It was interesting to get to know all those guys and to have my eyes opened to the world of the big-league TV comics. Every regular on the show is as obsessed with showing off their martialarts abilities as they are with flaunting their bisexuality. Hugh Dennis will regularly warm up for shows by stripping naked and throwing kickboxing combinations that stop inches from my face as I try to tear my gaze from his incongruous black genitals.
Andy Parsons is even more extreme. He stands in the wings waiting to go on and insists that everybody smash things off his tensed abdominals. Once I hit him with a chair until my hands were sore and he didn’t make a sound, tears running silently down his amused face. Nobody enjoys this part of the build-up, not even Andy.
Dara is a man of gigantic mirths and gigantic melancholies. Often he will parade a woman around the green room who he insists is his mistress. It is perfectly obvious to everybody that it is several large joints of meat that Dara has sewn together. Nonetheless, we are all expected to show deference to this chimera, paying her compliments and kissing her sausage fingers when introduced. Occasionally, we are introduced to the ‘child’ of this blasphemous union. Dressed in the immaculate uniform of a top boys’ school, it is clearly a Staffordshire bull terrier. Relentlessly questioned by the terrified production crew about its hobbies and hopes for the future as Dara gazes balefully on, the poor thing looks demented.
One of the peculiarities of panel-show comedy is the way that we are all expected and encouraged to shout over each other. On many shows you are given Red Bulls in your dressing room, sometimes even on set, without asking. I often think it must be weird for the viewers to see a bunch of people screaming witticisms as their hearts thrum in their chests like dying budgerigars. I have long accepted the real possibility that I will have a massive stroke while guesting on a David Mitchell-hosted celebrity news quiz. Slabbering and palsied, I will still attempt to drool out some funny reasons why something may or may not be the odd one out while everybody shrieks over the top of me like the soundtrack to a monkey gangbang.
Then I was awarded perhaps the ultimate accolade: a gig on Belgian TV. Mock the Week is shown on some late-night channel so I am vaguely recognisable on the streets of Belgium. You read that right. I hope it has made you pause to consider what you have achieved with your own life.
I was met at the airport by a guy who looked exactly like Antoine de Caunes, in a Fiat with his beautiful boyish assistant. As we sped off through the thick fog he played ‘You Spin Me Right Round’ at full volume as we all stared ahead impassively. It was the most intensely European experience I had ever had.
One of the producers took me for lunch with some friends of his. They were really great, incredibly friendly people on that show. Over lunch they started laughing about all the stereotypes there are about Scottish and English people and how there were no stereotypes about Belgians. I was startled. ‘But there are! Everybody says that Belgians are boring…’ There was a collective wince. They looked genuinely crushed at this information and started talking to each other in worried Dutch. They even called over a friend from another table and imparted the harrowing update. He took it like a bereavement. I was glad I hadn’t got to finish my sentence, which was going to be ‘Everybody says that Belgians are boring paedophiles.’
I’d come over a few days early for the show, to have a bit of a holiday. On the first night I managed to contract horrendous food poisoning and lay in my hotel room for three days hallucinating. Somehow there were mosquitoes in the room and they fed on my drugged, sleeping face. That’s how I ended up appearing on a Dutch-language television show feeling mentally ill and with a face so swollen by insect bites that it resembled a baseball catcher’s mitt. My memories of it are quite dreamlike. I had to listen carefully for my introduction and ran on after hearing my name blurted out in Dutch. I quickly gauged that nobody could understand a fucking word I was saying. I’d read a bit about racial tensions in Belgium and banged on about that for a bit, only realising later that it was actually something I’d read about Germany. Basically, I am now recognisable on the streets of Belgium as somebody who’s been on telly doing an impression of the Elephant Man having a nervous breakdown.
