May I Have Your Attention Please?

by James Corden

  Unfortunately, however, my enthusiasm didn’t last long. No sooner were my options on paper than I was called to see Mr Graham, our head of year. I don’t remember a huge amount about Mr Graham other than he had this sort of half-beard – not quite full growth and not quite a goatee. I do remember he was inconsistent, though. That’s got to make for the trickiest kind of teacher, doesn’t it? When you’re that age all you want from a teacher is to know where you stand. If they’re grumpy, they’re grumpy; as a pupil you know they’re grumpy and if you so much as look at them the wrong way you’ll be met by grumpiness. You can deal with that. Then you have the other, ‘cooler’ teachers, the ones who are daring enough to show they have a sense of humour, and so long as you don’t step too far out of line, will treat you with the same amount of respect you’re prepared to show them.

  I’m not saying that Mr Graham was bad at teaching – actually, I remember him being really good in the classroom; it’s just that you never quite knew where you stood with him. One day he would be fun and almost revel in the rolling of his eyes when you were a bit cheeky. Then the next day he’d have you marched down the staff corridor for doing the smallest thing wrong. It was all very confusing.

  So, a few days after I’d submitted my GCSE choices, I was summoned to his office. As I trudged down the corridor, I was hoping that today the side of the bed he’d got out of was so lovely that he’d decided I should direct the school play and that’s what this meeting was about. I waited in the staff corridor, leaning against the wall, looking on as the passing teachers glared and tutted at me.

  ‘I’m here for a meeting. I haven’t been naughty!’ I wanted to shout. But that wasn’t an option. If you so much as breathed too loudly in the staff corridor you were immediately shushed by Miss Ventress, the school nurse/secretary.

  Finally the waiting was over and I was called in. I sat down and took a good look at Mr Graham, trying to read him. He seemed in a good enough mood, I supposed. When I say good, I mean he didn’t glare at me the moment I opened the door. He told me to sit down and our conversation went something like this.

  ‘James,’ he said, ‘I’ve been looking at your GCSE options and I’m rather concerned.’

  ‘Really, sir. Why?’

  ‘Drama, Music and Home Economics?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Hmmm.’ He arched one of his eyebrows. ‘They’re not exactly what you’d call serious subjects, are they?’

  ‘Well, they are to me. I’m very serious about Drama and Music. Very serious indeed. And I think everyone in the school can see how seriously I’m taking Home Economics.’

  ‘James, you can’t do Music, Drama and Cooking as your options. I can see what you’re trying to do and it won’t wash. No way. What use will Music and Drama be in the outside world?’

  By this point, as you can imagine, I was slightly put out. ‘Well, that depends what I do, sir, doesn’t it? I mean, what use is Science to a milkman? No use at all, but even if you want to be a milkman, you still have no choice but to take it. I’m going to be an actor, I—’

  Mr Graham jumped right in. ‘James, you’re not going to be an actor. You’d like to be an actor.’

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘It’s all very well having dreams. We all have dreams, but at some point you have to live in the real world. No, I’m afraid it’s out of the question. You can’t do both Music and Drama. You simply can’t.’

  I was wide-eyed now and could feel the heat in my cheeks. ‘But—’ I spluttered.

  ‘Only three students have chosen Music as an option so we’re taking it off the syllabus this year. I’m sorry, we can’t have a class with only three students. It just isn’t possible.’

  ‘Oh right. Sure. I mean, God forbid that a class in this school should have fewer than forty kids to a teacher.’

  (OK, I didn’t say that. I wasn’t that politically aware; I was only fourteen after all. What I actually said was …)

  Truth is, I don’t remember what I said. I’m not sure I said anything. I was most likely speechless. I just didn’t know how this could be deemed acceptable. What if one of those three students was potentially a brilliant musician? What college or university was going to take them seriously if they didn’t even have something as basic as a GCSE? I tried to imagine how I’d feel if there was no Drama course that year. I’d have been so upset that I’m pretty sure I would’ve asked Dad if I could move schools. I’d have left my friends and everything else behind to do Drama. Music came a close second to that, and that had just been taken away.

