The evening rendered by the brush of Hieronymus Bosch.
Of course, I went back straight away and told the others—“You won’t believe this fucking joint, you’ve got to get down there.”
That’s why I got in trouble really—because I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. I kept telling everyone all the terrible stuff I’d done, in the hope of entertaining people and making them laugh (as a way of compensating for my pitiful inadequacies in more conventional arenas of social interaction).
Walliams refused to go back there with me, but I jostled Rob Brydon and a few of the others into giving it a go. None of them liked it, though—they all went home straight away. Everyone was nice, that was the problem, really. I was living a diff erent lifestyle—I was a petty criminal, drug user, who was hardened to the minor skirmishes such misdemeanors invariably entail.
I went back to the hotel with them to get some more money, and that was the moment Coogan finally arrived. I felt a frisson, seeing him go into the hotel. And then I made my way back to the retail park of debauchery for my third and final visit.
I’d gone in there hoping to get one of the girls I’d had before, but this time she didn’t want me to touch her. I said in that case I didn’t want a lap dance, and she said I’d still have to pay, and went off and got some management bloke. I thought, “Oh, here we go.” So off I went out of the club’s main entrance. Th ere were
two big geezers and one tiny bloke on the door. “Night gents,” I said and walked up the road toward the hotel.
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I’d gone about a hundred yards when I heard a full-throated cry of rage coming up behind me. I think it was “WAAAN-KEEEER!” I turned round—even though I’ve learned in this life that if you ever hear anything like “Oi!” or “Wanker!” the best thing to do is keep going—run if anything—’cos it’s never going to be good news, is it?
No one ever goes “Wanker! You may already have won a million pounds in our cash prize draw.” Or “Wanker—would you like to go out with my sister?” It’s always “Wanker . . .” SMACK!
In this case, when I turned round it was the little one of the doormen who was racing toward me. He punched me in the mouth, really hard.
A brief tussle followed. He was a knotted, sinewy little man, beaten hard by ultraviolet rays—a kind of sun-dried Greek feller. My jaw were put out of alignment by the blow—it was uncomfortable for ages afterward. I staggered back to the hotel and—this is how out of control I was at the time, I was literally fucking sex-mad—I think I had a wank.
Next day, I went upstairs. Walliams was in the swimming pool on the roof again. There he was, swimming about again, like a pristine amphibian. It was funny, because it did strike me at the time that he could be a proper swimmer. I thought “there he is, in his white trunks.”
At this moment, one of the production staff interrupted my Walliams-based reverie by asking if he could have a word with me. “Alright,” he said, “we’re giving you a week’s shore leave, better go and get your stuff together.” I went back to my room and packed my stuff up with a faint suspicion that perhaps this was not good. But when you live in the psychological space that I did, life is not about confronting reality, it’s about ignoring it.
So when someone says, “You’re getting a week’s shore leave,”
you don’t think, “Hang on a minute, I’m not a sailor,” you just 278
Call Me Ishmael. Or Isimir. Or Something . . .
go, “Oh alright.” I got a lift to Athens airport off Brendan Coogan—Steve Coogan’s brother, who was also working on the production. What was slightly tragic in retrospect was me going, “Do you want me to bring any newspapers or baked beans or En glish things when I come back?” He was like, “No, that’s alright mate.”
When I told Matt this story later he said, “You were like a dog being taken to the vet’s to be put to sleep that thought it was going to the park to have a run—all excited, with your head out of the window.”
I got back home, and almost as soon as I arrived, Conor called me up from ICM. “Russell,” he asked, in an ominously somber tone, “what did you do on that boat?”
“Oh, nothing,” I muttered, “ just the usual . . . I can’t really remember.” “Well,” he said, “they’ve sacked you. I’ve never had a client sacked before, and the people down there, the producer and the casting director, say they’ve never in all their careers experienced anything like it: they just think you’re an animal.”
Before I could blurt out, “But I just tried my hardest to fit in—I thought I was this bookish sort of feller,” Conor said, “I’m going to have to talk to you face to face.” I realized this was bad, so I went out and bought a load of heroin.
I knew I’d really ballsed things up. It should have been a fucking amazing job, that Cruise of the Gods. There we were, stopping off at all these gorgeous islands—going to Athens and Istanbul—and look how I, as usual, converted these beautiful experiences into a grimly picaresque ordeal. My mate Jimmy Black said to me when I got back from that holiday to Bali and Thailand with my dad:
“Fucking hell, Russell, you’ve been to all these amazing places and all you do is come back after three weeks and go,
‘Oh, I fucked some prostitutes.’ What else have you done?”
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“I saw a mongoose fighting a snake . . . I rode on the back of an elephant . . . I saw these monks that don’t ever talk, walking through the city, guided by a child.” “Well then, why are you only talking about the fucking prostitutes? What’s wrong with you?”
I’ve always been drawn to the seamier side of life. Th ose are
the kind of characters I’m attracted to, there’s an energy I get from them that drives a lot of the work I do. At this stage, though, my predilection for de cadence and abuse of drink and drugs was threatening to bring my career to an end before it had even properly started.
