My Shit Life So Far

by Frankie Boyle

  Paul Marsh lived in Bromley at the same time and so we got to hang out a bit. A typical evening involved Paul renting a video that he thought looked good. To me the same video would look like it had been made as a satirical joke about creativity entropy. He would then lose interest in it during the first ten minutes and play his guitar really badly as I watched in rapt horror. Pretty much anything that would normally dissuade you from renting a film will encourage Paul to get it. It’s British? Cool. It’s been directed by Keith Allen’s brother? Yes please. It features a lingering nude shot of an elderly Michael Caine? Give me two. In this, as in so many other ways, Paul has often made me wonder if he is an alien trying to work out what’s normal. There’s a key phrase that I’ll say one day that will make him think that his cover’s been blown and he’ll have the whole planet incinerated with a few incomprehensible words into his shirt-cuff microphone.

  I just couldn’t be arsed getting a teaching job and just drifted into doing comedy full time. I had a contract to do a thing called ‘The Comedy Network’, which was basically a whole load of university gigs. These were incredibly variable. One night you’d be playing packed gigs to 500 people in a theatre set-up, the next you’d be standing in a corner of a freezing bar talking to one table of baffled foreign students. To be honest, it was usually the latter.

  My first tour was with Paul Sneddon doing his Vladimir McTavish act, which confusingly is not a character. I compered and the other act was SeÁn Cullen, doing a character called Dame Sybille. He was an old lady of the English theatre relating bizarre and almost entirely improvised anecdotes about her life in show business. It didn’t matter how unpromising the room or the crowd looked, he would improvise almost the entire thing, even though the character had a lot of funny stock lines. He was unbelievably gifted. One particularly grim-looking group, which comprised a handful of science students and the venue bouncers, got treated to a bizarre treatise on Dame Sybille’s life among the Native American Indians. She had been a Dr Moreau-like figure among them and had, for some reason, bred a race of horses with human hands. It ended with a thrilling denouement where the Indians turn against Dame Sybille and she climbs up a large rock only to hear the horses with their human hands climbing up behind her. The Chief confronts her at the top but says nothing; he simply makes his horse stand on its hind legs and slap her in the face.

  There was a gig in Newcastle where they put all the acts up in a flat for a few nights while they worked over the weekend. One morning, this comic got up and told us all about this terrible nightmare he’d had. He’d been booked to do a show in a pub somewhere but there was no stage so he had to stand on bales of straw but there was no microphone, so he just had to shout as people talked at the bar. I pointed out that we’d all done much worse gigs than this in real life. When we got talking, it turned out one guy had done a show standing on top of a car in a car showroom during the day, as people walked by trying to gauge if he was a schizophrenic. Another bloke had done a gig where he turned up only to be bundled into a van and driven up to a group of a dozen elderly people in a car park. The van reversed towards the crowd and the back doors were flung open—him standing slightly hunched in the back doing his act.

  I’ve got my own share of horror stories. There used to be a festival in Glasgow called Mayfest and there was some kind of bylaw that if pubs put on entertainment that wasn’t music they would get a late licence for free. I suppose the idea is that boozers would stick on scenes from Death of a Salesman and people would be culturally enriched as they got drunk and gubbed handfuls of dry roasted peanuts. In practice, bar owners stuck on stand-up to exploit the loophole. You’d have to do five minutes so they could get their licence, but it paid £50 and you could do a few in a night. I did one in a big converted church on the South Side. There were about 300 people in on a Saturday night. The DJ just went, ‘Here’s a comedian’ and handed me his mic, which was tethered to the mixing deck by about two feet of cord. I crouched there and did some jokes and everybody seemed to be laughing uproariously, albeit slightly in the wrong places. When I got off, one of the punters explained that everybody was laughing at a laser that somebody had centred on my forehead, making it look like I was in the sights of a sniper’s rifle.

