by Alan Carr
The pod finally completed its laborious rotation and I couldn’t wait to get out – not because I was horrifically late for my radio show (which I was) but because the constant weeing had caused the pod to smell like a public toilet. I ran out, said I would see everyone later and hurtled across London to the studio. I made it – just! I raced through the door, leapt on to the swivel chair and, with a cue from my producer, started the show:
‘I’m Alan Carr.’
‘I’m Melanie Sykes,’ said Mel and we were off.
Usually on a Saturday as I sit in that studio hearing about everyone’s plans for the evening I get serious FOMO (fear of missing out) but that night, sitting safe within the confines of the show, cradling my polystyrene cup of tea, I embraced the two hours of calm and let my batteries recharge because I knew that at 8.00 I would have to head out again to finish off what had already been a hell of a day. I met up with them somewhere near Leicester Square in a sports bar and, as is always the way with daytime drinking, it wasn’t long before a feeling of ennui took over and the evening turned into a more subdued affair. Thankfully, we ended up having a drama-free night. As it happened, the nightclub I had chosen as the climax of the day was having a lingerie fashion show to accompany the music – yes, it was one of THOSE nightclubs – which of course went down very well with the gang of lads whose eyes were now on stalks. They ordered some shots and I slipped out after an hour and let boys be boys. Of course, trying to catch a taxi from Leicester Square on a Saturday night was a ball ache – countless buses passed me but I felt that tonight I would rather get a taxi. Let’s just say I’d had my fair share of being on a double-decker bus for one day.
My brother’s wedding to Carly was a far classier affair. They got married in one of the most beautiful places in the world – Santorini, a tiny little island in the Aegean Sea. The ceremony was held overlooking the beautiful town of Oia, so beautiful in fact that the town has been recognized by UNESCO as a world heritage site. The village could pass a Daz doorstep challenge any day: every building is a crisp bright white, and the only relief from the whiteness is the blue roofs and cupolas that dot the cove, complementing the blue of the sea. It’s so pristine and classically Greek that it is often the inspiration for mouthwash and yoghurt adverts.
We spent a really lovely week there, exploring the island on quad bikes, overdosing on feta and drinking ouzo. Every pamphlet and Santorini guidebook raves about its warm thermal baths and the accompanying health benefits, so it was at the top of my family’s to-do list. Who doesn’t want to feel replenished for the big day? Who doesn’t want healthy glowing skin for the wedding photos? Who doesn’t want to have huge open pores the size of manhole covers once the wedding photographer points his camera and says ‘Feta’? Or ‘cheese’ if we were in England. (I am not apologizing for that joke.)
To get to the thermal baths meant a short ferry ride to a surprisingly still-active volcano that after nearly two million years of activity has left a flat black hump protruding out of the water which from certain angles makes it look like the Aegean has a bald spot. We took the ferry to the volcano and, popping on our swimming trunks, gingerly shuffled down the side of the craggy path to dip into the thermal baths. I get it, I know the rancid smell comes from the sulphur, I remember that from my science lessons at school, but it hardly fills you with confidence when you see a mountain goat turn round on a ledge above, lift its tail up and do a shit, and said shit pinballs down the side of the mountain, finishing with a plop next to me and my family. I soon realized we were swimming in a goats’ toilet. And as for ‘thermal’, I think someone on Santorini needs to turn the thermostat up. After five minutes I was begging for the goats to have a piss in it just to warm it up.
One day my manager threw in a curveball – he suggested a chat show. Now, a chat show had never really crossed my mind. Doing The Friday Night Project I’d found I’d drifted off listening to some of the guests tell their anecdotes and thankfully a quick shout from my producer in my ear brought me back into the studio just in time to do a polite chuckle or a ‘What are you like, eh?’ Hmm, would I suit a chat show?
In the early stages of developing the chat show we toyed with ideas of how we get could get A-listers on the show whose tight schedules might not permit them to actually come to the studio but who would be willing to give us some of their time during the day. James Corden’s hugely successful ‘Carpool Karaoke’ is a fantastic example of this. The A-listers can sing (and plug) their little hearts out without ever stepping foot in a studio; it is, no pun intended, the perfect vehicle for them. We hit upon the idea of having a flat-pack men’s room that could be assembled in the blink of an eye wherever we wanted. I could leave my chat show in the studio saying, ‘Ooh, I just need to use the loo,’ go through the toilet door and, voila, come face to face with a (pre-recorded) George Clooney or Angelina Jolie washing their hands (I hope). I could have a little chat with them, plug their film, have a laugh and return through the toilet door back to the studio – an A-list interview in the bag, thank you very much. We liked the idea and thought we’d give it a go.
