Why Do I Say These Things?

by Jonathan Ross

  So desperate was I for a sexual experience that involved something more than my imagination and my right hand (or a satsuma) that I tried on one occasion – and please God, if you are in any way related to me and haven’t yet skipped ahead, do so now or promise never to mention this to my face – to get up close and personal with the family vacuum cleaner. The details are hazy now: no doubt my brain has deliberately tried to delete as much of this event as possible in the interests of self-preservation. But from what I can recall the house was empty, more or less, and the Hoover had been left in the bedroom I shared with my four brothers. I don’t think there was anything about the Hoover in particular that attracted me – this was long before they put cute, smiley faces on them, and it was just a smelly old plastic vacuum cleaner.

  I suspect that this practice, at least as a one-off, is nowhere near as rare as you might think. A few years back that fabulously talented yet sexually insatiable powerhouse that is Russell Brand admitted to having done the same thing. I didn’t come out about my own experiences at the time because I didn’t want to spoil his moment in the limelight. What’s the point of making a big embarrassing confession in public if all your mates just chip in that they’ve done that as well? I must have already been masturbating – one eye shut and the other squinting fearfully at the door that had no lock on it – when I spied this sucking temptress sitting in the corner. I knew the basic principle of vacuuming, and thought that the long aluminium tube bit might just work in tandem with the wrist movements I had grown so adept at, so I reached for the nozzle, turned her on (note that the Hoover has instantly become a lovely lady desperate for some callow boy to make sweet love to her) and gingerly inserted myself into the tube. You’ve probably already guessed that not only did it feel nothing like actual intercourse – not that I was going to find that out for many years – but also it was deeply unpleasant.

  I suspect the main cause of my terrible discomfort was the level of suction involved. I wasn’t to know it yet, but the suction power of a Hoover is far, far greater than what is called for in these circumstances. To make matters worse, I imagine my mum and dad had gone for the economy version which, while doubtless efficient at sucking up all sorts of crap from our cheap carpets, had unaccountably not been supplied with that all-important blowjob setting.

  And not only did it hurt like hell, but the sound it made changed from the familiar white noise of a normally functioning vacuum cleaner to a kind of strained, unpleasant whining, a sound I was positive would alert anyone within earshot that somebody had been stupid enough to put their cock into the nozzle. I tried to pull out but that was even more painful, and the volume went up several decibels. The Hoover now sounded like a fat drunk robot calling for help as a boy abused it. I imagine. While we’re on the subject, how long before someone invents a robot that provides this sort of service? Surely we have the technology by now, and anyone who’s watched late-night television knows there are more than enough lonely weirdos out there who’d buy it. Maybe I’ll suggest it to Duncan Bannatyne next time we meet. That’s an episode of Dragon’s Den I’d like to see.

  Mercifully, though, nobody came to investigate and by manoeuvring myself very carefully, I managed to reach the Off switch and put an end to the torture. And apart from having a bright-red, angry-looking ridge around the end of my penis which didn’t fade for about two weeks, I emerged from the experience undamaged and slightly wiser. If I was ever again tempted to bring myself off with a vacuum cleaner, I vowed, I would find one with a more accommodating nozzle and at least two or three different speeds. Are you listening, Dyson?

  Although, as I said, I don’t think this kind of experimentation is as rare as we might like to think, confessing to it probably is. If you could be bothered to check, I bet that some time in the late seventies or early eighties the British Medical Journal published an article on penile injuries caused by vacuum cleaners. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Someone I once knew who worked as a porter at the local hospital delighted in sharing with us mind-boggling tales from Accident and Emergency involving people’s privates. Over the years he swore blind that he had personally seen patients wheeled in with the following rammed up their bums: milk bottles; light bulbs; Barbie dolls; an electric toothbrush; candles (up to nine regular-sized table candles in one go, he insisted); and, in the oddest case, a training shoe.

  While most of these injuries were self-inflicted, we did wonder whether the training-shoe victim might have been unlucky enough to have angered someone, while naked, who happened to be tragically incompetent when tying up laces securely but had great aim.

