by Alan Carr
The phenomena kept on coming. I was also working at Tesco Brent Cross when it became the flagship 24-hour store. Impressed? I know, I know, at times my life seemed to imitate Forrest Gump, but whereas he was present at all history’s momentous occasions I was at all the shitty ones. BBC News was there and everything, and I had put my name down to work through the night. It was such a monumentally historic event that only a select few would be chosen. After much consideration, I got to work on Checkout 12. There was I, Alan Carr, working at the first ever 24-hour supermarket in the United Kingdom.
Of course, once all the excitement had died down and all the checkout people, including myself, realised that it was just an ordinary shift (obviously), the rest of the night felt like wading through treacle. Tesco Value Treacle, at that. A few curious shoppers turned up to see what the fuss was about, but mainly it was drunks and stoners with the munchies. It was left to the staff to tell the winos, ‘Yes, the supermarket is 24-hour, but the alcohol licence only lasts to 11 o’clock and if you want alcohol you’ll just have to burn off some Benylin. It’s in Aisle 5, next to the sanitary towels.’
It was my last-ever night shift, and it really was a drag. It was popular with the people who needed money fast. They could work through the night. One checkout girl used to take speed at the beginning of her shift because she was trying to save up for a car. No, the 24-hour shift was too much for me, and I returned to my usual daylight hours. I left at 10.00 p.m., just as all the shelf-stackers emerged onto the floor in their grey tracksuits, those mysterious, mute, nocturnal people who disappear when the sun comes up.
Middlesex University made its money by taking in plane-loads of rich foreign students. Let’s face it, they weren’t going to make any money from the talent, so there was always a fresh influx of victims. I remember one poor Chinese girl. She had just waved her parents off and turned around to walk into her room, when out of nowhere she was drenched head to feet with a washing-up bowl of potato peelings that Matt had lobbed at Melissa, but missed. They didn’t even apologise, they just laughed. I know it’s horrible, but food fights were the order of the day. Someone would flick a kidney bean at someone’s head to provoke a reaction, then it would be flicked back twice as hard, and before long one poor innocent would be sitting there wearing a plate of Rogan Josh as a brooch. Looking back, I feel such a moron. It was hilarious at the time, but the other students must have looked at us with such contempt, and rightfully so. That old adage is true, though: the devil makes work for idle hands.
You must be thinking, ‘Why is he bothering telling us about food fights?’ The honest answer is that we had more food fights than we actually did work. You were more likely to have a shepherd’s pie catapulted through your window than open up a theory book. We were useless scum, we were the students that people talk about in the Daily Mail, spongers, always down the pub, doing little or no work. A food fight was the highlight of the day, but to be fair the source of our food didn’t help: Food Giant. It’s probably a blessing that most of the food ended up on the walls. I remember buying a pack of fish fingers for 59 pence. It had on the box, ‘May contain less than 15% fish.’ That’s big bread-crumbs, I thought.
We were annoying, and we were bored. It seems that not only were we content to ruin our own prospects, we had to bring the others down with us as well. One irritating Japanese girl, Business student probably, always used to have her power ballads blaring out through her windows. Celine, Bonnie Tyler, Whitney, which, as you can imagine, can grate after a while. We spied on her through her window and saw that she had the same stereo as Finn, a fellow Drama student. So we lined ourselves up on the stairs opposite and with his remote control started operating her stereo through the window. You should have seen her face as we changed CD track, turned it down, turned it up, froze Bonnie mid ‘Holding Out for a Hero’, and turned on Kerrang FM. It was harassment, but it was funny harassment. Her bemused face was a picture. It took her ten minutes to realise it was us, and we were supposed to be the thickos!
* * *
If I’m honest, the novelty of doing nothing all week soon wore off and the shifts at Tesco weren’t doing anything to alleviate the tedium. So when we finally got to perform some plays we thought all our Christmases had come early. The plays we performed encapsulated all the different theatrical genres. One semester it would be the absurdist play, The Maids, by Jean Genet, Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and Edward Bond’s Saved, which featured possibly one of my worst performances ever. Saved was part of the political theatre genre. As I am possibly the least political person there is, I knew there would be problems. It had been banned by the Lord Chamberlain in the Sixties and had quickly gained notoriety, mainly because the play contains a graphic scene where the protagonist stones a baby to death.
