Life and Laughing: My Story

by Michael McIntyre

  ‘Hi, Dad, what’s up?’

  ‘Are you sitting down?’ my dad said, seriously.

  It seemed like such an odd question. Nobody had ever said anything like that to me before. He was going to tell me something that could potentially make me fall over. What could this collapse-worthy news be? Anyway, I wasn’t sitting down.

  ‘No, I’m not, I’m not sitting down. Shall I sit down?’ I was intrigued by this whole sitting-down thing.

  ‘I think you should,’ my dad confirmed, keeping the same serious tone.

  I was speaking on the frog phone in the hall. There was nowhere to sit.

  ‘There’s no chair here. Shall I sit on the floor?’ This conversation was getting weirder and weirder.

  ‘If you want, Michael, sit on the floor,’ my dad agreed.

  I sat cross-legged on the carpet.

  ‘OK, I’m on the floor now, Dad, I’m sitting on the floor. What is it?’

  ‘Michael, I’m very sorry but you have to leave your school. I’m in serious financial trouble, and I simply can’t afford to pay the fees any longer. I’m so very sorry, I know you’re happy there. I’ve tried very hard to find a solution, but I can’t.’

  When my parents split up my father had agreed to pay school fees for Lucy and me. Lucy went to Henrietta Barnet, one of the best state schools in the country that was conveniently located less than a mile from our home, but my dad still had to fork out a small fortune to send me to a school nowhere near my home so that I could be surrounded by characterless, suburban twats and one suspected paedophile.

  At this point my dad had been in America for about five years. His explanation for things not working out was that in England he was a big fish in a small pond but in the States he was a small fish in a big pond. When you also consider he had to cross the pond to get there, you can see the kind of nightmare he was having. He had been ripped off by one of his partners at his video production company in LA and Holly’s shop, Lemonade Lake, hadn’t been as profitable as hoped. They had downsized in LA before moving north to the breathtakingly beautiful state of Vermont. There they had opened another Lemonade Lake, this time selling toys, and lived a much simpler life. So there was little income. The Range Rovers, BMWs, Jaguars, swimming pools, tennis courts, farm animals and trampolines were over. Showbusiness is tough and unforgiving and my dad was now in his early fifties. If only he had stayed in London and been a comedy exec at the BBC – but he chased a dream in America and it backfired.

  I wasn’t devastated at all. I needn’t have sat on the floor. In fact I wished I hadn’t, as I got quite bad pins and needles and when I moved I cried out in pain. My father misinterpreted this and thought I was taking the news very badly. The only thing that did upset me was that his paying my fees was one of the few links I had to him. I had an argument with him the previous year when he suggested that I went to a state sixth-form college. ‘You’d have to give me the money for the fees,’ I said. He was unbelievably upset by this remark, but it was not born out of greed. I didn’t want his money; I wanted to feel like he was giving me something.

  I hated my school, and the prospect of taking my brown face and white neck out of there seemed quite exciting. My mum and dad had apparently been in cahoots over this for a while. This wasn’t a maybe, it was happening, now. Merchant Taylors’ were aware of the situation, and I had an interview the following day at a local state sixth-form college in Finchley. I was moving to state school. I wish it had been filmed, as it would have made for a hilarious Channel 4 fly-on-the-wall documentary.

  Let me tell you a bit about the school life I was accustomed to. I wore a uniform with a tie representing my ‘house’ called Hilles. There were school ‘houses’ who played each other at sport and had meetings and such. When the teacher entered, we had to stand up and say, ‘Good morning, sir’ or ‘Good afternoon, sir.’ The teachers wore black cloaks that wafted behind them as they walked. The headmaster wore all the gear. He had several cloaks and a big hat, so his authority was in no doubt.

  I had no idea what was appropriate to wear to the interview at Woodhouse College. I suggested to my mum that I wear my Merchant Taylors’ uniform without the tie. She told me to look smart, so I donned my elephant T-shirt, cords and loafers. My brother Nicholas was at nursery, but Thomas was still a baby so he had to come with us. Our appointment with the headmaster was at 11 a.m. We arrived in good time with Thomas conveniently sleeping in his pushchair.

