Alanatomy

by Alan Carr

  My dressing-up became so frequent that I started recognizing the actual wigs on telly. I’d be watching Where the Heart Is and all of a sudden I’d go, ‘Wait a minute, I wore that wig as Rula Lenska.’ Sometimes the dressing-up wasn’t even culturally correct – when we went to the Notting Hill Carnival with Cilla Black for The Friday Night Project my outfit not only got the wrong country, it was the wrong continent. When you think of British West Indian culture you don’t normally conjure up an image of a man dressed in a glittery slit-to-the-waist dress with high heels and a bowl of fruit on his head. I got so many frosty looks I was lucky I didn’t get a cap in my arse or at least bits of fruit shot off my headpiece. They had promised us our own Friday Night Project float but this never materialized and in the end we were balanced on a wooden palette on top of an ice-cream van. Poor Cilla Black, no spring chicken herself, had to be fireman-lifted on top of the ice-cream van and then simply clung on for dear life as we went around a housing estate in west London – we didn’t know if her legs were quivering from the mode of transport or the bottle of Moët she’d necked before the filming. One thing I learnt from that episode of The Friday Night Project was that Cilla drank a lorra lorra champagne – and good for her. Sadly, most of the footage was unusable; infuriatingly, any dialogue recorded atop the ice-cream van was either drowned out by various PA systems – ‘Here me now, here me now’ – or the music of steel pans. It was one of those ideas that had probably sounded brilliant around the table in The Friday Night Project office but once put into practice was a health and safety nightmare and not as much fun as it should have been.

  Whenever I dress up I always like to keep a ‘trophy’ – a little memento of the day and who I’ve been – so as you can imagine I have quite a substantial dressing-up box which gets wheeled out whenever we have a party. I’ve often come downstairs the morning after, hungover, to find a high heel or a nun’s outfit hanging from a light fitting. On one occasion, unbeknownst to us, a Cilla Black wig went AWOL – well, when I say AWOL, my red setter Bev had eaten it during the night, but I didn’t know this. It was only once we were over the park and she was having her morning poo that I saw these ginger matted fur balls coming out from between her legs. I did a double-take and screamed, ‘Shit – she’s having puppies!’ It was only on closer inspection that I noticed one of the ‘puppies’ had a ‘Do not boil’ wash label attached to it and I realized her litter was actually my Cilla wig. Thank God for that! Ironically, her having puppies made me have puppies.

  As I’m writing this now in a hotel room in Buxton, Cilla is back in vogue but for the saddest reason possible – she died of a stroke last week and her funeral is on every front page whilst her Greatest Hits CD is back at the top of the charts. One of the blessings of doing my job is that you get to meet these legends before they go, you get to see first-hand why they have made such an impact on our lives, why they were so loved. I’m instantly reminded of when Robin Williams graced the Chatty Man sofa. What a lovely man; he was everything you wanted him to be and more, so nice to everyone backstage – and I mean everyone – with charm by the bucket-loads. I think of Amy Winehouse too. Me and Justin had taken the piss out of her on numerous occasions on The Friday Night Project, plonking on a massive beehive and screeching ‘BLLAAAAKKKE’ at every opportunity, so when she died, I did feel a pang of guilt. We hadn’t known she was that tormented and ill, and if we had maybe we would have treated it all differently, I don’t know. I guess we’d sort of bought into that ‘panto drunk’ persona that the media had painted of her, with endless photos of her looking the worse for wear and then photos of those bloody ballet pumps disappearing through a cat flap in Camden when she’d lost her house keys. She actually did keep losing her keys – I had dinner with her once in Balans and she suddenly patted herself down, said, ‘Oh no, I’ve lost my keys,’ and phoned up a Camden locksmith. It was almost like they were expecting her call – she didn’t even have to say her name.

