* Worzel Gummidge is a children’s television scarecrow who comes to life. A deeply anarchic character who changes his head depending on his mood, and is much too scary to be on kids’ television. He has mice living in his chest, he’s obsessed with cake and he’s forever trying to seduce a shop mannequin called Aunt Sally, with whom he is in love. Th e whole
show is macabre, unsettling and inappropriate.
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who I was having sex with. It was a right lot of nonsense going on. I was pursuing hanky-panky like it was a job, like there was a league table that I had to be at the summit of. And as I explained how I toiled each day with the diligence of Bobby Moore and the grit of Julian Dicks, humming slave songs to keep my spirits up, Travis reassured me that I was just the sort of person who needed KeyStone’s help.*
The clinic, when we found it, was in the middle of this square in some quiet Philadelphia suburb. The house looked like a normal American family home does—you know, where they’ve got the sloping roof to the porch bit and gardens around it, a bit like where the Waltons lived, all pastoral and sweet, but with John-Boy chained up in the mop cupboard scrabbling around trying to fiddle with his goolies through a mask of tears. Over the road there was a church: a modern gray building, which constantly played a recording of church bells. Strange it was. Why no proper bells? I never went in but I bet it was a robot church for androids, where the Bible was in binary and their Jesus had laser eyes and metal claws.
I was greeted on the steps of the clinic by one of the counselors. I can’t remember her name, but she was wearing a t-shirt with frogs on. It turned out she was obsessed with ’em, and when I asked her why she said, “When I was a kid, there was a pond near my house which all the frogs would try to get back to, and they’d get killed crossing over the road, so I used to try and help them across.”
“Fucking hell,” I thought. “D’ya wanna have a clearer analogy
* Julian Dicks and Bobby Moore are West Ham footballers. Dicks was a real hard man defender, beloved by the fans for his spirit and commitment. He played in the early to mid-
’90s. Moore is regarded by many as the greatest ever English footballer. He captained England to our only World Cup win, in the ’60s, and he played with class, grace and finesse.
He is a sporting saint, an untouchable.
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etched on your t-shirt? How troublingly apposite that your mission in life should now be to save people from destruction as they pursue their natural instinct to spawn.”
At this point, the frog lady introduced me to a subdued and pinch-faced individual. “Arthur will show you around,” she said cheerfully. “He’s gonna be your roommate.” (In the film, Arthur would be played by Rick Moranis or William H. Macy.) Arthur showed me round the kitchen with its horrible meaty American meals. Meals which I, as a vegetarian, couldn’t eat, so I would have to live on fruit for the whole month, like a little ape.
One by one, I began to meet more of my fellow clients, or patients, or inmates, or perverts—whatever you want to call them, including an intimidating Puerto Rican cove who looked like a hybrid of Colin Farrell’s “Bullseye” character from the fi lm Daredev il and Bill Sykes’s dog in Oliver Twist (whose name was also “Bullseye,” strangely enough), who kept calling me
“London”—“Hey, London!”
I resented being called “London.” There are eight million people living in London, and my identity, I hope, is quite specific. He addressed me the same way he would’ve Ken Living-stone or Danny Baker—God knows what they’d be doing there.
I’m not even from London; I’m from Essex. (Though I suppose
“Essex” would have been even less appropriate—it has, after all, got the three letters “s-e-x” in it and that’s what caused all this bother.)
This demeaning and geo graphically inaccurate mode of address was just one aspect of what soon began to seem like a concerted campaign to dismantle every element of my persona.
It was not just my copy of the Guardian that had been confiscated on my arrival, but also my Richard Pryor CDs and my William Burroughs novel. And I’d not been at KeyStone long before my attire began to attract complaints. Apparently, the 12
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way my excess belt hung in front of my crotch was confusing and enticing to the pervert fraternity as it suggested a phallus.