I was as shocked as the next person to be given the part of Len. Obviously, playing against type can offer an actor a chance to show the true gamut of his emotions. However, as I had to stone a baby to death in this role, I really didn’t know where to begin. In my opinion, it was the worst piece of casting in the history of theatre since Cliff Richard stepped onto the moors in Heathcliff the Musical. I only got the part because the director had had a row with the lead and out of spite gave him the role of the long-suffering husband who had to spend all his scenes behind a newspaper, tutting. How easy is that? I had to kill a baby. I don’t know whether it was naivety or arrogance that made me accept the part, but I did. I had to play an impressionable young man with a dark side. I remember thinking, ‘I can’t do brooding.’ I don’t think I’d ever been brooding. I could look arsey, but something told me that wouldn’t be good enough.
The play started out on the wrong foot. I had to come on intoxicated and have intercourse on the sofa with Pam, who was played by my flatmate and fellow Drama student, Julia. Apart from Ruth with the green eyeshadow, I’d never kissed a girl before, let alone touched a breast, so I really had to concentrate. Whilst caressing her nipples I didn’t look lustful; I just looked like I was retuning a video. As I slipped my hand up her blouse and tried to unhook the bra (I knew the hook was at the back – I’d seen it on On the Buses), I grunted like a wild animal, admittedly one with its leg caught in a snare.
After sex, I had to get up arrogantly and light up a cigarette. Personally, I can’t stand smoking, and this fucking play was beginning to get on my tits. Smoke a cigarette, stone a baby, touch a tit – all I needed was to swim with a couple of Great Whites in a tank and I’d have faced all my fears. It was supposed to look like a post-coital cigarette, but the director complained that the way I was holding it was too reminiscent of Bet Lynch opening up at the Rovers Return. The problem was, as I didn’t smoke it didn’t look natural. There is a way, admittedly cool, that smokers handle the cigarette and matches with aplomb. But I couldn’t stop shaking when it came to light the damn thing. I wasn’t nervous, it was the thought of touching another pair of breasts in the matinée.
It wasn’t only my fault. The supporting cast was just as out of place. Miscues, badly positioned props, wrong lines. I remember in the pivotal scene where I bumped into a gang of lads in a park and was slowly brutalised, Melissa, who played my mother, walked on set with a teapot and shouted, ‘It’s on the table!’ That was a reference to the next scene, where I popped around for dinner. After her awkward realisation, Melissa slowly sidestepped off, watched by a tittering audience.
The night before, it was me who messed up. I was seated at the dinner table and said, ‘That looks delicious,’ before she’d actually put the trifle and custard on the table. What a complete disaster! And this was before I had to stone that bloody baby.
Finally, that dreaded scene came. I was alone in the park, and the baby was upturned in its pram, crying. It was down to me to deliver this important and iconic scene with gusto and brooding introspection. I slowly picked up the pebbles and began to throw them. All those hours of motivation and rehearsals could not mask the fact that I throw like a girl. To be honest, the audie
nce were on the edge of their seats mainly because of the fear of getting stoned. I kept missing the pram, and it was a miracle that I didn’t wipe out a St John’s Ambulance person. The pebbles started pinging off the walls, and some of the women in the audience had started covering their faces with their handbags. Not one hit the bloody baby. If this had been real life, the baby would have survived scratch-free and gone on to do its GCSE.
The whole thing was a complete embarrassment, and quite rightfully I got my worst ever mark for that production. But it taught me a lesson: stick to what you’re good at. If you have got the range, then you can play against type, good for you. But I think my forte is light-hearted, comedic roles. Maybe I should leave infanticide to the experts.
