Here Comes the Clown

by Dom Joly

  We all looked at each other as though the idea of going into any of these houses was utterly ridiculous. I prayed that they wouldn’t want to check our footage or we would probably be heading for a place similar to the hellhole we’d just visited in Jackson, and we all definitely didn’t want that to happen. They eventually let us go but told us to get out of Dodge, and we needed no urging. I didn’t blame the police – what we were doing was disaster tourism and if I had been a local I would have got annoyed as well. It was time to leave America before something bad happened – it was only a matter of time.

  Much as I adored travel, making Happy Hour was tough. This was mostly because what I usually loved about travel telly was going out with the crew after a hard day’s work. On Happy Hour, Pete and I were normally so wasted that we’d retire to our hotel rooms with black coffee and codeine.

  Coming home was hard, as I would be physically and mentally wiped out. I just wanted to sleep and do nothing. Unsurprisingly, Stacey wanted some help. She was home alone, looking after two young kids while I gallivanted around the world. She wanted someone to take over. She wanted to go out and have some fun. What I was doing was work but it was a difficult one to justify.

  You’re just travelling the world getting pissed and having a laugh. Don’t come home and tell me it’s tough . . .’ Stacey would look at me accusingly.

  ‘But it is work . . .’ I’d reply truthfully.

  ‘Yeah, work you enjoy and have a great time doing.’ Stacey was not having it.

  ‘So, it’s only work if I don’t have a good time doing it? I’m sorry that I’ve chosen a career that involves me doing things that I enjoy. Maybe I should be a coal miner, would that make you happier?’ I was on a hiding to nothing and I knew it.

  ‘Just don’t pretend that what you do is hard . . .’ Stacey was not letting go.

  My job was hard, but it was also enjoyable and liberating. I tried to put myself in Stacey’s shoes: what if she was roaming around the world and I was at home looking after two little kids?

  I remembered what my mum used to say about my dad when he travelled. She used to really miss him and long for him to come home. When he came home, however, he wasn’t the person she had been looking forward to seeing. I think I was fast becoming that person but didn’t realise it.

  Our next destination was Russia. For serious drinkers this had to be the mother lode. Russians like to drink, really drink. Curiously, for a nation of alcoholics there were remarkably few bars. This turned out to be because Russians didn’t really want to waste time with comfy chairs, soft music, a pleasant ambience – they just want to neck a bottle of vodka and pass out in the street. This was a country where beer was a legal soft drink.

  When Gorbachev tried to ban vodka because alcoholism was so affecting productivity, the locals took to drinking perfume or making samogon, a kind of moonshine vodka that had the effects of liquid rocket fuel. I sampled some in a flat somewhere near St Petersburg. It was ninety-seven per cent proof. I think I had three shots. After the second one I briefly imagined myself to be the ruler of the free world and fully understood the Soviet urge for world domination. On this stuff the world was most definitely yours. The third shot killed me off. I have no memory of the fifteen or so hours that followed.

  Blurry footage taken by an equally drunk crew showed me in a minibus somewhere hurling abuse at passers-by. At some stage I arrived at a hotel in central St Petersburg where, for some reason, I started a small fire in the lobby as a form of greeting. I definitely got to a room and somehow got online because my garbled messages to Stacey back in the UK were so incoherent that she got the staff to break into my room to check that I was not dead. Whoever came in would have found me naked and unconscious on the floor and clearly thought it best to leave me, as that was where I woke up. On the plus side, I had zero hangover. The samogon was so concentrated and without any of the usual impurities that cause the headaches and mood swings. Russia was quite a trip.

  We flew to Moscow, a schizophrenic city caked in grime and dirt but topped with elaborate, gleaming gold cupolas and crucifixes. The population was very similar: ‘New Russians’ who’d suddenly made vast amounts of money and were in a mood to spend. Large, shiny black cars zoomed around the all-mod-cons city centre at great speed. They took their oligarchs from high-end shop to extortionate hotel restaurant, spraying dirty snow onto the general population that stood hunched and weather-beaten, gazing at their strange new world in resigned disbelief.