So they censored me. I was like Elvis “the Pelvis” Presley on Ed Sullivan, I tells ya, punished for the crime of being sexy. (Him on the telly, me in a dingy sex center . . . any analogy will break down under scrutiny.)
As the days went on, I started to learn why other people were in there. I quickly found out that Arthur was a pedophile who had eloped with his thirteen-year- old foster daughter. If he went back to Arizona to face the charges, he’d be in line for either lifetime imprisonment or execution. Th is revelation
came as a bit of a blow and made me question the rationale of the whole dashed trip. “Okay,” I thought, “I’ve a bit of an eye for the ladies, now as a kind of punishment I’m rooming with a pedophile, is that gonna be helpful?” Like them lads that get sent down for nicking a car radio and end up sharing a cell with a diligent, bank robber mentor who schools them in criminality. I went down to the office and started making frantic phone calls home, saying, “Get me out of this place.” If I’d been less terrified I might’ve paused to dream up a new reality show format, I’m a Celebrity Get Me out of This Demented Sex Center, where minor faces off the box are forced to doss down with, say, Peter Sutcliffe for the amusement of an apathetic nation.
John was on holiday—he’d gone skiing or something—so I was trying in vain to get through to other people and tell them I was reluctant to share a room with this pedophile chap. No one I spoke to was prepared to sanction my departure so, out of fear, desperation and a kind of morbid curiosity, I decided to stay.
It’s extraordinary how quickly you get institutionalized in that kind of environment. You start wearing, not pajamas exactly, as you do get dressed, but certainly indoorsy sorts of 13
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clothes. They have meetings every morning and afternoon. Th e
rituals are astonishing. You have to go round the room introducing yourself—“Hello, I’m Russell”—and then admitting to your recent transgressions. These aren’t really wrongdoings as we would normally understand them, more everyday actions which have developed a sexual component.
“I had an erotic thought.” Or “I did some eroticized humor earlier today.” (I liked the phrase “eroticized humor” very much—it seemed like such a perfect description of what I do for a living, that a few months later I made it the title of a live show which I took to the Edinburgh Festival.) Or “I experienced eroticized rage.” Then you’d round the whole thing off by saying, “My goal for today is to get through the KeyStone experience and just live it as best I can.”
People began to customize this closing declaration, I suppose as a way of emphasizing their own particular characters. But far from lessening the institutional feel of the whole proceedings, it kind of exacerbated it. Soon enough, each person seemed to have their own slogan: “Hello, I’m Stuart, and I’m gonna swim like a KeyStone dolphin.” These customized slogans would often be drawn from the totemic cuddly toy that we were each obliged to select from the mantelpiece. I had a camel. He was forced upon me and I loathed and resented him. Or someone else would say, “I’m gonna ride the KeyStone Express,” and all the others would make supportive train noises—“Wooh! Wooh!”
And I’d be sat there in the middle thinking, “Oh great, I’m in a nut house.”
I’ve never felt more En glish in my life than when I was sat in that American cliché swap shop. They’d say, “I hear your pain, it’s good that you shared.” And I’d be thinking “Oh do fuck off. For Christ’s sake, someone put EastEnders on the fucking 14
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telly and get me a glass of Beefe
ater gin and a toasted crumpet.”*
In that situation, alienated from my normal surroundings, I realized that the outer surface of what I thought was my unique, individual identity was just a set of routines. We all have an essential self, but if you spend every day chopping up meat on a slab, and selling it by the pound, soon you’ll find you’ve become a butcher. And if you don’t want to become a butcher (and why would you?), you’re going to have to cut right through to the bare bones of your own character in the hope of finding out who you really are. Which bloody hurts. V
* EastEnders is a drab soap opera set in the East End of London. It concerns the humdrum lives of a group of working-class families and is largely defined by its glumness and ongoing popularity. The show covers contemporary issues, such as AIDS, abortion and rape.
It’s on in the early evening and is consumed as family entertainment. It is an interesting indication of our national identity that we happily consume such saddening fare, preferring depressing realism to Technicolor fantasy.