  The college was a lateral, not unpleasant Georgian building. Inside, it was much like you would expect, modern, sterile, functional, cheap. My mum and I sat on seats not designed for comfort outside the headmaster’s office. I was nervous. Waiting outside any headmaster’s office is nerve-wracking.

  At five minutes to eleven, the headmaster’s door opened. My heart skipped a beat. False alarm, it was a man in a tracksuit top. It must be the gym teacher.

  ‘Hello? Michael, is it? If you’re early, then we might as well start,’ he said, kindly.

  Good Lord, it was the headmaster. In a tracksuit top. What kind of a place was this?

  My mother and I stood up to the shared relief of our bottoms. Thomas was still soundly asleep in his pushchair. I decided to break the atmosphere with a joke. ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ I said to the headmaster, ‘but I brought my wife and child along.’

  This, I repeat, was a joke. I thought that was obvious. Apparently not for the headmaster of a state school that teaches sixteen-to nineteen-year-olds.

  ‘That’s absolutely fine, Michael,’ said the headmaster, ‘many of our students have kids here.’

  Unbelievable. Where was I?

  The interview went so well that at the end he said he was not just happy to accept me into the college, but also offered me the position of English teacher.

  So within days of taking my father’s phone call while sitting cross-legged on the carpet, I was starting at a new school. This time nervousness did not make me posh, it made me mute. Everybody else had started at the college about six weeks earlier, they had made friends and formed cliques. I was a late entrant, the new guy. I took the same number bus I used to take, but this time in the opposite direction. When I arrived for my first day, the scene was a far cry from the samey Merchant Taylors’ pupils. The major difference was that the lack of school uniform meant the students could express themselves at a time in life when they were extremely keen to express themselves. Every fashion statement ever made was being made by someone, and every race, creed and colour was represented. When I got inside the main building, it resembled the departures lounge of an international airport.

  I kept my head down and kept quiet. I was terrified, but already enjoying it more than Merchant Taylors’. The exciting difference from what I was used to was girls. Girls, girls, girls, everywhere. Small ones, big ones, white ones, black ones, brown ones, tall ones, short ones, blonde ones, brunette ones, ginger (strawberry blonde) ones, a bald one (what’s going on there?), too-much-make-up-wearing ones, not-enough-make-up-wearing ones, and one with the biggest breasts I had seen in my life. Wow. I was mesmerized by them. These were knockout knockers. They were attached to a long dark frizzy-haired beauty. I was lost. Asking directions is an ice-breaker. It could lead to something.

  I opened my mouth to speak, but as I hadn’t spoken for so long my throat was dry and no words came out, just this bizarre croak. She looked at me, bemused. I cleared my throat and tried again.

  ‘Hi, I’m looking for room 42,’ I said finally with the clarity I’d initially hoped for.

  ‘Room 42?’ she said with a voice that seemed to perfectly match her tits. ‘Just down the hall and I think it’s the second left.’

  Our exchange did lead to something. It led to room 42. I’d hoped for more, but, hey, I had plenty of time. I went to school here, with hundreds of girls. This knowledge suddenly gave me a rush of confidence, and I decided to take our relationship to the next level.

  ‘What’s your name?’ I asked.

  ‘Tina,�
�� she said.

  I stood there for a few moments waiting for her to ask mine. She didn’t. I headed to room 42.

  I found room 42. My classroom. When I entered, the scene was so rowdy that nobody noticed the new boy. It was a large class of about thirty-odd. People were laughing, play-fighting, chewing gum, throwing bits of paper, smoking, breastfeeding. I took a vacant seat right at the back next to a stocky bloke with two gold earrings in one ear and a shaven head.

  ‘All right, mate?’ he said in a voice that seemed to perfectly match his hair and earrings.

  ‘Yes, mate, I’m fine, dandy.’ I had never used the word ‘dandy’ before in my life. What a time for it to make its debut.

  ‘You’re posh, innit?’ he asked.

  There’s really no answer to this question. So I decided to ask one of my own.

