Those ferrets, for example. When they die, being a little bigger than a mouse or even a pet rat, if you have such a thing, they aren’t something you can flush away, and you have to give some thought to how and where you bury them, as you don’t want them being dug up by a passing dog or cat. So when the first of our ferrets turned up its toes we decided to bury it in its own coffin.
We have a friend who does odd jobs for us – actually, he used to be a fireman who helped us out in his spare time. He’s not a fireman any more, but he still comes round occasionally to lend a hand. Anyway, at that time we had an odd-job fireman. And one morning I greeted him with, ‘I’ve got a very odd job for you today. I need you to build a coffin for a ferret.’ So he made us a coffin for our ferret and it was very nice, quite big and surprisingly heavy. But by the time we put the ferret into it, he was stiff as a board and no longer looked much like the friendly pet the children had loved. In fact, he now looked like a shrunken version of some really scary monster from a horror movie. We had to nail down the lid pretty hastily. So that was a lesson for the kids, and a lesson for the grown-ups: when a pet dies, get rid of it sharpish. Don’t delay the funeral until rigor mortis has set in, or your children will be terrified and just fear the inevitable even more.
Yes, from cradle to grave, pets are great teachers. From their pets, our kids will learn that it is not socially acceptable to whip out your old man at the dinner table. They will learn, I trust, that it’s not acceptable to mount each other – well, not each other, obviously, but their sexual partners – in the middle of a football match. They will learn, too, how wonderful it is to have friends around you; cuddly, friendly friends. Not people, necessarily, because people can be quite annoying, but unquestioning, loyal friends who are happy to sit adoringly at your feet while you’re watching TV and keep you warm.
Fame: getting there’s easy
If there’s one question that I get asked more than any other, it would have to be ‘Why are you wearing that?’ – often followed by ‘at your age’. It’s a query I generally choose to interpret as being affectionate rather than aggressive. I think people tend to regard my wardrobe malfunctions as an inadvertent idiosyncrasy rather than a challenge or threat, and that’s a relief. But apart from queries about my rather spectacular dress sense, the other question I encounter a lot is ‘What’s it like to be famous?’ It’s a strange one to deal with, as it supposes that you still have enough of a grasp on what life was like before you were hit by this particular life-changing truck called Fame to make a valid comparison and report back from the front line. Or should that be accident site?
But I don’t get asked it as much as I used to. I guess that is because by now people are used to seeing me on TV and we have that weird relationship where they feel they know me without actually knowing me, if you know what I mean, and so the question probably seems less relevant.
Scarily, there are now young adults walking around unaided, old enough to vote and fornicate and generally carry on under their own steam, who were born after I first appeared on my own talk show. These poor souls have never known a time when I wasn’t available for the home consumer on radio or television at least once a week for most of the year. To them I have always been famous, and to everyone else the novelty wore off long ago, which might explain why I rarely get asked about fame any more by the curious or the needy or any wannabe celebrities out there. It’s a bit like having been dead for a long time. When you first die some people imagine you’re still hanging around, soaking up the last little dregs of life before you head off into eternity. That’s when people go to mediums to try and have one last chat with you.
I’m convinced people go to mediums more readily if their loved one has only recently passed on rather than twenty years down the line. The conventional wisdom seems to be that there’s more chance of the supposed psychic reaching someone who’s freshly dead than someone who’s been cold for donkey’s years. Personally I think that’s a mistake. Here’s my theory. Kicking the bucket and shifting over to the other side, where Doris Stokes rules the roost and everyone wanders around naked with wings, or bright red with pitchforks, must be rather like getting a divorce and moving to a new town and a new job. You still remember the people you left behind, hopefully with some fondness, but you have to put it all behind you if you are going to start afresh. Certainly the first few months will be spent settling in and bedding down, learning the shortcuts on your drive to the celestial office, trying to remember all the lies you told about yourself in the first week to make you seem braver and sexier then you ever really were in the other place. You might even have claimed to have had a cool nickname, like Foxy or Snake, and that takes some remembering. Take it from old Ho’ Pants here. But you certainly aren’t going to be rushing to the phone every time someone calls up asking where you left the insurance forms or whether or not they were the love of your life. Leave it a year or two, that’s my advice. Then when your dearly departed has got bored with the novelty of being able to fly, or listening in on every conversation happening on Earth simultaneously, they might be prepared to hover back over for a chat.
But to answer the question, the truth is that fame is almost definitely not what you’d expect it to be at all. The change in your life and situation and the effect of your being well known on those around you is gradual, and the changes take place so slowly that you don’t tend to notice them until years have gone by. Plip, plop, plip, plop, like water dripping on limestone, forming a little puddle, then a deeper bowl, and finally the original slab is no longer recognizable, having been either transformed into a unique tourist attraction that will survive for decades or completely washed away. Christ, I’m deep. Actually, to go off briefly on a small tangent, typing the words ‘plip, plop’ there reminded me of a very fine joke that the very fine comedian and comic actor Paul Whitehouse once told me. Can you name the French man who invented the sandal? Philippe Pheloppe.
