by Alan Carr
Poor old Elliott had to have six tough weeks off with his leg in plaster to get his leg mended and also, more importantly, to recuperate mentally – it had been such a vicious assault. I carried on the tour without him, hoping no more shit would go down. Seriously, I thought, enough with the dramas, what was happening to me? I felt cursed – I kept checking through my tour book to see if I had done a gig on an old Indian burial ground or something. Earlier in the tour we had stayed at a hotel up north and whilst having post-performance drinks the hotel manager, quiet tiddly herself, had pulled out a Ouija board and we had started contacting the dead. I wondered if I had angered any spirits and if this run of bad luck could have been brought about by meddling with things from the other side. Mind you, looking back, we weren’t terribly successful. At one point, we asked, ‘Is there anybody there?’ and the duty manager, who had nodded off at the table, started talking in his sleep – we hadn’t contacted the dead but we had contacted Jim. Well, anyway, drama like this makes it easy to write autobiographies but not so easy on the nerves.
After saying at the end of 2015 that I was going to relax and enjoy some quality ‘me’ time, 2016 has proved to be the complete opposite – isn’t that always the way? A succession of very exciting projects that I hope you will see very soon on your TV screens has had me beavering away, loving the chance to step back from the chat show for a bit and display a different side of me. These projects, however, have been bittersweet for me – it’s the first time I have taken on anything without being under the watchful eye of my manager, Addison Cresswell, who I mentioned earlier in the book. He took over my career in 2005 and changed my life beyond recognition – I owe so much to him. Ask anyone who knew him, he was a tornado, a whirling dervish of enthusiasm and ideas. The phone would ring at 2.00 a.m. in the morning: ‘You know that show we were talking about – what if we set it on a cruise ship and all the guests are shipped in on inflatable bananas?!’ If anyone rang at that time I knew it was either Addison or my Nan had died. Half asleep, I would try to piece together what the hell he was on about – ‘Er, yeah, I think that would be a good idea, eh?’ – but then he would flitter off, I would say like a butterfly but he was so nocturnal I guess moth would be the best simile. Comedy was his life and he just had this sixth sense for knowing what would work and what wouldn’t. He transformed stand-up comedy with his Live at the Apollo series; before that stand-up had been filmed in an almost apologetic way, above a pub or in a smoky back room with a solitary mike stand looking sorry for itself. Live at the Apollo made stand-up comedy sexy, it was flash, it was rock and roll, and it introduced the general public to a load of fresh new stand-up comedians that you might never have come across, John Bishop and Micky Flanagan to name but two.
The show mimicked his energy and enthusiasm so it was a complete shock on 23 December 2013 when I got a call to say that he had died of a heart attack in his sleep at the age of fifty-three. Totally unbelievable. This guy was so restless with ideas and schemes and plans I couldn’t even imagine him sleeping let alone dying. There was a horrendous storm that night, the trees were swaying violently past the window and our recycling bins were playing kiss chase across the lawn. Then, to cap it all, we were plunged into darkness courtesy of a power cut. Knowing what Addison was like, I could just picture him cackling away, moving objects around my house, slamming doors – and of all the people on his books it would be me he would take the most pleasure in haunting. Addison would make the best poltergeist and if you’d met him you’d know exactly what I mean. Sitting there in the pitch black, the only thing showing any life was the burglar alarm that for some unknown reason had started up and was wailing across London. Unable to get a technician out so close to Christmas, we had to put up and shut up. Yes, needless to say it was the most miserable Christmas ever.
Addison had saved me when I was at a confused time in my life, at a crossroads, miserable, unsure, uncertain of the future, and had put me on the right track. I miss him and his ability to make everything all right; in a notoriously flaky industry, he had my back. I even miss all those early-morning calls when I would grunt under my breath as I fumbled for my mobile on the bedside table, ‘What does he want now?’ What I would give for him to give me one last call, just so I could hear his voice again … Addison – I miss you so much.