  ‘What “house” are you in?’ I asked, referring to the school ‘house’ system at public schools.

  He just stared at me, trying to make sense of my question before saying, ‘Yeah, I like a bit of house, but mainly hip-hop and ragga.’

  At that moment, the teacher walked in. I had met him briefly when I came in for my interview. I immediately bolted to my feet and exclaimed at the top of my voice, ‘GOOD MORNING, SIR!’

  Nobody else in the class reacted when the teacher walked in. But they certainly reacted to me. They all stopped laughing, play-fighting, chewing gum, throwing bits of paper, smoking, breastfeeding and turned to stare at me.

  I was baffled why they weren’t standing to attention and presumed they hadn’t noticed the teacher had entered.

  ‘Sir’s here,’ I whispered to my new classmates.

  ‘Who?’ a few of them mumbled.

  ‘Sir!’ I repeated, motioning towards the teacher. At this point, even the teacher looked behind him, wondering who I was referring to.

  So this tremendously embarrassing misunderstanding is how I introduced myself to the class. People were confused by me, as if I was an alien from the Planet Posh. That didn’t really change much as people got to know me. Woodhouse was all about cliques. The mass of differences I witnessed arriving on my first day soon turned into groups. There were probably more, but the ones I remember are: ‘The Goths’, ‘The Asians’, ‘The Jews’, ‘The Rockers’, ‘The Greeks’, ‘The Geeks’ and me. Initially I joined ‘The Asians’ (maybe it was my Clarins fake tan).

  They auditioned me for their clique by inviting me out to lunch. At lunch, most people went to North Finchley High Road. I suggested PizzaExpress. They laughed. We went to the kebab shop and bonded over doners. A week previously I was at a school like Hogwarts but without the magic, and now here I was eating kebabs with Dilip, Chirag, Ammet and Jeet on North Finchley High Road. I felt out of place in both settings. I always felt out of place, but at least I was in a new place, and the kebabs were amazing.

  Not long after I started at Woodhouse, it was Valentine’s Day, the day for lovers and for wannabe lovers to make their intentions known. Valentine’s cards are traditionally sent anonymously, signed with a question mark. Great lot of use that is – you have no idea who fancies you; for all you know it’s the Riddler from Batman. My new college was filled with posturing boys and blushing girls waiting to make a move on each other. This was the perfect opportunity.

  An internal post bag was set up for students to send each other cards. I wasn’t particularly hopeful of receiving any, but when the bag arrived for my class on Valentine’s morning, it was so overflowing I thought I might be in with a shout. As it turned out, every single card, and there must have been close to a hundred, was addressed to the same guy. The school stud, Karim Adel. He accepted his teen heartthrob status with nonchalance and even handed out some of the cards for his fellow classmates to open on his behalf. I opened a few and they didn’t just contain question marks, they were shockingly graphic essays of desire.

  I didn’t understand it. I looked closely at Karim; I needed to be like him. What did he have that I didn’t? Well, for a start, he was Iranian. There was nothing I could do about my heritage. We were of similar height, similar build, I definitely had better teeth, but the main difference was his shoulder length hair. In fact, one of the saucier cards I read made several references to Karim’s hair. So I decided to grow my hair and imagined myself one year on when the next Valentine’s postbag was delivered. Karim and I would be sitting next to each other with our long hair intertwining and bathing in a sea of Valentine’s cards addressed to us.

  Growing your hair isn’t easy. Because hair grows upwards, you have to wait until it reaches a certain length and weight before gravity kicks in and it falls nicely over your shoulders – ‘Because I’m worth it!’ Before that, it will look unkempt and unattractive – ‘Because I’m not worth it!’ During this difficult middle phase, I bought a cap and squashed my overgrown hair inside. Soon the cap couldn’t contain the growing locks and they would sprout out of the back and on the sides. When I removed the cap, my hair would shoot up vertically.

