My Shit Life So Far

by Frankie Boyle

  Kids had to have chaperones on set, so I got to meet some interesting characters. One woman I had was an adorable 50-something Glasgow mum. She would go on about her passion for Richard Chamberlain (’a waste of a good man’) and generally gossiped at me like I was cutting her hair. My favourite was this moustachioed socialist guy who would discourse on what he’d do to various politicians and celebrities if he got them alone in a room. If you’re stuck in a Portakabin for long enough with anyone—even a young kid—you’ll eventually just start being yourself. His marriage, he confided, had been in trouble because of his libido, but had been greatly strengthened by the arrival of AIDS, which stopped him wanting other women.

  ‘Used to be a pretty girl would smile at me and I wouldn’t be home for three days. You caught anything, the doctor gave you a jab and told you not to drink for a while. Not any more. The party’s over.’

  I loved people talking to me like an equal. I was always sad when the job was finished and I had to leave the stories and the card games and the bacon rolls. Looking back, that was the start of my interest in show business. I didn’t particularly enjoy the performing but I did love the camaraderie and the sheer variety of folk, endlessly talking shit.

  The school had an annual talent show, which my best friend Aiden and I did one year with a filthy act of pretty basic sex material. We were two detectives, talking about our cases as being a bit of a side issue to all the women we’d fucked. It wasn’t even really double entendre; there was clearly only one way you could take it and everybody was horrified. After that they’d make us audition every year for the talent show on our own, and then ban us. I used to look forward to the wee audition, just standing on our own in an empty lecture theatre doing blue jokes to our very elderly deputy head’s flinty, unchanging scowl.

  The shows were always compered by two good-looking drama monkeys called Victor and Andy. Their schtick was that one would come on and say, ‘Where’s Andy?’ then go off to look for him while the other came on and went, ‘Where’s Victor.’ I hated those guys and, denied any other role in the show, we’d go and heckle them. I’d like to say it was witty heckling; it wasn’t.

  ‘Where’s Andy?’

  ‘You’re a CUNT, Victor!’

  We did notice that people in the drama society seemed to be fucking each other. I guess that’s the way of the acting profession everywhere and I salute it. We even thought about getting involved, purely for sexual reasons. I went to a school production of Guys and Dolls as a reconnaissance exercise and decided it wasn’t worth it. There was a girl who was the school’s Sharpay, who was a hirsute lassie routinely referred to as Teenwolf. She had these really hairy arms and kind of lady sideburns. All the guys affected to dislike her but we were all secretly turned on by the fact that she was a known shagger and must have had a muff like Henry Cooper’s armpit.

  There was a thing I got into the habit of doing that was basically the start of my comedy career. There were two attractive girls in the debating society and I knew the entrance they used to come into school. I’d hang around there most days, trying to look like I’d just turned up for school early and hung around near the gates without going in, like a lunatic. Each time I would have some little stories and jokes and stuff that I’d go over in my head on the way to school. It wasn’t that I thought I could get anywhere with them—they were a couple of years older and one of them was dating a huge and disturbing Chinese guy who worked as a bouncer. It was more that making women laugh was pretty much all they’d let me do to them—so I really threw myself into it.

  I was always able to make people laugh. In fact I remember at school being able to make them laugh really hard. Imagine nowadays if you were only happy with your gig if you’d made someone spit their drink out, or made milk shoot out of their nose. If a joke worked with one girl I’d keep it and maybe add something for the next one—working a little bit like a real comedian and driven by horniness. Actually, exactly like a real comedian.

  I was really into The Comic Strip Presents when it was on Channel 4 and Saturday Night Live. I seemed to be the only person in school who watched any of that stuff. It’s easy to forget that while alternative comedy is now the mainstream, at the time it was a real minority interest.

  It was watching Ben Elton that first made me aware of green issues. People give him a lot of stick now because he wrote some Queen musical that causes cancer, but I think he did a really good job of introducing green politics to a generation. Also, he wrote Blackadder, so he could write a musical about Ian Huntley and he’d still be alright by me. I’m always amazed that people aren’t more horrified by things like the ice caps melting.

