Why Do I Say These Things?

by Jonathan Ross

  ‘Well, we can’t – that’s why I’m asking you whether it’s OK to bring them along. But if they do start to kick and scream, I promise I’ll take them outside.’

  That normally ensured that the restaurant was, after all, fully booked for the foreseeable future.

  I don’t entirely blame them. Jane and I went for a lovely meal with Tom Jones once in Los Angeles. I had just interviewed him, and he offered to treat us at his favourite restaurant of the time. Matsushita, I think it was called, on La Cienega Boulevard. Like a lot of LA restaurants, the place itself was quite unassuming, although the food was spectacular. It was a tiny place, and we loved it, so we arranged to come back for lunch the following week with the kids and some less famous friends. Again the food was great, and after asking for the bill and signing the credit-card slip, I popped off to the loo. While I was away one of our children – and the guilty party has asked me not to be too specific here – exploded all over the table. This little treasure managed to poo with such force that it shot out of both the legs and the waistband of the nappy, landing on the floor and the table and completely filling this tiny eatery with a lingering smell that clashed terribly with the day’s special.

  Understandably the waiters weren’t pleased, and we hurried off, apologizing. But they chased after me, furious, not least because in their haste to throw out the tablecloth and chopsticks and dishes and anything else that my precious little angel had managed to launch a dirty protest on, they had also thrown out the credit-card slip. I had to return to the restaurant and walk the gauntlet of glowering Los Angelenos trying to enjoy their sushi in a baby-created fog. Even though that was fifteen years ago, I bet they’d remember my name and refuse to have me back, with or without children.

  I was very much a hands-on dad during the kids’ early years, and enjoyed being able to divide the responsibility with Jane. She did the lion’s share – or lioness’s share – of course, but I tried my best, even in the face of some good old-fashioned sexism. I remember going to those Gymboree-type set-ups down at the local library or church hall, where they’d have a Mother and Baby Hour – a concept that always annoyed me, seeing as I was trying to be just as hands-on as a mum. I imagine now they’d call it Parent and Baby Hour, but back then it was always Mother and Baby, and though most of the other people there were indeed mothers with their babies, it didn’t exactly put you at your ease. Everyone was always very nice to me, so doubtless I was just being paranoid, but I couldn’t help wondering whether they thought I’d borrowed the baby just to try to get some hot-MILF action.

  Once the suspicious sideways glances have died down and the mummies begin to accept you, you realize just how competitive they are about their babies, always comparing what age they started walking at and when they said their first word and whether or not they know who is the president of Uzbekistan.

  I’ve worked with competitive people and performed in front of some tough crowds in my time, but nothing compares with a roomful of young mums all trying to best each other in the Baby Einstein stakes, all desperate for their little bundle to be the smartest, the most developed, the best dressed.

  Jane and I lived in New York for a few months once, and we took the kids to a baby play place on the Upper West Side. There are few less restful ways of spending a few hours with your kids than in a room filled with a bunch of snooty, Waspy mums in immaculate outfits with their children beautifully kitted out in little Ralph Lauren Polo suits. They’d look on in horror as we rolled in, in slightly crusty tracksuit bottoms, trailing three rather diseased-looking north London children. They’d visibly shudder as Harvey wiped snot down a slide or Honey sneezed into the face of a mini-Manhattanite. Happy days.

  Despite all that, I really miss having small children, and I know Jane does as well. I don’t miss them waking up at all hours. I don’t miss them being illogical and not understanding when they need to go to bed or why it’s not OK to do certain things. I don’t miss changing them. I don’t miss panicking that they have meningitis every time they cough or run a temperature and rushing them off to the doctor. I don’t miss any of that stuff. And whenever I hear a child screaming on a plane or in a restaurant these days, I’m delighted, absolutely bloody delighted, because I know it’s not mine making the racket. I just sit back and enjoy watching someone else deal with it. That’s a bonus I never anticipated would give me so much pleasure. But what I do miss is that unique sense of connectedness between a parent and a very young child, which you lose something of as they grow up to become fully formed personalities with sophisticated little minds and clear wants and opinions. In the early years parenthood really is as uncomplicated as holding a puppy on your lap. Your babies look up at you adoringly, and if they’re safe, warm, dry and not hungry or suffering in any way, then all is right with the world and it’s a lovely, lovely feeling.

  I never doubted that I would have kids. I always wanted children and luckily my wife agreed. We have quite different backgrounds: Jane comes from a small family, just her and her parents, surrounded by a network of relatives, whereas I was brought up in a large nuclear family, very much created by my parents, in which other relations – cousins and uncles and aunties – really didn’t feature much at all. I have wonderful memories of my childhood, with my mum, my dad and us six kids in a big, busy, noisy house, so I guess I wanted to emulate that. I didn’t want to go quite as far as having six children, though, and Jane and I tentatively agreed that three would be a nice number. In fact, I think Jane agreed with herself on that question – I don’t actually remember being consulted. But I was perfectly happy with it.

