‘YES!’ I shouted. ‘Great idea, let’s go with velvet.’ And for a week or three while it was being constructed, velvet seemed like the greatest idea either of us had ever had. Until it was finished.
Part of the problem was the colour. I’d asked for green velvet, which I thought of as being quintessentially forties. So the guy brought in some samples, one of which was a dark green, or more of a peacocky green really, I suppose, and it could not have looked more beautiful to me. I almost cried, it looked so perfect. I had one set of measurements taken, went back another day for a second lot, and then had to go in a third time for more measurements and alterations, by which point you’ve forgotten what kind of suit you asked for in the first place. Finally you get to put on something that looks like a suit made by a partially sighted child for homework, with tattered bits of paper and chalk lines all over it. Then they take that away, and back you go again, hoping you’re getting somewhere close to having this bloody suit finished.
Anyway, when this green-velvet wannabe Cary Grant suit was finally unveiled, it looked predictably appalling. My tailor – and I use the term sneeringly – had been very excited to inform me that the velvet he had found for the suit was, if not actually from the 1940s, certainly not new. He had managed to find several bolts of vintage stuff in a warehouse outside Leeds. But what he had either not noticed or not even known to consider was that the velvet he had bought and fashioned into the cruel parody of a suit that I now stood before him wearing was upholstery velvet. Thick, durable, hard-wearing, fucking scratchy upholstery velvet.
I am exaggerating only slightly when I say the feel of the fabric was closer to a Brillo pad than the soft, plush velvet that Cary Grant would have worn. And because the fabric was so thick, by the time he’d put a lining in, it could virtually stand up on its own. I suspect it would have been perfectly capable of getting itself round town without me inside it at all. It was a dreadful-looking thing. I did try to wear it once or twice, but it was not only ugly but also phenomenally uncomfortable. Sitting down in it placed a great strain on the knees because the material didn’t really take to being bent. It was like wearing a roll of carpet on each leg. You had to sort of snap down smartly and catch it by surprise, then force it to bend to your will. All the time you were in a sitting position you could feel this ancient, tough couch velvet straining to spring you straight up again.
I soon gave up on that velvet suit and for many years it either hung or just stood up in my wardrobe, gradually being pushed to the furthest recesses where I keep suits that are no longer in favour, while I toy with the idea of giving them either to friends or possibly to a charity auction, where quite a lot of them have eventually ended up – usually raising dispiritingly small sums. I didn’t donate this one to a charity auction, though. I gave it to a small Indian gentleman who came round to help me with my plumbing one day. He was admiring my suits and I mentioned that from time to time I cleared some of them out. His eyes alighted on the peacock-green velvet. He was nowhere near as tall as me, nowhere near as well filled, probably about a foot shorter and about three stone lighter, and yet he clearly coveted this suit. I said, ‘Well, if you really like the look of that one, you can have it. Have it as a tip.’ He was absolutely over the moon, this little fellow. He said, ‘I’m going to get it taken in, taken up – it’s going to look great.’ And he left, wrestling with the green-velvet suit like someone learning to dance with a shop dummy in his arms.
Needless to say, being ever optimistic about how much better each new outfit will make me look has meant that I have owned any number of proper designer outfits that were just appalling. Probably the single worst outfit I have ever owned was a Jean Paul Gaultier single-breasted suit with a double-breasted-style collar and panelling under each arm in a kind of pleated elastic. The trousers had a flat front, rather like 1930s sailors’ trousers, and flared out somewhat oddly below the knee. If ever a suit was trying too hard to get noticed, this was it. And just to make sure that this suit could not under any circumstances be ignored, it was made from a shiny, silky fabric that came pre-creased. It looked as if someone had slept in and on the material for months before deciding it looked just horrible enough to be worn.
