Life and Laughing: My Story

by Michael McIntyre

  I’m pleased to say I finally accepted my sister and together we got on with the business of growing up in the eighties. But, in truth, there was another child in the house. Our mum. To give you an idea of the age gap, my mum once sprained her ankle and my father rushed her to Casualty, where the doctor said, ‘If you would like to just pop your leg up on Daddy’s knee.’ This pissed my dad off so much he sent my mum straight to bed without a story.

  In America, she would only have just been allowed to drink alcohol, but here she was raising two kids and learning on the job. It’s a job she did wonderfully well, with only the occasional hitch. For example, normally an adult would tell the kids to buckle up in the car, but nobody wore a seatbelt in my mum’s mustard-coloured Ford Capri. My sister and I would just bounce around in the back, occasionally clinging on to the front seats for survival. And remember, there were no speed bumps in those days. By the end of a journey, I would often end up in the front and my sister on the ledge in front of the back window with Bronski Beat playing at full volume.

  Family cars containing young kids will always be untidy. However, this is usually confined to the back. Not my mum’s Capri. The Capri was filthy in both the children’s area and my mum’s area. Strewn all over the front of the car would be crisp packets, bits of old chewing gum, magazines (yes, she would read at the traffic lights), Coke cans, old lipsticks and cassettes with unwound tape hanging out of them.

  Occasionally my mother would clean the car, by throwing things out of the window, in traffic. Once she threw so much litter out of the car at rush hour on the Finchley Road that my sister and I sat open-mouthed in amazement in the back. Literally, she chucked about four magazines into the street while Kajagoogoo blared out of her Blaupunkt stereo. Moments later somebody got out of their car, picked up my mum’s discarded debris, and threw it back into our car. Unperturbed, my mum promptly threw it out again. This continued all the way between St John’s Wood and Hampstead.

  Once, when we went shopping on Hampstead High Street, my mother loaded the boot with groceries, put me in the back seat and drove off. A few miles later, she started to get a nagging feeling she’d forgotten something. PG Tips? Shake n’ Vac? Culture Club’s ‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?’ on 7-inch vinyl from Our Price? No, my sister Lucy, who was still in her pram on the pavement fifteen minutes later when we returned. ‘Why didn’t you say anything?’ my mother screamed, blaming me.

  ‘Hey, I’ve been trying to kill that bitch for months,’ I said, although this came out as ‘Ma, Da, Shums.’

  After I moved to Tanta in Egypt with my Lebanese Catholic parents Joseph and Abia … (Oh no, I’ve slipped back into Omar Sharif’s autobiography. What’s wrong with me?)

  In my teens, I fell ill (nothing serious, don’t worry) and checked in at the doctor’s surgery reception in Hendon. The receptionist handed me my medical notes and said, ‘Please give these to the doctor, and you’re not allowed to look at them.’

  ‘Of course not,’ I lied.

  Moments later, out of sight, I had a flick through my little malady memoirs. I got quite nostalgic about my ‘pain in the abdominal area’ of March 1987, my ‘blurred vision’ of May 1985 and my ‘soreness in left ear’ of November 1983. What surprised me, however, were the first few entries. ‘Michael not talking. Parents worried.’ ‘Michael still not talking, just grunting. Parents increasingly concerned.’ ‘Michael only saying a few words. Worrying rate of development. Should be monitored. Only says “Ma”, “Da” and “Shums’’.’ I was shocked to find out that my early medical history was remarkably similar to Forrest Gump’s. Apparently my sister spoke before me despite being two years younger. Her first words were ‘Is Michael retarded?’

  My younger son, Oscar, is nearly two and only has one word, ‘hoover’, which he calls ‘hooba’. Out of all the things in the world, why ‘hoover’? My oldest, Lucas, who is four and a half – his first word was ‘car’. I have no idea why, but I suppose you’ve got to start somewhere. Maybe they’ll go into business together one day and run ‘McIntyre Brothers’, a car valeting service.

  So my memories really start to kick in at our Hampstead flat, which I remember to be quite dimly lit. Maybe at my parents’ height this was ‘mood lighting’, but from where my sister and I were crawling, it was just dark. The flat was in a big old Edwardian building that also contained three other flats.

