Alanatomy

by Alan Carr

  Out of all the shows I have done, that fleeting moment on Top Gear has had the most impact on me abroad, which is testament to what a global phenomenon it actually is. South America, the isles of Greece, Cuba – you name it, people come up to me saying ‘Top Gear’. At first you think, ay up, they’re selling me drugs, and it’s only when they start making a steering-wheel gesture that the penny drops. Ahh! That balmy evening at Dunsfold Aerodrome where I zoomed round a track in a Nissan Sunny.

  As with my experience on Top Gear, peeking behind the scenes can often enhance the magic and endear you to a show even more; sometimes, however, the stardust you see lighting up the screen on closer inspection can turn out to be asbestos. One such show was Celebrity Apprentice. This came under the umbrella of Comic Relief – they take over a well-known show and put a celebrity twist to it and they usually drip-feed it to the viewing public over the night of the fundraiser. It’s such an amazing charity, as you know, and I’m sure you’ve all donated too, so obviously when you get the call from Emma Freud or Richard Curtis asking for you to get involved, it’s a no-brainer – it’s an Almighty YES! I have done numerous things with Comic Relief, some of them really cool. I was once in a Jennifer Saunders sketch spoof of Mamma Mia. After being brought up on French and Saunders, this was a big deal for me and when I got asked by Jennifer to be one of the prospective dads to Sienna Miller, again it was an Almighty YES!

  More recently I was part of a spoof Take That for their Comic Relief charity single. We spent the whole day in a freezing warehouse on the outskirts of Ealing dressed up as Take That, taking the piss out of Take That to their faces. James Corden was Gary Barlow, Catherine Tate was Jason Orange, David Walliams was Robbie Williams and John Bishop was Howard Donald. I was Mark Owen, which was the worst casting ever – no, Catherine as Jason probably pipped me to that accolade – but poor Mark, he was about the size of my leg. I tell you, I will never tut and roll my eyes at a boy band dance routine again, they are hard, and I was just lip-synching. I had a stitch before the first chorus. The poor make-up girl kept having to come over and mop me down, I was so unfit. Respect, boys, respect.

  Anyway, obviously when Emma rang up out of the blue and asked me to do Celebrity Apprentice it was an Almighty – oh, okay, you get the gist.

  I was an avid watcher of the show and jumped at the chance to be on it. Looking back, I think that was the problem – I loved the show too much. The penny should have dropped when I saw Margaret Mountford, who on screen was a severe matronly type, no nonsense, a force to be reckoned with, laughing loudly with Nick Hewer over a pastry wearing a pair of Reebok Classics. What? Where’s her clipboard? Why ain’t she scowling? Then when we were told that we’d be going to see Lord Sugar in his office, instead of turning right to the throbbing metropolis of Canary Wharf we headed left towards Acton and pulled up on an industrial wasteland next to a DFS. What, Lord Sugar has a Saturday job in a settee shop? It messed with my head.

  One thing I’ll never forget was when we were filming the bridge scene. Anyone who has ever seen The Apprentice will know the bridge scene, where all the apprentices strut determinedly across the Millennium Bridge, eyes bright with ambition and with a look on their faces like ‘Who’s farted?’ We went to get the filming done early in the morning but the person who had organized it had not realized it was Lord Mayor’s Day and security was paramount, so we had to get out at Holborn and walk to the bridge. What? But I’m a celebrity, I don’t walk. The irony wasn’t lost on me as I lugged my carry-on case down the street and I couldn’t help thinking that if this was a task the person who had organized it would probably be fired – just saying!

  Well, the biggest slap in the face was still to come and on the last day of filming I was fired – yeah, fired. Fuck you, Sugar! Okay, not wanting to sound like one of those disgruntled employees who goes to an independent tribunal for justice, but fuck you, Sugar! Alan, stop it, stop it, he’s not worth it. I’m not very good at rejection as you can see, reader. I was stitched up. Stitched up, I tell you. Watching the edited programme was like watching another show altogether: footage of the rest of the team zipping around London talking into their phones held horizontally as they always do in The Apprentice was spliced with me sitting sipping a tea, looking aimlessly into the distance; Jack Dee and Jonathan Ross haggling frantically with the owner of a toy shop, cut to me, shuffling around a warehouse – and not only was I shuffling but they had put some plodding music over the top to accentuate the fact, just in case the viewers couldn’t make their minds up. ‘Is he plodding? Yes, I think he’s plodding.’

