by Matt Lucas
It was at one of these that I met the late Leelo Ross. A large, friendly Northerner, Leelo’s quickfire set was jammed full of great gags. It was a pleasure to watch her and a pain to follow her.
Some years later I found myself by chance sitting opposite Leelo on a bus to Muswell Hill. She told me she had given up comedy and become a clairvoyant. We got off at the next stop and popped into a nearby café, where she read my tea leaves. She told me that I had Italian ancestry, came from a family of sailors and that she could see my late grandmother standing in front of us, hairs coming out of her chin, holding a tray of cheap cakes. I thought it was high time she returned to making people laugh and shortly afterwards David and I cast her as Tanya in the ‘Fat Fighters’ sketches in Little Britain. She did a great job, giving a very natural, sensitive performance and bearing Marjorie’s ceaseless barbs with grace.
The audiences at the Jewish comedy nights were older than at most comedy clubs. They drank a lot less alcohol and didn’t particularly want to see sweary comedy. And it was at one such event in Palmers Green that my poor mother saw my act for the first time.
I was on the bill with my school friend Ashley Blaker. Ashley had been in the year below me at Haberdashers’ and we’d shared an interest in comedy and football. He used to do stand-up shows for charity at lunch break and hundreds would attend. Now, like me, he was starting to play the clubs, though his studies kept him from really making a fist of it.
Ashley had at least thought to come up with a few Jewish jokes for his set. There was nothing remotely Jewish about mine. As Sir Bernard cursed and screamed, my set – effective in the loud, smoky, combative atmosphere of a grotty pub backroom – played to total silence. My red-faced mum – who had been dubious enough when her son suddenly announced ‘I’m going to be a comedian’ – had brought a couple of friends and was understandably mortified by the whole thing. Is this what I had taken a year off for? As she drove us both home that night neither of us said much. Ashley too had generated more grumbles than laughs. He’d curtailed his set, telling the audience, ‘I know I’ve died tonight. If anyone’s interested, the shiva’s at my parents’.’ (If you’re Jewish, that’s a cracking joke, by the way.)
Autumn 1993. After a year on the circuit, having graduated from open spots to half-spots and now full twenty-minute paid spots in some of the smaller venues, and with agents starting to take an interest too, I put my stand-up career on hold and went off to Bristol University to study Theatre, Film and Television.
Within a few days of arriving there, I received a letter from Bob Mortimer. He said that there was going to be a new late-night ITV series called Comedy Club featuring stand-up comics and he thought I should audition for the producer, who he knew.
I phoned the Comedy Café and asked them if I could come down and do a short set. Bob and his girlfriend (now wife) Lisa came along, bringing the producer with them. Afterwards the producer said she’d love me to appear in the series. I was understandably thrilled. I was even more delighted to discover that I was going to be paid £600 – more than ten times what I’d normally get for a gig.
Comedy Club was taped on a Friday night at the Paris Studios in London. Backstage I sat waiting with Caroline Aherne, who I had seen on TV and been on the bill with a couple of times. She was doing her Sister Mary Immaculate character. I couldn’t help but notice how beautiful she was up close.
Some of the other acts could barely hide their surprise at my presence. They were all bill-toppers, seasoned pros, whereas I was not fully established throughout the London comedy scene. Many of them had seen me die a death, but there I was, on the same show and the same money as them. Despite my nerves, my set went down well, generating laughs in all the right places.
A few months later the show aired on TV. I was horrified – not only at my pale, sweating, tubby form onscreen, but also by the fact that my set had been trimmed down in the edit so much that almost all of the set-ups had been removed, so that while I appeared to get plenty of laughs, nothing made any sense. Worse, the large microphone obscured the lower half of my face. I had hoped that this appearance might help me get more club bookings, but many of the promoters I contacted told me that they had seen me on TV and didn’t think I was ready yet. It had done more harm than good!