Obviously, I was thrilled with the effect I thought this suit might have on less fashionable, more timid souls. Let’s call them sane people, shall we? Boring old non-mental dressers. I was very pleased with this suit and wore it on my very first trip to New York. I’d been invited there by the Mirror newspaper, in the days when it was owned by the late, not-so-great Robert Maxwell, to judge some sort of beauty competition to find them a new page- three girl. Embarrassing, I know, but they were offering a free trip on the QE2 and then a flight home on Concorde. I jumped at the chance so quickly that I didn’t realize the invitation was for me plus one. So when I turned up alone at Liverpool docks in the car they’d sent for me, the Mirror people were a little surprised I hadn’t wanted to bring my mum, at the very least, if not a close friend or nubile young lady. Which I could easily have done, had I realized it was part of the deal – I was already dating Jane, who was both a friend and a nubile young lady.
As it was, I had a rather dreary time crossing the Atlantic on my own. My cabin was just above the engine room, and I was kept awake for the whole four- or five-day voyage by this pounding, rhythmic banging beneath me, thinking regretfully that I might have created the same effect in my room if I had invited Jane along. She probably wouldn’t have enjoyed it much, though, as the journey was as rough as I imagine it can get without the boat actually tipping over. Luckily for me, I don’t suffer from any type of motion sickness, so I was one of the few passengers who didn’t go green and start chucking up once we hit stormy weather and high waves. Now unless you’ve been across the Atlantic on a boat in bad weather you won’t know what I mean by high waves. These waves appeared to my naked eye – and obviously, I’m not a sailor, I just occasionally dress like one – to be about three hundred feet high. They probably weren’t quite that massive, but when you’re on a ship the size of a small town and it is rocking violently, it feels as if they are. So the good news was, I didn’t get sick. The bad news was that the doctor’s medical room was on the same deck as me, and on the second night of bad weather I opened my door to be confronted by the longest queue of queasy people I’ve ever seen. Actually, it was the only queue of queasy people I’ve ever seen, before or since, but it was a big one.
The line stretched from the medical room, which was at one end of the deck, all the way down to my cabin at the other. And even though I was feeling quite jaunty and not at all nauseous, as I made my way past the queue the smell of partly digested food and bile was so strong I almost succumbed myself. People were clutching buckets and carrier bags and hats into which they had thrown their lunch. There was puke all over the floor, sloshing around with the movement of the ship, not quite ankle high but hard to ignore. Thank God for the bingo on the main deck. There’s nothing like a bit of bingo to take your mind off hundreds of people vomiting outside your bedroom.
Despite the puke, arriving in New York by boat was very exciting. I was looking forward to tracking down the B movies and grindhouse films I’d always dreamed of going to see in the States. I wanted to catch some kung fu, maybe some blaxploitation pictures – those 1970s movies that were much the same as regular films but – and here’s the novelty – starred black actors and actresses. Occasionally they were also written or directed by African Americans, but a lot of them were made by white people just cashing in on the trend.
As well as the big films, like Shaft and Super Fly , there were lower-budget gems – Coffy , with the wonderful Pam Grier, springs to mind – and some that had branched out into other genres. The black Dracula film Blacula was popular enough to spawn a sequel, not to mention a black Frankenstein film, called Blackenstein . No, I’m not making this up. The monster itself owed little to the conventional interpretation, to tell the truth, apart from the square head, which they achieved by shav
ing the actor’s afro into a high flat-top rather like a trimmed hedge. Scary. Apparently, Blackenstein didn’t do too well at the box office, because there were plans in the works for a black mummy film which, had it gone ahead, would have been called The Blummy . I would have been more than happy to buy a cinema ticket just to see the word ‘Blummy’ in big letters on the screen, regardless of how good or, as was much more likely, bad the film itself turned out to be. I could quite happily have got up and left after the opening title and still felt I’d got my money’s worth.
