So Me

by Graham Norton

  ‘A smile costs nothing,’ a customer who’d been ordering in dribs and drabs and therefore irritating me would say.

  ‘And intelligence can’t be bought,’ I’d retort. Why nobody rabbit-punched me I don’t know.

  I was at a dinner party recently and a female journalist turned to me and asked if it was true that I had worked at the Eagle.

  ‘Yes, I did.’

  ‘I’m sure you won’t remember this, but I used to be barred from that place!’

  She then told the party about how she had been barred from the Eagle for absolutely no reason in 1991. She had simply tried to order a drink from the wrong end of the bar, she claimed. Polite titters ensued. I stared across the table. Of course I remembered her. She’d been a vile, drunken bitch, and we had taken huge pleasure in telling her that she could never come back. I was disappointed for two reasons: one, that Mike had now relented and let her back in, and two, that somewhere along the line I had made decisions in my life that meant I was now sitting next to her at a dinner party.

  I felt for the first time that I had a bit of a life plan going. Often, when I wonder about my inexplicable success, I think back to my years on the eighteenth floor and realise that on some level I had to succeed because failure really wasn’t an option. I didn’t know exactly what plan A was, but I definitely knew that there was no plan B.

  Stephan was spending longer and longer stretches in France with his boyfriend, and our television had been nicked months before, so there were few distractions. I sat on the wheelchair I had got from a local junk shop and stared at my typewriter. I knew that what I wrote had to be funny, but the whole idea of stand-up terrified and appalled me. I absolutely did not want to do stand-up, but I did want to do a show. Characters? Maybe I could do Alan Bennett-like monologues? I tried a few but they all petered out. I ate a lot of Smash potato and did a great deal of wanking.

  For some reason, Mother Teresa of Calcutta had always struck me as funny. There is something ridiculous about anybody who is considered completely one thing, be it good or evil. When I was working at Melange, I would often pop a tea towel on my head and pretend to be the sainted old lady. It seemed to amuse the other people at work, but really it was just one quick visual gag and I had never thought of expanding it into anything else. Then, one day, in between the spuds and the spunk, a title for my show came to me. It would be called ‘Mother Teresa of Calcutta’s Grand Farewell Tour’. I still had no idea what was going to be in the show, but I knew that I would buy a ticket to a show with that title.

  I started writing, assuming that Mother Teresa would simply be the first character in a sketch with other characters, but I just kept thinking of things for her to say. In my mind she was like a tough old Irish housewife. The sort of woman who would consider herself a Christian beyond reproach, but who would think that anyone who actually believed in the Virgin Birth was more than a little naïve. I knew hundreds of women like this.

  I was on a roll, and before it was in any way structured or even fully written out, I asked Mike if I could perform it in the gallery space above the pub. He agreed, but said that he needed a date. I plucked a date out of the air five weeks ahead. It seemed suitably far off and vague. No pressure. Then, when I was working behind the bar, various people started saying to me that Mike had told them about the show and that they were really looking forward to seeing it. Suddenly it had all become very real and very soon. Pressure.

  Maybe it was because I was used to performing with others, but there was something about the act being just me, by myself, that made me uncomfortable. So I wrote in parts for two little sisters. My friend Nicola Reeder would play one, but I thought it would be handy if the other one could play a musical instrument, perhaps a guitar. It seems incredible, but we didn’t know anyone who could play an instrument. I guess we’d all been too busy carrying plates and planning our fabulous futures to find time to actually learn how to do something. Finally Nicola came up with Lorne Widhal Madsen. She was half Danish, model pretty with long blonde hair and she played the clarinet at professional level. It wasn’t exactly the happy-clappy folk mass kind of sound I had been looking for, but the very oddness of it appealed to me. I decided that she should deliver all her lines in Danish with Nicola interpreting them. I suppose I was trying to create a show that was quirky and unlike anything anyone might have expected. I hoped it was going to be funny, but if it wasn’t, at least it would be bonkers.

  When I had finished the script I had a read-through with some friends. Such was their keenness to get a sneak preview that they even made the trip to the eighteenth floor in the council estate. They seemed to like it. Rehearsals with the little sisters revealed they had so little to do that in actual fact they made it look more like a one-man show than ever. Oh well, it was too late now.

  I went on a PR blitz to promote this tiny one-off show above the Eagle. I had photographs taken of a faceless Mother Teresa looking at a London A–Z, I got press releases printed and (my favourite) I made business cards with just the name of the show and a small scrap of tea towel stuck to it like a holy relic. I sent this eccentric press pack off to everyone I could think of. The fact that I had no idea what I was doing coupled with the very real fact that I had nothing to lose gave me an extraordinary confidence. Time Out wrote a little feature about the upcoming event, and then on the day the Radio 4 show Loose Ends called. A producer called Alison Vernon Smith thought it might make a good feature for the show. I told her as much about the show as I knew, and she seemed to think it was funny. She would be down and she would bring her reporter for the piece, Emma Freud. Emma Freud! She did stuff on the telly! There was going to be a celebrity in the audience!

