by Spencer FC
Everyone in sixth form wanted to be part of FDL, which was essentially a comedy club masquerading as a debating society. The FDL also did a lot of charity fundraising and hosted school assemblies every Friday morning. But Friday lunchtime was the main event – the debate. Only sixth-formers were allowed to attend and no one missed it: there’d be 150 adolescents packed into a classroom, a crazy atmosphere, to watch speeches by the committee members. I’d never seen anything like it.
Of course, I wanted to be a part of it, so I did my election speech – just as anyone who wanted to join it had to – which went well, and I was voted in by the committee. Once you were in the FDL it meant that you’d be one of the people delivering a speech on Fridays, in which you’d do your best to prove a certain point while taking the mick out of your fellow students and teachers, and I loved every minute of it. It certainly gave me a taste for getting up on a stage and performing in front of people, although sadly a year later, when the year below us took the helm, the FDL was shut down because someone uploaded a video of one of the speeches that went a bit too far onto YouTube and some parents took exception to it. Proof perhaps that not everything we do in life needs putting up on the internet.
While I was at KEGS I converted to the role of centre-back for CBA and we managed to win the league cup in our debut season. Leading my mates to a 3–0 win against Hannakins Farm at Witham Town’s stadium was a real highlight for me, and at the time this was by far the best thing I’d achieved on a football pitch. Faisal Manji was on fire that year, racking up a total of nearly 40 goals and assists. After two years of Under-18s football, we capped it off with an overseas tour to Rimini in Italy, where we had a fantastic time. Everything about CBA was great fun.
I left KEGS in 2007 with my A levels and a place to do English Literature at Reading University, but it was the FDL that gave me my real education. University was a bit of a culture shock after sixth form, and in my second and third years I only had about three or four hours a week of seminars or face-to-face time with the teaching staff. I’d gone from a school where you had to work ridiculously hard in order to keep up with everyone in your class, to a place where the learning was essentially left up to you. Either do it or don’t.
Most of my week was made up of ‘reading’ time, which basically meant I played football every day (by this time I’d improved enough to play for the university team, which was a pretty decent standard), hosted a university radio show with my room-mate Greg Osborne, and performed in stand-up gigs three times a week.
Telling jokes on stage was never going to stop for me just because I wasn’t at school any more. The FDL had given me some great experience and allowed me to develop my skills and material, so I assumed I’d be well prepared for life on the comedy circuit.
As I drove down to Newbury for my first ever gig with Greg, however, I was no longer quite so certain. Greg was there for moral support – it’s always good to have a friendly face in the crowd, unless there’s hardly anyone in the crowd, of course. The gig was in a seedy bar and, unusually for a first-time performer in an industry where you can expect to do hundreds of gigs before you get paid for one, I was getting the outrageous sum of £100. In need of a comedy mentor prior to the gig, I’d turned to the collected wisdom of the internet, which had advised embellishing any experience I had in order to get a gig. I might have embellished a little too much …
Needless to say, it was terrible. I did a half-hour show, which is ludicrous for a first-time comic, and it was like a hen do in there – literally. The heckles came thick and fast from a load of middle-aged women smashed off their faces as I laboured through 28 minutes of awful jokes I’d written and about 2 minutes of better stuff I would use again. It would have been perfect for a 2-minute gig, and that was pretty much the material I based my show around after that. It would be another couple of years before I did another half-hour gig.
Most of my gigs were in London, and I would travel in to do anything from an open mic with three people in the crowd to later doing gigs with some really decent stand-ups, like Stephen Merchant and Kevin Bridges. Tom Rosenthal started around the same time I was doing it, and I was in the Reading Comedy Festival New Act Final with TV’s Rob Beckett, who won. I’ve since teamed up with both Tom and Rob for various projects.
A typical gag of mine back then went something like this: ‘My girlfriend talks a lot. I mean she really talks a lot. I call her Radio Three because I never listen to her.’ That always got a good laugh – not that I actually had a girlfriend. My love life was the real joke then, but what I didn’t realise was that I was building the foundations for something in the future. When my room in university halls sprung a leak one day, soaking a load of my stuff, I was fuming. I had to move rooms … to an all-girls’ floor. I couldn’t believe my luck – and nor could my jealous mates. My next-door neighbour was a girl called Alex, and we quickly became friends. I obviously made a good impression because I managed to get her to agree to go out with me – three years later.
My ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ video-upload experience had done nothing to dim my taste for putting up videos of myself – it had only encouraged me. I would put up silly little comedy videos with characters I’d created and my live sets, with no real thought or game plan behind them. I was just having fun. I didn’t really know if it would go anywhere and my football mates would give me some stick for being ‘that YouTube guy’, but the videos got me into a competition to be a T4 presenter on Channel 4. I got to the final stage of the process, but when I learned I would have to drop out of uni if I won, I dropped out of the competition instead.
