My friend Karl Theobald had wisely advised me to be wary of those who give me approval when I’m in a self-destructive mode. This is how he characterized the ensuing dynamic: “Oh yeah, look at him go. Wow! He’s like a runaway train. Go on Russell, wooh! Tear it up. He’s wild; he’s dangerous! He’s un-stoppable! . . . He’s done what? Sorry, Russell, you’re fired.”
And so to the 2002 Baby Cow production Cruise of the Gods, starring Rob Brydon, David Walliams, Steve Coogan and me—in a much, much, much, much smaller role, but nonetheless present on the boat throughout the trip.
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for three weeks, visiting Greek islands and the Turkish port of Istanbul. I was in no fucking state to be going anywhere on my own, but it was a great job and an amazing opportunity. Coogan was huge at that time, Rob Brydon wasn’t doing badly either and while David was not that famous yet—he’d done Rock Profile on the telly—I was really looking forward to working with him.
The story concerned a TV science-fiction convention, held on a cruise ship, where obsessive fans of a Star Trek–type show would get to meet the heroes of the program they had watched in its heyday, ten to fifteen years before. The central theme was the interaction between these aged and jaded stars. I can’t remember the exact intricacies of the plot; I didn’t read the script.
But it should not be assumed that I embarked on this cruise ship with a bad attitude: quite the reverse. I put myself through a mild heroin withdrawal before going on board (falling back on whiskey and grass), as I thought it would be stupid to take hard drugs on the boat. I said to Martino, who demonstrated his limitless compassion by remaining my friend after the carnage of RE:Brand, “I don’t want to get in any trouble on this job. I want to be known as the bookish actor who just kept himself to himself.”
Martino encouraged this. “That is a good ambition to have, Russell. If you can achieve it, you will have done well.” So off I went with that goal in mind. Within a week, I had been fired and sent home in disgrace.
Part of the problem was that I was so busy congratulating myself on not doing hard drugs that I just got pissed and stoned all the time instead, but that was not all there was to it. Some of the details of what happened on that boat are sketchy, but one thing I do remember is that the cruise ship wasn’t exclusively 268
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for the use of the production. There were passengers on that ship, and some of them had daughters, with whom I could pursue romantic entanglements.
Not a “daughter” in a terrifying way. She was eighteen—old enough by two long years to have sex with. I was safely above the legal age and under my drug-brella—the device that protects me from all condemnation. Beneath its shelter I cannot be damned, nor can judgments affect me; they are deflected like the rain, as I skip off into the decadent night. One drunken evening up on the deck, off the coast of some bejeweled isle, I was trying to make the daughter love me by shouting into the Aegean night, “Let’s kiss, with the moon as our witness and the ocean as our priest.” She was against it, saying things like “I hardly know you” and “you’re drunk.”
A quest such as this was beyond the realm that language could conquer: the daughter was German. I was prepared. I leaped over the railings that ringed the boat, and I hung off the edge, chival-rously proclaiming, “This is how badly I want you!,” dangling over the sea, switching hands and doing it one-handedly—just dicking around, really. This was one of the most unsuccessful seduction strategies that I have ever employed. The daughter started crying. “Sorry about that,” I said, getting back on deck. “A kiss may cheer you up.” It did a bit, but not enough for sex to happen.
I pointed out some stars, did a bit of Shelley and Coleridge, Th e
Ancient Mariner, but there was definitely to be no sex so I cleared off .
Later that night, there was a cabaret. It was a drab aff air.
There were a few people scattered around the room. And Posei-don, saddened by my earlier plight, provided dancers. I lured one back to my cabin by saying things to her. The quickness of it was brilliant, actually. One minute she was on the stage, the 269
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next minute I was talking to her, and then we were having sex.
She was one of those rare women who recognized that life is finite and saw orgasms as a wonderful distraction.
A few stolen moments from this encounter linger in my memory—the hint of a leotard, the glint of a blue eye, the smell of her hair, the touch of a woman, momentarily comforting me amid all the confusion that swirled around me. I got sad at sea and missed my drugs and comforts—other drugs. Sure I’d brought some drugs, but not proper ones that smash down on thoughts like Thor. I felt shy with the others, Rob, Dave and James Cordon, out of The History Boys. Coogan was off somewhere, I didn’t meet him till years later.
It’s not that the professionals weren’t interested in talking to me. Rob Brydon seemed fascinated by me and said, “It wouldn’t surprise me, Russell, if you took to the air and flew away off the back of this ship [sadly, this was a pretty accurate prophesy of what did happen] . . . You’re like Peter Pan,” he enthused.
“You’re gonna be a massive star.” Although I secretly believed this, and yearned for it to happen, it didn’t seem very likely at the time, ’cos I was in a right state.
The idea that I would one day share a yoga class with David Walliams would have appeared even more improbable at this juncture. I didn’t particularly like David at first (and he later revealed that he fucking hated me). He had a certain charm, but there was inevitably something of a clash between his eff ete head-boy and my subversive truant.
