Common As Muck!: The Autobiography of Roy 'Chubby' Brown

by Roy Chubby Brown

  ‘You’re in a good mood, aren’t you?’ said the woman at the check-in desk.

  ‘Yesssh,’ I said, slurring and grinning inanely. ‘I’m in a very good mood.’ And then I let out the longest, loudest fart I’ve ever heard. When it was finished, I turned around. George, his son Mick, the sound engineer Aaron and our lighting technician Mick were all on the floor, weeping helplessly with laughter. None of them could stand up or speak.

  ‘Somebody’s excited about getting on the plane, aren’t they?’ the check-in woman said.

  The fact that drinking was illegal in Bahrain just made us all feel like naughty schoolboys and, despite concerns that we might be prevented from flying, none of us could stop giggling for the next two hours. It was only when the plane was in the sky and we had a fresh round of drinks in our hands that we calmed down.

  When we got home, I tried on my multicoloured suit. After the stupendous breakfasts at the hotel and the booze blow-out on the last night – something to which I was no longer accustomed – it was getting tight. But then, I’d got used to being more svelte than for many years. Before going out to Bahrain I had lost more than two stone in weight since 1997. Why? Because I was in love.

  After the trauma of the divorce from Sandra in 1996, I thought I wouldn’t look at another woman ever again. Life with Sandra had damaged my view of all womankind, and I thought I’d be happy to bumble through the rest of my life on my own.

  ‘If you see me with another woman,’ I used to tell my friends, ‘shoot me in the back of the head and hide my body somewhere. Do whatever you like, but don’t ever let me set eyes on another woman.’

  Sometimes I felt lonely, but I just ploughed my energy into my work. I spent a lot more time tinkling at the piano or pounding my drums. I devised a lot of songs and wrote more poetry than I had done for years. I saw Richard and Robert, my kids from my first marriage, and got to know my grandchildren a bit better. Totally uninterested in women, I just kept myself busy.

  That all changed after a show at the tail-end of the 1997 summer season. Skegness was on Wednesdays, Thursdays I was in Rhyl, Fridays were Great Yarmouth, Saturday and Sunday I played Blackpool. I was always travelling and always stuck behind caravans, the curse of the road. It must have been a Wednesday because we were in Skegness when my driver Peter Richardson led me out of the stage door to where some fans were waiting. ‘There’s a girl here,’ he said. ‘She was here last week with a friend. Now she’s come back with her boss and her boss’s girlfriend.’

  ‘Right,’ I said – thinking, so fucking what? – as Peter brought them over. ‘Hello,’ I said.

  ‘Hello,’ the girl said. I hardly looked up.

  ‘Can she have a photograph, Roy?’ Peter said. I picked up a colour photograph to hand it to her, but Peter interjected. ‘Can she have a photograph with you?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Of course you can.’ I stood up. ‘What’s your name?’ I said.

  ‘Helen.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Helen looked at me and I looked at her. I won’t say it was love at first sight, but there was definitely something. She was the first woman I’d noticed for a long time. And boy was she a bonny girl. I tried to guess her age Thirty-two? Thirty-one? Maybe even younger? Whatever – she was far too gorgeous to be interested in me. Long blonde hair. Perfect figure. Lovely teeth and green-blue eyes. She was wearing a pink cardie and from what I could see had a perfect pair of tits beneath it. By God, you’re nice, I thought.

  ‘Have you seen the show before?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, I was here last week with a friend.’

  ‘Is your friend a fan too?’ I said.

  ‘Well, I converted him,’ Helen said. ‘I heard a couple of tapes of yours, then I saw you on video and you made me laugh so much that my sides were aching. I’ve always been a fan, so I persuaded my pal to come to your show last week.’

  ‘Well, that’s nice,’ I said.

  ‘And I’m coming next week as well.’

  ‘You what? You were here last week, this week, and next week? Who’s this you’re with?’

  Helen introduced me to John, a farmer, and Julie, who giggled a lot. I smiled and Julie grinned back. ‘Will you sign this?’ she said, pulling her jeans down. ‘Will you sign my arse?’