  I was getting irritated now and Mr Graham kept telling me to calm down. But I couldn’t let it rest. I didn’t want to do Science. I couldn’t see how I had any use for it and I wasn’t the only one – none of my mates wanted to take Science either. Why were we made to do this when Music – something that would be really useful to me and that I had a real passion for – was not even being run as a course?

  Mr Graham told me he hadn’t been born yesterday and he knew why I had chosen Music and Home Economics. It was because they were a doss; easy subjects for someone like me to breeze through. I argued that Music would and could become a big part of my career; that one day I was going to be number one in the charts. He laughed loudly and rolled his eyes and I sat there with my face screwed up while he made a point of telling me that no matter what I said or did, it wasn’t going to get me anywhere. The decision had been made and that was that. I had no choice. I had to choose something else.

  I wracked my brains, trying to think of some way I could come out of this with my integrity intact. Then suddenly it came to me. I looked at Mr Graham, smiled a tad wickedly and uttered the words ‘Religious Education’.

  If he thought Music was an easy option, nothing comes easier than RE. You just sit around chatting about things that may or may not have happened. I felt so smug right then and I can still hear the three scoops of sarcasm in his reply. ‘And why, exactly, do you want to do RE?’ he asked me.

  ‘I don’t. I want to do Music. But if I can’t do that, I’ll do RE instead ‘cos it’s easiest.’

  Amazingly (and this is the sort of school I went to), Mr Graham informed me that for the exact same reasons that Music wasn’t being run as a GCSE, neither was RE. It was ridiculous. Three kids wanted to do Music and were told this wasn’t sufficient. Only two wanted to do RE, so that was absolutely off the syllabus. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing so I asked Mr Graham which subjects were available and, word for word, this was his reply: ‘European Studies and Information Technology, but Mr Longman’ – the IT teacher – ‘has made it clear he doesn’t want you in his classroom.’

  So that was that, what a waste. Filling out the form, choosing my options, going to ‘have a chat’ with Mr Graham – the whole thing. What was the point of any of this stuff when the bottom line was I had to suffer Mr Hopkins and European Studies? Even now I can’t understand why Mr Graham bothered to call me in that day. He just laughed at my dreams and proceeded to inform me what I would be studying, without any apparent regard for the things I cared about.

  From that moment on, school meant nothing to me. I didn’t understand school and school had made it quite clear that it didn’t understand me. Being told I had to consider the history and geography of Europe every day for the next two years, all in the hope of obtaining what I saw as a pointless qualification, made me give up on the whole ethos of education.

  I decided I would only focus on the subjects that mattered to me: Drama, English and, of course, Home Economics. The rest was, as far as I was concerned, free time. I stopped taking a bag to school; most days I wouldn’t even have a pen. European Studies in particular became only about pulling the focus away from the teacher to where I was sitting, on my own at a single desk while everyone else was seated in rows of four. Sometimes I’d sleep, other times I’d try my hardest to be ejected from class just so I had something different to look at. It wasn’t inspiring in the slightest. I used to dream of having a teach
er like Robin Williams in Dead Poets’ Society, someone who would inspire me to leap up on a desk and cry, ‘O Captain, my Captain.’

  The thing with actively trying not to learn anything is that it quickly becomes boring. I would try to think of more and more ways to entertain myself, and I’m sorry to say that they usually came at the expense of Mr Hopkins. One time that really sticks out is when he came up to the back of the class to look at Katie Aslett’s work. He was bending over, looking over her shoulder, right in front of my desk, and suddenly, without thinking, I lifted up the lapel of his blazer with the chewed biro I had borrowed from Stuart Turner and dropped the pen into his pocket. He didn’t feel a thing. He walked back to the front of the class, quite oblivious.

  I waited a good five minutes until he was back in his groove, droning on about historic monuments in Bavaria or something, and then I raised my hand. Patiently I waited for him to acknowledge me. I waited and waited. He had seen me, but he knew that whatever I was going to ask would have nothing to do with the subject at hand, so he was ignoring me.

