by Alan Carr
For some reason, I couldn’t stop making a twat of myself. Peter probably thought that I was trying to get a part in Phoenix Nights or something. He was sitting on the settee quietly with his tour manager Gordon, and it was a real honour finally to meet him. Although I had never met him, I had felt his presence on the Manchester comedy scene for the past five years – whether it was Manc comics trying to do Peter Kay-style material or working with the cast of comedians from Phoenix Nights, like Toby Foster and Steve Edge, whom he had cherry-picked from the scene itself.
He sat there taking it all in, quietly listening to what I was saying, absorbing everything. I could see the cogs going and couldn’t help thinking that he was taking notes on me, sculpting a character out of my mannerisms or storing up a saying or a comment to be used in a sketch. Peter Kay, as we all know, is the ultimate people-watcher. Well, if he could make any comedy out of the nervous mumbo-jumbo I was muttering, then he was welcome to it. Needless to say, meeting Peter was the highlight of my Festival.
The Festival rattled along nicely, and before long we had reached the end of August, and it was time to go home. It’s surprising when you return home from living in this artistic bubble – living in fear of the reviews, praying you have an audience – that no one actually gives a shit. No, they don’t. Up there, it was so ridiculously intense, you felt that you were the centre of the earth and that the whole world’s eyes were pointing towards Edinburgh. I returned to Manchester with a loud ‘I’m back!’ – only to get a ‘Where’ve you been?’
‘Edinburgh!’
‘On holiday?’
‘No, the Festival!’
‘Oh …’
Lay people don’t really care about the Fringe. They think that it’s full of affected thespians, attention-grabbing comedians and tourists – and, come to think of it, they’re probably right. As any performer who’s been to Edinburgh will tell you, you come back totally drained, needing a serious detox, and just as you’re finally getting your mind and body round to recovering, a big fat bill from the Fringe pops on your doormat. The bill amounts to what you owe the Festival after they’ve taken the money for ticket sales off the price of hiring the venue. Added to that is the cost of flyering, accommodation, the list truly is endless. If you’re really lucky, you break even. If you don’t, you could be left with a bill of up to £10,000. I was lucky, I just had to pay £3,000. I don’t know why I used the word ‘just’, but hearing what some performers had to pay I felt incredibly lucky to get away with three grand.
* * *
My stand-up work carried on regardless. Although financially I was down, my confidence had improved from performing each and every night. But after saying nearly the same thing most nights for weeks, I was desperate to get writing and come up with some new jokes. My agent must have thought I was confident enough because he had put me forward for a corporate do for Abbey National Building Society on the outskirts of Birmingham. I saw how much they were going to pay me, and my heart skipped a beat. It was what I would earn at Barclaycard in a month. Of course, being the corporate whore that I am, I accepted.
I started thinking of what I would buy with my money. Some new shoes, perhaps, a holiday – my imagination went into overdrive. Not once did I wonder why they would pay such an obscene amount of money for what was basically performing twenty minutes of stand-up comedy. I’ll tell you why, because they’re soul destroying, self-esteem-crushing, degrading, vile experiences that in all my years have left me considering quitting stand-up comedy for good. Like Princess Lea chained to Jabba the Hut, you have to dance and perform every time they tug your chain, and, boy, do they tug it!
I was oblivious to this as I turned up at the conference centre and was taken to my dressing room. It was only once I’d stepped on stage that I realised I had signed a pact with the devil. But that was later.
The branch manager of Abbey National met me and took me to the large hall in the conference centre to do my sound check. ‘We’re looking for twenty minutes of clean stand-up. No swearing or sexual jokes. We don’t like smut at the Abbey National. Our staff are here for a good time and are like one big happy family.’ Sounded really nice people. This is going to be easy.
The time arrived for me to go on stage. The branch manager came on and introduced me.
‘Our host for the evening used to work in a call centre, and now he’s a comedian, so you could say he’s gone from sit-down to stand-up!’
SILENCE. Which I’m not really surprised about really, but anyway.
‘It’s Alan Carr!’
