Under the Microscope

by Dave Spikey

  When I say, ‘I took two dozen,’ I understate the facts. What this actually involved was going up to the battery farm and choosing them. This wasn’t an easy job. When you’ve got to choose twenty or so from thousands of sad, featherless, disorientated, beautiful animals bound for the great coop in the sky, it can be quite distressing. When I opened the first cage, one chicken made a desperate dash for freedom. Chucky dashed after it, caught it and roughly threw it back in the cage with a ‘You don’t want that scrawny thing’.

  ‘On the contrary,’ I said, ‘that’s one I do want, put it in the container.’ I chose the others, trying hard not to make eye contact.

  I took them home and released them into the garden. It was a wonderful moment; a moment that causes me to smile whenever I recall it. To these sad chickens, who until now had never had room to move about freely, the space was overwhelming; the grass under their feet alien after living their lives standing on cold wire mesh. The sight of these twenty-four chickens walking very deliberately, placing their feet down slowly and tentatively as they explored their new world, was funny and satisfying in equal measure.

  Then the sun went down and the chickens froze where they stood (metaphorically, obviously – that’s not how Birds Eye do it). This was because battery chickens never experience darkness; they are kept in constant light to stimulate the hormones responsible for high-yield egg production. Our chickens froze at each and every sunset until they eventually got the hang of night and day, which for me meant that for the first week or so, I had to go into the garden every evening with my torch and play ‘hunt the chicken’, pick them up and place them in the safety of their hut.

  Watching their transformation over the next few months from featherless, bloodied, battered and tortured souls into happy, beautiful, proud and inquisitive birds was a heart-warming thing. Battery chickens are more intelligent than you would give them credit for, plus they know no fear; how could they?

  So … they wanted to play with the dogs and the cats. They wanted to ride on Billy’s back and constantly followed me around as I undertook my gardening chores. It is surreally funny when stretching and turning after a session of weeding to find twenty-four chickens stood around you in a bunch, smiling as only chickens can (I’ve seen geese try and fail), as if to say, ‘What are you doing? Can we help?’ It is a constant delight to sit and watch the happy, funny chickens scratch in the soil, take a dust bath, sunbathe, or just mess about, dashing suddenly here and there for no apparent reason, genuinely seeming to be having a laugh.

  What is especially lovely is that they care about each other. One of them, Lesley, broke her leg when Bertie fell in love with her and wanted her to have his babies. Who’s Bertie? Where did he come from? I’ll tell you …

  The Turkey Who Would Be King

  IMAGINE MY SURPRISE when Kay announced that she wanted a turkey for Christmas. At first, the only explanation I could think of was that maybe she wanted the Robin Hood: Men in Tights DVD in her stocking. Not so, as it happens: she wanted a real turkey. A live one. One that we could release into the wilderness that is our back garden. I was overjoyed, not only because she had quelled my fear that she might be relapsing into meat-eating, but also because I wouldn’t have to sit through Mel Brooks’s filmic aberration.

  I decided to go back to the Animal Auction in Blackburn – where I’d got Billy from – to see if I could buy a turkey, but when I got there, they were selling them in lots of six; and I couldn’t have six!

  Then I saw two small billy goats in the same pen that Billy had been in and went over to have a look at them. They were terrified by the prodding and poking of the surrounding crowd and it was quite upsetting. A man approached me and asked if I was going to buy them and when I said no, he seemed crestfallen. I asked him why he was so concerned and he told me that they were his pet goats that he had kept on his allotment. The council had compulsory-purchased the land and he had nowhere to keep them. He obviously loved the goats, which both looked about two years old, and he was in bits about them going for halal meat.

  I bought the goats. I bid against a surprisingly angry crowd and got them both for twelve pounds. One was a white Sanaan goat and the other a beautiful Angora, and as I loaded them into the back of the car, a feeling of dread started to spread up my spine. My minor worry was that in the heat of the moment, I hadn’t really considered the implications of introducing two more billy goats into a garden ruled by King Billy the big brown goat – could there be constant aggravation and bloodshed? My major worry was how Kay would react to me returning turkey-less but goat-ful – and would there be constant aggravation and bloodshed?

