by Alan Carr
I do love the Royal Variety Performance. It’s the adrenaline rush you get from rubbing shoulder pads with royalty and I think even the staunchest republican, given the chance to go backstage and feel the buzz, would be won over. It is ridiculously crazy. You have musical legends, stand-up comedians, opera stars, ballet dancers, magicians and animals all swirling backstage with one thing on their minds: Don’t mess this up – even if every other gig I do is an abject failure, please let me at least get one laugh! I mean, seriously, if you did mess it up – God forbid – it’s not like it’s just confined to the theatre. You get a dirty look off Princess Anne, so what, who cares, but as you know, this show is televised. You could become a social undesirable and never work again – the stakes are high.
The last time I had performed on the show was in 2005 when I was an unknown, so really had nothing to lose. Thankfully, I had a good one and even got told by one of the Queen’s entourage that Her Majesty had laughed at my Tesco Clubcard points joke. My first thought was, ooh, I wonder if I could put that on a poster? ‘I LAUGHED’ – THE QUEEN. My second thought was, how does she know about Tesco Clubcard points? Still, I thank you for the laugh, Ma’am.
I wasn’t even listed in the programme for this performance so when I came on as a lacklustre Ashleigh and got such a lovely cheer it really did give me goose bumps – I’ve got so much skin showing, you can actually see them popping up. Anyway, it was a big success and we got lots of laughs. I packed up my stuff and went to go home.
‘Alan, where are you going?’ asked an officious young lady with a headset and clipboard.
‘Oh, I’ve done my bit, I’m off home,’ I said, unscrewing my ponytail and dumping it on the dressing table.
‘Oh, I’m afraid not,’ came the reply. ‘It’s protocol that everyone who performs on the Variety Show has to meet the Queen in the curtain call at the end.’
‘But I’ve only got jeans and a jumper,’ I confessed, pointing to my holdall.
‘I’m afraid you’re going to have to meet her like that.’
‘What?!’
‘Like that,’ she said, pointing to me and turning on her heel.
If you look back at the curtain call for the Royal Variety Performance 2012, you can see me adorned in leopard-skin moon boots and leopard-skin miniskirt, with a ponytail now screwed back into my weave hanging loosely atop my head like a flaccid pipe cleaner. I’m standing in between the real Ashleigh and Pudsey and boy band supergroup One Direction. The Queen walked along the line-up of cast and crew, smiling that fixed grin she is so good at. She shook my hand and for a moment I thought she was going to say something, maybe, ‘Oh, one did love that Tesco Clubcard joke – would one do it again?’ but it never came and she glided off without a word, leaving Prince Philip to give me the most curious stare, which of course I don’t blame him for – last time he’d seen so much leopard skin he would have pointed a gun at it and shot it.
One of the great things about standing in that curtain call is overhearing the conversations as Her Majesty goes down the row. ‘And what is it you do? she asked Louis from One Direction. And then I felt complete relief – if she didn’t know who Louis was, from THE biggest band in the world, after seeing them perform no less than an hour ago, then she would have forgotten about me a long time ago. Maybe I’d got away with it.
You might be thinking we’ve already covered quite a lot of arse action – stop it – what with the rumpologist and my explosive Girls Aloud Christmas dinner. Well, this isn’t about my bum – I’m sorry to disappoint – it’s about an ever so slightly more infamous behind, one that can carry its own champagne and break the internet at the same time. Now you’re with me …
I’d gone into the Chatty Man offices and heard that Kim Kardashian was coming on the show. Not only was she coming on the show but Kanye West had told her to come on the show, and not only had Kanye West told Kim to come on the show but he was going to be in the audience watching Kim actually be on the show. Well, my head nearly exploded as you can imagine. Kanye West in the audience – all that went through my mind was Kanye running on stage, grabbing the microphone out of my hand and shouting, ‘Graham Norton should be hosting this show!’