The lighting change happened, but not as promised. I was plunged into darkness, and the spotlight lit up a man in a wheelchair at the edge of the dancefloor. Then we had to wait while they repositioned the spotlight on me. A few people started to talk – I was losing them before I had begun. Finally I started my routine, but by then everyone had started to chat, and I was facing a wall of sound. I couldn’t hear myself speak, but I persevered nevertheless, hoping that someone, somewhere in the room might be enjoying my act.
I was halfway through, getting nowhere, when I felt something tap the front of my glasses, and then another tap. I looked down. It was a Cadbury’s Mini Egg! They were throwing Cadbury’s Mini Eggs at me! It was hard enough remembering my jokes without having to dodge the confectionary friendly fire that was staccato-ing off my spectacles.
They were animals. I could see the branch manager’s horrified look on the top table. This one big happy family he’d described was now resembling the Mansons! Alcohol was turning people who I’m sure were decent human beings when sober into monsters. I’m not blaming them for drinking – if I worked for a bank, I would, too. These workers who probably rarely left the house were being plied with free drink, and they were making the most of it, which is fine. The unforgivable thing was leaving on the tables massive pots of M & Ms and Cadbury’s Mini Eggs – a chocolate treat in the hands of a sober person, but a silver bullet in the hands of a premenstrual, paralytic bank clerk with a bubble perm.
I was sick of this unnecessary abuse, so I told them all to fuck off. I added that they were in my opinion ‘a load of ungrateful wankers!’ and left the stage to go to my dressing room. Karen, who lived down the road from the corporate in Sutton Coldfield, had come to give me some moral support, and together we just sat there shaking our heads. My brain was trying to compute what had just happened. I was downhearted, muttering to myself ‘Wankers’. The branch manager came in to apologise for his staff’s behaviour.
‘I’ve never ever experienced such a bunch of rude wankers in my life,’ I said, slipping on my coat. ‘I’m off.’
‘Where you going?’ he asked.
‘I’m off. I’ve never been so embarrassed.’
‘But you’ve got to present the raffle.’
‘What?’
He was right. I had only scanned the contract briefly. A raffle was part of the deal. The most embarrassing moment of my life was about to be surpassed ten minutes later by giving prizes to people I had just called ‘a fucking bunch of wankers’. Hmm! Nice.
‘This isn’t going to be awkward at all, is it?’ I thought. So I took off my coat and returned to the stage where they had positioned a tombola. My reintroduction – ‘It’s Alan Carr!’ – didn’t even get the half-hearted ripple of applause that my first introduction had received. Silence greeted my ears, but at least they weren’t pebble-dashing me with M & Ms.
So for the next twenty minutes I read out the raffle numbers and had my picture taken with the ‘wankers’ smiling cheesily. As I handed over the DVD player with a bow wrapped around it, I was hoping in my heart that when the winner plugged it in it would short-circuit and electrocute him. They were probably the most forced photos you would ever see this side of David Gest and Liza Minnelli’s wedding. Mercifully, the raffle didn’t take too long, mainly due to the fact that neither of us wanted to speak to each other, so pleasantries were kept to a blessed minimum.
* * *
I got
to see Peter Kay again, this time not in my sitting room, but in action at the Lowry in Salford. He very kindly invited me along. As it was sold out, he had got me a seat in the back of the auditorium, basically next to a St John’s Ambulance man with a comb-over and a bag of Murray Mints. The show was highly entertaining from the moment he stepped on stage to the finale – a rendition of ‘Danny Boy’. For ‘Danny Boy’, he got everyone standing up, waving their arms in the air. I was so far back, I didn’t bother and continued to sit, until I heard, ‘Alan Carr! Get your bloody hands in the air!’
I told you Peter was a people-watcher. Of course, I jumped up and joined in, surprisingly not embarrassed but dead chuffed that he had remembered my name.
Post-Edinburgh, my gigs were proving successful. Obviously, there were a few awful ones, although admittedly some weren’t my fault. One time I was gigging in Manchester above a pub on a busy crossroads, and my hand-held microphone had started picking up the frequency of a local taxi-rank. It’s hard enough dealing with a heckle from within the room, let alone ‘Foxtrot Alpha Bravo, we need a pick-up outside Morrisons’ stamping all over your punchlines.
