Life and Laughing: My Story

by Michael McIntyre

  My mother may also have looked good in 1976 because she was nineteen years old. Yes, I am the result of a teenage pregnancy. My father, on the other hand, was thirty-seven. He was a cradle snatcher, which was good for me as I was now sleeping in the vacated cradle. Thirty-seven! That’s four years older than I am now, and I’m writing my autobiography. He had a whole life before me. Born, as you know, in Montreal, he was named Thomas Cameron McIntyre, but changed his name to Ray Cameron to make this book slightly more confusing. Ray Cameron was his stage name. My mum called him Cameron, showbiz associates called him Ray, his mother called him Tommy and I called him Dad.

  An early publicity shot of new Canadian comedian Ray Cameron, my dad.

  He decided that he’d have a better shot at fame and fortune with a new name. Loads of celebs have changed their name. In most cases I think artists would have found the same success with their original names: Elton John (Reginald Dwight), Cliff Richard (Harry Webb), Kenny Everett (Maurice Cole), Michael Caine (Maurice Micklewhite), Tina Turner (Anna Bullock), Omar Sharif (Michael Shalhoub – I’m obsessed with him today), Meatloaf (Steak Sandwich – I made this one up). In some cases, however, you can see why a change was necessary. Would you have been comfortable listening to ‘Wonderful Tonight’ by Eric Clapp? Laughing at Fawlty Towers with John Cheese? Or watching Newsnight with Jeremy Fuxmen (I made this one up, too)?

  According to his brother Hazen, when we chatted in Café Pasta, the young Thomas McIntyre originally wanted to be a singer, but suffered a serious throat infection (I don’t remember the details) in his teens. He lost his voice for months, communicating by writing things down. Apparently he already had a wonderfully dry sense of humour, but his time spent voiceless meant he couldn’t waste any words when communicating through notes. This sharpened his comedy mind, and he often presented notes that had surrounding Canadian people in stitches. When he could speak again, his singing voice was lost, but his comedy voice was found. He started to perform stand-up locally with success before crossing the pond to try his luck in the bright lights of London. This might be a romanticized version of events, but I like it, so I’m going with it.

  In the early Swinging Sixties, my father, who was in his early swinging twenties, was performing live comedy in swinging London. The sixties stand-up scene was very different to what it is today. There were no comedy clubs. This was the age of cabaret and variety. My dad was the MC, introducing dancing girls and novelty acts while telling jokes in between. I feel extremely lucky to have some of his actual scripts. Only one of them, dated 11 November 1962, mentions a venue, the nightclub Whiskey a Go Go. I researched it thoroughly (typed it into Google) and it seems to have been the original name of the Wag Club in Wardour Street and is described as a ‘late-night dive bar’. The office for Open Mike Productions, who make Live at the Apollo and Michael McIntyre’s Comedy Roadshow, is just a few doors down Wardour Street. In the last few years, I have spent countless days working there.

  In fact, I’ve probably spent more time than I should have at the Wardour Street office. This is mainly due to Itsu, the sushi restaurant at number 103. I’m a big fan of raw fish. Although Itsu itself is synonymous with poisoning Russian spies with Polonium-210, the sushi that doesn’t contain radiation is divine, particularly the scallops. Itsu has one of those carousels, where you sit down and the food just passes by you: salmon, tuna, squid, miso soup, edamame beans. I once saw a Samsonite holdall around the time Terminal 5 opened at Heathrow. You pick what you want from colour-coded plates that relate to their price, and I literally cannot stop eating. My rule is that once the plates are piled up so high that I cannot see the carousel, I should probably get the bill.

  I’m glad there isn’t an Itsu closer to home. You know the expression ‘There are plenty more fish in the sea’? Well, I don’t think that’s the case any more. What I don’t understand about the Russian spy murderers is, how did they know he was going to pick the Polonium-poisoned piece from the carousel? Maybe they just wanted to kill somebody at random. Like Russian roulette, they poisoned one piece of sushi and watched it go round and round the carousel waiting for one unlucky luncher to select it. It could have been some advertising exec but ended up being a Russian spy. I don’t know. What I do know is that it’s a bloody cheek having 12.5 per cent service included in the bill. I picked the dishes off the carousel and brought them to my table. The waiter only takes them away. I figure this is worth a maximum of 6 per cent.