The experience did give me one piece of broadcasting advice that I still use in every single video I make today. When I was doing the auditions for the show, one of the producers said to me, ‘The trick to being a good TV presenter is to talk to the camera like it’s your friend.’ I took that advice literally, and that’s why I start all of my videos with, ‘Alright, mate, how you doing?’ That’s how I’d talk to a friend in real life, and that’s the difference between YouTube and television: on YouTube you’re watching a friend, not a celebrity or presenter.
Even without the T4 gig I would still make my television debut during university, though I definitely can’t claim to be the first in my family to be on the telly. My mum is a TV game-show nut. Name a show, she’s been on it: The Crystal Maze, Wipeout, Pets Win Prizes, Supermarket Sweep, Surprise, Surprise. She’s crazy for them, so I should have sensed something was going on when she told me she had a spare ticket to watch Graham Norton’s show Totally Saturday being filmed at the BBC in London.
What I didn’t know at the time was that the premise of the show was for two unsuspecting members of the audience to be surprised, and they’d be joined by their families, who were hiding out backstage, to compete for a holiday. I was interested in TV production and I was about to do an internship with Channel 4 for a few months over the summer, so I was having a good look around from my seat in the audience, watching and learning, when I set my eyes upon the autocue and saw my own name on it. What on earth?
This was my big reveal coming up, but instead of looking surprised when the cameras settled on me, I was glaring at my mum going, ‘I cannot believe you have stitched me up!’
Thankfully the audience saw the funny side when I said I’d seen it coming on the autocue.
My dad, brothers and two of my mates from football, Woody and Nash, came out from backstage and we competed against the other person who’d no doubt been stitched up too by someone in their family. It wasn’t to be their day, though. My family are so competitive and up for anything that when we did the challenge we really went to town on the other family and destroyed them at the game. When I got the winning points I ran towards the crowd like Cristiano Ronaldo does when he scores a goal. ‘Come on!’ I screamed, flexing my much less impressive physique.
Graham Norton had one last surprise up his sleeve. ‘Spencer, this isn’t your first time being a little famous, is it?’ h
e said. And then they played my ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ video on national television. Cheers, Graham.
TOP 10 FOOTBALL PLAYERS
(excluding Leo Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, before anyone complains!)
Bobby Moore
Before my time, but the quintessential football captain and key player in England and West Ham’s history. Legend.
Alessandro Del Piero
Grew up watching this guy’s magic for Italy and Juventus on Football Italia. Always loved pretending to be him in the garden.
Paolo Di Canio
Enigmatic West Ham striker who only scored great goals, including one of the best the Premier League has ever seen.
Zinedine Zidane
One of the most talented footballers in my lifetime. Watching him was like watching a theatrical performance as much as a football match.
Edgar Davids
More than just an enforcer, this guy could really play. His glasses and haircut always made him stand out, but his ability was right up there with the best.
Steve McManaman
He didn’t necessarily steal the headlines, but I loved his work rate and versatility, and he’s still the only Englishman in the Real Madrid Hall of Fame.
Michael Owen
His goal in the 1998 World Cup was one of the reasons I fell in love with football. He might get mugged off for his punditry now, but let’s not forget he won a Ballon d’Or. Not many Englishmen can claim that.
Ronaldo (the Brazilian one)
The best player in the world when I was growing up. Everyone wanted R9 boots because he bagged goals for fun, making it all look so easy.
Alan Shearer
Just a goal machine. Hit the ball like there was no tomorrow and got more Premier League goals than anyone else.
Scott Parker
His hard-working attitude in midfield made him my kind of player. I wish he’d been at West Ham longer.
Special mentions: Michael Carrick, Rio Ferdinand, Joe Cole, Vincent Kompany
With Mum and Dad working so hard to provide for us when we were kids, we didn’t have a lot of time for family holidays. So it made perfect sense that, having won one together as a family on Totally Saturday, we’d each go on separate holidays!
I went out to America for a dream post-university trip with Woody and Nash to Los Angeles and San Diego, California. It was a cool holiday, even if the cosmetic smiles and fake boobs of LA weren’t exactly my cup of tea. I knew after two weeks that going travelling for any length of time (like a lot of my friends were) just wasn’t for me. I was already getting restless and desperate to get on with my life.
I came back without much of a clue about what exactly it was I wanted to do. Given that I’d enjoyed doing radio and stand-up so much, and with no other ideas immediately presenting themselves to me, I thought I’d give the comedy game more of a crack. The Edinburgh Festival seemed like a good option to scope out the very best talent and do a few shows myself, maybe even get noticed by an agent. And when a fellow aspiring stand-up I met told me he had some accommodation up there and I could stay with him, it seemed like things were falling neatly into place.
Maybe a little too neatly. As soon as we got up there, it became clear that I had been a bit quick to trust the word of this guy. His name was Bob and it turned out there was no accommodation (and no chance of getting any, given how busy Edinburgh gets at festival time), and to top it off he was skint. He was hoping I’d be paying his way too! Stitched up was the expression that came immediately to mind.
Still, we were there now, so we had to make the best of it – and we ended up loving it. Bob turned out to be a really good lad and a lot of fun despite his organisational missteps. We watched some amazing stand-ups, who were just incredible to see, and then from about two until six in the morning I’d turn up at open-mic gigs and try to get a five-minute set. After that we’d head off for three or four hours’ sleep, only to do it all again the next day.