By the time I’d checked into the hotel, changed into my elastic-sided, flared-trousered Gaultier suit and wandered down to 42nd Street, it was already evening. I was thrilled by the atmosphere – this was when 42nd Street was still deliciously sleazy, before Mayor Rudy Giuliani cleaned up New York City to the point of Disneyfying it. Obviously, it’s better in some ways today. It’s nice that people aren’t getting stabbed and that you’re not tripping over junkies every few seconds. Yet I can’t help but feel New York’s lost a lot of its character. Where, now, can you go downstairs and see a transsexual strip off for a dollar? Nowhere. Or at least, nowhere I know of. By the way, when I paid my dollar I was under the illusion the she was still a he, and although it wasn’t an entirely pleasant surprise I was glad to have seen one up close.
There was only one cinema that wasn’t showing porn, a glorious old grindhouse with a kung fu film showing. I can’t remember which one now: it might have been When Taekwondo Strikes , and then again, it might not. When I bought my ticket and I went into the place I was the only customer. I was very happy, sitting there waiting for the film to start, my feet up on the seat in front of me to avoid the many cockroaches running around and copulating on the sticky floor. And then, just as the credits started to roll, a gang came in. An actual New York-style gang. There must have been about fifteen or twenty of them, all youngish men, all heavily muscled, all sporting a strange kind of top like a karate top with the arms cut off, and all wearing headbands. I was convinced that I was going to die that night.
Back then New York had the sort of reputation that London has worked so hard to achieve. A scary, lawless place. A place where you’d get mugged if you walked anywhere on your own after dark. You were warned not to go near Central Park unless you were keen on being raped or murdered or both, and hanging around 42nd Street unaccompanied came a close second on the list of incredibly stupid things overdressed tourists really shouldn’t do. So I sat there in a state of absolute panic and heightened awareness. Every time there was a rustle I’d jump, thinking, Oh my God, one of them is getting a knife out. And every time I heard the scuttle of a cockroach on the floor I told myself, That’s it now. First they’ll kill the cockroach and then they’ll start on me. But of course they didn’t. I’m pleased to say that, such is the power of kung fu, they watched the movie, hooting and hollering through the fight scenes and chatting through the rest, and when it was over, they very politely got up and filed out. They hardly even looked my way. In fact, they were one of the nicest bunches of people I’ve ever sat through a movie with. Possibly they saw the suit and were more scared of me than I was of them.
In case you’re wondering, the suit and I finally parted company in Hong Kong. I took it with me to film an interview with jackie chan, and decided to get it cleaned by the hotel. They must have washed rather than dry-cleaned it, and when it came back to me it was several sizes too small and every designer crease had been pressed out of it. If only I had kept the address of that Indian plumber I could have sent it to him as a gift.
Consider the alternative
It’s great to be alive, isn’t it? Especially when you consider the alternative. I love life, which is not as stupid a statement as you might think, because on any given day I meet people who clearly don’t feel the same way. I bump into them all the time, shuffling around with long faces, scowling when they see someone wearing a hat for no reason or singing out loud. Everyone has the occasional off day, sure, and I probably meet an equal number of people who deserve to be scowled at, but there definitely comes a stage in your life when you have to decide which side you are going to be on. Choose the wrong one and you’ll wind up with one of those downward-turning, deeply lined faces that only come with many years of visible disapproval.
I know I’ve been lucky. I have a wonderful and fabulously well-paid job, and a loving wife and three adorable children and seven very special dogs, a tremendous comic collection and a snake, but those aren’t the only reasons why I love being alive. I just love the experience. I like what every day brings; even on bad days, I quite like it when I go to bed at the end of the day. When you’re in bed, nothing else can go wrong. Unless you can’t sleep. But that’s why we have TV. And masturbation. There’s always something you can find to watch or do that will cheer you up.
But I admit I’ve never had a really bad day. I haven’t had a day when my house has blown up and I’ve had nowhere to sleep at night. I’ve never had to hear the words ‘Dad, I’m calling from the police station’ or ‘Welcome to Iraq’, and I’ve never been stuck in a lift with Michael Barrymore or Abu Hamza – although both at the same time might be fun. But I’ve certainly had a few rough times in my life, and even with those, when you look back, you generally realize that you learnt something, and rarely is anything all bad.
