by Peter Kay
With the technical hitch rectified, we soldiered onwards towards the finale. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Troy positioning himself in the wings and having a last-minute spray with WD-40. And as the music kicked in he came speeding onstage in all his man-eating-plant regalia. The audience applauded the costume but then Troy came to a juddering halt.
In all the excitement he'd neglected to recharge himself during the tea break. So there I was on stage pretending to be chased by a stationary disabled man dressed as a man-eating plant.
The song was supposed to climax with the plant exploding. I reached for the pyrotechnic charge hidden underneath Troy's back wheel and pushed the button. Nothing happened. The way things had been going I wasn't surprised in the slightest. I tried it again. Nothing. Shocked and confused, the audience stared at me in silence. Time stood still.
Then as the rest of cast reluctantly joined me onstage to painfully take their bows, the charge ignited and Troy exploded into a shower of sparks and smoke. Too much smoke as it happened, because the next thing we heard were the fire alarms and we all had to evacuate out on to the front street. What a balls-up!
I've no idea what passing motorists must have thought they saw on the pavement that rainy night in June. Seeing a group of people huddled around a charred man-eating plant on wheels. Who knows? What I do know is that whenever I have a nightmare you can bet Troy rolls through at some point in that man-eating plant costume.
Because the course was drawing to a close, I'd taken it upon myself to start applying for proper work several months earlier. I went to the library every Monday and browsed for jobs in the Guardian media section. I also wrote to every television company in the IBA guide. Yorkshire, Carlton, Grampian, etc. They would have all got a letter and CV from Peter Kay at one time or another.
Then one day I actually got a reply. A lady from Granada Television in Manchester rang me up. She was secretary to some bigwig called Grant Spencer and they were looking for a new runner to work in the editing department. I realised it wasn't acting but after the Little Shop of Horrors fiasco I'd decided perhaps my future lay behind the scenes. It seemed safer all round.
Anyway, at least I'd had a reply. I was excited enough just to get a call from Granada Television, the Hollywood of the North and home to Coronation Street, Brideshead Revisited and Albion Market.
So I went for the interview. I was very nervous.
'What an amazing view,' I said to his secretary as we travelled up to the seventh floor in the lift.
Well, I had to say something to disguise the fact that I'd just farted and thought that any form of conversation might eliminate her sense of smell.
'Oh look, you can almost see our house,' I said and farted again.
I shook hands with Grant Spencer over a bottle of Perrier that sat on his desk. Then I pumped once more before I settled myself back in a chair. What was wrong with me? I had been nervous before but this had gone beyond a joke.
'Right,' he said, startling me into another breakage of wind, 'I'm going to cut to the chase. I'm not going to bullshit you, Paul (I was far too nervous to correct him), it's not a glamorous job. Basically you'll be working six days a week making tea for the editing staff downstairs and you'll get £58 for the privilege. It's a crap job for shit money but it's a foot in the door and the last runner we had is now working in Spain on El CID with Alfred Molina so, hey, there's potential.'
I nodded, shook his hand, farted and left. The secretary didn't come back down in the lift with me and frankly I didn't blame her.
Travelling home on the bus I found myself sinking into depression. I had a very tough decision to make. I'd arrived at a career-changing crossroads in my life. Finally there was an opportunity to work in television, to get a foot in the door as Grant had suggested, but financially I just couldn't afford it.
Fifty-eight pounds a week? I know that money isn't everything but it's a start. The weekly bus fares to Granada would cost me half of that alone and what did that leave me for my driving lessons? Not enough. I truly believed that passing my driving test would open just as many doors in the long term. I was bringing in three times as much as that with my other dead-end jobs, but that's all they were, a dead end. What a dilemma.
Later that day back at home I got a call from Grant Spencer's secretary. For a second I thought she might have been calling to have a word with me about the state of my bowels, but she wasn't. She rang to say that after interviewing several candidates she was pleased to offer me the job.
Both elated and devastated, I declined the job there and then and regretted it as soon as I put the phone down. I felt like I'd thrown away my one chance, a decision I let haunt me, and I punished myself with 'what ifs' and 'maybes' for a very long time. I began putting any thoughts of my ever being in show business to the back of my mind. Anyway, who was I trying to kid? I had to be realistic. I was just an ordinary working-class lad from Bolton who made people laugh on their lunch breaks. I could never compete in the big leagues. It was time for me to face facts: I had no business in show business.
Despondent, I threw myself into work and took on a third part-time job.
I don't know if you're familiar with Netto. They're a chain of cheap supermarkets that have been popping up all over Britain for a number of years now. And when I say cheap, I mean cheap. A friend of mine won a trolley dash around a Netto store once and when he got to the checkouts and the woman tilled it up the total came to £11.20. Now that is cheap!