The problem was, we decided to do it with Marilyn Manson. Now, Marilyn Manson scares the shit out of me on a good day but a Marilyn Manson off his tits on absinthe and God knows what else doesn’t bear thinking about. To say the interview was unusable is putting it kindly; not only was he slurring, staggering and sweating profusely, the interview was interrupted every few seconds with cries of ‘coke time’ followed by a knowing look to his manager. He was so twatted he couldn’t focus, his one brown eye was so dilated and spinning that it looked like a Minstrel on a waltzer and, not only that, he mistook the pop-up men’s room for an actual toilet and undid his trousers to take a piss. Look, I wanted the toilet to look as authentic as possible but the aroma I could do without. Marilyn then started telling a charmingly whimsical anecdote about his grandad’s sexual proclivity for animal porn and we decided to call it a day. We canned the idea in the end – who knows, it might have been a huge success if we hadn’t tried to road-test it with Marilyn. It might have been my ‘Carpool Karaoke’. People might be having water-cooler moments all across the country, saying ‘Did you see this week’s Chatty Man when Alan bumped into Barack Obama in the bogs – wasn’t it just hysterical?!’ Well, you never know.
As I was leaving after the Marilyn interview, his PA sheepishly approached me. ‘I hear you have a Radio 2 show … I know this hasn’t gone so well, but if I could trouble you to maybe play Marilyn’s new single or give it a plug on your show, we’d really like that.’
I bit my tongue and said, ‘Sure – what’s it called?’
‘“Arma-Goddamn-Motherfuckin-Geddon”,’ she said with no hint of irony.
I thought, good luck with that one, love. We’d been told the week previously that even Tina Turner’s ‘Steamy Windows’ was a bit risqué as it alluded to dogging. I wonder what Radio 2 would have said if I’d slipped ‘Arma-Goddamn-Motherfuckin-Geddon’ on the old wheels of steel – I dread to think! I said I’d do what I could to help, took the CD from her and, once I was out of sight, slung it in the bin. This helping each other out lark, it works both ways, love, it works both ways.
These wacky added extras were all fine and dandy but the fact of the matter was – could I even host a chat show? Cut to me sitting in a draughty community hall, my garden-centre chair slowly being carried around the room from the reverberations of a Zumba class next door. Surprisingly, the audience liked it and then after a few more draughty run-throughs we progressed to a pilot – thankfully, a non-transmittable one. Any budding TV chat show hosts out there, please always make sure your TV pilot is a non-transmittable one – it stops them putting it out on the telly and, believe me, you do not want that bobbing up on one of those Before They Were Famous programmes like an unflushed turd.
Guest-wise, the pilot was all right, as pilots go. We had the late great Ronnie Corbett and my old mucker Gok Wan. Gok was the perfect choice of guest, a friend who w
ould support me, who was also warm, funny and nice, and who knew how much I needed this pilot to work. It was Ronnie Corbett I was worried about – this man was a legend, someone who I had grown up with and enjoyed watching all my life. Of course, with a chat show you are going to meet your heroes (hopefully) and you need to prepare yourself for that. I can’t remember much of the pilot, it sort of went by in a blur and I daren’t look back at it as I’m too scared to see how awful I was. I know that at the end of the Ronnie Corbett interview I said, ‘Give a big thank you to Ronnie Barker – sorry, Corbett.’
‘You did that deliberately,’ Ronnie snapped.
‘No, I didn’t,’ I responded truthfully. To be fair to me, we had previously been talking about comedy partnerships and I think my brain, seeing the end of the interview in sight, must have clocked off early. So if you are thinking of becoming a chat show host and want some advice, remember not to call the interviewee by their long-time dead comedy partner’s name. Another bit of advice is don’t forget to give your interviewee enough of your attention, which is easier said than done – you have to be looking at the next question on the autocue and at the same time keep listening and have an opinion on what that person is saying. It’s an awkward balance to get right. There have been times when I’ve been so interested in the follow-up question that it looks like I’ve got a lazy eye, or worse, the producers have talked in my ear over the interviewee’s answer – then you just have to do a nondescript smile and maybe throw in a nod. If the audience laugh then you laugh, but don’t laugh in isolation – they might have said something really sad. ‘Well, at that moment I knew I had to turn the life-support machine off.’ Hysterical laughter. That’s not the best combo.
