by Dave Spikey
Anyway, his instinctive, shocked, in my opinion overreaction caused the tattooist’s pen (do they call it a pen?) to zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz up my mate’s back, leaving a trail of dots in its wake. And my mate still can’t laugh about it, even though the tattooist bloke managed to incorporate the extra line into a very fancy-looking dragon’s tail, I must say.
The second time I played Hong Kong was a couple of weeks before Christmas. The city was lit up like an enormous Christmas tree and Christmas carols blared out of every shop and bar; it was magical.
That is, until I came down with a terrible dose of flu. Real proper flu, I’m talking. Sore throat, runny eyes, banging headache, sky-high temperature, shivers and aches flu. I had four gigs to do and I basically got out of my sweaty wet bed, staggered to the gig, did the show and went back to bed, every single night. It totally ruined my trip because I was confined to bed the whole time.
One night, I must have been delirious because I decided that as I was still suffering after mountains of paracetamol, bottles of cough medicine, Nurofen, throat linctus etc., what I really must try is the traditional medical treatment. After all, I undoubtedly had Hong Kong flu, so what better place to find a natural holistic remedy? I got up at 2 a.m., dressed and made my way down to the other city that never sleeps in search of an ancient Chinese apothecary.
I actually remembered seeing one down a side street in Kowloon on my last visit (possibly a hallucination), so I decided to catch the Star ferry over there – and this, I repeat, is now at 2.30 in the morning. I wandered the back streets of Kowloon for ages … until suddenly it was there! The window was full of weird jars full of dried plants and powders and a few that might have contained insects or tiny lizards or possibly sticks.
I entered the little shop and there he was behind the counter, the archetypal inscrutable Chinese man, complete with wispy beard and pigtail. He looked about 123 years old, give or take. I approached him and then, for some unknown reason, I started speaking to him in English with a slight Chinese accent and broken phrasing, missing out occasional words that I edited out as unnecessary. This isn’t as dodgy as it first sounds. I genuinely, in my own head, automatically did this, assuming it would help him understand.
‘Hewo,’ I said. (‘Hewo’, for God’s sake!) He bowed. Brilliant, I thought. I pointed down my throat and said, ‘Soah, soah’ (translation: sore), and he nodded. I felt my forehead and said, ‘Ho’ (translation: hot); he nodded again. I gripped myself with both arms and said, ‘Shibber, shibber’ – no, really, I did; I thought that ‘shibber’ was the perfect Chinese translation of ‘shiver’. He looked at me sagely as I questioned, ‘You ha somthey fo me?’ (You have something for me?)
He smiled and ducked down behind the counter, then reappeared, placed a bottle gently before me, and spoke for the first time in almost perfect English! ‘This very good medicine.’ (Thi beri gu medsin.) I stared at the bottle and said, ‘I can get Night Nurse at home, mate.’
He honestly gave me Night Nurse. I said, ‘Haven’t you got any magical roots or ragwort or horny goat weed or jojoba? Anything? Ginkgo biloba? What about butter?! I know, I’ll have butter for my temperature and some vinegar, please; I don’t know if you are aware, my wise old friend, that vinegar is nature’s cure-all. Oh, and while you’re at it, dig us out some knitbone …’ Then I fainted.
Lost in Translation
IT CAN’T JUST be me who goes into half-arsed auto-translation mode, can it? My mates think it’s hilarious when I ‘speak’ Italian or Thai or Indian in those respective restaurants. I order and look up to find them staring at me with stupid grins.
‘I’m doing it again, aren’t I?’
‘You always do it, mate.’
I did it the other week with someone who stuttered. I stuttered back a bit! I wish I didn’t do it, because it probably sounds quite patronizing when I write it down, but I honestly don’t mean it to be; I just want to be nice and friendly.
I’ll tell you something else that’s mad; I do it with regional accents as well! I did a couple of gigs in Cork a few years ago; another beautiful part of the world. I’ve been back on holiday several times since and the southwest and west coast of Ireland are breathtakingly beautiful. If you’ve never been, please go and take a trip around the Ring of Kerry and the Dingle Peninsula and take time to visit Kenmare and Killarney and Kildare and most other places beginning with ‘K’.
