I Am What I Am

by John Barrowman

  The producer for the segment met me at the parking lot and introduced me to some of the zoo’s staff; many of them appeared to be young enough to be avid viewers of CBBC themselves. The guy who was the keeper and main animal wrangler had to have been all of twenty-two. After enquiring about his training, I learned it consisted of a certificate programme in animal training and having a ‘great passion’ for animals, which he clearly had. But so do I, and you don’t want me taking care of your tigers. Trust me, you don’t. He was a nice enough young man, but I have to admit he didn’t inspire great confidence in me, especially when I learned that the director was planning to put me inside a cage with either a lion or a tiger cub for one of the segment links.

  While the producer continued to review the day’s shoot with me, a number of children – ranging in age from about seven up to early teens – straggled out of one of the buildings and headed to a Quonset hut for breakfast. I didn’t want to ask what was on the menu in case I was sent out into the far fields and asked to hunt and skin it.

  Before I headed to make-up, which had been set up in one of the Quonset hut classrooms, I asked to use the bathroom – and that’s when I realized I’d need to keep my wits and my hand sanitizer about me during this shoot if I wanted to get back to civilization a) with all my body parts intact, and b) without some rare animal disease.

  The toilet I was directed to use was in one of the main buildings, next to the zoo’s administrative office. This consisted of three desks set in a row, each one stacked ridiculously high with paper and files. Behind one of the desks sat Sybil Fawlty, with her beehive hair6 stacked just as high, answering calls and giving orders to campers and staff who were wandering in and out.

  I stepped into the toilet – and froze. The room looked as if it had last seen Dettol a few days before the First World War and it smelled as if the entire Foreign Legion had taken a piss in it. The toilet paper was non-existent; and if all that wasn’t bad enough, someone had had the nerve to stick an incense stick in a glass jar on the cistern. As if lighting it would have done anything more than add to the odour that was so thick and putrid I could taste it. But, and bear with me here, none of those things was the worst part of this toilet. This was. Instead of where a bathtub or shower should have been, there was a huge, glass reptile cage with one of the biggest iguanas I’ve ever seen inside.7 Two things struck me as being creepy and weird about having this reptile cage in the toilet at this zoo.8

  First of all – and I know this is completely irrational – I didn’t want to pee in front of this reptile. He looked big enough to be able to get up on his four stumpy legs and climb out of the cage. When I was in middle school, one of my science teachers kept a variety of reptiles in her classroom and one day, when we all sat down, she had one dangling from the tip of her finger. While she’d been feeding it, Dr Pepper (I think its name was9) had latched itself onto the end of her finger. She told the class not to pay any attention to Dr Pepper hanging there and eventually he’d get bored and drop off. She told the class that the more she tried to force Dr Pepper to release her finger, the tighter he pinched. I was never a very strong student in the sciences, but if I’d been taught more often by teachers who had reptiles hanging from their body parts, I may have been a better one. In the end, she had to leave the classroom before the bell rang because she noticed her finger was swelling and turning blue. I stepped into that bathroom and had a sudden flash of that teacher’s finger when I started to unzip my fly. Can you blame me for not wanting to pee anymore?

  Secondly, when families paid their admission fee to the zoo, did they all have to crowd into this smelly space if they wanted to see the iguana?

  Back outside, while I was looking for someone from the crew, wanting to ask if there was a toilet more acceptable for human use available – like in one of the other cages – I noticed a restaurant across the street. For the rest of that day and the morning of the next, any time I wanted to pee, I’d get in my car and drive across the freeway to the diner.10

  I was given the script to review for a few minutes before beginning. Since I was mostly filming intro links, most of what had been written was puns and animal jokes. Given the state of the place, I wanted to write my own introduction.

  ‘Good morning! John Barrowman here, working in a pigsty, picking up shit, and generally hanging out with animals.’11

  When filming started later that morning, my first segment was with a friendly, well-behaved skunk (well-behaved mainly because the poor thing’s stink had been removed). This was followed by a scene with a snake – a snake that I had to wear around my neck for part of the link.

  I’m not really afraid of any animals; cautious and respectful of some of them, but not afraid. The snake weighed heavy on my shoulders and by the time the handler – remember the kid of about twelve? – had finished explaining to me what to do to stop it crushing my windpipe, I was breathing heavily and wondering why I’d never paid attention to the old cliché about working with children and animals.

  Between every segment we filmed, I wanted to shower. The whole place was filthy and run-down. At one point, when I was dashing to my car to take a toilet break, I noticed that all the kids from the camp were actually cleaning the animal cages. To make matters worse, it had started to drizzle, and the caged monkeys hadn’t stopped screaming since lunch12 was served. I think the monkeys were planning a coup.

  By the end of the first day of filming, I’d lost my sense of humour along with my appetite, and I was thinking seriously about becoming a vegetarian.

  I can count on one hand the number of times during my career in theatre and in television when I’ve lost my temper on set with producers or directors. The end of that first day of shooting Animals at Work was one of them. I pulled the location manager aside and told him I wanted a trailer with running water and a clean toilet. In other words, a place to go where I wasn’t at risk from catching cholera or Ebola fever.