Eventually, I moved to London but strictly just for the short term. It was a shame to leave Scotland as it was actually an interesting time in Scottish politics. Apparently Tommy Sheridan had a bug put in his car. I’d love it if it turned out it had been put there by his wife. You have to respect any man so keen to look like the rest of the proletariat that he will toast his own body. At certain points in his basting cycle it used to look like the Scottish Parliament was being addressed by a jobbie with a face. Yet he seemed to be one of the few politicians who cared about the people he represented. I remember hearing a radio phone-in show he did for a bit. There were lots of people phoning in complaining about the state of their back courts and so on. He’d discuss everything as being of equal importance, whether what got brought up was the euro or someone’s benefit problems. It’s a rare politician who can understand that you don’t give a toss about the Maastricht Treaty if your giro hasn’t turned up. It was a great show, especially for Scotland, where the benchmark in radio entertainment is usually some tit with a mullet phoning up Greggs and pretending that he’s Sean Connery.
It was also around this time that the SNP won the Scottish Parliamentary election, but much was being made of the fact that despite the fact that the SNP was in power, there was no real ’buzz’ about independence. ‘People aren’t really talking about it in the streets,’ we were told. This kind of skirts round the fact that this is Scotland, so people aren’t really talking to each other much in general. We’re a country that knows that people need to choose the right moment to open up to one another. Ideally when one of us is drunk and the other one is dying.
Perhaps independence will one day mean that Scots who have gone south to seek their fortune return home—leaving our streets choked with tramps. If we could repeat our successes of the past in the fields of science and industry then anything might be possible.
We could harness our amazing natural-energy resources, and then divert those resources into building a Terminator we can send back through time to kill Geoff Hurst’s mum.
At least Alex Salmond looks Scottish, as if his heart pumps about once a day and his liver is fighting the Alamo. I suspect that, like Moses, he will not be the one to lead us into the Promised Land, although I do think he makes an interesting leader. If only for the excitement of seeing how long a man can survive under that pressure with the cholesterol levels of a fried egg. He looks like a selfsatisfied cat that’s about to ask you a riddle. It’s surely a measure of his ability that I seem to remember him standing down for a few years but have no memory of who replaced him. The Nationalists may as well have spent a couple of years being led by an animatronic eagle, for all I remember of that man (or perhaps woman).
I quite surprised myself by starting to go to musicals in London. Yes, I know. Some people just hate them. That musical theatre dumbs things down is well illustrated by the fact people now refer to the French literary classic as ‘Les Mis’. It’s like Les MisÉrables is too much of a downer. Let’s start referring to The Grapes of Wrath as ‘Grapey Wrathy’, or Crime and Punishment as ‘Ruski Murder Funtime’. Personally I just think that musicals are good for the economy. Airlines and hairdressing salons can’t physically employ all of Britain’s homosexuals.
Of course, some people ask how many more musicals do we have to put up with before Andrew Lloyd Webber can actually afford that plastic surgery? A lot of prejudice against musical theatre comes from people looking at Andrew Lloyd Webber and going, ‘My God, you are so ugly.’ But just because a man looks like his face was carved off his skull by a diseased butcher, put in a piÑata, beaten for six hours with a hockey stick, and the resulting slop piped back onto his head like icing on the ugliest cake the world has ever seen—sorry, I’ve forgotten my point. But I’ve always tried to find the positive in e
verything, and musicals are no different. If it weren’t for Elaine Paige then there would never have been a toilet break during The Two Ronnies.
I actually prefer musicals to the theatre. You need the songs because that’s when you can eat your sweets. Imagine sitting through a Harold Pinter play trying to get through a bag of Maltesers. Waiting through all the pauses just so you could finally have a crunch. You’d never be able to relax.
The following year, Mock the Week moved to having a longer run in the summer. When there’s fuck-all news. Basically it starts just as parliament closes and ends just as the party-conference season starts. It was particularly awkward for me as I’d already booked myself in to the annual howl of inchoate horror that is the Edinburgh Festival. I did my show most of the week, and would take the train down to London on Mondays and Tuesdays to film Mock the Week. The train really started to do my head in. Perhaps after so many years of doing it I’d just run out of patience. It seemed that the GNER has bought some stock from 1950s Russia, which rattled down to London like a dying breath. Actually, the West Coast Line from Glasgow to London has just been finished after ten years. They had to build the tracks just in front of the 9.20 to Euston that left in 1998, and managed to get in ten minutes early.
While commuting on the trains I started to become aware of things you would only notice through extreme boredom. Like the way women hate travelling facing backwards because of primal memories of being carried away from their settlement on the shoulders of Vikings. Then there are the announcements every ten minutes about what’s available in the buffet car. We know what’ll be available in the buffet car. It’ll be the sort of stuff that’s always available in a buffet car. We’ll be surprised if you don’t sell crisps, we’ll be surprised if you’ve got a roast duck on a rotisserie spit.
Miles Jupp is one of the few people who hates trains more than me, having a higher innate sense of what being treated decently entails. A few years earlier we wrote some sketches for a radio pilot and all the sketches reflected our shared horror at trying to interface with the world. Here’s one of them that was set in a railway ticket office.
Attendant: Next.
Traveller: Can I have a ticket to Salisbury, please?
Attendant: Ah yes, it’s lovely at this time of year. No, hang on, that’s last month I was thinking of. And I wasn’t thinking of Salisbury, I was thinking of the Dominican Republic. Smoking or non-smoking?
Traveller: Non-smoking, please
Attendant: Oh, they’re all smoking.
Traveller: Well, why did you say smoking or nonsmoking then?
Attendant: We pride ourselves on always offering a choice.
Traveller: Right, well can I get a ticket please?
Attendant: Single or return?
Traveller: How much more is the return?
Attendant: It’s not more—it’s less.
Traveller: Really?
Attendant: Yes.
Traveller: Well, I’m not planning on returning, but if it’s cheaper…
Attendant: Oh no. You have to return.
Traveller: Why?
Attendant: Because when you get to Salisbury the doors don’t open. It just comes straight back.
Traveller: The doors don’t open?
Attendant: Not at stations, no. They’re open for the rest of the journey. They have to be. Everybody’s smoking. It would become unbearable.
Traveller: Is there any benefit in getting this train at all?
Attendant: There is a trolley service.
Traveller: If I get a single then? Will I be able to get off at Salisbury?
Attendant: Oh yes. Not the station itself obviously, but if you time your jump right you could land pretty near to the station.
Traveller: So none of you trains actually stop at Salisbury station?
Attendant: No. They used to. But we had a lot of problems with people getting on and off.
Traveller: Look, is there any way I can get to Salisbury safely? Is there a bus service?
Attendant: Sir, this is a TRAIN station. Would you go into a baker’s and ask for a handful of meat? Would you leave a note on your doorstep saying ‘Dear Mr Travel Agent, two first-class flights to Orlando’
Traveller: Please can I just buy a train ticket to Salisbury!?
Attendant: I’m sorry, we close at half-past two.
Traveller: Well, what have you been doing for the last ten minutes.
Attendant: Humouring you.
Traveller: No you haven’t.
Attendant: Sorry, my mistake. I’ve been humouring myself. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to write a letter to my MP asking for three pints of semi-skimmed milk and a yoghurt.
Obviously Scottish trains have given me some glimpses of Lovecraftian horror. Like the time I saw a businessman trying to chat a woman up by telling her about a free-kick he’d scored at five-a-side that lunchtime.
‘Bang. Right in the top corner, darling.’
Or the drunken bams who met at my table on a train to Aberdeen and explicitly and loudly agreed to shag each other when they got off the train.
‘Life’s too short,’ the woman drawled at me. It will be for you, you AIDS-chasing scumbag.
Having done the festival for a number of years, I always try to stay out of it as much as possible. Like a lot of locals, I find it a bit of a pain in the arse. Yes, it’s good that you can go to see some great shows but having your city look like the evacuation of Saigon is a pretty high price to pay for that. One week, I played a couple of late-night shows at the EICC. There were break dancers on before me. The predominantly Scottish crowd were pretty amazed, but then it was definitely the first time they had seen more than one black person in a room.
I have to say that during the festival the late shows generally start to bite. These are the gigs you do to try to plug your show, or make a bit of spending money. I usually have a Red Bull before every show but it always catches up with me. I always looked forward to the final week of the festival when I struggle to speak because my throat contains my own poisoned pancreas.
That year, I took the unusual step of employing a boy on work experience. He wanted to learn how to become a comedian, so I took him to a bunch of shows to train him up. Hopefully he can replace me after the heart attack/stroke/lone gunman that is surely just around the corner now. I would honestly love to franchise my act out and let someone like this kid take the bullet/lawsuit/fatal sexual disease that I so richly deserve. A lot of comics kindly agreed to talk to him about what they do. While secretly suspecting that I am a predatory homosexual. For all the industry bullshitters in town, at some level the Fringe is still like a medieval circus for the performers. Subconsciously, we are allowing promoters, agents, venues to make a lot of money from us in exchange for us being allowed to get wrecked for a month.
I have to say that I find the adverts of a lot of female performers at the festival depressingly sexualised. Are these posters telling me I should go to see someone just because they have nice tits? I will, and that makes it even worse. It would be good to see a female performer who had the courage to have a poster where their looks weren’t used as a selling point. That would turn me on even more.
Not learning is clearly quite a big part of my personality. I’ve always hated doing festivals, so I went to Ireland for the Kilkenny Festival. I made the mistake of flying, despite being utterly terrified. I’ve never managed to overcome my fear—generally there’s nowhere I want to visit so much that I’m willing to be fired towards it in a tin box full of other people’s farts.
The security now is as frightening as the flight. You’re not allowed to bring fluids on the plane in case you make an improvised bomb from Coca-Cola and iPod parts. Who’s training Al-Qaida these days, Johnny Ball? If you really want to bring a plane down, get a normal bottle of Sunny Delight and shake it. Of course, airport security is even tighter if you look vaguely Middle Eastern. If you’ve got a turban and a beard, you’re about six months away from having to fly nake
d on a clear plastic plane.
I can’t begin to explain the different levels of increasingly wild paranoia that flying brings out in me. You think you’re scared of flying? Frightened of turbulence maybe? I panic every second of the ascent as I fear that the plane might contain an altitude-triggered bomb—something that may not even exist, for all I know. I always fear our own government agencies more than ’terrorists’. You’re looking for possible Muslim extremists on your flight? I’m looking for guys who look like they used to be in the army but now have cancer. I spent the whole of the flight to Ireland eyeballing a little bald man who had a quite futuristic pen that I felt might double up as some kind of detonator. He was reading the Bible, which didn’t help. People say they find prayer reassuring, but if the pilot came on the intercom and told you to put your seatbelts back on, would you really be happy to hear him tailing off into a few verses of the ‘Our Father’? Still, not quite as frightening as him bursting into something from the Koran.
What would be typical behaviour for people who are going to blow up a plane? Apparently, American Airlines are working on cameras which would monitor our faces on flights to check for telltale signs of nervousness. Good job they’ve not installed those yet. On the flight to Ireland I gave a performance that saw me gibbering like Dustin Hoffman in Rainman. I’d currently be doing a ten-year stretch in one of America’s underwater prison cities.
After the terror of the flight, I did the Kilkenny Festival with adrenalin levels most people will only ever achieve during a rape. Everybody there is incredibly nice, and the whole thing has a real party feel. Being a non-drinker made me feel like I was keeping one of the thousands of alcoholic comedians on the circuit away from the time of their life. The drinking was astonishing—even to someone from Glasgow. One night I had to hurdle a guy who was on all fours to get into the hotel.
My Shit Life So Far Page 20