  New Moscow was no longer the city of empty shelves and bread queues. Anything you wanted – and I mean anything – was available for the right price. To highlight this, we visited a place we saw advertised where you could get your hair cut by ‘Nice Russian ladies without any pants or other clothes’.

  This was no false advertising. We were ushered into a fully functioning salon where a naked woman did her best to cut my hair before I decided that enough was enough and that I hadn’t signed up to present Eurotrash. As the TV crew and I attempted to exit, like pious News of the World reporters, we were faced with a corridor full of scantily clad women beckoning us into dimly lit rooms with dingy mattresses. We scarpered sharpish and collapsed giggling in our car, having done our bit to further the British reputation abroad as emotionally crippled homosexuals.

  It was at moments like these when phoning home was tricky.

  ‘How’s the filming going?’ asked Stacey.

  ‘Fine . . . all going well,’ I’d reply.

  ‘What have you been up to?’ she’d continue.

  ‘Oh, this and that, you know . . . Getting my hair cut by a nude woman in a brothel . . . Oh, and I saw Red Square today . . . How are the kids?’

  Leaving Moscow, we headed out onto the Russian steppes. We would drive and drive and drive towards the infinite horizon. For hours and hours and then days and days we’d motor on, gaining a tiny understanding of what foreign invaders had faced when trying to conquer this behemoth of a country.

  Everywhere we stopped we were ushered into places where industrial amounts of vodka were produced and we’d have to go through an unbelievably elaborate ritual of toasts. Most started with one to our parents, then to our family, then to our hosts, then to us as guests and then . . . to pretty much everyone in the world, shot by shot. The key was to distract the host by pointing at something and then dumping the vodka in a nearby flowerpot. This method allowed me to dispose of about one in three of my drinks but still left me semi-conscious after every encounter. It made you very wary of meeting anyone. Upon arrival in any new town we tended to duck down in the car or hide behind corners whenever anyone approached us. It was like being hunted by alcohol snipers.

  If this wasn’t bad enough, we had a fairly unusual interpreter along with us for the ride. Her name was Natasha and to say that she was not a ‘New Russian’ was something of an understatement. She described Stalin as a ‘genius’ who might have been a bit ‘firm’ in running Russia but did a far better job than the ‘Jews and Germans’ who were apparently now in the driving seat.

  One morning she ventured that Ivan the Terrible was not really that terrible, more ‘Ivan the not-so-bad’. I gave up arguing with her – despite her vehement views, it was actually quite interesting to be so confined with someone holding such a diametrically opposite world view to your own.

  Natasha was the first in a series of local fixers who became characters in the series. She was particularly brilliant because she was very stern, with no discernible sense of humour. My favourite moment with her was actually rather poignant. We were standing by a statue of Peter the Great, a location where newlyweds paid a visit for good luck. As wedding party after wedding party came and went, I couldn’t help noticing that the girls were all rather tall and beautiful while the men were all short, fat and particularly unattractive. I mentioned this to Natasha, who sighed, ‘Yes, this is because for the last hundred years we have lost all the best men to war – our male gene pool is now very shallow and stinky . . .’

/>   Drinking was deep in the Russian soul and sat side by side with the national melancholia.

  I returned home and slept for a week, much to Stacey’s disgust. My only consolation was that Pete’s wife Michelle probably had it a lot worse. She’d been left alone in Newfoundland looking after his four young daughters and he was being paid in shirts. Fortunately, I decided against using this line of argument with Stacey.

  I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that that was probably not the way Michael Palin conducted his business.

  Stacey had started to get used to me being away and had established a routine that my return only served to disrupt. I was starting to feel like an unwelcome lodger in my own home. Recently she admitted that she ‘hated’ me during this period. I can’t say that I blame her. She was a fantastic mum to our kids while I was mucking about/working around the globe.

  Next up was Mexico. Our first stop was at a corrida, a Mexican rodeo where the director thought we might get some nice shots. I hadn’t quite anticipated what he had in mind.