  ‘Sir,’ I said, running out of patience; now I was supporting my raised arm with my other hand wrapped around the back of my head.

  ‘Yes James, what is it?’ he replied gruffly.

  ‘Sir, have you seen my pen?’ I asked, innocently enough.

  His eyes rolled towards the ceiling. ‘No, I haven’t.’

  ‘Sir, are you sure you haven’t seen it? It’s just it was here before you came up, and now it’s gone.’

  Mr Hopkins looked at me, understandably confused, given that I clearly had no intention of ever writing anything down in any of his lessons. So what was I doing talking about a pen?

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve not seen it. Look on the floor.’

  At that I got down on my hands and knees and pretended to hunt for the biro. I was down there a full minute or more until, with all the mischief I could muster, I stood up and said in a voice not dissimilar to one I’d seen used in various courtroom dramas, ‘Sir, have you stolen my pen?’

  Mr Hopkins, who was wiping the blackboard at this point, swivelled round and glared at me. ‘Don’t be so ridiculous, James. Why would I have stolen your pen?’

  I was now standing in front of my desk. The rest of the class had stopped any work they were doing and were all looking my way. ‘Sir,’ I went on, ‘I think you’ve stolen my pen. Why would you do such a thing?!’

  Mr Hopkins was starting to get agitated now. He told me to stop being stupid, sit down and be quiet.

  But I wasn’t letting it lie.

  I demanded that he empty his pockets.

  He refused.

  ‘Sir,’ I said, ‘if you’re innocent, you’d happily empty your pockets. The fact that you won’t tells me only one thing.’

  The rest of the class knew I was up to something and they were joining in now; even the best-behaved students were telling him to show me that he had nothing in his pockets.

  And so, under pressure from the entire class, Mr Hopkins had to give in. He was red-faced, muttering under his breath, visibly annoyed at the indignity of having to respond to my demands. With his eyes firmly fixed on me, he reached into his left pocket and froze. For a moment he just stared. Then he pulled out my half-eaten, ink-stained biro.

  I slapped my forehead hard in mock surprise and let go the loudest gasp.

  Half the class laughed; the others seemed stunned into silence. Before Mr Hopkins could say anything, I pointed my index finger at him and let out a cry. ‘THIEF!’ I shouted. ‘THIEF!! Why would you do such a thing?’

  You’ve never seen a man so angry at this point; that wasn’t going to stop me, though …

  ‘You’ve got loads of pens, sir. Why would you steal from a pupil?’

  His face turned a shade of crimson that can only be described as medically unsafe and, drawing back his hand in an arc, he lobbed the blackboard cleaner right at me. It came like a bullet, so hard and fast it was little more than a blur. It missed my head by inches.

  ‘GET OUT!!’ he yelled. ‘GET OUT OF MY CLASSROOM. NOW!!’

  Mr Thomas, the teacher from next door, came rushing in. ‘What the hell is going on?’ he demanded. I smiled to myself as I watched Mr Hopkins trying to explain how he had come to find my pen in his pocket, and then I was marched out of the classroom and handed a week’s detention.

  I told everyone I was going to go to the police to report Mr Hopkins for stealing. At one point I think I even said that this was bigger than all of us, and who knows how many other teachers’ pens had been ill-gotten gains.

  I really had washed my hands of the whole education thing now and these types of situations would occur almost weekly. I would constantly be on detention and always be in the staff corridor, though I wasn’t a nasty student. I never bullied anyone or tried to make anybody feel bad. My pranks were purely for my own amusement. I think in some strange way I viewed it as a kind of performance, an extended, real-life, real-time improv.

  It was all very silly really and I’d like to take this moment to state categorically that I don’t think my behaviour was cool. It was foolish, and the way I acted meant I was dismissed as nothing more than stupid, an oaf, someone who didn’t care and therefore shouldn’t be cared about. I wish I’d learnt my lesson at the time, that my attitude would only ever result in people thinking I was a prat but, alas, I fear this is a lesson I’ve only recently learnt – in the last year and a half, in fact.