  To me it feels like living in a nightmare. It’s just as well Scott of the Antarctic wasn’t setting off nowadays. It’d be a pretty boring journal. ‘Day 1. Got there. Day 2. Came home. Went to pub.’ Now if you get to the South Pole you can bring it home in a flask.

  As soon as the sun comes out we are faced with the usual tabloid headlines about scorching weather. Wouldn’t it be great for a tabloid front page to cover hot weather with a picture of a girl in a bikini with the headline ‘Global Warming Forces Desperate Polar Bears to Eat Each Other’? Changing weather patterns mean that animals are going to start to migrate differently. Personally I look forward to seeing Bill Oddie going to do some birdwatching in Norfolk and getting his head ripped off by a puma.

  I’m not sure I trust science to get us out of this mess. We tend to put all our faith in science these days. Scientists are planning to build a vault on the moon that contains details of crop growing and instructions for metal smelting so that survivors of a nuclear war or an asteroid collision could restart civilisation. There’s just one small problem I see with this plan—how are a ragtag band of survivors meant to access a vault on the fucking moon? I already have a detailed plan of action for coping with global warming when it really starts to affect Scotland. I’m going to remove a couple of jumpers.

  Actually, I think the most sensible thing to do to find out how the planet is going is to have a friend who’s a scientist. When he takes up smoking it’s time to worry. Or when he suddenly goes for a visit to the moon with all of his scientist friends.

  ‘Just going for the weekend, John? You seem to be taking a lot of canned goods…?’

  I’d say my overall outlook for the future is pessimistic. Here’s a theory of mine. You know how years ago David Bowie used to always be slightly ahead of the curve? He covered the Velvet Underground just before people heard of them, and seemed to be riding each new wave of the zeitgeist? Even Tin Machine could be seen as him trying to do grunge slightly too early. Well, my theory is the government captured Bowie and replaced him with a lookalike. They keep the real Bowie in a big glass prison room, like Hannibal Lecter, so they can observe him and predict future trends. I reckon everybody is shitting themselves because recently Bowie developed metal skin and turned Chinese.

  The fact there were pretty girls in the debating society convinced me to join and I loved it. In it, the hideous flaws in my personality suddenly turned into virtues. I looked at the debating society in the way that a bank robber looks at an easy score, trying to spot the catch. I was a facetious, argumentative bastard and it turned out that it was a game that required you to be a facetious, argumentative bastard. The only other boys looked like even bigger losers than me. It just seemed too perfect.

  The woman who ran the debating society was called Pat Slaven. She is a truly wonderful woman and if I ever invent a time machine I will go back in time and marry her. Right after I’ve finished fucking the young Diana Rigg.

  I took the whole thing really seriously, as I honestly saw it as a chance to impress girls. Yes, I saw what is now clearly the club least attractive to women as a chance to impress girls. How many people have lost their virginity to a woman who gasped ‘Great speech!’ as they came? Possibly less than none. I’d just do lots and lots of jokes, largely because I rarely understood the arguments involved.

&nbs
p; There was a real ethereal quality to the days of the big debates. I’d wake up really early with nerves and find my mum warming my good shirt by the fire and putting my shaving stuff out. It was a lot like doing comedy gigs later on: the nervousness dominated my whole day. On the bus trip to the school we’d be debating against, everyone else would be having a laugh but I’d be trapped in my fear bubble. Afterwards I’d be really excited, high and relieved, and there were often girls to talk to on the way back. I’d be back in my jokey mode, looking for the funny side of everything in the way that only an ingratiating virgin can. In hindsight, they must have all have thought that I was some kind of manic depressive.

  We were one of the few comprehensives who’d do well in the debates, because we had such a good coach. After the first round or two you’d be up against a bunch of public schools.

