My Shit Life So Far

by Frankie Boyle

  ‘So what can you tell us about T. E. Lawrence?’

  ‘Well, Tom, he loved a Mint Imperial!’

  There’s another great episode where he visited a school on an island and talked to this frightening-looking headmistress with thick glasses, who had modelled her hairstyle on Einstein. He spoke to her about the difficulties of schooling children on an island and she talked proudly of the new school computer. Cut to a loving shot of an old BBC Acorn computer in a shed somewhere, a shot that goes on for ages. Tom seemed enthused and asked if the kids could use the computer whenever they liked.

  ‘Oh, no’, she replied, shocked. ‘We can’t be sending Mr McKenzie down to switch on the generator every day!’

  I also started doing Mexican magic mushrooms with Paul Marsh. They used to be available legally from headshops and are a tremendous thing—they give you a real feeling of poetic clarity. Once I saw the comic-book hero Iron Man appear silhouetted on my bedroom wall. I knew that if I took more mushrooms, Iron Man would walk out of the wall and start speaking to me, so I went to bed. A missed opportunity. Another time I became obsessed with the idea that the mushrooms had let me see an important truth that explained everything and desperately looked for pen and paper to write it down. When I got up in the morning I discovered that in the centre of a sheet of A4 I had written in tiny letters, ‘Language is meaningless.’

  I started compering the Stand’s Thursday nights every week. I did Glasgow for a bit and later did a couple of years of the same thing in Edinburgh. It was interesting to do the same local gig so often. After a while, I could walk through town on my way there and sense how many people would be at the show and what the atmosphere would be like.

  As with anything you overdo, a lot of weird stuff started to happen. I remember doing the Thursday that was the first ever night of the Glasgow Comedy Festival. A woman went nuts screaming that she was on anti-depressants and they were bombing Baghdad. I’m still not sure how the two were linked, but some audience members took it upon themselves to pick her up and run out through the fire doors with her, using her as a kind of battering ram. Encouraged by this, the next week when I had another nutter throw her drink at me, I just asked a really big punter to pick her up and run away. He did, and neither of them ever came back. They both left their coats. He might have killed her for all I know. I hope he has.

  That said, any function has the potential to be pretty weird. I know a comic who had to do a student ball somewhere. It was fancy dress and the only person who came into the bit where he was performing was a student dressed as a jester, with a bell on the end of his hat. The organisers still insisted the comic did his full show.

  ‘40 minutes I did,’ he told me, ‘and that fucking bell didn’t ring once.’

  Once I performed at some kind of student ball at Cambridge at about two in the morning. I find it difficult to be on stage at a time when I’m normally a couple of hours into a sexually charged nightmare. To worsen the matter, I drank one of those brutal energy drinks. This one might as well have had the slogan ‘A 36-hour erection in a can’. There was a fair bit of heckling, which I could only deal with by threatening to come off stage and kill people. This went down pretty well, I think because people thought I was some sort of ironic Scottish character act, rather than genuinely suppressing a murderous, sleep-deprived rage. As I left, a hypnotist was taking the stage. How hard can it be to hypnotise a bunch of drunken students at two in the morning? I can only hope he led them all off like the Pied Piper and drowned them in the river.

  The next night I was in Scotland to perform in a castle for an association of small-shop owners (‘No Muslim jokes please, Frankie’). It was a lot more fun with pipers, me and then a display of falconry. There’s nothing like waiting to go on stage and being told to keep it tight because it’s ‘past the eagle’s bedtime’.

  I kept doing the Edinburgh show for way too long because one of the barmaids was really attractive. In fact, there aren’t words to describe it. She was really attractive in the way that the Taj Mahal is really attractive. I’ve always been attracted to women who are out of my league and it’s gotten easier to find them as I’ve got older and uglier. It wasn’t a lust thing, more an admiration of beauty; everybody has a view they love and that was the view I loved. I’d pretend to be looking out at the audience pre-show and would actually just watch her, boredly washing tumblers. The other comedians all thought I was obsessed with what our audience looked like. She hated comedy, making her perfect. I didn’t really ever get to know her properly. It probably would have spoiled it all.

