by Alan Carr
Anyhow, back at the ‘home of science’, we all filed in to see the children. Although we would be on opposing teams I thought I would try to put them at their ease. After all, they were only eleven and the prospect of appearing on television is scary enough, let alone answering really hard questions in front of an audience. So I went on the charm offensive. I stepped into the room, all smiles, only to be greeted with ‘GOD, ALAN CARR – YOU’RE SO LOUD AND ANNOYING – I CAN’T STAND YOU, YOU’RE NOT EVEN FUNNY’ shouted in an imperious voice. The rest of the children laughed and looked disdainfully at me. If no one had been looking I would have twatted the little shit round the head with his ‘Eggheads’ lunchbox. They then huddled in a group and looked over at Countdown’s Rachel Riley. ‘She’s nowhere near as good as Carol Vorderman,’ they stage-whispered. But it was poor old comedian Aisling Bea who bore the brunt of the little cherubs’ mockery: ‘Look at your nose – you big Irish witch. You DO know you’re not allowed to use SORCERY in the quiz?’ the ringleader chipped in, cackling and pointing towards her (for the record) medium-sized nose. If this is intelligence for you I would rather be thick as shit. It was like being in the playground all over again. I tried to be polite.
‘What’s your specialist subject?’
‘The paradoxes of Zeno of Elea,’ came the reply from one of them – for a minute I thought he was referring to Xena: Warrior Princess on Channel 5 but actually he was of course referring to the Greek philosopher Zeno and the set of philosophical problems he created to support Parmenides’ doctrine. ‘What’s yours?’ he asked inquisitively.
‘The Life and Times of the Golden Girls Season Four to Season Six.’
‘What’s the Golden Girls?’ he said suspiciously.
Great, I thought, now I feel thick AND old! I tried to explain the Golden Girls but he ended up looking at me in the same way I’d looked at him when he’d said Zeno, so I decided to leave it be.
To be fair, it was quite a fun day after all; once the children realized it wasn’t a matter of life and death and chilled the fuck out, the day passed without event. Child Genius is set to hit our screens this autumn, and hopefully it will raise lots of money for Stand Up To Cancer – we all of course donated our fees to the charity and I really hope you enjoy the show. I won’t offer up any spoilers to you, you’ll just have to find out yourselves who left with their heads held high and who ended up with egg on their faces – but you can probably have a bloody good guess.
Stand Up To Cancer is a biennial event (once every two years – yes, I learnt that from those clever kids!) and it is a real privilege to be asked to present it along with Davina and Dr Christian. On the one hand I look forward to it because it means raising lots of money (mainly thanks to your generosity) to help fight cancer but I also dread it because invariably I end up sobbing throughout the night, listening to all the stories and the battles, some won, some sadly lost. It is such an emotionally charged event – I don’t think I’ve ever been involved in anything so filled with energy and laughter one moment and then tears and snot bubbles the next. I remember we had broken the record set two years earlier and the whole team was buzzing with the enormous amount donated by the general public – I awoke the next morning still walking on air, foolishly patting myself on the back for a ‘job well done’. It was then that I went to my laptop and checked my mail and saw it there in my inbox – an email from the parent of a lad who had been in contact with my agent and was due to come and see my stand-up tour telling us he had lost his battle with cancer the night before. Stupid, I know, but you sort of think no one’s going to die when you’re doing a charity fundraiser, as if we could stop this awful disease just through positivity alone. We had raised all that money and yet we were too late to save him. Well, I just burst into tears – it had highlighted the horrible reality, this awful sobering thought that we can’t give up, the fight doesn’t stop once the telethon does, we have got to keep going. There are always going to be people who need our help and so the battle must continue and let’s hope this autumn Stand Up To Cancer raises even more money.
