But I can’t. Deep inside me, like a horribly perceptive and honest tapeworm, something tells me I should and could do better. I am driven by an urge, a compulsive desire to be, I don’t know, a sort of sleeker, more knowledgeable, more sophisticated and worldly version of myself – the kind of person that I like to think people might imagine me to be if they saw me on a long flight with the right type of luggage and a very smart-fitting suit, my appearance giving no hint of what I actually do for a living but guaranteeing that I am well travelled, well read and great company. There would possibly be sunglasses, maybe a hat of a sort that hasn’t been seen for a while, like a flat cap from the fifties that matches my outfit perfectly. But not the kind of hat that suggests I am trying for that look. Oh no, it has to seem accidental and effortless – like speaking another language should be.
I’d love to be able to say more than just hello to the air hostess in her native tongue. Imagine being able to hold a proper conversation in Foreign, never knowing which subjects you might touch on but being confident you had the necessary vocabulary and verbs to carry it off. I can speak a horribly mangled sort of French, in which hand gestures and facial expressions play as important a part in conveying meaning as the words themselves. Even then I often find myself in trouble. On a holiday to the South of France a few years back I managed to exchange a few words with the nice young man who brought drinks out to the sun-loungers. He admired my suit – a nice loose Vivienne Westwood thing in linen that I’d bought on the internet. He was almost definitely just after a larger tip, but I was so excited to be having a conversation in French with someone who spoke next to no English that I blundered on. I have since worked out that I told him I had chosen it especially to wear on the snow, and that I was sorry my children had injured the hotel pigs. That is as good as it gets and probably always will be. I’m pretty sure I’ll never be able to hold a conversation about French, Spanish or Chinese politics in any of those respective tongues that is not only knowledgeable but somehow manages to be funny as well as perceptive. But rather desperately, that’s the kind of person I want to be.
I don’t want to sound too hard on myself here, as I’m pretty certain that the majority of us Brits can’t manage more than about fifteen badly pronounced words in anything other than English. But why can’t I be more like Stephen Fry? That’s who we all want to be, really, isn’t it? Slimmer, maybe, and a tiny bit more conventionally attractive, and – in my case, at least – heterosexual, but essentially we all want to be Stephen Fry. And I’m not even close. Maybe that’s not entirely a bad thing. In fact, come to think of it, I feel a bit sorry for Stephen Fry – he has no one to aspire to. He is perfect already – his work is done.
For me it’s the result of coming from an old-fashioned, working-class background of the sort that you don’t see so much any more. Neither of my parents actually finished proper education – they both left school just before they were sixteen. My mum was sixteen when she had her first child and my father was eighteen. That’s when my eldest brother was born, on Dad’s eighteenth birthday – which by today’s standards seems almost illegal, but was pretty much par for the course back then. Now everyone waits until they’re about forty-five before they have their first child, especially men, thinking that they’re somehow missing out on their youth if they don’t still go snowboarding when they are essentially middle-aged.
I’m sure that’s one of the reasons why divorce is so prevalent today, because all these twattish forty-five-year-olds can’t deal with the fact that they aren’t twenty-two with their whole future in front of them any more, so they ditch the wife and kids and all other inconvenient reminders that they’re getting on, and swap the Previa for a Porsche, and find a young girl who’s too polite to tell them how ridiculous they look, and try to have a second go at life. Which is both greedy and wrong. My parents, however, certainly tried to ‘better themselves’, a weirdly old-fashioned phrase today. And they wanted us to do better than our circumstances dictated we might.
You would think that with around twenty years of attempted self-improvement behind me I might have achieved something by now, but I haven’t, really. I think it’s because I try to do too much. Maybe if I had the self-control to focus on one thing, I might actually get somewhere. Proof of just how thinly I am trying to spread my ability to learn is to be found in my loo. This is a list of books in my toilet right now: there is a history of punk, a history of Pinewood Studios, a history of modern Japanese art, another history of punk, this time focusing on the Roxy Club in London, and then there’s Why Pandas Do Handstands by Augustus Brown, a sort of natural history trivia compendium, and Firsts, Lasts and Onlys: Military by Jeremy Beadle – the same sort of book, but full of strange facts culled from military history. Utterly Lovable Dogs is next – not really self-help, I know, but the pictures are so cute that I normally reach for that one first. Then there’s a pamphlet that I got from a men’s health mag which promises perfect abs in thirty days, right next to four volumes of poetry. Four . I don’t even like poetry that much. I like a few, the greatest hits – wandering lonely as a cloud, we are hollow men, etc. – but I don’t like poetry anywhere near enough to justify four volumes of new stuff, some positively experimental. There’s a George Sanders novel, Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse, and finally, minus the cassette it came with, a dog-eared copy of Teach Yourself German .
Now the majority of these, especially Teach Yourself German , I don’t think have ever been opened, and it was wildly ambitious of me to think that even someone who enjoys going to the toilet as much as I do would spend enough time in there to actually learn a foreign language. Anyone straying into my toilet unprepared would be a little worried about who they might encounter in the rest of the house. A gloomy, German-speaking, poetry-quoting punk with spectacular stomach muscles and several cute dogs. Sadly, that perfect man is yet to materialize.