The first show eventually came about and as usual I was a bag of nerves. Our first guests were Sir Bruce Forsyth, Heather Graham and Ross Kemp, with music from the Pet Shop Boys, and we already knew we had Katy Perry chatting and performing for the second show – not bad, eh? Of course, none of the anxieties that had kept me tossing and turning in my sweat-soaked bed sheets arose: no one died, the set didn’t catch fire, none of my guests choked on a rogue glacé cherry poking out of their pina colada – of course not, why would they? As it happened, not only had my nights of anxiety been sleepless, they had been pointless because the show went swimmingly. The opening credits rolled and I just stood there, gained my composure, walked down the stairs and did what I had been doing all my life in call centres up and down the country – I chatted.
Interestingly, I have just got back from the ‘Just For Laughs’ Comedy Festival in Montreal, Canada, where I was doing my Yap Yap Yap tour and it turned out to be a very rewarding experience. It’s an international festival and it attracts not only the biggest comedy names from all over the world but comedy lovers from all over the world too and sitting in the bar after my show hearing Canadians, Kiwis, Aussies and South Africans approaching me and saying how much they enjoy Chatty Man and retelling their favourite moments from the various series makes my heart fit to burst. Remembering those early days, ‘I’m not good enough’ ricocheting around my brain, the worries, the anxieties, and here I am thousands of miles away, years later, talking to someone from another country celebrating Chatty Man, well, it’s a delight, and if anyone reading this is nursing an ambition to be a comedian or a presenter or otherwise needs any more reason to follow their dreams, then I tell you, go for it – because if I can do it – you can.
Anyway, seven years earlier, away from the comedy love-fest that was my ‘Just For Laughs’ experience, at Channel 4 we were trying to conjure up a successful chat show. Look, the first series of anything is always fraught with glitches and gremlins and of course you can have brainstorming sessions, flipcharts and focus groups till you’re blue in the face but only when it has been put before an audience do you get any idea if you have done the right thing. So you have to iron out any problems in the full glare of everyone’s eyes and once they see you changing things they get a whiff that things are wrong and you are lost.
The creative types at Channel 4 came up with a brilliant advertising campaign for the start of Chatty Man. The campaign went under the banner ‘Born to Chat’ and featured a child that looked like me, styled in the fashions of the seventies and filmed in a retro living room that actually looked remarkably like our genuine living room at Lowick Court in Northampton. The child would chat incessantly, demonstrating that from an early age I was ‘Born to Chat’. All we needed now was to find a child that looked like me and, hey, we were in business. My friend who works at Channel 4 casting went out to find the little Alan. Finding no child that looked like me down the usual casting routes (I must have one of those faces), she decided to throw her net wider and scour the Arndales and shopping centres of south London to find my young doppelgänger. It didn’t go well – after she approached one woman with a bespectacled child, saying, ‘Ooh, he looks just like Alan Carr,’ the insulted mother gasped and told my friend to ‘fuck off’. Everyone she approached to ask whether their offspring would do an advert for a new chat show because they resembled my good self either gave her abuse or walked off in a huff – the situation was hopeless and I had to be called in to a studio at the last minute and have my own face superimposed on to a child’s face. I spent a whole day with adhesive spots on certain points of my face which directly correlated with certain points of the mystery child’s face so they could be swapped with ease. Although at the time I was pissed off at the inconvenience, the finished advert is absolutely brilliant. It was cute and sinister in equal measure and got some lovely positive comments. It was even nominated for an award. With that whetting potential viewers’ appetites, I did the usual slew of chat shows to publicize my own, then recorded the first show and just hoped for the best.