  The room I remember most is the living room. This is odd, because it’s the only room that my sister and I were strictly forbidden to enter. I became obsessed with the living room, presumably because it was out of bounds. The living room was darker than the rest of the house, with dark green sofas and lots of plants. Because I was only two foot tall, to me it was like an indoor night jungle with soft furnishings. ‘Don’t go in there, that’s Mummy and Daddy’s special room.’ Special room? What goes on in that mini-Jurassic Park of theirs?

  My wife and I do the same today with our kids. We don’t let them in the living room because it’s our special room that we want to keep nice. I’m sure many people reading this can relate to keeping the front room child-free. But if I’m honest, my wife and I never go in there, and nor did my parents ever go in theirs. Let’s face it, the country is filled with homes, each with an immaculate room that nobody goes in. We buy and rent accommodation and don’t use all of it. The only time we’ve used our living room, and the only time I remember using the living room in my childhood Hampstead flat, was on Christmas Day. It’s a room reserved for one day of the year. This is OK if you live in a mansion, but this was a cramped flat. It made no sense to me as I toddled around that we’d cordoned off part of it for just one day of the year.

  One dinnertime, while enjoying a beef broth vegetable medley compote, I addressed my parents: ‘This living room situation is a joke. Why don’t you sub-let it? I was chatting to a girl at playgroup, and she says her parents do the same thing. Maybe we could solve the homeless problem if we, as a nation, open up our unused front rooms? We’d have to kick them out on Christmas Day, but the rest of the year would be good for them. And that’s another thing. If it’s just a “Christmas room”, why don’t you leave the Christmas tree and decorations up all year? And why have you got so many plants in such a dark room, have you never heard of photosynthesis? What kind of people are you?’

  Unfortunately, my rant sounded more like an episode of Pingu, and my dad just muttered, ‘We should go back to the doctor, his speech isn’t improving at all.’

  My parents’ actual room was not out of bounds. Every morning my sister and I would climb into our parents’ bed. I would always go on our dad’s side and Lucy would always go on our mum’s side. I don’t know why it was always this way round. All I know is that, with all due respect to my father, I got the bum draw, almost literally. We must have been very young at this time; in fact this might rival Poo-gate as my earliest memory. I love cuddling my two boys but seldom wonder what the experience might be like for them. They are little, soft and wonderful. I am not.

  Well, I vividly recall these early-morning cuddles with my dad. Not only was he a big naked hairy man, but his mouth was about the size of my little head. I will never forget his hot cigarettey breath blasting into my tiny face. At regular intervals, my hair would be blown horizontal as I would try to avoid it, like Keanu Reeves avoiding bullets in the Matrix trilogy.

  My dad and me eating breakfast in bed – the scene of his morning-breath cuddles.

  Morning breath (something I have discussed at length in stand-up) is bad enough – cigarettes certainly don’t improve things. Occasionally my father would be sipping coffee in bed. The combination of morning breath, cigarette breath and coffee breath became almost lethal. I think he was one garlic clove away from actually killing me. I would peek over to the other side, where Lucy and my mother were enjoying day-beginning cuddles and then return to my father’s life-threatening monster breath blowing a gale into my face. Come to think of it, maybe this is what was affecting my vocal cords. Maybe my morni
ng dad cuddles also shaped the way I look. Nowadays I always look a bit windswept and squinting, which is exactly how I would have looked in the eye of his breath-storm.

  My dad was a heavy smoker. Outside of his wives and children, the two great loves of his life were Marlboro and Camel. He began smoking as a twelve-year-old in Montreal when, believe it or not, smoking was encouraged for health reasons. Then, your ‘five a day’ referred to cigarettes. It was as if he smoked every minute of the day. Remember in those days there were no restrictions on smoking. So he’d be smoking in restaurants, on aeroplanes, in cinemas, on the bus, on the Tube. He was smoking when he said his marriage vows, he smoked while sleeping and when he swam underwater. My dad never managed to quit.

  I myself started smoking as a teenager and smoked about a pack of Marlboro Lights a day until my mid-twenties. Giving up was one of the biggest achievements of my life. I read Allen Carr’s book How to Stop Smoking and would recommend it to anybody trying to kick the filthy habit. In fact, I have recommended it many times, including to a very sweet, chain-smoking former tour manager of mine who then accidentally read Alan Carr’s Look Who It Is!, the 2008 autobiography by everyone’s favourite camp comedian. He then bizarrely reported, ‘I read that Alan Carr book you told me about. I thought it was hilarious and yes, I have been smoking less, thank you.’