  Eventually I learnt not to go around being too evangelical about parenthood, much as I love it personally. When I was younger, before it dawned on me that the world was a shade more complicated than I realized at the majestic age of twenty-three or so, when I first started to work, I would rattle on about children to child-free couples. ‘Yeah, you should have kids … You’d make a great father [or mother] … Don’t you want children? … I’m surprised you haven’t had children … When are you going to have children? … Why not go upstairs and make some babies? … Babies are great.’

  I must have sounded like a nut, but I really wanted to see everyone make babies, so I could play with them and help look after them until I finally found someone to make some of my own with. And they would politely deflect my comments or change the subject. Finally, someone took me to one side – he was a very nice man, a reasonably well-known comedian – and said, ‘Look, it’s very sweet that you keep asking, but actually, we can’t. We’ve been trying for years and years now, and it’s not biologically possible, so please, please stop saying that every time you meet us.’ I felt awful. It had never occurred to me that some people didn’t have children because they couldn’t. My remarkable insensitivity still haunts me, and the fact that Jane and I were lucky enough to have three so easily seems like a miracle.

  Of course, there are some folks who make a deliberate and conscious decision not to reproduce, and that’s fine. Better that than make kids they don’t really want or know what to do with. I met someone once who was as pro staying childless as I am on the side of breeding. I interviewed this fellow, a terribly grumpy old American comedian, on my radio show. He’s a very famous and (in my personal opinion) somewhat overrated ancient borscht-belt type. Much of his material is about the difference between being Jewish and being Gentile, and although there’s some humour to be had out of this, I find those kind of jokes rather mechanical and obvious and consequently they don’t really work for me. On the show he was funny enough, I guess, as I chatted to him between records, but then he enquired whether I had kids. When I said I did, he asked me if I regretted it.

  ‘No, not at all,’ I said, a little taken aback. No one had ever asked me this before or since – why would they? If one of my children had gone on a shooting spree or appeared on Big Brother then I might have understood it, but none of them had brought shame on the family – and he’d never e
ven met them.

  ‘I’m sure you do, if you’re being honest,’ he continued.

  At first I thought maybe someone had put him up to it, or maybe he had some material on the subject and was laying the foundations for a couple of killer punchlines. But nope, he just insisted that, in his experience, if you kept pushing long enough, every parent would eventually crack and admit that, yes, their life had been made exponentially worse by the arrival of kids, and they wished they hadn’t had them and they would have preferred to spend all their time and money on themselves and their partner. I can only guess that most people gave in and agreed with him just to get him to shut up and take his creepy opinion and go away.

  I was so intrigued by his weirdness that when I went home afterwards I Googled him to try to find out whether he’d channelled his energy into some marvellous charitable pursuit or helped save a small Third World country or something – anything that might have convinced him that his childless time on the planet had been somehow extraordinary. But nope, he was just your common or garden miserable old fucker. Perhaps he had a miserable time of it as a kid. Maybe I wouldn’t have been quite so certain about wanting to be a dad if I hadn’t enjoyed being a kid so much myself. It’s only the experiences you love and want to repeat or share that you recommend to others, after all. Very rarely do I come out of a bad movie and say to somebody, ‘Yeah, I hated that, you must go and see it.’ I only do that when I feel a film is so awful it defies belief, thinking that others might want to see it for themselves just for the experience. Normally, though, it’s the exhilarating things – rollercoaster rides, delicious meals, sexual positions – that you pass on with glowing praise, telling your friends they might want to give them a go. And so it is with being a dad.

  One of the less selfish benefits of having children is that your parents and in-laws and various relatives all get so excited about having grandchildren or nephews and nieces to spoil. On my side of the family there are a lot of kids, but as Jane is an only child, on her side she has been the sole provider of a new generation.

  We’ve had a lot of very enjoyable and fondly remembered family days, and none more so than those involving Kinny, who really sums up for me the pleasure the young and the old can bring each other. Kinny is not actually a blood relative, but a wonderful woman who not only looked after Jane as a baby, but her mother before her. She still comes over to see us regularly, joining us for lunch once every week or so, and even though she’s in her mid-eighties now, she has such a great spirit. You’ll still find her sitting on the floor playing on the Nintendo Wii with the kids, or out in the garden messing about with a water balloon, or perched on the swings in a pair of totally inappropriate sunglasses that one of the children has forced her to wear.

  On one occasion – I think it was Kinny’s birthday, in fact – we were sitting round the table playing that game which involves adding to and remembering, in sequence, a long shopping list. You know the one: the first person says, ‘I went shopping and put in my basket a cup,’ and the next person adds another item: ‘I went shopping and put in my basket a cup and a robot,’ and round and round you go until somebody forgets, and then they’re out. We were all playing with Jane’s mum and Kinny, and things started out calmly enough, with sensible choices like a newspaper and a puppy. But the kids were at that age – I think Honey, the youngest, was about seven – when they were highly amused by some of the rude words they’d picked up, and we soon realized that they were trying to slip in some off-colour options to see if anyone noticed.

  Before long we had a newspaper, a puppy and a thong, and the list grew saucier and saucier. With about ten or twelve items in the metaphorical basket, one of the kids selected an item I suspect doesn’t even exist, unless Elton John has been keeping quiet about his birthday gifts. A diamond butt plug. It seems to me rather a waste of a good diamond, because who’s going to see it up there?