  Eventually she left and I packed it in too. I’d always go out on a Thursday night, cycling round Pollok Estate then sitting and having a joint under a tree where you’d often see a lot of wee birds, squirrels and the like. At first I thought I was cycling to use up the adrenaline I’d have when I’d normally be doing a show. Eventually I realised I was just trying to replace the beauty in my life. I’ve debated whether or not this whole section is a good thing to admit to. I think Britain is probably too uptight to enjoy such a story. If the book gets translated into French, this bit will win me some kind of award.

  Incidentally, while on the subject of romance, here is what I have learned from my adventures of the heart. Drugs are better than Love. If there was a drug that had a comedown like Love, you would never take it. Here, pssst, take this. You’ll feel fantastic for a while, then after the high has gone you’ll feel like someone has plunged a broken shard of window pane repeatedly through your chest while reciting all your failings in a flat monotone. You’ll feel like that every day for about four years. Take it! I’m kidding; if you see a chance for love, go for it. Throw everything you’ve got at it like you’re a fool. Life without love is a fucking wilderness. It’s only the invention of MDMA that has stopped me throwing myself under a bus. I really don’t have the words for how I’d like to end this chapter, so I’d like you to imagine the long howl of an animal in pain.

  TWELVE

  For a wee while I was quite happy travelling around doing clubs but the stag parties, the Proclaimers-based heckles and the guys who’d storm it after me doing comedy songs about Viagra started to take their toll. I wanted to do something a bit different and my real break into telly was a show I did in Scotland called Live Floor Show. Comics often wonder about whether they network enough, or have the right agent to get a break. I literally just got an email from a producer who had never met me that said, ‘Hello from the BBC’, and suddenly I was on TV.

  It was a stand-up show hosted by Greg Hemphill, who is hugely famous in Scotland from Chewing the Fat and Still Game. There was also a camp, gay chap called Craig Hill, who had a lovely voice like a sort of velvety suggestion. Jim Muir was the Reverend Obadiah Steppenwolfe III, a drug-loving sex-hungry sociopath whom we quickly discovered to be a toned-down version of Jim’s real personality. Miles Jupp played an aristocratic English lord, indulging in the brutal Scot-baiting that we all enjoyed but without the safety net. Paul Sneddon had a football character called Bob Doolally and did brilliant sketches that were like little three-panel comic strips in a newspaper, perhaps one that had a pretty broadminded approach to obscenity.

  We filmed the credits for the show in a lap-dancing bar and they’d hired one of the regular dancers to show us how to pole dance. Looking back, it was an insight into what the producers really thought of us. I often play a game in the street where I look for a face that would make me leave a house party. Someone so debased or villainous looking that the minute they walked in I’d have to go before the whole thing descended into heroin and handcuffs. This bitch would have had me cracking the bathroom window open and scuttling down the drainpipe. She demonstrated a variety of basic moves we could try, while her 9-year-old daughter watched judgementally from a barstool. She told me that she did private dances but the one rule was that her knickers stayed on. ‘Doesn’y mean you canny hitch ‘em to the side’, she added, with a conspiratorial grunt that stopped me fucking my girlfriend fo
r about a fortnight.

  The actual credits they used on the show featured me doing the splits at the base of the pole, always a good way to introduce topical comedy. Paul Sneddon went to lick the pole during his bit and we all virtually bundled him to the ground. It was a moment of madness on his part—think of all the desperate vaginas that had gripped that metal. He might as well have sucked Gene Simmons’s cock.

