come.

  I decided that I should concentrate on travel, both in television and writing. I started to think about what kind of show I wanted to make. I was an obsessive watcher of travel shows but felt strongly that they were very dishonest. Whereas most of the rest of TV had grown up and broken the fourth wall in terms of not patronising the viewer and being honest about stuff, travel TV was still in a little bubble. For instance, I’d watch Michael Palin travelling Around the World in 80 Days. There’d be much tension (telly loves tension) over whether he’d make a train in Egypt. He made the train at the last minute but then there was a glorious shot of the train leaving. Who took that shot? Again, in a Palin show I remember him being in Ethiopia and the voice-over telling us that this was a very dangerous area and they couldn’t get out of the car – all this while we watched his car wind its way through hills in a shot taken by a distant cameraman who had clearly got out of his car.

  Travel telly even lies about meeting a local fixer when you arrived in a city. Normally you meet them in the reception of your hotel but the director will always make Paul Merton randomly bump into a strangely helpful local at an exotic market. This chance encounter will then decide to help him f
or the rest of the show. I wanted to make a travel show that spoofed these ludicrous practices while also taking me to places that I wanted to go to. As I was wondering just how I’d go about doing this, fate intervened. Firstly, I got a call from the editor of the Sunday Times travel section asking me if I’d like to become a writer for them? I asked her what sort of things she wanted me to write about. She told me that she wanted me to go and ‘do the things that everyone wants to do but never gets round to’. I didn’t need much urging.

  In the very same week I got another call: Sky 1 were making a ‘celebrity’ travel series called Excellent Adventures, in which they wanted people to head off on . . . well . . . an excellent adventure. So far, the list wasn’t that exciting. Minnie Driver was off to swim with sperm whales and Vinnie Jones was off to Mongolia to fish. I saw both these shows and they struggled to make an hour of telly. Minnie Driver flew somewhere, got in a bikini, got on a boat and then fell off said boat next to some sperm whales . . . Meanwhile, Vinnie Jones just wanted to fish but his director decided that he had to drive for days over flat, monotonous country to get there. Vinnie Jones was not happy. I had been asked as Macaulay Culkin had pulled out of his excellent adventure for personal reasons. Did I have an excellent adventure that I wanted to do? As it so happened, I did.

  I grew up in Lebanon, and every year we’d drive off into neighbouring Syria on great expeditions. We’d take tents and camp in the desert, explore Roman ruins, swim in ancient dams . . . I adored Syria – a truly magical country. I hadn’t been back for twenty or so years. This would be my adventure. I would head off from Beirut into Syria and end up in Palmyra, a little town in the middle of the Syrian desert. I wanted to try and find a set of caves that we used to camp under. Somewhere, I’d scratched my name in one as a kid. I wanted to find it. Television loves tension, but it loves ‘quests’ even more. Sky said yes.

  They wanted every celeb to travel with a friend. Long Way Round with Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman had just been a hit and telly likes nothing better than to slowly milk and dilute a successful format to death. So they asked me whether I had a friend who could drop everything and head off on this trip with me? I certainly did. One of my oldest friends, Pete had married a girl from Newfoundland (the island with no Eskimos) and was now living out there amidst the icebergs with his wife and four daughters. Pete was an ‘artist’ but things artistic at the time were not going that well. He was free and, I think, longing for an excuse to head off somewhere hot. I called him – he was in. We were off.

  Two weeks later, Pete and I landed in Beirut. The plane flew in low over the shattered city but nobody took a shot at us, as they would have done in the bad old days. Everyone clapped when we landed. The Lebanese are always appreciative of arriving somewhere safely. Someone had finally mended the sign over the terminal that used to read ‘Welcome to Leb . . .’ with the rest of the letters shot off. I was glad they had mended it – it was never the most reassuring welcome to a country. We picked up our rental car and headed into Beirut along the airport road that used to be such a sweet spot for kidnappers. We spent the night in the Commodore, one of the world’s great war hotels. You used to pay less if your room faced the mountains, as that was where the shelling came from. There was a parrot in the bar that had a microphone in its cage. The parrot had been trained by some wag to make the sound of incoming shells. Many a rookie correspondent had found themselves diving for cover on their first night in town while the old hacks howled with laughter and downed pints of Black Label.

  The following morning we drove into the hills above Beirut, where I’d grown up in a curious cocktail of paradise and war. I wanted to start our ‘adventure’ from where we used to set off when I was a kid, my family home. At the last minute, I thought twice about filming with my rather tricky family and so we headed off to Brummana High School, an English Quaker school that I attended before being sent off to boarding school in the UK. It was as I was wandering around this school filming that I discovered that I had been at school there with Osama bin Laden for a year back in the 1970s. This was quite a discovery, but I wrote about it at length in my first travel book, The Dark Tourist (now, according to Hatchards, a Travel Classic), so I won’t bore you with the story again here but you could always buy the book and read it for yourself.

  We set off over the mountains of the Metn, headed for the Bekaa Valley, where in prime Hezbollah land we were going to visit the Kefraya vineyard, a place that had been making wine since Roman times. We filmed a scene where a very pretty Lebanese sommelier gave us glass after glass to sample. Playing it for laughs, I downed every one until I was so drunk that I had to retire outside and pass out under a pine tree to the incessant, reproachful wail of the muezzin in the town below. We spent the night in Baalbeck at the Hotel Palmyra, where my family always used to stay on our way to Syria. The hotel, once so elegant, was on its last legs. Baalbeck, so beautiful, had been starved of tourists and we found only one lone Japanese man wandering among the ruins when Pete and I checked them out.

