Look who it is!

by Alan Carr

  Looking for a house is for me one of the most exasperating ways you can possibly spend a day: the travelling around, the disappointment, and – most exasperating of all – the lies! It doesn’t take you too long to decipher what the descriptions actually mean and that ‘up and coming’ means ‘dump’, ‘intimate’ means ‘tiny’ and ‘Chorlton Borders’ means ‘Moss Side’. If you ever see an intimate, up-and-coming, bedsit in Chorlton Borders, do yourself a favour and cross it off the list. After several infuriating bus trips, and countless disappointments, I went to visit a place, a beautiful road off Chorlton Green, and for once it actually matched the description. A grand Victorian house with wonderfully big airy rooms, all high ceilings and large windows and with what I thought was the best feature of all, an eccentric landlady, Ruth.

  We instantly clicked. She had been a glamour model in the Seventies and had won numerous awards, including ‘Penthouse Playmate of the Year’ and ‘Oldham Carnival Queen’. That accolade had been won at the age of 30. The age limit for the award was 21, and Oldham Council had found out her real age and demanded the crown back. It was just another fabulous anecdote in the world of Ruth. She was still an attractive woman, with her dark eyes, curvaceous figure and impressive décolletage, and it didn’t take much imagination to see how stunning she must have been in the Seventies. I’m assuming it was the Seventies because her age and any reference to precise dates were either never mentioned or destroyed.

  Ruth was a lady, and you never ask a lady her age. She was a camp icon in the making, and that was sealed the day I saw her stumble through the door after visiting the cash and carry, holding countless bags of bleach and toilet rolls and recollecting dreamily in the doorway, ‘I remember when this would be caviar and champagne.’

  I knew we were going to get on so well, and that is what we did. Most nights, you would find us with a bottle of wine, putting the world to rights. Sometimes we’d be joined by her friend Cynthia, an ex-bodybuilder in a mac with Mr Whippy hair. We would always get through a few bottles. The trouble is I would go to bed and Ruth would stay up. Still a bit merry on the old wine, she would start ordering things on QVC, and a few days later jewellery, lamps, shawls, facial saunas and gym equipment would all turn up. One day I remember signing for not one, but two massage chairs, which, along with the other stuff, went in the downstairs reception unpacked. It was a real Aladdin’s cave in there, what with all the QVC purchases still in their boxes. It’s what I imagined the upstairs at Argos would look like.

  The house, like its owner, had an air of faded grandeur, and subsequently was always in the process of being ‘done up’. The new housecat Mortimer didn’t help. Ruth and I had rescued him from a cat shelter in Stockport. He was a lovely soppy thing, terrified of his own shadow, but would look up at you with such a dumb expression you couldn’t help but fall for his charms. Why would anyone want to put him in a cat shelter? Because he shat and pissed everywhere, we soon found out. He was obviously urinating in the dining room because it reeked of ammonia, and you couldn’t stay there for longer than a couple of minutes before the stench would start burning your vocal cords and making your eyes water.

  He’d also done a couple of shits in my room. Obviously embarrassed, he’d tried to cover up his poo with my jumper. Any complaints to Ruth would be met by the usual ‘Ah! He probably got disorientated,’ and you would have to return to your room with a dustpan and brush and retch while you scooped it up and popped it in a carrier. It was impossible to be angry with him – he would stare up with his matted black and white face, eyes slightly crossed, and he was instantly forgiven. We strategically placed cat litter trays around the house to help him with his toilet training, and for a while it seemed to be working.

  Ruth had found another tenant from a card in the local newsagent. Her name was Helen Highwater – something told me that that wasn’t her real name. Helen was a hippy who played in a folk band and had turned her hand to interior decorating. I use the term ‘turning her hand’ because, looking at the wonkiness of the wallpaper and time she took to paste it up, you would think she’d only just started that morning.

  As I worked on Saturdays, Wednesday was my day off from Barclaycard, and I would usually spend the day washing my clothes or lying on my bed reading. This much-needed ‘me time’ would often be interrupted by Helen’s singing. Her voice was haunting, but not in a good way. The first time she ‘sang’, I started looking for Mortimer to see if he was in pain. Because she was wallpapering the hall, the higher she went up the stepladder, the closer the voice got. It seeped into my room like carbon monoxide from a dodgy boiler, and, ironically, she was a dodgy boiler.

