The loss of his job really hit Scott badly. A combination of his love of the business and the injustice of his dismissal meant it was almost like a bereavement for him. I tried to talk him through it as best as I could from a distance while drip-feeding all the reasons he should come to Britain. I would probably be earning enough for two if we were careful, he could maybe set up a similar tour of London, and, well, fuck all the other reasons, we could be together. Apparently this was an offer that he could refuse, and he vowed to find a new job in LA.
With two episodes of Father Ted and endless Carnal Knowledge episodes under my belt, I felt like a television veteran. I started to have meetings with more and more production companies about shows that never saw the light of day. Meanwhile, in a poorly lit part of the TV forest, a sad little plant was just about poking its head above ground. Channel Five was coming and they needed programmes.
Stand by for a complicated series of connections that end with me getting a job. Lee Hurst had just become a big star thanks to They Think It’s All Over which was made by TalkBack productions. TalkBack also represented Lee at the time. Lee had a format for a comedy panel game which he had pitched to Anglia TV. Anglia was owned by United News and Media, who also owned a big chunk of the fledgling Channel Five. They needed big names and so wanted Lee’s show, but Lee wanted to be a panellist and not a host, so the hunt was on to find the man for the job. Melanie was privy to all of this and got me a meeting with the executive producer Graham Stuart, who was head of entertainment at United. Graham Stuart has played a major role in my life, but I can truly say that our first meeting was very forgettable, so much so that I have. All I know for sure is that he didn’t hate me and I got the job.
The new show was called Bring Me the Head of Light Entertainment and was going to be filmed in Anglia’s own studios in Norwich. Every Monday a group of comedians would gather in Liverpool Street station and get on the train together. For some reason I was quickly cast in the role of Mother, so that I would have everyone’s tickets and make sure we were all on the train and that everyone had their coats and bags when we got off at the other end.
The programme was one of those panel games like Never Mind the Buzzcocks or They Think It’s All Over, where the panellists are expected to do vast amounts of homework. The minute we arrived in Norwich, the teams were locked in their dressing rooms to sweat blood over new jokes for the two shows we would record in the evening. I was the host – I went to the pub. The director Jim Brown, the producer John Naigh Smith, the writer Ian Pattinson and myself would walk through the streets of Norwich, coats flapping in the breeze, until we reached a lovely little pub on the river. Lunch was ordered – ‘Just a spritzer, I’m working’ – and then we would read through the script and laugh out loud, annoying showbiz laughs while travelling salesmen glared at us with their mouths full of cheese and pickle.
The shows usually went quite well, in part because they were funny, but I also think the Norfolk audience probably helped. The only other show that was filmed in Norwich at the time was the Vanessa Feltz show, so ours must have seemed like Monty Python’s Flying Circus in comparison. For the first few Mondays we all stayed in a small hotel which is still the only one I’ve ever stayed in where if you asked for a single room, that is precisely what you got. The beds were strange, narrow little pallets draped in brushed nylon that were too narrow to even have a wank on. Later in the series, Lee, because he was the star of the show, was able to ask for a minibus to bring us back to London. That epic weekly journey became part of the strange ritual. I always sat in the front drinking white wine I’d stolen from the green room, while the comics in the back trashed every other comic on the circuit. I usually fell asleep before we hit the M11.
More money. I don’t mean to sound obsessed by cash, but bear in mind that I had never really earned any before and I was now thirty-three years old. Also the money was being put to good use. I sent some to Scott to help him out, and in London, after searching for the perfect place, I found a smart two-bedroom flat near Brick Lane. It had a shower and quite a big fridge that I hoped an American might like.
Bring Me the Head of Light Entertainment was a moderate success on Channel Five, but Melanie was very excited because the Channel ‘liked’ me. I think the idea was that the Channel would build its own new talent. ‘New talent’ is TV speak for ‘cheap talent’. Established stars cost a lot of money and they didn’t have that.
As part of the whole ‘a face of Channel Five’ thing, I had been a guest on their new five-nights-a-week chat show hosted by Jack Docherty. It was filmed in the Whitehall Theatre just off Trafalgar Square in front of a live audience, and I loved being a guest. Then one night, as I was on my way to do a gig, my phone rang. I held it away from my ear. It was Melanie and she was excited. I had been asked to guest-host The Jack Docherty Show for a week. Did I want to do it?
I didn’t even pretend to think about it. ‘Yes!’
10
Talking with Strangers
EVERYTHING SEEMED TO BE HAPPENING at once. Scott had finally decided that he could bear to leave the city where he had no job or money and move to London. We planned that I would go to California and help him pack everything he owned into a truck, drive across America to Chicago, where it would be left in storage with friends, and then he would come back to the UK with me. The only problem was that I couldn’t do it right now because I was busy. There was the guest-hosting of Jack’s show, and then I was doing yet another show at the Edinburgh Festival. I promised that I would come after that. It would give him time to get organised. He agreed. Neither of us noticed that compared with when we had first met, I had been getting busier and busier. We just knew we had enough money for the airfare and the job I loved was going really well. Scott’s job was just gone.