On the first night it was raining, which immediately put restrictions on sleeping rough, so we climbed the fence in a park and slept under an ice-cream van. I was grateful that I’d remembered to bring Saunders’s army-cadet sleeping bag with me, though it was still pretty grim having a four-wheeled rather than four-poster bed. On the second night we managed to get into a block of flats – some people might call this ‘breaking and entering’, but it was a victimless crime, honest (we didn’t even break anything) – and slept rough in the corridor, and on the third night we just stayed up all night and got the train home first thing. It was a great experience and I got plenty of stage-time in, but the agents weren’t exactly queuing up outside the front door of wherever I was sleeping that night.
To make it in stand-up you’ve got to be committed, and you might be plugging away for up to ten years before you make any kind of success of it – if at all. And there’s no doubt that this was starting to play on my mind. When a gig went well and everything worked, I loved it, but I hated the gigs that didn’t. Don’t get me wrong, by the end I was doing well most nights that I performed, but I had a bit of a realisation during a gig up at Lincoln University Student Union that maybe it wasn’t for me any more.
Student Unions tended to be my best crowds, especially given that I was fresh out of university myself at the time and could relate to the audience well. There were about 150 students there for the gig, and I was getting paid something like £100. Once you’d factored in petrol and everything else it was more like £50.
Before I set off, I uploaded one of my comedy videos onto YouTube. Eight hours later, I arrived back at home shattered, with the post-gig high having worn off long ago in the car. I put my computer on and saw it straight away: my video had over 2,000 views. I’d just spent eight hours earning £50 and performing in front of 150 people, when my video in that time had been seen by thousands.
Something clicked for me then. I’m an efficient guy, as I’ve said, and these were numbers that added up to me. I would go up to Edinburgh the following year with Alex, just as a punter. Pitching the idea of sleeping rough under an ice-cream van to her would have been tough, and thankfully I had enough money and foresight this time to actually book some hotels. The standard at Edinburgh is so, so high, and I’d only ever been average, if I’m honest. We had a great time just watching the best at work.
The online videos, on the other hand, I could see a future in them. I’d done internships at Channel 4 during university, and had learned a lot and got to do some pretty cool things like shadowing Derren Brown for a week (with his permission, of course – I wasn’t just following him on the sly). Channel 4 had offered me a job in their corporate-relations department, which I turned down. Doing something corporate just wasn’t for me. But when I learned that a mate, Ross, from the year above at Westcliff school had started working for a small production company called BigBalls, I thought, This is more like it.
I bombarded him with messages, saying things like, ‘Mate, I made this YouTube video. I’ll come in and work for you guys for free.’ I didn’t let up for a second and Ross, who is a good lad, was a little slow to send my videos on for my liking, probably because he was still focusing on making a good impression himself. So I decided to take action more fitting for a company called BigBalls. I went on their website and sent an email to everyone whose email address I could find saying:
Hi guys,
My name’s Spencer. I’m Ross’s mate. I know he’s mentioned me already because he told me he has. He loves my YouTube videos, so do a small but growing amount of people online. Some of my videos are good, some are rubbish – here they are for you to have a look at. Let me come and work for you for free.
Spence
I wasn’t actually sure whether or not he’d sent my videos on, so in a way I may have been stitching Ross up (if you’re reading this, sorry, mate), but no harm was done and if you want something badly enough, sometimes you’ve just got to reach out and grab it. And it worked for me: a guy called Rich at the company really l
iked one of the videos I’d done.
I’d made a mock advertisement for the soft drink Mountain Dew, full of silly little slogans, and Mountain Dew had shared it on their Facebook page. It got a load of likes on Facebook, and this was at a time when I left all my email alerts active on my YouTube channel, so every time someone liked a video or subscribed I’d get an email telling me. I’d been out playing football that day, and when I came home I had over a thousand emails in my inbox!
Even though I hadn’t made it for Mountain Dew, and indeed some of it was taking the mick out of their product, they’d had a good enough sense of humour about it to share it. BigBalls focused mostly on making advertising content for brands, so Rich said, ‘This is our cup of tea – an irreverent video with a bit of comedy for a brand. Look, we’re a small company and we don’t have anything for you, but we do have a sister company who are making this football video game. Do you like video games?’
Did I like video games? More specifically, did I like football video games? I totally lucked out, as the sister company We R Interactive were making a brand-new football game on Facebook, a first-person game intertwined with real-life footage called I Am Playr, and at 21 years of age I became the community manager for the game, looking after their social media – a proper, salary-paying job.
The game was way ahead of its time. It incorporated things like the kind of girls you liked (a footballer’s essential, obviously) and the path your playing career took, as well as gameplay. It was basically a very early version of ‘The Journey’ mode you can now find on FIFA. It was very slick, and professional footballers like Lee Dixon and Steven Gerrard were involved in it. I met up with these guys to do interviews and make content with them, and it was great rubbing shoulders with some of the top players in the country and doing a bit of presenting.