  * * *

  Sarah and Cherry’s decision to get themselves a new place and start a family prompted me to focus on my own life. Like the time I had worked as a degreaser on the outskirts of Northampton, something had come to shake me up and tell me to take control of my life. I was 24 and working in a call centre. Same old story – shit job, shit money blah blah blah. I was determined to make a break for it. Something really had to give. Surely one day I would be able to experience a job I enjoyed. One of the cruellest things about working in the call centre was the amount of time you had to think. Sometimes you could sit there for seven hours just thinking, re-evaluating all the life choices you’d made that had led you here to this one place in time. With customers reading out their Tesco Clubcard number instead of their actual credit card, it could seem a lot longer than seven hours.

  What was I going to do? I can’t actually pinpoint the time I chose to become a stand-up comedian. I sort of just fell into it, which is no help to anyone reading this for guidance on how to become a comedian. I think it was just a series of signs, of flashing green lights that frustratingly pointed to a career that after the nerves of the King’s Head I’d vowed I’d never pursue. The germ of the idea had been floating around for years. I would always tell stories around the table to my friends, sometimes true, sometimes embellished, and that would always get them all laughing. Barclaycard customers would laugh at my voice and ask if it was a hoax. At first this was hurtful, but then it made me think, ‘Why not use my voice for good instead of evil?’ Then I would start to remember how well my routine at the King’s Head had gone and what the gypsy fortune-teller had said. These instincts were all saying, ‘Go on, do stand-up comedy. It makes sense.’

  So I looked through the local listings magazine and found an ‘Open Spot’ night at the Briton’s Protection. I rang them up, and they told me to come down on the Wednesday night. Although it was a week away, I instantly felt sick and couldn’t eat for the whole day. I wanted to pull out on the day, but Sarah and Cherry said they’d accompany me and give me some moral support, so I went along regardless. I didn’t have jokes as such back then. They were just stories about the call centre and my travels around Mexico and Thailand that had made people laugh around the dining table and that I hoped would have the same effect on the people in the room.

  The Briton’s Protection’s Open Spot night was in a dingy room above the pub of the same name. I arrived all nervous, eyes bulging and green with nausea. I looked like ET, and I sat meekly at the back of the room after giving my name to the compere. I soon realised that none of the people in the audience was a member of the public, they were all Open Spots themselves. I foolishly thought that this would create an atmosphere of back-slapping, friendly camaraderie where anything goes.

  I couldn’t have been more wrong. As I finally made my way to the stage and sheepishly performed my routine, the other open spots just stared icily at me, cold as stone, unimpressed. I came off stage after what seemed like ages, dumbstruck, still no clearer about whether what I had said was funny or had even made sense. It had been a brutal introduction to the world of Open Spots. It was bitter, dog eat dog, a battle for survival, and unsurprisingly seven years on some of the people in that room are still jobbing Open Spots. How depressing is that?

  My next one was at the Queen of Hearts pub in Fallow-f
ield, the student heart of Manchester, and that gig couldn’t have been more different. For a start, there were proper people who wanted to laugh rather than to sneer, and it was hosted by Toby Hadoke, a lovely man who was and is so supportive of comedy and, thankfully, of me. The gig was a success, and it filled me with enough confidence to carry on, to think that in fact I might have something here. If I’d had another gig like the one at the Briton’s Protection, I would have given up. No, in fact, I would have topped myself.

  I must have been buoyed up by that response, though, because I entered the Citylife Comedian of the Year Award. It was a brave move, as it was to be my third gig. Citylife was a magazine that annually held a competition to find the best new Manchester comedian. Even though the magazine was only available in the North West, its Comedian of the Year had a serious pedigree. Caroline Aherne, Jason Manford and Dave Spikey had all entered and subsequently won, while Johnny Vegas had entered and been beaten to second place by a young comedian called Peter Kay. To an up-and-coming comedian this award was important and in the North West hugely influential.

