Some work did come out of doing the show. I began doing a ‘thought for the day’ on Craig Charles’s breakfast show on London’s Kiss FM, and lovely Simon Fanshawe had me on his Radio 5 show. But it was becoming clear that while my live performances worked fairly well, it was a very niche audience and it wasn’t clear to anyone, including myself, what else I could do with my show.
Back in London I met a producer called David Johnson. He became my comedy agent. David is a great big, lovable bear of man and I couldn’t imagine being in Edinburgh with any other promoter now. David has a fairly unique approach to promoting his shows. He settles into the Assembly Rooms bar and tells everyone he speaks to that they must go and see his clients’ shows. I know that on the surface this doesn’t sound like very effective marketing, but that is to underestimate the vast numbers of people David knows and the sheer man-hours he puts into this endeavour. He and his then business partner Mark Goucher, an immaculately groomed man, a Cher to David’s Sonny, worked out of a tiny basement office just off Tottenham Court Road.
And work they did. Venues were booked, posters made, gigs booked. Sadly, they needed me to make money for them to make money, and while they never lost faith in me, they certainly lost money while promoting me. Happily, some of their other ventures like the Reduced Shakespeare Company, Trainspotting and ‘Puppetry of the Penis’ subsidised their little debt-spinner. Doubtless it was through some sort of desire to widen my appeal that David and Mark encouraged me to drop the tea-towels and write something more accessible.
Because the Edinburgh fringe programme goes to press months before the actual festival, year after year I would have to come up with a performance title and then set about trying to write a show that in some way related to it. My first outing post Mother Teresa was the tastefully named ‘Karen Carpenter’s Bar and Grill’. This was more like the show I had originally intended to write: a series of monologues loosely tied together by a story, albeit a hastily thrown-together one. To be fair it didn’t really work. There were a few funny ideas, like a fly-on-the-wall documentary about a closet heterosexual, a weird sequence where Karen Carpenter was abducted by aliens who travelled the universe in a giant Fray Bentos steak and kidney pie tin, and a few jokes that I’m ashamed to admit I still use today.
It wasn’t until the next year, in 1994, that I finally bit the bullet and wrote a show featuring me as myself. At last I was the one standing there talking to the audience, and I really liked it. The show was called ‘Charlie’s Angels Go to Hell’, and it was based around my travels in America and my time at the hippy commune. The idea was that Charlie’s Angels were my moral guardians and came to my rescue when I found myself in any situation that was out of my depth. I don’t remember any individual bits of it as being particularly funny, but as a whole it worked. It was my biggest success in Edinburgh to date. Good reviews, sold-out shows – it made me feel legitimate.
There is an odd, insular thing that happens during the festival, where it’s easy to forget about the outside world. If it’s important in Edinburgh, then it’s important everywhere else. I can only assume that that is what David and Mark were thinking when we decided to transfer my little hit show from Edinburgh into the West End. True, it was only the Arts Theatre, a smallish venue by anybody’s standards, but it was still the West End. Although we all probably sensed impending doom, it wasn’t the sort of offer you can turn down, so the posters were printed and the invitations for the opening night sent out.
On my way to the theatre I stopped at a phone box and rang my parents in Bandon just to make sure that they were there – I didn’t want them showing up and surprising me, because what would have seemed like a nice idea would have gone horribly wrong. They still didn’t know that I was gay and, as I have stressed in the preface to this book, there are still things I think they’d rather not know about my life.
The lights came down at the end of opening night and the crowd erupted. I was in shock. I walked around the party afterwards numb with happiness. My little show was a West End smash. The next night I walked out to an auditorium about a quarter full – obviously word had not reached the world at large yet about my amazing hit show. The music started and I performed my strange opening dance number. I came to a stop, panting slightly at the front of the stage. Just before I began to speak I heard a man in the audience say very loudly ‘Daft queen’, and apart from a few coughs that was the last I heard from the audience that night. Not a titter.