I had one of the best nights of my life in a small bar in Knocknagree (another ‘K’, see?), where a small door from the bar led to a world of years gone by as you passed through it into a dance hall. Johnny O’Leary, the great fiddle player, appeared onstage and said, ‘Good evening’ to a couple of hundred people, then continued, ‘Here we go, then,’ and he started playing and didn’t stop until midnight. We danced reels and polkas and goodness knows what else under the enthusiastic instruction of the local folk.
Prior to that, on our first morning in Ireland, we went shopping in the small town of Newstreet, where we were staying. The others wanted a coffee, but I said I’d go off for a bit of a wander to see if I could find a shop that sold corkscrews, as we’d forgotten to pack one. I soon discovered a small ironmongers; well, ironmongers and bar, obviously. (Nearly every other shop has a small bar and that, for me, is the hallmark of a civilized society.)
The little Irish fella, dressed in traditional ironmonger’s brown overalls, smiled a greeting as I approached him. I smiled back and said without thought or hesitation, ‘Would you be having a corkscrew at all?’ My brain screamed at me, ‘What?! Why are you talking like that?’ Why on earth didn’t I say, ‘Do you have a corkscrew please?’ or ‘Do you sell corkscrews?’
I maintained my inane, glazed-smile look as the little man said, ‘Sure I have,’ and wandered off to fetch one. He brought me one and said, ‘That will be two euros, please.’ I gave him the money and managed a near-normal, ‘Thank you so much.’ Then he said, ‘Would you fancy a glass of stout?’ and I looked at my watch, discovered it was almost ten o’clock in the morning, thought this was brilliant and said so: ‘To be sure, that would be brilliant.’ (!)
He led me to the bar, which was next to the hosepipes and gardening kit. I sat at a table and drank my pint of Guinness, thinking, ‘What a wonderful world.’ Halfway through my pint, the others walked past and saw me sitting in the ironmonger’s window, and I smiled and held up my corkscrew. Result.
I decided that I actually needed to learn a language rather than speak in English with a foreign accent, and so, during my frequent trips to Spain, I took the opportunity to polish up my linguistic expertise. It was not without its hiccups.
I was doing a gig in La Manga when a Spanish waiter told me that ‘I cagado en su leche’ is a traditional Spanish greeting, so I tried it out a couple of times – and discovered that it was also a surprisingly good way of seeing the sights at the local accident and emergency department. This spurred me on to learn some Spanish properly, in order to avoid another broken nose, but do you know what? I am so not a natural. I’ll give you an e.g. (Is it e.g or i.e? I always get confused. Call it e.g.)
I was in Benidorm recently with seven mates on a jolly. I like Benidorm a lot; I know that it gets a bad press sometimes and there are people who look down their noses at it, but it has so much to offer. The beaches are brilliant – some of the best in Europe – the old town is fab, and its interesting streets and alleys reveal a multitude of small bars and traditional tapas restaurants, some with an unbelievable number of dishes, plus the resort boasts entertainment to suit everybody.
We were in the old town on the way to a show at Benidorm Palace (check it out) and we’d just finished a delicious paella, so I said as much to the waiter: ‘La comida es delicioso’ (‘The meal was delicious’ – well, near enough). My mates were impressed and so was the waiter. Later, I asked for the bill, aiming to impress again – and this is where I made a schoolboy error.
Question for you discernable travellers: what is Spanish for ‘the bill’? C
orrect, ‘La cuenta’. Question two: what is Spanish for ‘cheese’? Yes, five points (cinco punto) to the fit lass in seat 36C, it is ‘queso’. Now, on paper, they look like completely different words, but now say them phonetically – altogether, everybody on the plane get into the holiday mood – ‘Kwenta’ and ‘Kweso’ – and again … (For those more fluid in Spanish than I am, I know it should be ‘Kehso’, but to a beginner it looks like ‘Kweso’, okay?)
So I shouted confidently to the waiter, ‘La queso, por favor,’ and he looked at me questioningly: ‘La queso?’ he said, and I said, ‘Sí.’ Then he said something I didn’t quite catch, but I think he meant, ‘For everyone?’ and I said, ‘Sí,’ and to illustrate my point (and show off a bit more) I counted out my companions! ‘Una, dos, tres, cuatro, cinco, seis, siete, ocho … para ocho.’
