I’ve always had a real problem with secondary education. It seems to exist to teach conformity and obedience over anything else. For me, it’s all in the bell. The bell goes and you move along to the next class. It doesn’t matter what you’re learning about, it could be Hamlet or dark matter. That bell goes and you trot along because nothing is more important than the system.
My course qualified me to teach English and was full of the sort of boring, conformist bastards that made Hitler’s rise to power so easy. I thought this was terrible at first, then once I’d been in some staffrooms I realised that these tedious flesh puppets were going to fit in perfectly. I always got on fine with the kids in schools; it was the teachers I struggled with. People who wear tweed and eat their lunch out of Tupperware might have things to tell your children, but those things are going to be thumpingly dull.
After years of thinking about it, it was during teacher training that I finally started doing comedy, aged 23. The Stand had a comedy club in the basement of W. J. Christie’s bar in Edinburgh. Plonked at one end of a strip-club area known as the ‘pubic triangle’, it was run by Tommy Sheppard and Jane McKay, a couple so much larger than life they would have been scarcely believable if they’d turned up in Dickens. Tommy described himself as ‘a businessman’, which I later discovered is a Scottish synonym for ‘crafty’. Jane compered the club and was always outrageous, hilarious, emotional and drunk.
I just turned up one night with a bunch of mates and asked if I could do a spot. Tommy told me that I’d have to book a spot and that obviously I couldn’t just turn up and go on. I was disappointed and told him I’d come down with about ten people and we’d all have bought tickets. That changed things completely and he stuck me on for five minutes. It was a tiny little room holding maybe thirty or so, with a bar at one side, a dressing area in the fire escape and a mirror high above the bar. From the stage you could see your own face in the mirror, desperately trying to keep it together.
It went really well, even though my act was rubbish. Everybody starts off rubbish; it’s a lot to do with trial and error, so how could they not? I think I started with some joke about how I’d like to know if I was going to be murdered so I could go around behaving really strangely for a few days just to mess up the reconstruction on Crimewatch. For the first year my act was all jokes about murders and people losing their legs and stuff like that. An ignored insight into what teacher training was doing to my sanity.
I hadn’t really planned to go back but Tommy and Jane turned up at my halls of residence and stuck a postcard under my door telling me to get in touch. Within months I was compering the club drunk and they were my surrogate family. There was a regular techie, Chris Cooper, who was a frighteningly degradedlooking 26. He looked like a 26-year-old man from the Middle Ages and spoke in a low, rasping, sexualised whisper. There was a general Man Friday called Mac—a young artist who liked drinking, as opposed to speaking. The whole crew who formed around the place was bonded to it by their love of the club and much greater love of alcohol, drugs and sex.
I quickly learned that there are two types of comedian. The outgoing extrovert performers, they tend to hang around after the show and try to pull women from the audience. And then there are the quiet, introverted comedians who have wives and families. They tend to shag the barmaids. Over the years the Stand grew to have two full-time clubs—they’re the best in the country, one in Glasgow, one in Edinburgh. I was to form an almost symbiotic relationship with the clubs’ bar staff. I’d often go down to hang out with them after shows, as they never came to the actual show, preferring the company of those who were as jaded and disgusted by stand-up as I was. I depended on the bar staff to get me drugs, and I tried to pump as many of them as I could. If you were to meet the concept of comedy bar staff on the astral plane it would be represented as a giant, drug-encrusted orifice. That didn’t laugh at your jokes. Anyway, I can’t diss comedy bar staff too much; they’ve been good friends to me over the years. And who knows, maybe I’ll need to shag some more of them in the future.
Coming up to the Edinburgh Festival in that first year, it was decided that the Stand would run every night of August so as to ‘steal a march’ on the festival proper. By the time the real thing kicked off we’d done eight nights in a row and were possibly in the advanced stages of alcohol poisoning. I was so bored that I started going through the bins outside the venue to find stuff to talk about. I’d come on wearing discarded specs I’d found in the rubbish and do half the show through an old picture frame.