Taxi-rank heckles aside, I was making progress, and my life in Chorlton was getting more settled, although my flatmates’ lives were anything but. Pauline had been arrested for drug smuggling in Munich. Terrified, she’d phoned us from the airport, asking if we could all club together and stump up £1,000 for a bond to have her released. We were all skint in that house and, after a group chat in the sitting room, we soon realised we couldn’t get our hands on that kind of cash. Plus, it became apparent that even if we did have the money, she’d been so sharp and aggressive with us over the previous months that we wouldn’t give it to her anyway. Also, who chose Pauline to be a drugs mule anyway? She was hardly the most discreet mule in the world. With her pierced face, pink hair, big thick leather boots and a leather trench coat, she looked like she must have been off her face when she got dressed that morning. Sad to say, we never saw Pauline again.
A lot of the time, I would have the run of the house. Ruth had started donating her body to science to get money. She would go to Medival for weeks on end and have drugs tested on her for such ailments as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and angina, and then come back and go on holiday, leaving me to look after the ever-expanding Mortimer, who was still frustratingly not litter-trained. Foolishly, I had assumed that going to the Edinburgh Festival would transform my career and that I would immediately be spotted by some television bigwig and get my own show. But obviously, it never materialised. Everyone else had the same idea. Worse still, people more talented than me had the same idea. Damn!
I don’t know why I expected television to come knocking. I’m not one of those comedians who took up stand-up comedy solely to get on television. But I get so bored so easily that the thought of just travelling around the country doing my routine in different cities until I died made me feel depressed. Already, I wanted more stimulation.
Edinburgh had in fact the complete opposite effect on my career – my workload had actually gone down. So I found myself at home a lot of the time, and I shouldn’t be left alone in the house with time to think because that’s what I do: think and think and think. Questions seemed to come out of the ether and buzz about my head like a bluebottle. I started wondering whether I’d made the right decision leaving Barclaycard. Was I good enough as a stand-up? Was that the reason why I wasn’t getting any work? Sitting at home most days, you do wonder why anyone would choose to be unemployed. And believe me, some people do choose. Being off work is so soul-destroying. Everyone else is at work, and what do you have for company? Diagnosis Murder? Flog It? Cash in the Attic? Christ. I’d rather go back to the factories, personally.
My financial position at the time meant that any work that did come in I grabbed with both hands. When I was asked to perform a New Year’s Eve show at Just the Tonic in Nottingham for £300, I nearly balked. The money was amazing and for me the equivalent of a fortnight’s stand-up gigs, plus it was New Year’s Eve and everyone would be in high spirits … wouldn’t they?
I arrived at Just the Tonic to find that the other comedians on the bill were Justin Moorhouse and the Voice of the Carphone Warehouse, Ed Byrne. This should be fun, I thought. For some reason, the men urinating in the queue outside and the women with the inflatable cocks chanting ‘Show us your dick’ didn’t register as potential hazards and I walked through the door of the comedy club like a lamb to the slaughter.
‘I’ve never done a New Year’s Eve gig before.’
Ed Byrne and the promoter Darrel Martin smiled knowingly at me. I didn’t take this as a sign either, and carried on going through my jokes in my notebook while the compere introduced Justin to the stage.
I got suspicious when Justin Moorhouse re-entered the dressing room, looking visible flustered.
‘They’re fucking animals. Just do ten minutes and get off!’ he said to me.
In my arrogance I thought to myself, you can handle this, they’re just excitable because it’s New Years Eve, once I’ve got into my flow they’ll love it. As it happens, the only way I could have controlled that crowd was if I’d mounted the stage on a police horse in full body armour and twatted the pissheads with a baton. They were indeed animals. Now in the early years I used to just go on stage and do my set and try not to get too wrapped up in what was going on externally, but when a woman runs on stage, getting her tits out mid-routine, you have to put the jokes aside and say something. I can’t remember what I said, but whatever it was it didn’t assuage the jeers. If anything they increased. My £300 fee was looking more and more like danger money.
