All Dad’s workmates and all the lads from his club came to the funeral. There’s not much to say about it except that it was incredibly sad. I looked at his casket and struggled to make sense of it. I couldn’t believe I wasn’t going to see him any more. Even now, thirty years later, I can see him as clear as if it was yesterday, standing on that corner outside Baxter’s bakery with his flat cap and bag of scones. And I can still see him when I was a boy, pegging it along the street on his bike after work, making his way home to where I’d cleaned and hoovered and cooked us egg and chips for tea. It seems only yesterday that I was waiting outside his club, hopeful of a tanner to buy a bag of chips or a bottle of pop, waiting for Dad to come and pat me on the head and send me on my way.
Sometimes you don’t realise just how much somebody means to you until you haven’t got them any more. We’d been together from when I was born. Dad was the one person who’d always been there. He’d been father and mother to me, and for a time I’d been son and wife to him. He’d been the one who took me to the football matches. He was the one who held my hand and who sat in the garden with us. When he had a bit of spare cash, Dad was the one who took me to the seaside or on a trip with the club or to Blackpool on holiday.
I don’t really know how I functioned in the months after Dad died. Everywhere I went, there were memories of him and of all the times we shared together. In the end, I had to force myself to stop thinking about it because I was getting nothing else done.
When Dad was cremated a few days later at Acklam crematorium, Barbara and I were asked if we wanted a plot with a stone in the garden of remembrance. Neither of us had any spare cash. With a string of bills owing, a van to run, maintenance to pay for Judy and the two boys, I was still pink lint even though I worked every hour God sent. It breaks my heart that I didn’t have the money then, but I didn’t and there’s no point in looking back.
Dad left everything to his new wife and her children. Barbara and I didn’t get a penny, so Betty asked us if we wanted to choose one of his belongings. I took a pocket watch that had been presented to my auld fella by his club. I kept in a drawer for years, until my house was burgled one night and the watch was pinched. I was certain that I knew who did it – he was a right rogue and he’d left his socks on the kitchen doorstep – but I couldn’t prove it, so I never got it back. It was all I had left to remember my auld fella by and again my heart was broken.
Even after Dad died, my mam was forever criticising him and she was probably right, but I could never fault my auld fella. Whatever had gone on between my parents, he was still my dad. Most of my friends and just about everyone I work with are forever going on about their parents and they never seem to have a good word to say about their mothers or fathers. I never felt like that. I’ve never yet met a man who says ‘I can’t wait for the weekend. My dad’s coming over. I don’t half love him.’ They don’t know how lucky they are.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THREE’S A CROWD
I WAS FULL of good intentions but once I got to the cancer clinic and lay down on the radiotherapy machine, fear and depression would often get the better of my resolve to recover. When that happened, there was one nurse who made all the difference. Nurse Noleen would sit beside the radiotherapy machine, clutch my hand gently between her own hands and speak to me. When she did that, I felt like a million dollars. ‘Now, are you all right?’ Noleen would say. ‘Is your weight all right? Has it been checked this morning? Are you sleeping well?’ She had some kind of supernatural ability to make me feel calm. Listening to Nurse Noleen was like taking some great big tranquilliser pill.
‘Is your hair all right? It’s not falling out, is it?’ Noleen said one day.
‘My hair’s all right but my pubes are gone,’ I replied. I’d always used humour to avoid confronting uncomfortable things in my life and having cancer was no exception. If I could make someone laugh about it, I used to think, then it wouldn’t matter. Escape your troubles with a laugh – it was like something sold under the counter at chemists.
But it was difficult to make jokes about friends such as Ronnie, the lad who’d been our van driver when I was in the Four Man Band and who swallowed petrol when we siphoned it from cars parked at campsites. After he stopped driving for us, Ronnie got a job as a hospital porter. Feeling ill one day, he showed a lump on his stomach to one of the doctors. By the time they’d done a biopsy and discovered that the lump was cancerous, it had spread to his brain. Ronnie tried everything, even travelling to Ireland to drink special water and to Lourdes on pilgrimage, but none of it helped.
