‘Later, Chubby got his act together, making love to her all night in a four-poster bed, in stage dressing rooms up and down the country and in the back of his luxury Mercedes car.’
Well, some of it was true. It seemed churlish to complain that the bits about the flat cap and making love in the back of my car were pure fantasy, especially as Estelle was quoted as saying ‘Roy’s a really sexy guy. He’s got a bit of a beer belly, but the rest of him is pure muscle.’ I didn’t disagree with that.
The inaccuracies in the article were irrelevant. There was enough in it for Sandra to eat my balls for breakfast, mashed up on one of those bacon sandwiches she was cooking. I thought of flushing the newspaper down the toilet, but realised that it would only block the drain.
I stuffed the newspapers down the back of my trousers. Pulling my top down over them, I sauntered out of the loo as casually as I could manage. ‘Is that bacon for me?’ I said. ‘You know, I’m sick of it.’
‘Where you going?’ Sandra said, noticing me moving towards the kitchen door.
‘Didn’t I tell you I’m away today?’
‘You said it was tomorrow.’
‘Well, all the lads are travelling today, so I thought I best join them.’
‘But I’ve bought Sunday dinner.’
‘Fucking hell,’ I said, pursing my lips. ‘Eh, I’m sorry about this.’
Thinking that it would be the last time I saw Sandra in Sunnycross House, I gave her a kiss and got in the car. At the end of our drive, two reporters were waiting. Beside them, a photographer, camera hanging round his neck, glanced into my car. I shielded my face and turned from him as I passed.
I knew as I drove away from Sunnycross House that my marriage was over – and not a day too soon for me. Things dragged on for a few more months as we tried to patch things up. I spent a small fortune buying Sandra presents and taking her on holiday in an attempt to repair things, but it didn’t work. An already bad situation turned worse and eventually our marriage collapsed. Sandra’s response was to go to the newspapers. A string of allegations were trotted out, most of which I felt were blatant lies.
I phoned Sandra. ‘What have you told the fucking newspapers?’ I said. She denied it to the hilt, but there were too many personal details for me to believe she hadn’t spoken to the press. And again there were quotes from Sandra that revealed her true motives. ‘I want a good financial settlement and I want to stay in this house,’ she’d told the Daily Mirror. ‘I am prepared to stick it out until I get what I want, regardless of how long that takes.’
Exactly what that entailed – and how far Sandra was prepared to go to get it – I found out in October, when our divorce came to court. Sandra filed on the grounds of unreasonable behaviour and I didn’t contest it. I would have admitted anything, even being an international terrorist, just to get rid of her. After all, they say the difference between a wife and a terrorist is that at least you can negotiate with a terrorist.
Sandra arrived with most of her family – her son and daughter, her mother, her Auntie Pat. It was a top day out for them. As I walked past her into the courtroom, I gave her my best ‘I hope you die’ look, but once in front of the judge I was the one who was murdered.
According to the terms of the divorce, I’m not allowed to say exactly what Sandra got. However, I can say that all I was left with was my pension, a small amount of money in the bank and my car. Sandra even got my beloved fifty-thousand-pound Steinway grand piano, even though she couldn’t play it.
But what really hurt was losing my home. I loved Sunnycross House. I bought it a year before I met Sandra and spent a fortune renovating it. It was my pride and joy, but I was now banished to a little rented cottage beside a pub. It didn’t seem right. I’d been a comedian for twenty years, working my balls off to get where I was. I’d spent eight years in purgatory, married to that woman. And after just two days in court I felt gutted like a fish. I was skint.
After the hearing, George took me out for a bite to eat and a drink. ‘It’s all over, son,’ he said. ‘Do you feel as if you’ve been ripped off?’
‘If I’d had to give her a shilling, I’d have felt robbed blind,’ I said. ‘A shilling would have been too much.’
‘Ah, well. What we’ll do is, we’ll earn it back for you over the next year or so. Don’t worry. You’ll get your money back. We’ll do it together.’