Then I felt something hit me on the head and fall to the floor. Someone had wrapped a cork in tin foil and had thrown it at me. I was outraged! I was only trying to make them laugh.
‘Throw it back,’ one rough-looking Nottingham woman screamed. Without a second thought, I picked it up, aimed it and threw it at the gang of lads that the missile had come from. I threw the cork up underarm, it hit a lampshade and fell limply to the floor.
‘YOU THROW LIKE A GIRL!’ YOU THROW LIKE A GIRL!’ the whole crowd chanted. For a split second I was transported back to Weston Favell Upper School’s playing fields. I couldn’t compete with this and left the stage to cheers, cheers that I was leaving presumably, rather than that they had enjoyed my anecdotal tales of life in a call centre.
After that response I decided to get pissed – hey, it was New Year’s Eve. I got a bit too pissed, however, and the promoter Darrell had given me a bag of party poppers to distribute, which I did. However, he never specified when – I didn’t realise he meant at midnight. I’m sorry to say that the moronic crowd starting popping them all through Ed Byrne’s act. Poor Ed, they were hard enough to control as it was and I hadn’t helped things.
Darrell snatched the bag out of my hand and shouted angrily, ‘What are you doing?’ and I started crying. I didn’t really care, I was just, like the audience, very, very drunk. It was the perfect ending to a perfect night.
* * *
My agent was adamant that I should do the Edinburgh Festival again.
‘It’s the place where stars of the future are spotted,’ Steve proclaimed. ‘It keeps you in the forefront of people’s minds.’
I wasn’t convinced, but then again, what options did I have? No comedy promoters were knocking on my door, BBC Manchester definitely weren’t, and my diary was giving me snow blindness with all its empty white pages. Could I be bothered? Staying up there again on my own, being at the mercy of critics and audiences, wasn’t very tempting, especially with the real possibility of losing another three grand or more if this show was a turkey. But eventually I decided to go for it again and started writing a new show with a new title. My agent set those all-too familiar wheels in motion – venue, time, accommodation, blah, blah, blah.
And to be fair, it was blah, blah, blah a lot of the time. I arrived up there in the August of 2003. I was performing at the Cave
rn, right at the rear of the Pleasance Courtyard; it was a sombre venue that resembled a bunker. It was dark and damp and seemed to me no place to perform comedy. Like the previous year, I got good reviews, but unlike the previous year, I wasn’t the new kid on the block any more. The BBC New Comedian of the Year Award had gone to the ventriloquist Nina Conti and her monkey. I didn’t have that all-important hook to draw people in, and some nights it showed. Monday and Tuesday were particularly grim, sometimes as few as twelve, thirteen people would shuffle in to the 120-seater. That was depressing, to say the least, especially when you could see they’d only come in because it was warm.
It was a great show, so I was naturally disappointed about the audience figures. We tried everything, even a two for one. But then people would come with the free ticket and, because they hadn’t invested anything in the show, they would sit there and open sweets loudly, slurp their cola, chat. Thank God the Cavern was so embedded in the ground they couldn’t get a reception on their mobiles, or they’d have been ordering pizzas. I wouldn’t have said I’d do Edinburgh again if I’d known I would feel this underwhelmed.
When I had first arrived, I had sneered over-confidently at Geoffrey from Rainbow’s show across the Courtyard, which was based on his favourite anecdotes about Zippy and George. How shit did I feel? He was selling out every night. People wanted to see him over me, it was like Bungle was giving me the wanker sign – shocking. What could I do to get people through my damp, dank door?
Sometimes I tried unconventional methods, which I’m not proud of. I photocopied a headline from a review of Jimmy Carr’s show – ‘THIS CARR IS THE ROLLS ROYCE OF COMEDY’ – and pasted it on my own poster. He was furious (quite understandably) and was seen in the Pleasance Courtyard yanking them off my posters in a rage. Sorry, Jimmy. I just thought family should stick together.