Some of them weren’t so bad, though, and I remember one especially who was a nice enough bloke. We would often stop at his house midway through the morning for a cup of tea and he and his wife would nip upstairs, telling me they’d be back down in five minutes. I’d be waiting there twenty minutes before they reappeared. With the wisdom of age, I now realize that Sunblest Man was giving his wife a pleasant Saturday-morning seeing-to, which was a perfectly legitimate way to spend his break. And she was, I seem to remember, a very pretty, typically seventies dolly bird – the best kind, as even I knew. Seventies dolly birds were invariably blonde, had pale lipstick and blue eyeshadow, wore short skirts or hot pants and used a lot of hairspray. They were also always up for it. I know all this for a fact after extensive study of the films of the period.
I was sitting in his living room one day, bored stiff as usual, when I felt something digging into me. I had a rummage down the back of the couch and pulled out something that looked like a long thick plastic pencil and that shook rather alarmingly when you pushed a button on the side. I couldn’t guess what it was, so played with it for a bit, and realized it tickled if you put the end in your ear. When Mr Sunblest came down from his bedroom jaunt I stuffed it back where it had come from. I didn’t work out what it was for about another six years, but still blushed when it finally dawned on me.
I had various other part-time jobs, all of which had the usual pro – money to buy comics with – and the same old con – having to work. My brief stint working as an assistant in the local greengrocer’s had an added bonus in that one of the regular Saturday-morning customers was a young mum who looked a bit like Sally Thomsett, the saucy, sexy, stupid one in Man about the House . I had a terrific crush on her, and coincidentally found out years later that my wife, then a little girl, had had an equally huge though perhaps less specifically sexual crush on the man who was about the house, Richard O’Sullivan. If we weren’t all getting on a bit by then this would have been the ideal combo for a swinging weekend.
Anyway, every Saturday I waited with growing excitement until this Thomsett lookalike came along, wheeling her hopefully fatherless baby in a pram and smiling at me with those prominent front teeth of hers. I would secretly select the larger potatoes in the pile specially for her, hoping she would notice my thoughtfulness while peeling them and realize that the fourteen-year-old who was so adept at adding up and knew his way around the boiled beetroots so well might just be the perfect man for her.
The worst part-time job I ever had was probably my last. Every summer a travelling funfair would pitch up on the other side of the Flats, offering the thrill of the Wurlitzer, the ghost train and the helter-skelter. For the more timid there was the chance to fish ducks from a small pond, or hit a metal plate that would send a rubber frog sailing towards but never properly on to a target that would guarantee a prize. All the usual games of ‘skill’ that were nothing more than borderline con jobs were there – try to throw a ball into a milk bottle, or rings over prizes resting on awkward-shaped cubes; attempt to get anywhere near a target with darts that never flew straight or air-rifles that wouldn’t shoot true.
Lamest and laziest of the lot were the stalls that offered you three sealed tickets for 50p. You tore the perforated edge and if you had the lucky number then you would win a fabulous prize, the largest and most tempting of which were hanging as an irresistible enticement around the edge of the stall. If you didn’t get lucky, as was always the case, then you still got something, just not something anyone ever wanted. People soon wise up to this sort of scam and would rush past these stalls, trying not to make eye contact with the poor sap wandering around with a basket filled with useless tickets – none of which, I’m convinced, actually had a prize-giving number – trying to drum up trade with pitiful, barely legal come-ons like ‘Everyone a winner’, ‘The luckiest tickets at the fair’ or the just plain desperate ‘Three for 50p, eight for a pound.’ As though having eight chances to win nothing was somehow more fun than three. So to sell the tickets the stallholders often resorted to crude showmanship, which happened to be the case the one and only time I signed on as a paid helper.
The guy who ran the stall was a deeply unpleasant chap who had received exactly the face he deserved. Imagine a mouldy peach with terrible acne and you’re halfway there. His great scheme to lure in passing trade was to have whichever local idiot he could coerce into the job to try to shift his worthless tickets while dressed as a Womble. Or rather, a cheap approximation of a Womble. He had a suit that was made of some sort of synthetic fur, a sort of bedraggled, almost dreadlocked, urine-coloured shag pile. It came with a mask made of the same stuff that covered your entire head. The inside was not only scratchy and smelly – a heady melange of sweat, bad breath and fear – but it was also damp. The crudeness of this wretched knock-off was such that the face had none of the friendly, unthreatening warmth of an actual Womble, but instead made the wearer resemble a gigantic, infected and probably contagious rat. Wearing a big floppy red hat.
The indignity of wearing this terrifying suit was bad enough, but after having reduced several small children to tears with my muffled cry of ‘Everyone a winner’, I decided to bail out early. The diseased stallholder – I’m betting syphilis – was furious, and not only refused to pay me but made me turn out my pockets to prove I hadn’t dipped into what he claimed was normally a guaranteed purse of about seventy-five quid by the end of the evening. After an hour I had taken around £1.50 and given out three of the consolation prizes, which were vinyl singles with the middle missing, and were all the same – a song no one had heard of by a band that never had a hit.
