How Did All This Happen?

by Bishop, John

  The show was a massive success, although regrettably I am no longer a part of it. Though I don’t miss days in the studio making the show, I do miss being with the lads, as I regard them all as friends: James I see as often as I can; Freddie is part of my five-a-side crowd; and I even go on holiday with Jamie, which is not something I would recommend as it normally involves me breathing in for two weeks.

  Part of the reason I left the show was because of that phone call I received from James, because what was to follow became a commitment whereby I could not guarantee to being around for filming the next series, so I said I would leave. As it happened I managed to do half of that series, but for the subsequent series the producers had moved on and regardless of my availability, I was not asked to be a full-time team member again. That’s television, I guess.

  ‘You and I should do something for Sport Relief,’ he said.

  ‘What like?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ll call them, and we can go and have a chat.’

  James then called them and we arranged to meet Kevin Cahill, who is the chief executive of Comic Relief, and can be best described as looking like a cross between Harry Potter’s granddad and someone who plays a ukulele in an Irish folk band. He has Santa Claus white hair, little round glasses and a look in his eye that suggests he has just had a Guinness, although I have hardly ever seen him drink.

  I had met Kevin the year before when I had been asked to participate in a Take That video for Comic Relief called Fake That where, along with James, Catherine Tate, Alan Carr and David Walliams, we pretended to be members of Take That. Whatever happens in my career, Melanie was never happier than seeing me in a Take That video as she is a massive fan, and at a variety of times in our marriage I have had to pretend I was various members of the band, anyway!

  At the time, James was in rehearsals for a new play called One Man, Two Guvnors, so we met Kevin in central London and suggested we would be up for doing something for the charity.

  Kevin then called Professor Greg Whyte, who was the sports scientist who’d supported all the great challenges that Sport Relief had done in the past, from Eddie Izzard’s marathons to David Walliams’s epic swim. We sat around the table whilst Kevin put his phone on loudspeaker and Greg explained that he thought we could do an adaptation of an existing challenge called ‘the Arch to Arc’. This is a race starting at Marble Arch and ending at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, and involves a combination of running, swimming and cycling. It was obviously difficult, because Greg said only seven people had completed it.

  As Greg spoke, James and I both looked at each other with expressions that said, ‘You must be bloody kidding!’

  During the conversation it was agreed that, whatever form the challenge would take, we must end in London: there could be no greater anti-climax than to round off the hardest physical challenge of your life surrounded by apathetic French people. The meeting ended with the conclusion that Greg was going to look at the challenge and how it could be adapted, and James and I were going to look at our diaries to see when we would both be free.

  This was done and, following a quick fitness test with Greg, we agreed to do the challenge the following February 2012. That gave us five months to train, which everyone thought would be enough.

  I had never sought celebrity, but now I had it I could use it to make a difference. I know that sounds naff, but it’s true. There are not many opportunities in life where someone says, ‘Can we borrow what you represent for a while, and if it works, a lot of people you have never met will have a better life?’ How could you say no to that? From what I can see, it is the best possible use of this thing called fame.

  Celebrity is an odd thing to experience. There came a point, and I don’t know when it happened, where I stopped noticing people noticing me when I walked in somewhere. The first time fame hits you is when you see people acting differently because you are there. Not the obvious things of asking for a photograph or an autograph, but nudging each other, watching what you do, the phones coming out as they text friends your whereabouts and, perhaps the most invasive thing of all, taking a photo surreptitiously.

  Then, after a while, that becomes normal and you stop noticing. You learn to walk without catching people’s eye, you learn to move quickly through public places like airports and, if you are stopped, your family learn to walk on. It just becomes part of your life, and you know it will change one day. One day the nudges and the looks will be accompanied by the question, ‘Didn’t that used to be …?’ There will be a point where your star has waned and people will have no interest in you. What would once have been the hassle of being unable to go anywhere without someone wanting a photo will become a privilege. You will go home to your wife and say someone recognised you today in the supermarket from a television show you did decades ago that is now being repeated on an obscure satellite channel, and for a fleeting moment you will think the good days are coming back and the phone will ring again. Until the silence reminds you that your time is over, you are a has-been and the obituary is getting shorter with every passing year.

  Celebrity is the candyfloss of life: sweet, but in and of itself worthless. I am a comedian, and it was through being a comedian that I was put on television. It was through being on television that I became a celebrity. It was through being a celebrity that I fitted the profile required by Sport Relief. ‘A famous celebrity does something’ is a better headline than, ‘Someone you probably have never heard of does something.’ That is why Kevin was interested in the first place, because if both James and I were involved it was like doubling your money. ‘Two celebrities – one very famous and his mate – doing something’ is a great headline.

  A lot can happen in a short space of time in show business. After a while, I realised I could not stay off the stage for the time I had originally planned. I had been touring constantly for four years and to suddenly stop doing gigs just made me irritable at home. It was Melanie who made the decision that I should consider another tour, although I think the way she put it could have been more subtle than, ‘God, you’re a miserable bastard. Why don’t you get out of the house and go to work?’