As you can imagine after all the trauma in Notting Hill, I had started missing Manchester. Yes, I had joked about Scally Karen in Stretford and how rough around the edges the Drum pub had been and how the barmaid had laughed at me when I asked for a wine list – ‘A what list?’ – but they’d never been weird. And I’d never felt uneasy up there – the people were too friendly. I was mid-reminisce one day when weirdly I got a call on my mobile with the 0161 code – ahh, Manchester!
I had been renting out my flat in Stretford – the property boom had flat-lined and the assurances that the Salford Media Village which had just been constructed around the corner would become the epicentre of the Media World and that my humble abode would triple in value hadn’t really materialized. This news was compounded by the discovery of a body in the park that was spitting distance from my flat. Even Phil and Kirstie would struggle to put a positive spin on that. The Manchester phone call was from my letting agent in Stretford. I picked up, instantly curious.
‘Hiya, Alan, it’s Dawn here, just letting you know, the police are outside your property in Stretford and they want to smash your door down – would you be okay with that?’
‘What? The police?’
‘Yes, they want to knock your door down.’
‘My God – what’s happened?’
‘I’m afraid your tenants, Mr Awolowo and Miss Chukwuemeka, have been using your flat as a cannabis farm and the police want to arrest them.’
Excuse me – cannabis farm? No, not my lovely flat, it was so innocent and unassuming. I couldn’t believe for one minute it had got involved with drugs.
‘Can the police go in?’
‘Er, yes, go ahead.’
‘We’ll keep you posted,’ trilled Dawn cheerily, hanging up, as if I’d rung up and asked her to tell me the latest goings-on in Big Brother or something.
Dawn did ring back and filled me in. They’d smashed the door down and Mr Awolowo had jumped out of the window over my Juliet balcony and run to the park, but thankfully he had been arrested trying to get on the Metro. Miss Chukwuemeka was not at the flat and had apparently gone rogue and disappeared under the radar, which is no mean feat with a name like Miss Chukwuemeka, but anyway.
At first I couldn’t believe it but then I could. This kind of weird shit always happens to me so I’m sort of used to it – do you know what I mean? There is always ‘something’, and here’s another example. Me and my friend Sam, who you might remember from Stand Up To Cancer survived throat cancer, we bought a narrow boat together. We’d had a lovely weekend in Bath cruising up the canals there, tipsy on lager, cranking open the locks, chatting merrily to all the other canal-boat owners; it felt so relaxing and liberating bobbing along and, like Victor Kiam, I loved it so much I actually bought a barge, as you do. Once we had transported it back to London, enamoured with our new purchase and thrilled with our new road-free utopia, we sailed along the Regent Canal into a body wedged in a suitcase in the canal – yes, a fucking body in a suitcase. The police were called and Sam was questioned (she was innocent, thank God). I was on stage in Croydon on my Yap Yap Yap tour at the time – honest, check the dates and everything – but nevertheless my boat was all over the news bedecked in ‘Police Crime Scene’ tape. Thankfully they caught the poor girl’s murderer – it was her boyfriend who had killed her. Like the cannabis farm, my agent told me not to tell a soul, which as you can imagine for me was so hard.
‘How’s that barge you bought?’ my mum would say.
‘Fine, just fine,’ I would say, shuffling nervously. If I saw two youths smoking a spliff I would imagine them saying ‘This is good shit – pure hundred per cent Stretford’ – well, maybe that’s an exaggeration but I was nervous and back then I was scared of the press. My agent was right though about keeping it all under my hat and away from the journalists. As newspapers migrate to more online pastures, the news is condensed into sound bites – the
y are called clickbaits – to draw you in to ‘click’ on the story. You find people don’t actually read the articles (but will gladly comment on them). I know it wouldn’t have been headline news, but still, the last thing I needed to see was ‘Carr’s Barge of Death’, or worse, a mocked-up head of me with a Rasta-hat and superimposed doobie, headlined ‘Alan Carrnabis’. So there you go, I’ve finally come clean – who’d have thought you’d be reading about drugs and murder in an Alan Carr autobiography. Who knows, there might even be a sex tape later – but then again, you’ve got to have sex first.