  Scotland’s public schools are pretty Lovecraftian: archaic and bizarre institutions dedicated to the production of humourless young adults. I’d never send my kids to public school, partly because I think it’s socially divisive, but mainly because I think they generally produce shallow people. When my kids have their nervous breakdown in their twenties (everybody seems to have a nervous breakdown before thirty, but culturally we are trained not to mention this) I don’t want the friends they have to fall back on to be a bunch of cunty, CV-padding, tax-discussing Scottish dentists and lawyers.

  I used to quite enjoy standing underneath baroque paintings of former headmasters, debating in my stiff C&A shirts and NHS specs. I felt like Alf Tupper, Tough of the Track. We won a few gongs and got a glimpse into another world, a world of different nerds. Nerds who knew that their school bullies would one day work for them.

  I suppose debating was my first real encounter with the class system. There was a guy from one public school we knocked out of a competition who refused to shake hands afterwards because we were comprehensive kids. The next time I saw him he was a left-wing student leader organising an antipoll tax sit-in at Glasgow Uni. I sometimes wonder if anybody really has principles or if they’re all just chasing different kinds of sex. Life isn’t just a choice between Conservatives and Socialist Workers. It’s also a choice between fucking a muscular polo player at an Oxbridge ball or being rattled in a caravan by your yoga teacher at a weekend of environmental awareness.

  We are, of course, ruled by genetic inbreds. Most aristocrats have DNA so damaged they could join the X-Men. When I walk through Knightsbridge I feel like I’m on a mini-break in Chernobyl.You can tell what class you are by this simple test. There’s a fox in your back garden. You’re upper class if you get on a horse and chase it with a pack of hounds. You’re middle class if you make your children draw a picture of it to send into Blue Peter. You’re working class if you beat it to death with a shovel and make soup out of it. Upper-class people go to Oxford or Cambridge, middle-class people go to any other university. Working-class people go the university of hard knocks: Dundee Abertay. If my grandfather had died working down the Strathblane coffee mines, if Strathblane even had a coffee mine, he would be turning in his grave, rather than exposing himself to care workers in an Alzheimer’s hospice, which I believe is what he’s doing right about now.

  The thing that really gets me about our upper classes is this: what’s wrong with using an attic to store old lampshades and games of KerPlunk? What’s this obsession with hiding inbred mutant children in the attic? That’s the reason why you never see a member of the upper class in an episode of Cash in the Attic.

  ‘This is a very unusual piece, do you know what it is?’

  ‘Oh, that’s Edward and Charles, the Siamese twins. I’d quite forgotten they were up here.’

  * * *

  There wasn’t just a class divide in Glasgow—when I was growing up it was also pretty racist. Asian shopkeepers would get abuse and black footballers had bananas thrown at them. I don’t know if the attitudes behind that have really gone away; maybe people are just better at hiding those feelings.

  I used to think of Scotland as particularly racist but when I went to England I found it much the same. The other night a cabbie in London recognised me and asked if I ever got censored on the grounds of political correctness. I mumbled something about occasionally having things toned down and he said:

  ‘I know. You can’t call a coon a coon or a poof a poof, can you?’

  It was amazing. This guy actually lives in a reality where everybody on Mock the Week is doing jokes about Obama’s fiscal-stimulus policy and what we’d really rather be doing is saying, ‘He is a coon.’ Of course, neither country has anything on Ireland, which has a set of cheerfully racist attitudes worthy of the Third Reich. Then of course, there’s Australia. It’s ironic that Australians are so racist. Kind of hard to defend the proposition that black people don’t belong in your country, when the white people keep dying from skin cancer.

  When I watched the infamous Celebrity Big Brother that featured the bullying of Shilpa Shetty I started to consider that I might be one of the few people who isn’t into racism and that I had totally underestimated its current level of coolness. One thing is certain, it doesn’t do ratings any harm so we’re going to try to build as much racism into the next series of Mock the Week as possible. Naturally, Hugh Dennis has raised objections but that is just the behaviour of a typical Chinky. Racism really does open up new markets to the canny performer. Jade Goody went from being an unknown in India to effigies of her being waved in the streets.