He went, he came back and, honestly, you have never ever seen so much cheese in all your life, all of which he deposited on our table. Of course, I’m a total idiot, so I think that this is a freebie. You know at the end of a meal when they give you stuff for being good customers? I said to the lads, ‘Look at this! You don’t get this in England. You just get a bit of fruit or some sweets or a rubbish apple liqueur.’ And then we get stuck in and about half an hour later, we had just about managed to see off the cheese mountain.
Then one of my mates, Steve, says, ‘Come on, Dave, we’d better get a wriggle on, the show starts in fifteen minutes,’ so I look for our waiter (‘Where can he have got to?’) and then he appears and I beckon him over. He approaches and I say, ‘La queso,’ and he just gives me a weird look, shrugs and disappears. Two minutes later, he’s coming back and Steve says, ‘He’s bringing more cheese, Dave,’ and there he is, wheeling Sainsbury’s cheese counter towards us on a trolley. I shouted, ‘Noooo!’ (in Spanish, obviously).
As a postscript, I am sad to report that Steve is now addicted to cheese – and I mean proper addicted. He has to wear those Kraft cheese slices like nicotine patches. He had a bad period when he snorted Parmesan, but he’s on the mend now, thank goodness.
Speaking of drugs (well, you know) …
Just Say No
Idon’t think that it’s a secret that the use of drugs is commonplace in the wonderful world we call ‘show’, but I’ve never been tempted. Possibly it’s because of my upbringing, certainly it’s because I’ve seen the effect of drugs first hand, and basically it’s because I’ve never fancied it. I’ve never smoked a cigarette, not one, not even had a drag, and I take no real credit for that because smoking wasn’t a big deal amongst my peers growing up, and so there was no pressure to conform; and in any case, even if I had been tempted, I knew how my parents would react, and I didn’t want them to be disappointed in me.
Working on the comedy circuit over the years, I have been offered all sorts of substances and witnessed the effect they have had on my fellow performers. I once saw a comedian on the late show at the Comedy Store storm the audience for the first ten minutes, then lose them completely for the second ten. She came offstage totally confused, ‘I don’t know what happened. I was going great. I had them, then they’d gone.’ I told her that indeed she had done a great ten minutes – but then she’d done the same ten minutes again! Seriously. You have to remember that sometimes you could do five shows on a Saturday night in London, dashing from one venue to another; obviously some performers need a little help keeping ‘up’.
Kay is even more naive than I am about the drug scene, bless her. She very rarely accompanied me to shows in those early days when I was travelling extensively, chasing gigs all over the place while she did extra shifts or on-call at the hospital, but there was one occasion when she had come with me, and which we still talk about.
We were in the green room, chatting with three other comics with show time approaching, when the comic who was compèring rushed in late and went straight into the toilet. He reappeared shortly afterwards and asked if anyone had a knife or razor blade. I said, ‘No, sorry,’ and while the others searched about their person, Kay started looking in her handbag. I whispered through a fixed smile, ‘Leave it.’ She gave me a look and carried on searching, as one by one the others came up empty-handed. Kay then smiled and offered the object of her search to the comedian. ‘I’ve got some scissors!’ she said.
I said, all smiley, ‘Please put them away.’
‘Why?’ she asked, a little confused.
‘I’ll tell you later.’
Then someone found a knife and the guy ducked back into the loo and came out five minutes later rubbing his nose, and announced, ‘There’s a line in there if anyone wants it.’
Kay said to me, ‘Isn’t that nice?’ and I said, ‘What?’ and she said, ‘That you comedians write lines for each other.’ I looked at her, thinking, ‘She’s got to be joking, right?’ but no, she was all smiles and I thought, ‘Yeah, right, it’s like a tradition. We write lines for each other and then we leave them in the toilet!’ I thought, ‘I bet mine’s got something to do with cocaine and scissors.’