  I performed my Citylife heat at the Buzz in Chorlton, which itself was a Manchester institution. Anyone who was anyone in comedy had appeared on that stage – Eddie Izzard, Lee Evans, Jack Dee, Steve Coogan, the list was endless. So the pressure of appearing on the very same stage as those greats was immense. I remember that night clearly. It was around the time that the petrol prices had gone through the roof. The lorry drivers had all created a blockade around the petrol pumps, and we couldn’t get a taxi.

  I arrived late, apologised to the compere, ‘Agraman’, the human anagram (don’t ask), and sat down waiting to go onstage. The worry of finding a taxi had focused my nerves elsewhere, and I was relatively calm as I went on stage and did my routine. Well, you wouldn’t believe the reaction. People were in hysterics, a woman at the front of the stage was rocking and crying with laughter. It was the same reaction I had had when I was performing at Middlesex University, but this time I was actually enjoying it, pausing for the laughter, soaking up the atmosphere, letting the timing do its thing.

  I won the round. Not only that, but Agraman decided to book me for the plethora of gigs that he had in the North West. I’ve still got those diaries, and it makes me smile to see ‘£15, Preston’ or ‘£10, Bury Arts Centre’. With the train fares, these gigs meant that I was out of pocket before I’d even left the house, but I was just proud to be getting money for something that I enjoyed for the first time in my life. Agraman was instrumental in getting my career up and running. Without his faith in me, I would never have improved as quickly as I did. In London, comedians have to wait up to a year to get an Open Spot, which must be terribly frustrating. To hone a comedy routine, you really need to take a run-up and have at least two or three consecutive nights to see an improvement.

  I was lucky that Manchester was on the cusp of something big when I was there. There were no Printworks, Selfridges or Harvey Nicks yet – they would be coming in the following years – but brand-new shops, bars and restaurants were popping up all over town. Along with them were brand new comedy clubs including the Comedy Store, which were crying out for new talent to fill their comedy nights. For the first time, I felt like I was part of something new and exciting. A few years back it had been cool to say you were a DJ; now you were cool if you were a comedian. I’d never made a right decision before. I was well pleased.

  The final of the Citylife competition for the best new Mancunian stand-up comedian came round more quickly than I would have liked. I was so nervous, as you can imagine, the butterflies in my stomach had wings the size of a pterodactyl. To prolong the agony, the final was being held at the brand new Comedy Store on Deangate Locks in Manchester. This was too much. At Barclaycard, all day my heart wasn’t in it, the customers just seemed more irritating than usual, and my concentration level was wedged at zero. The competition hung like a fog at the forefront of my mind.

  I turned up at the Comedy Store for a soundcheck and walked onto the stage. It was so daunting, it was brand new, and unlike the one in London it was set out like an amphitheatre. At least with this Comedy Store I didn’t have the added pressure of a star-studded heritage to make me shake even more. I tried to relax and for the 5,000th time I went through my routine. It only had to be seven to eight minutes long, so I picked my best seven minutes and started mouthing the jokes up and down the corridor, gesticulating and pulling faces in all the right places. I could hear the audience coming in, finding their seats. One by one, like lambs to the slaughter, we went on stage. Finally, it was my turn.

  Terrified, I went on stage, and the first few minutes were great. They were laughing, and I felt for once that I might actually have a chance of winning it. I completed all my jokes and embellished stories of working in the call centre and then … I forgot, I totally forgot what came next. I froze, I went dry, as we stand-ups call it. Of course, now when I ‘go dry’ I step over to my table, have a few sips of water and rethink, and the audience just thinks I’m thirsty. But then when I hadn’t even done more than ten gigs, I panicked, my head cleared and my lips dried up. I couldn’t remember any of my jokes, I couldn’t even remember a why did the chicken cross the road joke. Even my dad’s jokes which would inevitably involve two nuns in a bath remained elusive. It was awful. I mumbled something and then had to leave the stage.

  What a disaster! Justin Moorhouse quite rightfully won that night. I was distraught. Damn my bloody nerves, my body yet again sticking its oar in when I least wanted it to. It took me a while to get over it, but it did me the world of good. It was a sign that Rome wasn’t built in a day and that there was still a long way to go for me as a comedian.