  Apart from my parents’ room and the living room, the rest of our Hampstead flat is a bit of a blur. Strangely, comedy was already in the building as living in the flat above was the comedy writer John Junkin, who appeared with the Beatles in the film A Hard Day’s Night. I don’t ever remember him upright. He was always sitting, in fact almost lying, in his chair, and he seemed to have most of his life around his neck. His glasses were on a cord hanging around his neck, as were his lighter and a bottle opener. I think he might have also had a compass and maybe a medal for the longest time sat in one chair. Even as a toddler who could only grunt I thought, ‘That’s odd.’ The other bizarre thing in the Junkin household was the astonishing amount of Lucozade. This family was addicted to Lucozade. The whole flat had a sort of orange glow, like David Dickinson’s bathroom.

  John was married to Jenny. Jenny and my mother became the best of friends almost immediately, chatting to each other, from their respective flats, through makeshift telephones made of plastic cups and string. My mother’s name was Kati, pronounced ‘Cottee’ (I can’t believe I haven’t mentioned this before), but Jenny called her ‘Coke’, a nickname that stuck for some time. Looking back, it seems the Junkins were really into fizzy drinks, what with the Lucozade everywhere and calling my mum ‘Coke’. When Jenny fell on John, she too became pregnant and had a child called Annabelle, which was disappointing as my sister and I had a side bet she would be called 7-Up or Dr Pepper.

  Soon after we moved into our dimly lit Hampstead flat underneath the Junkins’ Lucozade-glowing abode, my dad’s career in comedy began in earnest. Barry Cryer was hired to write for a zany and wildly talented radio DJ, Kenny Everett. Kenny was moving to television with The Kenny Everett Video Show on Thames TV. Barry, who had worked with my dad on Jokers Wild, brought him in to help with a segment of the show. The three of them hit it off immediately, and to such an extent that my dad was hired for the whole series. The chemistry between Kenny, Barry and my dad was perfect, and they laughed their way through series after series of a show that was getting up to 20 million viewers.

  Kenny Everett, in Sid Snot guise, with Barry Cryer and my dad in their heyday, caught in a rare moment not laughing at each other’s jokes.

  In those days there were only three channels, BBC1, BBC2 and ITV. It must be impossible for teenagers, reading this book on their iPad, to fathom such a thing. It wasn’t really so bad. The only real difference is that in 1980 someone would ask, ‘What’s on TV tonight?’ and ten seconds later the reply would be ‘Nothing’, whereas in 2010 when someone asks, ‘What’s on TV tonight?’ it takes half an hour before somebody says, ‘Nothing.’

  TV was so much simpler then. Today I can hardly keep up with technology. I’ve just got HD; now I’m told it’s all about 3D. 3D technology is truly amazing, and soon we will get to experience it in our own homes. The problem I have is that, sure it’s amazing if you’re watching Avatar. I’ve seen Avatar. It’s unbelievable – you feel like you can reach out and touch the Na’vi characters and are surrounded by the landscape of Pandora, and you can practically smell it. But do we really want to be sitting at home watching TV and feeling like we can reach out and touch Jeremy Kyle? I don’t want to feel surrounded by the Loose Women, and I certainly don’t want to feel I can practically smell Alan Titchmarsh.

  For parents, TV is a salvation. It’s well-earned time off. ‘Sit down and watch this, kids, while I briefly return to a life I left behind.’ My four-year-old, Lucas, even has his own mini-DVD player, so while Oscar’s watching Teletubbies, he’ll be watching Finding Nemo on his portable. (When school was cancelled for a week during the snow, I think he watched every U and PG film ever made. He had to start on the 12s and 15s. When the snow finally melted, he was halfway through Carlito’s Way.)

  When I was a kid, my sister and I watched our fair share of telly. ‘Don’t sit too close or your eyes will go square,’ our mum would say before getting back to her colouring in. (The ‘eyes going square’ risk fascinated me, as did the ‘if you sneeze with your eyes open, your eyes will pop out’ claim. I spent countless hours trying to get my sister to sneeze while sitting too close to the TV, hoping her square eyes would pop out.)