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Umbilical Noose
Now for the old formative years, which traditionally in autobiographies are a bit boring—not in this one, however. My childhood is so jam-packed with melodrama and sentimentality (described as “the unearned emotion”) that you’ll doubtless use these very pages to mop up your abundant tears.
Once, for a TV program—which has been my motivation and justification for a good many personal atrocities—I had regression therapy, where a therapist hypno-regresses you back to past lives you didn’t have. In the car there my mate Matt Morgan (writing partner, Radio 2 cohost, companion and creative soul mate) kept murmuring facts about Anne Frank at a subtle, almost sub-liminal volume in the vain hope that I’d spend my session complaining about Nazis in the stairwell. As it transpired, my past lives all coincided with historical periods covered by Blackadder.
“I’m in a medieval courtyard, I’m beating up that idiot Baldrick, I can hear the theme tune from Blackadder . . .” “I’m in Regency London at the court of the glutinous Prince George—played by Hugh Laurie—and I can hear the theme tune to . . . Blackadder . . .
Christ, I’d better run, I think that’s the SS at the door!”*
* Blackadder is a sitcom in which the protagonist, Edmund Blackadder, exists in four different historical periods across four seasons. In Season Two, he was a courtier and 16
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Before the past lives were accessed, I had to be regressed through my childhood. As I rendered the bleak, joyless depiction of my infancy, the therapist remarked, “Can you not see anything positive?” “No,” was my response. “This is depressing—let’s just fast-forward to Blackadder Goes Forth, not the last episode though.”
So that’s what you’ve let yourself in for. Fortunately, both for you and me, I grew up to become a comedian and will make it as jolly as possible. In the words of Morrissey—“I can smile about it now, but at the time it was terrible.”
I suppose you want to know how it was that I came to be on this dirty little circle we call “world?” Well, I was born at midnight on 4 June 1975. My parents, Barbara and Ron, had fought fiercely throughout the pregnancy. There was one incident which Alf Garnett creator Johnny Speight would have rejected as absurdly chauvinistic—“People will lose sympathy for Alf,”
he might have told himself, “don’t put that in”—where my father, in a bizarre reversal of the dynamic one would expect, made my heavily pregnant mother push his broken- down van, while he steered and swore.*
It was a rapid yet complicated birth. I was born with my mouth open, and my umbilical cord wrapped around my throat, as if I was thinking, “Well, if this is all there is, I’m off . Check please.”
suitor of Elizabeth I. It was a brilliant show, which revolved around the relationship between the witty and sardonic Edmund and his idiot sidekick Baldrick. Evidently I enjoyed this period comedy so much that, when regressed, I’d co- opted it as a former life.
* Alf Garnett is a sitcom character who is a vitriolic, chauvinist, racist, and was in-tended to be ironic, but became beloved by the very people he was parodying. He called his wife a stupid cow, disgracefully abused his black, gay social worker and adored West Ham.
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My parents separated when I was about six months old. My mother, who had been told she could never have children, adored me and was doting and protective. My father, himself fatherless (his own dad had died when he was seven), was a sporadic presence, affording me cyclonic visits at the weekends. He would invariably arrive late, to find me ready and waiting for him, all dressed up and mummified in my duffel coat—toddlers can’t move properly in winter coats, they’re like little trussed-up Hannibal Lecters scanning the world with their eyes . . . Then a huge argument would ensue, which would generally end with both my mother and myself in tears.
Some of my earliest recollections are of seeing Dad on Saturdays—him leaving me watching the TV at his flat in Brentwood, while he read the papers or diddled birds in the room next door. I would mainly watch comedy videos, Elvis films and porn. Another very early memory is of our dog Sam being put down. I was only about two or three at the time, but I loved that dog. I remember him not wanting to get into the car to be taken to the vet’s, and me saying through a mist of tears,
“Come on, Mum, let’s go down the pub.”
