That’s what I assumed London was like. My childhood self would hate where I live now. He would also be disappointed that I’m not ruler of the world or at least Prime Minister or a wizard. But the fact that, far from a castle, mansion or cave complex, I don’t even live in a normal house with a garden and an attic and a spare room would basically make me indistinguishable, to his eyes, from a tramp.
Growing up, there were metaphorical stabilisers attached to my whole life. Born in Salisbury, brought up in Oxford and a student in Cambridge, I was 22 before I had to deal on a daily basis with anywhere other than affluent, ancient, chocolate-box cities where murders never happen but murder stories are often set. I was cosseted in deep suburban security and probably fretted about the outside world all the more as a result.
I have often suffered from the fact that warnings are calibrated for the reckless. Very sensibly, parents, teachers and people at TV filming locations who provide you with blank-firing guns for action sequences (to pick three random types of authority figure) design their remarks to prevent the fearless from accidentally killing themselves. ‘Don’t look at the sun or you’ll go blind’ … ‘A blank-firing gun is an incredibly dangerous weapon’ … ‘Verrucas can kill.’
The collateral damage is every last scrap of more timorous people’s peace of mind; the sum of their warnings makes people like me view life as a minefield. So my childhood, as I remember it, was laced with fear.
But, before I can remember, there was definitely a moment of recklessness – when I pushed at the stabilising boundaries that my doting parents had set for me. This was in Salisbury – in fact a little village just outside called Stapleford where we lived in a bungalow. I couldn’t walk but I did have a sort of walker – a small vehicle with a seat and wheels, but no engine, that I could propel along, Flintstones-style, with my bare feet. Having mastered this contraption, I apparently became unwilling to learn to walk properly but would career around in it at high speeds.
One day I took a corner too fast and smacked my head on a skirting board. There was blood everywhere. I was scarred for life. Literally. I still bear a tiny scar in between my eyebrows of which I was immensely proud as a child. And now I don’t drive. Can that be a coincidence? No, I say it CANNOT be a coincidence. Before that crash I was a fearless speed junky. I was destined for Formula One greatness. Also I was brimming with infant brain cells of which the crash must have led to a holocaust. My timorousness, my lack of a driving licence, the tiny mark on my face, my B in GCSE Biology all stem from that moment. If you don’t like this book, blame the corporate child abusers who made that deathtrap walker.
Maybe everyone is fearless in infancy and what marks us apart is our ability to absorb fears – some of us are made of sponge and soak them up while others are resistant willows that have to be repeatedly painted with the linseed oils of caution to prevent cracking from the dehydrating effect of their own imprudence. And, before you ask, no I haven’t lost control of that metaphor: I’m saying some people are thoughtful, sensitive types like me while others are wooden-headed idiots as a result of whom every foodstuff has to carry an over-cautious ‘Use by’ date. I think I should bloody sue.
I carry on along my road towards the Kilburn High Road. In many ways the Kilburn High Road isn’t very nice – it’s messy, often crowded, usually gridlocked, has a large number of terrible shops selling cheap crap, lots of places selling dodgy kebabs, about two others selling kebabs that are probably okay, pawnbrokers, pay-day loan sharks, old Irish pubs, closed old Irish pubs, closed old Irish pubs that have tried and failed to go gastro, closed old Irish clubs that have tried to go a bit nightclubby, the worst branch of Marks & Spencer in Britain and a little paved area which was almost certainly designed by ’60s planners to give the place a sense of community but is primarily used by people trying to encourage you to become Christian or Muslim with the use of leaflets, megaphones and sometimes both. There’s also an Argos.
But I like it. You probably saw that coming. I expect you’re expecting me to say that it’s vibrant next. Well it is. And also, I’m used to it and I tend to like what I’m used to. I’m not going to be here much longer but I expect I’ll come back and visit. (I expect I won’t.)