  We watched all the classics that will hit readers of a certain age with nostalgia. My favourites were Sesame Street, The Perils of Penelope Pitstop, Battle of the Planets and Buck Rogers. I could tolerate Rainbow but was not a fan of Playschool or Blue Peter; I found the presenters really patronizing. I know they were talking to children, but I just thought they were acting weird. The much-loved Floella Benjamin, for example, I couldn’t stand her. She was just way too over the top for me (and her first name sounded like a vaccine). I preferred the company of Big Bird, the Cookie Monster, Mr Snuffleupagus, and Bert and Ernie.

  When my parents weren’t loving, teaching and raising me, they liked to dress me up as chart toppers from the 70s.

  It was years later when it struck me that Bert and Ernie must be gay. ‘Good night, Bert’, ‘Good night, Ernie’ – they were sleeping in the same bed. I know this may come as a Michael Barrymore/George Michael/Rock Hudson-scale shock to some, but the evidence is there. They were flatmates. Flatmates would normally have their own room or at least have their own bed – if not, then it’s got to be a ‘head to toe’ sleeping arrangement. Flatmates in the same bed sleeping head-to-head? Gay.

  We only had a television in our parents’ room, and Lucy and I would sit on the floor in front of their bed. Occasionally, we would watch TV as a family. The main event was always The Kenny Everett Show because it was ‘Daddy’s show’. The Kenny Everett Show was famed for the rule-breaking sound of the crew laughing at the sketches rather than canned laughs or the laughs of a live studio audience. My dad had the biggest booming laugh. He would constantly be laughing uproariously. So the laughter on The Kenny Everett Show was mainly my dad, which would have a twofold effect when we watched the show at home. He would be laughing on the TV and laughing behind me in his bed. I could barely hear the jokes.

  Another evening I recall when we watched TV as a family was the launch of Channel Four in 1982. At last we would be getting a fourth channel. We gathered in my parents’ bedroom for what was a spectacular anti-climax. Countdown. I think the whole nation felt let down and immediately went back to the BBC and ITV, apart from Alan Hawkshaw, who went shopping.

  People look back fondly at a time with so few channels because the nation was all watching pretty much the same thing. We therefore had more in common with each other, leading to what the Americans call ‘water-cooler moments’. This is when people discuss the previous night’s television at the water-cooler. This expression has crept int
o our nation’s lexicon (I know, ‘lexicon’, quite a fancy word for me). I think ‘water-cooler moments’ are purely an American thing, and the expression has no place over here. British people don’t speak to each other anywhere, let alone at water-coolers. The only thing a British person has said to another British person at the water-cooler is ‘There’s no more water’ or ‘We need more cups’ or ‘Sorry’.

  I do think, though, that the multi-channels of today are great for kids. There are countless kids’ channels that are on twenty-four hours a day. If you have kids (or just enjoy unchallenging TV), it doesn’t matter what time it is, you can turn on the telly and watch Ben 10 or Bob the Builder. Whereas in the early eighties, my sister and I could only watch television intended for us at certain times, which led to us watching a lot of TV that wasn’t intended for us. I remember watching a lot of snooker on BBC2. My mother was forever trying to find Ray Reardon and Cliff Thorburn figures in toy shops. The film The Towering Inferno was on seemingly every day during the 1980s. It was on more than the weather forecast. It would be the news, The Towering Inferno, then the weather. Every time I turned the TV on, Robert Wagner was hanging out of a burning building. It was repeated so many times, I think I once watched it back to back.

  It was during my childhood TV viewing that I found out I was heterosexual. I can actually pinpoint the moment. It was in 1983, so I was seven years old and watching Billy Joel’s ‘Uptown Girl’ video featuring the model Christie Brinkley. She was gorgeous. I felt peculiar. I revisited those feelings a few times pre-puberty, and approximately every seven seconds post-puberty. Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman was a favourite, as was golden-bikini-clad Princess Leia, obviously, and there was a scene in Flash Gordon (the camp one with music by Queen – ‘Flash, Aaaaa!’) where Princess Aura is being whipped that I rewound so many time the video tape broke – as did the video player and the television. (I’ve just looked the clip up on YouTube. Tremendous.)