‘Don’t worry,’ said George. ‘I’ll ring my mate at Newcastle airport and get a helicopter to come and pick you up.’
There was no way I was going in a helicopter, especially in snow so thick that I could hardly see the tip of my nose.
‘If I was you, George, I’d make a sharp exit.’
‘Aye, right,’ he said. George found the club owner and told him what had happened.
‘George, you’ll have to go on the stage and tell them,’ the club owner said. His club was packed to the seams with punters who wanted to see Chubby Brown. There wasn’t enough room for oxygen in the place.
‘Aye, right …’ George said. It was the manager’s job to explain my non-appearance to the audience, but I knew George well enough to know he’d be petrified at the thought of walking on stage. ‘… I better have a ciggy first. I’ll just get my fags out the car.’
George went out to his car, jumped in and drove off. The club owner rang him the next day. ‘You crafty bastard, George!’ he said. ‘You knew what you were doing. You just didn’t want to go on stage and face the music.’
After a year together, George suggested that instead of being an agent of twenty-odd acts, he would be a manager of just one: me. I was very happy with the arrangement.
‘I’ll concentrate on you because I think me and you could go a long way,’ George said. ‘You’re the talented one. I’m the businessman. You leave the money side to me and I won’t tell you what to do on stage.’
Not long after we formed the partnership, George and I were sitting in a hotel when he made a suggestion. ‘I’ve been thinking about your act, Roy,’ he said. ‘There’s a lot of television work coming up, but you need to decide what you want to do.
‘You’ve got a gift for saying “fuck” without being too offensive …’ he said. ‘Well, you haven’t, but this disgusting character you’ve invented seems to be able to say “fuck” without causing offence. I think you should stop arsing about doing blue gigs and clean gigs. I think you should go full-time blue. Because if you do, you could become one of the most successful comedians in the country.’
Put like that, it was an easy decision. Whenever I could, I’d do a blue gig even if there was only an extra tenner in it. Going full-time blue would mean more money at a time when I was struggling to make ends meet.
However, there was a sting in the tail. ‘If you go full-time blue,’ George said, ‘you can kiss goodbye to any dreams of appearing on television. No television company will touch you.’
Regular television appearances were seen as one of the few sure-fire routes to wealth and fame for comedians. Just about every successful comedian working in the 1970s and 1980s got their big break on television – Russ Abbot, Billy Connolly, Victoria Wood, Bob Monkhouse and many others. If I went full-time blue, I realised, the crucial stepping stone of television would be out of bounds to me.
However, I also had to face the facts. I was never going to be Mr Clean, tap-dancing, singing, playing the drums and cracking jokes on my very own TV show. It wasn’t going to happen that way for me because I was simply too rough for the rarefied world of television. I was no good at sucking up to the concert chairmen in clubs, so what chance would I have in television where the recipe for success was one part talent and two parts arse-licking influential producers?
So I decided to become blue because it meant I could earn up to five hundred pounds for a show. In the end everything comes down to getting paid and paying your bills, and I went for it. I decided to go right over the top and be the rudest man in the country.
As soon as it got around that I was full-time blue, many clubs that I’d played for years rang George up to say I was no longer welcome. When I became well known, they offered me fortunes to go back just because they knew I put arses on seats, but in those days they didn’t want to know me.
The list of clubs that would have me got shorter and shorter. When I looked at my material, I was baffled. The only real difference between my old clean act and my new blue act was that there were more swear words. But back then, the number of comedians who had the guts to go on stage and say ‘Are you cunts having a fucking good time?’ instead of the same sentence without the expletives was small and the number of clubs who were prepared to tolerate such language was tiny.
At times I wondered if I hadn’t made the wrong decision. In quiet moments, I’d worry about what would happen when I wanted to settle down, get married and have children. Did I want my children living with a man known as Britain’s foulest mouth? I already knew that some audiences couldn’t tell the difference between the bloke on stage in the multicoloured suit and flying helmet and the bloke at home with his kids. They were the kind of people who’d think I went home to my wife and said: ‘Get the fucking kettle on, you fat twat. Are the fucking kids in fucking bed yet?’ They were the types who would later think nothing of shouting ‘All right, Chubby, you fat fucking cunt!’ down supermarket aisles. I worried about all these things, but I never back-pedalled.
