Alanatomy

by Alan Carr

  The reviews for The Friday Night Project were so appalling that I went back to doing warm-up for the Jonathan Ross Show, genuinely thinking, well, I had a go at this TV lark – I guess it’s not for me. Jonathan Ross saw me by the side of the stage and said, ‘What are you doing here? You’re on the telly – you don’t have to do this.’ I was only pre-empting my eventual sacking which was surely just around the corner. The sacking didn’t come and the show was recommissioned. It not only went on to garner two BAFTA nominations and a Rose d’Or but lasted a very dignified eight series.

  I’m not saying ‘Do not criticize me’, please do – but be fair. Yes, Singer Takes It All was flawed but it was live and it was interactive, with the outcome controlled by the general public via an app – of course it’s going to be flawed, it had never been done before. Ironically, if I’d trotted out yet another panel show with the same old faces it would probably still be running. Anyway, it’s only telly at the end of the day – I took a chance and it failed, hey, it happens. It’s the level of malevolence at my failure that was quiet disturbing.

  I don’t really know what’s going to happen to Twitter. I wouldn’t have got involved in it if I’d known there were people who would dish out rape threats and death threats to those who dared to disagree with them, and the perpetually offended who care more about a missing apostrophe than a missing child. I came off of it last year as it was affecting my mood and I was starting to lose faith in the general public – I’d switched on my phone and read ‘I wish you would die of AIDS’ at 7.30 in the morning. Listen, I’m not exactly a morning person either, but at least I wait until after my Coco Pops to send death threats. Right, that’s it, I thought, I’m coming off. Anyway, I was busy working on my Yap Yap Yap tour. It was the tour that reinstated my love for people, gave me back a bit of perspective, a bit of that old-fashioned human interaction that we’ve relied on as a species for thousands of years. There is a reason why when teenagers are coping with anxiety and depression they are told to get off social media – to get out there and interact with proper humans. We have lots more in common than we are told to think.

  I look forward with interest to see what becomes of the government’s ‘Reclaim the Internet’ campaign, because something obviously needs to be done. The anonymity of Twitter can turn the public into ‘the mob’. I was the victim of bullying at school but at least when I left the playground it stopped; sadly, due to social media, the bullying now follows young people back to their bedrooms and home life. It must be the worst and I really feel for them.

  Of course, not everyone on it is awful. I have had some wonderful conversations and laughs with a lot of people on there, and sometimes if you’re a bit lonely and stuck in all by yourself you can strike up a conversation with a complete stranger just to pass the time and have a right old giggle. And as there are no IQ tests to set up a Twitter account the level of stupidity on there can sometimes make you smile. I think my favourite rant was when the Chatty Man set got a makeover. There it was, bold as brass on my timeline: ‘You disgust me. How could you? I thought you liked animals. Using elephant’s legs to hold up your coffee table – how low can you go?!’ the angry tweet screamed. What? I rewatched Chatty Man, disgusted that this could have happened on my show – and burst out laughing. They weren’t elephant legs, of course (do I even have to say this?), but freshly sawn tree trunks holding up the table top. Unbelievable! Let’s hope we reclaim that internet sooner rather than later, eh?

  So what next? What next for little old me after Ding Dong? A few game show offers had trickled in but I didn’t really want to go there again. Ding Dong had soured my experience of doing a game show. Besides, for me the best one had already been invented, the Generation Game – and, okay, maybe Tipping Point. Coming up with a new and exciting game show was like reinventing the wheel, and a lot of the time not so much reinventing as recycling. Who was it who said, ‘Game shows aren’t like lasagna; they don’t get any better reheated’? Oh, it was me!

  So a lot of people came to see me and pitched me some ideas whilst I sat in a revolving chair with my back to them, stroking a cat. There was a lot of shit, as you can imagine. Some were wrong for me, some were not my cup of tea, some were just insulting and some, it seemed, had only been thought up on the basis of a pun. ‘TV funnyman Alan Carr jets around the world speaking to influential and famous homosexuals in foreign countries – we present to you Around the World in Eighty Gays.’

  I actually did one pilot which I thought had legs, despite the fact that it relied on a pun. It was called Hire Carr, do you get it? I would do odd jobs for people who didn’t have enough time or experience to do them themselves and of course it would be filmed with ‘hilarious consequences’ – we all hoped. Although I filmed a few things, they never saw the light of day. This family in south London didn’t have time to take their children to swimming lessons as they had important meetings that day so would I be able to take their two boys to the swimming baths somewhere near Victoria?