I love Channel 4, without them I would be nothing. They have supported me and given me work for the last ten years and for that I will be for ever grateful. But as much as I love television, I detest television politics, those behind-the-scenes goings-on where someone upstairs has made a decision and you being a ‘name’ or ‘face’ of the channel have to endorse it whether you like it or not. It happens at all channels and is by no means exclusive to Channel 4, but you soon come to the sorry realization that you are actually the monkey and not the organ grinder. Whether it’s a blanket ban on mentioning, say, a reality show that involves celebrities plummeting down a ski slope and ending up in a wheelchair or a neck brace – I’m just thinking out loud here – or maybe a show that a Channel 4 commissioner passed up on and subsequently turned out to be a huge hit for a rival channel, well, understandably as a paid-up employee of Channel 4 I’m not going to start raving about it. However, there are times when you find yourself caught in the crossfire and everything is out of your control and you have to sit there powerless, feeling the pegs being slipped slowly down the back of your shirt as you are hauled up upon the washing line and ‘hung out to dry’.
I used to be a features editor for More magazine, now sadly defunct (don’t look at me!) and I liked More because it was positive, no one was pilloried, it wasn’t bullying, it wasn’t sensationalist, it was the kind of magazine that if I had a teenage daughter I would like her to read – it was one of the good gals. No one got treated like a paedophile if they had a handbag that didn’t match their shoes and if you were fat no one gave a shit. Every week I would go to meet a ‘celebrity’ and chat to them and have a few photos taken with them, usually with me dressed as a gimp – but hey, it paid the bills. Well, one week I was meeting the stars of Sky’s hit dance show Got to Dance, Kimberly Wyatt, Ashley Banjo and Adam Garcia, at Covent Garden’s legendary Pineapple Dance Studios. I turn up there with my Dictaphone, notebook and pencil, and what every prospective journalist needs, a red setter (I think Paul must have been working – anyway, I digress).
I headed into Pineapple Dance Studios and how can I describe the vision that met my eyes? There was a camera crew filming and this homosexual pirouetting around the foyer like a lazy Susan on speed – I stopped in my tracks! ‘Welcome to Pineapple Dance Studios,’ he lisped hysterically, putting one leg into a pointe and resting the other on the reception counter – this man made me look like Chuck Norris. I laughed nervously and went into one of the many dance studios where I did my interview, thinking what an odd little man – obviously this was before Pineapple Dance Studios became such a big hit and the whole world was introduced to that fabulous camp human whirlwind Louie Spence. The penny dropped as I was watching it: ‘So that was the show they were filming – oh, I get it now.’ I was actually excited that I was going to be on Pineapple Dance Studios.
What I didn’t know was that Channel 4 had turned the series down the year before and it had gone to Sky 1 and since become this hit show that everyone was talking about. Channel 4, feeling a tad irked, had implemented a ban on any Channel 4 talent being on the show. But I’d already been filmed on it, what could they do? Channel 4 stood fast and denied permission for me to be seen on Pineapple Dance Studios. Please, when you’ve finished reading this book, go on to YouTube and watch the clip – it’s so ridiculous you can’t even get annoyed. I am completely pixilated, along with my dog, pixels so big they look like Stickle Bricks, and my voice has been autotuned HIGHER! The only thing they didn’t autotune is my laugh – so you can tell it is me instantly. As I come through the door the narrator, Michael Buerk, comments archly, ‘Sometimes international superstars drop into Pineapple Dance Studios –
this one refused to be filmed.’ What!? Arseholes – I’d been stitched up like a kipper! The humiliation of it all. But what could I do, what could I say? Did anyone really care about the commissioning process of Pineapple Dance Studios? Not really, but social media had their say (of course) without bothering to get the whole story (of course): ‘Too big to go on Pineapple Dance Studios, are you?’ came the accusations; ‘International superstar – I don’t think so.’