If you were to ask me what’s the one thing I’d miss most when I’m dead, it would simply be being alive – I can’t think of anything I’d single out. I like to approach my life in this manner, like a happy idiot, and in that spirit I try to find something to enjoy in a small and Zen-like way about everything. Washing up, making the bed, hoovering. Not that I do much of any of those things, and I’m sure if I did I might run out of things to appreciate, but even if it’s just the end result, you can generally find something to like.
Going to the dentist is a tough one, of course. I like my dentist and even play tennis with him, but there are few highlights to lying back with your mouth wide open while another man crams his hand in while holding something small and sharp. But the stuff you rinse with at the end is nice, and it’s great when it’s over.
Other chores are easier – the optician’s, for example. When I was a kid my optician was ancient and rather terrifying. In fact, he was probably only in his late fifties or thereabouts, but when you’re ten that’s unimaginably old. He also had the bushiest white hair sprouting from his ears and his nose – it surprised me that he could breathe or hear anything. You used to see a lot more of that sort of thing back then, before Trinny and Susannah and Gok Wan and all the rest of the TV makeover crowd started to gently bully us all into over-grooming. I miss those days. Bearded ladies, men with bug-red noses dotted with blackheads like ants on a jam spill, bushy eyebrows that touched and occasionally even grew into the hairline, long broken fingernails. Now I think about it, my childhood seems to have been populated by hairy pirates and gypsies and malformed goblins. The world was a little smellier back then, for sure, but perhaps it was more interesting too.
Anyway, my young eyes were just as bad as they are now, only these days I wear contact lenses to correct my incredible short-sightedness. And I really am very short-sighted indeed. It’s something that I’m perversely proud of. You would think that an affliction which verges on a major disability wouldn’t be a source of any kind of happiness in my life, but I like telling people, opticians in particular, that I’m a minus 9 in each eye with slight astigmatism. That means that, without glasses or lenses, I can’t recognize anyone or anything unless it’s about three inches from my face. Even when I’m looking in the mirror I am sometimes a little scared that it might be a stranger staring back. So far, I’m relieved to say, it has always turned out to be me, but I do need to pop my glasses on to check. Because I wear the soft type of contact lenses which are thrown away at the end of the day (a marvellous boon to mankind), I have to go in for a fairly thorough eye test before I can order a big batch of new ones, to make sure that I can still see clea
rly through them, and also to check that they’re not damaging my eyes in any way.
But when did going to the optician’s get to be such a time-consuming deal? When did eye tests become so complex? It used to be that you sat down, they shone a torch in each eye, got you to read some letters on a board and sent you home. But these days it’s not just a matter of going in and reading a few numbers off the chart. They still make you do all that old stuff, but then you have to embark on the thing with the variable lenses in the giant glasses that look like something Mr Magoo would wear if he ever became a rapper. They should just let you take those glasses home with you, so you could sit around at your leisure, popping them in for yourself and going, ‘Is that better? … Is that worse? … Can I see better now … or now?’ Hours of self-made fun to be had, and they’d look quite cool too – they have a kind of über-nerd vibe about them.
Before we go on, another piece of optician’s equipment that I have a bone to pick with is that silly device where you have to rest your chin in the plastic cup and your forehead against the top bit. I have never liked doing that because I always think I can feel the sweat of the previous occupant. Maybe they give it a little wipe down between customers, but in these days of MRSA and salmonella and botulism and weird diseases flying through the air and zombies rising from their graves, I really don’t want to put my chin on a chin rest where possibly a large bearded gentleman or even a bearded lady has been before me. What if they had beard nits, or bits of old cheese and Marmite panini lodged in there? But I’m not one to complain, so I endure the lengthy test, which now also entails looking at a moving dot of light for about twenty minutes with each eye, pressing a button each time I see it reappear. And they blow a puff of air right on to the eyeballs, and make me do eye aerobics, looking up and down and diagonally and side to side. It’s exhausting, but at least you can help pass the time by chatting to the person who’s giving you the test, which is not really an option at the dentist’s.
Why Do I Say These Things? Page 24