  Of course, sometimes you meet celebrities that – how can I put this nicely, hmm – that you never want to meet again. Now we all have off days and I know what it’s like sometimes in this business, you can’t just switch it on, you can’t. Believe it or not there are days when I just want to mince around the house in a poncho and jeggings, eating a family pack of Monster Munch. But Avril Lavigne refused to even come out of her dressing room to perform – she refused. Point. Blank. She would not come out. The door had to be smashed down and she was forced by her management to perform. She stomped on stage, scowling. Do you remember in Corrie when Tracey Barlow would say ‘I’m going upstairs to play me tapes’ and stamp upstairs – just like that she was. ‘It’s Avril Lavigne, everyone!’ we announced, full of our usual joie de vivre. Well, the look. Shade ain’t in it!! You’d think I’d done a shit and wiped my arse with her album’s sleeve notes. Like I said – maybe she’d just had a bad day. Mind you, even when Rihanna had her leg in a brace after a recent fall, then toppled over and got stuck in the ITV lift for fifteen minutes because no one could get her out, she was still all smiles and full of fun when she hobbled on to The Friday Night Project performance stage. She even made a foot brace look sexy.

  One person who didn’t like me and, I’m not going to lie, I didn’t like him, was Hollywood action film star Steven Segal. He was the host on The Friday Night Project in early February 2007 and Justin was excited – I mean so excited. We first met him in High Wycombe, I kid you not. He wasn’t in a TK Maxx or anything, he was performing at the Swan Theatre with his blues band and, to be fair, he was really good. Justin was a huge fan of his film Under Siege. Well, I’d never heard of it, and when I saw Steven in the flesh the only thing ‘under siege’ was his belt from his gut. The producers had met him beforehand and they had gone into his dressing room and found him reclining in his chair with a Japanese woman on her knees sucking his fingers wet and then slipping his rings on them. In the flesh the man is very imposing: he is huge, broad-shouldered, over six foot tall and very well-endowed – I know this fact because he kept telling everyone.

  The Friday Night Project would always say to the guest hosts that if they had any ideas, whether it be pranks, days out that could be filmed or characters they would like to dress up as, please come forth with the information and we will do our utmost to incorporate the idea into the show because you are the host, don’t you know. He had a great idea. Someone in the audience would stand up mid-show and say, ‘Steven, I love you, please go out with me.’ Steven would say, ‘Sorry, I’m like Alan, I’m gay.’ Then without any irony he continued, ‘All the women say “no way” and start crying. I see them crying and say “only joking”. All the women in the audience cheer and start taking their clothes off and dancing in their bras and panties.’ Well, there was a stunned silence in the production office – ‘Riiiiiight … hmm!’ we all said. Believe it or not we didn’t go for that idea because, well, we weren’t in the 1970s.

  He sort of got his wish though, because for the section called ‘Ask Me Anything’ (basically a question-and-answer session from the audience) he only wanted beautiful women to ask him the questions. We had to endure a weird casting of suitable ladies – all big-busted with dark hair. So if you’re watching it on Dave or some other satellite channel and you’re thinking ‘Phwoar, that’s a good-looking audience,’ you have Steven to thank. He was adamant that we show a (long) clip of the first Under Siege – why, I will never know. The lean, muscular, chiselled Steven Segal action hero kicking terrorists’ asses on a ship was in stark contrast to the chunky, jowly man sitting in the studio with spray-on hair.

  Although he wasn’t particularly nice to me, his stories had me mesmerized. His life had been saved in Japan, he told us earnestly. His house was on fire and he hadn’t realized – then a stray dog came into his house off the street and told him, ‘Your house is on fire’ (yes!) and he ran out. He leant in closer: ‘And you know what, I never saw that dog again.’ No, because it was dead – you left it in the burning house! I scream
ed on the inside. He also told us that he was reincarnated from a Native American chief (I’ve noticed that these people who are reincarnated never worked in a caff in the past, did they? Or as a rag and bone man?). He was always accompanied by a man who carried a bag. I later found out that the bag contained the ‘magic’ bones of a Native American chief and if they ever touched the ground they would lose their power. Well, I didn’t have the heart to tell him that while he was filming I caught the man with the bag having a sneaky Marlboro Light in a doorway with the bag of magic bones at his feet – yes, on the floor!