  To be fair, I wasn’t the most dynamic of the team – my motto is ‘When the going gets tough, the tough get going, and I get a bin bag and do a bit of light tidying-up.’ It’s interesting seeing those shows as a human experiment, seeing where you fit in as part of a team. Jonathan Ross and Gok Wan are very much alpha males and as soon as they were given the task they leapt into action, ideas, action plans, strategies flooding their heads – I did what I always did and retired to the kitchen to make a cuppa. I was quite proud that by the end I knew everyone’s tea preferences, who had two sugars, who had Canderel, who had it black and who liked a little bicky on the side … Reading this back, maybe I did deserve to be fired and hey, I’m not stupid, I know there has to be a fall guy in the show to give it a narrative, and it was for Comic Relief so I can’t complain too much, and it’s not about how I come across, ultimately it’s about raising money – it’s just that I wanted to impress Lord Sugar.

  We’d only met once before and that was on Jonathan Ross’s chat show earlier in the year. Lord Sugar was a guest and Jonathan asked me as a favour to wear a blonde wig and sit at a desk like the receptionist in The Apprentice and introduce the guests one by one via a telephone, all filmed from behind so that no one would see it was me. It was going really well, getting laughs off the audience, until a drunken Johnny Vegas took a shine to me, grabbed my head between his hands and tried to make me faux fellate him in front of a shocked Lady Sugar. I always wonder whether Johnny thought I was a genuine woman.

  Anyway, I’m going to put the whole Apprentice ordeal to bed now. It made me a stronger person and, let’s face it, it wasn’t the last time that I would be edited down for better or worse – but fuck you, Sugar!

  One of the most rewarding television shows I’ve done is Who Do You Think You Are? Being the nosey person that I am I’ve always been drawn to going through other people’s dirty laundry – sorry, finding out about different people’s lives – and as my own family tree is less of a tree and more of a Japanese knotweed my interest deepened further. I jumped at the chance to do it for a couple of reasons: firstly, it would be nice for the British public to see me in a more subdued light, not gurning, squawking or dressed as a woman but being me and, dare I say it, doing something with gravitas; secondly, there was an anomaly in my family tree on my mother’s side – my great-grandad had changed his name and no one knew why. Anyone who had been able to remember his real name had died and the trail had gone cold, basically leaving the present generation with a genealogical sinkhole.

  The Who Do You Think You Are? team were absolutely great. The research they put in to searching every nook and cranny of my family tree was astounding and I am for ever thankful to them for that. We spent a week on my dad’s family tree and then a week on my mother’s family tree. For my dad’s, we spent a wonderful time in the North East in the beautiful county of Northumberland – I love going back there as it always reminds me of my grandparents who lived in West Moor, Whitley Bay, and of searching for cockles near St Mary’s lighthouse. The Carrs being a generation upon generation mining family meant my journey took me to Burradon, where there had been a devastating pit explosion in 1860 that had killed my great-great-grandad and, unknown to me (they revealed this in the local pub to me on camera later that day), it had also unbelievably killed my great-great-grandad on the other side – my dad’s mother’s side. Not only that, they had been found holding eac
h other in a gruesome embrace, both burnt to death – one had gone back to help the other instead of fleeing the explosion. Tragic, totally tragic, and properly spooky that two lines of a family tree would be brought together generations later through this awful tragedy. It was a real moment for me and writing it down now it still gives me chills. I genuinely thought it would be a dead cert for the show but apparently Kate Humble had had a mining disaster in the last series so they decided not to include it – such is television.