So, that feeling of being famous takes a while to kick in. You do feel slightly different eventually, but only because of the way you get treated by others. The way you feel about yourself doesn’t really change, but the way that others react to you and deal with you certainly does. In many ways this is very pleasant, and in other ways it’s kind of peculiar and occasionally a little bit unsettling. I’m certainly not complaining – I probably enjoy being famous as much as anyone possibly can, but it is weird to go through life with most people already having a firm opinion of whether or not they like you before you’ve even walked into the room.
One of the nicest things about being on TV and consequently being famous is that you’re treated politely, even by people who don’t like you very much. And I’m not so far gone that I can’t appreciate there must be plenty of people out there who, on the basis of my TV and radio work, can’t stand the sight or sound of me. I know for a fact that not everyone’s completely in love with me and my output. That’s an odd phrase – ‘me and my output’ – it sounds like a porn movie for a very niche audience. Not a bad name for a band, either.
I have a small collection in the back of my head of weird things people have said over the years that would make great titles for books or names for popular indie bands. ‘My life is bubbles’ is one that I have earmarked for my autobiography if I ever get the urge to write it. That was said by my youngest daughter when she was about four, playing in the garden as we blew bubbles towards her. Lovely, isn’t it? And for a band, how about ‘The Maybe Elvis Toenail’? I encountered that gem while filming a documentary for Channel 4 called Viva Elvis in which I met up with a whole load of Elvis impersonators – let’s use the collective noun ‘a thrust’ of Elvises. Or Elvii. While in Gracelands we hooked up with a devoted fan of the late King who had honoured him with a small museum. Most of what she had was fairly pedestrian, but in a frame on the wall was a toenail clipping she had surreptitiously retrieved from the shag pile while on a guided tour of Gracelands with a posse of other Elvis fans. It may or may not have grown o
n Elvis’s foot, so in the interests of accuracy and full disclosure the sign underneath read ‘The Maybe Elvis Toenail’.
But if we assume that there are plenty of people out there – many of whom I meet and interact with on a day-to-day basis – who don’t enjoy my work, or just don’t like me and think that the way that I carry myself on television is irritating and obnoxious, then I am even more convinced that fame creates politeness in people. Because almost completely without exception I am treated with great courtesy or open displays of affection.
It’s like when someone meets a very old person, or a member of the royal family. Trust me, unless you’re a rabidly fervent republican, when you meet a royal you’re suddenly going to forget all those opinions you’ve rattled on about in the pub for years and you will find yourself bowing or curtseying and saying, ‘Yes, Your Majesty.’ That’s the power of being on stamps and five-pound notes and giving a speech on the telly each Christmas for you. It’s also how I imagine being a judge might be – everyone’s polite and gracious because they never know when they might need a favour from you. So if you’re royalty or a member of the judiciary or just plain famous then you find yourself having a pretty easy ride through life.
Let me give you some specific examples. For starters, you’ll get slightly better service in a bar at a crowded gig. That’s an interesting way of telling whether or not you’re truly famous. You manoeuvre your way to the front and eye the harassed barman, who is looking out at the sea of people all holding a tenner out, hoping to be served next. Now the first rule of working behind a crowded bar is not to make eye contact. That creates a bond and makes it harder to carry on as if everyone is equal.
According to several quite comprehensive magazine articles I have read on the subject, if you ever find yourself in the unhappy situation of having been kidnapped by a serial killer who intends to make you his next victim, the thing to do is to make him – or her, I suppose – think of you as a person, a fellow human being. Then it will be much harder for them to kill you and wear parts of your body as a hat. So it is with bar staff. If you penetrate their icy professional demeanour and get them to regard you as a fellow traveller on life’s highway, with hopes and dreams and the not unreasonable desire to get a bloody drink before the band come one, then you’re in with a much better chance than the stranger next to you who might still wind up being worn as a hat by the bartender. If he or she is also a serial killer. But if the bar staff spot a famous person they can’t help but make eye contact, and eye contact means that you will definitely be served next, or next but one at the latest.
I don’t know if fame would help with the whole kidnapped-by-serial-killer scenario I threw into the mix there, but it probably wouldn’t hurt. You might be killed a little bit more quickly and kindly if you’re famous. And only worn as a hat to extra-special occasions. That’s the way fame works – people give you a little bit of extra leeway.
Another perk of fame that at first seemed incomprehensibly cool was going out to the West End and getting into nightclubs free. Previously, not only was it a matter of having to pay to get in, but you weren’t even certain you were going to be allowed in. Especially looking the way I used to look. So to suddenly find them hustling me to the front of the queue, opening the door for me and sending over a free drink – man, I felt like I’d died and gone to heaven.
Here’s another example. These days I’m quite happy to pay the full fare when I travel, but for many years I used to rely on the charity of airlines as much as any other freeloading celebrity and would often buy a ticket in the class below the one I actually hoped to travel in, on the assumption that if there was space in the comfy haven of First Class then they would upgrade me. And more often than not they did. I might even be safe in saying that once my shows started getting a decent-sized audience I never once found myself sitting on a plane where there were seats in the class above that were empty without being offered the chance to sidle up the aisle and park myself with the rich people. Only if the people working the plane were British, of course. No one else on the planet knows or cares who the hell I am, and they wonder why I keep dropping hints about extra legroom.