  The worst gig I did was one in the Harbour Arts Centre in Irvine. There had been a music festival on somewhere during the day and they just let all the festival-goers in for free. The organiser looked out into the room and gave me this little satisfied nod. It was like she was saying, ‘If there’s one thing I like to see before a gig, it’s bodies swaying and lurching around the room like a challenging level in a zombie game.’ She got up and for some reason tried to do a raffle, then it was me. I think I tried a putdown on some heckler and he just walked up onto the stage and started screaming—it was a comprehensive emotional breakdown of some kind. There was actually foam on his mouth and I just stood there and watched him, suddenly completely bored. I managed to get him to sit down just by pointing wordlessly at his empty chair, like he was a trained animal. In reality, this cunt could only dream of the education that had been lavished on a good sniffer dog. It was hopeless. I managed to get a bit of hush, then said, ‘You people need to get yourself a fucking karaoke machine’, dropped the mic and walked off through this booing mob.

  What I’d forgotten was the rider. I got outside and then had to walk calmly back through the crowd to get the box of booze from the dressing room. People were going nuts, screaming in my face and stuff. Fuck it, I was going to need to drink if I was staying in Irvine. I was staying next door in the B&B and so, it turned out, was a lot of the audience. I woke up the next day, having drunk the rider, to see that I had piled all the furniture in the room against the door to thwart their efforts to get in there and kill me. I had no memory of what must have been a reasonably challenging evening. Good old booze.

  I’d recommend that everybody try bombing on stage at least once. People are always chasing new highs; what about new lows? I can assure you that dying on your arse is a low you won’t believe. I heard of a guy who died during a benefit gig for victims of miscarriages of justice. An old guy came up and put his arm round him at the bar. He felt a bit better until he realised that he had done so badly he was being commiserated with by one of the Birmingham Six.

  I played for a big chain of clubs called Jongleurs for a bit. They’d only book me for their easier clubs and always put me on first. I loved that. I’d have hated to get any more work from them; there wasn’t a moat and chicken wire across the front of their stages but you felt it would have helped sometimes. They were really strict about everybody doing twenty minutes. I was terrified that they’d promote me to their rougher venues or to headlining the ones I was doing, so I always did as short a set as possible. In fact, if I thought it was going too well I’d stop doing jokes and just chat about my day for a bit.

  There was a rough venue I’d compere a lot called The Frog and Bucket, in Manchester. It’s on a really rough street, the sort of place you’d go to hire a hitman. Once I got mugged when I was going down there. Two junkies grabbed me; they both had knives but I managed to somehow wriggle free and get to the front door of the club. They had some truly startling security at that club and even in the midst of the shock of it all, I laughed to see some full-on maniac of a doorman with a telescopic truncheon run off up the road looking for the guys.

  ‘Gig on the Green’ was a festival that used to be on Glasgow Green in the summer. An interesting part of town, it meant that there was a broad mix of studenty, music-loving types and people who were there to rob them. I turned up and the tent was packed with people waiting for the compere Phil Kay, who is hugely loved in Scotland for being an unpredictable genius and maniac. Phil was late and the organiser just wanted me to go straight on, but I got them to hold it for a bit. Eventually, Phil turned up and just walked straight on to this huge, football-ground roar. The first thing you could hear as it died down was one of the crowd shouting, ‘Show us your dick!’ Phil imm
ediately replied, ‘I’ll show you it if you get up here and wank it for me!’ and actually got it out. There was a big gasp from the crowd and this bloke, fair play, decided he was going to honour his commitment to get up there and wank it for him. Realising he’d need some momentum to get past security, he sprinted right at the stage and was in the middle of an impressive leap as two bouncers intercepted him and drove him face first into the ground like a fencepost. All I could hear through the chaos was ‘…please welcome Frankie Boyle!’ I shook hands with Phil as I took to the stage, trying not to look at his exposed penis.