I went back up to Manchester to visit the flat. It was so upsetting; it was totally wrecked. It stank like Bob Marley’s ashtray, they had stubbed cigarettes out on the carpet, wardrobes had been smashed up and the fridge was bent double where it had been kicked in. I left that day with a heavy heart and, weirdly, the munchies.
Not long after that I moved up to Blackpool – well, sort of. My agent had received a call asking if I would like to have my good self turned into a waxwork dummy for all to see at none other than the world-famous Madame Tussauds. Of course I leapt at the chance and obviously with me living in London it would be no hardship nipping up to Baker Street to check out my waxwork likeness. But it wasn’t to be in London, as it turned out, it was going to be in the Blackpool Madame Tussauds. Oh! My dream of rubbing wax shoulders with Gandhi and the Queen Mother melted before my eyes like, well, like a waxwork that’s been left next to a patio heater. I’d once nipped into the waxworks in Blackpool when it had started raining, at a loose end waiting for my father, who was manager of the local football team, to come back from training. The waxworks looked shoddy and with their gozzy eyes and manic grins, some of them were more terrifying than the serial killer dummies in the dungeons below. I don’t want to bore you with business details but apparently, since then, they’d been taken over properly and Madame Tussauds had invested loads of money, which was plain to see when I went back there. It had had a complete makeover and there I was alongside Keith Lemon, Simon Cowell and Cheryl Fernandez-Versini.
The process of making a waxwork was an interesting one, which took place not in Blackpool but just outside Hammersmith. I met up at their headquarters, a large multi-roomed warehouse full of ghostly white heads and bodies all in different stages of completion – half a Russell Brand here, a quarter of Ant and Dec there, all frozen in time waiting to be touched up (aren’t we all?). Sadly, some waxworks were looking a bit dejected, waxworks whose namesakes have lost their fame or done something naughty and therefore have to be taken off display. Forget all the gossip columns, it’s here that you can see who is in favour and who isn’t. Popularity made real and set in wax.
I foolishly assumed that getting my likeness made would be quite simple, I would just stand there naked and then Madame Tussauds would tip a whole bucket of wax over me, a bit like being gunged; it would cascade over my body and set in every nook and cranny and then, once hardened, they would chisel me out and by and by I’d be allowed to go home – job done. No, it was (obviously!) more intricate and professional than that. You have to stand on what can only be called a huge lazy Susan and then you’re told to ‘Strike a pose!’ a typical pose that would represent you. Once you have chosen your pose, you are then slowly rotated, inch by inch, while they take your photo and measurements with some very futuristic lasers, making sure all the time that you are still in your chosen position. How much you then want to put into the process depends on how realistic you want your waxwork to be. I wanted mine to be perfect and was very hands-on. It is so strange when they bring in a huge drawer full of eyeballs and then a huge drawer full of hair samples and you sit there choosing which one perfectly matches your own – it is a narcissist’s dream. I actually ended up donating my own clothes and spectacles. The end result looked very realistic, I was so impressed.
Madame Tussauds Blackpool chose my waxwork to be an interactive part of the tour – if you go there you can see they have recreated the Chatty Man set and I am placed in the centre, just waiting to be interacted with. Anyone who pays the entrance fee can just walk over to me and do whatever they like – and they do. Not a day goes by where I am not shown a photo of someone having their wicked way with me. Touched, fingered, bummed … my wax cock has been grabbed so many times the crotch is beginning to look threadbare. I might be made of wax but I’m like a piece of meat. Sometimes if I’ve had a bit of a night out and roll over in bed and check my Twitter, I have to double-take at the photos on my timeline to make sure it isn’t in fact ME who has grabbed that woman’s tit – oh, thank God, she placed her own tit in my waxy hand. One of the things that has always perplexed me is that although I am probably one of the least sexual people you will ever come across, people do try to have their wicked way with me. Maybe that’s part of the appeal – I am like Kenneth Williams and the general public are like Hattie Jacques, pulling me squirming to their ample bosom. That poor waxwork has been subjected to more groping and depraved indecency than a full-time sex worker.