Working for Netto wasn't the end of the world, but I could certainly see it. My badge said 'Shop Floor Assistant' and on the opening day I assisted the shoppers through the automatic doors of Bolton's first Netto superstore. What a shithole.
No matter how much I tried to make a go of this job it really was the pits. I think what made it worse was the whole Granada TV thing still echoing round my head. I continued to torture myself about it, particularly on busy Saturday afternoons, surrounded by kids up the freezer aisle, screaming for Mini Milks. You'll never know how close I came to tipping them head first into the freezer and sitting on the lid.
Occasionally I'd get the added excitement of shelf stacking or rotating the fresh milk in the fridges, but other than that my designated job was working the cardboard crushing machine in the back of the warehouse. Now that was a monotonous job, it was crush, crush, crush all day long.
I did it so much that I used to dream about it in my sleep. So now I was crushing practically twenty-four/seven. Only I didn't get paid for the night shift.
I had friends who worked in the cake factory over the road and they'd told me how they dreamed about work. They put cherries on top of Bakewells as they went by on a conveyor belt and when they shut their eyes at night all they could see were cherries floating past. I never thought I'd end up the same.
My dreams were slipping further away from me. I now had money for driving lessons — in fact, I had more money than I really needed – but absolutely no time to spend it. Between the garage, the cash and carry and Netto I had one afternoon off every fortnight on a Tuesday. On an average day I started at 6 a.m. and finished at 10 p.m. The work was relentless and I'd like to tell you I was happy but I wasn't.
The wages at Netto matched the food – cheap. I only stayed because the store was near home. We had a lot of managers too and in the four months I worked there we had seven. They'd arrive from other branches with a head full of fancy ideas and then leave when they realised the budget constraints. But they also knew they could get labour for a lot less than they were paying me.
Due to a clerical error at head office I'd been on £3 an hour since the day I signed my contract. That's why the managers attempted to make it their mission to get me to leave. Luckily they all left before me.
The other shop-floor assistants were on the disgraceful wage of £2 an hour. They were mainly students with debts up to their eyeballs. Then Tony Billingham arrived. He was a nasty piece of work in my opinion – wore Paco Rabanne and kept ferrets. He f
ound out about my clerical wage error and offered me a deal. He said I could either work seven hours a day at £2 an hour or four hours a day for £3 an hour. Reluctantly, I took less hours at the £3 an hour. I think he really wanted me to tell him to stick the job up his arse, but I didn't give him the satisfaction.
The following week I turned up for work with the flu, and when I say the flu I mean proper flu, not just man flu. I could hardly breathe, my eyes and my nose were streaming, but I soldiered on regardless. I had a sworn cardboard-crushing oath to uphold. At the end of the day I was called into the manager's office.
'I'm afraid we're going to have to let you go, Peter,' he said all formal like.
'We?' I said looking around. 'Are you schizophrenic?'
Then his mood suddenly changed.
'Look, I don't like a smart mouth, you're sacked, all right?'
'Why? What have I done?'
'You've not done anything and that's the problem. Your work isn't up to the standard we require here at Netto.'
'I crush card. What do you want, orgasms?'
He ignored my comment and asked me to hand over my Netto jumper and knife. Now just so you know, when I say knife I am referring to my standard issue Netto Stanley knife that every shop-floor assistant was required to carry on his/her personage at work. Just in case you thought I'd turned into a knife-wielding psychopath.
Furious, I handed them over to him, but then I did something that I'd never done before. I threw him into the lockers and threatened to bite his nose off. Now I'm not a violent person. I'd like to blame my actions on a number of things: the flu, blind rage and the half-bottle of Night Nurse that I'd knocked back on my tea break.
I went home and waited half expecting the police to come battering down my front door at any moment. But it was just his word against mine and thankfully nothing ever came of the incident. Well, not unless he reads this book and I get sent down for common assault.
Out of one shit job and into another. I got a job up the road at Hollywood Nights, a video shop situated in the back of the Spar supermarket next to a small sub-post office. When I was growing up I'd always imagined working in a video shop would be my dream job. I seemed to have spent half my life in them, hiring the latest video releases or badgering the store owner for the cardboard stands I'd seen in the shop window of Police Academy 5 or Cannonball Run II. But now I was on the other side of the counter and, disappointingly, I found the job to be quite boring and rather lonely.
I spent most of my shift reading magazines that I'd managed to smuggle out of the Spar on my way into the building, or eating out-of-date Monster Munch from the back of the stockroom (not that I could ever taste the difference). The customers in the Spar and the post office could hear the TV in the video shop, so as a result I was only ever allowed to watch family films. Consequently I must have seen The Love Bug and Lassie about seventy times.