  I turned up at the house to collect them, full of the joys of spring, swinging my brand-new kit bag, excited for my new job and hopefully, fingers crossed, for my new series. So all three of us, plus camera crew, headed to the Queen Mother Sports Centre in Victoria. (Because when you think of naming a sports centre you instinctively think of the Queen Mum, don’t you? ‘Linford Christie? Sally Gunnell? Kriss Akabusi – no, I know, the Queen Mother. Boy, did she love a crosstrainer!’) All was well as we filtered through the turnstile and headed to the changing rooms, it was only when I removed my top that these mild-mannered children turned into the spawn of Satan. ‘Why have you got breasts?’ said the littlest one, the question cutting through the chlorine-soaked air and rebounding off every tiled wall. Whilst I hissed for the boy to be quiet, the other one started whipping my bum with a towel – it was like being back in the school changing room.

  My next job was to take a lady to antenatal classes as her husband was away on business. I don’t know if this genuinely happens at antenatal class or whether it was set up for telly but I had to wear a very realistic bump and a truss to replicate the feeling of pregnancy. We sat in a semicircle on a rug and they placed a doll up inside the truss between my legs and I had to breathe whilst the wife comforted me with pats on the back. Then with deep breaths I had to try to force the doll out through the hole in my truss. It was very embarrassing, especially doing it in front of a group of genuinely pregnant and visibly unimpressed women. I heaved and grunted as best I could but, alas, it was a waste of time as it never got shown – the sight of the baby’s head coming out mid-grunt from between my legs was apparently too ‘graphic’ and ‘upsetting’!

  It’s about getting the right vehicle and also about seeing if you can work with a particular bunch of people. Sometimes you will just have a feeling that it’s not going to work but then sometimes you’ll get on swimmingly and it will be something totally out of your hands that scuppers the whole pitch.

  I went to one meeting about a sketch show that would obviously involve a lot of dressing up. They all seemed very enthusiastic and the meeting was going very well until my eyes caught something written on one chap’s notepad: ‘Check if he’s still fat?’ Well, that went down like a cup of cold sick. Jabbing the notebook, I said to him, ‘Yes I am,’ and wobbled out – finishing my pain au chocolat first, you understand, I’m not an idiot.

  You also have to keep your wits about you because these sneaky production companies always try to sell an idea with a dream cast – ‘Victoria Beckham, Gordon Ramsay and Prince Harry driving across America’s Route 66, doing tasks picked by the public’ is to me TV heaven, but obviously Alexander Meercat and that woman who put a cat in a wheelie bin going up the M6 … all of a sudden not so enticing.

  I think I was badly miscast when they asked me to host the Q Awards, it so wasn’t me. For a start, I had no idea who any of the bands were and when I did smile at them or wave I either got a scowl back or was completely blanked. Muse were nice and tha
t’s the only friendly conversation I remember. I’ve got no idea why I agreed to host the bloody thing, I’m hardly rock ’n’ roll, am I – chubby calves that have never seen a skinny jean and a head too fat for a trilby. It must have been the money and, boy, did I earn it.

  Weirdly, I’d had a good time on the previous occasion I’d gone when Kylie Minogue had asked me and Justin to present the ‘Icon’ award to her at the Q Awards. We got very merry, and my personal highlight was Sir Paul McCartney knowing who I was and giving me the old Macca thumbs up – to me, little old me. ‘He Loves Me – yeah yeah yeah’ I thought. As the awards finally started winding down, I went to the loo and what did I see there sitting on the floor next to the toilet bowl but a Q Award. Well I never, I thought. I picked it up and it had ‘Amy Winehouse’ on it. I finished my business and went to show Justin – ‘Look what I found’ – and in that befuddled grey area that lies between drunk and sober, right and wrong, innocence and guilt where that askew logic comes to the front of your mind and says ‘Stand back everyone I’ll take care of this situation,’ I decided to keep it. I’ve never owned a Q Award before and with it being Amy Winehouse’s I thought it would be a collector’s item. As I left, all the paps outside started clicking. Triumphantly, I waved the trophy aloft, shouting, ‘Look, I’ve got a Q Award!’ and me and Justin went off to a pub as we always did. Then we got the phone call from the organizers – had I stolen Amy’s Q Award? Apparently I was the last person to be seen with it.