I had first met Kanye on The Friday Night Project – in fact it was him choosing to do the show that really turned it around. All of a sudden people changed their attitude towards it, it became a cool show and celebrities started asking to come on. Obviously when you get a huge star like Kanye, you work around them, it’s you who bends over backwards – so much so that we were walking around in the crab position. Normally we film a day with them but due to his unbelievably hectic schedule this proved to be difficult. His people came up with a suggestion: ‘Why don’t you and Justin fly in his private jet to Oslo to watch him perform the night before – would that be something that you would be interested in?’ Errrr, let me have a think – now where did I put my diary? Hell yeah! A private jet, Kanye, probably Cristal, probably bitches, probably I’m going to have the best night of my life. Alan, you have made it! I rang up my agent and told him about my new and improved social life and that Monday I would be out of the country hanging with Kanye forshizzle.
‘Monday. Monday you say?’
‘Yep, Monday.’
‘You’ve got that charity event in Soho for blind kids.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Remember, it’s a charity night, it’s been in the diary for ages, mate.’
Damn! I panicked – ‘Couldn’t I just do an audio-tape recording of my act? They wouldn’t know I wasn’t there – they’re blind.’
There was an unimpressed, judgemental pause. Then, ‘The audience isn’t blind – the money goes to a charity that helps the blind.’
I just said it. ‘Fuck the charity, I’m out of here, get someone else to do it. I’m Alan Carr and I’m going on this goddamn private jet if it kills me.’
Of course I didn’t say that – I honoured the charity commitment. Yes, that’s right, if you are up there, God – I chose to do good, I put a charity first instead of myself – yes, next time you choose to make my mincer’s leg flair up, remember that eh?
We always used to do sketches with our celebrity guests on The Friday Night Project and Kanye was no exception. We had written our own pastiche of one of his songs. We had the whole of Studio One and we blinged it up. I was wearing a gold lamé tracksuit with chains around my neck – I didn’t look gangsta, I looked like a toffee penny – and we did our bits, rapping and generally mugging for the cameras, doing our rapper posturing, brap brap brap, etcetera, and then we waited and we waited for Mr West. Finally there was a buzz, he had turned up, and we could hear a commotion behind the set. Snippets of information trickled down to us. He would appear in the sketch but he would NOT allow his songs to be parodied – which was unfortunate to say the least as we had spent the whole morning performing ‘Gold Dogger’. His song was called ‘Gold Digger’ – d’you get it? Clever, huh? Not only did we have to reveal to him that we were actually doing a piss-take, ahem, homage to his international hit ‘Gold Digger’, we had to explain what ‘dogging’ was! Do you want a side order of embarrassment with your embarrassment, Mr Carr? His face was a picture.
The Friday Night Project team disappeared with Kanye West’s team and they had a discussion for about another hour. I don’t know what was said or what happened but ‘Gold Dogger’ went ahead. He was bemused a lot of the time – my voice when excitable can be a bit seagully and the Americans didn’t really understand Justin’s West Country twang so I don’t think that actually helped the situation, but the sketch was fun and everyone seemed happy. I will always remember Kanye leaving the set and overhearing him say to his manager, ‘This show is fake – I’m being Punk’d. I’m not falling for it – this guy isn’t real.’
Well, even after all that Kanye couldn’t have been that put off by me – maybe he still thought I couldn’t be for real – because he decided to come on Chatty Man, which was such a thrill, and he didn
’t come alone, he brought his protégé at the time, Mr Hudson, to perform their new single ‘Supernova’. Well, as you can imagine, we were all so excited. The interview went really well although maybe I had overdone my WKD measures because Mr Hudson’s voice had cracked and we had to take a little break in the filming to warm his vocals up. Kanye was using a vocoder so I couldn’t tell what his voice sounded like, but to be honest after a vat of WKD I actually sound like I’m using a vocoder, or sometimes if I’m really pissed I sound a bit like a shredder. Once Kanye had come off stage my Paul cornered him in the green room and told him about our impending Californian holiday. They swapped emails and Kanye did say (and I have witnesses) that we must hook up. Of course, you mustn’t forget, dear reader, this is the world of showbiz and people don’t always mean what they say. It’s why celebrities love air-kissing so much – I want to kiss you, but not really, I’ll just kiss the air around your face. Mwah mwah, darling.