  Of course, most of the ‘information’ we enthusiastically passed around as kids was complete nonsense. It took me at least ten years to unlearn the ‘fact’ that most women don’t like having it off and regard sex as a deeply unpleasant chore to be endured only if they want to make babies or need shelves putting up. Apart from nurses, obviously. Nurses, it was believed, liked nothing more, after a back-breaking eighteen hours washing elderly patients’ bedsores and stitching up drunks, than to accommodate every spotty teenager who happened to offer them a cider at a party.

  So convinced were we that nurses were just about our only hope of getting any action that we would eagerly seek out gatherings where we thought a nurse or two might pitch up. This fallacy was one of the few glimmers of hope I had to hold on to, and it was lovely while it lasted. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not suggesting nurses don’t like sex – I’m sure they have a healthy and sane approach to it – but they proved to be far from the desperate, permanently game nymphos that all young men living in Leytonstone in the seventies declared them to be.

  Thankfully, I was what we describe rather charmingly as a ‘late developer’. That’s not to say that the normal hormonal changes didn’t kick in when they were supposed to. I vaguely recall a brief period of anxiety during which I noticed that some of the other boys at school were beginning to get a little smellier and a little hairier than they had been previously, but before I had time to dwell on it I, too, had sprouted pubes and become aware of the musky aroma emanating from my armpits and feet that delightfully heralds the approach of manhood. A key sign that we no longer considered ourselves boys, but rather strong, forceful, lusty young men, emerged some time during the school summer holiday of 1973. There was nothing amiss in July, when I said goodbye to the usual assortment of sporty types, bullies and oddballs that made up most of the year – I only had about two actual friends I would see and keep in touch with over the summer – but when we all gathered for the first day of the new term the difference hit you immediately. The smell.

  It was as if someone had sent us all a memo that we had decided we must follow without question. Here’s what it might have said:

  Dear Pubescent Teen,

  The time has come. You are ready to embark on the biggest adventure of your life. You will soon snog someone and might also be able to put at least one of your hands inside their clothes and root around for a bit. You probably won’t enjoy either of these activities at first because, quite frankly, you will be terrified that you are doing it all wrong. And, almost without doubt, you will be doing it all wrong, but the girl on the receiving end probably won’t realize that, so don’t panic. If you really mess up, just pretend you were never trying to find a nipple under her vest, and that button on her shirt you so lovingly caressed for forty minutes on her front doorstep was in fact what you had been looking for all night. You love buttons! What could be more fun than rubbing a button while kissing a girl, worrying that you’re moving your tongue around too much in her mouth and wondering whether she can taste the Toast Topper you had for tea before coming out on this night of wild debauchery?

  But to reach these lofty heights of sensation you need one thing. And you need lots of it. AFTERSHAVE. The adverts have been telling you this for ages, but you must wait no longer. Follow the advice of Henry Cooper and splash, yes, really splash it on all over. Be like the bloke in the Denim commer
cial and marinade your chest in it. Get practising your self-defence because, as was revealed in the short documentary masquerading as an ad for Hai Karate, you will literally need to fight women off. But only if you absolutely soak your skin and clothes in cheap, pungent, spicy and sweet mass-produced perfume for boys. Go to it!

  Yours helpfully,

  The God of Sex

  Yes, we had all got that memo and we had acted upon it to the letter. Even now, as I write, I can feel my eyes beginning to water and my throat constricting at the memory of that first day back at school in September. Thirty-six of us crammed into an unventilated classroom all morning with a toxic cloud the colour of a day-old bruise hanging over our heads. One boy passed out during the mid-morning break, but it was unclear whether that was due to the build-up of Old Spice in his lungs or the fact that Michael Ponsford, the unfortunately named class hard nut, had kicked him in the nuts during a game of Barge.