  Finally the night came. I bought and borrowed cushions and placed them in rows on the floor of the gallery. Then I put lots of candles around the room, started the pre-show music of some wailing Bulgarian choir and waited. Soon the little room was packed. When I say ‘packed’, I mean about fifty people showed up, but in a space that small that meant standing room only. To indicate the start of the show, Lorne walked into the performance area and played halting esoteric jazz on her clarinet. Nicky wandered slowly around the room lighting the candles. It didn’t say comedy, it didn’t even say show. If I had been sitting in the audience that night my heart would have been sinking fast. In alternating Danish and English Mother Teresa was introduced, and in I walked, draped head to toe in Irish linen tea-towels.

  By the end of the show I had learnt two things: it was forty-five minutes long and people really seemed to like my Mother Teresa.

  I was giddy with excitement. Fifty people, mostly fairly good friends admittedly, liked my show. Emma Freud interviewed me and told me to ring her. A woman called Judith Dimant who worked for a venue called the Pleasance in Edinburgh came up to me and told me how much she liked the show. People bought me drinks. The handsome friend of a friend slept with me. The accolades were pouring in.

  I did the show twice more above the pub. True, there were slightly fewer people and laughs on both occasions, but they were still successes, and friends who had witnessed my failed drama career looked relieved. I had found the thing I was good at, and as sure as awkwardness follows sex, my career would, I was sure, take off. I seemed to be right. I had hardly taken off my tea-towels and started wondering what to do next when I got a call from Judith Dimant. There had been a cancellation for the midnight show in the cabaret bar at the Pleasance. Did I want to do two weeks at the Edinburgh Festival? I ironed my tea-towels and packed my bag. I was taking the show on the road.

  8

  A Little Something off the Fringe

  AUGUST 1991: I EMERGED FROM Waverley Station. The city of Edinburgh loomed above and around me with an imposing, confident grandeur that struck me as out of place in a city in the UK. It had the air of a small European principality: the festival had arrived and old women with newly washed and set hairdos in see-through plastic rain hoods gave way to shiny-haired boys and girls who had leaflets fo
r hands. I had never been tempted to go to the festival as a punter, finding the whole idea of it too daunting, but now I was here for a reason.

  I had no idea how lucky I was with my accommodation. While all the other first-timers were shacked up four or five to a room or in campsites outside the city, I swanned around in an enormous, beautiful flat which belonged to the family of a woman I had worked with at Melange. Zebra-skin rugs, pictures in silver frames sitting on a baby grand piano – I might have had the good grace to feel guilty except that I knew that come the end of the festival all the shiny-haired kids would return to leafy loveliness and utility rooms, while I would be creeping into a fire-charred lift designed to accommodate coffins.

  I also didn’t realise how lucky I was to be fast-tracked straight into one of the premier venues on the fringe. It was still hard to get audiences and reviews, of course, but at least I stood a better chance than most other first-timers. I did twelve nights. The show started at midnight and somehow I managed to make it last for an hour. The audience seemed to be mostly made up of people who worked at the venue and a handful of pissed people who couldn’t get into anything else.

  Every night I came off stage and went into the dressing room where the next show’s comedians would be waiting. It was a late-night line-up of stand-up comics compèred by a greasy-haired, baby-lipped man called Mark Lamarr. I would pack my tea-towels up, and they would ignore me and share private jokes. They made me feel like I was back on the rugby field in Bandon Grammar School, and yet this time I knew deep down that it was different. I might not have been ready for the first eleven, but I could at least play the game. I knew that I had a perfect right to be there.

  On about the third or fourth day I had a review. It was a good one. That night I came off stage and the comics spoke to me. At the time I thought they couldn’t be bothered to talk to me until the review gave me some sort of credibility. For years after that I couldn’t like Mark Lamarr. Then, when I became a stand-up comic myself, I understood. Despite all the bravado and the pissing in sinks, the balance between doing well or badly on stage is so unpredictable and so spurious that no one wants to jeopardise their chances. Before the review, to have spoken to me would have been to have touched potential failure. Each night they must have heard the thinly populated applause and then seen me appear at the door like some linen-draped comedy albatross. Now I can appreciate Mark as one of the best and most conscientious comics working in Britain today – oh, yes, and as a nice person too.

  That year in Edinburgh I met Simon Fanshawe. As far as I knew he was the gay one with glasses off That’s Life and a former winner of the Perrier award for best comic on the fringe. We had lunch one day and I remember being so impressed when someone came into the café and asked him for his autograph. I had no idea at the time what a huge debt of gratitude any gay comic in Britain owes him. Whenever articles are written about gay comedy, they always seem to go straight from Larry Grayson to Julian Clary and me. There are two people that Julian and I owe our careers to and they are Simon Fanshawe and Kenny Everett; Simon for being the first openly gay comic on the circuit, and Kenny for charging at the borders of good taste without stopping to apply for a visa.