God, I felt a right dick and although my ego was bruised, it was a great leveller, a little reminder that you are a small cog in a bigger machine and that sometimes things are out of your control, you are powerless. This surprises some people because they think celebrity equals power, but sometimes that just isn’t the case. I assumed that once on the telly in the comfort of my own chat show format I would be brimming with confidence, I would feel bulletproof, I would be striding down the street, chest puffed out, cockiness personified. Oddly, I’ve found the opposite to be true; if anything, it has undermined my confidence in a lot of ways. Instead of soothing my anxieties I think it has added to them, but then again I worry too much and I know this. You create the show or the stand-up routine and like a parent you send your child off to school and hope it doesn’t get too bullied and picked on. Why do you do it then? you ask. Give up, let someone else have a chance if you hate it so much, you big old misery guts! Well, it’s the buzz, isn’t it? All the time I’m on stage I am getting the biggest thrill – it’s the other bollocks that attach themselves to the process that do my head in.
The problem is that celebrity is mistaken for wisdom. I remember a female DJ saying something ill-judged on the radio and she got a barrage of abuse. She apologized and everyone forgot about it – that’s the reason I’m being vague because she’s moved on from it all so I don’t want to dwell. (And besides, this book is about ME! If you want to know about her scandal, read her bloody book!) Commentators, social media and anyone with an opinion basically said, ‘She’s in the public eye – she should know better.’ This has always perplexed me – WHY should people in the public eye know better? How do we know better than you? What is better anyway? Perhaps people assume that once you get a show on television you are whisked off to a ladies’ finishing school, lobotomized, fitted with a chip and shoved back out with all your opinions sanitized and politically correct – believe me, you aren’t. I am fumbling along, trying to make sense of it all, like the rest of you.
The only guidance I ever got was a couple of hours of media training at Channel 4 headquarters, where a woman who was a dead spit for the Governess on The Chase quizzed me ferociously on camera in a mock interview, pelting me with journalistic curveballs, flustering me and leading me down conversational cul-de-sacs. I then watched it back and she went through my answers with a fine-tooth comb, highlighting how things could be taken out of context, homing in on what was quite an innocent reply and how that could be manipulated to say the complete opposite – it’s true you can draw poison from the clearest of wells. She then told me conspiratorially to avoid certain nightclubs and bars as newspapers and gossip magazines had paid informants (her words) that would be listening into your conversations. She said, ‘Taxi drivers, doctors, police, court clerks, nurses, bar staff, cabin crew – all sell stories so don’t say anything incendiary around them that could be used against you.’ Fuck, as I left the building I looked behind me to check whether I had in fact wandered into MI5 instead of the Channel 4 offices.
Filled with fear, the taxi ride home was like a minefield.
‘What you up to today?’ said the cabbie.
‘Nothing!’ I replied, scanning the cab for bugs – desperate that my ‘Big Shop at Asda’ would remain off the front page of the News of the World.
I read a lot of autobiographies, both for pleasure and for Chatty Man, and I know there is nothing more boring than a celebrity moaning about the awful press intrusion, especially when you see them on the front of every magazine, gurning spread-eagled on their kitchen island, legs akimbo, letting the press inside ‘their home’. ‘Their home’ is in inverted commas because a lot of the time it’s not their home at all and is rented or hired for the photo shoot, which makes the whole pantomime even more ridiculous. I get on with journalists, I’ve got some that are my mates; we always have a good laugh and a gossip and you can bet your bottom dollar that gossip will be with them until they die. Having said that, some journalists aren’t nice – then again, some celebrities aren’t nice.
I’m proud of how well Chatty Man has done, but it wasn’t always like that – it got slagged off badly in the early days. The Sun ran a piece saying it was going to be axed after JUST ONE SERIES – they changed the font and put it in bold just in case you didn’t quite understand the words. I can laugh off that shitty article now from the safety of my sixteenth series, but it stung at the time. They’d followed me and taken a photo of me holding my head looking miserable in the street, because if you find out that your series has been axed after JUST ONE SERIES I don’t know about you but I tend to go out and just stand in the street holding my head. The show then kept getting moved around in the listings, which isn’t ideal – if your audience can’t find you then how can it grow? It’s been moved again this year to a Thursday, which I actually think is a good move on Channel 4’s part; at least the comparisons with Graham Norton’s chat show directly opposite on a Friday might stop (which has the most frighteningly amazing celebrity line-ups each week!). Wherever you move it, of course, some people still don’t get it or enjoy it and that’s fine. ‘Chatty Man? More like Batty Man!’ the wits cry. I know, that’s why I called it Chatty Man, it was a deliberate subversion of the homophobic term. Jeez!