  I think this was peculiar to our school, but it was a craze that grabbed hold and didn’t loosen its grip for about two years. The rules were simple. If you were lucky enough to spot another boy of roughly your size standing up, you would run up behind him and leap into his back, shoulder first. When you managed to catch someone full force who hadn’t seen you coming, the effect could be quite spectacular. They would go flying through the air, sometimes six or eight feet. Fortunately, boys are fairly resilient creatures and no one got seriously injured. It also served to hone our reflexes somewhat. One kid, a friend of mine called Patrick Robinson, was like a bloody cat. You could hit him full on from behind and he’d roll with it before springing gracefully back on to his feet like a panther. He was the king of Barge, for sure.

  This trial by aftershave was probably the biggest health hazard faced by teachers in all-boy schools back in the seventies. It was at its most dangerous following the Christmas break, when the male youth of east London would reluctantly drag themselves back to their classes, after a couple of weeks of Christmas telly and Quality Street, doused in whatever potentially lethal fragrance they had been given by their aunts or uncles or particularly unimaginative parents. Thank Christ nobody was allowed to smoke during assembly. The fug of chemicals that permeated the air as we mumbled our way through the hymns every morning, avoided only by those lucky enough to be Jewish or Sikh, would have turned the hall into a giant incinerator.

  Smoking was pretty much tolerated elsewhere, at least among the sixth-formers. It seems amazing in this health-conscious, nanny-state age that teachers turned a blind eye to kids smoking in the playground and even, in a couple of cases, in the classroom, provided that they stayed near the back and didn’t cough too much. Seriously, it was so commonplace that I’m surprised smoking wasn’t a course option alongside social studies and drama. It would probably have been more useful to most of the kids there.

  I never had a proper girlfriend until after I left school. And seeing as I failed all of what were then called O levels the first time I took them, I was still there when I was eighteen. But, you know, I really didn’t miss having one too much. My passion, my love, my only genuine interest before I reached voting age was comic books. Specifically, American comic books. Even more specifically, Marvel comic books, written by Stan ‘the Man’ Lee and drawn by those two giants of the industry, Jack ‘King’ Kirby and ‘Sturdy’ Steve Ditko.

  I have my brother Paul to thank for this obsession as it was he who first introduced me to comics. I’m trying hard now not to rattle on about my passion for these four-colour adventure stories, because I know if I digress into a long rant about why Steve Ditko was the greatest Spiderman artist and just how cruelly the comic-book industry treated the genius Jack Kirby, or a detailed analysis of the Agents of Thunder or Herbie, the Fat Fury, we’ll be stuck on the subject for some time. Such rambles can last for several days, to the evident discomfort of my audience, usually people who work for me and who therefore feel obliged at least to pretend to listen with something approaching interest. I’ve noticed that their eyes tend to glaze over and their chins droop towards their chests, like those young IT workers you see on the last tube home dozing off after seven or eight pints of cider. So I’ve had to learn to stop myself before I send them into a coma.

  Suffice it to say, for the moment, anyway, that I kept my comic collection, such as it was then, in two old wooden drawers under the bunk beds I shared with Paul. I had the top bunk, he had the bottom. Traditionally, it seems, the top bunk is the prized position, and I don’t remember how or why it was decided that I should have it – it was just the way it was. As I mentioned, we shared the room with my three other brothers, and although it was a relatively cramped space for five boys, we all got along surprisingly well. I guess this was because of the great job my parents made of raising us all to be level-headed and respectful of others. Or maybe it was because we all had very different interests. Of the five of us, I was the least bothered about sport, finding no joy whatsoever in either playing or watching anything that involved fit people wearing shorts chasing after balls or jumping over or throwing things. As a result I spent as much time as possible indoors, and managed to compensate for the awful wasteland that was daytime, early-evening and weekend telly by gorging myself on comic books.

  When, as was often the case, I had no new ones to read, I would invent my own characters and occupy myself for hours trying to draw professional-looking comic books of my own. I came up with the Mutant Army, a thinly veiled knock-off of the X-Men, but could never get them to look right. Partly this was due to a simple lack of skill, but I think it was also because I didn’t realize how much time the artists devoted to each panel, laying out the drawing and roughing out sketches before committing to the artwork proper. To me, it somehow felt like cheating if I took longer to draw it than to read it.