Edinburgh itself has always felt a bit inauthentic to me. Like the shortbread-tin side of ourselves we use to attract American tourists. To be fair, the Americans do make great comedy audiences during the festival—always whooping and cheering. I often think that we should be more heavily medicated as a society. I think it’s every patriotic Scot’s duty to help out American tourists. Latch onto them and let them know about your city:
‘This is Princes Street. So called because it’s owned by the pop star Prince. Here, on Calton Hill, there are all kinds of nighttime events and they’re all free! It’s where they held the auditions to find the Bay City Rollers. And here we have Scott’s Monument. Erected to honour James Doohan who played Scotty in Star Trek. If you go all the way to the top, there’s an animatronics model of Lieutenant Uhura reading the Federation Charter. Well worth the climb. This statue of Greyfriars Bobby is the actual dog, who was so overcome with grief when his owner died that he threw himself into a cement mixer. This is John Knox’s house—where he lived before he went off to present Blue Peter with Shep.’
Tommy decided to start selling luxury filled rolls at the shows. Probably a bit of a surprise to anybody who’d staggered into a dingy basement near a strip club, largely so they could keep drinking, to be confronted with a choice between GruyÈre and French mustard. Tommy became preoccupied with roll sales. How the shows were doing actually became something of a side issue. One night Mac and I started giving away the rolls to the local homeless, who couldn’t understand what any of the fillings were.
‘Brie and avocado!’ offered Mac to a baffled tramp. ‘…That’s eh, cheese and eh…well, avocado.’
Tommy was enraged when he found out. ‘To the homeless! To the fucking homeless?!’ I managed to pacify him by pointing out that he was Deputy General Secretary of the Scottish Labour Party and he saw the funny side.
A highlight of that period was Tommy’s appearance on Masterchef. The show would always do a wee bit of back story with the guests, and Tommy wanted to be thought of as the sort of person who went on country walks with Irish setters. He wasn’t; he was the sort of person who liked to get drunk and sleep late, so he had to scour Edinburgh for dogs to borrow and persuade Jane to be filmed climbing a hill with them. I watched it drunk and felt like I was looking into a weird new dimension. Everyone used to give their dishes fancy French names but Tommy—a dour bastard but still the most cheerful person ever to come out of Ulster—called his things like ‘Pie and Veg’. Gordon Ramsay was the judge and panelled him. This was in the days before Ramsay was allowed to swear, although he looked like he really wanted to.
My drinking certainly seemed to be a lot less out of place in Scotland. Good old Scottish drinking. Other nations think of us as the great party nation. Oh no, that’s Ireland; and they think of us as kind of depressed. I found that I was drinking more and more, and my behaviour was becoming more extreme. Living in the part of the Venn Diagram where ‘Scottish People’ meets ‘Comedians’, nobody noticed. A key skill for alcoholics is to be able to make light of vomiting. ‘I think I was an asset to that barbeque…burp.’ Once I woke up in Tommy and Jane’s and found that I couldn’t see. Eventually, I realised that this was because I wasn’t wearing my glasses. I had a tribal memory of vomiting out of a window, so I looked out of the window in the living room. There, two floors below, my glasses stood face-up in a puddle of vomit being eaten by a seagull. That served as a sort of wake-up call and five years later I
quit.
My main teaching placement was at a school in Muirhouse. It’s quite a deprived part of Edinburgh, near where Trainspotting is set. It was a community high school with really brilliant kids. My principal was an amazing woman called Margaret Hubbard, who pioneered media studies in Scotland and was really insistent on teaching kids to question who produced what they were watching and why. She toured primary schools with a class that taught kids to decode children’s programmes. It was called ‘The Ideology of Postman Pat’. She was great. The kids told me that occasionally her back gave out and she’d teach them while lying down in the middle of the floor.
Working in that area gave me a real sense of how marginalised a lot of folk are; how completely not invited to the party. Life there wasn’t terrible but a lot of stuff should have been a lot better. A couple of the kids walked me round their area one day, showed me where they hung out, and it just made me really furious at what the world was offering to them. The place was full of nice, spirited kids and their country just didn’t seem to give a fuck about them.
I had to recalibrate my expectations of the children a bit too. A bunch of the first-year guys started talking to me one day about the actress Isla Fisher, who was in Home and Away at the time. ‘Ooh, do you fancy her then?’ I asked, in the teasing manner I remembered my own uncles employing with me. ‘Got a wee crush on her?’ One of them looked up at me baffled, and blinked, ‘Sort of, Sir. Eh, it’s more that we’d all like tae ride her.’
I spent free periods and lunchtimes with the other students on placement. They were three women who were all beautiful in totally different ways, all immaculately dressed in skirt suits from Next. This led to me teaching many of my classes in a disembodied state of sexual reverie. Once, while my second years were reading a poem, I was only brought back to reality by the sound of my own grinding teeth.
I was never much of a teacher. There were often times when the complete unreality of the whole thing hit me. I’d see myself standing writing at a blackboard like somebody’s teacher. I was somebody’s teacher! It wouldn’t have been a whole lot weirder if I’d quantum leaped into the body of a 1950s housewife. There were only a couple of kids who were really unbearable. I sat them together so that if I felt the need to fart I could walk casually by their table. Kids never really think of teachers as farting, so they’d go absolutely nuts at each other.
There was a wee guy in my third year who was unbelievably gay. Well, maybe not actually gay but certainly destined for gayness. Once, I set that class a short story and got the usual selection of stuff about scoring the Cup Final winner for Hibs or Hearts, winning the lottery and so on. He produced this tempestuous forty-pager about a woman trying to make her way in the fashion industry of Milan. She was designing a collection on a shoestring while her Cuban ex-lover attempted to blackmail her for sex. He succeeded actually. He ‘inserted himself inside her’ in a shower, in the one scene that the author’s heart didn’t seem to be in.
At the end of that placement there was a school talent show. I did my stand-up act. I’d been going for maybe six months then, so I was alright at it. The place was packed out with kids and former pupils. It was a really wild gig, playing to little kids who responded like a drunken crowd on a Saturday night. You haven’t lived until you’ve done a putdown on a 13-year-old boy from your form class. Obviously, it was about him being a virgin. He’d probably had more sex than me.
I couldn’t stand most of the students on the English teaching course so I’d hang out with three or four bad hats. Living in halls with people who aspired to teach physical education was fairly wearing on the soul and I was really looking forward to the course finishing.
I hated it at the time, but I think I’d find teacher training unbearable now, especially as bankers are being encouraged to go into teaching. Can you imagine a banker in the school room? ‘OK, so let me demonstrate. I have no apples and you have thirty apples. You give me all your apples. So I have all the apples. HA HA HA LOSERS! I HAVE ALL THE APPLES! SCUM!’ Before taking a pension of four million apples.
Some schools are hiring bouncers to control disruptive pupils when teachers are off sick and supply teachers are brought in. Classes are a lot better behaved now that pupils are barred from getting in for wearing trainers, and ugly kids are being sent to schools around the corner.
My final placement was a wash-out. The department didn’t want a student there and actually stopped speaking to me. I enjoyed that immensely, often going up to the other teachers and telling them the whole psychedelic plot of a Michael Moorcock book I was reading while they attempted to ignore me. It involved a parallel 1970s earth where the British Empire spanned the whole globe with the aid of giant Zeppelins. The only guy who spoke to me was a predatory homosexual. I finally worked out the key phrase that would make him go away. It turned out to be, ‘I think that you are a predatory homosexual.’
So with nowhere else to finish the final placement, I got put into a primary school for a month or so. Primary teaching isn’t a real job. Getting children to make paintings out of seashells and glitter? That’s pretty much what they’d do if you weren’t in the room. Also, you don’t need to know that much. Just tell them loads of lies and they’ll believe you. I fought against the temptation to tell them that face-painting was invented by the Jews during the war to hide from the Nazis. ‘You are mistaken, Herr Kommandant! We are not Jews! We are TIGERPEOPLE…except him, he’s Spiderman.’
Nowadays, the curriculum in primary schools is to be revamped so that children are familiar with blogging, podcasts, Wikipedia and Twitter. Aren’t kids already familiar with all of these? The average primary-school child is already more relaxed with computers than a NASA scientist. Talk about putting a strain on the teachers. The only people qualified to teach children aged 7 about how the internet works are children aged 8. Another problem with this revamping is that information technology is moving so quickly that by the time children leave school, websites like Twitter will be as dead as the dodo. Although pupils won’t have been taught what a dodo is; they’ll be saying ‘as dead as MySpace’. Teaching children about information technology is going to replace fad activities, such as reading books and learning about history. That might seem like a dreadful shame to us, but remember that future generations are going to have to fight the cyber wars and, unfortunately, knowing how to download plans for an electromagnetic pulse disruptor is going to be more useful to them than knowing how long Queen Victoria reigned when they come face to face with an army of giant robotic bees.
Actually, my primary-school placement was a great time for me. Everybody was incredibly tolerant of having an idiot, who couldn’t paint or draw, lumber round their classrooms trying to show them how to paint and draw. During the weekly assembly when hymns were sung, I had to sit outside with a wee Jehovah’s Witnesses boy whose parents didn’t want him to take part for religious reasons. Those were great afternoons: a hundred tiny voices singing to Jesus while this little lad with bottle-top specs questioned me incessantly about my life in the outside world.
He said that I should see him throw a cricket ball. I’ve since discovered that this is an almost genetically innate ability some people have. Ian Botham held the world record for years and then I think it passed to Ian Botham’s son. Anyway, I wasn’t really supposed to but one day when everybody was singing hymns I got hold of a cricket ball and we sneaked out to the field behind the school. There wasn’t a house for about half a mile. I can still see him launching it like a fucking rocket towards the horizon, beaming up at me as glass broke in the distance. We gave each other that man-shrug that says, ‘Nobody needs to know about this. Let us never speak of it again.’
TEN
I’d been going out with a girl since working in mental health, and after I finished teacher training we got married. Why? I was drunk. I was drunk for the courtship, proposal, wedding and most of the year-long marriage itself. I know that I should probably em and ah a few regrets here but, to be honest, drunkenne
ss is quite a good way to approach marriage. Relationships are largely about blotting out other people’s failings, having an idealised version of somebody to relate to. It’s so much easier not to notice those failings when you can’t see your own face in a shaving mirror and sleep like a well-fed hamster. Fuck it, I tried. Oh no, wait a minute. I didn’t.
I read recently that the secret to a happy marriage is for a man to marry a woman who’s far more attractive than him. This is according to the results of a scientific investigation carried out by…a really ugly scientist. This is the follow-up to his earlier studies, ‘Why scientists should mate with supermodels’ and ‘Why men with tiny cocks make the best lovers.’
During the marriage we lived in Bromley. It’s in Kent, but is really a suburb of London. Basically, if you ever have to go there and you really can’t get out of it, kill yourself. I’d kill myself if I had to change trains there. Nobody between the ages of 18 and 30 lives there; only the occasional acid casualty living with their parents will have failed to get the fuck out at the first opportunity. It’s so incredibly nondescript that I would feel foolish trying to describe it. Avoid.
We had a dog, a little cocker spaniel. As I only worked doing stand-up at weekends, I spent a lot of time with the dog, until I found that I was starting to look and behave like a dog. One day I shaved off all its fur and arranged it in the shape of the dog on the living-room floor, even putting its little collar on. When my wife came home I pretended it had been in an accident and she burst into tears. I still have no idea why that relationship didn’t work out. That dog will be dead now. I’m talking about the spaniel, rather than my ex-wife. I read that the world’s oldest dog just turned 21. It’s a dachshund and it struggles to see, hear and walk. That’s not really a dog is it? That’s a draft excluder that shits itself.
My Shit Life So Far Page 12