Instead, I placed all my trust in George. And George trod very carefully. There was no longer any point booking me to play a Catholic club. He worked hard to place me in the right clubs. Good agents are like good second-hand car salesmen. They have to be good liars. In the office, I’d overhear George on the phone – ‘Yes, he’s fantastic … comic of the year … sells out everywhere … in huge demand … don’t know if I can squeeze you in, he’s that busy …’ – and when he put down the receiver, I’d ask him who he was talking about. ‘Oh, I was just selling you,’ George would say.
‘Selling me? I didn’t recognise myself in all that, George!’
‘Just leave it to me, Roy. You tell the jokes and I’ll do the business.’
Gradually my notoriety started to work for me. The slamming in my face of many clubs’ doors was a form of censorship. And like anything that’s prohibited – booze, fags, drugs, pornography – the more I was driven underground, the greater the demand for my act. George started getting calls from punters asking where they could see me because their local club wouldn’t have me on stage. Word got around that I was the comic to book for stag nights. So George put up my price, which made people think I must be something really special, which drove demand up even further.
My act got better because I was more comfortable telling blue jokes than the Paddy and Mick gags that were the staple of most comedians’ acts in those days. I’d always thought that when an Irishman told an Irish story it was a damn sight funnier than when an Englishman told the same tale. Told by an Irishman, it looked like he was laughing at himself. From an Englishman, it looked like he was taking the piss. It was the same with blue jokes. My laughs came from ridiculing my exploits with women. ‘Have you heard?’ I’d say. ‘J-Lo’s pregnant. God, am I in the shit.’ The audience would laugh because it was preposterous. They knew I was taking the piss out of myself. The same joke from a slim, good-looking comedian wouldn’t have been half as funny as from a fat, balding lump, dressed in a multicoloured suit and flying helmet like a clown’s outfit.
But my rise wasn’t without setbacks. After playing a club in Sunderland, one of the punters came into my dressing room. ‘Nobody – and I mean nobody – swears in front of my wife,’ he said. Then he spat in my face. I lamped him and he leaped on me. ‘I’ll get you outside, you fucking twat!’ he snarled when the club security broke us apart. I came out of the club to find my car on bricks.
I did a tour of Scottish clubs. The first night I played Penicuik Working Men’s Club, as rough a club as any. I lasted two minutes. The next night I was in Lesmahagow. Paid off after ten minutes. On the Tuesday, I played Rosyth Naval Yard. Tore ’em apart. They were standing on the tables and the wives loved me even more than the sailors did. When I got a standing ovation, that big, draughty hangar felt like a little club. The following night I was paid off at Kilmarnock, at which point George suggested I came home. ‘Fuck ’em,’ he said. ‘They don’t know talent when they see it.’
; I played the Pile Bar, a social club in Bradford. On the poster outside it just said ‘comedian’.
‘You do know what I do?’ I said to the club chairman.
‘All the lads have seen you at a club along the road. They said you’re fantastic, so we booked you.’
‘But that’s not the question. Do you know what I do?’
‘You’re a comic, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, but I’m a blue comedian.’
‘As long as you’re not too bad, we don’t mind.’
Walking on stage, I opened with ‘Good evening, ladies and gentleman. My wife’s got two cunts. I’m one of them.’ I looked at the audience. They were just gobsmacked. All I could see was row upon row of white, ashen faces.
‘Has he just said …?’ a woman said, breaking the silence. ‘Has he just said …?’
Ten minutes later, the club chairman marched up to the stage. ‘I demand you get off immediately.’
‘That’s OK, mate.’ I said, ‘I told you what I was like and it’s like the moon’s surface up here. No atmosphere.’