  This rather slipshod and impatient approach to creativity has dogged me throughout my career, and I’m sure it’s no coincidence that I’ve always preferred making the kind of TV shows you just do more or less live, before moving on to the next one, rather than more considered, lovingly crafted work that requires far greater application and concentration. The exception would be the documentaries I have worked on over the years, where I’ll happily spend hours and hours trying to get little details right, and normally find the fact that you have to finish them and hand them over to be broadcast deeply frustrating. Give me more time! We can make it even better!

  Whatever the case, comic books kept me excited and filled my days. My first thoughts on waking and my last before going to bed were always of the Fantastic Four, the New Gods, Spiderman, Mr Miracle or even the brilliant Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth. In fact, one of the greatest dreams I ever had was one in which I was summoned down to Hell by the Son of Satan, admittedly one of Marvel’s lesser characters, and the Ghost Rider helped break me free.

  You’re glazing over a bit, aren’t you? Sorry. Anyhow, this obsession with comics – and it really was an obsession – only began to take a back seat when girls became too attractive a proposition for me to ignore them any longer. It’s weird the way boys develop – or at least it’s weird the way this boy developed. It wasn’t that I didn’t like girls or like the idea of getting friendly with at least one of them, even if I was motivated merely by a desire to smell their clean, long hair and lovingly lick their small, pink ears. But I couldn’t envisage any way of getting close enough to one to start a conversation, let alone begin to imagine what I might say to her if, by some miracle, I ever did. I sensed that it would be tricky to try to break the ice with an opening gambit about the comics created by Jack Kirby after he left Marvel and went to DC Comics in the early seventies (a golden age, but for God’s sake don’t get me started), but I was far too petrified even to make a stab at it.

  So scared was I that when I caught sight of a particular girl for whom I nurtured an unhealthily strong affection – I’d never spoken to her, of course, but I saw her on the way to school every day – I would sometimes forget to walk. Given that I was at
least fifteen, maybe sixteen years old, I am only too aware of how ridiculous this must sound. But as soon as this sultry little thing, whose name I never discovered, appeared on the horizon, wearing, of course, the traditional 1970s school uniform, complete with white socks, and no doubt nursing her first Benson & Hedges of the day, my legs would go all wibbly. Once or twice I feigned a loose shoelace in order to kneel down and steady myself by pretending to tie it until she’d gone, but it wasn’t long before it dawned on me that she would get suspicious, or worse, imagine I was some kind of mummy’s boy who had never learnt how to do up his shoes properly and, rather than put in the work or ask an adult, was happy to struggle to school each morning stopping every hundred yards or so to wrap the laces into some sort of useless bunch that would soon flop apart again.

  I then stumbled on what seemed like the brilliant concept of banishing all thoughts of her from my head by concentrating on a popular rhythmic pop tune of the day and walking in time to the beat. This worked, more or less, although I’m sure I must have seemed oddly jaunty as I bopped past her silently humming ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’, or some other hit from the recent past that had a consistent, easy-to-remember beat. Showaddywaddy and Mud were both good bands for that as well, as was, ‘Billy Don’t Be A Hero’ by Paper Lace. But don’t even think about trying it to ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. You’d trip up like a baby giraffe.

  My first actual brushes with real live girls were predictably unsuccessful. I can remember the exact date, time and place of my first proper grown-up kiss, although unfortunately I can’t tell you anything much about the young woman lucky enough to have been on the receiving end. It would have been approximately twelve forty-five on the morning of 1 January 1978 and I would have been seventeen. I know the date because not only was it New Year’s Eve, but it was also both my dad’s and my eldest brother’s birthday. We always had a bit of a party to celebrate that – nothing huge, but as we all grew older it was noisy enough to keep the neighbours awake – and this was the first year I decided to flex my wings and do my own thing on New Year’s Eve. By now punk rock was in full swing and I was as punky as a timid seventeen-year-old with terrible eyesight could be. I can’t remember what I was wearing, either, sadly, but it would have been a home-crafted concoction of some sort, in keeping with punk’s anti-consumerism message and my own modest resources.