The show dragged on for three weeks, and the responses I received most nights were somewhere in between the ones I got on the opening night and those on the second night, but ticket sales never really picked up and finally David and Mark broke the welcome bad news to me – my run had reached the finishing tape. Oddly, because the reviews had been all right, most people didn’t know what a disaster it had been. The posters looked good, I had got a lot of publicity from doing the show, so apart from having to do the actual performances, it had been very good for my career.
Thanks to Simon Fanshawe’s ex-producer Will Saunders, I was regularly doing interviews on Loose Ends by now – not celebrities, just people I think Ned couldn’t be bothered to talk to. The female judo champion was given to me when the show went to Hull (‘Not the first time I’ve been tossed by someone wearing big pyjamas’), and in Taunton I got Mr Sheppy the cider maker (‘Mmm, tastes familiar. Is it Cox?’). I loved doing the show and really enjoyed all the people who worked on it. Sitting in the pub after the show with Ned was a real treat as he told us endless stories of theatrical luminaries behaving badly.
Once Loose Ends went live to South Africa, and in case of a technical disaster Emma Freud and I were called into the London studio on standby. If anything went wrong we were to introduce some pre-produced clips of old shows to fill the airtime. The show began, and Emma and I sipped our coffee and listened politely. I think it was while a South African poet and MP was telling an anecdote about singing in parliament that we grew a little restless. Emma, pregnant at the time, decided to show me some breathing exercises. Soon we were both on our backs recarpeting our pelvic floors. In the distance I could just hear one of Ned’s guests saying something about how the world had become much smaller when suddenly South Africa seemed to have fallen off the edge of the earth and Radio 4 listeners could just hear Emma and I panting and groaning as we got up from the floor. A puzzled nation assured itself, ‘No, it’s Graham Norton, they can’t be fucking!’
The other positive consequence that came out of ‘Charlie’s Angels’ was a meeting with Helen Chown. She had done the PR for the show, but once it was over she started working with a man called John Keyes who ran the Paramount Comedy Company. They asked me if I wanted to do some stand-up gigs. I had always resisted doing pure stand-up, but between ‘Charlie’s Angels’ and bits of the ‘Karen Carpenter’ show I thought I probably had enough material. Also, despite having to pay no rent, I knew I didn’t have enough money. The other reason I decided to give it a whirl was that John and Helen got me the gigs – I didn’t have to phone round the promoters themselves and risk rejection or, perhaps worse, open spots.
My first gig was at the Comedy Box, a small comedy club above a pub in Bristol. I got the train down and I have never really known nerves like it. I tried to act nonchalant about the whole thing because I didn’t want the promoter or the other acts to know that this was my first proper gig. I waited in the big, empty pub kitchen that smelt of wet facecloth. I could hear the other acts going well and seriously wondered what sort of giant mistake I had made. I looked at the industrial size deep freeze and considered climbing into it. Too late. I was on. Now, I’m sure I was awful, but people did laugh and I did some OK ad-libs and generally felt like I had got away with it and fooled at least some of the people most of the time. I went back to the candlewick bedspread on the skinny single bed of the bed and breakfast and felt like a comedy king. I was a working stand-up!
The next morning I got a message to ring Helen. There had been a cance
llation in Ireland. Could I fly out that day to do one night in Sligo followed by a gig in Galway? Could I? I was a working stand-up, that’s what we did. I headed straight to Stansted and flew off to Knock airport. I was very excited, not just by the thought of the gigs but also of actually seeing Knock airport for the first time. At first glance it may just look like another bungalow though with a driveway long enough to accommodate a jumbo jet, but its very existence is as miraculous as any Virgin appearing on the gable wall of a house. A man called Bishop Horan – well, he was a bishop, that wasn’t just some nickname – had constantly argued that Knock needed an international airport to service all the planeloads of pilgrims from around the world.
‘What pilgrims from around the world? We haven’t seen any,’ was the response of many.
‘Well, of course you haven’t. They can’t get here until the airport is built,’ replied the wily Bishop.
