May I Have Your Attention Please?

by James Corden

  When August came around and the fabled brown envelope flopped through the letterbox, I wasn’t there to receive it. I was still in the Salvation Army at the time and a few of us were away at music week. I remember when the results came out, though: it was all anyone could talk about. ‘Oh, I got this’ or ‘I got that’, my friends either celebrating or commiserating with each other. But I didn’t even dare to ring home. However, Dad came along to the performance at the end of the week and, with a face etched with real disappointment, asked me if I wanted to know the results. I told him that I doubted it, but he went ahead and delivered the news anyway: a B in Drama, a C in English and the rest, well, all below an E.

  So that was that. It was a kind of confirmation that school was over for me. What was the point of it if it only brought disappointment or detention? But, despite his obvious frustration with me, Dad was about to prove just how much he believed in me, bad exam results or not …

  Right, before I carry on I’m going to nip back to the hospital now to see how Mummy and the little fella are getting on. Have a cup of tea, I’ll be back in a minute …

  OK, he’s doing well, but we still don’t know what to call him. We’re thinking Felix. I’ve never met a guy called Felix who hasn’t been cool, so I’m liking it as a name, though Jules is worried it just sounds like cat food. It was so lovely, just now, at the hospital, holding him as he drifted in and out of sleep in my arms. It made me think of my own father, and the different times he’s given me advice and really been there for us kids. I remember Dad once saying to me that ‘The difference between doing something and not doing something is doing something.’ He was talking to me about homework at the time, and yet I’ve always remembered it. I like it as a saying because it takes chance out of the equation. It says if you want to do something, if you really want to, and believe you can, you will.

  Holding my newborn baby in my arms just now, I couldn’t help but wonder what he’s going to do, or who he’s going to be when he’s older. What will he remember as the best day of his life? I remember mine clearly, but to fully tell you about the best day of my life I kind of have to fill you in on one of the worst. Here goes:

  I was walking home from school on quite a grey day, listening to Arrested Development on my Walkman, bopping like I was in some sort of music video. You know, the ones where people stride purposefully towards the camera in time to the music? That was me, all the way home. I remember the beat to ‘Mr Wendal’ kicking in when, out of the blue, Dad pulled up alongside me in his car and asked if I wanted a lift. Of course. I jumped straight in, but instead of talking about his day or telling him about mine, I just carried on listening to my Walkman.

  We got home, and Dad said he had to tell me something. I went into the lounge where my mum was sitting on the sofa along with Andrea and Rudi. I remember asking Ange (what we call Andrea) how she got home so fast.

  ‘Dad picked me up,’ she said.

  ‘And me,’ said Rudi in her cute little voice.

  At that point Dad came in and sat down next to Mum. I wish I could remember exactly what he said, or how he even began to tell us, but I can’t. I can’t remember anything about that moment, except one thing. Dad told us that he’d been called up to fight in the first Gulf War.

  ‘But you’re just a musician in the Air Force,’ said Ange, saying exactly what we were all thinking.

  ‘Yeah, you just play the saxophone. What are you gonna do?’ said Rudi, echoing our thoughts.

  Dad told us that he was going to be a stretcher-bearer and he’d be leaving in three weeks. I remember standing up off the floor (we had furniture, I just liked it on the floor) and dramatically sweeping out of the lounge and up to my room. I did this mostly for effect, but also so my mum wouldn’t see me crying. The big problem with sweeping out of a room is that the moment you get out the door, you don’t know where to go. I remember feeling drowned in questions to ask my dad: ‘Will you have a gun? What will you eat? Where exactly is Bahrain?’ But rather than go back and ask, I went to my room and got into bed. I got out pretty quick, though, ‘cos to balance out the worst news we’d ever been told as a family, Mum had gone all out for tea: turkey burgers, chips and beans – I was upset, not stupid.

  Three weeks came and went pretty quickly, and the day for Dad to leave arrived. I remember it so vividly. We were all in the kitchen and Dad was standing there, dressed like Action Man, with all this camouflage gear on.