So when I felt depressed and hopeless, I’d think of Ronnie and think that there was always somebody worse off than me. As long as I kept thinking that, I stopped worrying about recovering. I stopped worrying about the unimportant things, such as if my cock was hanging out, or how much money I had. Cancer taught me that materialistic things didn’t mean anything. All I wanted was to live a little longer so that my wife could put her arms around me and make me feel good.
Maybe it was a reaction to my auld fella’s death, but not long after he died I started doing the dirty on Beryl. I had a comedian friend called Billy Kelly, who later drank himself to death. Billy was the compère at the Fiesta Club at Stockton-on-Tees and we’d often meet for a drink and a natter. When Billy’s wife Shirley died of breast cancer, Billy needed some time off to get himself together, so he asked me to compère the shows for him.
The Fiesta was a classy venue, a typical 1970s nightclub with all the tables arranged so that everybody could see the stage. The men were dressed in dicky bows or ties, the women were dolled up and always looked a million dollars. Cocktail waitresses took orders – there was no queuing at the bar. All the top acts stopped at the Fiesta: Shirley Bassey, Freddie Starr, Tom Jones, the Four Tops, the Hollies, the Big Three, the Shirelles. Anyone who came to England at that time would work the Fiesta.
I had a great time at the Fiesta. The night Russ Abbot handed his notice in to the Black Abbots, I was there. You could have cut the atmosphere with a knife. I was there the night the Paper Dolls split up and there was a big cat-fight in the dressing room. And one night, one of the biggest television sitcom stars of the 1960s and 1970s appeared there. I was thrilled to see such a big star walking the corridors backstage – and even more thrilled when I walked in on him getting his leg over with his on-screen wife on the settee in his dressing room.
I’d been compère at the Fiesta for a few months when there was a knock at the back door. I opened it to find a large woman in a scruffy coat standing outside, a heavily laden plastic bag in each hand. ‘Where’z da drezzing roomz?’ she said in a deep, hoarse voice.
‘What?’
‘I zaid: Where’z da drezzing roomz?’ she growled again. It was uncanny – she sounded just like Tommy Cooper’s stage voice. I’d never heard such a strange voice from any woman. I pointed the woman down the corridor to the dressing rooms and turned to a mate loitering behind me.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said. ‘Tommy Cooper?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You won’t believe it. She’s his wife.’ And sure enough, a few minutes later Tommy appeared and headed down the corridor in the direction of his gravel-voiced wife.
Whenever Tommy Cooper played the Fiesta, he asked me to help him with one of his routines by passing him an aluminium ladder through the stage curtains. Standing in the slips in his trademark fez, Tommy instructed me what to do. When he waved his arms and said ‘Ah-zazzz’, I was to push the ladder out from the curtains by six inches. Then he’d say ‘Ah-zazzz’ again and the audience would see another six inches of the ladder emerge from the curtain. Every night, this amateurish magic trick had the audience in hysterics. But one night I replaced Tommy’s eight-foot ladder with a much longer fourteen-foot one and kept on pushing it out long after Tommy stopped saying ‘Ah-zazz’. The audience fell about, but Tommy didn’t see the funny side of it at all. When he came off, I thought he was going to kill
me. He went berserk.
‘You ever fuck my act up again …’he said.
I hadn’t fucked up his act, but he certainly lost his rag.
Standing at the bar of the Fiesta one night, I noticed a regular customer who hadn’t previously crossed my radar. She was a great looker with nice eyes, lovely teeth and long dark hair, but the first thing that went through my mind was, ‘By God, they’re big tits.’
I’d been seeing Beryl for seven or eight years by then. We’d never lived together, mainly because I needed my own space, but otherwise we were as good as married, so I kept my distance from the top-heavy lass. We exchanged a few words while she was ordering a drink and that was it. The next night, we talked a bit more and I found I had a lot in common with Pat. She played the guitar and had written a few songs; I was teaching myself the piano. We swapped chords and words and began to realise that we were interested in each other.
