James Acaster’s Classic Scrapes

by James Acaster

  I had never been to watch wrestling before. I had never really been a fan when all of my friends were watching it on TV back in my school days and the poster for this event looked like it was very much in the same vein – men looking like cartoon characters pointing and roaring at the camera – but I thought I’d at least be able to make fun of it afterwards when I told friends about it.

  If you haven’t been to watch live wrestling before you owe it to yourself to go. And if you already go and watch live wrestling, why are you not going more often? Yes it’s scripted but so is The West Wing and that’s why it’s amazing. I wish every sport was scripted: there’d be no nil-nil draws and I wouldn’t miss a game if the World Cup had a storyline to it. Imagine if players had vendettas against each other and were doing speeches about it beforehand, and not sporting vendettas but personal ones, unforgivable wrongs. Say if Cantona had stolen Le Tissier’s car and crashed it into the stadium before the match and now Le Tissier was out for revenge and had announced that if his team won then Cantona had to buy him seven new sports cars or face the consequences and then at half time we learned that Cantona had been having an affair with Le Tissier’s wife so they decided to play the match one-on-one, everyone else sitting on the sidelines while they competed for one lady’s affections. Gripping, well paced, purely scripted drama. I’d watch it every day. But sadly such things do not exist in football and so I haven’t watched a single game since I was thirteen, hence why the only footballers I can name are Eric Cantona and Matt Le Tissier.

  I loved wrestling as much as I loved line dancing and I may be the only person who’s ever said that (apart from the wrestling world champ Dancing Joe The Dosey Doe Dynamo, who most people haven’t heard of because I just made him up).

  This particular wrestling event was held in a community centre and the room was packed with a much broader range of people than I had expected. There was of course a big wrestling ring in the middle of the room (much like the boxing ring Pindrop had performed in once upon a time) and the audience were sat around, cheering and clapping and stamping feet. The majority of the evening was a Royal Rumble, which was perfect because you got to see loads of wrestlers coming and going, all doing special moves. Some of my favourites included Shamu (a large gentleman who jumped off the top rope like a killer whale jumping out of the water) and The Spin Doctor (a man dressed as a doctor who would spin around in circles until he hit someone. He lasted five seconds, left the ring, then had to sneak back in because he had forgotten his lab coat). I was caught up in the excitement like nobody’s business. I’m usually quite reserved but tonight I was a hardcore wrestling fanatic and screaming the names of my favourites as loud as the next person, which meant I was mainly shouting, ‘Go on, Shamu!’ for one and a half hours (behaviour that would surely get me kicked out of Sea World).

  After the Royal Rumble there was one more fight, a grudge match between good guy, Lion Heart, and all-round baddie, The Judge. They came out and trash-talked for a long time, mainly The Judge being mean and running his mouth off, calling Lion Heart nasty names and being out of order. Then Lion Heart took the mic and held his hand in the air until everyone was silent.

  ‘Before we do this, I want to say a few words about someone very special. She’s with us tonight, she’s been here at every single show we’ve ever done, and every time she comes she brings with her an amazing group of youngsters who provide such support and encouragement to every fighter in this ring. We’re incredibly grateful to her for the amazing work she does with these kids, so please everyone give a big round of applause to Lynne as she joins us up here in the ring. Come on Lynne, we’ve got something for you!’

  What a lovely speech! Lynne looked genuinely surprised and slowly climbed into the ring, the crowd clapping and cheering, the kids that she worked with going crazy. Lion Heart handed her a beautiful bunch of flowers; even The Judge was applauding her. As the applause died down Lynne said thank you to everyone, Lion Heart gave her a cheeky little kiss on the cheek and she began to return to her seat. But The Judge also had something to say. He took the mic from Lion Heart and put a hand on Lynne’s shoulder.

  ‘I would also like to say thank you, Lynne, you do inspiring work with young people in the local area, it means the world and . . . can I see those flowers quickly, please?’ Lynne handed The Judge the flowers and he threw them on the floor and repeatedly stamped on them like a madman. He went ballistic, manically stamping on them until they were in tatters. And guess what? the whole audience turned on him. What few supporters he had were against him now. Bad move you stupid judge wanker, I hope you lose now more than ever! She does amazing work with kids, you scumbag! Let the fight commence!

