Little Me

by Matt Lucas

  Maybe a generation or two earlier he would have gone to a special school, or not even gone to school at all, but I’m so glad he came to ours.

  The truth is, it put things into perspective. Having no hair was unfortunate, but spending time with someone who had to face significantly greater challenges showed me that if nothing stopped him living his life to the full, why should my situation set me back?

  I should point out that, when we were seventeen, Michael took me out for a spin in his specially adapted shiny red car. I’ve failed my test twice and still can’t drive.

  Meanwhile my ever-growing cap collection was coming in useful. My oldest friend Jeremy can scarcely recount the number of times he got into trouble at school for something we both did, while I bowed my head, smirk hidden beneath the huge brim of my cap. Before long, tears of laughter would be rolling down my face. If you were taller than me, you’d never know.

  My favourite piece of headwear was different from the others, a small-peaked sailor’s hat that my grandmother had bought for me. I fell in love with it after watching Ghostbusters in the cinema (twice in one week) as it resembled the one worn by the giant Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. I wore it for months and months, until it became filthy. Then one day, spurred on by my brother, I wrote ‘STAY PUFT’ on the front in thick black marker pen, which was great until it rained and the hat was ruined.

  Though we would fight like cat and dog at home, my brother Howard was the first to stand up for me if anyone gave me any aggravation. Sure, he’d badger me mercilessly about my steadily increasing weight, but he never ever teased me about having no hair.

  Quite the opposite. He loved my bald head so much that one day, as he sat in the back of the car, with me in front of him, and our mum outside chatting to a friend, Howard offered to draw a Pac-Man on my head. I thought it a terrific idea. First, I would have a Pac-Man on my head and who didn’t like Pac-Man? And second, I knew he would get into trouble.

  Howard whipped out one of the marker pens he habitually stole from school (for graffiti purposes) and started to draw. On Mum’s return I gave a beautiful performance.

  ‘Waaaah! Look what he’s done now!’

  Mum was furious with him. I was delighted. What I hadn’t bargained for was that the Pac-Man wouldn’t come off. Howard was instructed to scrub until my head was clean, but the traces were still visible three weeks later.

  Joking around with my brother was one thing, but my baldness could also attract a more mean-spirited attention. Around the age of twelve or thirteen, I was deemed old enough to go out with a friend, rather than with a parent, so Jeremy and I would often get the bus to Copthall swimming pool or Harrow Leisure Centre.

  I remember one time we were upstairs on a double-decker when we were joined by a couple of rough boys who seemed younger than us and were keen to stamp their authority. Without provocation, they pushed us around and took great pleasure in repeatedly slapping my head. I was petrified. This wasn’t the usual teasing – there was something ungovernable about them. I doubt they even went to school.

  I encountered them a few times in my youth. Once, one of them spotted me in Edgware when I was out with my mum and walked behind us in the street, kicking me in the rear at regular intervals. I didn’t say a word.

  On another occasion I was sat in the front passenger seat of the car, with my mum driving, when we stopped at some traffic lights. I was minding my own business when a biker in black leather pulled up next to us and repeatedly shouted ‘Baldy’ in a mocking voice. My mum and I sat in silence. When the lights changed to amber, I watched him zoom off laughing in the distance. I hoped he might crash.

  The truth is, there was always some kind of incident whenever I went out – a confrontation, name-calling, sniggering. The dark side of young people, the lack of empathy, might feel like a new phenomenon, thanks to the camera-phone videos you see online of kids humiliating each other. It isn’t new. Kids are inherently cruel. Kindness doesn’t come for a while – not naturally, at least.

  While children could be cruel, the younger ones were just confused. It didn’t make sense to them. I understand why a three-or four-year-old would simply point at a bald kid. When I was that age my brother and I used to tease our father and tell him he wore a wig. It seemed such a fantastical notion to me, because of course he didn’t. We were just having fun.

  But then, one Sunday morning when I was maybe ten, as I was getting ready to go to Hebrew classes, Dad beckoned me into the bathroom. He shut the door and told me that he had actually lost his hair at thirteen years old and that he wore a toupee.

  He then proceeded to slowly and carefully peel it back, until it came all the way off. He had hair round the back and sides, but otherwise, like me, he was bald, I was gobsmacked. He made me promise not to tell a soul and I swore blindly that I definitely wouldn’t and then went straight to Hebrew classes and told EVERYONE.

  ‘You’ll never guess what! My dad … wears … a WIG!’

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ said Darren Swabel, rolling his eyes. ‘It’s pretty obvious.’

  And then I remembered one evening a few months earlier, when he had come home and Mum had looked at him, unimpressed.

  ‘I’m not sure about that at all,’ she said.

  Dad had been defensive. ‘I think it looks nice.’

  I have to admit his hair did look pretty different that day, kind of flatter, darker and shinier. A bit like a Brillo Pad or a small, flat hat.

  It was a different time, I guess. In those days, not having hair was seen as socially unacceptable. People actually thought that it was preferable to wear a squirrel on their head than be bald.

  So I guess I shouldn’t have been entirely surprised when my parents suggested to me that I might want to wear a wig at secondary school. Certainly I didn’t question it.

  At this moment, as I type away, I do question it. I really question it.

  What the hell was everyone thinking?

  It was 1985, a full five years after my hair had fallen out. Five years. I had already done my best to somehow assimilate my baldness into my personality, if that makes sense. I had figured out jokey responses to the same old questions if I was in a good mood and withering retorts if I wasn’t. I had mastered the art of staring back fearlessly at people when I caught them sneaking a look at me. I had figured out, in my own way, how to live with being bald.

  This was survival, turning a disadvantage into something I could own – but in my heart I still wanted to be just like everyone else. Maybe the wig could do that for me.

  I was assessed again by a doctor and then told that, yes, I could have a wig on the National Health Service, so off I went with my mum and grandma to a wig store in central London, where the offending item was waiting for me.

  I don’t know if they make wigs for children nowadays, but they certainly didn’t in 1985. A large brown human-hair wig – intended for a woman – was placed on my little head and cut down to size. Unsurprisingly, it was still far too big for me, but Mum and Grandma and the lady in the wig shop all said it looked marvellous and so we left the shop with the wig in a bag.

  Back at home I put it on and looked at myself in the mirror. I didn’t like it, but I also didn’t really feel – having come this far – that I could or should just give up on it. The fact that I didn’t have any eyebrows made the giant hairpiece look even more unconvincing, but I don’t think it occurred to anybody to teach me how to draw them in.

  For a few days I wore the wig around the house to get used to it. The lining scratched my head so my lovely Aunty Denny kindly sewed a handkerchief into it.

  And then one morning I tottered up the road to the primary school where I had been going every day for six years – but now with a colossal bloody wig on my head and even more self-conscious than I had been without it.

  Head down, I walked across the playground. Suddenly, without saying a word, one of the tough boys in the year above me ran past, whipped it off and threw it on the ground. I picked it up in te
ars and hurried off to seek the comfort of a teacher.

  I persisted with the wig for a few more days, but summer was approaching and it was just too hot and uncomfortable. I would slip it on and take it off as if it were a hat. Before long I was passing it round the class, letting everyone have a go.

  Matt 1 Wig 0.

  Poor Wiggy. It was only trying to help. Instead it found itself unceremoniously tossed into a cupboard, where it stayed until I could find a better use for it.

  Years later, well into adulthood, I was speaking to a doctor who asked me how I had lost my hair. I told him the story about being knocked down by the car and how it had been assumed that it was the shock that had made it fall out two years later. It was a story I had recounted so many times that it was gospel to me now. I no longer questioned it.

  But he did.

  He asked me if I had asthma, eczema, hay fever or allergies. I said yes, funnily enough, the lot – chronically.

  He said that my hair loss was most likely the consequence of my having an over-active immune system, one that was constantly fighting, even when it had nothing specific to beat. No one could say exactly what had made it ‘reject’ the hair but it wasn’t necessarily anything as dramatic as being knocked down by a car.