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
LOVE CONQUERS EVERYTHING
BORSTAL AND PRISON made me grow up. Clubland showed me an escape from a life of crime and dead-end jobs. Turning blue put enough money in my pocket for me not to have to worry too much about the future. And being diagnosed with cancer made me realise that money isn’t everything and that the love of my wife and children is more important than anything.
The thing that surprised me about cancer is that once I’d recovered I didn’t feel any different. It’s not like I was dragging my leg or I had a lump on my head and every time I combed my hair my comb caught it. But it was living inside me and maybe because of that, it made me change the way I think.
It made me realise that comics of my generation don’t live long. That might be because the job goes hand over fist with drinking, smoking and not eating well. Whatever the reason, every time I open the paper these days it seems that another comedian has died. And they all seem to be around sixty-seven or sixty-eight years old – not much older than me. Anything beyond that seems to be a bonus. Woody Allen said, ‘I don’t mind dying, I just don’t want to be there when it happens’ and I’m like that. When I first discovered that I had cancer, I wondered if it was better to die than to lose the voice that had been my fortune and my saviour. I don’t believe that any more, even if it means that I’m the first comic who has to mime his gags.
I want more time to improve my piano-playing and to learn new instruments, but most of all I want it to spend with my two young children. Having come from nothing I don’t want to go back to nothing, so I’ve always worked hard. But more than anything I don’t want my kids reaching adulthood and thinking that although their dad was famous and left them a good legacy, they never really knew him – like I never really knew my mam.
George kept to his word, packing the calendar with gigs. I never worked as hard as in those first years after I divorced Sandra, toiling to recoup gradually everything she had taken from me. My schedule was relentless and I was in dire need of a holiday when another comedian told me about playing in South Africa. It sounded fantastic – good money and a first-class air fare to a first-class hotel in a beautiful climate. I could see myself relaxing by a cool pool all day, then playing a gig in the evening. It would be like a paid holiday. I told George that I wouldn’t mind having a go and he said he’d make some enquiries.
A few days later he reported back. ‘You can’t go to South Africa unless we take one of their acts,’ he said. Equity rules stipulated that I’d have to find an act just like mine. If I’d been a girl singer or dancer, I’d have had no trouble finding a South African counterpart, but I was a filthy, dirty, disgusting stand-up blue comedian and there was no one remotely like that in South Africa. I was snookered.
‘Don’t worry,’ George said. He had a plan B. ‘We’ll go to Australia and New Zealand.’
By October 1997, I was on a flight to Australia via Hong Kong, the first stop on my maiden world tour. I spent the entire flight worrying about how I’d go down. Would they understand me? Would English working-class gags mean anything to Bondi beach bums and Hong Kong wheeler-dealers? As it turned out, Hong Kong was fine. I played a small theatre packed to the rafters with expats and army lads. It was like playing any army town in England. And when I arrived in Australia I realised they were more British than I was. They watched EastEnders and Coronation Street, and of course Neighbours and Home and Away. They drove English cars on the same side of the road as us. They had Indian takeaways, kebab shops and fish and chips. They had the same problems as us – consumer debt and immigration. And to my North Yor
kshire ear there was little difference between the Australian accent and cockney. The only difference was the currency and the weather.
Riding in a limousine from Sydney airport to our hotel in the city centre, I got talking to the driver. ‘So you’re Chubby Brown, are you?’ he said in a thick Aussie twang.
‘Yeah,’ I replied. ‘Do you know me?’
‘Oh, yeah, mate. I know you. I’ve got all your tapes. I had Billy Connolly in the limo last week.’
‘Billy?’ I said. ‘He’s fantastic.’
‘He is, yeah, mate. He rates you!’
‘Does he?’ I said. The taxi driver told me how they’d passed a building site surrounded by a massive wooden fence plastered with posters advertising bands on tour.
‘Then,’ the limo driver said, ‘Billy spotted a poster for your tour, mate. “Oh, fucking hell, Chubby’s coming here,” he said. “D’you know him?” I asked. “Yeah, he’s fantastic, I love him. He’s a broad-church comic. He’s open to everybody. He talks about things that we all laugh about.”’