I was so excited about travelling to California. I’d been there before with my friend Catherine when I was skint – but youth hostelling it and sitting staring blankly at your washing finishing its spin cycle in the launderette is, I’m certain, not the kind of California Dreamin’ the Mamas & the Papas sang about. It would be nice to go back there with a bit of brass in my pocket and maybe do something more exciting at night than watching my off-white smalls go round and round in a washer-dryer.
You’ll be pleased to know the ‘Sunshine State’ did not disappoint and it proved to be one of our favourite holidays ever! We were advised to hire a convertible and drive up the ‘PCH’ – that’s the Pacific Coast Highway to you – so that’s what we did. What no one told us was that if we were having the top down we should apply copious amounts of sunscreen as even though it was thick cloud those harsh rays do filter through. No one had told me that my bald spot was coming into its own either so when we arrived seven hours later in San Francisco (seven hours – the PCH looked about an inch long on the map!) not only did I have the complexion of ‘The English Patient’, but my bald spot was so red and protruding that my head resembled one of the buzzers on Britain’s Got Talent. Unbeknownst to me, we hadn’t been driving a convertible but a George Foreman Grill with wheels.
San Francisco was everything I wanted it to be, but when I tell people this they assume wrongly that I love it because it’s so gay. The gay area in fact is a very small area called the Castro and basically takes up a couple of blocks – don’t get me wrong, though, it is very gay. We saw a man there casually walking down the high street naked with a cock ring and a balaclava – well, it was a bit nippy. No, believe it or not, it was the other parts (of the city – not the man) that attracted us. Being a huge fan of Vertigo I spent days following where Kim Novak’s character would have gone in Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece like a really really late stalker, so I obviously made a visit to the Palace of Fine Arts and that jetty underneath the Golden Gate Bridge where she tossed herself off.
We then travelled to Sonoma and Napa Valley, all sunscreened up, you’ll be glad to hear. My skin had thankfully gone from beetroot to terracotta in the few days we had been in San Francisco. Sonoma and the Napa Valley are the cutest places you’ll ever see and are famous the world over for their wines – or as I like to put it, Disneyland for pissheads. We’d be walking around a flea market in the square, minding our own business, and then we’d hear a ‘psst psst’. I’d look round and my eyes would settle on a stuffed moose and I’d think, ‘Alan – you must stop drinking.’ But behind the moose there would be a vintner (posh word for winemaker) trying to get our attention, waving a bottle of wine and saying in hushed tones, ‘Do you like Pinot Grigio?’ Yeah – duh! ‘Then follow me’ – and we’d be off down some back street, all very clandestine, to sip some wine. It’s like Scarface but with Sauvignon Blanc. We’d spend the whole day getting leathered and buying all their delicious wine, because naturally there’s no such thing as a free piss-up.
It’s dangerous being pissed all day, for health reasons of course, but also for making judgements when shopping. All over the Wine County there are these quaint little markets and fairs – I promise you, I’m not being paid by the Sonoma tourist board, it’s just that they are really cute. Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of shit being sold too – if I’d turned up on Antiques Roadshow with this one-armed Victorian doll with matted grey hair Fiona Bruce would have pissed her knickers.
Feeling that mid-afternoon slump one day – that’s what happens when you have your first ‘tasting’ at half ten – I went to relax by the pool (okay, I was face-down on the slats of a sun lounger to stop my head spinning), leaving my partner, Paul, shopping unsupervised. Next thing I know I’m being rudely shoved awake.
‘What the …?’ I groan.
‘Alan, Alan, look what I’ve bought, oh my God, oh my God, I can’t believe it – only twenty dollars. I rushed out the shop as soon as I bought it so she couldn’t take it back.’ As my eyes refocused in the Californian sunlight I could see Paul triumphantly holding up Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. In Paul’s defence, it was at least to scale.
‘You woke me up for that? A bloody copy of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers?’