Chapter Five
GOING DOWN IN THE BOX
Unlike some of the richer students, who went back home to chill out and relax, I had to work in the university holidays. My family didn’t really know any businessmen or managers who could get their eldest son a job temping in an office. My father’s social circle only extended to warehouse foremen and forklift drivers. So more often than not, I would find myself in some dreary depot in a hard hat and steel toe-capped boots. Because Dad was held in such high esteem, they would bend over backwards to get me a job – the bastards.
I had never been happy with the recommendations that the career’s adviser had given me at Weston Favell Upper School, but she had never warned me that jobs like this existed. Really boring, mundane, wrist-slittingly dull jobs. My first job was for Laxton’s at Brackmills Industrial Estate. I’d saved up and bought myself a yellow Mini which, sadly, didn’t help change anyone’s perception of me. In fact, driving through Overstone on a summer’s day, I heard one of the kids shout, ‘Look, it’s Mr Bean!’
I loved that car, and it broke my heart when it had to be sold for scrap two years later. You always have a soft spot for your first car, even if it has let you down on numerous occasions. The bonnet would often fly up as I passed the 70 miles per hour marker. It would be terrifying to know that any minute your windscreen would be obscured by a piece of banana-coloured metal. The heater didn’t work, and the car didn’t have a radio. So I would put my ghetto-blaster on the passenger seat and pop cassettes in and sing along, which wasn’t the safest thing to do, I admit.
Every morning, I’d defrost my car and head off to my job at Laxton’s. The first week, I was packing boxes with video recorders. I was absolutely terrified. How could this effeminate student cope with being flung into this world of machismo and ribaldry? These workers hated students at the best of times, but I was the worst kind of student. I was a Drama student. I thought the best thing was to become mute. As soon as I opened my mouth, the game would be up. I had to get more masculine. I had to become one of them. It was my toughest role since Len. This had to work. I had to create a whole new identity, one that would be believable and one that I could dip into, if I needed a get-out clause. This alter ego would have a steady girlfriend whom I would mention at various times in the conversation – that might throw them off the scent. I just hoped they never saw my yellow Mini parked outside.
We started at 6.15 a.m. I’d been told I was taking over from the night shift. I went into the staff canteen, which was basically a room with one of those revolving food dispensers. What I at first thought was frosted glass was in fact the fumes from twenty-five years of passive smoking smeared on the window. When looked through, the nicotine-stained glass gave the canteen a sepia glow, as if it were from yesteryear, a Victorian workhouse perhaps. But this warming, nostalgic feel was shattered as soon as I inhaled the smell and saw the hardcore pornography on the television. I couldn’t take my eyes off a shaven-headed woman moaning in ecstasy as she was being masturbated over by a gang of men.
Before I could say anything, one old man turned to me and said of the bald woman being masturbated over, ‘That’ll make her hair grow.’
I nodded and went, ‘Not half!’
That made everyone look, not because it was said in a camp voice – believe me, I deliberately butched up – but because I sounded like someone from a Carry On film. I couldn’t have said what I wanted to say – ‘Actually, I think this kind of smut degrades women and puts the suffragette movement back thirty years, if you ask me,’ or alternatively, ‘Don’t you hate it when that happens?’
I could see it was going to be a verbal minefield, this warehouse malarkey. I was going to have to be very careful. I just sat there mute. I didn’t want to get involved in any conversations, so I read and re-read the ingredients on my Ribena carton. Citric Acid and Sodium Benzoate – hmm!
What really pissed me off was that I had a brand-new P.D. James in my bag, but I guessed that was going to have to stay where it was. Well, at least until the men in the porno had come; then maybe I could get some peace and quiet.
It’s a fact, factory workers resent students because they would waltz in every Christmas, Easter and summer holiday, laugh, joke about, take the piss out of the workers and then waltz off back again to their halls of residence, telling their friends about the ghastly people they were forced to work with – and I was no exception. The trouble is, I was the only student there because Dad was friends with the foreman. To be fair, he was doing me a favour employing me in the first place. A lot of the time, I would be on my own. There were so many occasions when I just wanted to exchange a look or roll my eyes at someone. When I got home, my parents wouldn’t understand what I’d seen that day, and I would be left frustratingly subdued.
