I Am What I Am

by John Barrowman

  This particular article really angered me, but I have to say that, for the most part, the response of the rest of the press was to see this for what it was.7 Friends who monitored bloggers on even the Daily Mail’s website explained to me – when I could handle hearing the details the following week – that most folks generally felt it was a stupid antic that went too far and nothing more. The day the story hit the front page of the Daily Mail, a close friend from television emailed me, sending his support. He added: ‘But a great pic of you, John.’ It really was.

  Even after I released my apology on the Monday, the reporting of the incident kept spreading like a bad cold. By Tuesday, I had sunk into a deep funk that drove me into seclusion. By Wednesday, my body felt as if it had been pummelled and it simply shut down. I didn’t read emails, avoided the press, and couldn’t make myself answer my phone. Everything hurt. I don’t have these dark periods very often, but when I do, Scott, Gavin and my family know to leave me alone as much as possible and to let me work my way out of them.

  Poor Scott. He felt completely helpless. This incident was the first time that Scott had really seen me felled by something as public as this, something that he couldn’t do anything about to help, and even his mothering and cooking, and hugging and silly jokes, and the smart retorts he imagined writing to the press couldn’t break my ever-blackening mood.8

  Gavin tried to throw all kinds of work distractions my way, but none of them made a difference. I was angry at myself for getting into this situation in the first place, that’s a given, but – honestly – what I was most upset with was the blinkered, petty moralizing from folks who had neither seen nor heard the incident first hand, and who were simply responding to second-hand summaries, many of them inaccurate. Plus, can I just write this again – it happened on the radio! No one from the general public saw anything.

  By Thursday, I’d crashed, physically and psychologically. I’d completely lost my voice and every part of my body ached. At the last minute, I was forced to cancel my BBC Radio 2 ‘Friday Night is Music Night’ concert.

  In the face of dead air on a Friday, Jodie Keane, who’s produced many of my BBC Radio 2 concerts, Joe Bennett and Gav pulled in some favours on my behalf, and they found performers at the eleventh hour. I was in no condition to do anything at that point, and I certainly wasn’t able to phone anyone up to ask them to help out. Jodie very calmly arranged for Sally Ann Triplett, who was my Reno in Anything Goes at the National, Matt Rawle, who was playing Zorro at the time in the West End, Shona Lindsay, who played opposite me in The Phantom of the Opera years ago, and my concert duet partner, Danny Boys, to step up to the mic for me. They performed to my accompaniment as the programme’s host (I sounded a lot like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo).

  At the weekend, I had my voice back, but I still wasn’t 100 per cent. I sang ‘What About Us?’ at the Royal Variety Performance – and I sounded like shit.

  What did I learn from all this? Other than the obvious about not getting into that situation again, the entire week reminded me that, given my fame and status as an entertainer, certain members of the press, and even a few in the public, will always descend like a pack of wolves on any mistake I make, or flaw or weakness I appear to show. So be it. I will do my very best to limit any opportunities for feeding frenzies in the future. But I also decided that what I will not let a week like this do is make me into something I’m not: straight-laced, inhibited, unambitious and bland.

  The consequences of events like these can make performers try to change; can even make them afraid to be themselves anymore. I felt this way for a while in the middle of that debilitating week. Fear can be a heavy anchor in your life if you hang on to it – and it can be heavier still if it’s chained with regret. I’m sorry for what I did, but after I came to grips with myself at the end of that long week, I refused to be weighed down anymore by either one.

  Admittedly, all of this was painful enough to live through, but the consequence that affected me most deeply was that the entire incident forced a delay in the announcement of Tonight’s the Night’s commissioning. The day after ‘Ballgate’ broke in the tabloid press, Gav was called in to the BBC and ripped a new one, and, as my manager, he listened, he accepted the reprimand, and then he passed the message along to me, pretty much word for word. This made my depression even deeper – because a dream I’d had since childhood was suddenly threatened.

  In the end, a comment from my dad helped me to put the whole episode into perspective, and began to bring me out from under my duvet. On the following Sunday night, when I called my parents to talk to them about what had happened, my dad allowed me to see some humour in the situation.