I walked home feeling both crushed by having worked for such a horrible bloke for nothing, and absolutely elated to be free of my scratchy Womble-rat suit hell.
Nothing in those part-time jobs, apart from perhaps the slender brush with show business that the Womble outfit provided, gave me any clue as to what I would one day wind up doing for a living. But I don’t think it’s an accident that I am here. Not because I have some great gift, or am somehow super-talented – it’s got as much to do with luck and perseverance as talent. I have worked single-mindedly to get where I am because it fulfils a boyhood ambition, the one genuine, lasting ambition I had that wasn’t just a whim or a fad – like being an astronaut or a mad scientist, both of which I held on to as career options for far longer than was advisable.
I finally gave up on the mad-scientist idea at about the age of twelve, when it became apparent that I was pretty useless at all sciences and that even the easy part of the job – being mad – was probably never going to be comfortably achieved. I liked normal stuff too much, and had once seen an episode of the TV series Colditz in which a soldier fakes insanity to escape, but then wees himself at the end. This was the programme-makers’ shorthand for the fact that he had really gone mad, and so his plan had backfired. In the seventies seeing a man wee himself on TV was a rare and memorable occurrence, and it haunts me even now.
I’m sure I have seen many men wee themselves on TV since then, and several in real life. I have even weed myself occasionally, but of course as you get older that sort of thing occurs more frequently – when running for a bus or sneezing, for example. Not a full bladder-load, of course. Just a trickle. Maybe that’s the key. In Colditz he started with the wee, and then, although he must have worked out what was happening, he didn’t stop himself, even after the commandant shouted at him to stop, in German. ‘Stoppen zi weeing!’ he barked, I think. Whereas if I sneeze, or find myself bouncing a little too energetically on a trampoline with or without the kids present, and a little wee escapes, I turn the tap off pretty quickly.
The one exception was when I was in bed once and really, really needed to go but kept putting it off, half asleep as I was. Then I found myself getting up and walking to the loo and letting go, only to wake up to the embarrassing realization that I had only dreamt I’d walked to the loo, and was in fact lying on my side on a soaking mattress
. Fortunately I had already been married to Jane for over fifteen years at this point, and she has stuck with me through far worse displays of oafishness than that, so we were solid. But the dream wee and my surprise at having done it is the exception that proves that I am not mad – at least not in the clinically recognized Colditz sense, and so tragically could not be a proper mad scientist, even today.
As for the astronaut lark, that was a common dream for most boys who remember watching the moon landing. I saw it on a little black and white telly with my dad. I don’t remember my brothers or sister being around, so either I have blanked them from the memory or they weren’t interested in watching man walk on the moon for probably the first time. I say ‘probably’ because I like to keep my options open on situations which aren’t absolutely definitive, and although I grudgingly accept it’s unlikely that men visited the moon before the Apollo landing, I have read enough Jules Verne and H. G. Wells to really want a Victorian gentleman in a spaceship made of copper and oak and hand-blown glass to have beaten us to it. But this hope that I might one day be one of those chosen few, those brave souls who wrestle free from gravity’s selfish embrace so they can jump around in Space and say profound things to the millions watching on boring old Earth, stayed with me for ages. Right through school, even when the combination of super-poor eyesight and poor exam results in maths and physics told me otherwise.
Every year from about the age of fourteen onwards we were visited at school by a careers adviser. And every year we all sat around, grimly trying to come up with a few suggestions that might sound plausible to him without crushing our young souls the moment we spoke them out loud. I would normally offer one or more of the following: comic-book artist, monster hunter, pilot (which was only slipped in to pave the way for the next bombshell), astronaut, and one year I rounded the wish list off with boxer. This was after I saw the first Rocky film, in 1976, so I must have been either fifteen or sixteen. So taken was I with the movie, and the realization that I possessed all the underdog qualities needed to become a world champion from a standing start, that I went to a boxing class at the local youth club. Just the one visit. I never so much as mentioned the probability of my being an undiscovered world champion again.
The career adviser ignored the comic-book idea altogether, and was also polite enough not to mention the boxing. Monster hunting was out because you needed a good grade in at least one other language, so we normally chatted about my desire to fly. It was, of course, nonsense, based on my love of science-fiction books and movies, but he was always reasonably kind in pointing out that I lacked even the most basic requirements to start thinking seriously about flying as a career – however, the local dairy was always looking for milkmen and a new plastics factory had opened near by. I told him I’d think very seriously about both, and then I’d wander off having hopeless daydreams about using my job at the plastics factory to make a new propulsion unit for the milk floats so that I could still be in Outer Space before I was twenty.
So those ambitions came to nothing, really. But the one ambition I did stick with – a sort of anti-ambition, really – did pan out, which was the simple desire that I never wanted to work for a living. Not that I mind work as such. But my brothers and I used to walk to school, and most mornings we walked along with a neighbour who was a friend, and occasionally his dad would walk with us. He was a lovely man, with a big Edwardian-style moustache and a remarkably chipper attitude, considering that his wife was a little bit mental and his sons – he had four – were all terrible little fuckers. The police were often round at their house, asking to talk to them about misdemeanours ranging from credit-card fraud to an incident involving the youngest boy, who had taken to whacking passing old ladies around the shins with his conkers while shouting, ‘Fuck off, old lady!’ Why? No one knew. The older brothers were almost certainly behind it, but what any of them gained from this was never clear.