  I spoke to Lisa and my promoter Ed and decided to go on tour again later in 2011. The Sport Relief challenge was already booked in for February and the tour was scheduled for September through to November.

  I wanted news of the tour publicised and the tickets on sale ahead of any Sport Relief announcement, to avoid any cynics suggesting that I was in any way trying to capitalise on the charity. I became almost paranoid about ensuring there was a clear demarcation between the two things. I never allowed mention of my tour in any interviews to do with the challenge, and we delayed the actual launch of the tour marketing to avoid it being out at the same time as Sport Relief activities. All of which was probably rather unnecessary; after all, watching a man in agony doing a physical challenge probably doesn’t make you think, ‘I bet he’s funny. Rather than donate to charity, let’s go and see him on tour.’

  The tour needed a name to put on the posters, so over dinner one night I asked Melanie and the boys for suggestions.

  ‘What’s it going to be about?’ one of them asked.

  ‘I don’t know, just the ups and downs of the last year or so. But I want a punchy name, ideally one word, like “Sunshine”.’

  ‘And not a poster where you look like a dick.’

  ‘That’s right, son, a poster where I don’t look like a dick.’

  The poster for the ‘Sunshine’ tour was of me holding a microphone. The single worst, most cheesy thing any comedian can do is to stand holding a microphone grinning at the camera. It screams, ‘Look at me! I speak into a microphone, like I am doing now, and people laugh!’ It also screams, ‘I have no imagination, and I think you are so thick I have to hold this magic stick so that you can understand why people can hear me when they are so far away.’ My particular picture seemed to scream, ‘Hi, I’m John, Sagittarius, and I am available for walks in the park
and dinner dates in between my stints as a bingo caller.’ I hate that picture, and now it will be on DVD boxes in bargain bins looking back at me for years to come.

  It was Daniel who proposed calling the new tour ‘Rollercoaster’. It was to be the biggest tour I had ever done and was to be the most fun. We had a crew of 13 travelling with us all the time, so we formed a five-a-side team and challenged each of the venues to a game. This was a great bonding thing for all of us, and though some of the lads had not played football since school, and from the way they played some had not even played football in school, it was great fun, and by the end of the tour we had even started to win games.

  But all of that was to come. What had to happen first was the completion of the challenge.

  It was the middle of September 2011, five months before the challenge was due to begin, and James phoned me up to say he might not be able to commit to it, after all. Things had gone ballistic with the play, he’d received rave reviews, and there was talk of him taking it to Broadway. If he did this, then his insurance would not allow him to take on such an event.

  This changed the complexion of everything: I was now committed to something that I had only thought of doing because James was participating. Now, if there was a chance that he would not do it, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to; in fact, I didn’t think anyone else would be that bothered if I did it either. James was the big star who would attract the media attention so, without him, I had doubts that it was actually going to be worth doing at all.

  I spoke to Kevin and he suggested a few alternative names, all of whom I refused. Not because they weren’t great people, but because I didn’t know them. The challenge was going to be a thing between mates, and suddenly replacing that mate with a celeb face would have been like finding your friend had cancelled his stag do but sent you to Amsterdam anyway, with people you had never met before: the end result may be the same, but the process is certainly not as much fun. I said that if the challenge was to happen I would want to do it alone, although I’d need Greg to give the go-ahead that I could manage this, rather than in the tandem way we had planned.

  In October, James confirmed that he was going to Broadway and was out of the equation. He was both gutted and excited at the same time. He was very committed to the challenge and had a long relationship with Comic Relief and Sport Relief, but the chance to go to Broadway does not come along often in anyone’s career. He went and, as expected, was a blistering success, so it was without any doubt whatsoever the right decision for him.

  Kevin, Greg and I had our own decision to make: should we go ahead with it or not? After a lot of intense discussions, we all agreed we should. Greg drew up a 12-week training plan for me, and Kevin got the wheels in motion for the documentary to be made for the BBC, of me visiting some of the projects in Africa.

  It is only when you get involved with Sport Relief that you become exposed to the machinery that is behind it. My day-to-day contact was Bex. I could call her any time for anything and, provided it was aimed at making the challenge successful, she would get it. Kevin is an incredible wheeler-dealer, and from the moment he was recruited by Richard Curtis to head up Comic Relief he has been driven to make the charity as effective as he possibly can. Without doubt, the greatest way of doing this is knowing how to manage people in the best possible way to ensure you gain their commitment.

  It was January 2012 when we went to Sierra Leone. I was six weeks away from the challenge and, after a Christmas of self-denial where I had even trained on Christmas Day – sitting on a rowing machine in my freezing cold garage for 90 minutes – I have to admit to feeling slightly disillusioned. Training alone twice a day in the dead of winter was no fun at all.