  I’m not really a horsey person. Living in the Cotswolds, you’d think I might have taken up polo or fox hunting but I have always been more of a ‘lying in front of the TV’ man. That’s not to say that I couldn’t ride. When I was young, growing up in the Lebanon I had my own horse. She was called Calamity Jane and I spent a brief period rather fancying myself as some sort of Levantine cowboy. During the Lebanese Civil War, when petrol got very scarce, I even rode to school on a couple of occasions. This would have been cool if my mum hadn’t insisted on accompanying me, leading Calamity Jane on a rope. You wouldn’t have found Billy the Kid doing that sort of thing and my interest in equine pursuits quickly dwindled, as I became the butt of many a school joke.

  All this flashed through my mind as the director of the TV show asked me whether I could ride.

  ‘I’m something of an accomplished horseman,’ I lied, quick as a flash.

  ‘Good,’ he replied, ‘because we need you to dress up as a Mexican cowboy and take part in the event.’

  I necked a couple of stiff tequilas and tried to remember which bit was the saddle. Sometimes I should just have kept my mouth shut. An hour later and I found myself squeezed into some tight leather chaps, sporting a pair of spurs and an enormous sombrero. There was no going back now. I was given a sprightly looking horse that registered a panicked look as it saw me waddle towards it. Horses smell fear, I remembered, so I tried to look as nonchalant as possible but I think that we both knew that I stank of terror.

  I mounted my steed and cantered into the arena slightly faster than I’d anticipated. After a tentative couple of minutes, however, I actually started feeling quite comfortable. Over the Tannoy, the commentator informed the large local crowd that I was a guest rider from ‘Inglaterra’ and I got a huge cheer that dangerously boosted my confidence. I was starting to strut my stuff a little bit and even managed to gallop the full length of the arena before pulling up sharply right by the stands. A sexy Mexican woman wolf-whistled and a portly, moustachioed man proffered a bottle of tequila. I grabbed it and tried to gulp some down in a suitably macho manner. Things were going well and the crew seemed to be getting some good shots.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ asked the director.

  ‘Great, piece of cake,’ I replied.

  ‘Good,’ he said, ‘now they want you to chase a bull, grab its tail and try to flip it over.’

  I nodded and tried some deep breathing. I was in too deep. I couldn’t back down now. The sexy Mexican lady was winking at me and the tequila had hit me hard. I was directed to the very top of the ring where revolving metal gates led into the bullpen. The cameraman was laughing his head off. He knew that he was about to film gold dust.

  A cowboy screamed instructions at me in Spanish. I didn’t understand a word but nodded and hugged the saddle with my thighs as tightly as I could. Mexicans ride with one hand on the reins, the other one must always be in the air, unless tipping a bull, in which case it should be on a bull. There was a crash and suddenly there was El Toro. He took one look at me, snorted in derision and shot off towards the stands. I kicked my horse hard and it bolted after the horned monster. I managed to get level with it, adrenaline pulsating through my veins like crack cocaine. I was going to do this and become a local folk hero: El Inglés, the man who came and conquered the bull. I steadied myself and leant down to my right, trying to grab the bull’s tail. I made two attempts and then suddenly I had it. At least, I thought I had it. I felt a warm sticky sensation. I’d inadvertently stuck my hand up the bull’s arse. It shot off in a different direction in some discomfort and I was left alone raising my bullshit-covered hand to my horrified face.

  The crowd howled with laughter and I limped out of the corrida trying to wipe the stuff off onto my leather chaps. By the time we’d finished filming, the story had spread like wildfire and every Mexican I passed waved their fingers at me in delight. ‘¡Ay caramba!’ as Speedy Gonzales would say. It took me months to live the ‘Shitfingers’ moniker down. It was a gift to the crew and not one that they were going to forget soon.

  We headed off up into the Sierra Madre to a ghost town called Real de Catorce, an old silver-mining town that had been deserted when the mines closed. Over the years, a group of people had returned and restored some of the houses to live in and the place was becoming popular in Hollywood as a film location. Locals couldn’t stop telling us about how Brad Pitt had been there for two weeks very recently.