  My mum’s ancestral story took me to Dartford and Woolwich. Didn’t any of my ancestors fancy going anywhere exotic? Didn’t any of them flick through a Thomas Cook brochure and think ‘Ooh, Trinidad and Tobago – wonder what that’s like?’ Apparently not, I realized as I drove through the Blackwall Tunnel for the fifteenth time. One thing I hadn’t known about the show was the huge amount of filming that would be involved. I’d been doing my own shows for a few years so I knew it could drag, but really, the amount of filming was excruciating: driving over bridges, driving under bridges, driving on motorways, driving on B-roads – doing three-point turns on B-roads when you missed the turning for the A-road. Believe it or not, it wasn’t the hours and hours of driving footage that got to me the most, it was the sentimental shots, the ones where they film you wandering in front of somewhere dramatic or geographically important, looking whimsical and full of thought. Oh God, I found them so eggy, plus they were difficult. More often than not I would get the giggles and then when I started doing the universal mime for thinking, stroking my chin, I would get a ‘Cut!’ from a disgruntled director – you just couldn’t win. The most excruciating moment I had to do was sitting in a roadside cafe, fingering through a couple of photo albums, staring thoughtfully at the A1 over a Belgian bun – I mean, please. They also wanted me to do long shots, where I’d walk across a bridge or up a cobbled street and the camera would film me from afar – I had to wander up and down one bridge so many times, looking so contemplative, that people I passed kept giving me anxious looks, thinking I was going to chuck myself off.

  But for all the filming and repetitiveness it was lovely to do and the experts were so generous with their time and knowledge. It also filled that niggling gap on my mother’s side about why my great-grandad had changed his name. I was taken to an old weapons artillery shed in Woolwich and was told by the expert that Henry had gone to war. He signed up in Peckham to fight WWI with his mates, and that particular battalion had fought in the Battle of the Somme and then the Battle of Ypres. ‘And …’ dramatic pause from the expert, ‘Henry had survived both.’ I looked to the heavens, what lucky star was I born under. ‘He survived,’ the expert continued, ‘because he wasn’t there. He’d deserted – twice.’ Shit. Oh shit. The number of Who Do You Think You Are? episodes I’d watched where they had found out that the long-lost relatives had been an admiral or an inventor or, in Brooke Shields’s case, a couple of popes and a saint (which I think is just plain old showing-off!). Why a deserter? Why? All caught on camera too! Admittedly, it was embarrassing, but at least we had found the reason for his name change and the subsequent confusion it had caused. You never know, if he hadn’t deserted and had carried on to fight at the Somme or Ypres he might not have come back and then there would have been no me – which is a bad thing – yes? Yes – a bad thing.

  When you become a ‘TV personality’, that godawful misnomer (do you know the amount of people I meet who work on television that have no personality?!), things change. You don’t, but things around you change. The only way I can describe it is it’s like you’re having an out-of-body experience – you sort of drift off, leaving yourself down here while the perceived ‘you’ floats up into the sky, gets stuck in a tree and everyone treats it like a piñata. Yeah, grab a stick – get bashing – enjoy yourself – knock yourself out. For the most part I have had a wonderful charmed life mainly thanks to you and your support over the years and, believe me, my arms are purple with the amount of times I pinch myself at how it’s all turned out. I have become a ‘celebrity’, whatever that means, and inherited all the responsibility that comes with it. It’s a right royal mess being a celebrity because it means so many things to so many people. I struggle to grasp what I’m supposed to be half the time. Celebrity! Let’s face it, there aren’t many words in the English language that can mean ‘icon’ and ‘twat’ at the same time, depending on that person’s point of view. If you slip into a pub and sit and read quietly in the corner, you’re aloof; if you walk into the same pub and say hello to everyone, it’s ‘Who does HE think he is?’ You can’t win. If I ran into a burning orphanage and saved every last child from a fire there’s always going to be someone who says ‘Looks like someone’s drumming up a bit of publicity for their DVD’, or worse, ‘Someone’s got fat ankles.’ The best thing to do is just roll with it. Like beauty, fame is in the eye of the beholder – and depending on their interpretation of ‘celebrity’ you could be talented, you could have a gift, you could even be an inspiration, a role model perhaps to thousands, or conversely you could be shallow, vain and narcissistic. Just recently ‘tax dodger’ has been added to the list of suspicions you have to put up with. ‘Are your tax affairs in order?’ a journalist quizzed me on the red carpet; a valid question, yes, but a bit insulting, don’t you think? Fair enough, if you meet me and I don’t take my eyes off a compact mirror, preening myself whilst you chat to me, yeah, call me vain; or if you see me in the Cayman Islands making a ‘deposit’ then you go for it, call me dodgy – judge away, boo and hiss behind your computer – but don’t pile all this prejudice on my doorstep just because I clock into a television studio now and not a call centre.