  It’s incredible to think that as I sit in Itsu arguing over the service charge in front of a tower of empty plates resembling the Burj Khalifa building in Dubai, fifty years earlier my dad was performing just a few yards away, clutching these very notes I have in my hand today.

  It’s fascinating for me to see my dad’s notes. A comedian’s notes tend to make little sense. They will consist of subject headings and key words. My dad’s notes say things like ‘Westminster Abbey’, ‘School teacher’, ‘The house bit’ and ‘Your horse has diabetes …’ Comedians carry around these scribbles of key words that they hope contain the DNA of a good gag. Looking at some of the notes from my last tour, it’s the same kind of thing: ‘Wrinkle cream’, ‘Morning’, ‘Last day sunbathing’. I once thought it would be fun to swap notes with other comics on the bill and try to make jokes about each other’s subjects onstage. This suggestion wasn’t met with much enthusiasm in Jongleurs, Leeds, circa 2005.

  In among the notes there is a script, and it’s hilarious. So here’s my dad in a Soho nightclub in 1962:

  I’d like to tell you a bit about myself … I’m one of the better lower priced performers … I’m from Canada. I realize that it may be a little difficult because you’ve never heard of me here but don’t let it worry you ’cause I have the same problem in Canada …

  But it’s real nice to be here … I brought my wife over with me … You know how it is … You always pack a few things you don’t need …

  We had a very interesting flight over here, we came on a non-scheduled airline … You know what that is? … That’s the type of airline who aren’t sure when the crash is going to be … You see, they use old planes … In fact this one was so old that the ‘No Smoking’ sign came on in Latin …

  But don’t get me wrong it wasn’t all bad … There were only a few things that I didn’t like … For instance when I fly I like to have … Two wings …

  It’s such a treat to have so many attractive ladies in the audience … Especially for me … Because I come from a very small town … And I don’t want to say the girls in my home town were ugly, but we had a beauty contest there once … And nobody won …

  They finally picked one girl and called her the winner, actually she wasn’t that bad … She had a beautiful bone structure in her face … Those eyes … Those lips … That tooth … She had this one tooth right in the front and it was three inches long … The first time I saw her I thought it was a cigarette and tried to light it … To see her eating spaghetti was really something … She used to put her tooth right in it and spin the plate … But I married her anyway …

  I got married because I wanted to have a family and it wasn’t long before we had the pitter-patter of tiny feet around the house … My mother-in-law’s a midget … I told her to treat the house as if it were her own … And she did. She sold it …

  I hope you found that as funny as I did. I particularly like the ‘I thought it was a cigarette and tried to light it’ bit. This is proper old-school stuff, wives and mother-in-laws being the butt of the joke. I don’t know if he wrote all of it, some of it or none of it. I know that comedians back in those days used to share jokes around a lot, but nevertheless it’s still funny. I have gags, I couldn’t really survive without punchlines, but a lot of my material is observational or mimicry. It’s a different approach to making people laugh – it makes me laugh, which is why I say it. But you can understand how ‘old-school’ comedians can be baffled by ‘alternative’ comedy, because there are so few proper ‘gags’. ‘Where ar
e the jokes?’ they’ll say, normally in a northern accent. For me, it’s quite simple: if people are laughing, it’s comedy … or tickling.

  Browsing my dad’s notes, I’m not sure he was the most confident performer. There are two pages entitled ‘No Laughs’, back-up in case the jokes weren’t working. Here are some of them:

  Well, I wasn’t born here, but I’m certainly dying here.

  That gag is twenty years ahead of its time. It’s just your bad luck that you had to hear it tonight.

  Well, from now on, it’s a comeback.

  I don’t mind you going to sleep, but you could at least say goodnight.

  Ouch. I certainly never had a plan for dying onstage. I’ve always found that once you’ve lost an audience, there’s nothing you can do to win them back.

  Comedians talk about stand-up in very hostile terms. If you have a good gig, you ‘killed’, and if you have a bad gig, you ‘died’. It’s kill or be killed. Witnessing a death onstage is excruciating. Experiencing it is indescribable. The worst death I ever saw was during my brief stint at Edinburgh University, years before I took to the stage myself. I never knew the comic’s name and haven’t seen him since. This career path was certainly evident that night, as he performed to near silence. It was a packed audience of about 400, including a gallery. The comedian was fighting for his life, sweating, dry mouth, throwing every joke he could think of at it. No response. People were turning away, chatting among themselves.