It’s not only in my toilet that you’ll find evidence of this relentless quest for a better me. If you were to look in what we laughingly refer to as my ‘home office’ – which in actual fact is just a room where I keep my comic collection, answer my emails and play video games with my kids – you’d find any number of abandoned books and so on. They are always quite practical, though, which I like to think is a saving grace.
You won’t find copies of Men Are from Mars and Women Are from Somewhere Else , but you will find a collection of cassette tapes – that’s how far back it goes – and CDs, providing language courses in a number of tricky foreign tongues. Japanese, for instance. I have three complete and very expensive courses, which, to be fair, I persevered with enough to be conversational at the most basic level with any Japanese tourist. I could ask them where they are from and tell them whether the weather is nice or bad – information that they could probably work out for themselves. How useful it actually is I don’t know, but it’s very nice to be able to say ‘Nice weather, isn’t it?’ in Japanese to a passing Japanese person, if only to see the look of astonishment that crosses their face because they’re so unused to anyone outside of Japan knowing any words other than ‘sushi’ and ‘kamikaze’.
The downside is that I am so excited by this small trick that I will approach anyone who looks vaguely Japanese and ask them how they are and give them a weather report. I have so far embarrassed myself in this way with passing visitors from Korea, China, Thailand and, on one memorable occasion, Wales.
My collection also includes courses in French (I have never even opened this, having mastered how to mangle the language already at school – but one day I might get around to it); German (one of which I bought, one of which I was given and complements the book in the toilet that’s never been opened); Cantonese (or is it Mandarin? Anyway, it’s one of the Chinese languages – and I’ve no idea why I bought that one). It gets worse, because on the top shelf I have – only opened once, which presumably seemed like more than enough – a starter course on CD that I purchased for myself in Farsi. Farsi!
Why did I e
ver think I would want to learn Farsi? Why did I think it was a good idea to spend money, which presumably I’d worked at least a little bit to earn, on this particular CD box set? I’ve never even met anyone who speaks Farsi. It is spoken by people from the country formerly called Persia and now, of course, known as Iran. Actually, I tell a lie. I did meet someone who spoke Farsi once and she was very nice, but her English was so fluent that the need for Farsi didn’t arise between us. So why on earth I wasted my money on a Farsi starter set remains a mystery.
You’d have thought that possibly, while buying self-improvement books, I could have picked one up called One Language Is Enough: Why You Don’t Need to Learn Any More, Just Concentrate on your Abs and left it at that. But no, I’ve got the Farsi. And you know what’s even more tragic? Several times I’ve tried to tidy up my room and get rid of stuff that I don’t need or which might be of more use to someone else, and every time I’ve taken down the Farsi CDs and looked at them, and then put them back. That’s right, I’m holding on to them because part of me still believes that one day I’ll find the time and the necessary inclination and willpower to sit down, put on a headset and ‘repeat after me’ how to say ‘Hello, what lovely weather we are having’ to a passing Persian.
Perhaps I shouldn’t be so hasty to tar everyone with the same brush here. I don’t really know enough about the psychological make-up of women to be sure that they feel the same way. Maybe having a womb and the birth-giving capability circumvents the need to learn enough to be able to show off in public. However, I can assert with confidence that men (with the exception of Stephen Fry) all feel the need to work on themselves. Essentially, the males of our species are just dogs that have learnt to walk upright.
I’m not saying anything here that women haven’t already figured out for themselves or that men wouldn’t freely admit to, if they didn’t think they were going to be judged too harshly – all we’re interested in is eating, sleeping, rutting and occasionally having something not too demanding to divert our attention: you know, a pretty female or a football match. That is where we stand on the scale of things. I’m not saying this to blow our cover, fellas, I just think it’s time we acknowledged it, and I think acceptance is a very valuable first step in learning to live with the opposite sex.
I’m not going to get all preachy on you now. I’m not going to start giving you my top ten tips for how to make a marriage last or stay in a relationship, because frankly I have no more idea about that than anyone else. It is a remarkable challenge to put two adults in a confined space, encourage them to breed and then see if they can stay together for longer than about nine months, and I don’t know how Jane and I have managed to pull it off. We’ve been married for twenty years now and I’m still none the wiser. But I do know that every day enough things happen between us as a couple to make us want to stay together. But I’m not going to offer you any advice, so you can relax and rest easy.
Instead, I am going to offer you an observation about the man-dog similarity when it comes to sex, because short of actually grabbing hold of an attractive woman when she walks past and humping her leg, there’s very little to choose between us.
Most men are so easily swayed by a pretty face that that’s all they focus on. I know many men who are fairly civilized, urbane, sophisticated and successful, who nevertheless think they would be happier spending their time with a partner who is gorgeous but stupid, rather than someone they can actually talk to. It’s a tragic fact that most men are only really interested in the surface.