  Anyway, the diamond butt plug was added to this imaginary shopping list. None of the grown-ups wanted to make a big issue of it, and of course it was very funny, and the kids were killing themselves laughing, but we were all a touch embarrassed about what was going to happen when Kinny’s turn came round. Was the octogenarian at the end of the table going to have to announce to the assembled company that she’d acquired a diamond butt plug? We were also pretty curious about what she might think a diamond butt plug was.

  We needn’t have worried. When the list got to Kinny she began: ‘I went shopping and I put in my basket a newspaper, a puppy, a thong …’ She reeled off the items that followed and as she counted down towards what we were all waiting for there was an audible intake of breath. Finally, the moment arrived. ‘A Bagpuss, a hat made of cheese, a picture of David Dickinson and’ – we were on the edge of our seats – ‘a diamond bus pass.’

  It just goes to show that the gradual hearing loss associated with age really does have a silver lining.

  You’ve done it again

  Ooh, it’s a minefield, having famous friends. If you work in television you can’t help but acquire a few over the years. You meet people and you get on well and you become mates – it’s the same as any other job in that respect, really. I’ve still got a couple of friends from before I was famous, but not many. But that’s got more to do with the fact that I didn’t have a lot of friends back then, than with me changing, or them changing because of me changing, if you know what I mean. But it’s tricky, being friends with famous people. There are hidden dangers that you rarely encounter with people who have normal jobs.

  I have a friend who works with computers. He does OK for himself and he knows his stuff, but he never asks me to check out a new office he’s just equipped with Apple Macs and tell him what I think. I’ve never had to sit through a film he’s made on the subject or read a novel he’s written set in the fast-paced and ever-changing world of information technology and offer an opinion as to whether or not he might get shortlisted for the Booker prize.

  But famous friends need to know what you think, all the bloody time. At the very least you have to be aware of their work and acknowledge what they’ve done. And occasionally they’ll do a show or bring out a book or be involved in a movie which isn’t particularly good, and you face that terrible quandary – do you lie, or do you lie? This happens no matter who you are. I’ve made my fair share of rubbish on TV, as well as putting in a couple of guest appearances in movies which aren’t very good. It’s always me playing me, but I’m not even very convincing at that, so I’ve learnt to give acting a wide berth, and I’ve also stopped asking my friends what they think. So why can’t they afford me the same courtesy?

  Over the years friends have announced endless new projects, or even come to me directly with new ideas, and I’m dangerously close to running out of ways to sound impressed and delighted when I’m not impressed or delighted at all. But there’s no alternative. No matter how close you are to someone, they don’t really want to hear the truth from you.

  One thing that I’ve found works with people you don’t know that well, if you’re called upon to pass judgement on their new movie or West End performance, is to merely smile, nod meaningfully and say, ‘Well, you’ve done it again’ – a phrase which is so brilliantly open-ended that it covers just about every eventuality. That normally satisfies people.

  Another way of getting around the problem is to find one or two small things within what may well be a steaming dung heap of awfulness that you didn’t find as objectionable as the rest, and focus on those. So in the case of a movie you could say, ‘I loved that bit where you were walking along the street and you looked up at the sky. I thought that was tremendous – that walking/ sky-looking sequence was fabulous. And all the door-opening you did was tremendously natural. Brilliantly done. No one opens doors like you.’ That tends to work, or at least gives them a polite clue not to press you any further.

  The hardest people to avoid being honest with are ones who’ve written a book. You can quite easily say, ‘Oh, I didn’t g
et to watch your programme’ or ‘I’m terribly sorry, I haven’t managed to see your movie yet, but I will get around to it.’ But when someone’s given you their book it is more embarrassing to say, ‘I haven’t read it yet. It’s on my pile of books to read.’ You can only keep that up for so long. I know – I’ve tried. You’ve got about five weeks, maximum, before they start hating you for not making the effort. And neither can you manage to talk about it without being specific.

  With a movie you can just pick out a couple of moments, but with a book you have to talk about the characters, the writing, and it’s so much more of a personal creation as well. With a film or a play you can always pick on someone else in the cast who maybe didn’t pull their weight. That’s a great way of deflecting your general disappointment. And let’s face it, most of us like to hear that someone else did a slightly shittier job than we did. But a book – that’s tough.

  There are probably only one or two really super-close friends who I would be totally honest with regardless of the consequences, because I respect and like them too much to lie to them. Whether that’s more for my sake or theirs I don’t know. But there have been a couple of times over the years when I’ve been subjected to something on stage or I’ve been handed a novel and read it, or tried to read it, and I’ve said, ‘You know what? I didn’t like it.’ You come to realize as you get older that just because you don’t like something doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad, it’s just not for you.

  The only sensible way to proceed is to tell people you can’t read or listen to or go to see things made by friends. As a default setting it saves you a lot of emotional wear and tear in the long run, but it’s a bit like forcing them to acknowledge up front they might have made something rubbish, so whether it really helps is debatable.