Here Comes the Clown

by Dom Joly

  I still have dreams about that night. In this, the desert valley of my youth, we sat by our campfire and consumed copious amounts of Kefraya wine that we had bought at the vineyard back in Lebanon. At about midnight I put on Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here. Back in the Seventies, we’d had an eight-track player in our early Range Rover and, apart from opera, Wish You Were Here was the only cassette we’d had. I opened the car doors so that the speakers were facing out and pressed Play. The music droned out over the desert. There was a full moon, which waltzed in and out of the low night cloud. At one moment, as we were all singing, a great swathe of moonlight marched across the desert plain until it hit us and lit up the cliffs that loomed high above us. I wish this had happened to me earlier – I could have found the right words at that urinal in the V&A . . .

  Life didn’t get much better than this.

  There was no sign of our spy all night but he turned up the next day just as Pete and I were clambering up the steep, rocky slope towards the little caves at the base of the cliffs. He ordered us all to come down but everyone just ignored him and carried on upwards. After fifteen minutes of scrambling we got to the caves. Pete ducked into one and I went into another. They were small and had clearly been used overnight by hunters, as there were spent shotgun shells on the dusty floor. I headed to the back of my cave where I peered at the wall. There it was: still pretty visible, the word ‘Dominic’ carved into it by my 9-year-old self. This was as close to a result as travel television ever gets. I was unexpectedly moved and took a moment to reflect before exiting and starting a sarcastic chat with Pete about how we could now cash the cheque and get home. Eight years later I would be back on the border of Jordan and Syria to visit a vast refugee camp full of innocent civilians who had fled their homes and the chaos that had enveloped that beautiful, magical country.

  Chapter 7

  Happy Hours

  I’ve had a long and steamy love affair with America. Growing up in Lebanon, the civil war was Levantine, my education and family were British, but my home entertainment was all-American. Lebanese TV broadcast almost nothing but American shows, and there was an early pirate video library in the nearby town of Brummana called Cineteque that contained almost every American movie ever made. Fortunately, they also had no truck with things like age restrictions and so I had a particularly broad education in every aspect of Americana from a young age.

  My first actual experience of America was in 1987. My train pulled into Grand Central station early on a crystal-clear-skied New York morning. I dragged my little black suitcase through the breathtaking central hall of the station. It was like stepping onto the set of a thousand familiar movies. There was an energy in the air that you could almost touch. All around me, an ethnic kaleidoscope of New Yorkers rushed from destination to destination as though their lives depended on it. It was the Wall Street movie era – greed was good. Lunch was for wimps. I felt out of place, the only living boy in New York without a purpose.

  I drifted out of the station into the sprawling expanse of the Manhattan jungle. It was a world of vast shadows, the sun blanked out by the sheer enormity of the Manhattan skyline. I rode the Staten Island Ferry, conquered the Empire State Building, explored Central Park. It was like meeting one of your childhood heroes and finding out that not only did they not disappoint, but that they were far cooler than you’d ever dared hope.

  One of the most common insults thrown at Americans is that they are insular, disconnected from the rest of the world, with only twenty per cent of the population in possession of a passport. To us this seems unthinkable. When you travel in America it all makes sense. Why travel abroad when it would take you a lifetime to discover your own country?

  To begin with, I only really flirted with the place, skirting the periphery, visiting the oh-so-cosmopolitan cities around her edges: New York, Miami, New Orleans, Los Angeles, San Francisco. Each with its own individual character, and complicated identity – enough to keep you busy for years.

  I first went to Miami by chance. I had to film some American Trigger Happy TV clips there. I wasn’t really looking forward to it. To me, Florida was all about neon tackiness, Miami Vice and hideous theme parks. In a way, I was right. There was a kind of gloriously confident kitsch to Miami. That was part of its appeal. This, after all, is the only city in the world where a yellow Ferrari makes sense.

  The combination of fabulous climate, art deco architecture and a mellow Cuban-Hispanic influence instantly made Miami one of my favourite cities in the world. Nothing quite beats sitting on the terrace of the Tides hotel, mojito in hand, watching a perfectly toned world glide by. One breakfast, the rapper Ja Rule and his pet lion sat at the next-door table to me for breakfast. Moments later, Mike Tyson and an entourage of twelve took the table on the other side. Only in America . . .

  People warned me about Los Angeles: ‘No one walks anywhere, it’s not a real city, it’s all so fake, so artificial.’

  They were right. It was all those things and you needed to embrace them to enjoy the place. When the wheels of my plane first touched down at LAX, I got the same weird feeling in my stomach that I’d had way back in 1987. Such familiar places, yet I’d never been before. It was 3D déjà vu. I’d just stepped through the screen.