  The Judge

  Lynne sat down and the match kicked off. Interesting fact about Lion Heart – every time he gets punched he does a mini roar like a lion cub. And Lion Heart was getting punched A LOT, like it properly looked like The Judge was going to win and if that flower-stomping bully won this fight I didn’t know how I was going to react. I’d be inconsolable; I’d be a wreck is what I’d be. The Judge delivered a heavy blow to the face of Lion Heart and he fell to the floor. He was rolling around growling like a little cat as The Judge picked up his gavel and raised it high in the air above him, but the crowd got firmly behind Lion Heart, their cheers making him stronger by the second, and the more we cheered the more energised he became. He started encouraging us to cheer more because that’s definitely where he was getting his power from, and I was going bananas. I’ve never cheered so loudly. My whole face was vibrating. I just didn’t want Lion Heart to get it with the gavel. And then Lion Heart used every bit of strength in his entire body . . . to kick The Judge in the balls. That’s how he won. With a shot to the nuts. It was perfect and I’ve never felt so elated.

  The following day I attended a martial arts class. This was the thing I think I enjoyed least all week. The martial art in question was called Jeet Kune Do, a martial art I have never heard of before or since. I was paired with a seventeen-year-old guy who told me he was ‘sick of taking shit from people all the time’ and then I let him punch me for two hours. I was holding up pads, sure, but he put all of his might into every punch. Every time he hit me I had the urge to roar like Lion Heart but as no one else in the class was doing animal noises I opted not to. At one point he hit me incredibly hard with his left hand and when I said, ‘That’s quite the left hook,’ he paused and nodded, ‘Yeah, I’m a south paw,’ then punched me in the hand again.

  The teacher was an interesting guy because he looked weedy like Rick Moranis but was a master of three types of martial arts. I talked to the other students and apparently on five separate occasions he has beaten the crap out of men in town on a Friday night because they were sure they could pick on him and didn’t anticipate him being a martial arts sensei. Another student told me that the teacher had once chased burglars down the street while waving a samurai sword in the air. Good for him.

  And so I had one more day to go. I had done a new thing every night (bar Wednesday, but I’ve made my feelings clear on that). If I could do something on Sunday night that I’d never done before I would have succeeded. But I didn’t. I didn’t do something I’d never done before, I did something I’d done many times in the past, and I failed. There was nothing to do on Sunday night! Not even karaoke. Wouldn’t that have been great, if I’d gone back to the karaoke pub and done karaoke on the final night? But no, they only did it twice a week. There was nothing, nothing whatsoever, just church stuff, and thanks to my Christian upbringing I had already done plenty of church stuff in my life. You might think, never mind James, you discovered you love line dancing and going to the wrestling, you got two new pastimes out of just one week. And you’d be right, only I didn’t keep either of them up. I’ve never done either one of them ever again (apart from wrestling but that was because I took part in a comedy wrestling match at the Edinburgh festival). And even though I had enjoyed two of the activities I didn’t much like the board g
ames and the martial arts. Although worst-case scenario would’ve been the people from the board games club being at the martial arts class. Especially Chris, who probably still hated me for making him lose. He would’ve obliterated me at martial arts class, probably would’ve dressed up as a Dad’s Army character then roundhoused me in the mouth. Yes, things could’ve gone worse and this little project had certainly passed the time. Five out of seven isn’t too bad, is it? Basically, a working week with the weekend off, more or less. So a working week of new things, if not the entire week. Right? No, I can’t get out of this. I failed. Well and truly.

  Shame

  The next story is something I still feel bad about. Whenever I do something I’m not proud of I tend to carry it with me for a long time. For example, the thing I feel most guilty about in my entire life happened when I was twelve years old and involves eating some wild strawberries. My mother, who is the nicest person in the world, had been growing wild strawberries in the garden for months and months. Wild strawberries are much smaller than regular strawberries, not much bigger than a blueberry, and from what I can tell they’re not easy to grow. After dinner one day my mum served me and my dad our desserts and then she smiled proudly and said, ‘I know what I’m finally having for pudding today!’

