My Shit Life So Far

by Frankie Boyle

  I’ve never really felt any sense of kinship with other comedians; they’ve always seemed too needy. I don’t think I need the love, approval, affirmation, whatever it is, that other people are after. Maybe I did at the start of my career; I can’t remember because I was drunk. At that festival a fire alarm went off during one of the shows and the building got evacuated. Everybody was doing their shows in the courtyard. The show had to go on. We just slunk off with our hoods up, glad of a night off. I don’t think it’s entirely about me being a miserable bastard. Stand-up needs a roof and a microphone, and I’m not so desperate for love that I’ll yell my jokes out in a car park, like a cunt. God only know how hard those guys’ dads must have been able to punch.

  I never read reviews anymore, not mine or anybody else’s. It really depresses me how much attention comics pay to that stuff. 100 words that the classical music critic’s wife writes for gin money can make or break somebody’s year. That’s clearly ridiculous and a position that any intelligent person should be able to think their way out of. If you want an opinion, invite somebody you respect and ask them what they thought. Comedy criticism is basically what a cunt thought of something they didn’t understand. I know a comic who did a show called Beyond the Pale: 100 Years of Irish History, basically a potted history of Ireland, and it was very good. He told me that his main review that year said that he went on about Ireland a bit too much. That’s the level of most comedy criticism. It’s amusingly shit I suppose, but sad for anyone who actually takes it seriously.

  Jimmy Carr saw us at the festival and gave us a job writing for him on his quiz show Distraction. Even then, Jimmy was at an echelon of show business that we could only dream of. He had access to drugs that allowed him to speak almost any language and could teleport at will. We’ve got to know him socially since, and he’s a lovely chap. Most of his time is spent in a huge Lawnmower Man-style machine with Jonathan Ross. He says that they use it to commune with aliens and occasionally make love, but knowing him as I do it must be something infinitely more sinister. There are rumours that it’s part of a plot by Jimmy to re-imagine the earth in the shape of his own face. At least it will be bigger.

  I think for Distraction we had to write jokes based on the biographies of the appalling people they chose as contestants. These were generally beery rugby blokes or sex-case tour reps. Looking at the details of their ‘lives’ was like peeking under a rock. I say ‘I think’ because we were desperately stoned at the time. Jimmy might have been presenting the news for all I know.

  I stopped smoking dope after that. When you finally get off drugs, the world seems like a much less threatening place. I ran into my old crystal-meth buddy the other day. Turns out that the talking cat from outer space was just a movie we saw when we were high. Actually, there’s a lot of nonsense talked about drugs.

  They don’t make you paranoid. That’s an idea the CIA injected into our culture through hidden messages in Happy Days.

  I found it quite hard to finally give everything up. The way your body keeps craving stuff. Thank God I never took cocaine. It’s amazing how extreme the physical reaction is to withdrawal. My body would have turned into a missile that fired itself at Colombia. Jim kept going and these days the only way he can get enough tranquillisers to come down is to dress up as an escaped lion and jump around in the cafeteria of the local zoo.

  The main reason I stopped smoking dope was that it started to give me a crippling, overwhelming fear of my own mortality. I remember it hitting me with total clarity that I am going to die and everybody I know is going to die too. I was sitting having a joint in the afternoon, watching a home-improvement show when the reality of death crushed all interest in the conservatory of a sexually ambiguous project manager. Mortality is a good thing to face up to. I reckon people meditate for years to achieve what I had right then, a frenzied, disabling horror. Looking down at my legs I could see the muscles twitching in a classic flight response. My legs were trying to run away while my brain grimly reminded them that there was no outrunning this thing. A fact that OK! magazine wanted to remind Jade Goody of when they dedicated ‘an official tribute’ issue to her earlier this year. The only trouble being they did it while she was still alive. This must have been shocking to Jade, particularly as the obituary explained she died in a motorcycling accident while trying to jump twelve London buses. That sounds like a good idea for a new reality-television show. Terminally ill people are given obituaries written by the public which they have to enact as accurately as possible to win money for the people they leave behind. You can imagine Noel Edmonds: ‘…Next up on Suddenly/Peaceful we’ll have Maureen, 95, who needs to die in a circus-tent fire, as she attempts the world’s first display of flaming midget juggling.’