Oh, and also it’s on a Roman road, which I like. I get a sense that there’s something genuinely ancient about Kilburn as a scuzzy little strip development along the Roman road into London: that London needs, and has always needed, these little pockets of grubby prosperity. And so, as well as liking the vibrancy and familiarity, I’m comforted by the thought that Kilburn is a constant in a changing world. When the recession hit in 2008, a lot of Kilburn’s pound shops and garage-sale-style outlets closed, like weeds knocked back by a harsh frost. But they grew back in the next few months, with different names but the same displays of stuff which I can’t imagine anyone ever wanting to buy. I found that cheering.
My parents like Kilburn – they liked it as soon as I moved in, despite making the mistake of eating in the greasy spoon café at the end of my road. They’re not fussy eaters but they hate bad service. They used to be hotel managers – in the 1970s, the era of Fawlty Towers and of a Britvic orange juice being an acceptable starter. But I think they were good hotel managers, for the time. That’s what they’ve always led me to believe, and they’re not, in general, boastful people.
When I was born they were joint managers of the White Hart hotel in Salisbury. They weren’t from Salisbury – my mother grew up in Swansea and my father in Liverpool – but they’d met on a degree course in Glasgow, where they were studying hotel management. And then they got married and became hotel managers and got a job working for a hotel chain and were posted to Salisbury. Posted in the military sense. I think they probably went by car.
So: Ian and Kathy Mitchell, a husband and wife running a West Country hotel in the 1970s. But instead of a Spanish waiter, they had a baby, who they kept in the cleaners’ cupboard when they were working. This was primarily because it was a large enough cupboard to have a phone in it. By which I mean, it actually had a phone in it. Almost every cupboard is large enough to have a phone in it, otherwise it’d barely be more than a box attached to a wall. I mean large enough to warrant the fitting of a phone line. So it was really a sort of terrible room. Or an amazing cupboard.
Anyway, it was where they kept the cleaning equipment for the hotel. The first word I ever said was ‘Hoover’. I didn’t even know that other brands of vacuum cleaner were available.
And the relevance of the phone? It was so I could order stuff on room service. And also so that it could be put on ‘baby monitor’, which meant that someone on reception could listen in and hear if I was crying, rather than asleep or dead, which very different states share the attribute of not requiring immediate action.
They stopped being hotel managers when I was two and we moved to Oxford, where my dad got a teaching job at the polytechnic. The decision was always explained as being to do with me – that running a hotel and family life were incompatible – which I suppose makes sense. Then again, thinking about it, my friends with children seem to find the first two years of childcare the most onerous and it always seems the impact on their careers is lessened thereafter. So maybe my parents were sick of running hotels for other reasons and rationalised it as a family decision, or just very wisely expressed it to me that way so I’d feel grateful at their sacrifice rather than irritated that they no longer had interesting jobs.
I was a bit sorry, as a child, that they didn’t run a hotel any more. And that when they had, I’d been too young to notice anything more than an industrial Hoover. (My first adjective was ‘industrial’.) (It wasn’t.) I love hotels – they’re fun and fascinating – and having one to run around in, albeit carefully and with a beady eye fixed on sharp skirting boards, would have been brilliant.
And I wanted there to be a place of which my parents were in charge. I’m hierarchical like that. I wanted them to have people working for them rather than just lots of ‘coll
eagues’. That makes me sound like a bit of a megalomaniac. But my hunch is that most children are like that. Ideally, my parents would have been a king and queen. Failing that, hotel manager seemed to me a bit higher up the scale than ‘people who teach hotel management at a polytechnic’. When I got older, a different snobbery came to bear: the polytechnic became a university and ‘university lecturer’ seemed better than ‘hotel manager’ – more to do with learning and less with trade. So my view changed over the period of my minority as I changed from one kind of little shit to another.
This will be grist to the mill of people who think I’m a posh twat. ‘Listen to him, nasty little snob,’ they will be thinking. They will also probably be wondering why they’ve bought a copy of his book. Or maybe not. Perhaps there’s a constituency of people – the most rabid online commenters, for example – who actually seek out the work of people they loathe. They may be skimming each page with a sneer before wiping their arse on it and flushing it down the loo. Or attempting to post it to me. If so, I’d like to say to those people: ‘Welcome! Your money is as good as anyone else’s.’