  I looked at Helen. Her face was redder than the ripest tomato and she was staring out the window. For Julie, who moaned in mock ecstasy as I signed her arse, it was all a big joke, but I could see that Helen wasn’t like that. She watched silently. Then, as they were leaving, she said quietly, ‘I’ll see you next week, then?’

  ‘That’d be nice.’

  ‘Can I come backstage next week?’

  ‘Come early, come a couple of hours before the show and we’ll have a cup of tea and a sandwich if you want.’

  ‘Honestly?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  I stood beside Helen while John snapped a photograph of us together. ‘I’ll bring the photo next week,’ Helen said. Then she left and I got in my car.

  On the way home, Peter didn’t stop talking about Helen. ‘She was a bonny girl, wasn’t she?’ he said.

  ‘She was, yeah. Nice as well.’

  ‘Oh, was she?’ he said.

  ‘She’s coming again next Wednesday and I’m going to have a cup of tea with her.’

  ‘Eh, you might be in there, mate.’

  ‘Nah, I’m not bothered. I couldn’t pull a young bit of stuff like that,’ I said. ‘She’s lovely and all that, but what would she see in me?’

  ‘Well, you know, women are funny,’ Peter said. ‘They’re more canny than us blokes and I can see she doesn’t half like you.’

  ‘Listen, Peter, she’s nice, but she’s just another split arse. And they’re all the same,’ I said, remembering my marriage. But women aren’t all the same. Some can bring out the best in you and some can bring out the worst. I didn’t yet know that Helen would make me happier than I’d ever been with myself.

  In my dressing room at Skegness a week later, Peter knocked on the door. ‘That girl’s here,’ he said with a wink. ‘She’s stood outside the door.’

  I went out into the corridor. Helen looked even more gorgeous than she had the previous week. ‘Where we having this cup of tea, then?’ she said. We found a café with a jukebox across the road from the theatre and walked in.

  ‘Oooh, I love them buttered scones,’ I said as we sat down, pronouncing ‘scone’ as ‘scon’.

  ‘It’s a scone,’ Helen said, pronouncing it ‘scoan’.

  ‘No, it’s not. Where I come from it’s a scon and it always will be.’

  ‘No, it’s a scoan,’ Helen said, starting to laugh.

  Refusing to let me pay, Helen bought me a cup of tea and a scone. And so over a scon, scoan – whatever – we got to know each other, flirting and giggling like two teenagers. Walking back to the theatre, she touched my arm. ‘I probably won’t see you after the show,’ she said.

  ‘Oh … no … why?’

  ‘I’ve got to get away quick because I’m working in the morning.’

  ‘Oh, that’s a shame.’

  ‘I must apologise for Julie last week,’ Helen added, explaining how she’d given Julie a dressing-down the next day. ‘How dare anybody do that!’ Helen didn’t have to say it for me to know that she was a decent woman. I could just tell. I’d lost all confidence in my judgement of when women were telling the truth, but there was something about Helen that convinced me I could trust her.

  ‘This is my mobile number,’ Helen said. ‘Will you give me a ring?’

  Two days later I was in the car on the way to a theatre. I dialled her number.

  ‘Hello?’ she said.

  ‘It’s Roy.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Roy, Roy Brown.’

  ‘Eeh, I never thought you’d ring me.’ Helen chatted for a while. ‘Next week you’re at Blackpool, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘I’ll come over with my mate and we can catch up.’

  When I put the phone do
wn, a smile as wide as the mouth of the Tees at Redcar cracked my face. ‘I don’t know what that’s all about,’ I said to Peter. ‘But she wants to see me again.’

  I booked two single rooms for Helen and her friend at the hotel in Blackpool and that night we chatted long into the night before we went back to separate rooms.

  From then on, I called Helen every day. She was living with her parents but they didn’t know about me, so whenever I’d phone her she’d hide under her duvet. We’d speak for hours, Helen whispering under her bedclothes. Four months later, Helen came to Blackpool on her own and I booked her into the room next to mine. We’d had a couple of drinks and were on the way upstairs when I gave her a kiss.

  ‘Is there sommat wrong with me?’ she said.

  ‘Far from it.’

  ‘Well, you know … you haven’t, like, even … you haven’t even put your hand on me.’