  I’ve always been pretty broadminded about other cultures. For instance, I’m in favour of the full-length burqa as it allows me to masturbate in Tescos. The spectacle of British politicians playing to the assumption that we are all racists sickens me. I’ve come up with my own British Citizenship Test exam paper that would help make sure the applicant will fit in with the culture.

  1. Spot the difference between these two cartoons of Mohammed.

  2. Why has your country never voted for us in Eurovision?

  3. Have you ever looked at the ingredients on Ready, Steady, Cook and thought ‘I could make a bomb out of that’?

  4. You’ve just picked up a newspaper on your way to the Tube. Expecting to be shot?

  5. Write down ten well-known British swearwords. On the house of your local paedophile.

  6. A TV presenter has been involved in a sex offence. Do you find this (a) horrifying, or (b) a bit of a laugh?

  7. Your mother has just died. How long do you spend talking to the doctor about football?

  8. If you fail this British Citizenship Test, will you accept a taxi driver’s licence?

  Earlier this year Carol Thatcher was booted off The One Show for comparing a black tennis player to a golliwog. To be fair she does live in Knightsbridge, so the last time she saw anyone black was probably on a jar of Robertson’s jam in the Seventies.When she saw Obama’s inauguration speech she just thought it was just a long advert for marmalade. Her mother was just as confused. During the Brixton riots Margaret Thatcher thought she was watching the director’s cut of Noddy.

  Carol Thatcher obviously lives in a twilight world where everyone is a cartoon figure. She probably thought The One Show was being presented by Shrek. Actually for months so did I. Carol comes from a different generation; no doubt as a kid she had a golliwog—who shined the family silver, tended to the horses and gave her mum a right good seeing to once a month when Denis had gone to work.

  Actually, the Queen recently came under fire for selling golliwogs. A palace spokesman said, ‘We apologise unreservedly. They’re a historical anomaly from another time. But they are the royal family and they’ll do what they like.’ The palace has now banned golliwogs from its royal shop in Sandringham. When Prince Philip heard this he said, ‘Quite right too, and it’s time to add public transport and restaurants to the list.’ Is it the dolls that are offensive or the name? Perhaps they just need to be rebranded. I suggest a name change to ‘Urban Barbie’. Carol believed she was sacked from the BBC because of a longstanding vendetta
against her mother. Ridiculous. If the BBC really had a serious grudge against Margaret Thatcher surely they would have invested billions of the licence fee into developing an injectable dose of Alzheimer’s disease that fellow guest David Frost could have secretly administered to her when she appeared on a 1987 episode of Question Time. Oops, have I said too much?

  FOUR

  The school had a nice policy of trying to do stuff for elderly people in the community. Every Christmas we’d be put into groups to make up a food parcel for the old fuckers. The teachers supervised but really only checked them by weight, so we’d try to make them as bizarre and unhelpful as possible. One year myself and the Marinelli twins gave someone a box containing two out-of-date industrial tins of pilchards from their dad’s shop; every available flavour of Angel Delight; a tin of curried beans that had been in my house for so long it was almost an heirloom; and an almost complete pack of Top Trumps: Rally Cars.

  A lot of us have felt ambivalent about old people at some point. Grandparents have a lot of annoying habits. Like dying just as you get addicted to their heart pills. Or owning a nice house and then not dying. If it wasn’t for MRSA I’d never have managed to get my new kitchen. On the upside, the elderly do get their own seats on the bus. Albeit ones that stink of piss. But it does always amaze me how many seats on the bus are reserved for the elderly and infirm. Ever got on a bus and thought, ‘Where’s this thing going? Lourdes?’

  In fifth year, my friend Aiden and I volunteered for doing community work with the elderly one afternoon a week because it got us out of PE. We had two oldies we visited regularly. One was an old man called Mr Bowman. He was a really sweet old guy and we enjoyed his endless stories about Scottish history, something he had quite a poor grasp of. The weekly lecture was generally cribbed from a week-by-week periodical he got delivered called Scotland’s Story. He would throw people from one era into another and add macabre details nobody could have known like he was a postmodern novelist.