  Working in mental health made me ideally qualified for doing a programme with BBC Scotland. We were an in-house production, which meant I got to deal with people who were lazy, moody or daft to the point where it could have been registered as a handicap. The whole department appeared to make about two or three shows a year, a workload everybody seemed to find absolutely harrowing. You’d go into the office and they’d all just be sitting playing internet poker. Later, when I first started working in London, I was really struck by how messy the offices were—scripts and DVDs piled on desks and researchers running around. It seemed chaotic and unnatural to see people actually working.

  Naturally, both the producers on the show were English. One was just some kind of figurehead; he’d come down and drink wine in the green room before a recording and tell hugely implausible stories about celebrities he knew. Who knows, maybe he thought he was fulfilling some kind of function there, like perhaps we needed settling before a performance, and the only way to achieve this was by listening to a long-winded story about a 1970s children’s TV presenter who had a specially adapted ambulance that he used to sexually abuse the disabled.

  Our main producer was a plausible, bulshitty media type. We’d go off and write the show every week, and his job was to edit it so that just before a punchline there would be a sudden cutaway to a shot taken from fifty feet up in the air, or of some people talking in the crowd. Rising to the top in BBC Scotland must be a lot like getting ahead in the Bolivian air force—nobody has much idea of what’s going on, so the bluffers will thrive. Most of the senior people there would, in another walk of life, have had a job like Pizza Hut franchise manager. Although probably not for long.

  The producers of LFS would come to the try-out show we did every week and sit in the crowd, putting little ticks or crosses against our jokes. They’d veto stuff for quite random reasons (‘Don’t do a joke about him, my wife’s reading his autobiography’), and we’d sometimes have to go away afterwards and write new stuff through the night. It was a bit of a grind some weeks, but it meant I became really prolific at writing new stuff. Also—I’m going to say this because sometimes I need reminding—sitting up stoned thinking of jokes and watching MTV Base isn’t a very hard job.

  It was during that period that I started smoking dope to write. It really helped me to think sideways. I can’t ever remember sitting down with a load of grass and worrying that I wasn’t going to get the job done. All the jokes that got blocked meant I’d have to write maybe ten minutes of short, topical gags a week. That’s a lot more than is practical and I needed the drugs to do it. Even Jay Leno with the best writers in America is only doing five or six minutes. If you ever see Jay Leno opening with a tight ten, you can be pretty sure that he’s stoned out of his mind. That’s why I’ve always thought it must be great being George Michael. Getting stoned and waiting for that wave to wash over you. That wave of realisation…‘I’m George Michael!’ OK, it’s naughty for him to drive under the influence but in his defence, he is going really, really slowly.

  I’ve not smoked for years, but I was pretty horrified when cannabis was reclassified from Class C to Class B. That’s only going to confuse people, especially cannabis users. Somehow, I can’t imagine the whole reclassification has hit the cannabis industry very hard.

  ‘Let’s go out and get stoned and have a good time!’

  ‘I take it you haven’t seen today’s Guardian then? No more cannabis for us, we’re going to need to find some really time-consuming hobbies. That make bad television seem amusing.’

  We were pretty unusual for a TV programme in that we’d all go and party after the show. They’d pay for hotel rooms in Glasgow and we’d all go back and get hammered. Everybody else drank but myself and Jim would drop pills and get stoned. I can’t really imagine that happening on Mock the Week, but it would be great if it had. I sincerely regret never having had a night where Rory Bremner, Hugh Dennis and I got high on MDMA powder while vibing to the latest hip-hop videos. There’s still time.

  I remember one day the production crew gave us a row about a drugs reference in one of the warm-up shows. I can’t remember the joke, but it was just Jim saying that I was skinning up for him backstage, which I was. They thought it was a bad thing to associate the show with. That night after filming they came to our hotel and got steaming. They all had a massive argument with the staff as they tried to get up to our rooms to continue the party. We were in my room and could hear them being chased along the corridors by security guards, screaming. Next day, I saw all the production notes from the show strewn on the steps, together with scripts and the acts’ phone numbers. Overall, that show’s production was the most chaotic, wrongheaded thing I’ve ever seen in any field of human endeavour. The whole experience was like being in a farcical movie about comedians dealing with a group of inept bank robbers who had taken over a TV production and for some reason had to make a show before they could escape with their bank-robbery money.