  A weird side of stand-up is that you get to spend a lot of time in places that nobody ever goes. You wait to go on in corridors filled with beer barrels, or rehearse on fire escapes outside venues. The same is true of the places you go to on your way there—the motorway services, the coffee shops in railway stations. I’m probably one of the only people in the country who knows this, but Leicester station has the most purgatorial cafÉ in the UK. It has the usual depravity of fruit machines and Formica tables but seasons it with a set of framed photos running all around the walls of famous people who come from Leicester. Gary Lineker, he’s from Leicester. So is David Attenborough and the snooker player Willy Thorne. The fact that none of these people chose to stay in Leicester is irrelevant. So what if they thought that it was better to move away from Leicester? The final face is Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man. It says a lot when a town takes pride in being the birthplace of a hugely deformed circus freak. Even he pissed off to London. And it’s not even him; it’s a photo of John Hurt in the movie. The UK’s National Space Centre is in Leicester, because proximity to the town gives scientists an added incentive to come up with technology to get off the planet.

  Dope smoking is similar to stand-up in that way. You get to see a lot of unusual psychogeography, smoking joints in alleyways and on patches of waste ground. I remember once getting stoned behind an old tumbledown wall in a Glasgow park and thinking that I probably had my own name in the language of the local stray cats. Another time there was a murderer on the run in Glasgow and every time I went for a joint I’d panic, thinking ‘If I was a murderer this is exactly where I would hide!’

  Travelling around Britain as a stand-up I really noticed how public space has been colonised. Every park or public garden seems to be seen by councils as a missed opportunity to sell lattes and Cornettos. I remember reading some Scottish politician bemoaning the fact that Loch Lomond attracted hordes of visitors but didn’t have anything for them to buy. They built a big shopping centre on the banks and of course nobody shops there. Because it’s a shopping centre and they’ve turned up to see a fucking lake. I hate that attitude of wondering how you can make things pay. It’s a sickness. Queuing in a railway station to pay 30 pence to take a piss makes me feel like a shambling animal in an abattoir. And Ryanair have recently announced that they are going to charge passengers to use their toilets, although they seem to prefer it when people refer to them as planes. A pound to go to the loo on their planes?! Michael O’leary has obviously never eaten his own airline food. How long before he installs coin meters in the chairs just to keep the plane flying?

  Another thing I soon learned from my early days on the road is that a tiny but determined minority of stand-ups are compulsive liars. Everybody knows who these guys are and most people really look forward to car journeys with them, just for the sheer, wild, Michael Moorcockesque unreality of it all. There was one guy who told me that he was a black belt in aikido, but had to retire after cutting off his big toe with a sword. As he sat in front of me wearing sandals. He also told me a story about a friend of his who jumped off the Pompidou Centre in Paris into a bucket of water.

  ‘You mean a tank of water…?’ I replied.

  ‘No, a bucket!’

  ‘Like in a Tom and Jerry cartoon?’

  ‘Yes.’

  On a different occasion another guy went outside to take a mobile-phone call when we were sitting in the dressing room of Glasgow Jongleurs. The Rolling Stones were playing in town that night and of course this maniac said Mick Jagger was phoning to see if he could borrow a couple of local gags. In its own way, that’s weirder than anything the Yorkshire Ripper did.

  This same guy phoned me one time and asked if he could do a weekend I had booked in with a club up north because his wife was in hospital with cancer. Her hospital was near the venue and it meant he’d be able to be by her side. Why he’d want to be zipping off from the bedside to berate students for 120 quid a night I didn’t know. Maybe they needed the money for cancer drugs or something? Of course it turned out his wife was absolutely fine, quite cheerful in fact, as she’d split up with him a couple of years before. It was worth losing the work because every time I met him for a few years after this I’d get him to update me on his wife’s recovery. I really banged on about it incessantly. I think in the end he just told me she’d died. It’s just like the lying kids at school; the stand-up circuit is a bit dull. Those guys think that the truth is a bit too boring to tell and they’re sort of right. Mind you, comedians in general are such social retards. Every time I’m stuck in a dressing room I keep expecting Tom Cruise to turn up and drive them all to Vegas.