Of course, even when they know who you are and like you, it isn’t guaranteed. The only way you know for sure that you’ll be sitting up front is if you pay for it. I’ve got to the stage in my life now where I rather enjoy treating myself, so I happily part company with an absurd amount of cash just to get a nice wide seat with a bit more space around it that folds flat at bedtime on a long haul.
But being famous creeps up on you. I remember when I began doing my first television talk show, The Last Resort , which started in January 1987 – alarmingly twenty-one years ago as I write this, which is both rather difficult and rather depressing for me to get my head around. It was my first concerted effort to be a TV performer, and there’s rarely a day goes by when I don’t thank my good fortune that it panned out the way it did. That’s not to say that the show necessarily deserved to be a hit. Some weeks were terrific, but others were bloody awful. To be honest with you, I think we got away with a lot simply because there was no one else attempting a show like it, certainly not a young bloke, clearly with working-class roots, who also dressed a bit peculiar and spoke funny. Maybe they could sense my nerves and gave me the benefit of the doubt.
Young people certainly didn’t wear designer suits when I first started, in fact no one on TV did, remarkable as that seems now. I don’t know where they bought their suits back then but they never seemed to be in fashion. Or to fit. I suspect the older ones were passed down from presenter to presenter, like shiny, cherished heirlooms. But I put the success of the show mostly down to a series of lucky accidents. I couldn’t talk any differently than the way I did, no matter how hard I tried, and I had no idea that my difficulties with the letter R would become a weird sort of trademark – part impediment, part catchphrase. The suits weren’t a deliberate ploy on my part to try and get noticed either, it’s just that I’d always wanted to have a few really nicely made suits and had never been able to afford them before. Now here I was, doing a TV show, and discovering to my delight that there was a clothes budget for the presenter. It wasn’t a huge amount – about fifteen hundred pounds for the whole series. You can do the basic sums required here to work out that it didn’t buy me a suit a week. I think it bought me two new ones and a bunch of shirts and ties and a pair of nice black shiny shoes. Things have shifted again since then and the younger presenters on the hipper shows don’t really want to wear suits any more. Nowadays the fashion is for skinny jeans and T-shirts with the names of cool-sounding old bands like Kiss and the Ramones and Led Zep on, but for a while after I first started doing it you couldn’t channel hop without seeing some gormless young berk like Andrew O’ Connor or Shane Richie in a shiny red or purple mohair two-piece gurning away. My sartorial gift to the nation, for which I apologize unreservedly.
You may well be familiar with the school of thought – or theory, rather – called the Kübler-Ross model, that outlines the universal processes that people supposedly use to deal with grief. It suggests that there are five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Well, I would like to put forward my own model for the five stages that people go through in finding fame, losing it, then finding it again. They are: desire, entitlement, bargaining, depression and – yay, for symmetry – acceptance. Pay attention, class.
First up, desire, to demonstrate which I shall recount the tale of my first-ever autograph. Not the first one I ever got, which may well have been Cliff Richard, so please let’s not dwell on it. No, the first one I ever gave.
I was delighted when this happened. It was January 1987 and I was walking down South Molton Street after the second episode of The Last Resort had gone out on Channel 4. When it first began we recorded the show on a Friday evening at around seven, then tidied it up with a perfunctory edit before transmitting the finished item at twelve thirty. We didn’t expect, or get, a huge audien
ce, but it was certainly getting noticed. But it hadn’t in any way changed my life, including my financial situation – which was fine, but I was hardly rolling in it and not yet in the market for a £500 suit. So I was window shopping, when a guy came up to me and started chatting. My initial thought was that I had yet again been mistaken for a young gay man on the lookout for some action. It happens far less frequently these days now that I am – how shall we say? – more solidly built. But back then I was a slip-thin youth with a quiff staring through the windows of flamboyant menswear emporiums, so I brought it on myself really. If we have time, I’ll tell you later about the time I was chased by a young Chinese fella in a multi-storey shopping mall in Hong Kong and wound up playing a weird sort of hetero/homo hide-and-seek. And maybe also about the time I was chased around a desk by a toothless old queen in Scotland while researching a documentary on the Edinburgh Festival. Happy days.
Anyway, this particular guy wasn’t one of those not-so- particular gays. After some small talk concerning the possibility that the monocle might make a reappearance on the catwalks of Milan, he said, ‘Are you the new guy on TV?’
Reader, it was only because I had the presence of mind to grip the store’s railings that I was prevented from swooning like a Jane Austen heroine finally getting a dance with a legitimate prospect. To be recognized! By a stranger! In the street! In this particular street! It was all too heady a combo. Some further small talk ensued, during which he might have pointed out that the show was almost quite good, but he certainly wasn’t what you would consider lavish in his praise. So I was all the more surprised when he concluded with ‘Can I have your autograph?’
Why Do I Say These Things? Page 4