  While I was waiting for my hair to grow, a new opportunity to attract girls presented itself. I had started driving lessons and on one of her Sunday visits, my grandmother announced she wanted to give me some money to buy my first car. She was like a fruit machine: every once in a while you’d hit the jackpot. She gave me £2,000 to buy whatever car I wanted. I was so excited. My own car. Freedom. Every day I scanned the pages of Loot, Autotrader and What Car? to find my dream set of wheels.

  Quite a few of the students had their own cars and drove to college. They would park adjacent to the school in a parade of the worst vehicles on the road, like a queue for the crusher at the car pound. I wanted a car that would stand out and turn heads. In particular the head of Tina, the girl I met on my first day who had her own airbags to compensate for the lack of extras on whatever car I could afford.

  What is the coolest car you can buy for £2k? It was like a challenge on Top Gear. I stumbled across the ‘Classic Cars’ section of Loot. I hadn’t been checking there as I assumed classic cars cost a fortune. But there she was. There was no photo but the particulars sounded amazing: Triumph Spitfire Mark IV, Royal Blue, convertible, reliable, 6 months’ MOT. It belonged to a man in Kent and as soon as I saw the price, I wanted it. £1,999, perfect, I could even use the pound change for the Dartford Tunnel on the way home.

  With my grandma in my Triumph Spitfire. Unfortunately she was the only female I picked up in it.

  I bought my Spitfire, and she sat proudly in our Golders Green driveway while I learned to drive. Meanwhile my hair continued to grow, upwards, refusing to drop. I had to buy a bigger cap to contain it. I looked like an idiot, awful, invisible to the Woodhouse girls. But I waited patiently, knowing that soon I would remove my cap and, like a plain secretary taking off her glasses and releasing her pony-tailed hair in slow motion, I would be transformed. At home, I would take the cap off to assess my progress, but still my hair would ping upwards.

  After about six months, I had to admit defeat and booked a haircut. But I didn’t want my six months of suffering to go to waste and asked the hairdresser if there was any way to keep the length and give me a style. So he cut the front and left the back long. The net result was a mullet. This was a totally inadvertent mullet. It’s not like I went in the hairdressing salon and said, ‘I want a mullet, please. I want to look like Glenn Hoddle and Chris Waddle when they sang “Diamond Lights” on Top of the Pops in 1987.’ I did not say that, but I may as well have.

  ‘Why did you keep your mullet?’ you are surely asking. Well, I didn’t know what a mullet was, my mullet was accidental, and the fact is my hair looked a lot better than it had for the last six months squashed under various caps. So, believe it or not, I thought it looked good.

  This is a recurring theme of my youth. I was desperate to be attractive, so that I could attract attractive women, but I did myself no favours whatsoever. However, I still had my next throw of the dice waiting: my Spitfire. Surely when I parked this car in the parade outside Wo
odhouse, nestled among the Nissan Micras and Fiat Pandas, girls would see that I’m different, interesting, classy.

  When I passed my driving test, I was wildly excited about my new life on the road. On my first drive into college, conditions were perfect. The skies were blue and my little sports car was sparkling in the morning sunshine. After a quick breakfast, I put the roof down and set off, slowly. I could sense the car may have some mechanical issues. There was an unidentified rattling, the distinct smell of petrol, and when I braked, it took quite a while to stop. But there was no denying my Spitfire looked splendid and was turning heads.

  As I approached college, my heart raced and my engine struggled, but we were going to make it. I had timed my arrival to perfection, it was the busiest time, the road was filled with students, and every one of them stared at me in my convertible classic car as I parked directly outside college. It was like I was pulling up on pole position at the Monaco Grand Prix. It was exactly how I’d imagined it would be. All the cliques of Woodhouse froze, open-mouthed, staring at the new me.

  I shut the car door; the rearview mirror trembled from the reverberation, but clung on. I swung my rucksack over my shoulder and walked towards the school gates in what seemed like slow motion. My self-conscious walk to Lucy Protheroe on the wall outside Arnold House did not return. I felt surprisingly confident and strode purposefully. Then I saw Karim Adel, typically, surrounded by groupies. They were all staring at me in amazement. Karim opened his mouth to speak. He had never spoken to me; already I was being noticed, accepted.