With Doddy, Billy Connolly has always been my comedy hero, so hearing that was just the confidence boost I needed before facing an Aussie audience. I played three nights in Sydney, the first in a comedy club beneath Sydney Harbour Bridge, the steel for which my father helped produce all those years ago when I’d wave him off to work at Dorman, Long. It was a great night, with a lot of heckling, but the Aussies had never heard anything like my brand of answerbacks and ad libs – ‘Why don’t you get your mind read? It’ll cost you fuck-all’ I shouted at one of them – and they loved my act. The next night I played the University Theatre and, on the third night, another big theatre where I was on with a band that combined rock and roll with yodelling. They called themselves the Von Trapp Family. So bad they were funny, they came on stage dressed in lederhosen and green Bavarian hunters’ hats with feathers. My audience, mostly lads on the piss, didn’t take to them at all. ‘Fucking get off!’ they shouted. ‘You’re shite!’ When the Von Trapp Family came off stage, George met the lead singer in a backstage corridor.
‘I’ve never known a rougher crowd than that,’ the singer said.
‘Well, you know who’s on, don’t you?’ George said. ‘Britain’s bluest comic, Chubby Brown. You didn’t stand a chance.’
We checked out of the Ritz Carlton hotel the next morning. Two days later, I was on stage in Brisbane. The news had broken that afternoon that Michael Hutchence had hanged himself in the hotel I’d just left. He must have been staying there at the same time as us. ‘I stopped at the Ritz Carlton in Sydney yesterday,’ I said on stage that night. ‘Closed the bathroom door, there’s a fucking bloke hanging there with an orange in his mouth.’
The audience gasped. Hutchence was a god in Australia. It was the equivalent of making a joke about Princess Diana just after her death. But I thought it was just a throwaway line, so I kept going. ‘Paula’s coming over,’ I said. ‘Do you know Paula Yates? She has got Fifi Trixibelle and Peaches, and I think the other one’s called Cream.’ I told some more gags about the kids’ names. The audience fell about and I’d got them back on side, but it was a close-run thing. The Aussies have no inhibitions and nothing seems to bother them. They’re very accepting and take as they find, so my brand of humour went down a storm, even better than in Britain.
We went on to Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth. Every city was wonderful and every gig sold out. The staff at the theatres told me that the tickets had gone quicker than any others for years and treated me like a superstar. In Perth, we shot a video that later became Chubby Down Under. I thought it was one of the best gigs I’d ever played.
Spending as much time as possible looking around each city, I loved everything I saw in Australia. It was just like the clichéd view of Oz, only better. Instead of working crazy sixty-or seventy-hour weeks, like in Britain, the Aussies had got the balance right and spent as much time as they could outdoors, on the beach, drinking lager, throwing prawns on the barbie, surfing, cycling, running and swimming. It was no wonder they were so good at sports. Everyone was tanned, beautiful and healthy – I only wished I was twenty years younger. And when I went out in the evenings, the bars were relaxed and easygoing, with girls singing and bashing tambourines and the lads joining in.
The one thing I really noticed about the Aussies was that they swore so much they made me sound like the Archbishop of Canterbury – maybe that’s why they took me to their hearts. Whatever it was, they looked on me as some kind of international celebrity and I loved every minute of it.
After Australia, we flew on to New Zealand. I was expecting Maoris everywhere but, riding in the taxi to the hotel, we could have been in Middlesbrough – Marks & Spencer, Woolworths, the houses and most of the stores on the high streets were the same. I got to the hotel and switched the telly on. The first channel I turned to was showing Coronation Street. On a side table was a kettle with Tetley teabags and sachets of Maxwell House coffee.
I played a small theatre in Auckland. Another superb night with a cracking audience. The next morning I got a phone call asking me to come onto a radio show. ‘You can say anything but “cunt”,’ the disc jockey said.
‘What? I can say “bastard”, “fuck” and “fanny”?’
‘Yes, anything but “cunt”,’ he said. ‘And we want you to take the piss out of our mayor. She’s a lesbian, but she thinks nobody knows it. Of course we all do.’
It sounded like the perfect radio show for me, although I was worried that they might be setting me up. When I arrived at the studio, they poured me a coffee and sat me in front of a microphone. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve waited a long time for this …’ the DJ said. ‘He’s finally here, the fat bastard himself, Chubby Brown.’