  We said goodbye and Dad went down the line, hugging all of us. There were so many tears. Mum was trying her best to be strong but, the minute Ange went, Rudi went, then Mum went and that made me go. Dad stayed strong, but when he hugged Mum he was sobbing so much he held her in his chest and called the three of us over to all put our arms round each other; that cuddle felt as if it went on for ages, the whole family just clinging on to each other. I’m sure this sounds quite dramatic, but the thing about war is that it is just that. Everything feels like a huge drama. It’s the unexpectedness of it. No one actually knows what they’re letting themselves in for, so you end up focusing on the worst-case scenario.

  Dad eventually left, and life kind of got back to normal, but to tell you the truth I was never myself during the time he was away. I couldn’t cope with it. I couldn’t talk to him on the phone. He’d ring every couple of days, and Ange, Rudi and Mum would chat to him, but I would just burst into tears if I heard his voice. I just couldn’t adjust to where he was or what he was doing and pretend it was normal.

  Some days were fine – it wouldn’t feel too different to any other day, but there were times you’d really notice it. I remember being in the kitchen eating a bowl of Frosties one day, chatting to Mum, when we heard on the news that a Scud missile had been intercepted over the base where Dad was stationed in Bahrain. I just stopped eating and looked at Mum, who had gone pale. She walked over, put her arm around me and said it was good news because it hadn’t hit and everyone was fine. I was down all that day; in fact, it got to a point where they were all pretty much down days in our house.

  We were moving into month five when I remember coming downstairs and seeing Mum sitting on her own in the lounge. I was watching through a gap in the doorway and she was just sitting there, not crying or anything, just sitting, as if the weight of the world was on her shoulders. She looked so alone.

  ‘You all right, Mum?’ I asked.

  ‘Yep,’ she replied, and got up and left the room. She wasn’t all right at all.

  All a bit down this, isn’t it? So I’m gonna skip forward to the good stuff, the day we were told that Dad was coming home. It was an incredible day, totally amazing. So amazing that I don’t remember where I was or who told me or anything else about it. All I remember was being told he’d be home in three days. Before I knew it, we were in the car on the way to RAF Uxbridge. We got there and there were loads of other families crowding around, all waiting for the return of their loved ones.

  Mum was talking to lots of other mums, and Rudi and I just sort of hung out together. Someone had tried to set up some kind of ‘buffet’ in the mess, but they shouldn’t have bothered. There were just lots of little bowls of crisps – rubbish crisps – and two bowls of peanuts. Now that’s all right, but that’s not a ‘buffet’. You’re just getting people’s hopes up for sausage rolls and picnic eggs and salady stuff when you call it a ‘buffet’. Just put the crisps and peanuts out and say nothing about it; that way people thank you for it, instead of complaining about the spread.

  The buffet disappointment didn’t last long though, because there was suddenly a rush of activity, with everyone racing to get outside. There was loads of whooping and cheering, which was then getting drowned out by the noise of an engine and a beeping horn. I ran to the front of the crowd and could see a big blue and white coach pulling in to the car park. It drove past us a bit and I ran alongside it, looking up at the windows to see if I could find Dad. I couldn’t see him anywhere and, for a brief moment, still running along, I had a pang of worry tha
t he wasn’t on the bus at all, that something had happened.

  Then, just as the coach slowed to a stop, I saw him. He was right there in the window, looking straight at me. It was as if there was no one else in the world. He was smiling and looking tanned and, in a strange way, he didn’t even look like Dad. The coach door opened achingly slowly and he was one of the first to get off.

  He looked at me and said, ‘Hiya, son,’ and then threw his arms around me. I remember squeezing him so tight, my face pressing so hard into his shirt. He smelled like the inside of a bag that is full of your wet and musty clothes after a day on the beach. I kept holding on tight as I heard him call out to Mum and Rudi. They came over and, at first, I refused to let go. Then he picked Rudi up in his arms and held a hand out to Mum. I stepped away and Mum put her hands up to his face and just stood there, looking at him. They both smiled and almost began to laugh at the sheer joy of it all. Dad pulled Mum closer and kissed her tenderly on the forehead, and she just let out the biggest sigh of relief, as if all her worries had disappeared in that one moment. She shut her eyes and kissed him on the cheek, then Rudi leant in and gave him a kiss on the other cheek. And Dad just pulled them both closer to him, smiling all the time.