  I try to do my bit because I have awful guilt about the amazing opportunities that have come my way, but a lot of the time it feels like you’re swimming upstream. Once when I was on the red carpet at the Pride of Britain Awards an autograph hunter squashed behind the barrier pointed at some nurses and carers on their way in to collect well-deserved awards and said, ‘It’s them that are heroes, not you overpaid stars. Real people, people who don’t get any recognition.’ I wholeheartedly agreed with him: soldiers, nurses and teachers are all real heroes who need to get more recognition and respect, but you’re the one who’s waited here since one o’clock, screaming and shouting, to get a photo of yourself with someone from Emmerdale – instead of lecturing me, maybe you need to have this conversation with yourself.

  Those responsibilities I mentioned aren’t just supporting charities, or donating money, or retweeting fun runs, etcetera, sometimes they are closer to home – sometimes the responsibility is to stop yourself becoming a dick. Because you’ve become famous you have to act like you’re famous – right? Wrong. That is a one-way ticket to Twatland. I remember once in the early days sitting in my garden and seeing a flash. ‘God, I’ve been papped – please, please, please, all I want is to be left alone, can’t the press just get that into their heads?’ I pleaded, grabbing my stuff and stalking to the safety of my lounge. The paparazzi, it seemed, was God as it hadn’t been a camera but a flash of lightning. Oh. Even more embarrassing was the day I was driving back to my house and I thought people were recognizing me from being on the telly the night before. They were waving and waving as I drove along. It turned out I was driving in front of a bus, blocking its way. Cringey or what? I was comfortable enough with myself to give myself a good talking-to: ‘Just because you are on the telly Friday nights for an hour, Alan, does not make you Madonna! You are not the centre of the universe, you are not even the centre of Holloway – get over yourself!’

  I remember tweeting about a contestant on Deal Or No Deal who had sadly missed out on the big money. ‘If you really cared, you’d give him one of your MILLIONS,’ came the quite frankly bonkers reply, the malevolence bubbling just under the surface for all to see. I went to my keyboard and began to type, ‘If I had all those millions I wouldn’t be sitting here watching Deal Or No Deal on a rainy Monday afternoon, I’d be in St Tropez on a yacht being pu
mmelled by a house boy, you miserable …’ but I bit my tweet. Alan, it’s petty, leave it. Considering that it was probably one of the least vile things I have had said to me on Twitter, it still irked. It’s not just confined to social media either – family members muscle in too with their half-baked assumptions of what I am like. Paul and I went to Vietnam and, no offence, Vietnam, but we didn’t like it. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the charming old town of Hoi An with its cute little lanes and trees adorned with coloured lanterns, and Halong Bay was breathtaking, but we found the cities depressingly polluted with not much to do. I remember when we arrived in Ho Chi Minh how we laughed at all the people going about their business wearing these protective face masks – we spent the first hour pretending to moonwalk up the street, doing our high-pitched Michael Jackson ‘hee hee’ and ‘shamone’ to anyone who would listen. After an hour, when I’d got a chemical headache and bogies as black as coal were being picked from my nose, we gave in and got a protective face mask each. On telling our families we didn’t like Vietnam, a cousin who had obviously had a different experience to us asked, ‘Did you even step out of your limo and see the real Vietnam?’ What? Why would I be driving around a Third World country in a limousine, you wouldn’t get to see anything would you? Then it dawned on me: Oh, I know why, because I’m on the telly and that means I’m rich and stupid – okay, I get it now.