  I bumped into Simon again in a gay club a couple of nights later, and as we were chatting he told me he ran a comedy festival in Brighton called Laughing Gas and he offered me a one-night gig at the Ship Hotel. I was delighted. Then, by an enormous stroke of bad luck – and who could have seen this coming in a million years? – I got a part in a play. I had so far hidden my burgeoning comedy career from my agent Barry Brown – I was terrified that he might start demanding ten percent of the very little money I had managed to earn – so when I got the call to say that I’d been cast, I couldn’t tell him that it clashed with my big night at the Brighton Comedy Festival. The play was a musical written and directed by Tim Luscombe, called Eurovision. Later it would be produced by Andrew Lloyd Webber and become one of the biggest flops ever seen in the West End, but at the time it was a huge cult success at the Drill Hall, a fringe venue in London. To begin with I tried to get Tim to write me out of it for the one night, but he sucked his teeth and told me that he felt that was impossible. In the end we compromised. I would be written out of the second half and I would miss the curtain call.

  I’d planned that particular evening like a military campaign. Nicola and my actor friend Darren got to Brighton early to set up the props on the stage. As the audience for Eurovision were still applauding the end of the first act, I was sprinting out into the street where Stephan was waiting in his little Peugeot, the engine running. Driving faster than someone delivering a replacement kidney, he pointed the car south and put his foot to the floor. Not many people can tell you this with first-hand experience, but I can assure you that getting changed into a nun’s habit made of tea-towels in the front of a small French car travelling at speed is not an easy thing to do. This was long before everyone had a mobile phone, so the good people of Brighton simply believed I was going to show up. As we hit more roadworks and heavy traffic, I wasn’t quite so sure.

  Finally we arrived in Brighton. Dressed in white, holding my small black handbag, and with my tea-towel flapping around my head, I ran down the sea front towards the Ship Hotel. A burly man in a suit at the door stopped me.

  ‘Are you Mother Teresa?’

  Panting and wiping off sweat with my very handy towel, I assured him that I was.

  ‘Follow me.’

  We raced through corridors and kitchens. I could hear Bulgarian music wailing, I could smell candles, I was on. The show went down better than it had ever done. I played with the audience and made jokes with local references. The laughs sounded genuine, and not just charitable and kind. I went back to Eurovision the next night convinced once and for all that this comedy thing wasn’t just something I was doing while waiting for better acting jobs to come along. It was what I wanted to do for ever.

  The next year I headed back to the Edinburgh Festival for the whole three and a half weeks. This time I was in a much smaller venue in the Pleasance called the Attic. Each night I felt like a comedy version of Anne Frank, except more people found her.

  One night the stage manager came into the dressing room.

  ‘Do you mind if there are some people in wheelchairs in the audience?’

  ‘Of course not,’ I assured her, though I did silently wonder about fire regulations. They might find some burly men to carry them up five flights of stairs, but if tongues of flame started licking around them, these people were going to be toast on wheels. I decided that very early on I would make some jokey references to them to show that they were up for a laugh and that the rest of the audience could relax. Not a problem.

  Once on stage I looked over to the three wheelchairs, which seemed to be taking up about half the room. Before I could say anything, one of the disabled people let out a weird, high-pitched moan which sounded a little like whale music. This was accompanied by a rather startling head roll. This was not a group of friends out for a laugh, this was a severely handicapped group, and if the whale sounds and rolling eyes were any indication, I didn’t think I’d be engaging them in any sort of witty audience banter. As the show went on I strained to interpret each new outbreak of marine music, but it was impossible. They were so random. Sometimes I thought it might be a laugh, occasionally a heckle, but mostly I felt they were cries from the heart: ‘Who the fuck thought it was a good idea to drag us up five flights of stairs to see this fool? We were promised a possible miracle cure!’

  It’s true that there had been quite a few misunderstandings surrounding my alter ego. The idea of a show about Mother Teresa may not have been immediately obvious, but it shocked me how many people got the wrong end of the stick. Hotel receptionists would look confused when I showed up after doing a gig at some arts festival or other. ‘Oh, we were expecting Mother Teresa.’ Now I’m sure the lady was all for humility, but I really doubt that the world’s foremost living saint would be booking
herself into the Travel Inn while in Bristol.

  On another occasion, I was delighted to get a call from a researcher at BBC Scotland. She worked on a show that was hosted by an Irish singer called Dana. It was a religious programme, and they told me they were very keen to do something about the show.

  ‘Does Dana have a good sense of humour?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh yes, it could be a very light-hearted piece.’

  ‘Great.’

  I was amazed that this Dana woman was evidently so open-minded and had such a dry, deadpan sense of humour. What a fun and ground-breaking religious programme this must be?

  A letter arrived from the researcher a few days later and alarm bells started to go off in my head. This wasn’t deadpan, it was serious. They thought they’d be interviewing the real Mother Teresa. Someone with, I presume, a university degree and who had been employed by the BBC had been flicking through the programme for the Edinburgh fringe and had seriously thought that Mother Teresa was abandoning the poor of Calcutta for nearly three weeks to appear in a sixty-seater attic. I wrote the researcher a letter on behalf of Mother Teresa apologising that she was unable to write it herself but she was very busy, what with trips to the laundrette and watching Countdown. The penny must have dropped. Almost by return of post I got a brief note sadly informing me that the programme was now overbooked and there would be no time for the interview with Mother Teresa. It will be a lifelong regret to me that my Mother Teresa never got to meet Dana and her great sense of humour.