On my way to meet Conor, I saw Johnny Vegas in the back of a cab. “Oh dear God,” I thought, and smoked some more smack (by this stage I was able to use more or less anything as an excuse, even a sighting of another comedian). I finally met Conor in a café in Soho Square. It was raining. He said, “I’m sorry Russell, but I’ve got to let you go.”
I was all too familiar with the feeling that overtook me at this juncture (“I’ve had a lot of sobering thoughts in my life”—as Lennard Pearce said to Del Boy—“it was them that started me drinking”). I’d felt it when I couldn’t go back for a second year at Italia Conti, when I was thrown out of Drama Centre, when I was sacked from MTV and XFM and on numerous other occasions when I’d been sacked from jobs.
Up until those particular instants of helplessness and despair, I felt myself to be an invincible blur, impervious to any kind of judgment—“Your bullets can’t harm me, my wings are like shields of steel!”—but then suddenly, like Icarus, I’d clatter back to earth.
Th
e difference was, on this occasion, I had no idea how I was ever going to get back up in the sky again. V
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Part IV
“The insatiable thirst for everything which lies beyond, and which life reveals, is the most living proof of our immortality”
Charles Baudelaire
“Forward ever, backward never”
Mr. Gee
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The aim of heroin use is to get to the point where your eyes roll back, your head lolls forward, your mouth drops open and drool hangs from your lip. “Gouching out” is the technical term for it.
During the period after I got the sack from Cruise of the Gods, Matt would often come round to my flat and find me in that state. At other times, the evening would start off with me chatting fairly normally, but as it wore on I’d slowly descend into a kind of vegetative stupor, a waking anesthesia. And if we ended up sleeping in the same room or even the same bed together, Matt would often wake up in the night to find
me hunched “like Gollum” (this was the image he always used, and when I eventually saw the film, I understood why) over the tinfoil. He also coined a new nickname for me, based on my newly acquired predilection for wearing Arabic robes. “Here he comes,” Matt would greet me cheerfully, “Mustafa Skagfix.”
When Conor McCaughan finished with me, I realized—with the last vestige of survival instinct that remained to me—that my other agents, KBJ, would be next. So I phoned up John Noel.
I’d first met John maybe a year or so earlier, when I had a round of meetings with diff erent agents. I went to his offi ce in
Chalk Farm ( just round the corner from Drama Centre) with 283
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lovely Martino. I had a little tennis ball– sized rubber globe, and I was throwing it up against the wall and catching it. When John gave me and Tino the tour of his offices, pausing to marvel at Brian the pervert accountant, he gave me a beach ball– sized globe. “Ere are. Have that son.”
I recognized this as a good metaphor—that I had a little world, and he gave me a bigger one. I liked him, he was very complimentary about my work, and lots of people said he was the right agent for me because he was strong and I needed controlling. But I didn’t sign with him then, because I wanted to go with this woman Joanna Kay at KBJ, which is the presenters’
wing of PBJ (this huge agency which has Eddie Izzard, Th e
League of Gentlemen, Reeves and Mortimer—all the people I adored—as well as lots of the comedians I grew up with, like Rowan Atkinson and Lenny Henry). When I’d turned John down he’d been quite disappointed.
John Noel, for those that don’t know him—and I’ve got to assume that’s the majority of you don’t, although he’s become increasingly notorious—is a gruff, Northern, working-class alpha male: fists and fangs and fury and “fook off ’s are the things that characterize him. He has cold, steely eyes, but a warm passionate heart, and the temperament of an Andalusian widow.
He’s quick to temper, yet fiercely loyal: a loving, generous man who runs on anger and bullishness but is hugely compassionate to people that are vulnerable. A quick look around his offi ces
reveals that the place is cluttered with waifs and strays—John’s projects . . . among whose number I was soon to count myself.
When I went in to see him for the second time, I was a very different—visibly bruised—figure from the cocky young man who’d bounced the world off his office wall. I told him everything that’d happened, all the people who had sacked me, and that while I was still formally with KBJ, things there weren’t 284
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looking good. He just said, “I think yer great, I’ll sign you.” He didn’t play any games, or oblige me to take any time to think about it, which was a good job, because a few days later, sitting alone in my empty Spitalfields flat, I received a letter releasing me from my contract with KBJ.
If you’re living in a fifty-quid-a-week bedsit, you’ll be lucky to get a month’s leeway before they threaten to throw you out, because they know you’re dirt poor. But if you live somewhere that costs ten times that much, they assume you’re rich, so if you just don’t pay the rent, no one notices. Aware of this, I hadn’t paid rent for a year.
My professional relationship with John began with him giving me money. Not to pay my rent, because he didn’t realize how bad things had got in that department, but he used to say,
“What ideas have you got—what do you want to do?” I told him I wanted to make a documentary. There was a vibrant arts and crafts market in Spitalfields over the road from my flat. Several multinational companies were lobbying to close it down for re-development, and I wanted to make a film about the campaign to stop that happening. He just said, “Go on then—I’ll give you what ever you need.”