  ‘Er, er, pardon?’ I said, playing for time as I scanned the pub for a vat of acid to destroy the evidence. ‘Well, I wouldn’t say steal as such …’ Then I caved in and gave it back. Yes, I was the proud owner of a Q Best Album Award for forty-five minutes until it was cruelly taken back and given to its rightful owner.

  We had Amy Winehouse on The Friday Night Project and she was so much fun, such a laugh, ready to throw herself into anything. We had to re-enact some sex scenes as part of the panel show item. I did the ‘Wheelbarrow’ with Amy whilst Justin did the ‘Reverse Italian Chandelier’ with George Galloway. Justin’s position didn’t go well and he slipped and ended up grabbing George’s cock and balls – George walked off set disgusted at being manhandled. Me and Amy won by default and can I say we gave wonderful wheelbarrow. To think that my nose was at one point resting on the top of that now iconic beehive makes me burst with pride.

  Well, hosting the Q Awards was a whole different kettle of fish. Meatloaf came on and being a big lad myself I ignored his profuse sweating – it was hot up there under the lights and there was no air. Then he started swaying to and fro and suddenly toppled forward. I ran from the podium, grabbed the fringing on the arm of his leather jacket and yanked him back. As I have said many a time in my life, thank God for fringing. If he had dressed conservatively he would have been dead and so would the guests at the table at the front. I assumed he was pissed and made a quip about it. I was then taken to one side during a Duffy VT and told it was medication and jet lag, not alcohol, so I felt bad. The whole thing was a horrible experience and not only did I not get asked back, I didn’t even get a Pride of Britain Award for saving Meatloaf’s life. Charming.

  Another ill-fated pilot I did that I in no way regret and would do again in a heartbeat was The End of The Pier Show for Channel 4. It was a game show filmed in Blackpool, you guessed it, on the end of the pier. It was rubbish and the only saving grace was my co-host Lionel Blair. Sorry, Justin, but I have never worked with anyone before or since who has made me laugh so much. And don’t be fooled by his image – underneath that perfectly coiffed hair is a mind jam-packed with saucy anecdotes and rude jokes that would make even Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown blush. We filmed one sketch where Lionel and I had booked into a B & B, the joke being that we were both oblivious to the fact that the B and B stood for Bisexual Brothel. The scene opens with us both sitting down for a full English breakfast and as the waiter turns round we see that in fact his trousers are bumless. So far, so camp. All Lionel had to do was stick a fork in the Cumberland sausage, unzip the mouth of my gimp mask and shove it through. Don’t ask why I was wearing a gimp mask, but anyway, this sausage-shoving took thirty-six takes – thirty-six! I didn’t even have any lines, I just kept convulsing with giggles – a sketch that shouldn’t have taken more than twenty minutes took over two hours because I was shaking with laughter. There were actual tears coming out of the eye holes (probably not for the first time). I’m even chuckling as I write this and I’m thinking that I must try to find that clip – maybe I’ll put it in as an extra on one of my stand-up DVDs.

  The End of the Pier Show was going to be the first television show filmed at the end of a pier and I was to travel the length and breadth of Great Britain to different piers (with Lionel Blair, of course), entertaining excited holidaymakers – well, that was the plan. Whereas on The Friday Night Project we had a studio and all the technology that comes with a studio to hand, for The End of the Pier Show pilot everything had to be imported to Blackpool, and as we didn’t have the luxury of multiple stages, the poor audience sitting on deckchairs had to wait for the stage to be set up. It was soon beginning to dawn on me that there was a reason why this kind of show had never been done before!

  After one very long day of filming and sketching, me and Lionel were enjoying a drink at the end of the pier when a man rushed in. ‘I need help, quick, quick, someone is hanging off the end of the pier – he’s trying to kill himself!’ Well, the man’s eyes scanned the bar and for some reason stopped on me and Lionel. Really? We were hardly Batman and Robin. Am I really the best person to go and talk someone down from a pier? I’ve hardly the most soothing voice, have I? Anyway, we both ran to the end of the pier and there was a man hanging off the end, shouting, ‘I want to die, I want to die!’ Thinking back, it all happened so fast, but the one thing that does stick in my head is that his clothes had been neatly placed in a pile next to his shoes, which were paired up. We spoke to him calmly, my body not once betraying the adrenaline that was bubbling up and down like a SodaStream. Slowly the man came round and he thankfully decided not to end it all. We reached out, grabbed his hand and pulled him over the railings to safety. The police were called and he was taken away without even the mention of a Pride of Britain Award for me and Lionel. Charming! We were inundated with calls from the local press, wanting our take on the prevented suicide – we even got asked to go on BBC North West Tonight to give our side of the story. I’d never been a hero before (or since!).