I walked off, got me gear, and walked across the road from the club to a pub. I’d just got myself a pint of lager when people started arriving from the club. ‘Chubby, I thought you were really funny,’ one of the lads said. ‘But you were in the wrong place …’
‘I know, I know,’ I said. So I started telling them a few gags at the bar in the pub. Within minutes, I had sixty or seventy people around me, so I started my act. At the end, I said goodnight. They all clapped as I walked out of the pub, got in my van and drove off. I knew I was doing something right. And it wasn’t just the need to earn a living that kept me going. When I was on stage, I was on show. Every breath, every move, every hand gesture counted. The audience laughed at my movements and my actions just as much as at my patter. And when they laughed at what I did, rather than at what I said, they were laughing because they liked me. No matter how hilarious the gags, no audience laughs if they don’t warm to the person telling them. And when I was on stage in front of several hundred, or even several thousand people rolling in their seats, I felt fantastic. Like heroin, no one can describe the feeling or explain the addiction you feel for that high of excitement. You need to experience it to know what it’s like. And that experience was why I didn’t pack in. That’s why I didn’t let a bad night, when I would go home crying, get to me. That’s why I never stopped working. I needed and craved those nights when I had that audience wrapped around my finger, when everything I did made them laugh, when standing up on stage with them was comic ecstasy.
The turning point came in late 1986 after playing a stag night at the Viking Hotel in Blackpool. In the dressing room after the show, Eric, the manager of the hotel, came up to me.
‘We had several people in the audience from the company that own the South Pier Theatre,’ he said. ‘They were asking: who’s this lad?’
‘What did you say?’ I asked.
‘I said he’s Chubby Brown. They asked how many times you’d played here and if it was always as packed as this.’
The next morning the phone rang. It was George. ‘I’ve just come off the phone to the management of the South Pier Theatre. They want you to do a season of Saturdays and Sundays, but you won’t be on until eleven o’clock after the family show.’
I was fearless in those days and the thought of 1,600 punters didn’t frighten me. It excited me. ‘Aye,’ I said. ‘I’ll have a go.’
Even in the mid-1980s, British seaside resorts were still packed, especially Blackpool. The worst thing they ever did at Blackpool was build the M55 motorway. Before that, it was twisted A-roads, traffic lights and little villages all the way to Blackpool. Once you got there, you were that glad, you’d stay for the week. Nowadays people just go in for the day and come straight out. But back then, there’d be thousands of people walking the Golden Mile every evening and the theatres would be packed with merry holidaymakers looking for a laugh. That was where I came in. The only problem with playing at eleven p.m. was that for every hour I waited to go on stage, my audience would have sunk another three pints of beer. When I walked on stage, around a thousand lads and six hundred women were waiting, more than half of them completely pissed. Some were asleep in the front row, snoring. Faced with a drunken audience, most of my act involved dealing with hecklers or telling simple jokes about Blackpool that the audience would immediately understand. Jokes like: ‘A sign in my hotel room said: “For turn-down service, ring 336.” So I rang it. A woman said: “I wouldn’t fuck you if you were the last comic in Blackpool.”’ It was a tough gig, but I handled it and the word got around, especially among comics, that my show was harder and more vulgar than anything else seen in a theatre in the mid-1980s.
Occasionally we’d have a complaint that my act was too crude. And because I was known for tackling controversial topics, I’d be blamed for anything offensive said by just about any comic in the land. I learned early on never to apologise for my material and to laugh it off when I was blamed for some other comedian’s offensive remark. Once you start apologising, you’ll never stop and you’ll get a hiding. Just look at Boris Johnson when he offended Scousers. If he’d brushed it off, he wouldn’t have got half as much stick as he did when he went to Liverpool to apologise. Or look at Billy Connolly when he made the joke about Ken Bigley. It was a bit insensitive, but it wasn’t Connolly who murdered Bigley, nor did he start the war that put Bigley’s life in danger. Everyone in the theatre that night knew it was a comedy show and that it was meant as a joke, so Connolly was right not to apologise. No comedian sets out to frighten or offend an audience – the show’s supposed to be funny. My character might say ‘fuck’, but so does everyone in the audience. My character might make jokes about oral sex and lighting farts, but that’s only because oral sex is popular and lighting farts can be funny. If you get offended by a joke, you’re taking offence at real life.