A substantial portion of that limited bud get was allocated to the crack houses of Bethnal Green, but the remainder we spent wisely—the ever idealistic John Rogers and Mark Pinheiro toiled for expenses—and the result was GADAFFI, an acro-nym for something that started with Global Action and had Faction near the end of it; I can’t remember exactly how it fi tted together, but it worked and we were all quite proud of it. It wasn’t flawless, but it was a noble attempt, given the state I was in at the time.
We spoke to the local council and various protest groups, and I turned up at the offices of Balfour Beatty, dressed as my 285
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old staple, the Elephant Man, and claiming to be the spirit of Victorian London. There was some funny footage of me getting thrown out on the street by a security guard, still with my sack over my head.
And after he’d seen it, John kept on giving me these odd bits of money—£500 here and there—to go on these little quests, often with no end in sight other than keeping me out of trouble.
Me and Matt made this short film called Littl’uns, with all these toys and dead animals. The two of us walked up the ce-ramic stairwells of my Spitalfields apartment block, naked except for white masks that looked like the walls. Then we reversed the film so it looked like we were walking backward, let these locusts loose in the corridors, and told the story of this Victorian man in a top hat called “Jack Scratch,” who had to lie in bed all the time, because he had chicken’s feet. There was a good bit with Matt in a clown’s wig in a Perspex disabled lift, and I ended up calling all these toys to follow me, going “Littl’uns, Littl’uns”
in a really scary voice. It was mad.
My troubled state of mind meant that I was much better suited to this kind of experimental endeavor than anything that might conventionally have been considered entertainment. Meters away from me as I write this, Nik Linnen, John’s eldest son, is here watching and ensuring that I don’t drift off and do something naughty as the book goes to print within weeks and this deadline, its umpteen pre deces sors lying dead from negligence, must be observed. When I met him this ridiculously handsome and generous soul was still young and dwelt in the enormous shadow of his powerful father. He has emerged as together we have forged a working relationship that has taken me from digital TV to Hollywood films in three years. We do not yet know if the film I’ve made for producer and director Judd Apatow 286
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(The 40- Year- Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Superbad) will be any good, but Universal has commissioned a further project—and what ever happens it’s better than signing on. Nik, who is a partner in Vanity Projects with me, John and Matt, has been invaluable in keeping me well.
The first time Nik came to see me do stand-up I’d been at the agency for a week. Gunther von Hagens was on the TV that night. The Comedy Café was the venue for a performance that made Gunther’s cadaver-bothering look like jaunty high jinks.
I opened doing Elephant Man impressions, determined still that he was funny. A hen party were sitting near the front, so I took this woman’s handbag and did an autopsy on its contents, to be topical, and scattered her knickers, lipstick and phone around the room. Then I jumped on a table in front of this group of office workers, kicked over all their booze, and ended up pulling down a lighting rig that I’d been swinging on. Ta da!
The gig had to stop for about half an hour while everything I’d broken was put back together. During this hiatus, I walked over to someone at the venue and magnanimously told them not to worry about the twenty quid I was meant to be getting paid, as it could go toward the damages. They said, “Not only are we not going to pay you—we don’t want you to come here ever again.”
I cheerfully asked Nik afterward “That was alright, wasn’t it?”
Nik scrambled around for a bright side. “No one died.” He had a look of what I now realize was horror etched on his face, as the magnitude of the challenge he and his dad had taken on hit home.
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The overall tenor of my life at this point was really rather bleak; most of my friends reported an air of doom around me.
The true extent of my disarray was fina
lly about to become apparent to people with the strength of personality to help me actually do something about it.
I realize that my whole life had been leading up to this moment. People say that when they win an Olympic medal—“My life has been leading up to this moment,” they say. But that’s true of every moment. Even if you’re only doing the washing up, your whole life’s still been building up to that moment. Just because something’s insignificant you can’t immediately relegate it to the past, it has to be in the present for a moment. That is the nature of a chronological existence. Even if at birth I’d splin-tered into a thousand clones and each of these existed in a parallel world, they’d still have to live their lives in some sort of order. And, eventually, they’d all end up at John Noel’s Christmas party in 2002.
I’d only been with John a couple of months by then and didn’t know him that well, yet. All I really knew was that at our first meeting he’d farted in a very loud and unapologetic way, and I’d asked Nik, “Fucking hell—who’s this character?”
I can discern a clear progression in my agents—from those tragic avuncular whoopsies running extras agencies with thinly veiled homoerotic names, through slightly more savvy, wideboy-esque characters like Nigel Klarfeld, to charming middle-class ex-presenter women like Joanna Kay. Until eventually I came across the patriarch I’d always required in John Noel: this sort of heavy-fisted, surly but gentle Northern brute of a man, who has come from a difficult background and overcome his own demons and thereby has an eye for a misfit, and was willing to take me on when I had all but destroyed my own career.
John’s parties are notorious, because he often behaves abys-288
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mally in public. Twice to my knowledge he’s been thrown out of his own social functions, but that was not to happen on this occasion. The venue was some place above an Irish pub in Kilburn.
My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up Page 25