  My first time in LA, I did the place the way it should be done. I was there for meetings at Comedy Central and they really pushed the boat out. I got sent a stretch limo to the airport that whisked me in air-conditioned splendour to my suite at the Chateau Marmont, the Sunset hotel that’s borne witness to the very worst of Hollywood excess. Whilst unpacking I was unable to keep my eyes off the smoggy LA skyline through my French windows. I wandered into the Chateau’s small courtyard garden to find Johnny Depp nursing a Tom Collins. It was a celluloid fairyland. Even the urinals, for some unexplained reason, had crushed ice in them instead of the usual, oh-so-common blue cubes. I’d never be content peeing anywhere else again. Every sharp-suited executive at every meeting promised me the earth was mine – it was a merry-go-round of broad smiles and green lights. It all went pear-shaped, but my God, it was fun. I was living the cliché: the American Dream.

  All of this and nothing . . . I’d only dipped my toes in some of the coastal outlets of this enormous entity. Politically, America is two countries – one, the big coastal cosmopolitan cities that encircle the second, the more insular and, to our eyes, more unsophisticated heartland: the Republic of Middle America.

  It was into Middle America – Jesus Land – that Pete and I flew for the first episode of Dom Joly’s Happy Hour, possibly the greatest blag in TV history. It came about like this.

  Back in the UK after the Excellent Adventure, we edited the show together and gave it to Sky. It made quite an impact. Sky came back and said that they’d like to make a travel series with me. I went into a meeting with the bosses at Princess Productions, who had made the Excellent Adventures series. Henrietta Conrad and Sebastian Scott were proper telly professionals and it was certainly quite the experience to see the medium stripped to the bare essentials.

  Sky were very keen to do a series with Pete and myself – did I have any ideas for a theme? I wanted to continue the Lebanon/Syria idea and go to dodgy, Dark Tourist-type places and try to get underneath the headlines to find some fun. They felt it was a bit too close to Ross Kemp’s territory. He was already making his Gangs series for Sky. We batted about various ideas until Sebastian brought out the Guinness Book of Records and flicked through it. World’s most dangerous cities? Most extreme weather zones? Most remote destinations . . . So this was how telly was made? Find a peg, pick a presenter and off you go . . . Kerching. I wasn’t that interested in any of these ideas, and we chucked some more about until someone finally said, ‘Don’t you have any hobbies?’

  I thought about this for a moment and then jokingly replied, ‘Well, I like a drink . . .’ It was as though I’d invented electricity. Everyone lit up and started nodding.

  ‘That’s the one – very Sky. That drinki
ng scene in Lebanon worked.’

  And that was pretty much that. Suddenly we were commissioned to make a show about drinking all around the world. I still maintain it was indeed the greatest blag in the history of television (apart from when Chris Evans went round the world playing the eighteen greatest holes in golf). I rang Pete in Newfoundland and someone in his village went to get him off the whaling boat, and I told him the good news. ‘Tiger . . . You remember all that drinking we did when we were younger? That is now considered research – we’re off round the world drinking . . .’ He was predictably amazed, although even more so when Princess announced that they weren’t going to pay him to make the show.

  ‘Oh, come on, the travel itself is a treat for him,’ said Henrietta Conrad, a multi-millionaire.

  I eventually managed to get them to buy Pete four shirts from Paul Smith as payment for the series. I still can’t quite believe this happened, but Princess were not ones to treat their staff with much love . . . It was to become an issue throughout the series and I grumbled about it – a lot. This got me a reputation as being ‘difficult’. If being ‘difficult’ means that you think people should be paid for their work and that a show should be something you put your heart and soul into so that it doesn’t become some formulaic piece of crap then, yes, I’m very ‘difficult’.

  We started filming in Miami, easing our way into the danger zone. We drove down Ocean Boulevard, marvelling that this was the run-down location for the violent drug deal gone wrong at the beginning of Scarface. Now it was the funkiest strip in America and packed to the rim with the beautiful people . . . and us.

  We quickly learnt that people in Miami drank cocktails . . . This was the sort of incisive journalism that the show was brimming with. Sky was half-concerned with making something informative, but also wanted something entertaining. I was entirely concerned with making an entertaining romp around the globe with the occasional dig at travel shows. My informative side stretched to the revelation that wherever you went in the world, someone made a disgusting local spirit that they claimed had aphrodisiacal qualities.

  The Sky lawyers were also a bit concerned about the fact we were making a show about alcohol at all. We were told in no uncertain terms that we should ‘Not glorify the consumption of alcohol. Not drink in excess. Always drink in context.’

  This made us howl with laughter. We used to drunkenly ring the Sky lawyer in the middle of the night from various bars to announce that I was having my seventh vodka and that I was worried about the context . . . She stopped taking our calls after a bit. I’m sorry. We were probably really annoying.