  Poor Jade Goody. If you were going to guess her final words, surely they would have been along the lines of asking her children to take good care of her husband. She said she was looking forward to going to heaven; unfortunately she thought that heaven was a region of Portugal. I missed the reports from the funeral, but luckily for quite a while her coffin-cam was screening footage through the night on E4. Of course, we’ve all fantasised about our own funeral, wondering how sad everybody we know will be, having that girl we always loved turning up distraught, leaping from the coffin as a zombie and becoming Ground Zero for the death of humanity. Wendy Richard was buried in an eco-friendly coffin woven from bamboo. I’m planning on doing the same as that’s how I’d like to go. Ripped apart by ravenous pandas.

  Inspired by our time writing for Distraction, Jim and I went into a kind of development hell working on a pilot with Craig Hill for BBC Scotland. There was a real tension between BBC Scotland wanting us to do a basic, shitty show with jokes about Scotland and us, well, not really wanting to.

  One of the main battles was our desire to have a guest host, Fish from Marillion, which they eventually let us do. Fish was great. He just didn’t give a fuck and did whatever gags we asked him to. He opened with ‘Hello people of Scotland. We know that you won’t be watching this if you’re in Dundee, you’ll be outside date-raping a seagull.’ Fish was also our interviewee in an item called ‘Jungle Bus’, where we were to interview celebrities every week on a bus full of mercenaries, fighting its way through the African jungle. We’d do the interview, while the celebrity helped us man a roof-mounted machine gun, and then we’d kick them out of the bus with a small scrap of map, and they would be immediately murdered by the natives.

  I don’t think I can really explain how much the commissioning editor hated this show. I had a character who was a revolutionary from the Spanish Civil War and he asked me if I could make him a Scottish janitor. That’s the kind of gulf we’re talking about. We made it during winter, which is always a mistake in Scotland. People we knew and had worked with before just acted like they’d been replaced by alien seed pods. Cunty alien seed pods.

  My favourite bit of the show was a thing we all wrote with Jim. I think we were all on Valium for the writing sessions, which gave it a weird prosey quality. It was a monologue by an overblown, Jerry Bruckheimer-style movie producer called T. Carter Mondell. Here he is:

  I like all pictures to come in under twenty words, including the words I speak. That’s ten. What? A man in a house? What kind of shit idea is that? Can’t the house be a prison and the man be a vampire?

  I feel that I have a lot more energy than a lot of people in Hollywood because I’m not a fag pretending not to be a fag. That’s gotta take up a whole lot of time. Attempted assassinations? I’ve not lost a lot of sleep over that, just a few wives and a child.

  Dennis Hopper liked to challenge himself at the end of every take. He would drink a bottle of Scotch and smash himself in the forehead with a mallet. The challenge was to remember his lines. He forgot his lines. He also forgot what movie he was in, who he was, where he was and what he was. He would start screaming a number that he claimed was the key to the universe. We learned later it was the telephone number of a local head surgeon. />
  Phil Spector was doing a cameo as a bagman till he fashioned a tree out of cocaine and it fell on him. The crew were great friends with Phil Spector, despite the fact that he was always trying to murder them. Every morning he dived out of his trailer spraying bullets across the set. People were surprised when they heard that he killed a woman. What surprised me was that he did it with a gun. He always insisted that if he got the opportunity he’d do it with a golf club. I had my doubts about Phil since I saw him masturbating at the O. J. Simpson trial.

  Roman Polanski didn’t move to Europe because of a rape charge. He moved because the standard of living over in the States is so high that he could no longer overpower the average 13 year old.

  They sent a stripper to my room. I thought it was one of the hookers that you’re allowed to beat. That’s what I ordered. She’s suing me for assault and battery, and I am counter-suing to be allowed to come in her ears.