  There’s nothing cool about not caring, or, more to the point, wanting to be seen that you don’t care. People will do and say things all the time that will make you want to jack it all in, but it’s the people who stick it out, who dig deep and put their heads down and persevere – these are the people who get the biggest response. I’ve lived most of my life acting like I don’t care, wanting to seem like I’m cool or brash, and the sad truth is, I care more about how people see me than anyone I know.

  When Gavin & Stacey became popular and I’d be invited on to various chat shows, I would act my most supremely confident and try to be the funniest or rudest version of myself, when actually, deep down, all I wanted was to be taken seriously. The same rules apply in adulthood as they did at school. There’s nothing wrong with caring and there’s nothing wrong with being quiet and showing that you might feel vulnerable. As I say, it’s literally in the last eighteen months or so that, for the first time, I’ve been comfortable enough in my own skin to actually just be myself.

  CHAPTER 5

  BEST MUSICAL ACCOMPANIMENT:

  ‘Theme from Rocky’ by Bill Conti

  BEST FILM TO WATCH ALONGSIDE:

  Invictus

  BEST ENJOYED WITH:

  Lucozade Sport

  EVEN THOUGH THERE were plenty of times at school when I would rather have been anywhere else, it’d be silly not to admit that there were also times that were really good fun. As I’ve said already, the plays were a big highlight and there was one other lesson I’ll always remember very fondly: PE.

  Ah yes. Physical Education. I’m sure you’ve already worked out that this wasn’t my strongest subject. That’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy it – I did. I enjoyed it a lot, actually. I was just rubbish at it. And I mean totally rubbish, woeful, crap, pants, chod – whatever word you want to use, I’m pretty sure it fits. Believe me, you know you’re bad at PE when you’re playing mixed indoor football and even the girls are shouting at you. It’s bad news.

  At the start of my fifth year, aged fifteen, when the first PE lesson of the year came round, the whole year was told to go to the sports hall, the regular kind with floor markings, benches down one side and ropes tied against the wall, where we would be told about what to expect that year. We all sat on the benches, chatting away, when Mr Atkinson, the head of PE (and a teacher whom everybody liked) came in. He spent three or four minutes asking for quiet and then explained that in our final year PE was going to be a little different. They were going to split the year into different groups, and if your n
ame was called, you were to move into one of the groups Mr Atkinson specified.

  He began reading out names. ‘Steven Hawes. Group A.’ Steve, or Deano, as we called him, was the school’s football star. He’d represented England at every junior level and was at that time a schoolboy on the books at Sheffield United.

  ‘Lyndsey Reece. A.’ Lyndsey was an incredibly gifted runner who used to run for the county or something like that. When she heard her name, she moved over to the A group with Steven.

  ‘Andrew Frewin. A.’ Frewin was a brilliant footballer and had had trials at lots of big clubs. He was one of those natural sportsmen who was good at everything.

  And so the list went on. Everyone could see what was happening: they were forming an elite sports lesson for the brightest and best. It was fair enough: those guys could climb a rope in no time so you could see why the school didn’t want them being held back by the rest of us. Except, and here’s the thing, the rest of us wasn’t the rest of us at all. Once the A team had been sorted, they moved on to the B team. This was where the majority of my friends ended up: Richard Shed, Kevin Wilkinson, Stuart Turner; all pretty classy athletes in their own way.

  As more and more names were read and the benches started to thin out, I looked around the room at the people left and it suddenly dawned on me what was happening. There weren’t just two groups – there was a third, as yet unmentioned group, Group C, and I was very much a part of it. I looked at the people who were left and took in the biggest bunch of misfits I’ve ever seen. And when I say biggest, I mean biggest. Group C basically consisted of anyone who was big – so that was the likes of me, Simon Phillips, Luke Smythson, Chris Briggs. Then there were all the hard-nuts, the guys everyone was scared of: Craig Thompson, Jason McKenzie, Jez Pope and Alex Carver. And all the geeks. Every. Single. Geek.