But there is a cure. Recently, one of our dogs had his testicles removed. He’s the youngest of our dogs and, perhaps partly because he’s Jane’s pet and partly because he’s our youngest, we were a little bit more indulgent with him and didn’t have the knackerectomy performed quite as speedily as we had done for the others. So Sweeney held on to his little chestnuts for longer. What a lovely little pair they were, really smart and neat. He’s quite a dark dog and his testicles were even browner than the rest of his body. Imagine if a top designer had encased some small peanuts, perhaps, in beautiful dark crocodile skin and then given them a lovely, highly buffed wax polish. That’s what they looked like, surrounded by a small, spiky bush of pubic dog hair – very attractive, very attractive indeed. Not unlike an hors d’oeuvre I once saw in an expensive restaurant, which might have had something to do with scallops or possibly sea-urchins. It was too pretty to eat, as indeed were this little dog’s balls.
Anyway, they were a lovely little set but he was getting a bit too randy, and Princess, the only female dog in the house, was on heat and we’d never got around to having her done and he was bothering her pretty much constantly. She only had to walk within ten feet of him and you could see his little ears prick up and his nose twitch and off he’d go with his slowly emerging lipstick, desperate for action.
Now that’s not dissimilar, I’m afraid, to the way I am with my wife. I can’t help it, I’m a man. We are hard-wired that way. When she walks into the room the first thing I do is check out her breasts and the second thing I do is try to evaluate mentally, using some kind of ancient masculine arithmetic handed down instinctively from father to son, whether or not the combination of her mood, the look on her face, the situation, the amount of natural cover, and the general wind-chill factor in the room add up to a possibility that we will be having sex in the next forty or so seconds.
Now seeing Sweeney sitting there comfortably, one week after having his nuts removed, completely cured of his terrible compulsion to rut at every opportunity, I can’t help but wonder whether I might not be better off without mine. And I’m sure many men have thought about this as well. Little Sweeney just looks so happy with both his exterior testicles and his inner demons removed in one fell swoop. You can even have fake ones put in – they’ve got these prosthetic ones so you look as if you still have the full package. In actual fact, you could probably choose the size and shape you wanted and actually go one up on what Nature gave you. I’ve always wanted to have quite large, round, soft ones, rather like peaches. Mine dangle a bit and the one on the left is a little bit lower. This is very common, or so I’m led to believe.
Not having ever spent much time with a lot of naked men, on a desert island or in jail, for instance, I’ve never actually had the chance to study anybody else’s for long enough to find out just how common it is. But I wouldn’t mind mine both hanging an equidistance from my body and being a little bit fuller and a little bit softer. And just think, if you didn’t have your testicles any more, you wouldn’t flinch every time a ball came hurtling towards you. Obviously a lot of popular American film comedy – especially films involving children – would have to look for a different punchline to those scenes that rely on an adult being hit in the bollocks for a laugh, and You’ve Been Framed would be a very short programme. But surely that’s a small price to pay for a saner world. And if they could whip them off and teach you Farsi at the same time, I’d definitely be first in the queue.
A truly great night out
It might surprise you to know that I am not a fan of strip clubs. Nor do I frequent or secretly wish to hang out in lap-dancing joints. It might also surprise you to know that this is not because I have had a terrible or shameful experience in one, or that I find the seeming availability of lovely leggy nudey ladies, which turns out to be an illusion in that they are not really available at all, too much to bear. In fact, the first few times I discovered lap-dancing bars – that’s right, I discovered them once, then went back and rediscovered them three or four more times just to be certain – I thought they were just about the greatest invention since penicillin or sliced bread. Or a penicillin sandwich made using sliced bread. With the crusts already off.
I can clearly remember filming in the USA back in the late 1980s, away from my lovely child-wife and hence also on vacation from normal behaviour. My working companions and I were very much in love with beer, and would always seek out new bars. This one was opposite the hotel, and
it was only because the hotel itself had a very impressive beer-list and did twenty-four-hour room service that we hadn’t strolled out before. But on the final night in Baltimore, I think it was, where we were filming an interview with John Waters for a series called The Incredibly Strange Film Show on Channel 4, we left the hotel and walked the 150 feet across the street to this late-night bar that also had strippers. It was a memorable and impressive experience.
We were, of course, drunk and everything always looks so much better when you can’t really focus on it, which is why as TV presenters get older they sometimes ask for gauze to be put over the lens of ‘their’ camera, or even, I have been told, have Vaseline smeared on it. I don’t think either of those old standbys will work in years to come, what with high-definition and all, so I’m buggered. Although I take some solace in the fact that no matter how grotesque, saggy, wrinkled or grey I become, I’ll always be beautiful inside because I’m kind to small dogs and ugly children and I never try to upset anyone deliberately.
I was working as a researcher at the time, which is a job that covers any number of requirements, depending on the kind of show you’re doing. For example, on a talk show you’d be involved in suggesting guests, then helping to book the guests, then getting as much information as you can find on a certain guest before compiling a list of possible question ideas that the host can consider. Then you’d have to help look after the guest and smooth their ego on the evening they turn up on the show, and then usually forget to write to them and say thank you afterwards. When you’re working on a documentary it’s a far more interesting and challenging job in some ways, in that you’re often trying to source material or come up with facts and information that people aren’t particularly keen on giving you, which you then have to find a palatable way of serving up in the finished show.
Why Do I Say These Things? Page 15