Still, I am determined this is not going to be one of those moany books all about poor me being slagged off. I had my journalistic epiphany on Chatty Man, believe it or not. We had Karl Pilkington on, a boy band you might have heard of called One Direction and Lady C – a bonkers hermaphrodite aristocrat fresh from her stint on I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! – don’t ever say Chatty Man doesn’t give you variety!
During the interview Louis Tomlinson’s phone had gone off and out of politeness he said, ‘Sorry, Alan, oops, should have turned it off,’ and slid it across the floor. The audience, full of Directioners, cooed in unison, their hearts melting at such an act of kindness, and the interview continued drama-free. We had to record a couple of songs because One Direction had very kindly said they would sing a song for my Christmas special too – the sweethearts – so the record was taking longer than normal. By the time Lady C came on well past 9.00 p.m., the Directioners, who had been outside the studio from 9.00 in the morning so as to get good studio seats, decided quiet understandably to go home. The show was all wrapped up by 9.30, I had a few glasses of wine with the team and we all congratulated ourselves on what a fun show we’d had. So imagine my surprise when I read in the paper the next day that Louis had thrown his mobile across the studio in a fit of rage and the audience, so outraged at what Lady C had said, had stormed out – I thought maybe someone had spiked my Cinzano. None of that had happened, it was all bullshit. I get so protective of my show that I felt truly aggrieved. It was a load of bollocks. This was a betrayal by the press, I spluttered to my agent down the phone, shaking my fist – probably. Then the next day when we got the ratings in, I had my epiphany. You stupid idiot, Alan – you’ve missed the whole point of this chat show lark. The newspapers got the headlines, the band got the publicity, the newspaper readers got the gossip and I got the ratings – and before my eyes blazed the reciprocal ring of celebrity. Who cares if it’s not true, everyone got what they wanted and I was the last to understand it – what an idiot I was. I had to get it into my big, thick, naive skull that this isn’t charity work, love, it’s showbiz. What a revelation.
Still, it has to be said that press intrusion is not always so flippant; sometimes it can take a more sinister turn and there is one incident that I do need to mention that really shook me up. It was
my first taste of the ‘dark arts’ of the tabloids.
I got a call out of the blue from my mum, asking me frantically, ‘Are you okay? Are you okay?’
I put down my croque monsieur. ‘Yeah, why?’
The drama unfolded. A journalist had come to my parents’ neighbours’ house and told them I had been in a serious car accident and that he needed to contact my brother, Gary, to let him know. ‘Would you have his phone number or address, it’s really urgent?’ he said. My parents’ neighbours, obviously in a panic, gave him my brother’s address and the journalist went off. Of course, once at my brother’s, there was no mention of me being involved in a serious car crash; however, if Gary wanted to sell any stories on me he would be handsomely rewarded. He told them to ‘fuck off’.
Apparently it’s called ‘doorstepping’ and it’s quite common with tabloid journalists, but whatever it’s called it was pretty low behaviour and it put not only my family but their neighbours in a right state. I think even the most ‘celebrity-hating’ reader, with their predictable catch-all ‘if you don’t like it get a job at Tesco’, will feel slightly unsettled at that story. A line had been crossed and it felt sinister. I’m not going to start pointing fingers and moaning about the press; we are all to blame because we are the ones who want the gossip and we want it now and we want it fresh. I have spent hours chewing the fat with friends, discussing X’s career or Y’s love life, when my own home life or career has been less than rosy. I guess it’s easier, and safer, to sort someone else’s life out than your own. If you start picking at your own life, I think we’d all feel a bit scared at what we might find once it started unravelling.