I found the idea of making conversation with them nerve-wracking. Yet there was Rob, who’s such a socially skillful man, constantly playing the piano and bursting into his impeccable Tom Jones, and Walliams with his high-camp Kenneth Williams routine. Everyone just seemed so at ease and comfortable, 270
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and I didn’t know what to do with myself. So when we got to Istanbul, I said, “I’m gonna go out tonight.”
The boat was in the harbor, and when the suggestion was made at about eight in the evening, everyone agreed to come—I remember Rob and Walliams saying, “Let’s all go.” By the time it got to midnight, of course, they’d all changed their minds.
(People do this a lot. They don’t seem to realize that the future is just like now, but in a little while, so they say they’re going to do things in anticipation of some kind of seismic shift in their worldview that never actually materializes. But everything’s not going to be made of leather, the world won’t stink of sherbet.
Tomorrow is not some mythical kingdom where you’ll grow butterfly wings and be able to talk to the animals—you’ll basically feel pretty much the same way you do at the moment.) At midnight, I swaggered drunkenly down the gangplank and got into a cab, on my own. “Alright, mate,” I said to the cab driver,
“I’m looking for birds.” He was Turkish, so he didn’t understand; he looked at me in the rearview mirror, perplexed. I did the internationally recognized mime for a woman—the silhouette of a Coke bottle, or Marilyn Monroe, or an hourglass. He said “Ah, lay-dees!” I went “Yeah!” And off we sped. (In my imagination, smoke flew out of the back of the taxi, and there was a wheel spin and a skid noise as well.)
We made our way at breakneck speed through the streets of Istanbul, and eventually arrived outside a brothel—miles away from the boat, so I was already thinking through my drunkenness “this is a bit mad.” Outside this place was what I can only describe as a snaggletoothed crone. In fact, if you’re ever looking to use a “snaggletoothed crone” in a film, and this one turns up to audition, book her. Don’t go, “No, there might be a better one round the corner,” because there won’t be.
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he was wearing a black shawl over her head, which she pulled in at the chin with one hand, while the other stretched out begging. She had two or three teeth, and one of her eyes was all milky and upward, while the other stared at you. She was looking for a tip for not doing anything, which I suppose is what begging is.
That brothel was more of a lap-dancing club really, but sex was never far away. It was like the set of an old-fashioned Saturday night ITV game show—You Bet, or maybe Family Fortunes—but produced on a bud get of about thirty-fi ve quid. Th ere were
four or five women in C&A frocks, hobbling about on this floor that would light up like in the “Billie Jean” video, but not so well coordinated.*
I didn’t really fancy any of them, and the atmosphere was quite depressing. There were a lot of burly great Turkish men, sat around in drab suits, the same way those who operated beyond the fringes of legality in London in the old days would dress in suits to lacquer over the criminality. I sat down in the corner, and a bloke came over with some suspicious looking bar snacks. “See anything you like?” he asked. “No, not really,”
came my response.
At this point, he introduced himself—I’ve still got him in one of my phones somewhere—I think he was called Ishmael or Isimir or something like that. “Why don’t you like these women that we’ve got here?” he demanded, with a grandiose sweep of the arm across his dreary kingdom, gesturing toward the broken-faced marionette women doing a stringless dance of death on the Billie- Jean floor. “They’re just not my cup of tea,” I maintained. When he asked what I was after I replied, “Oh, probably
* C&A is a now-disbanded department store. It was a bit rubbish and if you got your clothes there, people would take the piss out of you at school.
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someone in their twenties, with massive boobs,” and he said inevitably—“Come with me, I have the perfect thing.”
She was not a thing but a person, with feelings, but there are two ways this tale can be told. The first is from the perspective of someone who is a connoisseur of sex in general but also prostitution. The second is through the eyes of a man who has since awoken from the amoral dream of commodifi ed sex.
You’ll probably enjoy the whole thing more if I take the former option, so I shall write from the perspective of a man who is unaware that the suffragette movement ever happened. I shall adopt the stance of a man who, if he’d seen Emily Pankhurst chained to some railings, would probably have thought, “Hello, she looks vulnerable—get your bloomers off .”
So Ishmael made a phone call, and the girl then arrived at the club, announcing herself with some ridiculous name for a Turkish woman: Bev. The issue of payment was raised. He said 800 euros or something; it was quite a lot and I didn’t have enough cash on me. I don’t know much about exchange rates and global finances; except for a fierce pride in the strength of the pound—COME ON YOU POUND!—I have no interest in it, and suspect the whole silly business is a ploy to keep us bewitched by numbers.
Ishmael looked at my Solo card—this preposterous debit card I had that only seemed to work inside the confines of my house—and said, “Well, this is problem.”
Me, Ishmael and this girl—who looked alright, actually—set off through the streets of Istanbul in search of a cash point.
Eventually, I managed to get the money out. We arrived at the hotel and I discreetly handed over my 800 euros to Ishmael (who paid the guy an hour’s fee—they obviously had an arrangement). Then he slipped off, and me and Bev went upstairs.