Nonetheless I dug my heels in and continued to gig, and over the coming months I received more interest from TV producers. However, as much as I wanted to work in television I became anxious at the thought of having to surrender control to editors and producers. I was also concerned that I would be using up my best material on TV and would then have to drop it from my live act, as audiences would already be familiar with it. I wasn’t yet confident enough, prolific enough or funny enough to churn out dozens of new gags for each TV show – nor was I established enough to have writers working for me – so I became judicious with my TV appearances, preferring Sir Bernard to appear in conversation, rather than give away the most valuable jokes from my stand-up act.
My favourite TV appearance as Chumley was on Barrymore. Michael Barrymore was one of my heroes. While Vic and Bob were innovators on BBC Two, Barrymore was truly anarchic on primetime ITV. These days he’s remembered less for his work and more for events in his life, but at his peak he was in a league of his own. I was almost sleepless with excitement at the prospect of appearing on the sofa with him. He was perhaps the biggest comic in the country at the time, but he was generous and encouraging, both onscreen and off. Our chat finished with a duet – the Lee Dorsey hit ‘Working In The Coalmine’. I was allowed to choose the song and it amused me to pick the most random one I could think of.
Though I had intended to gig a lot less while at university, I found it hard to resist the lure of the spotlight. There were a couple of comedy clubs in Bristol which I would play, and I’d head off most weekends either to London or some far-flung corner of Britain to perform.
The best place to improve, though, was at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, not least because it was customary to take only one or two nights off. By gigging almost every night for a month, you could really sharpen and hone your act.
I went up four years in a row, the first time with Vic and Bob’s pal Dorian Crook in 1994, and the next three years with my funny friend David Williams – now Walliams, as there was already a David Williams in the actors’ union. As well as stand-up, the shows featured daft songs and we were joined by my university course mate Tim Atack on the keyboard.
It was during the Edinburgh Festival in 1995 that I had one of my most memorable gigs – and not for the right reasons …
Reeves and Mortimer had come to town, to headline a show at the Edinburgh Playhouse, which Mark Lamarr was hosting and which would also feature Harry Hill, Sean Lock and Charlie Chuck.
The gig was due to start at about 11 p.m. and the plan was for me to go on first and do ten minutes, and then dash off to the Assembly Rooms for my hour-long midnight show with David and Tim as usual.
However, on arriving at the Playhouse, I saw that the street was full of people waiting to get in. The ballet that was on before us was seriously over-running, so I went over to the Assembly Rooms, did my regular midnight show with David and Tim and then returned to the Playhouse, where the gig had finally begun.
I popped my head around the back of the auditorium. The audience – who had been kept waiting for over an hour – were not in a very generous mood. Addison Cresswell, who was promoting the gig, told me not to panic, that I had fifteen minutes before I was due on. What neither of us realised was that the act before me – who was having a bit of a nightmare – was cutting his set down radically as he went. Less than two minutes later I heard myself being introduced.
It was quarter to two in the morning. I walked out to the centre of the stage, blinded by the light. The place was sold out – there were over three thousand people there.
To my surprise – and relief – my opening few gags went down really well. My set was designed to reel them in with some humdingers at th
e start, before the more theatrical, surreal stuff would start to happen.
But on this night – or rather morning – the stranger stuff left the audience cold. And they stopped laughing. I was only supposed to do ten minutes, and the first three minutes had been great. The next two were a little quieter and then it started …
‘Get off!’ came the voice.
As I hadn’t had a laugh for a couple of minutes, I didn’t quite have the authority to take this heckler down, especially as he was joined by a couple more and then, within seconds, a couple more. Also, with the spotlight so bright in my eyes, I couldn’t see them, but I could hear that they were up on the balcony, miles away. Often in a small club you could wander over to the culprit, size them up and engage. Not here.
And now they could smell blood. There were maybe six of them in a room of over three thousand, but it was enough. They made so much noise that I was drowned out. To my credit I didn’t hang about. I got off stage within seconds. But I couldn’t pretend it had been anything other than a disaster, and a very public one at that.