I once did a gig in Lisbon, another beautiful city, and on the morning after the show, which was a Saturday, Kay and I strolled through the main square and down a pedestrianized road that leads down to the sea. There was a street market and the place was buzzing.
As I looked in shop windows and studied the stalls, I became aware of Kay shouting at a grubby little man, ‘ “No,” I’ve said! How many times?’
I went over as the man sloped off and asked her, ‘What’s going on?’
She replied, ‘That horrible man has been pestering me all the way down the street. He keeps trying to sell me a block of chocolate and it’s not even in a wrapper! Have you seen the colour of his hands? Who would be stupid enough to buy chocolate off him? You wouldn’t know what it is.’
Indeed you wouldn’t – but I tell you this: you’ve gotta love her for that, haven’t you?
Overnight Success
WITH THE SUCCESS of Phoenix Nights and my elevation to minor ‘stardom’ – gauged by people shouting ‘Jerry the Berry!’ at me in the street and asking me where the black bin bags were in ASDA – I decided I’d better get myself a fancy London agent and my first choice was Comedy Store Management.
I’d always had a good relationship with the office and the legend that is Don Ward. I met with Charlotte and Don and outlined my plans and they agreed to manage and represent me. Charlotte organized my first ever tour – ‘The Overnight Success Tour’ – and booked it into theatres of varying sizes around the country. I was apprehensive about the size of the tour and theatres, but Charlotte and Don, as always, were incredibly enthusiastic in their encouragement and support. The tour more or less sold out and I had the best time.
Justin Moorhouse was my special guest on tour. He was a tad overweight and had an unhealthy lifestyle, so he decided that he would take the opportunity while travelling with me to become a vegetarian. I was impressed, and applauded and encouraged this initiative when he announced it in the car on the way to the first tour show in Cambridge.
I’d said that I’d drive to the first couple of gigs, and borrowed my wife’s Peugeot 305 as my car wasn’t a comfortable ride over long distances. And so it was that we turned onto the A1(M) on a bright sunny March day, an hour into our adventure.
Then Justin saw a Burger King.
‘Can we just pop into here? I’m starving,’ he said.
I looked at him in disbelief and replied, ‘Two words: unhealthy lifestyle. Oh, and one more – vegetarian?’
He smiled weakly and said that he just wanted one last Whopper, just one, last one ever, so I pulled into the services and parked outside the burger place. He emerged minutes later with the biggest double, treble Whopper cheese-type burger whatever-they-call-them and got back into the car.
‘I cannot tell you how disappointed I am in you,’ I said.
He didn’t reply; he couldn’t as he’d just taken a massive bite of the giganta-burger. I pulled away and joined the slip road back onto the m
otorway, giving him a further disapproving look as he took another huge mouthful. He looked back at me, eyes wide now, and said something like ‘Mbwwermuborri!’
I shook my head and said, ‘You’re a man of straw, you are,’ at which he became even more agitated, staring just over my shoulder and repeating loudly, ‘Mbwwermuborri!’
That’s when the lorry hit us. I saw it at the last minute and braced myself as it side-swiped the rear wing and door, while Justin was knocked off his seat. He was instantly concerned about the bright red blood he was covered in. ‘I’m bleeding, I’m bleeding!’ he yelled.
‘No, you’re not,’ I said. ‘That’s ketchup.’
I asked him why he didn’t warn me and he insisted that he’d been trying to communicate ‘through the power of eye’. The lorry driver dismounted his cab and limped towards us, repeating in a monotone, ‘Not my fault, not my fault,’ and to be fair it wasn’t. I braced myself to call Kay at work and told her that one hour into the tour, I’d written off her car and it was mostly Justin’s fault for wanting a burger … she took it as a joke and said, ‘Yeah, right,’ and then hung up.
In retrospect, we were lucky to escape alive because it was a proper massive truck and the car was really bent. We had to get a taxi to Cambridge and the show went really well, with Justin improvising his whole thirty-minute set around the accident and the ‘Not my fault’ driver. I worked with Justin recently at a charity comedy night for a Special Care Baby Unit and he was brilliant – why he isn’t a massive comedy star I don’t know, but hopefully his time will come. He is also, by the way, a committed vegetarian now; so top man all round.