  Like Shakira, my hips don’t lie. They ache, creek, bend and buckle. On stage I semi-affectionately call it my mincer’s leg and like most comedy there has to be a grain of truth in it to work. And there’s more than a grain. Some people will roll their eyes and go ‘Yeah, yeah, mincer’s leg,’ but seriously, years of mincing has put so much pressure on my left hip that the pain has become excruciating at times and I’ve had to have physiotherapy. Ridiculous, isn’t it? There was me growing up gay, terrified of contracting AIDs or of weekly visits to the Gay Men’s Health clinic because we all lead such promiscuous lives, obviously – who knew it would be my mincing hip that would be the silent killer? I had been in pain for a while with it and, typical man, I had just soldiered on in ignorance until one day, walking up the hill in Crouch End, it went! My leg just went! Not into a shop or a Costa Coffee, I mean it suddenly went from under me. I fell down and my shopping bags dropped to the floor. I started rolling back down the hill but thankfully my back fat got wedged under a paving slab and I remained beached. It was so embarrassing and painful. Using my baguette as a staff I managed to grab hold of the nearby fence and pull myself up, then leaning on the fence as a makeshift bannister I hobbled back down the hill.

  I should have got help ages ago when I first felt the twinges but now I really did need to get help. My over-active imagination was conjuring up images of amputation, so it was a relief to finally get to see the physiotherapist. He said that if I hadn’t sought help then I would have ended up with a stick or a wheelchair. What?! I was in my mid-thirties! How much mincing had I done? You never really think you’ll end up like that – maybe it’s the naivety of youth but you assume people get old for a bet or a laugh, that they get up one morning saying ‘Do you know what – today I’m going to shuffle. Yeah, shuffle! I’m sick of walking upright so I’m going to acquire a hump.’

  The whole process of having your hips realigned is bloody painful, lying there in your pants as the physio pulls and pummels. I’d assumed he was going to massage through my jogging bottoms, but no, I had to take them off. Typically, I had the worst pants on – they were clean but a bit grey and baggy round the leg. It’s the story of my life. Nice pants – my trousers never come off; crap pants – life will in some way create an ingenious ploy for you to lose your trousers.

  I remember once, we were filming a promo for The Friday Night Project, and it was a huge affair. It was back when there were budgets to advertise TV shows; nowadays you just get a clunky montage but back then the adverts were made on film sets. For this one we had a Winnebago, catering, costumes, dancing girls, dancing guys, and the backdrop to it was a stately home. Well, to cut a long story short, the final scene of the day was Justin running through the grounds, Rocky-style, firing a machine gun with explosions behind him whilst I flew down on a wire dressed as a cheerleader. Confused? Good, because I was. It was all going to plan until Justin actually shot me with the machine gun – he fucking shot me! I screamed in pain, looked down and saw blood oozing out of my leg – at which point I panicked even more. As I was writhing on the floor, thinking ‘I’m a celebrity – get this bullet out of me!’ a hunky nurse on set ran straight over. Very easy on the eye, he was, which eased my pain slightly. Without a second thought he knelt down, ripped off my tights, stuck his hand up my skirt to stem the bleeding and gingerly removed the bullet from my milky thigh. ‘Thank you,’ I whispered, whilst surreptitiously filing the whole episode into my wank bank. As it turned out, it wasn’t a bullet, it was a shell, but hey, I wasn’t to know – something black and hard came out of the end of the gun and to me that’s a bullet! With ragged tights and a bruised knee I had to remove the bloody cheerleader’s skirt in front of everyone and, yes, you guessed it – awful pants.

  Now I come to think about it, I don’t have much luck with promos. We were filming the New Year’s Eve Specstacular and I fell off the two-metre-high stage when I stepped back without looking where I was going. I fell on to concrete – the thud was so loud. The whole sound studio went silent and then everyone ran over. I couldn’t get up as I’d landed on my bad hip. People buzzed around me asking if I was all right, someone brought water, someone laughably brought a crash mat – bit late, mate, bit late. I didn’t cry in front of everyone but waited till I was in my dressing room and then I burst into tears and cried and cried and cried. I was so winded that I went into shock and the nurse on set gave me oxygen – in a can to suck on?! ‘Beyoncé has the same thing when she comes off stage during costume changes, dear,’ said the nurse warmly, rubbing my back as I vomited into the toilet.