  As I made my way to the driver’s door, the man who had owned the goats before ran over to me – tears in his eyes, smile on his face – and gripped my hand with both of his. As he shook my hand, he blessed me for my kindness and compassion, let go his vice-like grip and walked away. I looked at my hand to find two pound coins he’d placed there.

  Kay was at work until lunchtime, so I released Georgie and Henry (I went with the king theme) into the garden. Billy came to say hello, they sized each other up for a few minutes … then went to eat a tree.

  When Kay came home, things didn’t go as smoothly. She went ballistic! I told her the story of what had happened: I showed her the two pound coins, I tugged at her heartstrings, I suggested that she could get an Angora jumper made from Georgie and she calmed down … eventually. But she still wanted a turkey.

  A few days later, I was driving past a farm that had a sign: ‘Christmas Turkeys – Pick Your Own.’ A stupid sign, I think you’ll agree – how do you know which is yours? So I pulled in, saw the farmer and picked a turkey. He said, ‘Shall I kill it and pluck it?’ And I said, ‘No, put it in the car’ – but because it was a spur-of-the-moment thing, I had no room in the back, so ‘Bertie’, as he became known, sat in the passenger seat, and I drove him home. It was a long drive and Bertie wouldn’t keep his seat belt on and insisted it was a left turn at ‘Fredericks’ ice cream, but, as I tried to explain, that takes you through Standish, which although it looks quicker on paper, has those lights near the ‘Old Priests Hole’ that take forever.

  Kay loved Bertie and she released him into the garden with a ‘Happy Christmas, Bertie!’ He was greeted by twenty-four chickens, three goats, a sheep, eight dogs, six geese a-laying and what looked like some sort of duck in the pear tree.

  I don’t know if you know, but turkeys are bred in June to be killed at Christmas. Six months – not much of a life, but it meant that the young Bertie was no problem; he integrated well and was a lovable pet. No trouble to care for and in return provided endless hours of amusement for family and friends with his antics.

  Then he got hormones. Puberty, chemistry, testosterone. An adolescent turkey is a different kettle of fish. Not your normal everyday kettle of fish at all; not cod, halibut. He’d grown very big and now looked enormous when he displayed. He was a magnificent sight with his feathers all puffed out and his massive tail-feathers fanned out.

  He was also rather scary. My daughter’s boyfriends all (all!) refused to go out to feed the goats and chicks because Bertie was now King of the garden. He would attack when you least expected it, usually from the rear, but I could see the signs, so when I turned round quickly in anticipation of an attack to discover him hurtling at me full pelt, he’d stop suddenly, almost bashful, and put his wings back down and stretch his neck and pretend to whistle with that ‘What?’ look on his face.

  Then he fell in love with Lesley. I was having breakfast one morning when I noticed the chickens were all stood in a circle, surrounding an animated Bertie. When I went to investigate, it became clear that Bertie was making turkey love to Lesley, while all the other chickens stood round in a circle (‘What’s he doing?’). Lesley, meanwhile, looked around in desperation with a pleading look that said, ‘If you could get him off me now, please?’

  I chased Bertie away and discovered that he’d obviously broken Lesley’s leg.
He’d also pecked the back of her neck so badly that all the skin had become detached and rolled up her neck – exposing sinews and bone! I rushed the poor thing to the vet, who I thought would say, ‘Brick it,’ which is a technical term, but he didn’t; he unfolded the skin and stitched it in place, then put a plaster cast on her broken leg. When I put her back in the run, away from Bertie’s amorous advances, this lovely thing happened, which was that all the other chickens signed it, ‘Keep your pecker up,’ that sort of thing.

  We decided that Bertie had to go. It wasn’t fair on him, keeping him alone when he needed a lady wife – and it was becoming increasingly dangerous for the chickens. Luckily, through our animal welfare connections, we found a farm in Ormskirk that were desperate to find a stag turkey after theirs had recently died. As previously explained, mature turkeys are hard to find. We took Bertie up there and when we got him out of the car, the farmer and his wife could not believe their eyes. They said he was the biggest turkey they had ever seen and he was huge.