But of course being a snob and being posh are different things. Being a snob, a conventional snob, involves wanting to be posh whether you are or not, and thinking less of people who aren’t. Wanting to be posher, usually – which is why the very poshest people are seldom snobs: they know they can’t be any posher so it’s no good wishing for it.
I plead guilty to being a snob when I was a child. I definitely valued poshness, jealously guarded it to the extent that I felt I possessed it, and wanted more. My instinct was not to despise the social hierarchy but to want to climb it. So maybe it serves me right that I now get called posh all the time, when I’m not really and I’ve long since realised that it’s a worthless commodity. In fact, career-wise, it would have been more fashionable to aspire in the other direction. But I didn’t have the nous to realise that there would be any advantage in playing the ‘ordinary background’ card – or that, as a child of underpaid polytechnic lecturers, albeit one sent to minor independent schools thanks to massive financial sacrifices on those parents’ part, I completely qualified for playing it.
Had I guarded my t’s less jealously and embraced the glottal stop, I could have styled myself a person ‘with an ordinary background who nevertheless got to Cambridge and became a comedian’ rather than ‘an ex-Cambridge ex-public schoolboy doing well in comedy like you’d expect’. Both descriptions are sort of true, but people like to polarise and these days I might have been better off touting the former.
Still, I’d have been giving a hostage to fortune. The estuary-accent-affecting middle classters always get hoist by their own petard in the end, when it turns out that Ben Elton is the nephew of a knight or Guy Ritchie was brought up in the ancestral home of his baronet stepfather.
The thing is, I find the idea that my life has followed an unremarkable path of privilege rather comforting. I wanted to think I was posh because I felt, not entirely without justification, that bad things didn’t happen to posh people. If other people thought I’d be all right – even in a resentful way – I could believe it too.
So, in the binary world of popular opinion, I got dumped on the posh side of the fence – which is sometimes annoying as it denies me the credit for any dragging myself up by my bootstraps that I might have done (it’s not much but, you know, we never had a Sodastream). It also leaves me worrying that people will think I’m claiming to be properly posh – when proper posh people know I’m not. My blood is red and unremarkable. (Although I always remark when I see it, as my scant knowledge of medicine leads me to believe that it’s not really supposed to come out.)
This is a roundabout way of saying that my background was neither that of a Little Lord Fauntleroy, as the people who write the links for Would I Lie to You? would have it; nor was it the opposite.
But who, in the public eye, is really the opposite? Very few people who come to prominence, other than through lucrative and talent-hungry sports, genuinely come from the most disadvantaged sections of society – we just don’t live in a country with that amount of social mobility. Which is why famous people who went to a comprehensive and can sustain a regional accent do themselves a lot of favours by letting those facts come to the fore, so that journalists can infer a tin bath in front of the fire and an outside loo rather than civil servant parents who were enthusiastic theatre-goers.
Perhaps you think I’m thinking of Lee Mack. Well, I am now, obviously. But I don’t think his parents were civil servants and I wouldn’t say Lee has ever seriously pretended to be anything he’s not, any more than I have (which is quite an indictment of both our acting powers). That said, on Would I Lie to You? we’re very happy to milk comedy from people’s assumptions that he keeps whippets and I’ve got a beagle pack. And we’re both amused by the underlying truth that, in terms of our values and attitude, we’re incredibly similar. We’re middle class. We’re property owners who would gravitate towards a Carluccio’s over a Pizza Hut. I bet he’s got a pension. I know he’s got a conservatory. He used to have a boat on the bloody Thames! I live in an ex-council flat, for fuck’s sake!
But he’s got a regional accent, so the audience makes certain assumptions and I’ll happily play to them. If he doesn’t claim to be working class, I’ll do it for him. So – in spite of everything I’ve said about people’s instinct to polarise, and worrying about appearing to be something I’m really not – I’m also quite happy to accept a cheque for telling Lee not to get coal dust all over the studio while he wonders whether I shouldn’t offer a glass of water to the footman he claims I’m sitting on.