  We left Miami and drove off to look for America proper. We met some hillbillies in the Appalachian Mountains. Barney Barnwell, an unintelligible hillbilly who made his own potent strain of moonshine, was telly gold. I’d always heard about moonshine, a clear spirit made in illegal stills by people whose basic beef was that they resented having to pay duty on their alcohol – to them it was ‘un-American’, and who was I to argue? Barney fitted the description of a moonshiner: long white beard, silly hat, faded dungarees and a possum called George Jones, who lived on his shoulder.

  He’d organised some of his friends to come round that evening with their different moonshines so that we could try them all. The friends looked like extras from a Klan rally but were all incredibly kind and polite. Each had their own recipe – PeachShine, ColaShine etc. – and they were all cutely keen for us to sample their wares. I can remember very little of the rest of the evening. Watching the footage shot that night reveals a moment when I ask how strong the Shine was? I was told to spit some on the fire, which I did. The fire flared up as though petrol had just been added. Enough said.

  Pete and I wound our way through the Deep South, visiting increasingly strange places. We spent one night at a bed and breakfast in which the owners had built a jail in the basement and stuffed the house full of oversized furniture and creepy dolls. We left very early the next morning.

  The most frightening moment never made it onto the screen. We’d made friends with some policemen in Jackson, Mississippi, and they allowed us to tag along as they set up random roadblocks and checked for drunk drivers. When we’d finished filming, one of the troopers offered to show Pete and me round the local jail on the condition that we didn’t film.

  We left the crew at the door and entered what I can only describe as the most terrifying place I have ever been to. We were taken down a corridor, where a guard sat on a chair facing into an open cell. From within came the most terrible screaming I’d ever heard. As we passed by I glanced in to see an inmate sitting on the floor, restrained by some sort of straitjacket. He was wild-eyed, foaming at the mouth and had the look of a man who was not unused to extreme violence. He was on suicide watch. Quite how he could even attempt suicide while in a straitjacket was a matter that I never got to the bottom of. This was not a place for glib questions.

  We were taken into a large bare room with a table and two benches that were built into the ground so that nothing could be ripped up and used as a weapon. Around the top of the room was a balcony with a row of individual cells. At the press of a button from a guard in a control room behind thick glass, the cell doors swung open and the inmates were released. We were being shown around by the sheriff, an enormous bear of a man with whom you clearly did not argue. He shouted at the inmates to come down and sit.

  ‘Listen to me, we’ve got some important visitors from the BeeBeeCeee in the YoooKayyy. If they ask you a question then you answer respectfully . . . Am I clear?!!’

  The inmates all nodded nervously. I thought it best not to tell the sheriff that we were Sky not BBC – the BBC opened all doors abroad. I looked at the inmates – they were nearly all under twenty, some as young as fourteen. A few were wearing white overalls, while most were in red. I asked the sheriff what the difference was?

  ‘Those in red are in here for murder.’ Pete and I nodded and looked at each other nervously. The sheriff got us to ask the kids (for that’s what they were, and all black) some questions. We felt woefully inadequate for the task and asked a couple of inane things, both of us wanting to get out of this hellhole, this cul-de-sac of despair, as quickly as possible. After about half an hour we were out and back in the car with the crew.

  ‘How was it? Did you get bum-raped?’ asked one. For probably the first and only time on a shoot, we didn’t laugh or even respond. That night I had terrible dreams . . . Truly the stuff of nightmares.

  Our arrival in New Orleans was like driving onto the set of Escape from New York. This was eight months after Hurricane Katrina had devastated the city, but it seemed that not much had been done to repair the place. We approached the city down streets and streets of abandoned houses, entire abandoned neighbourhoods, dark and ominous due to lack of electricity. It was creepy as hell. The centre of town wasn’t that much better. Electricity there was irregular, no air conditioning worked and it was insanely hot. The whole city was suffocating, angry and heartbroken – it was an unsettling place to be. Wandering late at night down a backstreet of the French Quarter, the maudlin strains of a lone blues guitarist took on a completely new meaning: a paean to a sunken city.

  We were told that the Ninth Ward was the worst-hit area and we drove out there the next morning. It was an astonishing sight to behold: vast swathes of a First-World city completely deserted, utterly devastated. Houses had messages painted on them in panicked scripts – 3 people alive, or 1 dead, or Atlanta.

  We went into a couple of the houses. You could see where the waterline had reached up to. It was nearly at the ceiling of the first floor. We reconvened in the street to film a piece to camera when three police cars screeched up next to us, and the officers got out brandishing guns and made us all get on the floor and ‘spread ‘em’, in what seemed to be a slightly unnecessary manner. They were really aggressive and accused us of being looters. We tried to explain that it would be a bit weird to do this with a film crew in tow but this didn’t go down
well.

  ‘Don’t get smart with me, boy, or I’ll break your face . . .’

  I piped down slightly.

  After twenty minutes, once we’d shown them papers and filming permits, they relaxed a bit.

  ‘If you guys had gone into any of these houses we would have busted your asses and you’d have been going down for a long time . . .’ said the most aggressive of them.