I remember arriving at the Whitehall Theatre to guest-host my first show. I went through the stage door and climbed the endless concrete stairs to the star dressing room which was in effect Jack’s home. I was already putting my toothbrush, toothpaste, razor and shaving cream on Jack’s sink when I found a card. It was addressed to me. ‘Dear Graham, I hope you have a great week but remember the following. Please feel free to be a) hilarious, b) attractive, c) charming, but on no account should you be d) BETTER THAN ME. Lots of love, Jack.’
My first guest that night was Uri Geller. I introduced him by saying, ‘Channel Five were worried that with me hosting, the show might be too gay, so I’m sorry to say that my first guest is a big bender.’ The show went well, and over the week it got better and better. We found a truly awful pop video of a new girl band from South London called Vanilla. They had obviously saved their dinner money for a week to come up with the budget for the filming, and the song, ‘No Way, No Way’, was just as bad. Each night I showed another bit of the video. I gave them nicknames like the Spice Girls, and on the Friday night show, the brave ladies actually showed up and performed the song. It could have been an awful moment of television because we were just laughing at them, but somehow it managed to be funny and sweet. Every now and again I will bump into someone who asks me about Vanilla, and I regret to inform the public that the band have since split up. I did meet two of them in a shop recently, and no, they weren’t working in it. They were on their lunch break.
When the week was over I felt robbed. I had found my dream job but it was someone else’s. The executive producer had been Graham Stuart again, and he saw how much I had enjoyed doing it. He suggested we put together a proposal for my own chat show on Channel 4. I nodded. ‘Hmm, yeah, that’s a great idea.’ I felt like a child being promised something nice for my birthday just to stop me being jealous as I watched the other kid opening his presents.
Off to Edinburgh. Over the last few years my shows had changed a lot. Now they were pure stand-up, but each year I tried to include something quirky and odd. The last show I had done was Graham Norton and his Amazing Hostess Trolley. The title was somewhat misleading since there wasn’t actually a hostess trolley in
it. I put out a story that my hostess trolley had gone missing during the journey from London to Edinburgh. A local radio station even put out an appeal for someone who could lend me one. The truth was that I had never had one and never wanted one because I would have had to drag it up and down the stairs from the dressing room to the stage every night, and that wasn’t my idea of show business.
In that same show I had a section called ‘Raffle Chat Show’. I got the names of people who had paid by credit card from the box office and then I just randomly introduced them as my guests. I asked them a list of simple questions about their relationships and sex lives, a bit like those questionnaires that celebrities sometimes do in the back of glossy magazines. It was quite a risky thing to do but it usually turned out to be pretty funny, or at least interesting.
One night I called out a man’s name and a hand went up. All eyes in the tiny auditorium turned to him. He looked ill, very ill. He was obviously a person with AIDS and he was clearly dying. I hesitated for a moment. I wasn’t even sure if he could walk to the stage, nor whether he wanted to. Equally I didn’t want the audience to feel uncomfortable. I think I asked him in a fairly straightforward way if he wanted to play. He did. He came to the stage and sat beside me. The audience was very quiet and the atmosphere was still. None of us knew where this might go. The man was lovely and as he answered my trite questions about love and sex, I could feel the crowd warm to him. I found out that he was in a relationship and that they lived together in Clapham. He was completely open and honest, and my silly questionnaire took on an awful seriousness because of what love and sex had done to him. I had reached the final question, and I looked at my sheet of paper in horror.
‘If you could shag anyone in the world, but it was the last person you could ever shag, who would it be?’ I read out.
To anyone else in that room the question would have been a cue for some jokey answer about Brad Pitt or Pamela Anderson, but for this man it had an appalling relevance and reality. He looked down for a moment and then looked up with a small smile before answering, ‘My first boyfriend in Australia.’
I can’t explain what happened in that moment. I don’t know why it wasn’t awkward, macabre or even mawkish, but it wasn’t. It was just a man telling a group of strangers who the love of his life was, and this was a man who knew because his was nearly over. I don’t think there was a person in that audience that night who didn’t ask themselves the same question. I know I did, and the answer was ‘Syd’.
About a year ago a woman came up to me at a corporate gig I was doing and told me that she had been in the audience that night and just wanted to tell me how moved she had been by it. As we stood there talking about the show, drunk men from the sales department jostling us, we both had to wipe away a stray tear.
Normally my little Festival gimmicks didn’t take me to such unexpected places. I read from school diaries, I phoned out to have pizza delivered, and then when the guy arrived I’d make him act out the start of a porn scene with a woman in the audience. Probably what was most successful was when I rang people who had put their numbers in gay personal ads. If you aren’t familiar with gay personal ads, let me assure you that they are really quite different from the heterosexual variety. There isn’t much in them about pina coladas and walks in the rain.
I would read out a selection of truly vile ones and the audience would choose which one I called. Sometimes we just got an answering machine, but usually, because the show was quite late, I managed to get through to an actual person. I still love that moment when the stranger’s voice suddenly comes through the speakers and a wave of embarrassment, guilt and glee sweeps through the audience. Everyone holds their breath. ‘Hello.’ Then a simple ‘What do you look like?’ leading to a physical description so detailed that a police artist could put together an identikit of their cock. In the bar after the show I always got people coming up to me asking, ‘Was that phone call real?’ They couldn’t believe what had just happened. It wasn’t as if the calls were particularly pornographic or even that funny, but because I have done so many phone calls since and on television, it’s hard to describe how shocking and exciting they were back then.