For the rest of the evening – for the rest of the festival, in fact – comics and industry people came to commiserate with me. I’m sure the intention was to make me feel better, but each time it just confirmed that yet another important person had witnessed my humiliation.
It wasn’t the first bad gig I’d had and it wouldn’t be the last, but the scale of it felt enormous and very public.
Just a few weeks later, I faced another challenge when I was booked to join Blur on tour, as their support act.
I’d already met the band, having been asked to appear in the video for their single ‘Country House’. Director Damien Hirst (clang, split in two, preserved in formaldehyde and sold for a million) wanted a bald guy to get chased by some sexy girls – in a reference to The Benny Hill Show.
My memories of the shoot mainly involve having several asthma attacks as I ran round and round for hours on a hot soundstage full of farm animals crapping everywhere (them, not me). Even now, whenever I hear that song, I suffer a mild panic attack.
I had a laugh with the band, though. Alex, the bass player, had seen me on TV a week or two before the shoot and remembered some of my gags. At the end of filming, I said goodbye and that, I assumed, would be that – but during our Edinburgh run my agent called to tell me that Blur had been back in touch. They were doing a mini-tour of UK seaside towns, as a warm-up for a big arena tour, and wanted a comic to support them. Was I potentially available and did I have a video recording of my act that they could watch?
Yes and yes.
My dad dropped me off on York Way in King’s Cross where the tour bus was waiting. There would be eight shows in nine days. Usually the support act would travel separately, but as I didn’t drive, the band had agreed to let me travel with them.
It was the week of the release of The Great Escape album. The battle with Oasis had hit its peak and the two bands, constantly sneering at each other, were the darlings of the tabloids. Each morning we’d eagerly sift through all the papers and see what Noel or Liam had said about them. Damon or Alex would usually have a pithy response. They knew it was a game and they played it well.
The band wanted to watch my set on the opening night, but I discouraged them, telling them it might take me a gig or two to work out what the crowd wanted. I should have let them see that gig, because it was probably one of the best ones I had on the whole tour – or rather, one of the only ones I managed to get through. Well, I say ‘get through’ – I had been booked to do half an hour but I never managed more than fifteen minutes.
The following night, in Dunoon, where Blur were not only the biggest band in Britain but the first major act to play there since the Tourists fifteen years earlier, I lasted a full two minutes, before the crowd dispensed with my services as one, gleefully shouting ‘You fat bastard! You fat bastard!’
I couldn’t blame them. There they were, a horde of frenzied teenage girls and there was I, a doughy, pudgy, surreal stand-up. While I had a warm response in a couple of the venues, I would say at least five of the gigs were calamitous – and that’s me being generous.
While the audiences declared war on me nightly, the band at least took pity on me. I grew quite close to Alex James and Dave Rowntree, in particular – continuing to see them long after the tour was over – but any of my friends who came along would stammer in their presence. In Brighton, David Walliams came to visit and when I introduced him to Damon he was so starstruck he could barely speak.
After the show, the band and their crew would get plastered. I didn’t drink much – preferring to smoke pot, as ever. It had become a real habit by then. In Bournemouth we went into the sea in the middle of the night, then Alex swanned around the hotel, naked. I was impressed by the band’s lack of inhibition and their conscientious adherence to the rock lifestyle – all while absolutely killing it onstage every night.
Shortly after the tour ended, the first series of Shooting Stars aired on BBC Two (more of that later). I carried on gigging as Sir Bernard for another eighteen months – sometimes to audiences who heckled me throughout, calling for my TV persona George Dawes – but Shooting Stars was opening doors and I was keen to step through them. I’d slogged the circuit for four and a half years, doing hundreds of shows. I’d had the best of times and the worst. Now I was ready to move on.
I began eating at a young age
E – Eating
I’m a bit peckish now, after all that. Shall we grab something to eat? What do you fancy? A sandwich? Anything in particular? Oh, you don’t mind? Great.
What do I want?
Oh blimey, where do I start?
I’ve never tried cocaine, acid or even ecstasy. I haven’t had a joint or smoked a cigarette in nearly twenty years. I have maybe six drinks a year. Baileys on the rocks, usually, but I can take it or leave it.
Food, on the other hand – that’s my vice. This thing here ain’t no beer belly. This is chocolate and chips, cakes and crêpes, croissants and croutons and copious amounts of crisps. When I’m eating breakfast, I’m wondering what to have for lunch. When I’m eating lunch, I’m musing on whether I’ll make it through to supper without needing a snack along the way. In bed, cursing my aching tum after yet another Roman banquet, I’ll munch a handful of Minstrels before dreaming of macaroons.
It wasn’t always thus. I started eating in earnest around the age of maybe eleven or twelve. I’d had puppy fat until then, like many kids, but by the time I was heading for secondary school, I was a big fat pudding.
It was announced one day in assembly, a year or two before I left primary school, that the canteen was changing. Until then school dinners were free and you ate what you were given or you went hungry. It was the usual fare – corned beef or Spam, a scoop of salty mashed potato from a packet, veg that had been boiled for what tasted like hours and, for afters, semolina, sago or sponge in custard.
The government was privatising school dinners. It was sold to us as a positive thing – although we would now have to pay for our meals, we would get to choose what we wanted to eat. Obviously eager to turn a profit, the contractors simply served up junk food. And what ten-year-old wouldn’t just choose nuggets or pizza or burgers for lunch every day? I don’t think anything green ever touched my plate in that school again.
At my secondary school, Haberdashers’, old-fashioned dinners were served – and again, you ate what you were given. Things should have calmed down a little then weight-wise, but unlike before – when I would walk from home to school and back – I was now heading up the road to catch the school coach from Stanmore station, where there was a kiosk. Each day on my way to school and on my way home, I’d stop there and buy something sugary.
At school there was a tuck shop. While the other kids spent their lunch break playing football, I would queue up, wolf down a jam doughnut or a Marathon (as they were back then) and then head to the back of the queue and start all over again.
My
parents’ divorce, my father’s imprisonment, my discomfort at being bald, my increasing unease at my growing attraction for other boys, my anxiety at my persistently low grades and the ever-increasing workload – I struggled to talk about any of this. Instead I just ate and ate and ate.
Back home after school, I would dissolve some chicken stock cubes in boiling water and add huge amounts of pasta, devouring the lot during Neighbours. A couple of hours later I’d be raiding the freezer and whacking some Birds Eye Steakhouse Grills and Alphabites in the oven.
Things came to an inevitable head. While I was out one day, my suspicious brother pulled my bed away from the wall to reveal hundreds of discarded chocolate-bar wrappers beneath.
It was decided that something really had to be done about it and so I enrolled in a weekly Weight Watchers class. My mum wasn’t overweight but joined me in an act of solidarity. I was put on a strict diet and was thrilled to lose nearly half a stone in the first couple of weeks.
Each Wednesday evening we’d line up for the weigh-in – ‘we’ being about twenty-five women, one man and Matthew, the fat little boy with no hair.
The course leader was a bright, chirpy lady called Barbara, who would begin each meeting by asking if we had any ‘noooooo members’ – sound familiar? The longer you spent in the programme, and (hopefully) the greater the weight loss, the more the eating plan opened out to include previously forbidden foods. At the beginning I came to regard a slice of brown bread or a digestive biscuit as the height of naughtiness. Eventually I was permitted the occasional Hula Hoop or maybe even a Birds Eye Supermousse.
Over the next few months I stuck diligently to the diet and went from being a fatty bum-bum to – well, not quite stick-thin but certainly noticeably thinner. Throughout my teens I managed to stay just about the right side of chubby, but then eventually lardiness descended again.
And I’ve been there ever since. I go through phases where I get myself together, lose a couple of stone, but I always seem to return to my solace, my pleasure, my pain – food.