Undeterred by the lack of government funding, he set about raising the money through charity. Years of fund-raising finally paid off. He turned the first sod of turf and the bulldozers moved in and soon Knock had a runway that could cope with the world’s largest aircraft and a terminal building that looked like yet another bungalow. The effect is that flying in you feel like you are approaching someone’s house up a really big driveway. It was only when the bishop died that they discovered that his fund-raising hadn’t quite been up to the job and in fact the airfield of dreams was built on huge debts. I rather admire Bishop Horan. His dream was so strong that he couldn’t let the mere absence of money stop it from happening. He died a happy man, and just in time.
I was doing the gig with a man from Newcastle whom I’d never heard of before. I had been sold to the Irish promoters as a headline act. Well, I supposed I did appear regularly on the BBC, was a veteran of the Edinburgh Festival and had delighted West End audiences with my solo show. The poor fools must have felt lucky to get me.
Night one was Sligo. The function room at the back of the small hotel was transformed into a comedy club. The man from Newcastle struggled through his act, and then it was time for me. Somehow I managed to get away with it once more. I think I spent most of my time on stage just talking to a loud group of women near the front who had taken an irrational liking to me.
Night two was in Galway. This was the big time – a city – and we were playing its premier nightclub, and what’s more this was a big gala anniversary night for the club. A couple of the lads had ironed their shirts and quite a few of the ladies were wearing tights. It was probably just the crossing of their legs, but the atmosphere did seem really charged.
Newcastle Man kicked things off and he went down much better than the night before, but he still wasn’t great. I charged on to the stage after I was introduced thinking this was going to be an easy ride, and was met with the sort of look a piece of meat might get if it fell from the ceiling in a vegetarian restaurant. I started my unpolished act. They polished off their interval drinks. I was talking about the hair on my shoulders. They were just talking. Slowly the volume of the audience threatened to outdo that of the microphone. I was in deep trouble and had no idea how to get out of it. A couple of lads started to heckle, but even that wasn’t fun. I knew they hated me, but they didn’t know how to make me stop. I hated them and didn’t know how to get away. There was an increasing number of people trying out a pretty straightforward heckle of ‘Fuck off !’ Didn’t they realise that I was the last act? If I left there was nothing else.
I tried to reason with them. In a very understanding but slightly threatening voice, I announced, ‘Look, if you all want me to fuck off, I will.’ This was the news they’d been waiting to hear. At first there was a random cacophony of ‘fuck off’s, but that gradually grew into a loud bass chant. ‘Fuck off ! Fuck off !’ This made the second night of the West End show look like a flower-throwing ovation. Although dying on stage is awful, the thing I learnt that night was that it isn’t as bad when it happens to you as it is when you are watching it happen to someone else. It’s hard to explain, but trust me, it’s true. The other thing I found out that night was that they still had to pay you even when you bombed.
I liked my new job.
9
Love Is in the Airfare
STAND-UP IS A VERY ODD job. Twenty minutes’ work can make all the difference between a good day and a bad one. The contrast is so extreme that those twenty minutes contain all the pressures and tensions of most twelve-hour days in any other job. The good thing about that stress is that friendships with other comics develop in dressing rooms with a hothouse intensity. People you’ve only met a handful of times you consider really good friends. Only they understand what you’ve been through and so a weird special bond develops.
The other part of the job consists of spending hours in other people’s cars travelling to and from gigs up and down the country. Every comic has a list of people they dread making a journey with: the ones that smell, the ones that analyse their own act for the entire trip, and let’s not forget the standard bore.
But on the whole it was fun and I was enjoying myself and no longer feeling like I was drifting. I had got much better at stand-up over quite a short space of time, though I was never a great or even a very good club comic. I hated being the closing act because I was never a sure thing. Far better to put me second on the bill or, my favourite of all, as compère. But I can’t have been that bad because I found I was making some money. It started coming in just in time.
A knock came to the door in Cockroach Towers one day. I looked through the spyhole and saw a stern woman with a clipboard. I guessed the chances of her being involved in some gang-war vendetta were fairly slim, so I unlocked the door. She was from the council and she told me in no uncertain terms that I shouldn’t be living in the flat. She explained that the block was going to be torn down and that the council had no responsibility to rehouse me. I, of course, informed her that I would be going to the Citizens Advice Bureau and fighting her to the highest court in the land.