  ‘Is it time for the wild strawberries?’ asked my dad, and she nodded excitedly. She then disappeared into the garden and returned, cupping a small pile of strawberries in both hands. She washed them and put them into a bowl – she had barely got half a bowlful but the work that had gone into them had been immense. She put a little yoghurt on them and sat down with a spoon. She got a spoonful, leaving only three small strawberries in the bowl.

  ‘Do you want to try them?’ she asked my dad. He leaned in and pretended to eat the whole spoonful as a joke and they both laughed, then he took two from the spoon and ate them.

  ‘Would you like to try some, James?’ my mum asked me. I had watched my dad’s joke and thought it was funny but could’ve been funnier. I knew what it needed. With humour, you need to push boundaries and go as far as you can go, that’s the secret to a great joke, I knew it. I leaned in and just went for the big laugh. As soon as my lips met around the strawberries and I was past the point of no return, I knew I’d messed up. My mouth was clamped over the spoon, all the wild strawberries were in my mouth now. I looked up at my mother who was still holding the handle of the spoon and she looked horrified. I realised what I’d done, I had destroyed something she’d worked hard for, I had taken a simple pleasure in her life and thrown it away. And it still feels like the worst thing I’ve ever done. The wild strawberries. I don’t even remember what they tasted like.

  I feel worse about the wild strawberries than I do about the next story, which is weird because many of you will think this next story is much, much worse.

  Three Line Whip split up when I was twenty. Graeme and I then formed a new band, a band that would shatter all music that had ever come before it, a new sound for a new age of the human race. The band was called The Wow! Scenario and the band members were me and Graeme. Because there were only two of us we had a slight problem. We desperately wanted to be in a band with sweet, Beach Boys-esque vocal harmonies. Graeme had sung in Three Line Whip but I had still not gotten over my phobia of singing in public thanks to The Woodcutter and the Christmas Dove and ‘La La La Humpty’ and the failed karaoke night.

  However, we were tired of recruiting new people to join our bands. I realised that if we were going to drive this band forward in the direction we wanted it to go in, then it was up to me to get over my phobia and learn how to sing from scratch. I knew I wouldn’t be able to teach myself so I found a singing teacher who taught from her home in Kettering and she ended up teaching me to sing every week for three years. Oh, and spoiler alert, to this day I still can’t sing.

  My singing teacher was a lady called Melissa and please don’t let my lack of talent reflect badly on her. She did a sterling job, I was just a lost cause. The first lesson I had with her I remember having to sing along to her playing some scales on the piano and she actually turned to me and said, ‘I can’t teach you.’ That was within five minutes of my first lesson. I was determined though and said, ‘Give me a load of stuff to practise and if I come back next week and I’ve not improved at all then we can stop the lessons.’ I did two hours’ singing practice a day over the next week and returned to Melissa’s house having marginally improved, so she agreed to keep teaching me. It took her three years to teach me to sing as well as the average person can sing along to the radio in their car. That was ten years ago though so I’m probably back to square one now as I haven’t practised in a long old time.

  I got to know Melissa pretty well. Once when she went abroad to visit friends she asked me to house sit for her and I said yes. House sitting was fairly easy; the only responsibility I had was to look after the cat, a rather fussy creature named Mischa. Mischa was a neurotic creature who was always worried she wasn’t about to get exactly what she wanted, so never ever stopped mewing. The noise in the house was constant as she walked around relentlessly trying to get her own way. Melissa told me that when I went for a wee I should never lock the bathroom door as Mischa liked to drink from the bidet while you were urinating. Was I supposed to operate the bidet while I went for a wee or did Mischa do that herself with her paws? I was supposed to operate it? Well then no, absolutely not. So every day when I went for a wee in that house I would receive some louder than usual mewing at the door because someone wanted to get in on the bathroom party.

