Little Me

by Matt Lucas

  Before and after the match, the shop would be mobbed. Despite supporting a rival team, I used to hope Chelsea would win purely because it would put the customers in a better mood.

  The customers generally seemed to be made up of two different types. There was your rough’n’ready Chelsea diehard, who knew everything about the club and, not unreasonably, assumed I did too. I was often engaged in long, misty-eyed conversations about Peter Osgood and Bobby Tambling, during which I would bluff my way through, pretending I knew who the hell they were.

  One of the techniques I employed was to use an all-purpose word of my own invention that would hopefully buy me time or, if I was particularly successful, end the discussion completely.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ I would say, ‘only one word for that: morditorial.’

  Few people want to admit they don’t know what a word means, so I used to get away with that one frequently – and still do, sometimes. Feel free to use it yourself, by all means, though I would request that you don’t ascribe an actual meaning to it, because then it will simply be just like every other word.

  #KeepMorditorialMeaningless.

  The other type of customer we would play host to was your posh Kensington High Street-type chappie, clearly unfamiliar with the game but keen, as a local, to ‘get stuck in, you know’. I’d lay it on thick with these guys, insisting that real fans bought the whole kit, and the jumpers, T-shirts, cufflinks and ties. I found you could sell them anything.

  There was also a third type of customer in the shop – well, just this one guy, really – who was very friendly and had a giant spider tattoo on his face and a large thick swastika on his forehead. He was so nice and funny that I decided he surely must have had the tattoos done when he was young and incredibly stupid. He was a different person now. One day a Motown song came on the radio and I started humming along.

  ‘We don’t sing that stuff, mate,’ he said. I changed the station.

  I toiled in Chelsea Sportsland by day and toured the comedy clubs by night. On that morning in the winter of 1992, now a seasoned pro with a full two months of stand-up experience under my belt, I woke up in a cold sweat. I was calling my own bluff. I was actually going to play the Comedy Store.

  As usual I grabbed two scalding strawberry Pop-Tarts (another recent American import) fresh from the toaster, wrapped them in silver foil, got in Vince’s freezing-cold clapped-out Citroën and gave him two shiny pound coins to pay for petrol. He drove us to the shop – which took the best part of an hour. On the way, as ever, we raged about the villainous Tory government – Major, Portillo, Lilley and Co. We shared the hope that one day Labour would displace them and knew that when they did Britain would run perfectly again.

  Our manager Tony had gone to the toilet. I had been left in charge of the shop, as Vince hadn’t been working with us for very long. We had some customers in and I was climbing a shelf to bring down a selection of jumpers when I felt a fart brewing.

  I had recently perfected – or so I thought – an ingenious method of concealing a blow-off in company. Not necessarily the scent of it – the severity of which was inevitably dependent on whatever mélange of backstreet junk food I had polished off the night before – but the sound of it.

  It had occurred to me that if I could manufacture a strident enough cough to coincide with the expulsion of said gas, then those present would be none the wiser. Sure, they might pause at a later moment to enjoy the aroma of a nearby gardenia or peony and in the process inadvertently inhale and subsequently gag at the tang of Tuesday’s Birds Eye Potato Waffle by way of the large intestine, but – crucially – at the moment of auditory impact they would be none the wiser as to the creator of the offending pop.

  With two more customers appearing in the shop, the opportunity to further develop my groundbreaking theory of fartivity came upon me and, as I had been prone to do, I exercised my fine powers of coordination with focus and determination.

  Reader, I am proud to inform you that fart and cough were fused quite exquisitely. Certainly there was not even the slightest turn of head or wrinkle of nose from any of the assembled personages.

  I am less pleased to tell you that, because I had ejected perhaps too enthusiastically, a voluminous quantity of merde shot out of my anus and into my underpants. Indeed, I fear a pellet or two may even have made its way down the trouser leg and onto the floor.

  A butt-clenched stagger to the door followed, as I excused myself, leaving a helpless Vince stranded on the shop floor with several eager customers, confusion and betrayal in his eyes. Where was I going? How could I forsake him? Had I forgotten he didn’t know how to properly operate the till yet?

  With Tony occupying our shop’s only lavatory (he was later to return in fury at my absence), I somehow managed to totter to the travel agents next door: another Chelsea franchise, where you could book a trip to watch the team play abroad, though it was many more years before they would actually qualify for a European tournament.

  I smiled weakly and asked for the key.

  Catching it nimbly, I headed inside. There was nothing I could do but commence the industrial-sized clean-up job. Of course, had there been any toilet paper in there it might have been a little easier. Suffice to say I had a relatively decent reception at the Comedy Store that night, and if you looked closely enough you would have been able to see that I wasn’t wearing any socks.

  D – Doing the Circuit

  It had been a few months and I hadn’t heard anything from Bob Mortimer, so I thought I’d be proactive. Taking my trusty dictaphone into my bedroom, I shut the door, shouted downstairs to my mum not to come in, recorded my stand-up set on an audio tape, stuck it in an envelope and posted it off to him, with an accompanying letter explaining that I was enjoying gigging on the comedy circuit but that at the end of my year off I was going to go to university.

  Not long afterwards, in a questionnaire in Smash Hits magazine, Bob named Sir Bernard as his favourite new act of the year. I was chuffed to bits and also delighted because I could use this as a quote on my publicity material.

  Meanwhile I was ever-present on the circuit, going to clubs most nights, even when I wasn’t performing. I made as many contacts, took down as many phone numbers as I could, and learned the names of every promoter at every club.

  Back home I’d ring them up. Some warmed to me and welcomed me, others sighed wearily at the sound of my voice. My act was polarising, extreme, strange – but I made sure to tell everyone that Bob Mortimer had seen it and taken my number. I had also done a gig with Harry Hill, who – alongside Mark Thomas – was at that time the king of the circuit. Harry very kindly gave me the numbers of a few key promoters and said I could use his name as a reference.

  It was a truth universally acknowledged that the most terrifying club to play was Up the Creek in Greenwich. Veterans told stories about its predecessor – The Tunnel Club – which had been closed down after bottles and glasses had been hurled at the acts.

  Up the Creek had a similarly fearsome reputation. Both clubs were run by Malcolm Hardee, a deadpan comic – one of the older acts on the circuit – who wore thick bottle-rim glasses that made him look a bit like Eric Morecambe.

  Hardee had an unusual way of introducing acts – particularly new ones that he hadn’t seen before. ‘Might be good, might be shit.’

  And lots of very good people were shit at his club, as it happened, because it was often such a nightmare to play. The audience at Up the Creek didn’t like observational comedians very much, even if they were headliners everywhere else. The weirder, quirkier acts had a better reception, but even then the crowd might bray and boo and hound the turns without mercy.

  I had heard the horror stories and resolved to avoid the place, but one Friday evening I found myself on the bill elsewhere with Malcolm. He took a shine to my onstage antics and invited me to play his club that Sunday.

  I turned up and realised this was no ordinary club. It was far grander in scale. The acts waited stoically like
condemned men in a room upstairs where the wall was covered in a huge mural depicting the Last Supper, but with various comics taking the place of the Apostles and Malcolm himself in the middle as Jesus.

  I received Malcolm’s trademark non-committal introduction and went onto the stage. The audience could immediately sense my fear and it wasn’t long before I was heckled. I gave as good as I got and won the audience over. From that moment on they laughed at everything and I finished my set on such a triumphant note that Malcolm slipped me a £20 note, even though I was an open spot. He also said he wanted to book me for two full sets.

  ‘I haven’t got twenty minutes yet,’ I told him.

  ‘Just do fifteen, then.’

  The first set took place the day after my nineteenth birthday. I gathered a few friends and we headed across London on the train (from north-west to south-east) for the show. I had none of the luck of my previous visit, and lasted seven terrifying minutes before I was drowned out by the boos.

  We were all shellshocked, but my friends tried to cheer me up on the long journey home. ‘You just made eighty quid in seven minutes. That’s probably more than Paul McCartney,’ said Jeremy. A couple of days later I rang up Malcolm and, before I could say anything, he said, ‘I know why you’re calling. You want to cancel the other gig. Well, you can’t.’

  I did the other gig and this time I didn’t even manage five minutes before I was relieved of my duties. One crazed audience member was so incensed by my attempts to entertain that he grabbed me by the collar as I came offstage, screaming, ‘You come back here again and I’ll fucking finish you!’ into my ear.

  I played Up the Creek a few more times after that, but always had an absolute stinker, even though I was headlining regularly elsewhere. Malcolm wanted to carry on booking me regardless, but it was too disheartening. Despite the decent money, getting booed off isn’t good for your confidence or your reputation. Everyone knew that Up the Creek was a law unto itself and that even the best of them could get destroyed there, but even so, every time you got booed off anywhere, other comics would witness it and talk about it amongst themselves.

  Somehow I got away with it, though. I guess I was a bit of an anomaly on the circuit. There weren’t many people who would ‘die’ as often as I did and yet still get booked, but promoters seemed to like what I was doing, and would accept that I was a risk worth taking.

  If it went well, it tended to go really well. If it didn’t, it was a disaster. There was no in between. People truly loved it or hated me. The act had developed – out went the dodgy impressions and in came some actual gags. It was no longer an echo of anything anyone else was doing. As I became more experienced, I grew bolder and braver onstage, interacting with the audience and improvising more.

  I still had some disastrous shows, though. At St George’s Medical School in Tooting the students had destroyed everyone on the bill before I came on. I went onstage already angry on behalf of my colleagues and it wasn’t long before I too was the recipient of abuse. In my case someone threw a bottle and – in a rare and uncharacteristic moment of skill – I returned it on the volley, punting it over the heads of the front few rows. ‘Come on then!’ I screamed. Not wise. More bottles followed and I scarpered to the dressing room, where I had to be locked in for an hour for my own safety.

  Some months later, I was performing at the intimate Aztec Club in Crystal Palace. I was more confident by then, but again alarmed as every act was falling prey to a huge, very drunk Irish guy, who was bellowing insults across the small room and ruining the evening. Even the compère was helpless.

  I knew I was doomed to the same treatment, but I decided to meet the challenge head-on. I went onstage, dispensed with my material and instead focused my act solely on the man, hurling insults at him, belittling him, even impersonating him. The atmosphere changed. The tyrant was humiliated! The relief in the room was palpable. Now surely this bully had been silenced once and for all. Maybe he would even leave.

  I came offstage to wild applause and the next act went on. I packed my wig and jacket into my bag, paused for a moment and leaned against the wall near the bar, smugly basking in a jubilant glow.

  The floored giant came over and calmly spoke to me … ‘Very funny, that. Good stuff. I like what you did.’

  ‘Um, thank you,’ I said, a little surprised.

  ‘And now I’m gonna take you outside and beat the bollocks off of ya.’

  I looked up to him and gulped. His eyes burned into mine. The moment seemed to last forever.

  ‘Nah, I’m only playin’ wit’ ya.’

  I exhaled loudly. The relief probably would have been visible from the moon.

  He paused, studied me and then spoke again. ‘Nah, you’re gonna get a bruising. Pick up your bag. I’ll meet you outside.’

  A low whine from yours truly, then …

  ‘I’m just mucking about. You’re fine.’ He patted me on the head.

  Pause.

  ‘Nah, screw it. Do you think you can talk to me like that in front of these people? In front of my lady? Fetch your coat.’

  Imagine a nineteen-year-old arse quivering and then times it by ten.

  ‘I’m messing. I’d never do that.’

  ‘Ha. G-g-good.’

  ‘Nah, this is my local. No one comes here and talks to me like that. Funny man, yeah? I’m gonna teach you a lesson. Come with me. Now!’

  This went on and on, back and forth. He was going to beat me to a pulp. Of course he wasn’t. He was going to smash my head into a lamp-post – no, he was just joking. He was going to punch my lights out. Only kidding.

  One of the bar staff witnessed this exchange from a few feet away. He came and stood between us, and then whispered in my ear that it might be a good time to leave, and that he and a couple of others would walk me to the station. I didn’t hesitate to accept his offer. I assume Goliath watched as I picked up my bag and coat and we slunk out of the bar, but I didn’t look back so I’ll never know.

  Remember in the first chapter when I was name-dropping? Well, here is one of my proudest ever clangs. In 2008 David Walliams and I had the honour and pleasure of spending a little time with Robin Williams in LA. I told him this tale one night when a group of us were at dinner, swapping war stories, and he fell in love with it. Later I heard that he’d started doing an impression of my impression of the Irish guy in his act.

  Does it get any clangier than that? Unlikely.

  Except it just did, because Billy Crystal was at that dinner too.

  Clang!

  Clang!

  Clang!

  Clang!

  Clang!

  Sometimes when I played outside London, accommodation was provided as part of the deal. This sounded good on the face of it, but it usually meant a dodgy B&B, a flea-ridden bed in a cupboard in a university hall of residence, or a room in someone’s mate’s house, rather than a hotel.

  I had a tough gig at a student union in Newton Abbot, where I was supporting the magnificent Jenny Eclair. Afterwards we were dispatched to the austere home of Mrs Dalton, a thin-lipped old lady who had been widowed just a couple of months before.

  I couldn’t get to sleep because it was freezing cold in my room – and also she had cats which set off my allergies and gave me a pretty severe asthma attack. Stupidly I had forgotten to bring my medicine with me and in the early hours, sleepless, wheezing and shivering as the window frames rattled in the wind, I quietly took myself downstairs to the kitchen.

  An irritated Mrs Dalton, woken by the noise, followed, and kindly made me a cup of tea. We chatted for a little while and then I went back up to bed. A couple of hours later, still sleepless and now genuinely struggling to breathe, I returned downstairs. Mrs Dalton reappeared too. Close to tears, I told her that I might need to call an ambulance. Mrs Dalton had had enough of this strange man wandering around her house. She calmly told me that if I called an ambulance, she would call the police. I went back to my room, sat on the bed gasping for air, and wai
ted for the sun to rise. Eventually Jenny surfaced, fresh from a lovely night’s sleep, and we shared a taxi to the station. I told her about my night.

  ‘Oh, you should have woken me,’ she said. ‘I get asthma sometimes. You could have used my inhaler.’

  There were happier experiences. My favourite batch of out-of-town gigs was a mini-tour of the south-west – Exeter, Yeovil, Falmouth, Bridport and Torquay – booked and compèred by a lovely guy called Bentley, who worked away on the oil rigs for several months of the year and then returned to spend time with his family and run comedy shows. Everyone on the circuit was happy to do Bentley’s gigs, even though they didn’t pay a king’s ransom, because he was such a generous host, cooking for us and driving us around.

  When one of the other comics offered me a joint before the show one night, I declined because I didn’t know how it would affect my act. Some comics could knock it back but I never had more than half a pint before I went on, and certainly didn’t smoke pot ahead of a gig, though I often indulged afterwards. Bentley told me I should have a toke – it might inspire me. I warned him that I had no idea what would happen and he said he didn’t mind and I should just enjoy the experience.

  I had a few puffs, but to my surprise it was really strong stuff. I went onstage, started my set and the audience was laughing. I then got completely paranoid that they were doing so for the wrong reasons. I became convinced that I hadn’t done my flies up properly, and kept stopping to adjust them, which the crowd thought was part of the act. I went down so well they gave me an encore. I promptly went back onstage and was so disorientated I repeated my entire set word-for-word, prompting more hysteria from the audience and more confusion from me as to what they were finding funny.

  In the early nineties London had a burgeoning Jewish comedy circuit, where some established acts – Ivor Dembina, Mark Maier, Peter Moss, Dave Schneider, Ian Stone – would perform modified sets or even create new ones.