  Now, I don’t know if it was thrown or dropped, but somehow a lit cigarette originating from the gallery landed on the comedian’s head. As it burned away atop his full head of hair, the audience started noticing the cigarette and giggling. Unaware of the lit cigarette, the comedian’s eyes lit up, too. ‘I’ve cracked them!’ he was thinking. He then started to loosen up, moisture flooded back into his throat, the sweat on his brow began to clear, and he confidently launched into more material. Flames started to plume from his head. The giggles now escalated into fully blown laughter. He thought he was Richard Pryor, but looked more like Michael Jackson making a Pepsi commercial.

  ‘You’re on fire, mate!’ someone shouted from the crowd.

  He took this as a compliment.

  ‘Do you like impressions?’ he said, feeling like a star.

  The audience were now weak from laughter, tears rolling down their student faces as he broke into his ‘Michael Crawford’, not realizing he was already doing a pretty good ‘Guy Fawkes’. It looked for all the world as though this ‘dying’ comedian might die for real. People were laughing so hard at the situation, they were unable to tell him he was ablaze, and he was so thrilled at the response to his ‘ooh Betty’ to notice. Eventually, just after he’d commented on the non-existent smoke machine, he ran from the stage screaming. It was a horror story and not for a moment was I thinking, ‘That’s what I want to do for a living.’

  However bulletproof you think your ‘set’ is, a comic can die onstage at any time. From what I’ve been told, my dad didn’t need to use his ‘No Laughs’ jokes very often. He opened for the Rolling Stones and lived for a while with Irish comedian Dave Allen, who told my mum years later that my dad was extremely talented. But, unlike myself, I don’t think his vocation was to perform, and his move behind the camera began when he devised the comedy panel show Jokers Wild for Yorkshire Television. Hosted by Barry Cryer, the format was simple: Barry would give two teams of three comedians a subject to make a joke about. During the joke, a member of the other team could buzz in and finish it for points. It’s like Mock the Week but with flares, corduroy and more manners. The show was a hit and ran for eight series, regularly featuring Les Dawson, John Cleese (Cheese), Arthur Askey, Michael Aspel and my dad himself.

  As indicated by my birth certificate, my dad was primarily involved in the music industry. It was during Jokers Wild that he met Clive Dunn and recorded ‘Grandad’. He and his partner Alan Hawkshaw (who signs his emails ‘Hawk’) were writing and recording songs. I met Alan when I was about thirteen. He’s a hilarious character. My dad, my sister and I went to his enormous house in Radlett, Hertfordshire. Music had been good to the Hawk, one piece of music in particular. He wrote a thirty-second tune that made him a fortune. Can you guess it?

  Here’s a clue … It’s exactly thirty seconds long.

  Here’s another … Du-du … Du-du … De-de-de-de … Boom!

  Yes, that’s right, Countdown.

  (I actually met Carol Vorderman once in a lift. I got in and she was standing at the numbers and asked me, ‘What floor?’ If I couldn’t make a joke in these circumstances, I’m in the wrong business. ‘One from the top and four from anywhere else, please, Carol.’)

  Those thirty seconds netted the Hawk a fortune. His house had its own recording studio, swimming pool, snooker room. He gets paid every time it’s played, that’s every weekday at about 4.56 p.m. He actually gets paid by the second, so the longer it takes for people to guess the conundrum, the more money he makes. You can imagine him in the eighties, turning on the telly at 4.55 p.m., hoping the contestants can’t decipher the conundrum so that he can afford a better holiday.

  Countdown aficionados (judging by the number of adverts they have for Tena Lady in the break, Countdown is mainly watched by women who pee in their pants) will know that if the contestant buzzes in to guess the conundrum, the clock stops. If they correctly identify the jumbled-up nine-letter word, the game is over. However, if they get it wrong, the clock restarts, which means more money for Alan. You can only imagine the excitement in the Hawk household, whooping and cheering when they guess incorrectly, wild applause, back-slapping and champagne corks popping when the tune reaches its ‘De-de-de-de … Boom’ climax.