  ‘Well, John,’ he said, ‘I guess you won’t be hosting Songs of Praise anytime soon.’

  TABLE TALK #5

  ‘Blame It on the Flip-Flops … and the Harveys’

  ‘Lick him!’

  ‘Mum, please get the dogs away from me!’

  ‘Lick him!’

  My mum blamed the flip-flops for my accident. I blamed years of practical jokes, silly games, prank falls and general Barrowman nonsense.

  When Andrew, Carole and I were young, it was not unusual after dinner – when the three of us would be doing homework or playing in the living room – for my dad to stumble in from the kitchen, saying, ‘Marion, I’ve cut myself. It’s bad.’

  We would all drop what we were doing and gather round him. He’d lift a blood-red hanky from his hand and expose his doubled-over thumb, which would be covered in … tomato sauce. He’d vary the injury. Sometimes it would be his toe, sometimes his knee, but always the wound was presented to us with such award-winningly convincing pain that we never failed to get sucked into the drama. Even when we got old enough to know better, we’d see that bloody hanky and we’d have to peek.

  And these fake accidents weren’t staged only for my siblings and me. As I got older, if I was bringing friends home who hadn’t met my dad before, it wasn’t unusual for me to say upfront, ‘Ignore my dad if he falls down. He thinks he’s Dick Van Dyke.’

  To this day, Dad plays similar pranks on his grandchildren – and anyone else who happens to be passing. He is always falling downstairs, tripping off kerbs and tumbling across furniture. One Christmas holiday in Florida, when Clare, Turner, Scott, Mum, Dad and I were doing some last-minute shopping, we went into a shoe store, where my dad proceeded to fake-fall. Because the people in the store were so genuinely upset – and security happened to be passing at the time and attended to him immediately – he had to spend the rest of the afternoon limping in and out of every shop we visited, because he was embarrassed they might catch him in his joke. Of course, the rest of us had no sympathy for him at all.

  I have to own up to one or two fake falls myself over the years. And having forged a career on television and in theatre, I’ve had access to stunt professionals who have schooled me in some of their ways, which has made me even more skilled in walking into doors, or falling over real and invisible obstacles in the street.

  At the Hub convention in 2008, however, my stunt moves didn’t work out in quite the way I’d planned. Carole and I had retreated to our adjoining hotel rooms to chill before a signing session. I decided to stage a fake tumble across the room when she came to get me for the event.1 When the adjoining door started to open, I launched into action … only my foot caught on the edge of the coffee table’s top; a slab of thick black marble that was perched precariously on a flimsy balsa-wood frame. As the door swung open, I went sprawling across the floor – and the table collapsed behind me.2

  I also recently scared the hell out of a hotel maid in Glasgow, when I tumbled out of the elevator and barely missed her cart full of cleaning supplies. She was truly appalled when Scott, Carole and my brother-in-law, Kevin, walked out of the lift behind me, climbed over my prostrate form,3 and kept heading to their rooms, without pausing for an instant to offer help.

  So, you can see why my mum was not inclined to rush to my rescue when
I fell over, poolside.

  The last time I performed in the US was at the Stackner Theater in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 2002, when my cabaret sold out three nights, and I played to lots of family, friends and fans from the area. When an opportunity came up to perform in the US again, this time in Chicago as part of the Torchsong convention, taking place from 5 to 7 June 2009, I was excited to include my cabaret in the event’s programme as a special treat for my American fans.

  The month of May 2009 had been a crazy, fabulous one for me. I’d performed at seventeen venues to seventeen sold-out audiences on my concert tour in the UK. As June began, I was settling into a couple of relaxing days at my house in Sully, before heading off to Chicago for the convention. My parents were staying with me, and Scott had taken a few days off. We were all lounging by the sea.