  He said he’d see what he could do. He wasn’t sure there was money in the budget, so if he could get Basil Fawlty’s permission, would I be willing to use the main house as my dressing room if they couldn’t get a trailer?

  I’ve never been one who believes life is full of compromises. I don’t think it is. I think life is full of choices.13 I told the location manager that I’d try the main house, but if it didn’t meet even minimum health standards – and when I said minimum, I meant not sharing the bathroom with a frickin’ anaconda – I wanted a trailer.

  The next day, I showed up at the main house. From the outside, the house looked as if you might find Heidi and her grandfather inside, but once I crossed the threshold, I decided that this house could easily have been the inspiration for H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau. The place smelled like wet fur and faeces. The living room – where my make-up artist had been set up – was decorated like a jungle palace, with marble columns competing with huge palm fronds and stuffed animal carcasses. To top it all off, there was a puddle of pee on the tiled floor right next to my make-up chair.

  My trailer arrived at lunchtime.

  The rest of the shoot was fairly uneventful – until the director asked me to wander among the llamas for the final segment link. The llamas were hanging out at the far end of the property as if they didn’t want to have anything to do with the rest of the place.14

  As the shoot had gradually moved further into the zoo’s acreage, instead of sitting under a tent in the cold drizzle between takes, I’d taken to driving my rented SUV as close to the location as possible. I sat inside the car as the director set up the shot, and I kept my eyes on those llamas.

  Now, I don’t know much about llamas, other than the whole ‘head on the can of polish’ thing and that they make a tasty sausage,15 but I thought this particular group looked angry and just plain mean.

  When the director called for me, I walked across the grass and made my way into the herd. I swear I could hear them hissing and taunting me.

  ‘Can you get a little close
r, John?’

  I took two steps towards to the llama the director wanted in his shot. It turned and stared at me. I think I heard it chuckle malevolently.

  ‘A little closer please, John.’

  ‘This, Mr DeMille,’ I said, ‘is way close enough.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ‘MAKE THE DIRT STICK’

  ★

  ‘I want you all to know that I’m writing this … stark naked, with my knees behind my ears, and I’m using only one hand.’

  A. A. Gill

  A few good lessons learned from a really bad week

  1 Sometimes going along for a ride can take you in the wrong direction (especially if it’s in a wheelbarrow on the radio).

  2 Apologize first, analyse later.

  3 Just because I have confidence in me, doesn’t mean my blues don’t get black.

  4 Being ‘seen’ on the radio is an oxymoron.

  When I was growing up in America in the late seventies and eighties, I adored TV series like The Donny and Marie Show, The Sonny and Cher Show and Barbara Mandrell and the Mandrell Sisters because they had spectacle, surprises, banter and lots of music. Little-known fact: when I was performing at Opryland USA in Nashville in the eighties, my first TV gig was as a backing dancer and singer on Barbara Mandrell’s Opryland Special, and, might I say, she was a treat to work behind.

  About two years ago, when the BBC and I first began serious discussions regarding a possible series for a Saturday night, even before we imagined Tonight’s the Night, I knew I wanted two things: firstly, that the programme hark back to those variety shows of my youth; and secondly, that the company set up by Gavin and me, Barrowman Barker Productions (BBP), be part of the production team.

  Oh, I loved the style and tone and sheer razzle-dazzle of those entertainment programmes from the eighties, and lots of little details about them have stayed with me. I knew that I wanted every show to open with a big, glitzy, Busby Berkeley-style number; and towards the middle of the opening song, I wanted to cut in with that episode’s menu. To me, this small moment was a quintessential element of a variety show.

  I imagined the opening for Tonight’s the Night to go something like this.

  Big number. Big number. Dancers dancing. Music drops. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, on tonight’s show we have a Welsh woman who always wanted to perform as a Jersey Boy, four colleagues from Kent who can do amazing things with their flutes, plus … Chaka Khan!’1

  On Tonight’s the Night, I wanted nostalgia, spectacle, audience surprises and compelling live drama. Unfortunately, the week before the show was officially commissioned by the BBC, my life was overwhelmed with more drama and controversy than even I could handle, and it sent me spiralling into a physical and emotional tailspin.

  Big number. Big number. Dancers dancing. Music drops. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, in this chapter we have the story behind the story of me flashing “my boys” on BBC Switch on Radio 1, plus … Chaka Khan!’

  When I think about the events surrounding the incident that was quickly labelled ‘Ballgate’, I go from good humour to anger in less than sixty seconds flat. I’m not angry at myself much anymore, and certainly not at the DJs, Nick Grimshaw and Annie Mac, their producer, or anyone at the BBC. Instead, what angers me most when I think about the episode is that much of the outcry in the days following the actual event was flamed by a couple of tabloid newspapers, and a handful of folks who had not witnessed the incident first hand.

  How do I know this? Because the so-called ‘flash’ occurred on the radio – that’s right, on the radio, a purely aural medium, and one, in this case, without a live studio audience and with its web cameras turned off. I’m not saying that my outrageousness didn’t get out of control, it did, and I have taken full responsibility for any offence it caused those actually listening to the show, including making a public apology. But I’ve always felt that the incident got inflated into something bigger in the blogosphere than the actual act itself warranted. As a result, the flash of ‘my boys’ was heard, not seen – remember it happened on the radio – around the country.