  We left him with heavy hearts, but knowing it was the best thing for him. For years afterwards, they would send us pictures of Bertie with his many wives. What a great bloke he was.

  Ungrateful Beasts

  ONE DAY, we got home from work to find that Billy, Henry and Georgie had eaten the kitchen. We had obviously arrived home earlier than expected and surprised the lads, who were just finishing off dessert.

  The first thing we saw when we opened the kitchen door was Billy standing on a worktop eating the telephone. He stopped mid-chew when he saw us, the curly receiver wire dangling from his mouth, and gave us a look which said, ‘You’re home early!’

  There was that second or two of stunned silence as we took in the devastation – and then Kay screamed and swore at them and they bolted for the sun lounge doors, which were swinging open. Then Kay was after them. In all the mayhem, she seemed to have forgotten that she was carrying a length of 2 × 1 timber that we had collected on the way home, which was intended as an extra perch for the chickens, and now there she was, chasing the goats round the garden, brandishing it and screaming like a banshee, ‘I’ll bloody kill you!’

  The next-door neighbours, Ruth and Keith, who were having tea in their conservatory, witnessed the action and apparently Ruth said to Keith, ‘That’s the last time I park outside their house.’

  In my Crimewatch-style reconstruction of events, I’m pretty sure that what happened was that Billy – who still thought he should live in the house – had leaned heavily against the somewhat flimsy sun lounge doors, and then shouted over to Georgie and Henry, ‘I think these’ll go if we put our backs into it.’ And so they did, whereupon the three of them made straight for the kitchen, which they proceeded to eat.

  They opened all the cupboards and ate as much coffee, tea, flour, cereal, biscuits, bread (insert here every other food in the pantry) as they spilled on the floor. They ate wallpaper, place mats, cushions – you get the picture: everything. They ripped down curtains and pulled over plants and vases of flowers; the soil mixing with all the above on the floor and work surfaces. They obviously didn’t have time to go outside to the toilet because mixed in was a liberal amount of goat piss and poo. It took us days to return the kitchen to anything like its previous condition.

  The goats laughed about it for years. We didn’t; we had their knackers chopped off.

  The noisiest animals we ever had were a peacock and some ducks. Peacocks shriek, you know? Proper shriek. In summer, they start at about four o’clock in the morning. Of course, cockerels crow to greet the dawn, but you can sort of register that and keep on snoozing, but when the bloody peacock starts, you’ve no chance. What does he want? Why does he keep doing it? What is the point?

  Hang on, though! Maybe he’s trying to warn us of something. Maybe he’s a guard peacock. The first time it happened, I got out of bed and stumbled downstairs and out into the garden to see why he was shrieking. When he saw me, he just turned and spread out his massive tail and said, ‘Look at me!’ – and that’s all they want. They are just showing off.

  We once got some ducks and if you’ll take my advice, you won’t follow suit. Don’t get ducks. Ducks do cabaret. I’m sure you will have experienced this if you’ve ever camped or caravanned near a country stream or pond, or had a canal holiday or sailed on the broads. The thing is that the cabaret doesn’t start until midnight, just after you’ve drifted off into a deep slumber brought on by the tiredness induced by outdoor life. ‘Oh, I’m tired. Are you tired? It’s all this fresh air. You can have too much fresh air.’ (It’s nothing to do with the six pints of real ale you’ve had in the country pub.)

  So there you are, sound asleep in your sleeping bag or your bunk, and the duck cabaret starts spot on midnight. The comedian comes on at about half twelve and begins, ‘Quack quack quack quack – quack quack – quack quack,’ and all the other ducks laugh loudly and hysterically, ‘QUACK QUACK QUACK QUACK QUACK QUACK!’, half the bloody night.

  And the Winner Is … II

  I PLAYED THE Comedy Store for years, some nights cramming in three other gigs around London in between the early and late show. Then came a hosting gig that was to prove momentous. Fate was again waiting behind a bush, ready to ambush me.