After the first episode came out, the ratings were great – at least people had tuned in to see whether they would like it or not. I think it’s fair to say though that viewers didn’t exactly fall in love with it and that depressed me. Here we go again, I thought, Chatty Man is going to go the same way as Celebrity Ding Dong – two flops on my hands in direct succession. I went up in the loft and brushed off my Barclaycard call centre headset, Ashford & Simpson’s ‘Reunited’ playing in my head as I looked down at it sadly. I went up to see my parents in Northampton to get out of London, have a bit of TLC from the folks back home. And then, out of the blue, I got a boost from an unexpected source, one voice of cheerfulness in a cacophony of boos. I was at Weston Favell Shopping Centre with my parents, helping them unload their trolley, when the phone went – I didn’t recognize the number and thinking ‘pissing PPI’ I didn’t pick up. It was only when I got home and sat down with a cuppa that I listened to the message – it was Brucie!
‘I just wanted to say how much I enjoyed being on your show and can I just say I think you have a hit on your hands.’
Well, it was just the tonic, what a lovely thoughtful gesture – totally unnecessary but so needed by me, and I will be for ever thankful to him for that message. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as people were saying. Sir Bruce seemed to have had a good time and he’s a TV legend, and do you know what, that was good enough for me.
He has been on the chat show several times since and he is always such a good sport. I had the honour of sharing a dressing room with him at the Royal Albert Hall in 2012 for the Royal Variety Performance. Me, Brucie, Jimmy Tarbuck, Des O’Connor and Ronnie Corbett (who thankfully had forgotten Ronnie Barker-gate from the Chatty Man pilot) were all in one room. Sharing a dressing room with all these legends was very humbling for me, plus one of those very rare occasions where I was the youngest in the room. It was genuinely one of those ‘How did this happen?’ moments. I had grown up watching these men on the telly and to be standing here in their gang with them recounting showbiz anecdotes and memories of Royal Variety Performances past was of course surreal.
They wanted to watch the live feed from the television so they could see what was happening on the stage and they looked at me, be
ing the youngest (did I mention I was the youngest in that room?), to tune in the television. I am a complete technophobe but I half-heartedly fiddled round the back and finally got hold of the right cable with one hand and with the other wiggled the aerial aloft. There must have been brief flashes of the performance on the screen because they all started oohing and ahhing, then groaning when I lost the signal. As I waved the aerial, no lie, Brucie was going, ‘Higher! Higher! Lower! Lower!’ I thought, is he taking the piss? If he says ‘You get nothing for a pair, not in this game’, I’ll shove this aerial where the sun don’t shine.
At one point they were all speaking about a certain celebrity who was, completely against his public persona, a complete pothead. Brucie turned to me and said, ‘The trouble is, you young’uns think you’re the only ones that do ’em.’ I had to laugh; he was right. It’s the naivety of (relative) youth. We always think we are going to be the generation that rips up the rule book and turns everything on its head but in fact these performers had seen it all, done it all and, in the case of this unnamed old-school celebrity, ‘smoked it all’ – THEY had lived.
I remember I had been smuggled into the back of the Royal Albert Hall earlier that night through the tradesman’s entrance, not because I had a beef with Her Majesty but because I was a surprise performer in the night’s proceedings. I had received a text from David Walliams months back out of the blue asking me for a favour. My curiosity was pricked, and I couldn’t wait another minute, so I rang him. As it happened he was presenting not just any old Royal Variety Performance but the one-hundredth-anniversary show and he wanted to know whether I would do a comedy skit with him on the night. I absolutely love David and said yes immediately, but was naturally intrigued as to what he had up his sleeve. Ashleigh and Pudsey the dog had wowed the audience and the judges with their Flintstonesque performance earlier in the year on Britain’s Got Talent and it turned out that David wanted to recreate that performance in front of the Queen. I took it all in – to be fair, there are some really impressive dog costumes and if I got it made in the right material I suppose it would be easy to move around in. ‘I’m going to be Pudsey the dog,’ David went on, ‘and you’re going to be Ashleigh.’ Images pushed to the front of my memory of Ashleigh astride Pudsey wearing leopard-skin moon boots and a hip-skimming leopard-skin miniskirt – one false move and Her Majesty would see my bearded collie. I seriously wondered about employing a ball boy like they do at Wimbledon, so that every time my ball became visible below my miniskirt they could run across the stage, pop it back in my (probably leopard-skin) knickers and then run back to refresh themselves with a lovely glass of barley water. Ball boy or not, I really wanted to do it – it would be such an honour. ‘When do we rehearse?’ I said to David.