  We were going to film a peyote scene. Peyote is an incredibly potent hallucinogenic used by local Indians and visiting hippies for powerful trips. This wasn’t exactly alcohol but we never much worried about that on the show if it got in the way of a laugh. We used a local vegetable called chayote as a prop for the filming and had a lot of fun making a paranoid dream sequence in the desert. When we’d finished we headed back into the ghost town for a drink. A local who had been showing us some of the best locations asked us whether we wanted any real peyote? I definitely didn’t but I did want to see it. He handed us a bit that looked like the end of a cactus. Pete put it in his pocket, joking that his night was ‘sorted’. We forgot about it and ended up in a makeshift bar in town. At one point, Pete and I wandered outside and sat on the steps nursing our beers. Pete took out the peyote bulb and joked about dropping it in his beer. At that very moment a Toyota Land Cruiser drove past us on the dusty central street. I looked at the car and saw that it contained four Mexican policemen and they were all looking at us suspiciously. The man on the passenger side was staring hard at Pete’s hand . . . The hand with the peyote in it. Before we knew what was happening, the vehicle had stopped and the police had jumped out and were all over Pete. He was spread-eagled on the floor and the peyote was ripped from his hand and held up for the others to see. I suddenly realised that we had a big problem on our hands. How was I going to get out of town quickly without being arrested myself? Sorry – I meant how was I going to get Pete out of this sticky situation?

  He was arrested for possession of hallucinogens and taken to the makeshift police station that we didn’t know even existed. For a ghost town this place was seriously organised. Pete was locked up and looking rather nervous. I went in with the fixer and started trying to negotiate. We told the police that he was holding the peyote as a prop for a filming sequence but they were having none of it. They told us that he was to be transported to the state capital where he would be put in prison until a trial. The guide told us that they were talking months followed by a serious prison sentence. The normally intensely relaxed Pete, a man described by his training officer when he unbelievably once tried to be in the army as ‘so laid-back he could be a duvet’, was looking very unsettled. We asked the head honcho whether there was anything that we could do to sort this matter out between ourselves. He laughed as though the idea of a Mexican policeman taking a bribe was an insult to his entire nation.

  I went outside and discussed matters with the crew and Alphonso, our wig-sporting M
exican fixer. Alphonso then went back in and had a private chat with the police chief. He came back out looking very serious.

  ‘He will not move – Pete will go to the trial. They are very serious about peyote here. They want to make an example of him. He will go to prison for very long time.’

  We all looked at each other in disbelief.

  ‘Bloody hell, Alphonso . . . Don’t sugar-coat the pill, will you?’

  I was really worried.

  I went in to have a word with Pete.

  ‘How’s it looking, Tiger?’ he asked me nervously.

  ‘Fine, it’s looking fine. Alphonso is dealing with it and we’ll have you out very soon . . .’ I smiled weakly at him while trying to suppress a strong mental image of him in a small prison cell, meeting a giant hairy man called El Bubba.

  A couple of hours passed as we kept going in and out of the police station. They were enjoying the drama and were in no hurry to sort anything out. They were now saying that the transport to the state capital was not going to come until the following day. We had a big meeting in the bar. We pooled all the money we had, both personal and from the production kitty. I think we got about $700 together. I went back into the police station with Alphonso. We sat down with the police chief and told him that we were so upset that our filming had caused such problems for him. We were also worried that the arrest of the mega-famous performer Peter would have international repercussions when the press got hold of the story. Nobody wanted the hassle of this and we wondered whether we could maybe sort out the misunderstanding over what was a filming prop with us donating something to the town restoration fund? I passed over an envelope with the money inside. The police chief looked inside the envelope for a moment and then looked back at us. For a terrible moment I thought we were about to be arrested as well. Then the police chief smiled for the first time since we’d met him. He announced that there had indeed been a terrible misunderstanding and that, if we signed a couple of forms, we could leave with Pete but we were to leave the state immediately. We signed about seven forms. I had no idea what they said. I didn’t care. I just wanted out, and for Pete or me not to shack up with El Bubba.