  I asked him what the significance of having this over-active immune system was and how it was likely to affect me.

  ‘Um, well, you’ll probably never get cancer, actually.’

  For a brief moment I felt like a superhero. Then he added, ‘But there’s about fifty-five other things that might well get you, I’m afraid.’

  I took a deep breath. ‘So it’s a shorter life?’

  He shrugged. ‘You could get hit by a bus tomorrow.’

  ‘Wouldn’t be the end of the world,’ I replied. ‘Maybe the shock would make my hair grow back.’

  C – Chumley

  The bespectacled, frizzy-haired Chigwell housewife stood in front of us, recounting her life story. She talked about school, her first job, how she met her husband. It was all going swimmingly.

  ‘And then I was raped.’

  We gasped.

  ‘Well, no, I wasn’t, but I wish I had been.’

  Another gasp.

  She continued her loose, improvised monologue for another minute or two, but we were now too shocked to laugh. As she came to an end, we applauded uncertainly, then turned as one to Ivor, who was running this stand-up comedy class.

  ‘Thank you, Pamela. Um, very good. Yes.’

  Not much seemed to faze Ivor, but it took him a moment to work out how to respond.

  ‘Some nice observations there. If I had any criticism, I would say that, while there are no taboos in comedy as such, the “rape” line did take us all a bit by surprise. I felt that perhaps we found it hard to laugh again after that.’

  We nodded our heads in agreement.

  Summer 1992. Like some of my friends, I had opted to take a year out after my A levels. Unlike my friends, however, many of whom were travelling around the world, I had decided to launch myself on the London stand-up comedy circuit.

  My teenage passion for performing had continued unabated. The year after my Edinburgh Festival experience, I’d bagged a background role in a West End play. Two years after that, at sixteen, I joined the National Youth Theatre – which mainly did Shakespeare and more serious stuff than the NYMT.

  In the National Youth Theatre I had met a funny guy called David Williams, who was a few years older than me. (I’ll tell you more about that later, of course.) David and his friend Jason Bradbury were doing ‘open spots’ on the comedy circuit – unpaid five-minute slots for aspiring acts – and I’d follow them around. Sometimes they went down a storm; other times you could almost see the tumbleweed – but I thought they were hilarious and I dreamed of being a stand-up comic too.

  Ivor Dembina’s stand-up comedy course was incredibly helpful. Not only did we get to write and test out routines on each other, building them up week by week, but Ivor also taught us how the alternative comedy circuit worked: no sexist, racist or homophobic material, don’t go over your time, don’t nick anyone’s gags and don’t badmouth other acts because you don’t know who’s friendly with who.

  The only sticking point was that I had an idea for a character that I wanted to try out, but Ivor wouldn’t let me. His reasoning was that we should be ourselves onstage. I was happy to do that on the course, but I knew that, as soon as I was playing the circuit itself, I would appear in character.

  There were a few character comedians on the circuit and they were always my favourites to watch. As much as I enjoyed the observational comics, I had no desire at all to be one. I didn’t want to walk out and do gags about being bald and I didn’t have a girlfriend to talk about. I wanted to perform – to show off – but I wanted to do it in the guise of someone else.

  And I had a character in mind – well, not really a character, more just a silly voice at that stage. Throughout my childhood I would both entertain and ultimately rile my mum and brother by doing silly voices. I’d often fixate on one and then get consumed by it for weeks. For a time I couldn’t stop being Jack Wild in Oliver! After I returned from the Edinburgh Festival I was Miss Jean Brodie.

  ‘Okay, that’s enough now!’ Mum would say, her patience wearing thin once again, especially if I was supposed to be studying for my bar mitzvah or mowing the lawn.

  I had been a massive fan of Harry Enfield and had loved a spoof South Bank Show documentary he’d made, called Norbert Smith – A Life. Enfield played the subject – formerly the defining young actor of his generation, rather like Lord Olivier, and now a sweet, befuddled old man.