  ‘I might be a blue, filthy, downright dirty comedian, but I’m not an animal. I wouldn’t dare … you know, I’m twenty-odd years older than you.’

  ‘What does that mean? C’mon, what do you think of me?’

  ‘I think you are wonderful.’

  ‘And I think you are wonderful,’ Helen said. ‘So do you want to stay the night?’

  She had a perfect body. I was so nervous, I was cracking jokes. ‘The downstairs department’s not massive, you know,’ I said. ‘Top floor, not bad, but downstairs in the lift …’

  And that was the start of our relationship.

  The following night on stage I ran through my material at forty miles an hour, I was that excited. I couldn’t believe what had just happened to me and I wanted to tell everyone.

  ‘I told you she liked you,’ Peter said.

  I couldn’t get over it, but I knew I was a difficult man to live with. Over the next few months, I told Helen about my past, my kids, my hard, violent days in the clubs, what I’d been and what I hadn’t been. ‘You’re best off just walking out the door,’ I said. ‘You said you loved me and you’re a wonderful person, but I do have a dark past and some women would find that difficult.’

  Helen said it didn’t matter. ‘Well, at least it gives you something to talk about when you go out for dinner with your friends,’ I said. ‘“Still with that fat bastard, are you?” they’ll say.’

  Again, Helen didn’t care. All that mattered to her – and to me – was that we saw each other as much as we could. Working all week and most weekends, I made sure that I snatched every available opportunity, travelling to where she lived in Grimsby whenever it was possible. And if I was on the road, playing a gig near Grimsby, Helen would travel down for the night and go back to work early the next day.

  We spoiled each other rotten, buying each other flowers, cards and chocolates all the time, not just on birthdays. Helen would buy me all sorts of jumpers, ties and socks, never forgetting me when she was at the shops. But most of all we just let each other know that we loved each other – after all, it doesn’t cost a penny to say those few words that let someone know you really care.

  We’d been seeing each other for a year off and on when I decided to rent a little cottage in a village outside Middlesbrough. Things at Helen’s workplace had got complicated and she was no longer enjoying it, so very reluctantly – because she was adamant she didn’t want to be a kept woman – Helen agreed to come and live with me. Shortly after that, the most magnificent house in Helen’s home village came up for sale. Situated on a hill, Maltby House had a front room, side room, back room, living room, snooker room, two kitchens, wine cellar, five en-suite bedrooms and many more rooms that we didn’t know what to do with. It had three and a half acres of land, tennis courts, a lake with a thousand catfish, a two-bedroom guest cottage and a three-car garage. I paid four hundred and sixty grand for it and at last we had a proper home of our own. We renovated the entire property, planting dozens of trees and plants and reseeding all the lawns. I had an indoor swimming pool built with ‘Helen’ and ‘Roy’ inscribed in mosaic tiles on the bottom of the pool. It was housed in a Swiss log cabin and cost me about sixty thousand quid. We installed a Roman bath in the back garden and fitted electric gates with a security camera at the end of the drive. When the postman rang the bell, we could see him on a television screen in the kitchen. We’d buzz him in, then press a button and all the fountains in the Roman bath would come on as he came up the drive. It was really impressive and we loved it, but we soon found that the upkeep was enormous. It cost us a fortune to maintain Maltby House, including employing a full-time cleaner and two full-time gardeners. After two years, when Helen was pregnant with Reece, our first child, we realised it was too much and we sold it. But I still miss that house to this day.

  It was while Helen and I were living at Maltby House that we switched on the television to see a signpost with ‘Royston Vasey’ on it appear at the beginning of a show. A few months previously, George had taken a phone call. ‘We’re the League of Gentlemen …’ a voice said. Neither George nor I had ever heard of them.

  ‘We’re making a series set in a small town. Would it be all right if we named the town after Chubby?’ the voice continued. ‘We’re all big Chubby fans. We love his stuff and when we were at college we used to watch him on video and listen to his tapes and he used to have us in hysterics …’

  George was baffled. ‘I’m sure I don’t have to … I’m sure he’ll be flattered,’ he said. Then he rang me.

  ‘What are they going to call the town? Chubby Brown?’

  ‘No, they want to call it Royston Vasey after you.’