It was gone two o’clock in the morning, we’d been circling each other for a few weeks and we were both heading home when Pat asked me if I wanted a coffee.
‘Yeah,’ I said as we crossed the road. ‘That’d be nice, if it’s all right with you. Where do you live?’
‘Here,’ she said. It was less than a hundred feet away. As soon as we got in the door – my God, she was faster than a whippet. Forget the coffee, it was straight down to the nitty-gritty. I knew she wanted it and she knew I did. And boy, she had the loveliest, biggest pair of tits I’d ever seen.
We became lovers and had been going at it hammer and tongs for a couple of months when I gave her an indication of how I felt. Problem was, it came out all wrong.
‘I don’t like you hanging round the bar,’ I said. ‘All the blokes slathering all over you.’
‘No, they don’t.’
‘Well, how do you think I met you?’
‘What about you, stood on stage? All the women looking at you, thinking you’re gorgeous?’ It was just kids’ stuff. Immature jealousy, but it caused a big argument and we split up. Then we got back together. Then we split up again. We were on and off like Christmas-tree lights.
Pat was great fun, one of the funniest women I’ve ever met. She always had a quick answer for anything and would have made a great comedienne if she’d had the bottle to get on stage. But you couldn’t trust Pat as far as you could throw her. Everyone told me the same thing: ‘You want to watch Pat. She likes a bit of dick.’
‘You don’t have to tell me,’ I said the first few times I heard it. ‘She likes dick and I’m happy.’
But it soon became apparent how much she liked blokes, particularly ones in bands. We were watching a band one evening when I noticed Pat staring at the guitarist. ‘He’s gorgeous, isn’t he?’ I said.
‘I know him,’ she said.
‘Do you?’ I found out that she’d slept with him before we met. And I discovered that as far as Pat was concerned, anyone who was in a band or group was a target. Talk about a dog of war. All the time I was with Pat, I was never sure if she was seeing someone else on the side. But then, I couldn’t complain – I was still with Beryl.
My career at that time was no less complicated than my private life. After the disappointments of Opportunity Knocks and New Faces, I’d realised that I had to make a decision. I was faced with a simple choice. Did I want to be one of thousands of clean comedians trying to establish themselves and getting paid twenty-five or thirty-five pounds for a gig or did I want to be a blue comedian, with the potential to earn a lot more money but from a much smaller market? I knew there were only three or four blue comedians in the country that got regular work and that they were paid a hundred quid a gig.
On the face of it, the decision was easy. I was skint and there was little sign of my prospects improving. But I also knew that if I failed as a blue comedian, it would be much more difficult to find regular work as a clean comedian. The thing that swung it for me was realising that I had a talent for being filthy – or rather, the Chubby Brown character I’d created could get away with being crude and rude because my stage persona was a hapless fool, a lecherous Billy Bunter who boasted about his virility but was quite obviously a dead loss with women. I’d already discovered that I could get away with a lot more dressed in my multicoloured patchwork suit and flying helmet than dressed normally, so turning blue was simply a matter of throwing a few more well-timed ‘fucks’ into my routine. But once I started that, there was no turning back. A lot of people stopped noticing the material. All that mattered to them was the fact that I’d said ‘fuck’. And once I started doing that, many doors were slammed in my face.
Like many comics of that era, I had two acts. A clean act for most clubs and a blue act for stag nights and men-only after-dinner gigs. In those days, many clubs in the North-East didn’t admit women. And all clubs were men-only on Sunday dinner times. It was a very male world.
Max Miller used to have what he called his white book and his blue book – clean jokes and dirty jokes – and I had just the same, except it was all in my head. Since the age of about twelve, I’d sworn like a trooper in the street, but I stopped as soon as I walked in the house out of respect for my auld fella and because he would have given me a thick ear if he’d heard me swear. Likewise, I’d swear all the time I was getting my stuff out of the van – ‘Where’s my fucking microphone?’ ‘What fucking time am I fucking on?’ – but as soon as I walked up to the microphone I stopped swearing because if I did I wouldn’t get paid.