‘Don’t you be so fucking ignorant, you fucking halfwit,’ I said. My first sentence broadcast on New Zealand airwaves had two ‘fucks’ in it. I thought it was great. ‘And that fucking big fat lesbian you’ve got here, can you imagine me and her on the job? Fart and give us a clue …’
I talked for about twenty minutes, running through my gags. When I got to the theatre that night, the manager stopped me. ‘Were you on the radio this morning?’ he said.
‘Yeah.’
‘We’ve been inundated with calls for tickets. Our phone’s never stopped today, we can’t get them all in.’ That night I played a blinder, one of my best performances ever.
Two years later, in 1999, I toured Australia and New Zealand again, but this time we flew via Los Angeles, where I played a gig at the Henry Fonda Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. I didn’t like LA. The people were rude, George nearly got arrested for smoking in a bar, we were frequently tapped for money by beggars on Venice Beach, a Groucho Marx T-shirt cost two hundred dollars, the waiters and waitresses were all out-of-work actors full of bullshit and nobody talked to us in the street. But the show was a barnstormer.
Appearing in the middle of Hollywood, the centre of the show-business universe, I was racked with nerves before the curtain went up, but as soon as I started I realised that half the audience was British. I sat at the piano, played some ragtime, told gags about America, flying, hotels, Venice Beach with its muscle men, dieting and mother-in-laws, then finished off with a number on the ukulele-banjo. I got a standing ovation.
When we returned to Middlesbrough, George was being pestered by a bloke in Bahrain who wanted to book me to play a gig in a desert tent. Having just travelled halfway around the world, I didn’t feel like getting back on a plane. I don’t like flying any road and I didn’t want to go all that way for one gig. ‘He’s offering you a small fortune plus all expenses. We can take the whole crew,’ said George.
‘I don’t want to go,’ I said. ‘Tell him to double it and I’ll think about it. That’ll shut him up.’
The bloke phoned back ‘He’ll pay double plus all the crew and expenses,’ George said.
‘Fucking hell, George,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to go. What are we going to do now?’
&nbs
p; George, as usual, had a plan. ‘I’ll tell him you’re pencilled in to do a TV show and the only way you’ll cancel is if he’ll pay three times his original offer and provide first-class accommodation and air fares.’
The bloke phoned back again. A fee of three times his original offer of a small fortune was not a problem. It was the most I’d ever been offered for one night’s work, so I reluctantly flew out to Bahrain.
Once I got there, I realised it was the best decision I’d made in a long time. With a chandelier larger than some English houses, the hotel was amazing. I was there for only a couple of days, but I felt like I’d put on more than a stone. At least I came home with a lovely tan.
Because it was illegal to drink in Bahrain, the bloke who’d hired me had erected a marquee near an expats’ tennis club. We drove out into the desert until, in the middle of nothing but sand, we arrived at a wire-fenced compound like an army camp. Passing through a checkpoint, we drove on until our little convoy pulled up beside a big white tent. Inside it was carpeted, with a stage at one end, an excellent PA system that sounded better than most theatre sound systems, and a grand piano. Outside it was hot, the temperature in the high eighties even at night, but they’d air-conditioned the tent and inside it I could have been anywhere.
I played for ninety minutes to an audience of oil workers, their families and the expats who serviced them, such as doctors, dentists and cooks. There was even a lad from Grangetown who’d been three classes below me at school.
After the show, they opened a cupboard behind the stage. It was packed to the gunwales with whisky, brandy, gin, rum, sherry, beer and wine. Invited to help ourselves and with only half an hour until a taxi arrived to take us to the airport, we ripped through the cupboard’s contents, nearly emptying it. By the time we arrived at the airport, I was legless. ‘How are we going to get Roy on the plane?’ George said. I couldn’t stand up. They dragged me into the gents’ toilet and splashed cold water on my face until I pulled myself together. I took a deep breath and stumbled to the check-in.
Common As Muck!: The Autobiography of Roy 'Chubby' Brown Page 33