  It sounded genuine, so we said yes and took the chance. All we knew was that it was an off-the-wall black comedy.

  The first time I saw it on the telly I couldn’t believe that my name was on the signpost. Royston Vasey – Helen and I looked at each other and went ‘Fucking hell!’ The first scene showed a hearse going by and the flowers on the coffin spelling ‘bastard’. From that moment on, I thought it was great.

  When the first series finished, they rang me up and asked what I thought of it. ‘Some parts of it were brilliant and some parts I couldn’t understand,’ I said. It was the truth.

  They said that was the reaction they were looking for. ‘Would you like to be the mayor in the next series?’ they said. I agreed immediately.

  The League of Gentlemen were a bunch of young lads, Mark Gatiss, Jeremy Dyson, Steve Pemberton, Reece Shearsmith. On the first day’s shooting, we spent ages in the make-up caravan, talking about humour over cups of tea and biscuits. Then they gave me a script. I read through it, took note of all the directions and then went to shoot my scene.

  We lined up on the set. When an assistant director shouted ‘Action!’ I ran through a door, stopped, looked around and ran back through the door. That was my first take and I thought I’d done a good job. But the lads were all looking at each other as if something had gone wrong.

  ‘You didn’t deliver your lines,’ Mark Gatiss said.

  ‘There aren’t any lines,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, there are about ten lines.’

  ‘No, there aren’t.’ I called over to George, who was standing to one side, and asked him to go to my caravan and bring the script back. I flicked through it. ‘There,’ I said, pointing at the sheaf of paper. ‘Look – no lines.’

  ‘What the fucking hell’s happened here?’ Mark said, grabbing the script. He flicked through the pages. ‘He hasn’t got fucking page three.’

  I hadn’t noticed that the page numbers jumped from two to four. All my lines were on page three. No wonder my scene had been so easy.

  They gave me half an hour to learn my ten lines, then we shot the scene again. Over the next couple of days, while shooting all the rest of my scenes, we talked more about comedy. They asked me how I came up with gags. I explained how I would scan through the newspapers for ideas, writing things down and trying to play on words. Whereas I had to use my patter to paint a picture for the audience, much of their comedy involved thinking of thi
ngs that would look funny or absurd on screen. While the others were acting, one of them was always writing and adjusting things to make them look better.

  In my biggest scene, something that caused nosebleeds had broken out in Royston Vasey and the press wanted to interview me, as the mayor, about it. As I was being interviewed, a van pulled up with ‘Mobile Swimming Pool’ painted on the side and a bloke in his trunks got out of it, drying himself with a towel. I thought that was really funny – you’d never see a mobile swimming pool. As I walked past the swimming pool, the bloke in the trunks spoke to me, asking me to talk to the press but insisting that I didn’t swear. ‘You know me,’ I said. ‘I don’t swear in front of the camera. Never swear on camera.’ Then, with the press hounding me and onlookers pestering me, I answered questions about the nosebleeds. I was asked if there was an epidemic in Royston Vasey, if it was true that there was poison in the drains, whether an axe murderer was on the loose, and so on. At the end, I said: ‘Hold it, hold it. It’s a beautiful day. There’s nothing wrong with Royston Vasey. We have a small problem and as far as I am concerned …’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Mayor,’ the press said.

  ‘It’s a fucking pleasure,’ I said and then the scene ends.

  The mayor was one of the first to get the disease and I had to lie on a cobbled street for an hour and a half with fake blood coming out of my ears and nose, shivering as I got colder and colder. Two days later I was in bed with the flu, but I’d really enjoyed shooting my two episodes.

  While recuperating from the flu I opened the Sun to discover that ‘the son of blue comic Roy “Chubby” Brown shot at a driver in a road-rage attack’ and was now appearing in court. This was news to me. I knew that my two sons Richard and Robert were happily getting on with their lives in Redcar. They’d never cause trouble, let alone fire a gun at someone. I read on: ‘Martin Reilly, 26, allegedly fired a pistol into Trevor Finn’s car at Billingham, Teesside, after having to give way. The shot just missed Mr Finn and smashed a passenger window, Teesside Crown Court was told yesterday.’ Now it made sense.