  Wherever the conflict in your movie set is, you need to send a white guy in. A black hero? As far as Joe Schmo’s concerned, you might as well rub black cum in his daughter’s face or have some black guy blow his windows in with black sperm in a drive-by from his pump-action black balls.

  You’ve got to make movies about the stuff that people want to see. What people really want to see is chicks in sports bras being stabbed by a psycho. Have you seen the African version of Rainman , where the boy is taken into a clearing and has his head smashed by rocks? He never learns to count. The rest of the film is about Mseste Mtbmu’s desperate search for food and water.

  People ask me where do I get my ideas for my movies—I drive out into the Mohave Desert, sit upon the mesa and smoke a combination of herbs and gekko sweat, then I go into a deep meditative state and enter the Dreamtime where I open all of my senses to the rhythms of the universe—then I drive back to my office and read the scripts I’ve been sent. I gotta real knack for developing scripts. I remember this writer comes to me and says he’s got an idea for a romantic comedy set against a backdrop of racial oppression—I had the vision to take that script and make Full Moon Lockdown. Another time I got a script for a road movie. A middleaged guy discovers he’s got two teenage daughters and takes them on a road trip of discovery across America. Right away I knew I had found the movie I’d waited all my life to make—Full Moon Lockdown 3.

  I remember a script lands on my desk this one time. It was for a movie about a team of US commandos that fly into South America to take down a scientist who’s threatening to unleash an army of zombie soldiers. It was like the writer was reading my mind. I took his script and made Terms of Endearment 2 . I see my movies like I see my children, at weekends in cinemas.

  This is a business…show business. Sometimes the business of making money, arranging for a certain race of hooker to be placed in Jean-Claude Van Damme’s camper van, sometimes arranging for the body of a certain race of hooker to be removed from J-CVD’s camper van. And sometimes it’s about making movies.

  The thing I look for in a movie is Entertainability…does it have the ability to entertain? Or not? I’m not asking, ‘Does this movie move me? Are the characters well developed? Is it relevant to my life?’ I want it to be the biggest, loudest piece of shit I’ve seen this week. Other than my kid.

  You know what makes ideas great? Cocaine. If they sold it with your popcorn this shit would make a lot more sense to you. Wesley Snipes was so desperate to be famous he allowed us to make him black. And call him Wesley. Thanks for eating my ass, Wo-Ling-Ho.

  I take a gun with me everywhere because you never know who you’ll have to shoot. It’s part of my therapy to shoot my reflection three times a day.

  I get some of my best ideas during heart attacks. You think you’ve lived? Unless you’ve had a heart attack inside Uma Thurman’s ass, you’ve never lived.

  I put forward the concept of a movie that would be a 120-minute shot of a vagina. They said it would alienate our female audience. I said make it Sarah Jessica Parker’s vagina and get her shoes in the shot. People say I see women as sex objects…I don’t. I see them as a lifesupport system for a vagina. I say to women, ‘Your vagina’s not losing its self-respect. Your vagina’s not got any dignity, your vagina doesn’t feel any shame. Just butt out and let us get on with it. It has nothing to do with you. Your only responsibility is not to die during this.’

  A director once told me I was decadent. I came in his ears and beat him to death with a peacock.

  That experience convinced me that I’d need to go down south to do telly stuff. There was a whole circuit of what are called ‘office pilots’ in London, where production companies film tasters of shows in their offices. I hadn’t quite made the move to live there full time so I was skint for a year, and often playing quite illconceived games in front of an audience of jaded researchers. I remember one where we had to do jokes about what random celebrities might say at their moment of orgasm. I went into a hysterical laughing fit thinking about how much funnier it would be to grab the producer in a headlock and jump out of the window.

  For a long time I always stayed in the same hotel in London. The Russians who worked there all got to know me and started to anticipate my idiotic needs. It was a bit like being the Major in Fawlty Towers. It was always good looking into the glassy eyes of the sinister Russian duty manager knowing that a man who may well have killed to get his passport was in charge of finding me an ironing board. One night it sounded like a bunch of staff came into the room next to mine and gangbanged a Russian woman against the adjoining door. There were a lot of nods and winks the next day. That’s when you know you’ve become overfamiliar in a hotel. When the staff are staging group-sex pranks to keep you awake. I acted mildly irritated, but had obviously found it all pretty horny, and had a tempestuous wank that comfortably makes my all-time Top Ten.