  I am often asked what my parents said when I told them that I wanted to be a stand-up comedian, and the truth is I never told them. If I’d told them, they would only have just rolled their eyes and muttered, ‘What’s he up to now?’ Don’t get me wrong, they were wonderfully supportive of me. It’s just I was always the kid who ran through the door, fired up by my imagination – ‘Mum, I want to be a detective!’ ‘Dad, I want to be an archaeologist!’ I would watch one documentary and that would be it. It would have a direct effect on me, and I would channel all my energy into getting into that profession, writing letters, asking for information packs. It must have been wearing for my parents. If I had told them, ‘I’m going to be a stand-up,’ they would have politely said ‘Yes, Alan’ and added it to the ever-growing mental list of ‘Alan’s potential jobs’, filed behind store detective for good measure.

  Anyway, the Citylife final had been so dispiriting for me that I didn’t even class myself as funny, let alone as a stand-up comedian. Nevertheless, I persevered, and in the ensuing months I raised my game. I had to, call centres couldn’t be my raison d’être. In fact I was living a double life. I would finish my shift at Barclaycard and then run to Piccadilly train station and head off to some destination to do my thing. Sheffield, Burnley, Bury, Preston, New Mills, Buxton, you name it, I’ve graced the stage for a tenner. If I was lucky, I could get a lift back with another act and would not have to wait on my own at a train station till the early hours.

  I find it a bit naive of people when they come up to me today and say, ‘Don’t ever forget, we made you.’ I don’t actually remember seeing them standing with me at Sheffield station in the rain at quarter past midnight waiting for the train, or sitting with me on the National Express coach to London because I couldn’t afford the train. Believe me, on those rainy bus journeys home to Manchester, clutching a fiver in my hand, I paid my dues. It’s like Linford Christie training for years for the Olympics and just as he crosses the winning line a spectator joins him and shouts, ‘We did it!’ I really am flattered that people think I make success look easy, but it really wasn’t.

  Travelling to gigs in a car full of comedians sounds like it should be hours of fun, but that wasn’t always the case. Sometimes I didn’t know what was worse – getting the sleeper train that st
opped at every little village or accepting a lift from the other comedians on the bill. The younger ones were great company, the brilliant Jason John Whitehead, Jim Jeffries, Steve Hughes. However, the older ones, already made bitter by years and years of comedy, would find it hard to suppress their resentment. You would always get the feeling they weren’t 100 per cent behind you when you left the dressing room and went onto the stage. Sadly, that resentment would spill over into the car journey, especially if you had had a better gig than them. Sometimes you’d get the older ones who’d be going through a divorce and you would have to sit there listening to a sob story from Manchester to Carlisle and back again: ‘Why would she leave me, Alan?’ I don’t know, Jeff, but we’ve just missed the turning for the A43. Flashbacks to my days as a driver’s mate came back to haunt me, but at least I was getting paid to listen to that drivel.

  * * *

  My set was developing well. I had crept past the five-minute and ten-minute mark and nearly had fifteen minutes of comedy material. With the help of such comedy promoters as Agraman, Silky, Toby Hadoke and Toby Foster, I was getting lots of practice. The Open Spot circuit, though, is depressing. Not only are you not getting paid, you often have to sit through a lot of rubbish, terminally unfunny people with hack jokes, stolen jokes or at worst hack, stolen jokes. Then again, some nights would sparkle with talent, and you would be on the same bill as people who are now formidable headliners or fronting their own TV shows. You have to remember that everyone has to start somewhere, and like every other job it’s at the bottom.

  One Open Spot night in London is particularly memorable, not because of the abundance of talent, but because a comic dressed as Hitler came on stage with a carrier bag, some crappy Nazi jokes, said that he had Princess Diana’s head in a bag, and then jumped out of the window. Just another night on the Open Spot circuit. Sometimes it’s the audience that’s weird. I had a blow-up doll thrown on stage in Maidstone. I told my agent who said: ‘Was it with a hen party?’ Well, I don’t think it came by itself.