My very first utterance in life was not a single word, but a sentence. It was, “Don’t do that.” Why is that the first thing I said?
What kind of infancy was I having that before I learned “mum,”
or “dad,” I learned, “Could you stop? Whatever it is that’s going on, just pack it in . . .” On reflection, it was probably because I’d just been told not to do something that I made this my debut proclamation, rather than because I had the pressing need to bring some unpleasant incident to a conclusion. More normal words like “bird,” “clock” and “mum” did follow fairly soon after, and ’tis good that I’ve got a mum who remembers all them things.
In fact, my childhood can’t have been that bad if someone loved me enough to document my fi rst words.
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That person—my mum—still lives in the house I grew up in, in the small town of Grays in Essex, on the northern side of the Th
ames estuary.
I trained, as I suppose all children do, to practice seduction and manipulation on my mother, but the particular nature of our circumstances inclined me to focus on this strand of my development to the exclusion of all others—to the extent that I simply didn’t feel equipped for other activities or human relationships. First I hated playschool, then I hated infant school—just as I’ve subsequently hated every institution that I’ve ever been forced to try and fit into.
The outside world was fearsome. But I was safe with my mum, and at least once—when I was really young—raised the possibility of matrimony. I remember saying to her, “Why don’t we just get married? That seems like a sensible solution to all this fuss and bother.” I hadn’t foreseen the diffi culties that could
subsequently arise with such an arrangement. Although it’s not that long ago, there was much more stigma attached to being a single-parent family when I was growing up than there is now.
My friends’ parents were all still married, and the fact that my mum and dad were divorced was regarded quite sympatheti-cally at school.
My mum had lots of female friends, so I had a kind of matriarchal upbringing—surrounded by women. As well as my dad’s sisters, Janet and Joan, who gave me picture books which I would later get extra use out of by changing the words to make them offensive and rude, there were lots of other aunties who were not actually blood relations. There was Auntie Brenda—who drove my mum to the hospital to have me (because my mum was out walking the dog when I decided to get all nice and born)—and Auntie Pat. She used to give me books as well.
Then there was Auntie Jo
sie, the woman from over the way.
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My mum’s still friends with her now. In my early childhood Josie loomed large. She was “brassy.” There was one occasion as a small child when I heard my mum on the phone to her. Josie’s hot water had stopped working and she asked if she could come and have a bath at our house. Knowing that Josie was on her way over, I quickly decamped to the bathroom, taking with me as many of my toys as I could get my hands on. “Oh, Russell’s in there,” my mum warned her. “Don’t worry, I don’t mind,” she replied, “he’s only a little boy.”
“Ha, ha, ha, you fools!” I exulted privately. I knew exactly what I was doing. As a result of my subterfuge, Josie was there in the bath, naked, and I was on the fl oor, innocently playing with cars (and other things I weren’t even that interested in), all the time watching her wash her glorious breasts. “That’s it,” I thought,
“keep washing; after all, I’m only a little boy. What do I know of the pleasures of the fl esh?” I really was quite manipulative, even at that early age. I was already a weary connoisseur of my dad’s pornography and had begun to develop my almost supernatural ability for guessing women’s bra sizes. Just the statistics alone turn me on a bit. 34G. Cor. 36F. Blimey. It’s only a number and a letter but it thrills me. That’s why I could never play the game Battleship. “Thirty-two C—I’ve sunk your battleship.” You may have sunk my battleship but you’ve also decorated my pants.
As a result of this matriarchal upbringing, I have been be-queathed a kind of hotline to capable, working-class women of a certain age. I am truly comfortable in their company. Th at’s
probably why all the women I have surrounded myself with in recent years—Lynne, my housekeeper, Sharon who buys my clothes, and Nicola who does my makeup—all have the same accent. The only exception is Leila, my yoga teacher, who is American, but she’s like the others in that she’s a very strong woman—warm and spiritual.
My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up Page 2