  And that, right there, that moment – that was the best day of my life.

  It does feel strange, looking back on that day, now that I’m a father. That the things I do and say will have a greater impact on my as-yet-unnamed son’s life than I’m sure I can comprehend. I hope, like my father, that I can be a good one. I asked my dad a couple of days ago if he had always believed in me, even when things like my awful exam results happened. Whether he thought that I could do the things I’d dreamt of, the work I’m lucky enough to be doing now. Without even pausing, he said that he always had; he just hoped I would put the work in as he knew how incredibly lazy I could be. When you look at my awful GCSE results, you can’t really blame him for thinking that. But, as I said previously, it was right at that moment of my exam results – when he was probably at his most frustrated and disappointed – that he was about to prove once again just how far his belief stretched.

  I had already decided I wanted to go to Amersham and Wycombe College to do a B-Tech National Diploma in Performing Arts, but you had to have four GCSEs or more to get on the course. If you had fewer than that, you’d have to do a B-Tech something else for a year, a sort of access course, before going on to the National Diploma. I didn’t want to waste a year, but then I didn’t have the results to get me in. So I talked to Dad about it and he decided that the two of us would go and speak to the lady who looked after the admissions.

  I was so nervous that I can’t remember a lot of that meeting, but I do recall it not going so well from the start. At some point I started to lose it a little, and was really pleading with her to let me straight on to the B-Tech course. Dad had let me do most of the talking to begin with, but as I started to get more and more desperate, he cut in, just at the right moment, and told her that whatever my exam results seemed to suggest, I wasn’t stupid; it was just that all I cared about was Drama and English. He reminded her that this was a ‘Performing Arts’ course and that, since the age of eleven, I’d been involved in nothing but that. He was vehement, fighting my corner, asking her what it mattered if I didn’t have a C grade or above in Science or French because it wasn’t relevant. And guess what? It worked. After a good old battle, she agreed to let me on the course. Dad killed it.

  September came around and it felt as though a new chapter was beginning. On my first day, I got the bus to Amersham and walked up the hill to the college. It looked massive. It must’ve been four times the size of Holmer Green Upper, if not bigger. And the sheer number of people making their way in … Mrs Hatfield’s comments rang in my ears. She was right: this was a much bigger pond. Four thousand people on that campus alone, and they all looked totally different to any people I’d hung out with before. For starters, everyone looked cool – lads were rolling up on skateboards, like Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future. I’d never been any good on a skateboard; I was always the kid lying down on it while everyone else was doing ollies and kick flips. People were smoking and wearing tour T-shirts of bands I’d never heard of. But as the day continued, my nerves started vanishing and were replaced with a massive feeling of excitement. This was all shiny and new: different people with different mind-sets from different backgrounds. I was so relieved not to be at school any more.

  There were about thirty or forty kids in my class, and that first lesson we had to go round the room and say something unique about ourselves. It came to my turn and I stood up and looked around at my fellow students. ‘Hi,’ I said, ‘my name’s James and I don’t care what you say, I love Take That.’ I guess it broke the ice.

  I met some really good friends at college. There were two guys in particular called Jack and Josh, who to this day are two of the best actors I’ve ever met. They came as a package, Jack and Josh, and they kind of took me under their wing. I remember one Tuesday, we had two free periods back to back, and they asked me whether I wanted to go hang out in Josh’s car. ‘Sure, why not?’ I said, not even asking where we were going. So we went out to the car park and all bundled into Josh’s beige Vauxhall Nova. I sat in the back with Jack and Josh in the front and waited for Josh to start the engine and drive to wherever it was we were going. But that never happened. Instead, Jack reached into his pockets and started pulling out various Rizla papers, half-used cigarettes and a small, clingfilm-wrapped, green wodge of something that looked like herbs, and began building what I now know is a joint. At the time I had no idea what was going on. He rolled it up and lit it, took a few deep puffs and, exhaling, said, ‘Oh yeah, that’s really good. Really smooth.’ He then reclined his seat, closed his eyes, slid his head back and passed over the joint to Josh, who did exactly the same and then passed the joint back to me over his shoulder. I held it between my thumb and index finger and, not wanting to appear like a novice, or in any way uncool, put it in my mouth and inhaled for as long as Jack and Josh just had. Bad idea. Within seconds I was coughing and spluttering all over the place. My chest felt as if it was going to explode. Jack and Josh burst out laughing and one of them handed me a bottle of water. Once my coughing had stopped, I looked at them both in the rear-view mirror and said, ‘Yeah, that’s really smooth. Not harsh at all.’