  I don’t understand London’s racism toward Eastern Europeans. I don’t have a problem with a Polish plumber coming round to do work on my house. They’re cheap, arrive on time and it’s a lot easier to understand what they’re saying than a British workman. I had a Polish worker round at my house last week, and I was more than happy with the service…they knew exactly what they were doing, they were thorough, cleaned up afterwards, and she didn’t have that dead look behind her eyes that you normally get from British prostitutes.

  One of the things I tried out for was Mock the Week. It was quite impressions-orientated when they came up with it, because Rory Bremner was on it. I couldn’t do any impressions so I didn’t think I’d be in it if it got made. It was good to see Dara O Briain again; I’d been a fan since I’d worked with him in clubs years before. He used to have a really sinister bit where he’d pick a big guy in the audience to shake hands with and then just refuse to let go, as tension mounted. There’s a wonderful juxtaposition in seeing such a delicate, tricksy mind contained in such an enormous body. I see him as being like a French nineteenth-century lady, a wit of some great lady’s salon, who through early scientific endeavour has managed to have her brain transplanted into a gorilla.

  While I was waiting to hear back about Mock the Week, I got a job writing for Jimmy Carr on 8 out of 10 Cats. I think it was the first and only job that I really loved. Everybody was really nice. The other writers were better than me so the jokes got written whether I tried or not, and people went out and got you cake. The basic engine of the writers’ room, the fuel that it ran on, was misogyny. We would take that energy, the desire to hurt women, and turn it into pithy monologues about statistics. The whole experience left me more convinced than ever that sex offenders should be forced to write hundreds of topical jokes per week, to dissipate their fell desires.

  It was great that people went out and got you food, but we all started to get badly out of shape. Once we had somebody go to Greggs. I ate four chocolate doughnuts and an apple turnover. I went for a sauna that evening and started tripping; it felt like I could zoom my vision into extreme close-up, like a powerful photographic lens. We all kept talking about havin
g an ‘abs challenge’, the idea being that knowing we’d have to display ourselves to the office meant we’d get rid of our bellies. We all secretly knew that our devotion to Nando’s would have made any such contest a blasphemous obscenity. I think Jimmy would win that nowadays as he has lost quite a lot of weight. Sadly none of it off his head, so he looks like a fucking Pez dispenser.

  Recently, I was doing a guest appearance on a show and ran into one of the guys I’d worked with on Cats. He told me about a joke they’d written about the Special Olympics that hadn’t got in. ‘At the Special Olympics this week, somebody was injured during the hammer throwing. But nobody could work out who it was.’ Somehow that really made me miss them all.

  FIFTEEN

  Shortly after landing the job writing for Jimmy Carr, a couple of the shows I’d been trying out for actually got made. One was FAQ U, a sort of topical discussion thingy on Channel 4, and the other was Mock the Week. FAQ U was made in Bristol, so I had to go and live there for three weeks, nesting in a hotel bedroom that I turned into a masturbation furnace. I was a writer for the episodes that I wasn’t on and wrote jokes for Justin Lee Collins, who struck me as being both a really nice guy and the opposite of talented. He looked just like the lion from The Wizard of Oz and we’d all keep trying to get Bert Lahr, the name of that actor, into the script out of boredom.

  I was pretty surprised to hear that Mock the Week was getting made and that I was in it. It was welcome news. I’d bought a flat in Scotland to be near my daughter and was largely broke. Most of the regular guys who’re on it now were about from the start. Dara and Hugh were on every week, and Andy Parsons popped up regularly. Russell Howard hadn’t yet appeared but he was becoming increasingly popular across Britain for a series of unbelievable stunts on rocket-powered rollerskates, and it was getting more and more difficult for the producers to ignore him.