George started putting up signs outside the shows. ‘If Easily Offended, Stay Away,’ they said. But that just attracted even more people. By the late 1980s, I was firmly established as Britain’s bluest comedian and I could name my price. A few years earlier, shortly before Brian Findlay died, I considered seventy-five quid good money for a gig. Now I was getting two grand or more a night. And my audience was changing too. When I first went blue, it was nearly all men – bus trips from building sites, industrial estates and factories, all male. Suddenly, the audience was half female. Times had changed and telling dirty jokes was in fashion with everyone. When I came on stage and said ‘Good evening, my wife’s got two cunts and I’m one of them’, I could see them sat there thinking ‘Eeee, I wish I’d thought of that!’ When I said ‘Girls, keep your gob shut when you’re fucking … you know what it’s like, lads – tongue down her throat, fingers in her minge, cock up her arse, you’re looking for somewhere to put your foot,’ they all laughed. It was different from anything they’d heard before and they loved it.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
FRUITS OF SUCCESS
‘THIS WILL TAKE TIME,’ she said. ‘We are going to learn how to speak. We are going to start from A, B and C and it will take a long time.’
The physiotherapist, a lovely woman who looked like Victoria Wood, rested her hand on my chest. ‘Let’s start at the beginning. You need to learn how to breathe. From here,’ Jane said, pressing the top of my stomach. I’d always thought breathing was something that I knew perfectly well how to do but, given that I was struggling to turn hisses into audible language, it appeared she had a point.
Several times a week I would turn up at Jane Deakin’s office to relearn the gift of the gab. ‘Hold your stomach in and say “Ahhh”,’ she said at our first meeting. I tried and nothing came out. I practised my breathing with her. ‘That’s better,’ she said. ‘Let’s try to say chair.’
‘… Huh … cheeeer,’ I said with a windy whoosh.
‘Breathe right in, breathe right out again. Get as much oxygen as you can into your lungs, then
try again,’ she said.
‘Um … cher’, I said.
Was I ever going to speak? I wondered. Your stage career is over, I thought, kiss your hopes of being a comic goodbye, Chubby. ‘There are no guarantees, Roy,’ said Jane. ‘I don’t know if your voice will come back. It’s all up to you.’
Regaining my voice seemed so unlikely that I seriously entertained thoughts of what to do instead. I made plans to go into management and started to scout around for young comics with promise and potential – younger versions of me. I’d been in the business long enough to know when someone was funny and I’d seen hundreds of comics who weren’t funny at all but were still earning a living. If I could find a young lad who was funny, then surely I could earn more than a living by showing him the ropes.
After six weeks’ intensive therapy, Jane said there was nothing more she could do for me. ‘If you keep doing the exercises and practise the techniques I’ve taught you,’ she said, ‘then your voice will come back. It’s all a matter of patience and time.’
Sitting on the side of my bed every morning, I’d warm up my last remaining vocal cord with a few ‘ahs’ and ‘ums’. Slowly, I heard my voice get better, the wavering and hissing becoming less all the time. Drinking litres of water every day and eating sensibly, I was starting to feel stronger and regain confidence. Maybe I’d manage it after all.
Then George phoned. It didn’t take him long to pop the question. ‘Are you ready yet?’ he asked. When I said no, he didn’t hesitate with the follow-up. ‘So when do you reckon you’ll be OK?’
I felt pressured. I was the man on the microphone and from the moment I put that microphone down George’s wages had slowed to a trickle. ‘Just give me time, George,’ I said.
Six months after I started the speech therapy, Jane called me. ‘You sound much better,’ she said. ‘Now you need to learn how to use a microphone.’
Common As Muck!: The Autobiography of Roy 'Chubby' Brown Page 27