Anyway, this old chap seemed to breeze through life oblivious to the terrible legacy he had created. He was never down, always cheerful, and was rather nice to walk along with. He would leave us halfway to get his train, and we would carry on to school alone. One morning he seemed a little less abnormally cheerful than usual, and he told us it was his last day at work. He still occupied a rather lowly position as a junior draughtsman at the office he had been with for over thirty years, and it was his last day. We all thought that might be a cause to celebrate, but it weighed on him. He was given a watch, as it turned out, and was told he could come home early, and thanks for the thirty years, and don’t forget your coat. He died about two years later, unhappy and unwanted and scratching around to make ends meet, while his sons continued to exasperate the neighbours with their antics.
It might seem as if I’m exaggerating, but the effect this had on me was profoundly depressing and, you guessed it, life-changing. For the first time in my life, even immersing myself in the adventures of The Amazing Spiderman and The Fantastic Four couldn’t cheer me up, so I made myself a promise. A promise I really meant, and that didn’t involve me one day wearing a costume or owning a harem or landing on Mars. I promised myself that I would only do what I really wanted to do with my life, and that I’d leave if things got too boring, but not before I’d earned more than enough to do whatever the hell I wanted when I quit. And even though it all worked out for me just so, I dearly wish I could somehow go back and share my good fortune with that sweet old man who used to walk with us to school.
One day I will eat myself to death. This I promise you
Hard as it is to believe, I am now a man of advanced years. Inside, of course, I still feel like a spunky, occasionally insecure fifteen-year-old, hoping to get invited to that cool party that I am convinced is happening somewhere near by and everyone else is going to. At this party everyone looks fabulous and they all know the hippest new bands and the best new movies, and at the end of the party they will all have sex with each other, but, remarkably, won’t feel at all cheap or embarrassed afterwards. Chances are I have been invited to such parties many times without quite realizing it, but even when I have had a suspicion that it might all be going to happen I have usually decided to stay at home instead. This is without doubt the sensible and more enjoyable route. If I were to go to that mythical party, I’d probably wake up with an STD and my wallet missing and have to endure an excruciating kiss-and-tell in the News of the World or the Mail on Sunday .
Why do you think people do that, the whole kiss-and-tell thing? Money’s obviously a factor, but it’s still odd, isn’t it? Presumably they want to have a little moment of fame, some attention. Strange way to get it, though, letting everyone in on the fact that you’ll allow a horny stranger access to your personal nooks and crannies just because they’ve been on TV or had a hit record. Maybe there’s also an element of revenge – if someone feels used then they may well want to get their own back, and revealing that their famous bed-fellow has an overly hairy back or snores after sex probably seems eminently justifiable.
Aftercare is the answer, I think. A couple of phone calls are probably all it takes for the sexual donor to feel respected enough not to turn you over to the tabloids. Although then you’d have to keep talking to them for ever, and if it was just a quick leg-over after a corporate in the Midlands, it seems a steep price to pay. But I always feel very sorry for both the people doing the telling and the individuals being told on, not to mention a little queasy thinking about the journalists poking and prodding away to get hold of the more salacious titbits for their Sunday-morning audience. It’s not nice, is it?
I’m lucky enough not to be talking from personal experience here, but I have had one particularly memorable exchange with the papers. Someone had been carrying out a string of sexual attacks on women in London, and the one thing all the victims were agreed on was that he had a distinctive London accent and could not pronounce the letter R very well. One of the tabloids decided it might be a good idea to brand him the ‘Wossy Wapist’. Just calling him a ‘w
apist’ makes light of the whole thing – it’s like saying Elmer Fudd has been on a wampage. But on a more selfish note, the last thing I wanted was my name, however humorously they spelt it, linked with a rapist. I’ve had enough experience over the years to know that people don’t always read past the headlines, so I’m pretty certain that quite a few people would have assumed that I was the one carrying out these attacks, and no amount of protesting or printed apologies would have changed their minds. Thankfully, someone who worked at the paper warned my agent and he managed to step in and stop them.
Aside from the press implying you rape people, the big downside to being on TV is that people get to see as well as hear you. On radio you can wear more or less what you like, and you can do whatever you want with your hair and eat as much as you fancy and it doesn’t really trouble anyone. But if you work on TV then you have to make at least a token effort to keep yourself presentable. This becomes harder as you get older, and not just because you start looking worse and bits start drooping or falling off or going gradually grey. It’s also because – and I don’t know if this is the same for women – men grow less and less bothered about their appearance and grow increasingly grumpy as they get older, and therefore don’t want to have a bunch of people spraying make-up on their face and straightening their hair and adjusting the waistband of their trousers.
Why Do I Say These Things? Page 7