My Drama student alter ego didn’t stay under wraps for long. You’d always get some mouthy foreman pre-warning his work colleagues, ‘I’ve got that Graham Carr’s son coming next week.’
Of course, all their ears would prick up, and then he’d deal the fatal blow: ‘He’s a Drama student.’ I knew he’d told them because, a few mornings in, they would start.
‘So,’ they would say, looking over at their colleagues’ faces, ‘I hear you tread the boards. What programmes would I have seen you in?’
Of course, typically, not seeing the trap and relishing the chance to talk about something that wasn’t vagina-based, I would start talking away.
‘Yes, I would like to do television, but theatre is my first love …’ This would be interrupted by a giant howl, and I would think, ‘Damn! They got me when I was weak – the buggers.’
Then as the day progressed, I could see the shift changes. New workers and lorry drivers would come in, and although I couldn’t hear, I knew they were talking about me because they would nod in my direction, do a mincey walk and then all laugh.
I couldn’t help feeling that if I had some of my university friends working with me, it would be a bit of a morale boost. I craved someone to see this surreal factory double life I was living. The minutes dragged, and there was always an endless supply of videos to be put in boxes. There was no sense of satisfaction (could you ever be satisfied packing boxes?) because, just as the last video was placed in its box, some unsmiling worker would deliver a whole forklift truck more of them. Your heart would sink, and your eyes would look to the clock with its motionless hands and think, ‘Someone’s taken the batteries out of that thing, surely.’
My only saviour was the radio. In Northampton, we had Northants 96.6 blaring out from two speakers that would reverberate through the warehouse. At first, the cheeky banter and cheesy Nineties tunes would be quite uplifting, but then the resentment would start to creep in. Why am I stuck in this dump? Why aren’t I a DJ? I wouldn’t mind being like the travel girl and going up in the helicopter telling everyone about the traffic – anything but packing boxes. It got so bad, I actually got excited when I was moved from packing the boxes to unpacking the boxes. Boxes, boxes, boxes, I was doing everything with boxes, everything but climbing inside one, stamping a faraway postcode on it and hoping a kind lorry driver would take me away from this cardboard hell.
Now, chatting with women and having a good old gossip is my forte. There aren’t many women�
�s hearts that I can’t melt with my cheeky, bespectacled face and witty repartee. But oh no, not these ladies. Talking to these women was like talking to Dad. They talked about women’s bits and scratched their crotches more than the men did. One of them, Sue, could give as good as she got when it came to the catcalls and sexist remarks.
On the first day, I asked her to help lift a pallet. As she bent over, she went, ‘Ooh! I’ve touched cloth.’ I didn’t think that was the right moment to ask Sue what finishing school she went to.
I remember walking to my Mini at home time. Sue had decided to cycle to work, and the men had gaffer-taped a huge dildo to her saddle.
‘I bet you’ll enjoy riding home tonight,’ shouted Doug, the resident sex pest.
‘It won’t touch the side, what with the size of my c**t!’ Sue replied wittily.
Everyone laughed, apart from me. I fled to my Mini as if it was a panic room, got inside and quickly shut all the doors. I could see Sue in the wing mirror pretending to fellate the dildo. What is this place? I didn’t want to know any more. I just put my foot down and drove out of the industrial estate.
Factory work after a while slowly numbs you to the outside world. Admittedly, with the fortnightly stints at Christmas and Easter, the light at the end of the tunnel was never more than a weekend away, but during the summer holidays you could be entrenched for up to eight or nine weeks. You slowly started becoming brainwashed into their way of life. It was just little things, like siding with the perms when a temp started (probably a student), getting to know the name of the tuck-van lady and, worse, start sharing information with her. I would find myself having a chat with her about her family, and worse still, making jokes with her. I had become one of them. I used to sit there scowling at this rough woman with the dyed hair and a sovereign on every finger. Now I was laughing with her, complimenting her on her hair and asking her if the rings were real brass.