It’s a lot easier than going on TV with the premise that you’re basically normal.
- 2 -
Inventing Fleet Street
I’m not taking a direct route because I want the walk to last over an hour. It’s the brisk continuous walking that seems to be the best back medicine. So I turn left down Quex Road. Some of the road names round here are brilliant: just off Quex are Mutrix Road and Mazenod Avenue. Quex, Mutrix and Mazenod! They sound like robots. I wish I’d ever written anything that needed three names for robots so I could have used those. In fact, what am I doing writing this? It should be a sci-fi epic about Quex, Mutrix and Mazenod, three evil cyborgs blasting their way around the galaxy and seeing who can destroy the most planets.
I think the main reason I associate those names with robots is that I’ve always had a feeling that ‘x’ and ‘z’ are the most futuristic letters. I don’t really think they are. In fact I’m pretty sure ‘x’ in particular is about as ancient as a letter can be – it’s just two lines, after all. Anything less than that and it’s not really writing. It’s just a mark. But, because they’re not very useful letters, they somehow feel like the alphabetical equivalent of shiny silver jumpsuits.
Sadly those three street names have nothing to do with space or the future and everything to do with places in Kent. The family who owned the estate on which that bit of Kilburn was built also owned a Quex House in Kent. Mutrix and Mazenod are nearby villages. It’s a bit of a dull explanation for the names, really. Of course I’ve no idea why those villages are called that. I expect it’s because some space robots once attacked Kent. Yawn.
The first street name I was aware of was Staunton Road, which is where we moved to in Oxford. The second was Fleet Street. That’s because my parents were constantly being hassled by paps. Not really. I became aware of Fleet Street at the point when I thought it was a phrase I’d invented. It was a road name I came up with for my toy cars to drive along. I was so sure it had originated in my brain that when I came across it again, in a story about Gumdrop the vintage car (I was terribly interested in cars at the time but managed to get it out of my system a decade before everyone else got a driving licence), as a name for an ancient and famous London thoroughfare, I was furious.
I was convinced that I’d thought of it entirely separately and it seemed so unfair to me that,
having displayed the genius to come up with such a demonstrably successful name for a street (I think I assumed that Fleet Street’s prominence and centuries of prosperity were somehow because of its name), I should go unrewarded. I felt like a victim of history. I could so easily have been born hundreds of years earlier and been the one to come up with the name in the first place. Surely this would have brought me great fame and fortune, I thought. I didn’t seem to realise that the identity of the inventor of the name ‘Fleet Street’ is lost in the mists of the past and that whoever it was probably went to his or her grave unlauded and unremunerated for having named a street after the nearby Fleet river.
I don’t know whether this means I was an imaginative child. I think that’s how I thought of myself, though. I was an only child for the first seven and a half years of life and so I spent quite a lot of time on my own, inventing games and pretending to be other people. I loved dressing up but at the same time it made me ashamed – very much like masturbation a few years later.
In my special costume trunk (box of old clothes) I had a highly patterned lime green and brown jumper which was too small for me but was my outfit for being someone to do with Star Trek (not actually Captain Kirk – I think I styled myself his boss). In truth there was nothing remotely Star Trekky about it, but the way it clung to my arms reminded me very much of the way the shirts in Star Trek clung to people’s arms. I also had an old pocket calculator which I could flip open in a way that was satisfyingly reminiscent of a communicator.
And then there was a black mac. I got tremendous use out of that black mac. It spent a while as the coat I wore as one of the versions of Doctor Who I pretended to be – I think I was essaying a slightly more rainproof version of the Peter Davidson incarnation. I definitely remember putting some foliage into the buttonhole at one point to represent the stick of celery he always had pinned to his. My mother was reluctant to provide actual celery for such trivial use, which is a shame because, as it turned out, that moment of asking was the only point in my life when I was ever going to see any point in celery.
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