‘How do you know it’s not genuine?’ he answered back sharply.
‘Well, firstly the real one went for over sixty million pounds and secondly, this one’s got Van Goff written in biro on the back.’ I mean, I know Van Gogh had some disturbing mental issues but give him his due, he could spell his own name.
Typical Paul, he digested this information and, still refusing to admit that he’d wasted twenty dollars, said indignantly, ‘I’m going to get it valued.’ He didn’t. I think he had a quick browse courtesy of Wikipedia and saw that the chances of our Sunflowers being genuine were very slim – I noticed it wasn’t packed in the car as we left our hotel. So we drove on, a painting lighter and sadly sixty million pounds poorer.
We spent the last few days of our holiday in a scorching Palm Springs. The place was almost other-worldly; all the colours seemed heightened and juxtaposed against the barren desert landscape and we couldn’t really decide what to make of it as we walked the streets. Judging by its inhabitants, it seemed both elderly and yet full-on homosexual. Basically, if Sir Ian McKellen was a holiday destination he would be Palm Springs. Sad that our holiday was coming to an end, my travel wallet depressingly empty, my head full of memories, my suitcase jam-packed with dirty washing (you know the score), we decided to head to Melvyn’s.
Melvyn’s is a restaurant and lounge bar for ever associated with old Hollywood history. Frank Sinatra, Rita Hayworth, Debbie Reynolds and Liberace have all walked through Melvyn’s legendary doors for a beverage or two; well, they can add Northamptonian National Treasure Alan Carr to that list now. It was like walking back in time – in a good way, not like walking into a British Home Stores. If the Rat Pack had suddenly jumped on the stage and sang ‘Ain’t That a Kick in the Head’ they wouldn’t have looked out of place, if you see what I mean.
Something I did not know, which came as a pleasant surprise, was that Melvyn’s is also where the Apple Martini was invented, or so the waitress told us, so of course it would be rude not to. I’d never had an Apple Martini before, so what an amazing opportunity for me to pop my Apple Martini cherry. Hmmm! You know how some people have a certain drink that when they drink it they go a little bit doolally tap? For example, with my friend Matt it’s High Commissioner Whisky – he once picked me up and put me head first into a wheelie bin. Until that fateful night in Palm Springs I hadn’t realized that my drink was Apple Martini. I don’t know what Melvyn put in it but I turned big style – not only did my Apple Martini give me superpowers (superhuman stamina and a relentless appetite for more drink), it also gave me amnesia. I woke up in our chalet and at first I thought we had been burgled – the burglar had tipped the coffee table over, pulled my clothes out of the wardrobe and flung them across the room. I didn’t feel good at all. I went to the bathroom, looked in the mirror and saw that I�
��d got a black eye – oh my God, I’d been in a fight. I went to the bed and rolled Paul over. His face was bruised too and he had what looked like the imprint of a flip-flop sole on his forehead. Unbeknownst to me, we’d had a fight the night before. After we’d left Melvyn’s I’d turned into a wild man and lunged at my Paul in the street, attacking him with a Havaiana flip-flop. The only way he could get me off, he said, was punching me in the face. Who knew something as innocent as an Apple Martini would be for me like bath salts in a glass.
We went down to breakfast and were met by the frosty eyes of everyone in the hotel. It was only a boutique hotel so thankfully there weren’t too many people, but there were enough combined glares to melt the ice cubes in our Tropicana. We had never had a fight before so it was all a bit awkward. We had meant to visit the Sinatra Estate where, yes, you guessed it, Frank Sinatra lived after visiting Palm Springs in the late 1940s and falling in love with it. Apparently there is a chunk missing from the sink where Frank threw a bottle of champagne at Ava Gardner – maybe he’d had an Apple Martini at Melvyn’s too, who knows. But both being hungover and in a foul mood we decided to just stay put. It was sad that such a lovely holiday had ended on such a downer – and that feeling wasn’t about to improve. We still weren’t talking to each other until Paul, surprisingly, spoke (it’s usually me that speaks first – well, I guess I am Chatty Man).