  Well anyway, as you can imagine, The End of the Pier Show soon ended up ‘The Bottom of the Bin Show’. It never saw the light of day, and although I hadn’t given the audience the gift of laughter at least I gave a stranger the gift of life and if that means you decide to nominate me for a Good Samaritan-style award, so be it. I also made a friend in Lionel and the year after we kept in touch – he came to one of my shows and I went to see him do his wonderful ballroom-dancing show at the Birmingham Hippodrome. We went out around some bars afterwards and ended up at the Nightingale nightclub. The music was so loud in there that Lionel found himself gesticulating for a drink – I couldn’t help thinking that if he couldn’t get himself a large gin and tonic from miming after umpteen years doing Give Us A Clue, then there was no hope for me.

  Although The End of the Pier Show didn’t work out, it wasn’t long before I found myself back up in the Vegas of the North for my radio show. Radio 2 had decided for a weekend in September to up sticks from London and travel the 250-mile journey to Blackpool. It felt like a real Radio 2 family affair; lots of shows were being recorded live from there including the Chris Evans show from the Tower Ballroom and there were concerts with people like Paloma Faith, JLS and Pixie Lott; but more importantly, I had been asked to turn on the Blackpool lights, which was a real honour for me. As a teenager I had come up to see the Illuminations with my family as a treat and if anyone has bothered to read my previous autobiography they will know that this was a real reversal of fortune; I had lived above a laun
derette on the seafront up there and an illumination of Father Christmas had filled our bay window for months, so to be able to follow in the footsteps of such greats as Dale Winton, Julie Goodyear and Frank Bruno and switch on those very lights, well, who was I to decline?

  It was blustery and raining heavily on the evening I did it – I know, who’d have thought it – but it didn’t dampen the huge Blackpool crowd that had come to see me do the all-important ‘turning on’. I’d known it was rainy and windy before I even left my hotel room thanks to the lack of insulation around the window frame; the fringes on my table lamp were swinging violently and every so often my face would be sand-blasted by a gust from the Golden Mile. It was a relief to get outside on to the seafront away from the breeze in my bedroom.

  Blackpool definitely knows how to party and I dare anyone not to have a good time up there. I ended up, naturally, at the Flying Handbag, Blackpool’s most famous/notorious/iconic/scariest (depending on your own viewpoint) pub, which was a bit naughty as I was doing my radio show Going Out with Alan Carr the next day with my original co-host Emma Forbes.

  Lovely Emma had never been to Blackpool before and I don’t think she realized what had hit her. When I lived in Manchester we’d often headed to Blackpool for a night out, swigging tinnies on the train and lubing ourselves up for the anarchy that would ensue, so at least I knew what to expect. Emma and I weren’t doing the radio show in a studio, oh no, we were going to do it on a tram – around Blackpool. We sat in a car by the tram tracks waiting for our transport to arrive and ferry us along the newly illuminated illuminations. As we waited, a pissed-up hen party staggered towards us holding a bottle of wine – well, it was half four in the afternoon. Spotting Emma in the back of the car, the bride-to-be lifted up her tutu (yes, you read that right – tutu), pulled down her knickers and squashed her arse cheeks against the rear window. ‘Emma, welcome to Blackpool!’ I cried. What an introduction! Not a minute too soon the tram finally arrived and we leapt on board. It had turned out rather nice – the tempest that had pebble-dashed my face the previous night had subsided and the evening, dare I say it, seemed quite pleasant. It was very strange to think that I would be communicating to the whole of Radio 2 whilst on a tram hurtling around Blackpool. People lined the tram tracks and waved and halfway along we picked up Mika, who sang us an acoustic rendition of his hit ‘Love Today’. As if the whole day wasn’t surreal enough, I was dressed as Olive from On The Buses and Emma was Blakey – there had never been a spin-off called On The Trams, hence the homage to another mode of transport. It was a lot of fun and after being cooped up in the studio most weekends it made a nice change to be getting some fresh air down the iconic Golden Mile. Mind you, we couldn’t relax too much due to the sudden blasts of static from the tram that occurred sporadically above our heads, showering us with sparks like acid rain. I definitely earned my broadcasting stripes that day, replacing ‘shit!’ for ‘shoot!’ and ‘fuck’ for ‘flipping hell’ at a moment’s notice as I patted the burning sparks down on my porcelain skin.