In the early noughties the city of Barcelona peppered its Ramblas with brightly coloured fibreglass cows which proved a big hit with the tourists, so my home town Northampton decided to emulate this by erecting lions all over Northampton town centre. I was honoured when it was decided to decorate one à la Alan and there it stood in Northampton town market in all its magnificence, guarding the fruit and veg; well, it wasn’t long before someone had nicked its glasses, snapped its teeth out and tweeted a photo of someone bumming it. Now I know how Banksy feels when someone throws a pot of paint over one of his creations.
Sketches have always been a big part of my oeuvre (whatever that means), whether it’s The Friday Night Project or my annual New Year Specstacular, and I recommend anyone to watch at least one Specstacular before you die. It’s like CCTV from an 18 to 30 holiday – it makes Geordie Shore look like Downton Abbey. That dreadful footage filmed in Magaluf a few years back of the girl sucking those fifteen men off so as she could get a complimentary cocktail was so close to an actual game on Specstacular that I had to speak to my lawyers. Have you ever seen that BBC natural history programme Earth with David Attenborough? Do you remember the episode where those barnacle geese goslings are stuck 400 feet up on the side of that mountain and they need to learn how to fly so they just leap into the unknown and plummet downwards, ricocheting off the side of the mountain, smacking their heads against the granite as they bounce down, only to land with a thump, sore and battered but alive and well? That’s like me on a Specstacular record: I swig some champagne, go out on to the stage and plummet – I just freefall through the show, bouncing merrily off whatever I hit, all six hours of it.
We have such good guests on that show, Justin Bieber, Bruno Mars, Ellie Goulding and James Corden to name but a few, and whether I like it or not, it’s always a riot. Sometimes it’s hard to tell who are the more pissed, the celebrity guests, who all evening have been slowly pumped with alcopops, beers and Prosecco, or the audience, who all evening have been slowly pumped with alcopops, beers and Prosecco. You see, comrade, everyone is treated the same on my Specstacular. By part eight, it’s basically crowd control; people are getting off with each other. Jimmy Bullard, fresh from his ‘success’ on I’m a Celebrity, pulled off his trousers and sat on my face; another year one celebrity got fingered during a crowd surge and poor old Danny Dyer went through every alcohol stage during the six-hour record, from fun drunk to silly drunk, morose drunk, angry drunk and slumped drunk, and ended by flashing his surprisingly large ballbag at me and Mel B.
Considering my outfits and wigs for the sketches are ropy, historically incorrect and downright itchy, the locations that the team pick are always surprisingly excellent. There is someone who is dedicated to finding these locations for filming the sketches and, as you can imagine, they have to be spot on – they can make or break a scene. You wouldn’t film Wolf Hall in an NCP car park, do you get what I’m saying? I have rocked up to film my Specstacular sketches in some absolu
tely beautiful places, including Hever Castle, the Methodist Central Hall in Westminster and many lovely churches and stately homes. Some things, however, are out of the location manager’s hands. I turned up to one location, a woman’s house near Golders Green, and I was going to be Kerry Katona. To be honest, the sketch was a bit harsh and unnecessary. I was going to have trotters and a curly tail – yes, I was cruelly going to portray Kerry as a pig. I feel so bad because I’ve met her since and actually she’s really sweet; like everyone, I’d seen her in the papers and thought I’d got her sussed. Anyway, I came through the door hooved and snouted, with my cute little tail poking through the back of my terry towelling dressing gown. I was greeted by the aghast homeowner screaming, ‘Get out, get out of my house!’ I was like, what? It turns out she was an Orthodox Jew and any depictions of pigs or anything remotely porcine were strictly forbidden in her house. Well, my cute little curly tail was out the door quicker than you could say ‘pork scratchings’. I was then ushered away to wait in the car by the production manager as another maybe less religious household was found.