  The North-West Comedian of the Year competition was getting bigger, better and more prestigious year on year. It was a tradition that one of the previous winners would host the final – and it was my turn in 1997, when Johnny Vegas was the hot favourite.

  I knew Johnny from playing his comedy club, The Citadel in St Helens, and I always remember the first time I saw him (well, you would, wouldn’t you?). I was on the bill with Mark Hurst, whom I really rated. I went on first after Johnny’s compèring spot. I did well and came off and met Mark in the dressing room. Mark asked me what Johnny was like and I couldn’t really explain it! I think I said something like, ‘I think he’s shit, but if he is, I’ve never ever seen anyone with so much confidence doing such rubbish onstage.’ Turns out, of course, that I was way off the mark: Johnny was and still is like nobody else. I very soon realized that he is a comedy genius – and I mean about half an hour later when he did his second compèring spot. I’ve been a massive fan ever since.

  I had a gig at The Buzz the week before the North-West Comedian of the Year contest and Agraman asked me if I’d seen a young comedian from Bolton called Peter Kay, who he said reminded him very much of me. I hadn’t seen Peter, but I met him early on the night of the competition because he’d got there very early. Agraman introduced us and we got on very well. I found out that he’d only done a handful of gigs after leaving college and was very nervous about the show. He was to get more nervous still when he drew the last slot on the bill, which looked like being about eleven o’clock – which meant that he’d have to hang around for another four hours.

  There was a packed house for the show. After a procession of average acts, Johnny went on about sixth and ripped the place apart – ‘Game over,’ we all thought. After the next break, with the time approaching eleven o’clock and the crowd getting drunker and noisier, it was Peter’s turn. I wanted to get him on as quickly as possible, but in hindsight I could have given him a better build-up than: ‘Come on now, ladies and gentlemen, settle down, there’s only one act left and here he is … Peter Kay.’

  Peter came on and took control at once. His confidence and composure was staggering considering his lack of experience. He may have been a bag of nerves on the inside, but his stage presence belied this and his comedy presentation was enthusiastic and absolutely effortless. I remember that for part of his short set, he sat down on the edge of the stage and just chatted with a few hundred drunk Mancunians and they loved him; the next minute, he was throwing himself around the stage re-enacting kids’ antics at weddings. I’d seen John Thomson do something similar before, but Peter lived it. He was amazing.

  The judges got together and arrived at a stalemate. They asked for my opinion. They thought that Johnny should win, but ha
d a problem with the crowd’s reaction to Peter’s set. This was really weird; it was an almost identical situation to the events that occurred when I won the competition – when Dave Gorman was the favourite, right down to me going on last on that night!

  I couldn’t believe that they had a problem, though, because although Johnny had produced his trademark set of random genius, Peter had lifted the roof off the place and was the absolute outright winner on the night. They agreed and Peter was crowned the North-West Comedian of the Year. Who would have thought then that he would get so big?

  Chain Chain Chain Chain … Chain Letters

  I’D STARTED DOING TV studio warm-ups about two years before I met Peter. It is without doubt one of the most intensive, difficult, unsatisfying jobs a comedian can do. There is a theory that it is a good career move as it showcases your talents to television producers, but I must say that, on the whole, they don’t take much notice of your efforts. It can be a lonely and discouraging experience – but on occasion, when you are welcomed into the studio by a good crew and team and the audience are up for it, you can have a great time.

  I did warm-ups for Crosswits and Chain Letters at Tyne Tees, where the experience fell into the latter, most enjoyable category. I did University Challenge and Quiz Night, as well as a few recordings of Question of Sport; and this was possibly the easiest and most enjoyable job of the lot. I am a massive sports fan and so meeting the superstars involved at close hand was amazing.

  The shows were recorded on a Sunday afternoon at BBC Manchester and there was a tradition of sitting down to a formal Sunday lunch before the show. I clearly remember pinching myself as I joined Bill Beaumont, Sam Torrence, Ian Botham and Lynford Christie at the dining table. I was totally starstruck and wandered round in a bit of a daze – so much so, in fact, that I remember one Sunday seeing somebody I sort of recognized (maybe one of the BBC team?) walking down the corridor and so I engaged them in conversation.