  My sister and I loved Alan as soon as we met him. He was a charming and personable man. Within moments of our arriving, he sat at his grand piano and dramatically played various TV themes he had written that we might recognize, including the original Grange Hill. It’s wonderful to see someone so proud of their work, and I have to say his rendition of Countdown was one of the most moving thirty seconds of my life. We drove for a pub lunch in his new Japanese sports car, in which he played all his own music, announcing, ‘I only ever listen to my own music in the car.’

  As the pub was about ten minutes away, I remember thinking, ‘I’m glad he has an extensive canon of work – otherwise we’d have to listen to Countdown twenty times back to back.’

  So Alan and my dad were writing music and producing records in the sixties and seventies. In 1975, my father found a song and was looking for a singer. This is basically record producing in its purest form. He held auditions in his small office off Trafalgar Square, and in walked my mum, a bleached-blonde beauty young enough to be his daughter. ‘If you can sing half as good as you look, we’re going to be rich,’ observed my dad.

  She couldn’t. Her audition was appalling. If she was on The X-Factor, Louis would have said through his giggles, ‘I’m sorry, you look great, but I don’t think singing is for you’; Danni would have said, silently seething over how gorgeous Cheryl looks, ‘It was a bit out of tune’; Cheryl would have diplomatically said, ‘I think you’re luverly, but I think you’re a bit out of your depth singing, sorry, luv’; and Simon would have said, ‘I give up’, and then walked off set, immediately cancelling The X-Factor, American Idol and Britain’s Got Talent, retiring from showbusiness to become a recluse with nobody knowing his whereabouts, apart from Sinitta.

  My father’s reaction was less drastic. One thing led to another and before you knew it, I was peeing on the doctor in a hospital in Merton in 1976, which probably came as a relief to the doctor as much as me due to the Sahara-like temperatures.

  4

  When my mum fell pregnant (an odd expression: ‘Wow, you’re pregnant, what happened?’ ‘I fell … on top of that man’) with my sister Lucy, we moved in search of more space. We found it in a ground floor flat in leafy Hampstead. I know what you’re thinking – Kensington? Hampstead? La-di-da. I kn
ow. There’s no denying I had a pretty decent start. This is primarily due to my grandma (‘Helloo, daaarling’) marrying Jim, the wealthy Scrabble-losing stockbroker.

  I can only imagine my father’s face when he found out this beautiful nineteen-year-old had rich parents too. And you can only imagine my grandma and Jim’s faces when they found out their daughter was marrying a thirty-seven-year-old Canadian comedian who went by several different names and whose greatest success was producing Clive Dunn’s ‘Grandad’. The relationship between my dad and grandparents was uneasy, to say the least. My mother recalls how on their first meeting my dad addressed the thorny issue of their wealth, saying, ‘I’m a bit worried about your money.’

  To which my grandmother replied, ‘Don’t vorry about it, you’re not gettiing it.’

  Relations certainly weren’t improved when my dad sold their holiday home in Malta, which Grandma and Jim had put in my mother’s name for tax reasons. I tried to talk him out of it, but my vocabulary was limited to ‘Ma’, ‘Da’ and ‘Shums’ (my word for ‘shoes’). I threw up on his shoulder, but it had little impact. The Maltese house was sold, and the Hampstead flat bought with the proceeds.

  My mother was expecting her second child. I wasn’t. I thought she’d let herself go. I didn’t know she was about to give birth to a rival. I was the centre of attention at home. I was used to having everything my own way. I was the main man. Then one day my mum suddenly lost a tremendous amount of weight and there was this baby stealing my limelight. ‘Isn’t she beautiful?’, ‘Can I hold her?’, ‘Look at those little hands’, ‘Adorable’, gushed friends and relatives.

  ‘Michael, do you want to say hello to your new little sister?’ my dad asked.

  ‘Keep that little bitch away from me,’ I tried to say, although all that came out was, ‘Ma, Da, Shums.’

  It was a shock to have competition at home, but I had to see the positives of having a sibling and a growing family. Unfortunately, I couldn’t and decided to try to kill my sister instead. According to my mother, up until Lucy was about six months old, I made several attempts on her life. Much like a Mafia hit, I would win her and my parents’ trust before striking. I would gently stroke her cheek, before trying to suffocate her with her own frilly booties. I would sweetly comb her hair, and then bash her in the temple with the brush. I poisoned her rusks with red berries I found in the garden and tried to drown her so many times that we had to take separate baths.