As we were going up to the room, she kept taking calls on her 273
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mobile. When we got there, I suggested she undress, and she came back from the bathroom completely naked, meaning I missed the Christmas moments of bra and knicker removal, so I asked her if she could put her underwear back on, and she looked at me like I’d asked her to plow a fi eld. Her phone kept ringing every couple of minutes. She just carried on living her life, without really acknowledging that she was working as a prostitute.
“Look,” I said, and bear in mind that a substantial sum of money has been paid, “can I have some oral sex on my privates please?” And she said, “Yuk! I don’t do that.”
I tried to be resourceful, racking my brain for things I’d done or even read about. “Felching?” “Bagpiping?” “Donkeybiting?”
There was barely anything she would do. And mine were pretty standard requirements. Frankly, this girl was a sorry, fair-weather excuse for a prostitute.
Eventually she agreed to have sex, but a kind of weary, half-hearted, semi-erect, bored, disappointing bit of sex, for which I’d paid a lot of money. During this act of tawdry friction her phone rang again.
“Could you turn that phone off?” I asked. “I can’t relax.” She took the call. I began to wish I hadn’t left the boat. “Brydon’s probably doing ‘Delilah’ by now,” I mused, which actually helped my erection.
Another twenty seconds of boring rubbish goes past, then the phone rings again, and I, and this is the worst act of misogyny I’ve committed since the spitting debacle, took the phone out of her hand and threw it at the wall. Slow motion. It hits the wall and smashes, and she looks at me, the sex stops, and we separate.
Silence. Then I say, realizing my position is compromised, “For fuck’s sake, you kept answering the phone.” And she looks at me 274
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again, suddenly mortified, and the scene becomes real and awful, and she just starts crying.
And now we’re two human beings in a room on earth. Our previous roles, a prostitute, and customer, a tourist, a drunk—that’s all gone now; the shards of that illusion lie shattered amid the pieces of her phone. We’re just people, one of whom has behaved atrociously toward the other. I apologize: “Look, I’m really sorry, I didn’t mean to do that, but the phone kept ringing, and I was frustrated.” And she just says, “It’s OK, I’m going to go now.”
She went back into the bathroom and started getting dressed and came out wearing her underwear, and I thought, “Bloody hell she looks nice. I wonder if there’s anything I could say to . . .”
But there isn’t. As we picked up the bits of her phone, this atmosphere of faint possibility dissipated all too quickly, and by the time we were going downstairs I was thinking, “This is not looking good—I’m going to have to walk past reception in a minute, five paces behind a crying prostitute.”
We both head out into the street, and she goes her way and I go mine. Momentarily I feel full of pity and regret for myself and the poor girl stranded in the world. I fight back compassionate tears when I think of her situation: young, beautiful, perhaps in love; maybe it was her boyfriend on the phone. Or her mother; she does have a mother. I think of my own mother and the times I’ve let her down and am rinsed with pain at the thought of the son I could’ve been, the son she deserved.
Then I decided to go back to that brothel and get my fucking money back. Tension, it gets a bit loud and argumentative with Ishmael, all those Turkish blokes in suits start gathering round and I’m thinking, “Fucking hell, I’m on my own here.” But at this point I call upon the—soon to be patented—“Oh yeah, sexy Turkish boys, you want me to tap my cock on your curly 275
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slipper” technique, and this, quite miraculously, secures me a fifty percent rebate.
Honor satisfied, I got into a cab and went back to the boat, and went to bed, then woke up terrified in the middle of what was left of the night, just thinking, “You did that thing: you smashed the prostitute’s phone, you risked getting into that fight at the brothel—what if they find out? You’re meant to be here doing this fucking job, you idiot. These are not the actions of a quiet bookish man who keeps himself to himself . . . OK, well you seem to have got away with it. Just don’t do it again.”
The next day, I woke up feeling so bad and guilty about the whole thing
that the only option was to get drunk and pick up where I’d left off. Athens was our next stop, and we disembarked.
But I soon got bored in the hotel. Walliams was always in the pool (and this was before he became the world’s best swimmer—swimming himself away from his presumed homosexuality).
As luck would have it, there was a lap-dancing club just down the road. I didn’t have loads of money, so I walked. Once you got inside, it was an amazing place—a despicable sexist hell, really. Architecturally, it had the feel of a World of Leather or PC
World—there was a vast low ceiling, but the place was full of swirling smoke and dense music and cheap liquor. I got myself properly pissed (I’d always have a bottle of spirits that I’d carry about with me and not so surreptitiously swig from).
You know those kind of laser key rings that shine a red dot?
The men that worked there had those. You’d identify a girl who you’d like to do a lap dance for you, and the male staff would shine that pen into their face and eyes—really startle them—and then lead them to you. If they were stood in the northwest quadrant of that giant warehouse of debauchery and you were in the southeast, they’d have to go, “Ooh, I’m being shined at”
and then trace the laser back toward you.
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A more misogynistic den of iniquity it would be hard to conceive of. But in one respect this establishment was special. It turns out that the “no touching” rule that applies in most British lap-dancing clubs does not apply in Athens.
This reckless deregulation enabled me to lose my mind in there with those women; I was wanking and drinking and touching, it was disgusting. I came about three times in there. Mental.
My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up Page 24