  There were various interviewees in the film – characters who had supposedly worked with Sir Norbert and who shared their recollections. One of them – played by Moray Watson – was called Sir Donald Stuffy, seemingly a nod to a couple of other famous theatrical Donalds: Sinden and Wolfit. During his scenes he told long-winded anecdotes and appropriated the names of other actors. For instance, Dame Anna Neagle became ‘Dame Anna Neagly Weagly’ and Rex Harrison was ‘Rexipoo Harrison’. He was the ultimate ‘luvvie actor’ and even though he only appeared onscreen for a minute or two, my brother Howard and I thought he was the funniest thing in the show.

  I’d impersonate all the characters in the programme, but whenever I did Sir Donald Stuffy’s voice it seemed to amuse Howard the most. I did it so often that it wasn’t long before I stopped quoting lines from the programme and started using him as a vessel for my own jokes instead.

  Gradually I built up a biography for the character – shows he’d been in, his friends, his agent, where he lived, until it felt like my own. Howard proposed the name Sir Bernard Chumley, which stuck.

  If Ivor wasn’t too sure about me appearing in character – at least, on his course – my mother had greater concerns. If I was going to be taking a break from full-time education and still living at home, I’d need to be contributing towards my upkeep. I couldn’t argue with that and I knew it would probably be a long time before I’d be getting paid to perform, so I started to look for a day job.

  Previously, while doing my A levels, I’d added to my pocket money by working as a babysitter. I didn’t get much work – most parents told me that they would rather have a girl minding their children – but after I placed an advert in the synagogue magazine, one couple, Clive and Michelle Pollard, contacted me and I started looking after their kids on a Saturday evening.

  Clive manufactured and imported football merchandise – like those mini-kits you see in car windows – and had the contract to sell his wares at Wembley Stadium and in various football club shops. He had also just won the contract to run the shop at Chelsea Football Club. I was Arsenal through and through, but, keen to fund my stand-up career, give my mum some money and aware that jobs were hard to come by in the recession-hit Britain of 1992, I asked Clive for a job.

  ‘We’re looking for an assistant manager,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, I
can do that.’

  ‘You’re only eighteen.’

  ‘Well, I’m old enough to be trusted with your kids,’ I replied. He said it was a good enough answer to get me a job, and so it was agreed that I would help set up the shop and work there during my year off.

  The job kept me busy through the day, and during the evenings I set about launching my comedy career in earnest.

  I began by writing a dreadful routine at the desk in my bedroom. The set took the form of a long, rambling theatrical anecdote about events at a party Sir Bernard had attended. He name-dropped frequently – but often got the names a bit wrong – Bruce Wallace, Mel Gibbons – and invariably I would use the name-drop simply as an excuse to do an impression of a particular celebrity – Jimmy Savile, Jim Bowen. I had no idea what I was doing and, in truth, my desire to perform and be acclaimed for it outweighed any particular comedic message I wanted to deliver.

  My meteoric rise was carefully planned. I would do my first open spot at the Punchlines in West Hampstead on Saturday, 3 October 1992. I would perform the following evening at the club for open spots that Ivor had recommended – the VD Clinic (which promoter Kevin Anderson said stood for Val Doonican). And then on the Thursday night I would crush it at London’s premier venue, the Comedy Store. In less than a week I would be a star. Job done.

  What confidence. What delusion. But then I was only eighteen years old.

  Actually I ended up having an unofficial first gig a few weeks earlier, somewhat spontaneously. David Williams and his friend Jason were performing at the Comedy Café in Rivington Street. On a Wednesday night the club traditionally featured a bunch of open spots. The first to arrive and put their names down on the list would get a slot. I had gone along with my friend Jeremy to watch David and Jason perform and, on learning that there was a space on the bill, couldn’t resist putting my name down, so eager was I to get on the stage – and also to impress David and Jason.

  I was one of the last to go up. I didn’t have my costume. I had written my act down a few weeks before, but hadn’t actually learned it yet (not that it would have made much difference, devoid as it was of any actual jokes). I busked it, as they say. And it didn’t go down well.