After she left I looked around at the buckled floors, the bare wires, the cockroach corpses and wondered why on earth I would fight for the right to stay in this place. I should be thanking the woman who, after five long years, was kicking me out of this hell in the skies.
Over the next few months I did as many gigs as I could and finally scraped together enough money to put down a deposit in order to rent a flat. I found a small one-bedroom place near Columbia Road flower market in the East End. When I say small, I really am not exaggerating. They had created a one-bedroom flat from a room that would have been described as ‘a bit cramped’ in the property section of the Toy Town Gazette. The hallway looked like a mini Studio 54, while the bathroom and kitchen both looked like ads for Flash cleaning powder circa 1972 – Avocado and Donkey Brown respectively – but for ninety pounds a week I could live alone and in Zone 1.
My friend Nicola helped me move, but I’m ashamed to admit that I left most of my belongings behind. I just shut the door on my bed, desk, sofa, clothes and books. I did this mostly because there was no room for any of this stuff in my new doll’s house, but also because I wanted a new start. I often drive home via Queensbridge Road now, and while the lady with the clipboard was right about their plans to knock down the Holly Street estate, there is one lone tower block still standing and it’s the one we lived in for all that time. It has been totally refurbished and I believe it is used as accommodation for the elderly. Finally Grange Court has come full circle – it’s ‘like an hotel’.
So this was my life. I lived in my retro shoebox, did the occasional bit of work on the radio, and travelled around the country doing gigs. It wasn’t exactly what anyone would call a career, but it was the closest I’d got to one so far. Of course, as soon as one part of your life seems to be going all right it’s time to focus on how rubbish the rest of your life is. After gigs I would come home and literally stare at the empty bed. I am a frighteningly self-reliant creature, but some nights I did yearn to
have someone else lying there beside me. It wasn’t about sex, just that basic need we all have to be held. Somehow, seven years of being single had gone by since Ashley had broken my heart. I was beginning to wonder if it would ever be fixed.
A couple of friends called Stuart and Steve, whom I had met when I did some corporate events for the travel industry, had invited me to dinner one night. Normally I might have looked forward to it, but I was tired and a bit grumpy that day. The previous night I had done a gig in Chester with Jo Caufield and Rob Hitchmough. It was in a wine bar and restaurant, which was fine except that nobody seemed to notice the start of the show because they were too busy eating their microwaved lasagne and chicken Kiev. Food was served throughout, and frankly there are only so many jokes you can make about Hollyoaks to distract from the comings and goings of garlic mushrooms. Afterwards, on the way home in the car, Jo and I bitched on about this stupid idea of serving food while Rob was a little non-committal. It was only when I did the gig he ran in the Aztec comedy club in South London that I understood why. There they didn’t just serve food, they served food that made noise! Sizzling platters of fajitas and Southern chicken could arrive at any moment to ruin a punchline. It’s one thing being heckled by punters, but when the food starts talking over you . . .
We’d got back very late from Chester and I’d crawled into my tiny bed. The day of Stuart and Steve’s dinner party I just wandered around in a daze, dreading the night ahead. What made it worse was that they had also invited some American friend of Stuart’s. I was assured that he was a lot of fun and ran this crazy tour in LA called Graveline, where he would drive tourists around in the back of a hearse and show them where famous people had died. He sounded ghastly.
I showed up with my bottle of wine and newly brushed teeth wondering how early I could leave without seeming rude. Stuart and Steve gave me a drink and showed me into the living room. I glanced at the people dotted around the room with their gins and vodkas and pressed jeans, but there was no sign of the dreaded American. I was introduced to everyone and when we got to the only sexy man in the room Stuart said, ‘And remember I told you about my friend Scott from LA?’ This was Scott? He was cute and sexy! Why had I thought he wouldn’t be? I’ve no idea, but here he was, tall and broad, masculine and funny, with beautiful eyes and a great smile. I knew he would never be interested in me, but still he was something good to look at over dinner.
So Me Page 13