  Greg came up for the occasional session to check on my progress, and I had been able to join my friend, Martin, and his mates for bike rides. They were a great set of lads who made the effort to come out with me and fit into my training schedule during one of the coldest winters on record. They called themselves The Big Dogs and had had cycling kit made with their club name emblazoned across the front and back: whenever they walked into a café or pub during a ride they looked like a Hell’s Angels gang in Lycra. They all fitted the description of middle-aged blokes on bikes, a new social phenomenon that has replaced the darts or dominos teams as a form of social interaction for men; I cannot have imagined my dad going out in tights to spend time with his mates. I am not even sure what my kids thought of me doing the same, but I got an inkling when they laughed at me. But, I enjoyed it and still do it now.

  Whether Kevin had purposely planned the Sierra Leone trip to coincide with my potentially losing faith in the challenge or not I couldn’t really say, but it wouldn’t surprise me. We arrived with the documentary team at our hotel late on the first night, so we just had time to check in and sleep before – the following morning – being taken to the country’s only children’s hospital.

  Those who have seen the documentary will know some of the stories that emerged during my time in Sierra Leone, so I will not go over them again here. Suffice to say, I left with renewed commitment to drag myself through the challenge, no matter how reluctant I was.

  We have all watched scenes from the appeal films that Comic Relief and Sport Relief make, but it’s difficult when you are sitting in the comfort of your own home to take in the complete picture. Even when they are well done, there will always be things that you cannot capture without being there. In the hospital, I saw deceased children swaddled in sheets and left in a cot in a corridor that formed a makeshift morgue, as the hospital did not have the staff available to take the bodies down to the basement. So parents were tending to their own child within feet of one that had lost its fight for life, generally from a disease caused by poverty – death caused by the absence of £5 to pay for vaccinations or a mosquito net. I paid £5 for a coffee recently in London, and though I nearly choked at the cheek of the price, I never died because I didn’t have the money.

  Some things in the film we couldn’t show. Some things television cannot show, such as the smell from the slum in Kroo Bay where I sat with 11-year-old Kadiatu, whilst raw sewage stagnated in an open sewer next to her home.

  Other things were simply too difficult to capture and bordered on voyeurism because they would not help people watching at home to understand the situation more – they just moved things on to another level of pain. I was standing in the hospital ward talking to the camera and explaining what was around me when I heard a sound that cut to my core. A mother had just seen her child breathe its last breath. She had spent days travelling to the hospital by any means she could, only to find it was too late. The malaria was too advanced.

  There is something about being a parent that is impossible to explain. It is an overwhelming feeling that makes you wake up in the middle of the night to check your child is still sleeping in their cot. It is smelling their clothes before you put them in the washing machine so you can have the last vestiges of their scent because, as a single dad, you will not see them again for a week. It is standing in the freezing cold beside a football pitch holding their hand and waiting for them to be brought on as a sub. It is the apologies you give to schools for behaviour you can’t understand. It is the hollow self-hatred if you overreact to their provocation. It is the pride when you see them walk in and light up a room. It is that small crack in your heart when you realise they like you, not just need you. It is the joy of dancing with them. It is the hospital visits where you wish you could make it all better. It is the frustration of mobile phones not answered and the reassurance of the key in the door as you lie awake trying not to wait up. It is listening to dreams and ambitions and hoping they realise them all.

  It is the sound that leaves your body as the final breath leaves theirs. A sound that cannot be shared via a television screen because it is too visceral; you don’t hear it, you feel it in your gut. You want to help and you want to run away and hold your own children, all at the same time. It is a sound I shall never
forget.

  CHAPTER 36

  A FAMILY DAY AT WEMBLEY

  The week of the Sport Relief challenge came around very quickly, but it coincided with Liverpool playing Cardiff in the Carling Cup Final at Wembley. Although the Carling Cup is not one of the major cups, it is still a cup. I have referred to it as a drunken girl in a nightclub at ten to two in the morning; she may not be your first choice, but in the absence of anything else you can’t help but be grateful to be in the game. As Liverpool supporters, we used to expect to be in a final every year. That isn’t the case any more, so you enjoy the opportunities when they come. I was not about to break the promise I made to myself after missing the final in Istanbul just because I had a busy week coming up.

  I wanted to go to the match before travelling to Paris on the Eurostar to start the challenge, so Bex made all the arrangements necessary in terms of getting me and my mate Duff, who was coming to the start line with me, from the ground and onto the train by motorbike taxi. The plan was to film some footage by the side of the pitch, which could then be used in the documentary to illustrate what a busy life I had: ‘Here’s John, who goes to football matches, too’ – that kind of thing.

  The game ebbed and flowed, and at the final whistle it was a 1–1 draw, which meant there would be extra time played. Beth, one of the directors working on the documentary, came up into the stand to our seats to say we really had to get near an exit to catch the motorbikes or we would miss the train, which would have been a disaster.

  As we were led by staff through the bowels of Wembley, we had no sense of where we were until we reached a pitch-side entrance leading to one of the corner flags. As the doors opened and our little group stepped back into the daylight and walked towards the corner flag, the ball fell to the Liverpool striker, Dirk Kuyt, who promptly fired the ball into the Cardiff net.