Bored on pension days, I'd deliberately play Bonnie and Clyde on the video and turn the volume up during the robbery scenes – 'Stick 'em up, get down on the floor.' Then I'd close my eyes and wait for the pensioners' screams from behind the partition. It worked like a charm, but the Spar manager never saw the funny side. Some people have no sense of humour.
Occasionally the area manager would show up and make me justify my wages. He'd force me to hoover the shop and polish the video covers on the shelves. Can you believe I actually had to polish the video covers?
Sometimes I'd put a few adult-film cases in the Kiddies' Castle but even that backfired. One night I had a bloke lingering in the shop. I could tell from his finger-less gloves that he wanted soft porn. He deliberately waited until I was about to close and then he slammed an adult-video case down on the counter. Then without making eye contact he hastily snatched the tape out of my hand, scooped up his loose change and bolted.
About ten minutes later, as I was just about to padlock the serving hatch, I saw the same bloke charging down the aisle in the Spar towards me. He thrust the rental case into my hand and whispered, 'Are you taking the piss?' I opened the box and read the tape, but instead of Free My Willy 2 it was Rosie and Jim.
I don't know if you're familiar with Rosie and Jim, but basically it's a kids' show about two puppets and an old man who sail around on a canal barge. Not really the kind of thing you want when you've got the big light dimmed and your pants around your ankles.
The only time we ever had a rush on was on Saturday nights and then it was usually couples arguing over what video to get. They used to drive me mental. They'd pick a Top Title from the latest releases section no problem, but it was when they came to the counter and I told them they were now entitled to a 'free pound video' that things went tits up.
They'd spend ages choosing a second film because the bloke always wanted something violent and trashy about 'ninjas settling old scores' while his girlfriend wanted something slushy and trashy like a mother fighting to get her kids back from her estranged husband who's taken them to Iraq.
But in the end it didn't matter which video they decided upon because it would never get watched anyway and I guarantee you they'd both be asleep before the end of the Top Title.
Getting a 'free pound video' from Hollywood Nights was a false economy, a bit like trying to chose three DVDs for £15 in HMV. You can only ever find one you like, maybe two at a push but try for a third and you'll be in there for hours. Then when you get home you look in the TV guide and the third film is on Channel 5 the following night.
The only perk I had working at Hollywood Nights was that occasionally I got to take home a Top Title at the end of the shift. I'd type my staff password into the computer and put the video hire through the till. Big mistake. I only did it a few times and then I got a call at home from the area manager Gavin.
'I have reason to believe you've been stealing from Hollywood Nights.'
He said he'd found confirmation on his hard drive that I'd made numerous transactions over the last few months and the Top Title he shopped me on was What's Love Got to Do With It.
He accused me of hiring videos out to customers and pocketing the money, the cheeky bastard. I confessed to occasionally borrowing a few videos at the end of my shift but I said I'd never once profited from my actions in any way. Gavin said he'd no choice but to 'let me go' and sacked me over the phone. I was gutted and couldn't believe I'd been sacked for taking Tina Turner home.
So what do you do when you lose a job? Well most people would go to the pub and get drunk. But I went to the pub, or in this case the Wine Lodge, and got another job. It was to be my first and hopefully last time working behind a bar.
I've never had a taste for alcohol, except for Baileys, but then again that's more of a dessert than a drink. Being teetotal, pub culture was completely alien to me and I hadn't a clue what some of the customers were asking for half the time.
'Can I have a Blastaway?'
What the hell is a Blastaway? I mean, how was I to know that it was a bottle of Diamond White and Castaway mixed together? Who thought these concoctions up, for God's sake?
A Snake Bite, a Black Russian, I was beginning to get paranoid and thought that customers were just making these names up in order to take the piss out of me. The final straw came when one bloke asked me for 'a pint of Golden'. I had half a mind to take his pint glass into the Gents and urinate into it. Why couldn't somebody just order a pint of beer and be done with it?
And as it was the Wine Lodge there were all the names of the wines to contend with as well. I'd have customers asking me for 'Ozzie Whites' and 'Blobs'. For the first few weeks I thought everybody was speaking jive.
I was also incapable of getting a head on a pint of beer. There must be some special kind of magic involved because I could never master it. I'd watch the other members of staff and try to copy them but it was useless. I just couldn't get any head (story of my life). The drip tray would be overflowing, the floor would be sopping wet, and I'd be trying everything, shaking the glass, waggling my finger around in the
drink when the customer wasn't looking. Apart from actually spitting into the beer I just couldn't get a head on any of the pints. I even considered coming in early and squirting fairy liquid into all the pint glasses.