  Days later, the Times columnist A. A. Gill captured brilliantly what I believe was underpinning the consequences of the entire event. In a hysterically funny and politically pointed piece of satire, he wrote that ‘[t]he truth is nothing as salaciously vile as the imaginations of the prim’.

  Here’s what happened. Gav usually travels with me to my scheduled appearances, but he left me to my own devices on this day and took a much-deserved break from what had been a hectic weekend schedule.

  Would I have gone as far as I did in my outrageousness if Gavin had stayed with me? Maybe. Maybe not. Anyway, Gavin went home, poured himself a glass of wine, put his feet up, and tuned his radio in to listen to the show from home, leaving me with Joe Bennett, my record-company publicity person, and Scott.

  During this particular BBC radio show, it’s not unusual for guests to play games and carry on with the DJs – and you know me, I rarely need an invitation to do either. On this Sunday evening, the antics got progressively more out of hand as the show went on. At one point, I put on a crash helmet and the DJs wheeled me around the studio in a barrow, playing a ridiculous ‘grab and fill the bucket’ game. The studio had been decorated with copies of my CDs hanging from all the surfaces and this was the booty I had to snatch.2

  From the moment the show went on the air, the DJs joked about my habit of mooning people,3 and asked if they should be worried about me taking ‘my willy out’. After they’d egged me on throughout most of the programme, in the spirit of the show’s shenanigans, I looked at the producer and pointed to the webcam. She nodded it was off, and it was, so I gave the DJs a quick flash of ‘my boys’.

  Anyone who has been on set, backstage, or spent any time with me at home knows that I like a good laugh, love to pull outrageous pranks and that, if the circumstances are appropriate, I can be adult in my antics. An edgy radio show on BBC Radio 1 seemed, at the time, to be an appropriate forum. In my head, I remember thinking, ‘We’re on the radio, the cameras are off, so if I do what they’re encouraging me to do, only Scott and the DJs will see me.’ Of course, Scott had seen my boys before.4

  I called Gavin immediately afterwards to ask if he’d heard the broadcast, as I usually do after I’ve been on the radio or on TV and he’s not been with me. His first words were, ‘Did you really have to take your dick out?’

  ‘I didn’t! It was just my balls,’ I said, and I added that I hadn’t really taken them out completely.5 The moment was but a brief flash in my palm.

  If my antics had happened at any other time, I’m convinced everything would have been nothing by Monday morning, but, unfortunately, they occurred during what was a very sensitive period for the BBC. Some people – and when I say some people, I mean one newspaper and one public complaint during the show – interpreted my flash as one more black mark against the BBC and its talent, and the incident was quickly linked to the Jonathan Ross/Russell Brand prank calls made a few weeks earlier.

  For me, one of the consequences of the Ross/Brand incident, and ‘Ballgate’, was that it brought to light what I’ve always thought is an anti-BBC bias in a couple of the British tabloids; newspapers whose pump is always primed to flood their pages with any behaviour they perceive to cross their thin blue line of propriety. They’ll bend over backwards6 to expose BBC personalities in a dim light. Regardless, I issued a heartfelt apology first thing on Monday.

  After the stories ran in the Evening Standard and the Daily Mail, I realized that their response was out of proportion to what had actually occurred in the studio. Tellingly, both articles failed to explain until past their leads that no members of the public had ‘seen’ anything because, as the Daily Mail admitted further down the story, ‘Barrowman’s genitalia were not actually shown.’

  In the Daily Mail piece, my autobiography, Anything Goes, was raided, with details taken completely out of context to add to the paper’s litany of my ‘lewd behaviou
rs’. For example, in one of the paragraphs, the Daily Mail described me as ‘a serial exhibitionist’, citing random examples from AG of times when I’ve bared my bum.

  I have to say, this newspaper’s questionable journalistic practices were what angered me most about the incident’s aftermath. I couldn’t help wondering, even then, how much their continued attacks on the BBC and its personnel were, in part, because the Daily Mail is owned by the same company that has an interest in one of the BBC’s competing television networks.

  However, what was truly appalling about the Mail’s article was that in the same paragraph it detailed my supposed ‘licentiousness’, it also noted that I had ‘married’ my ‘long-term partner’ in a civil ceremony; suggesting by association with the other examples that my civil ceremony was another example of my ‘lewd behaviour’.

  And the Daily Mail called me outrageous!

  Shame on the Daily Mail for equating being gay with being ‘lewd’, and shame on them for suggesting that a public expression of two people’s love for each other – something non-gays have been doing forever – is equally licentious. This is Britain in the twenty-first century, and yet this kind of bigotry can still find space in a national newspaper.

  As if this association wasn’t awful enough, the newspaper’s story closed with the line that I once ‘kicked faeces into the audience’. Anyone who has read Anything Goes knows that this incident was neither premeditated, purposeful, or even my fault, and that the flying faeces happened while I was high-kicking during a dance routine onstage, after a rival performer spiked my water with a laxative.