  They must’ve known it was my first time, but being decent guys, they didn’t take the piss or anything; they just rolled another and for the next two hours we hotboxed in Josh’s Nova, smoking joint after joint. When the time came for us to go back to lessons, Jack and Josh stepped out of the car like nothing had changed. I, on the other hand, was all over the place. I could barely feel my legs and, when I looked up, I could see two Jacks and two Joshes, which was pretty much the funniest thing I’d ever seen. I burst out laughing, then they burst out laughing, and with tears rolling down our faces, the three of us stood there in the middle of the car park and pissed ourselves (not literally) for five straight minutes. To this day I’m not sure I’ve ever laughed that much.

  Jack went back to the car and grabbed his sunglasses. ‘You’d better wear these,’ he said, handing them to me. ‘Your eyes are a giveaway.’

  We stumbled back into class, and there I sat, right at the very back, wearing Jack’s shades with the biggest grin on my face. When the teacher asked why I was wearing sunglasses, Josh jumped in quick as a flash and said, ‘He’s got an eye infection,’ which made me crack up even more. I have no idea what the lesson was about that day. All I know is I sat at the back of that class, feeling one minute like I might die and the next like I might fly.

  After class finished, I still had £1.70 in my pocket for my bus fare home, but was so all over the place that I went straight to the vending machine and spent the lot on a bag of Wheat Crunchies, a Yorkie and a Twix. The four-mile trek home took me hours. When I got back, at 7.30 p.m., I felt so sick I went straight to bed. After that, I only joined Jack and Josh in the
car on the odd occasion – and only if we didn’t have a lesson straight afterwards.

  I mentioned earlier that there are certain teachers who can really influence your life, for good or for bad. There was one at Amersham who was absolutely amazing: John Keats. (No, not the poet – he’d never have taught at a place like Amersham.) John had his own theatre company, which put on some really innovative productions, and his lessons had that same spark: they were like nothing I’d ever known. He had this aura about him, big-time charisma. People would be chatting away as he’d walk into a class and he’d just clap his hands and tell everyone to stand on their chairs, and – bam! – everyone would get up.

  In class, we covered all aspects of performance and spent a fair amount of time on comedy. John asked us to bring in a video of our favourite bit of stand-up, so I took in Newman & Baddiel’s ‘History Today’. Watching everyone else’s favourites showed us a broad spectrum of what made people laugh, and perhaps I absorbed more of that than I remember at the time. John asked us to follow it by bringing in five minutes of our own material. I remember some of the girls crying, completely terrified at the thought of doing it, but John was as reassuring as he was charismatic and he just told all of us we could do it. And so we did.

  I loved it. To this day people still refer to me as a comedian, or ask if I’m ever going to do stand-up. My answer is always the same: anyone can be funny for ten or fifteen minutes, but that’s not stand-up comedy. An hour, hour and a half – that’s doing stand-up, and I’m pretty sure I don’t have that skill. It takes years to get the precision needed to do it properly. I’m in awe of the people who do it: people like Seinfeld, Chris Rock or Michael McIntyre. Michael is a brilliant comedian and I talked to him the other day about possibly giving stand-up a go, obviously on a much smaller scale than he does. I’m blown away by how he can command an arena, with 16,000 people hanging on his every word. I’m not sure I have that ability, but one day I’d love to just give it a try; to do it in clubs and much smaller venues and see how it goes. That’s if I can muster the courage.