  You know all those television adverts, bumper stickers, radio announcements, posters, etc. saying ‘A Dog is for Life Not Just for Christmas’ that have basically never been out of our sight the whole time we’ve been growing up, yes? Well, my Paul must be the only person who has never ever come across these wise words as for our first anniversary that Christmas he got me a dog as a present and then the following June another dog – as a present. Two dogs, two years into a relationship, what was he thinking? I’d never wanted a dog. Don’t get me wrong, I love them, it’s just that I’d noticed it was always dog walkers who found dead bodies – have you noticed that too? Always on the news, someone walking their dog on some waste ground early one morning coming across a dead body. You never get that with cats, do you?

  Of course, now I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t being dragged around the park at all hours, shouting ‘Down’ as they jump up to lick a child’s Magnum, but back then I was dumbstruck when he said ‘Surprise!’ and held out a handful of red setter in my lounge. It had genuinely been a surprise because I hadn’t even mentioned I wanted a dog – wait there, I hadn’t even mentioned the word dog – and now after just ONE year of being together – you’ve got us a DOG!! For fuck’s sake! Bye-bye freedom, bye-bye expensive holidays, hello dog-shit bags and hello dog-friendly B & Bs, ugh, I could taste the fur ball in the back of my mouth just thinking about it.

  Red setters or Irish setters, whatever you want to call them, have an undeniable charm but are sadly not as popular as they were in the seventies. They’ve sort of been overshadowed by labradoodles, cockerpoos and jackadoos, or – as I like to call them – mongrels. Red setters will win you over whether you like it or not, they will, they are possibly the best dogs in the world – admittedly they are not the sharpest knife in the drawer but they have absolutely bucketloads of personality and an appetite that knows no bounds. The amount of arguments, confrontations and bare-knuckle fights I have got into because of those dogs you would never believe and more often than not food is the source of the tension. When it’s a sunny day and it seems the whole of London has decided to picnic in Hyde Park, you will often find me apologizing profusely to a horrified family, handing them a fiver to get more sandwiches with one hand whilst scooping a Scotch egg out of my dog’s mouth with the other.

  I don’t have a PA or an entourage, something Paul failed to realize before he bought me the dogs, and a word of warning if you are thinking of getting a setter: they need a lot of exercise and I mean a lot, in all kinds of weather. You will often see me walking my dogs with a scowl on my face, a bit like Pauline Quirke with her black Lab in Broadchurch. They are so hyper, even my parents make excuses now when I want them to look after them when I go on holiday. The first time we went abroad, my parents said, ‘You go, go on, we’ll look after the dogs.’ I remember pulling up on their drive when we g
ot back and seeing my mother’s exhausted face appear at the window, then Bev jumped up, pushed her on to the floor and just stood there licking the window – my poor mother.

  So with me and the dogs being social pariahs I often have to bring them with me as I can’t bear to leave them alone in the house for hours on end, it’s just not fair on them. I was doing a photo shoot in Wapping once and nature called for the dogs so I decided to take them out to the local park. On cue, unbelievably, Graham Norton comes into the park with his two dogs and all hell is let loose – our dogs hate each other. My two, normally so ditzy and carefree, were baring their teeth and salivating, and Graham’s dogs, hackles up, were barking angrily. I often think it would have made a great pap photo – or an advert for a new Channel 5 programme, Celebrity Gay Dog Fights. We both apologized for our dogs’ behaviour and kept our distance in the park.

  The dogs come down to the studio a lot when Chatty Man is on and with no unsuspecting picnickers to terrorize, Bev turns on my peers in her desperate search for food. She once ran into the Loose Women dressing rooms and nicked a plate of croissants. She doesn’t care which channel either – on the One Show a good few years back when it was hosted by Adrian Chiles and Christine Bleakley it had been Christine’s birthday and the BBC surprised her with a birthday cake. We all started with a chorus of ‘Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday …’ But we never got to finish it because just as the cake was plonked on the table there was a ginger flash, a gasp from the production crew and there she was on her hind legs tucking into the cake like Patisserie Valerie had made it Pedigree Chum flavour.