  Directly after we moved into our house in Sully, Scott and I had a deck built at the end of the garden. (Scott had also, of course, found his trusty hammer within the first few days, and set about knocking down a few walls.4) The base of the deck is a couple of inches higher than the area around the pool, but the shoreline and the deck line combine to create the illusion when I’m lounging there that I’m floating out over the sea. When the weather is warm – which happens many more days than you might think on the southern coast of Wales – Scott and I regularly eat dinner out there, and cocktails when we have company5 are de rigueur on the deck.

  We were midway through the cocktail hour(s) on this particular night when I picked up my mum’s glass to head inside for a refill of her Harveys Bristol Cream. In an instant, my plans for Torchsong and singing for my American fans went over the edge. I stepped off the deck and went over on my left ankle. I felt something inside snap, and I swear I heard a pop. I went down hard. The pain was instantaneous.

  While I was writhing on the ground, my dogs thought I was playing games and they leapt and bounded all over me. My mum and dad thought I was playing games and they leapt and bounded all over me. Scott continued to watch the sunset.

  ‘Get the dogs away from me,’ I cried.

  My mum finally paid attention. She leaned over me and said, ‘Stop goofing around, John. Just get up.’

  ‘Get the dogs away from me.’

  ‘Lick him! Lick him!’ she chanted.

  ‘Mother, I’m serious!’

  It wasn’t until she looked down and saw how much my ankle was already swelling – to at least twice its size in the few seconds I’d been writhing – that she and my dad believed that this was not a prank. I really was injured.

  ‘It’s those damn flip-flops,’ my mum cried. ‘I don’t understand why you wear them. They’re an accident waiting to happen.’

  My dad and Scott helped me off the ground and out to the car. This move was made doubly difficult because Charlie, Jack and Harris thought the entire event was a game, and kept nipping and grabbing at my injured ankle.

  In considerable pain, I made it to the emergency room, where I learned that I had pulled tendons and torn ligaments in my left ankle. Until the swelling went down, I was told there’d be no flying, and for four weeks I was permitted only limited movement on crutches, with my ankle encased in what I called a ‘Beckham boot’ cast.

  When we got home from the ER, my mum felt so bad that she had not believed me right away that she immediately headed into the kitchen and made a pot of my favourite home-made chicken soup. After I’d eaten a couple of bowlfuls, she rubbed my feet until the pain medication kicked in and I fell asleep.6

  A month later, a friend’s young son was explaining to someone what had happened to me. He said, ‘Poor John! He fell off his deck and tore all the testicles on his ankle.’

  Now that would have really hurt.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ‘MR SATURDAY NIGHT’

  ★

  ‘All my life I’ve had one dream: to achieve my many goals.’

  Homer Simpson, The Simpsons

  Five tips from Tonight’s the Night

  1 Gaffer tape holds up (and keeps down) anything.

  2 Everyone loves you when you bring chocolate biscuits

  (M&S Rounds especially).

  3 Hold a little back during a rehearsal and the show will pop.

  4 Don’t edit me while I’m trying something new

  (wait until the second time it doesn’t work).

  5 A successful variety show must have a personality

  (and not only mine).

  Saturday night was sweetie night in our house, especially when we still lived in Scotland and my gran, Murn, and her sister, my Auntie Jeannie, would come over to babysit. Carole, Andrew and I picked our favourites from their sweetie stash – making certain not to touch Murn’s Fry’s Chocolate Cream – and then we’d coorie on the couch and watch Cilla Black, Lulu, Lena Zavaroni,1 Opportunity Knocks or anything with Bruce Forsyth. My childhood Saturday nights had magic and, can I say, a sweetness to them that continued when my family emigrated to the US.2

  On special occasions, Murn brought a box of Cadbury’s Milk Tray chocolates with her. We’d all tuck in excitedly, grabbing our favourites – the caramels and the creams – but we were notorious for nibbling the others first. We’d taste all of them, and then we’d return to the box the bitten sweeties we didn’t like.3 Did we ever think of reading the descriptions that came in the box? Puhleeze. For the most part, Barrowmans don’t read directions of any kind. Putting together a table from IKEA? We use only our wits, a screwdriver, and a lot of swearing.