  Miles Jupp’s monologues as a pompous old monied lord were hilarious in their vicious snobbery and deliberate anti-Scottishness. It was the first time I understood comedy as a sublimation of our real personalities. Miles was, as a person, somewhat horrified and disgusted by the world and his character was able to express that in a sort of cartoon form. While we were doing the second series Miles got a job as Archie the Inventor on Balamory. I used to try to keep him up getting pissed when he had to film in the morning, just so that years later I’d have the pleasure of switching on CBeebies and seeing a man staggering around like a zombie in a kilt, trying to make a telephone from yoghurt tubs. For one extraordinary moment I almost presented a kids’ TV show. It was a thing where I lived in a house somewhere with a bunch of wee puppets that would make little arts-and-crafts-type things and show them to me, their human pal. I met the producers and said that I wanted to play it as if my character was a schizophrenic. I’d be seen doing push-ups at the start of every episode, and would share my house with a normal family downstairs. Occasionally you’d see them talking to me, and my puppets would be lifeless, as if the whole thing was part of my paranoid imagination. Bizarrely, they were quite up for that and arranged for me to come do a screen test. Clearly I would have ended up being like Krusty the Klown if this had come off. I was supposed to rehearse a little song-and-dance number for the audition. I just couldn’t do it. I phoned them up and felt odd to hear the words coming out of my mouth as I told them in a choked voice, ‘I just can’t sing the little song, I just can’t do the little dance.’

  For a while, Paul Sneddon drifted into doing the sort of gigs that Bob Doolally would have had. He did a lot of sporting dinners and terrifying sounding corporate functions. He told me about one where he turned up early and asked if there was a dressing room.

  ‘A dressing room?’ said the man who’d let him in, pronouncing each word like it was completely new to him.

  ‘Yes, so I can put on my wig…for the character.’

  ‘You’re wearing a wig?’ The guy was in deep shock. ‘You’re a poofy bastard!’

  I was killing myself laughing when Paul told me this, but there was more.

  ‘Thing is,’ Paul told me, ‘this guy was doing the vote of thanks at the end!’

  Apparently the guy stood up after dinner and thanked everybody involved. When he got to Paul he said,

  ‘Thanks to Bob Doolally…for being shite.’

  I also did Scottish corporate shows, and at one the organiser came up to me before I went on and said the one thing that would really make you wonder why he’d hired a comedian. ‘Remember son, no smart remarks!’
Incredible. Nowadays a Scottish corporate gig means telling gags to queues outside soup kitchens. They can be tough gigs—a Scottish businessman’s idea of humour is farting on a golf course. To be fair, when your life consists of selling automated garage doors the last thing you want is a sense of irony. I know they say you should tailor your gigs to the audience but I refuse to wear flares and tell jokes about Ugandans. The advantage of these gigs is how healthy they make me feel. The only time you’ll see more fat guys in suits is at a darts player’s funeral. It’s like looking at an M&S window display reflected in the back of a teaspoon.

  I’m one of the few Scottish comedians who never get booked to do a Burns supper, having done one where some business arse offered me his performance advice afterwards and I offered to punch him in the mouth. Actually, I’d done one before that, at some old military club in London. In the event of an invasion this base will be a real asset. If it took me and the taxi driver an hour to find it with a satnav, the Chinese have got no chance. I went into the room and it was a beautiful ballroom. It looked like a movie set. There was a piper playing and he looked immaculate, like one of those old lead army figures come to life.

  ‘I’m the comedian!’ I told the organiser.

  ‘No, we have Richard Wilson,’ he hissed back.

  I played upstairs standing on an improvised stage that was an empty ammo box, while the organiser held an anglepoise lamp over my head so people could see me. I did a wee question-and-answer session at the end.