  ELEVEN

  Having been going full time on the comedy circuit for about a year, I did a run of gigs in Dubai. It’s the only time I’ve ever done that sort of thing because I hate flying and I hate expats. There are only two reasons for someone becoming an expat. Either they’ve failed at life in Britain or they’re a paedophile. The whole British expat community there is like the residue of some experiment to clone Jeremy Clarkson. It’s full of people who can never come home because they get used to the maids and the deference. They always end up going on to other outposts of neocolonial horror and their CVs read like they’re the hero of a Joseph Conrad novel. When they come back, expats always say things like, ‘I can’t believe you still live here…’ and you know they’re only ever a few drinks off saying, ‘because of the blacks’. They always bang on about the weather and the food, like that’s more important than the place being a Third World police state. Here’s a wee rule of thumb I have (no doubt some people will find it naÏvely idealistic): never live in a country that imprisons homosexuals.

  The people putting on the gigs were really decent but it took me the first week to get over the flight. I’ve always hated flying, partly because I didn’t get on a plane till I was in my twenties. I distinctly remember that first time as we roared up the runway thinking, ‘If this thing goes any faster we’re going to take off!’ I’d take loads of Valium and sleeping pills for every flight for a while, but once I was so out of it that I seized a man on take-off and fell asleep with my arms around his neck. Perhaps I was trying to take him hostage, perhaps I’m a deeply sublimated homosexual.

  The brace position they ask you to take up in the event of a crash (head between knees) is actually designed so that your teeth will stay with your corpse and they can identify the body. I reckon that if you time it just right at the moment of impact you can probably spit all your teeth into someone else’s lap, messing things up for everybody.

  I hate people who say, ‘Don’t worry, if you’re in a plane crash it’ll all be over in an instant!’ That’s the problem. I can’t believe that people actually try to reassure you by saying that you’re going to be snuffed out of existence in an instant of unimaginable pain. Those who tell you there’s no such thing as a good way to die are people who have clearly never heard the phrase ‘drug-fuelled sex heart attack’. On a plane going down you’d fuck anything. I hit an air pocket last week and I had half a mind to hump the trolley. That’s why they never released the black boxes from 9/11. It’s probably nothing but sex groans and the occasional, ‘Blow this tower, Mustapha!’

  I stayed in Dubai for a week or so and did a range of different gigs. Some were just like a nice club gig at home, some were like a shite gig in a pub in the Middle East. One was in an expat village—the sort of people who tra
vel to another country and want to be surrounded by other British people, if you can imagine that. There’s a thing that happens when you do shows where lots of people are sitting with their boss—they wonder if they’re allowed to laugh. This was exactly like that, but there was a big Scottish group who were just visiting and didn’t have to worry about whether anybody else approved. They were just killing themselves. It was great, most of the room just silent and twenty or so guys could hardly breathe. It was hugely uncomfortably, perversely enjoyable. It was the first time I realised I could totally split a room and still do well, that some people in crowds would always hate me but I didn’t really need them anymore.

  Everyone on the tour was a great laugh. One of the organisers was a forty-something woman and was trying to shag one of the acts, who was horrified. She was a nice woman but, well, looked constipated. One night it was just the three of us in a hotel room, so the guy kept up an intense conversation with me about movies, desperately hoping I wouldn’t leave him alone with her. As I left, you could see real terror dawning. ‘Wait a minute, Frankie!’ he shouted desperately as I was closing the door. ‘Do you remember that movie where Eric Stoltz played a boy with a giant face? Do you?!’

  I’d never been anywhere sunny before so I loved it, just laughed the whole time. I wonder how much of our national temperament, and my own, is simply due to the pish weather. I actually have a policy not to do anything major in Scotland in the winter—everybody’s in a terrible mood. A recent survey revealed that one in ten Scots are on anti-depressants, which begs the question, what have the other nine got to be so happy about? It also reported that people in Scotland are more depressed in the winter months but I think we just hate the fact that there are twelve of them. But the truth is no poll will ever truly reflect our national character, because no poll includes a category of choked alcoholic sobs. When I was a kid there was an old Spectrum game called The Hobbit. One of those old type-in adventures: