Soon after I started on my own, Brian sent me on a week-long tour of Doncaster and Rotherham. There were loads of huge clubs down there – the Clay Lane, the Grangetown, the Belmont, the Yarborough, and largest of all, the Wheatley Hill Working Men’s Club – all full of hairy-arsed miners and rough steelworkers. Before I set off, I rang up the concert chairman of one of the clubs to ask if there were any theatrical digs in the area.
‘There’s one at Rotherham that they all stay at,’ he said. ‘It’s called Pandora’s Box and it’s at 1 Vesey Street.’ I booked a room for three pounds fifty a night and two pounds for breakfast, which amounted to around thirty quid out of my two hundred pound fee for the week.
At the club that evening I arrived first, did my act and had a fair night. South Yorkshire venues were hard clubs full of lads who would get their bollocks tattooed without flinching and I wasn’t nearly as slick as I made myself out to be, so I considered it a fair night in those days if I got half a dozen laughs.
I put my bags in my little red van, asked a copper where Vesey Street was and drove round to the boarding house, my first-ever pro digs. Having paid my deposit and dumped my bags in my room, I walked into the lounge, a big room with a string of sofas and chairs around the walls, a television blaring in one corner and about a dozen lads and lasses all getting well stuck into the drink. In the middle of all of them was a bloke about forty years old with silver hair.
‘All right, son?’ he said.
‘Yeah, thanks.’
‘What you doing, then?’
‘Oh, I’m an entertainer,’ I said.
‘Really? What does that mean?’
‘Well, I do the clubs, you know.’
‘You mean you actually stand on stage?’
‘Yeah, yeah, but it’s just a job.’
‘What do you do, then?’ the silver-haired bloke said. ‘Can you give us some idea?’
‘Well …’ I said. I didn’t want to brag or anything.
‘I’ll tell you what,’ he said. ‘Let’s pretend this is a stage …’ He put a cushion down on the floor. By now, everyone in the room had stopped talking and was watching me.
‘Well, what happens is I stand here by the microphone,’ I said.
‘What, like this?’ the silver-haired bloke handed me a broom. ‘And you walk on, do you?’
‘The microphone’s here and I say, “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My name’s Roy Chubby Brown”, and then I tell my jokes.’
‘Really? What, so people laugh at that?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I bet some funny things happen to you in the clubs,’ he said. ‘Yeah, they do.’
‘Well, tell us about them, then.’
So I told them some of my clubland experiences, including what had happened to me a few nights before at Seaton Delaval Social Club when, dressed in a flat cap and miming with a wooden shovel to a Bernard Cribbins song, ‘There I was, a-digging this ’ole, ’ole in the ground, so big and sort of round …’ the concert chairman walked up.
‘Oi, mate,’ he said. ‘When you’ve finished digging that hole, fuck off!’
And I told them about another recent experience at a social club in Yorkshire next to a big wood yard. Halfway through my act, a siren went off and everybody in the club ran to the windows. Outside, the wood yard was going up in flames. Inside, I was talking to the audience’s backs. ‘Eh, have I ever wished I were Joan of Arc,’ I shouted at them. ‘At least you would be facing the right fucking way.’
Halfway through telling my stories, I looked at the silver-haired fella again and thought to myself ‘I know that bloke.’ As I looked around at the other people in the lounge, I noticed that few of them were laughing out loud at my stories. There’d been a few titters, all right, but when I looked closely I realised that several of them were biting their lips.
‘That’s really funny,’ the silver-haired bloke said when I’d finished relating the last of my tales. ‘You know, I’m Johnny Hammond.’
I looked at him and the penny dropped. That was where I’d seen him before. Johnny Hammond was a local legend. He was one of the biggest comics in the North-East and had opened for Andy Williams, Val Doonican and dozens of other big stars. He’d recently won the first New Faces All Winners Show.
Pointing at each of the dozen faces around the room, Johnny introduced them. ‘That’s Bobby Thompson, that’s Linseed and Aniseed, those two are Frank and Jessie …’ They were all big clubland names. ‘… That’s Larry Mason …’ He was one of best impressionists around. Now I knew why they’d all been biting their lips.
‘I can also fight,’ I said.
‘Oh.’
‘I’ll knock your fucking …’ And then I smiled and the rest of them burst out laughing.
‘Come and have a drink,’ Johnny said. ‘It was just a bit of a laugh.’
As I sat down, Larry Mason stood up. ‘Goodnight, lads,’ he said. ‘Nice meeting you, son. I’ll see you at breakfast in the morning.’
‘Aye,’ I said as Johnny poured the first drink and we got chatting. He was a lovely man and since he came from Hartlepool, just up the coast from Middlesbrough, we had a lot in common.
Five minutes later, Larry walked in, stark naked with a bowler hat on his head. With his cock and bollocks hanging out, he stood by the bar, ordered a drink and said, ‘Can’t anyone get any fucking sleep in this house?’
I realised then that they were all nutters like me and that show business didn’t have to be a battleground. It wasn’t quite the cliché of one big happy family – there was too much professional rivalry for that – but we all respected and liked each other and became great mates over the years.
But back then I was the novice, wet behind the ears and eager for advice, which they all happily gave. After years of struggling to get to grips with the strange practices of some of the clubs, at last I was being told the golden rules of the game. Get your money when you walk in a club; always be friendly; learn by watching others; learn when to speak and when not to speak; always make a concert chairman feel like he’s God; say your pleases and thank-yous and don’t talk down to him because he’s the one with the money in his pocket; always be polite to the backing band and always have your dots ready (in those days, I didn’t even have any sheet music); if you’re going to use a club’s drums, give them a fiver; make sure you park your car near the stage door for a quick getaway if there’s trouble; make sure you go to the toilet before you go on, even if you have to piss in the sink; make sure the door’s locked when you piss in the sink; if you’re in a bad mood, don’t take it out on the audience – remember you’re an entertainer, so be professional; if the microphone goes off, use it in your act and pretend it goes off every night; if there’s a fight in the concert room, just say ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I’ll be back on in …’ and go to the dressing room, then get out fast.
There were hundreds of little tips that they passed on to me and I realised then that I could read all the books I wanted and watch every movie I could find, but the real thing about show business was watching those who between them had more experience than I would ever gain on my own. I learned something from every comedian I watched, but Johnny Hammond taught me the most.
What I really liked about Johnny was that his material was common. He talked about the coalman and the milkman’s horse and things like that. And that was a revelation. There’s a market here for being common, I thought, for being the man off the building site. And what do men on building sites do all the time? They eff and blind. ‘John, pass that fucking brick,’ they say. The swear words fly about like they’re about to be outlawed and pleasantries are never heard. I’d worked on enough building sites to know that the swearing was a release valve from what was often a miserable, back-breaking job. And I guessed that if I took the man off the building site and put him on stage, then the swearing would become a release valve for an audience looking for some relief from the misery and mundanity of their lives.
I watched Jo
hnny Hammond like a hawk and learned a lot. The way Johnny told jokes within stories was a lesson to me. Up until then, I’d always been a one-line gag merchant, but Johnny showed me how to link jokes into themed stories. And, in time, I came to realise that Johnny was a straight man telling funny jokes, like Bruce Forsyth or Bob Monkhouse.
Bob was widely regarded as the cleverest comedian on the circuit. Everyone called him the Governor. He was the finest comic this country had for years and his material was second to none. But he wasn’t a funny man. His material was funny, but because he told it in a straight way, audiences admired the quality of his jokes, but they didn’t really laugh.
Tommy Cooper was the other extreme – a funny man telling straight jokes. Audiences laughed as soon as Tommy walked on stage. He didn’t need to say anything. He was just a funny person. If you listened to his jokes, they were usually rubbish – often intentionally so – but it didn’t matter. Tommy’s act was all about his personality and his personality was hilariously funny.
For me, Ken Dodd was the best comedian of all. He had both strengths. The consummate all-rounder. When I saw Doddy on stage I laughed at him and I laughed at his material. And that, to me, was the benchmark. I wanted to combine the visual slapstick of Tommy Cooper, the clever storytelling of Dave Allen and the one-liners of Bob Monkhouse, but bring it together for the common man, the hairy-arsed builder or factory worker who lives in a council house with little money and not much to do except shag, drink and swear.
But I also knew that if I based my act around the behaviour of the rougher end of society, then I wouldn’t have much of a future on television and would probably remain a club act. I’d already had a few small tastes of the world of telly and I was getting a sense that television and I were not easy bedfellows.
Shortly before the George and Mick incarnation of Alcock & Brown came to an end, I got a chance to audition for Opportunity Knocks, the top talent show of its day. I travelled down to London and I found myself in the same room as Little and Large and several other acts I knew from clubland. I performed a five-minute routine in front of two stony-faced television executives in an empty room. With no audience reaction, I had no idea how well I was going down. On stage, you feed off the atmosphere, you feed off the laughs. The audience gives you love and affection. But there was nothing in that room. I might as well have been practising in front of a mirror. It was one of the longest five minutes of my life.
Afterwards, one of the Opportunity Knocks executives came up to me. ‘You were good, mate, but you let yourself down there by saying arse,’ he said. ‘You spoilt yourself.’
In those days, I saw myself as a member of a group or duo, so I didn’t really care that I’d not passed the audition as a solo comic. But a few years later, when I was asked to compete in the 1976 series of New Faces, I was determined to prove my worth as a solo comic.
The night before New Faces, I appeared before an all-male audience of 1,700 in a club in the Midlands. I was waiting in the dressing room when a skinny black-haired stripper came in.
‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ she said.
‘Don’t apologise to me, pet,’ I said. ‘I’m on with you.’
‘Oh yeah, you’re Chubby Brown aren’t you? I think we’ve worked together before.’
‘Aye, we probably have,’ I said.
The club manager walked in as we were talking, but the stripper took no notice of him.
‘Do you mind,’ she said to me, completely ignoring the manager. ‘I’m busting for a slash.’ And without waiting for an answer, she cocked her arse in the sink in front of two men in the dressing room. As far as she was concerned, we were invisible.
Five minutes later, she went on stage. With 1,700 blokes shouting at her and bawling ‘Show us your tits! Show us your arse!’ she whipped off all her clothes, rubbed cream and baby oil all over her body, then set to work on herself with a vibrator. After twenty minutes, she came back into the dressing room.
‘I knew I worked with you before,’ she said as she sat down. ‘I was racking my brains while I was on stage and then it came to me.’
‘Oh yeah?’ I said. ‘Where?’
‘Wallsend Labour Club. I was the singer Carrie-Anne.’
I remembered her. She’d been a great singer. ‘What did you pack it in for?’ I said.
‘Couldn’t do it any more. I lost my bottle.’
The next morning I auditioned for New Faces at a club in Halifax. Standing in front of a panel at half past nine, I knew that this time I had to be spotless. Not a mention of the arses, tits and fannies that had peppered my act at the stag party the previous night.
The many nights drinking in pro digs had put several pounds on my waistline. Tipping the scales at twenty-two stone in those days, I thought I couldn’t avoid mentioning my weight, so I wrote a song especially for the audition called ‘It’s Awful Being Fat’.
‘It’s awful being fat,’ I sang. ‘I’m trying to diet to lose a bit of fat. People say I suit it, well, it’s just the way I’m sat.
‘I breathe in all I can and I try to look my best, but the fat still sticks through the holes in my vest.’
I played the piano and told a few jokes. ‘You know, we were that poor where I grew up, I once opened the oven and next door was dipping their bread in the gravy,’ I said. ‘Christmas Eve, we’d all sit around the fire. If it got really cold, we’d light it … and then we’d get the Bible out. You know, a big thick book like that burns for three hours.’
‘Fabulous, fabulous, lovely,’ a very camp stage manager said at the end of it. ‘We’ll be in touch.’ A few days later, I got a letter detailing a date for when I should record my appearance in front of the New Faces panel.
Before the recording, they asked me to take out the joke about the Bible, but other than that I stuck to the same act as at the audition. It all went very well, except for a painful moment in the song, when the lid of the piano slammed down on my fingers.
At the end of my five-minute routine, I told the joke I’d just written about the Irish Evel Knievel who tried to jump twelve motorbikes with his bus and would have made it but someone rang the bell. Then I stood stock-still on the stage, the spotlight trained on me, and waited for the panel’s verdict.
Tony Blackburn was first. ‘I think he’s very funny, this lad, I’d like to see him over an hour,’ he said. I thought it was the best compliment I could have hoped for, but I only wished he’d been one of the 1,700 punters at the club I’d played the night before. Then he would have seen what I was like over an hour.
All the panel, which also included Mickie Most and Dave Dee, gave me good scores, but at the end of the show I was pipped to the post by a country band called Poacher that went on to win at the Country Music Awards and become a big name.
I’d hoped that New Faces would have lifted me out of the club circuit, with its sadistic concert chairmen and uninterested audiences. I was disappointed as I drove back to Teesside, but it was still a lot easier than standing at the bus stop at seven a.m. in the pouring rain, getting to ICI and carrying bricks up and down ladders, mixing darbo and cement for laggers, carrying and fetching and arguing and being on time and having to clock off and go home and fall asleep in the chair – all the things that a normal Teesside everyday bloke would do. Show business promised a little bit of excitement, as long as I had the bottle to do it.
A few days later, I was in my little red van, driving back from a music shop in Slaggy Island, when I passed my auld fella standing outside Baxter’s, the bakery on Bolckow Road in Grangetown from which as a kid I’d bought that sack of broken biscuits with a stolen pound note.
I stopped on the other side of the road. ‘Dad!’
‘Hiya, son!’
‘How are you doing?’ Dad was wearing a long grey mackintosh and a flat cap, a fag wedged in the corner of his mouth. Typical Andy Capp.
‘I’m fine, fine.’ Dad had been retired two years. ‘What you doing?’
‘I’m working tonight. I
’m at the Stockton Engineers’ Club.’
‘Oh right. How’s Beryl? Is she all right?’
‘Yeah, she’s fine.’
‘Betty’s just sent me down to get some bits,’ he said, holding up a bag of scones and tea cakes.
‘Right, well, I’ll probably speak to you tomorrow or the day after.’
That night I was on stage at the Engineers’ Club when I noticed a policeman standing at the back of the hall. He walked over when I came off stage.
‘It’s your dad, Roy. He’s had a heart attack,’ the copper said.
I rang home. Betty said Dad was in hospital but stable, and that I should wait until the morning before visiting him, so I immediately drove back to the Ponderosa, the filthy dump of a doss-house that all the neighbouring Redcar residents hated and where I had a flat. Early the next morning Beryl came round from her house. She was crying.
‘What’s wrong?’ I said.
Beryl couldn’t speak, she was crying that much. I put my arms around her and comforted her. When she’d calmed down, she spoke. ‘I’ve just had a message,’ she said. ‘Your dad’s died.’
I started crying myself. ‘It was only yesterday morning I was talking to him,’ I said.
Washed and dressed, I drove round to Dad’s house. Parked in the street outside, a black funeral director’s van with blacked-out windows contained my auld fella lying in a box. Inside the house, Betty and my sister Barbara were waiting, crying. I hugged them both. ‘Why?’ I said. ‘It doesn’t seem right. What has he ever done to hurt anybody?’
Betty told me what had happened. As usual, Dad had gone to the club at half past seven. At half past eight he was back home, complaining of not feeling well. He went upstairs and lay down on the bed. At about nine o’clock, Betty heard a long, low groan and a wheeze come from the bedroom – they call it the death rattle, don’t they? – so she ran upstairs. When she went in, Dad was unconscious. Betty rushed my auld fella to hospital and he died that night. It was 3 September 1976. Dad was sixty-eight. He’d worked all his life, never taking a day off from the steelworks, then he’d retired and two years later he was dead. It struck me that was no kind of decent life.
Common As Muck!: The Autobiography of Roy 'Chubby' Brown Page 23