  We drove from Baalbeck to the tiny northern frontier post that I remembered from when I was a kid. Back then we would always have to wait for hours and hours while the documentation was sorted. Very little had changed. There was a little shaded river nearby and I used to swim in there until I spotted the water snakes darting about in the shallows. This was Syria all over, darkness lurking beneath a beautiful surface.

  Things were fine on the Lebanese side of the border but we were given the full going-over on the Syrian side. They got us to empty the entire van and went through every case. There was a wonderfully embarrassing moment when a soldier opened one of Jamie the cameraman’s cases. It was packed with tiny bottles of spirits stolen from the Commodore’s minibar. I think that Jamie had assumed that Syria would be a ‘dry’ country. Far from it – although suffering under a horrible regime, the Ba’athists were a secular movement and alcohol was freely available. Syrian beer was surprisingly good.

  The soldier looked surprised but laughed about it and we eventually got through. Just as we were about to get back in our car, a dodgy-looking man presented himself and announced that he was our guide. We looked very confused and told him that there had been some mistake. We didn’t need a guide. I knew the country very well. He ignored this and announced rather grandly that the Syrian Ministry of Tourism had assigned him to us, and that he would be accompanying us throughout our trip. Again we thanked him profusely but told him that this would not be necessary. He was not a man to take no for an answer, however, and hopped into the crew bus. I suddenly clicked what was happening. I’d never been to Syria with a film crew before, and to Syrians we were technically journalists. In a totalitarian system like Assad’s you did not just let journalists wander around your country. Although claiming to be from the Ministry of Tourism, this man was our government minder and he was clearly going to be a major pain in the arse for the next ten days.

  One of the joys of pain-in-the-arse officials is that they tend to make good television, and our new friend was no exception. He would question everything we did as though looking for some nefarious purpose to our tomfoolery. Every time he did this, we’d challenge him as to why he would worry about something and suggest that he must be working for the secret service. He would flatly deny everything and tell us that he was a humble tourist guide. He would tell us how he had left his beloved wife and kids in Damascus to come and travel with us and that we were most ungrateful for his services. So we started asking him to tell us about the various sites that we visited, like the Crusader castle of Krak des Chevaliers or the Roman water wheels of Hama . . . He knew nothing and would bluster wonderfully on camera before raising his hand to the lens and demand that we stop filming. Every evening, when we stopped somewhere for the night and were relaxing at a restaurant, he would insist on getting a photograph of us all. We were pretty sure he was sending these photos somewhere, for what reason we could not fathom. To piss him off we would all raise our glasses in mock gree
ting so as to cover our faces every time he tried to take a photo. He got progressively more angry every time this happened, and he would implore us to keep the glasses down. We told him that this was considered rude in the UK – you had to raise your glass to salute a photo. He couldn’t quite come out with what was bothering him – that he couldn’t see our faces in the photos – so he kept changing angles and we kept moving the glasses. This happened night after night and kept us very amused. One evening, in Aleppo, he went to the loo and left his camera on the table. I grabbed it, as I wanted to take a close-up photo of my eye, and inadvertently turned on his camera roll. Images flicked up on screen of a woman in what looked like our hotel, standing in a bath, naked and smiling. She had a heavy henna tattoo on half her face . . . We wanted to see more, but he returned and we quickly turned the camera off and replaced it on the table. It seemed our secret agent had a secret life.

  We eventually made it to Palmyra, a very special place layered in history, lost in the middle of the Syrian desert. It was here that Queen Zenobia, a Syrian equivalent to Boudicca, held out against the Romans. We always used to stay at a beautifully run-down old hotel called the Zenobia, where service was nonexistent, bookings were never honoured and which my family loved with a passion. We drove through the Roman ruins that the hotel sat in the middle of and up the dusty drive. It was just as I remembered it: tatty, run-down – perfect. The plan was to drive out into the desert and to try and locate the cliffs under which lay the caves where my name had been scratched so many years before. If we found them, then I wanted to camp out there. We didn’t inform our spy of the plan, as he would have definitely said no.

  The following morning we drove out into the desert and I was astonished to find that, despite not having been there since I was a 9-year-old kid, I recognised things and managed to guide us for an hour to the base of the cliffs. There was no need for any fake excitement for the purposes of telly. I shouted at the top of my lungs and my words echoed around the cliffs just like they had back in 1977 (although possibly a couple of octaves lower). The director, Matt Reid, decided that we should make the climb up to the caves for the big reveal the following day. So we started to set up camp. Our spy went absolutely berserk. There was no way we could stay out here. We had to return to Palmyra. We asked him why we couldn’t camp there? He lost all pretence of being a tourist guide and started going on about secret military bases. We all looked around the vast, arid expanse that surrounded us. We saw no bases. He insisted that he was not going to camp out in the desert and that, because he wasn’t going to, we couldn’t. I’d had enough of this bastard by now and I lost it. We had a violent slanging match that went on and on, with Pete giggling nervously nearby. Eventually I told him that we were going to camp here whether he liked it or not. He caved in and said that he would stay at the Zenobia but drive out to check up on us. I promised him that we would not do any looking for any secret bases and hinted that, thanks to progress in satellite surveillance, there were actually no secret bases in his country that the US and Britain were not intimately familiar with. He looked puzzled by this statement while also seemingly becoming more convinced that we were up to no good. He eventually disappeared back off to Palmyra and possibly another naked bath lady. For the first time, we were properly alone in Syria.