  I’d pick a chocolate and if it was a flavour I didn’t like – such as coffee – or something with a hard crunchy centre, I’d bite it to check it really was as yucky as I’d imagined, and then I’d put it back in the box, maybe turning it over so the nibbled bit couldn’t be seen immediately. We all did this. I’m not sure what we were thinking – that maybe the next time someone opened the box, they’d say, ‘Oh, thank God someone already bit into this sweet because now I can see that it’s one I’d like to eat.’

  Instead, what would happen is that my mum would open the box to have a chocolate with her coffee the following afternoon or evening, and the box would look like it had been raided by a team of chocoholic mice. She’d eat one anyway, because no one wastes whisky or chocolate in our house. You can see now why ‘life is a box of chocolates’ is not a metaphor I like – because what on earth does it mean if our box of chocolates was always partially regurgitated and the centres were sucked out?

  The BBC announced that it had commissioned the pilot of Tonight’s the Night the week after the ‘Ballgate’ incident. I put ‘my boys’ behind me4 and went to work on one of my lifelong career dreams: hosting my own Saturday-night variety show.

  The BBC and I began talking two years prior to the actual commissioning announcement about the possibility of me having my own show on prime-time Saturday night. The Kids Are All Right had been a huge success, but the BBC wanted me to do something different: something bigger, with more variety.

  A show with all those components was a very tantalizing prospect, and, best of all, it would give me the opportunity to be involved behind the scenes as well as in front of the camera. Gavin and I established Barrowman Barker Productions (BBP) in 2008 so that we’d have more creative input into whatever I do, and so that we could get involved in aspects of the entertainment business where I’m not necessarily a performer. Forming BBP made perfect sense at this point in my career because it united my performing side with my creative side.

  During all my years in theatre, I was always bothered by the dichotomy that many producers perpetuated between their talent (that would be me and the other actors) and themselves, sometimes forgetting that without the performers, they could produce themselves right into the dole queue. Tonight’s the Night was not only the unveiling of my Saturday-night entertainment show, it also marked my attempt to unify these two important sides of the entertainment business with Barrowman and Barker’s debut as producers.

  Setting up BBP was in itself a new and exciting chall
enge. As well as attending hours of legal meetings, Gavin and I also created the company’s logo. The image we decided on has a retro feel to it, with an element of the ‘boy’ in it – without being too gay. It’s a man pushing a wheelbarrow with a dog sitting inside it.5 We designed the logo in such a way that if we wanted to make beer mats or T-shirts for gifts,6 the logo would work well.

  A major benefit of this new development in my career, however, was that it added yet another string to my bow. I hate being pigeonholed – as an actor, singer, ‘the talent’, whatever. Sometimes producers, and even network heads, want to put me in a nice neat performing niche, but I refuse to go. This is one of the reasons I don’t answer a question that’s often put to me – ‘Which do you prefer: singing or acting; theatre or telly?’ – in the way the asker may want.

  My response is always: ‘I’m an entertainer. I love all of them.’

  As a case in point, one of the most difficult decisions I’ve ever faced as an entertainer was having to make the choice between television and theatre when, a couple of months after Cameron’s rant at me during I’d Do Anything, he offered me one of the biggest deals in the West End: the lead in Barnum. Oh, man, I really wanted to do it.

  Barnum would have been a great musical to showcase my voice and my talents, what with its unique blend of music, comedy, drama and the razzle-dazzle of the circus. The Cy Coleman and Michael Stewart musical first opened on Broadway in 1980, and in the West End the next year. The plot follows the life of the innovative entrepreneur and outspoken entertainer P. T. Barnum, and his ‘Greatest Show on Earth’ as it travels from city to city.

  Cameron had a lot of terrific ideas about making his revival more modern and accessible to today’s theatre audiences. His production would be more in the style of Cirque du Soleil, with acrobats and high wires, rather than three rings with lions and tigers and bears.7 What would have been really brilliant about playing Barnum was that I would have gone to circus school in Amsterdam, to learn the ins and outs of being a Big Top leader. Can you imagine me on a high wire? Doing a double backflip? In a ring with a whip?8