Graham Stuart came to see the show and afterwards was full of excitement. We could use the telephone idea in the chat show that he was preparing to pitch to Channel 4. ‘Yes, that’s right – whatever.’ Standing in a suspicious puddle in an alley outside the Assembly Rooms, I was finding it hard to take his offer seriously.
Every year at the Edinburgh Festival a strange fever sweeps through all the comics. Almost before anyone gets to Scotland they begin to talk about who is going to be nominated for the Perrier Prize, and then, as the days turn to weeks, the talk becomes an obsession. Sometimes it is described as the comedy Oscar, but I think of it more as the comedy Booker or Turner Prize – the people involved and the media think it is wildly important while the vast majority of the population couldn’t give a shit. I knew that quite a few Perrier judges had been to see my show, but I didn’t think too much about it. In past years I had got sucked into the nominations speculation and then been terribly let down when I wasn’t. This year I didn’t care. I really and truly didn’t care. I couldn’t have cared less. The list of nominations was announced and I was on it. All right, I cared a bit.
I honestly didn’t think I was going to win, which is just as well because I didn’t. The announcement was made at midnight after all the nominated acts had finished their shows. We all crammed into an old German beer tent, and the announcement was made. ‘And the winner is . . .’ And that was the moment when I hated myself. I knew that there was less chance of me winning than of the Irish basketball team carrying off the Olympic gold, and yet in that little pause after ‘winner is’ some awful tiny self-deluded part of my brain couldn’t help but pipe up, ‘It could be me!’
The winners were the League of Gentlemen. ‘Hurrah! Well done!’ I cheered and clapped as loudly as everyone else. On a deeply shallow level, though, I really didn’t mind. Firstly because the League of Gentlemen were brilliant, and secondly because the trophy for the runners up was much prettier than the winner’s gold bottle of Perrier.
Back in London I did a few more weeks standing in for Jack Docherty. Although I still enjoyed it, the atmosphere had changed. The series producer I really respected had gone, and some days I felt quite exposed. Also, because Channel Five wasn’t really taking off as people had hoped, it was becoming increasingly difficult to get guests for the show. This was when I really grew to rely on Graham Stuart. He wasn’t supposed to be working on this show in a very hands-on way, but each lunchtime he left United and came over to the show to go through the script and the interviews with me. He had worked on a vast number of chat shows over the years and his suggestions usually made a lot of sense. I began to wonder if the idea of us putting together our own show for Channel 4 wasn’t that far-fetched after all.
I had never been so busy. A new series of Bring Me the Head of Light Entertainment was in the pipeline, and as well as guest-hosting The Jack Docherty Show I was appearing on lots of other comedy panel shows and doing more and more live gigs. It was around this time that if my name was mentioned in the paper, it was tagged with the word ‘ubiquitous’. Although it went against all my instincts, I began to turn down jobs. I remembered what had happened to Tony Slattery when he’d seemed to be on TV all the time, and I was determined not to have it happen to me. There are all sorts of ways to wreck your career – one is to say yes to too many jobs, and another is to say yes to the wrong job. Although I’d never thought of myself as very ambitious or the sort of person who had a career plan, I liked my new life and I was going to try to keep it going for as long as possible.
I finally took a break and headed out to California for the long cross-country trek with Scott. For me the idea of Scott coming to Britain was very straightforward. I wanted him to be with me, end of story. Of course, for Scott it was a very different thing. He was leaving everything and everyone
he knew to come to a country full of strangers, bad weather, poor service and the sort of vehement anti-American feeling that you only become truly aware of when you are living with an American. Worst of all, he was leaving his dog behind. Seeing Scott saying goodbye to Osso is one of the main reasons why I have never got a dog.
For some reason he wanted to bring his small grey wreck of a car all the way to Chicago with us. We pulled away from the kerb slowly in a huge truck packed full of all of his belongings, with his car on a trailer behind it. Like a couple of very dull circus performers we steered our caravan of love towards the desert.
Given that I had already crossed America by road nearly twenty years earlier, I don’t know why its huge size took me so much by surprise. We thought we would give ourselves an easy first day, so we eased ourselves off the coast and across towards Las Vegas, which according to the map was very near. Hours later in the dead of night we were still rumbling along in the desert. Then in the distance there appeared to be a beam of light shining up into the night sky. The nearer we got the brighter and bolder it seemed. Like Jesus in reverse, we followed the star to find the gold, and if the wise men were fat, old and badly dressed, there were way more than three of them. I love Las Vegas. It is such a pointless, amazing place. Jaw-droppingly awful, but undeniably impressive. Paris full of friendly Americans, Venice with extra slot machines, New York with a rollercoaster subway – why would anyone go anywhere else? We managed to park our mighty convoy, and almost before we had booked into our hotel we were shoving coins into slots.
So Me Page 15