I told a lot of clean jokes, even performing in old people’s homes. ‘A man went into the baker’s,’ I’d say, ‘and said: “I see your sign outside. If I order any sandwich and you haven’t got what I want, I can have something else for free.” The woman behind the counter said: “That’s right.” He said: “I’ll have an elephant sandwich, then.” And the woman said: “That’s okay, could you come back in three hours.” And he went: “Ha ha ha ha! I knew you wouldn’t have it.” She said: “No, sir, you’ve misunderstood. It will take three hours to butter the bun”.’ It was simple humour and the old dears loved it.
Or I could play Saturday nights in clubs, where it would be jokes about the mother-in-law, the car, debts, about dancing and young girls and navy-blue knickers. A bit of naughtiness, but nothing too rude because it was a mixed crowd and the club didn’t want to get a reputation for being rough.
The next day, Sunday dinner time, I could be back at the same club and there would be eight hundred scaffolders with broken noses and scars and no respect for a comic who came on and talked about navy-blue knickers while they sat there with their pints and plates of cheese and biscuits, waiting for the strippers to appear. They’d throw you through the window. I had to walk on and I had to be aggressive. I had to tell gags about dildos and fucking and prostitutes and – in those days because it was what scaffolders and builders expected – about black people and Asians. That was what they wanted to hear because they’d spent their entire lives on building sites and docks or in steelworks and mines. They liked to play the part of the hard man and there was no way they were going to mince their words, so comics couldn’t either. They liked jokes such as: ‘My mate’s really hard. None of his tattoos are spelt right’ or ‘He’s had his nose broken in three places. The back kitchen, the front room and the bathroom.’ Subtle wit and social awareness would get you beaten up in those clubs.
Word started getting around clubland that I was ruder, cruder and more combative than many other comics. I was in great demand in the rough-arsed clubs, but my reputation also got round to the more respectable venues. ‘Oh, we don’t want him, you can’t get up to go the toilet. He takes the piss,’ I heard the committee members tell each other. ‘Every other word is eff this or eff that. Have you heard some of the things he comes out with? He’s brilliant on a stag night, but we have lady members and we don’t want all that muck.’
And then, of course, concert chairmen spoke to each other, clubs discussed acts and suddenly my phone didn’t ring as much. I’d have standing ovatio
ns at stag nights and on Sunday dinner times, but a raft of sour faces at small mixed clubs, not because my act was no good but because my reputation had preceded me and they’d decided they didn’t like my sort.
Of course, some clubs and some bookings exploited the fact that I could be a bit too blue for some audiences. Cleveland Police Force, which was giving out bravery awards to people for feats such as diving into rivers and saving dogs, had invited up some top copper brass from Scotland Yard. Charged with organising the entertainment after the awards ceremony, one of the desk sergeants booked a band and me to appear at the Ladle Hotel in Middlesbrough, although I suspect he’d employed the time-worn way of having a go at a boss who didn’t swear, namely booking a blue comedian.
I arrived at the Ladle to find all the men dressed in red dinner jackets and bow ties. All the women were in long dresses, white gloves above their elbows and box hats with veils. The sergeant took me aside. ‘Roy,’ he said, ‘I don’t want you to be too blue.’
‘Well, what did you book me for?’
‘You can be a bit saucy but don’t go too far …’
‘I’ve travelled here tonight, I’m only on seventy-five quid for a big do and now you’re telling me I can’t do what I want to do?’
‘Well, just play it by ear …’
I walked on stage in a room dripping with candelabra. I cracked a joke and nobody laughed. So I cracked a joke about the police force. Again, nobody laughed. Then I cracked another joke. Silence. I looked down at a table in front of the stage, where two stuck-up women were gazing at me aghast.
‘What the fucking ’ell’s the matter with you two, Minge and Bracket?’ I said.
Common As Muck!: The Autobiography of Roy 'Chubby' Brown Page 24