  Once the house sitting was over, Melissa told me to keep the keys because she would be needing me to house sit again at some point and so I did as I was told. Some important details you need to know at this stage: Melissa lived near the town centre and I lived just over an hour’s walk away from her, and back then I not only had a phobia of singing in public but I also had a phobia of taking a dump in a public toilet. My worst nightmare would’ve been having a dump in a public toilet while singing ‘A Woodcutter’s Prayer’ to mask the sound of my own bowels. So naturally one afternoon I was in the town centre and all of a sudden I had to go, urgently. I didn’t know what to do. There was no way I was using a public toilet and the walk back to my house would take an hour. The only person I knew who lived nearby was Melissa. I rang Melissa’s doorbell hoping that she would let me in to use her toilet but no one answered. No one was home. And so I made a split second decision and let myself into somebody else’s house, without them knowing, when they weren’t there. I know, I know.

  I ran straight to the downstairs bathroom, closed the door and immediately did the biggest dump of my life so far. Naturally Mischa came along to investigate, mewing at the damn door, but to be fair I wasn’t supposed to be in her house today so she could behave any way she pleased. I finished, breathed a sigh of relief then looked to my left and, nightmare of all nightmares – no toilet paper. If you’ve ever done a big dump and then turned to the toilet roll holder to find it bare you’ll know there is no panic like it. Well, imagine doing that when you’re currently intruding in someone else’s house. It was terrifying. I was so scared I nearly did a second dump out of pure panic. I had to think fast. There was only one thing I could do. I knew there was a second toilet upstairs, so I could go there and use the toilet paper from the upstairs toilet or use the bidet up there as the downstairs toilet was annoyingly bidet-free. Even if you agree with the first part of this plan you probably won’t agree with my next decision.

  I chose to leave my shoes, trousers and boxer shorts behind in the downstairs toilet, discarding them because I thought they would only slow me down. I didn’t want to pull them back up for obvious reasons, I didn’t want them round my ankles and for some insane reason it didn’t even occur to me that I could have carried them upstairs with me.

  What followed was a real low point in the old life. As I slowly ascended the stairs, naked from the waist down, with a dirty butt, in someone else’s house without their kno
wledge, all I could think was please don’t let anyone come home right now, because the staircase was directly in front of the front door. If anybody opened that door they would be greeted by my sullied rear end staring down at them from above. I was shaking. To make matters worse, Mischa was following me the entire way mewing her head off. Directly behind me, pretty much mewing at my butt, learning the hard way what a bidet is actually meant to be used for.

  Luckily for me I made it to the bathroom without anybody coming home and luckier still there was toilet paper there. I took care of business and felt relieved until I flushed and then it dawned on me why leaving my trousers and pants in the downstairs toilet wasn’t such a smart idea after all. I now had to descend the stairs while cupping myself, once again praying that no one arrived home right at that very moment. It would be bad if Melissa got home now but it would be worse if her husband, who I didn’t know well enough, arrived home because he may kill me. Because I was so worried, all I could do was look at the door as I walked down the stairs so if someone did come home I would’ve been staring at them while covering my modesty, a small black cat making a racket at my ankles and when I explained myself, well, I imagine that would only make matters worse.

  I ran into the downstairs bathroom and hurriedly put on my boxers and trousers. I put my shoes on but didn’t tie them up as I wanted to get out as soon as possible, I ran out of the bathroom, across the hallway and, just as I was about to leave the house, realised I had forgotten to flush the downstairs toilet. Don’t worry – I ran back, flushed and then left – but imagine if I hadn’t realised in time. If I had made it all the way home before realising I had not flushed the downstairs toilet, and Melissa’s husband had come home to discover an entire poo sitting in his downstairs toilet but no toilet paper in the bowl. Like someone had snuck into his house and done nothing but floaters and then left. I sort of wish that happened because as it stands, I never got my comeuppance for what I did that day. I just got away with it! I deserved to forget to flush and leave evidence behind and then Melissa would have had to deduce that it was someone with a key as there was no sign of a break-in. Maybe they’d send the contents of the toilet to a lab for testing and figure out it was me that way, and I would be stripped of my keys and never be allowed in their house again. But no, I carried on having singing lessons and carried on house sitting, and never told her! Obviously I will have to tell her now that I’ve written this book and I’m not looking forward to that. In fact I will add another paragraph after this story so you can know how that panned out. In fact, here it is below: