Life and Laughing: My Story

by Michael McIntyre

  Alexandra, however, treated the occasion as if I was interviewing Kitty. She spent the whole evening selling her daughter to me. Not only had I been pursuing Kitty for two years, but I thought it was obvious to anyone that she was well out of my league.

  ‘I love your home, Alexandra, have you lived here long?’

  ‘Kitty’s a wonderful swimmer,’ she announced, ‘she enjoys reading and travelling and speaks GCSE French.’

  It was like she was reading from a CV. I didn’t know how to respond.

  ‘Great news,’ I said. ‘My mother lives in France. That will be useful, and she has a pool, too. There will be many opportunities to swim and speak French.’

  Alexandra ploughed on. ‘Her cooking is improving all the time, and she has an excellent backhand. She wears a size four shoe, the perfect size, I’ve always thought.’

  Meanwhile, Simon continued telling his stories. On several occasions Simon and Alexandra were speaking at the same time, over one another. They were eccentric to say the least. Simon would be mid-story about performing with Laurence Olivier, while Alexandra revealed how Kitty mastered the yo-yo at a surprisingly early age. They had been married for over thirty years, and it was apparent that Alexandra had heard all of Simon’s stories several times before. Every time he started a new one, she would mumble, ‘Oh no, not that one again.’ Towards the end of the evening, Simon told a story that he had told towards the beginning of the evening.

  ‘For God’s sake, Simon,’ Alexandra interrupted, ‘you’ve already told that story tonight. Now, Michael,’ she said, turning to me, ‘have I told you about Kitty’s needlework?’

  I had a wonderful evening with them. They were personable, charming and entertaining, and I’ve loved them from that moment on.

  The family introductions were off to an excellent start. With my mum now living in France, next up was my grandma. We arranged to go out for lunch, but Kitty had to cancel, as she was unwell. It was clear from my grandmother’s reaction to this cancellation that my suspicions about her not actually wanting me to have a girlfriend were valid.

  ‘Vot do you mean, she can’t make it?’ she said.

  ‘She’s not feeling well, we’ll have to reschedule.’

  ‘I don’t like the sound of this girl, Michael, she not right for you, she’s verry sickly, she’s always ill. You’re too young to settle down, play ze field a bit. Vot about Marta? My cleaner?’

  So it was with some trepidation that I took Kitty with me the following week to my grandmother’s plush flat in Putney. Kitty was naturally very nervous, but I genuinely believed that, despite her reservations, my grandma would fall in love with her as I had.

  The signs weren’t good when she opened her front door and – rather than say hello to Kitty – she asked first about the milk she had requested me to bring.

  ‘Oh fantastic!’ she exclaimed with a beaming smile when she saw us, giving me false hope. ‘You rememberred ze milk.’

  ‘Grandma, this is Kitty,’ I said, with my girlfriend smiling beside me.

  ‘I know, you better come in,’ my grandmother said, now with her back to us and scuttling along her luxurious corridor.

  When we finally settled down with drinks – that I had to offer and pour – my grandmother proceeded to take the opposite approach to Alexandra. Rather than try to promote me to Kitty, she set about discrediting me.

  ‘Kitty, daaaarling, do you know zat Michael is a universiity dropout? He has no qvalifications, nothing.’

  ‘He’s doing well though now, as a comedian,’ Kitty said.

  ‘Daaarling Kitty, listen to me, I hev known Michael his whole life, never hes he made me laugh. He is meny things, but not a comedian. The funniest thing he hes ever said to me vas “Grandma, I vant to be a comedian.” He is a lozer!’

  ‘Anyone want any more drinks?’ I asked, interrupting, but Grandma wasn’t to be stopped.

  ‘I buy everything for him. I bought a car, do you know about this? He crashed it, this is his life, a car crash, a pretty girl like you could do better.’ Then she turned to me, as if Kitty wasn’t in the room. ‘What about Marta? You have feeling for her, yes?’

  ‘Grandma, what are you talking about?’ I said, jumping to my feet, ‘I’ve never even spoken to Marta! I’m going to get us some more drinks, let’s change the subject.’

  ‘Who’s Marta?’ I heard Kitty saying as I left for the respite of the kitchen.

  While I was getting the drinks, my grandma said something to Kitty that we still laugh about today.

  ‘I’ll tell you something else, Kitty daarling, when Michael comes here to wisit, he teks the most enormous shits, he has the smelliest shits, like nothing I hev ever known, the whole place stinks for days, I hev to fumigate. Is dis the kind of life you vant, Kitty?’

  It was funny, but it was ultimately very sad. My grandma was jealous of my girlfriend. It was a bizarre and unhealthy situation. She was spiralling out of control and over the next few months became increasingly rude to and about Kitty. She created an untenable situation. She would stop at nothing to get Kitty out of my life. She was forcing me to make a choice between them, so I did what was right. I split up with Kitty so that I could play Scrabble with my grandma and inherit her millions.

  I’m kidding.

  My grandma and I had a flaming row, and true to form she cut me out of her will. I was deeply hurt that my grandma could turn her back on me. She had fallen out with so many others that perhaps it was only a matter of time, but I thought our relationship was different. As unhappy as I was, I was also pleased that I could spare Kitty from the same manipulative unpleasantness that had dominated my mother’s life. I wanted my life with Kitty to be free from all that rubbish. I had hoped my grandma would change, but it wasn’t to be. So Kitty and I started our life together away from her shadow.

  My grandmother had always been my safety net, she was always there to look after me and bail me out of any financial trouble. Now it was time for me to be my own man. Something I wished I had become years earlier. I didn’t have a penny and neither did Kitty. All my stand-up comedy was unpaid, and Kitty had decided not to pursue an acting career. So when we moved into a £190-a-week flat in Fleet Road, just down the road from Kitty’s parents, we had no means of paying for it, let alone eating.

  The next nine months were my first experience of real life. It was tough. Kitty got work as a nanny with horrendous hours, and I sold mobile phones for a telesales company. I worked for a company called Dial-a-Mobile, maybe you’ve seen their adverts in the back of newspapers. I sat in a vast call centre with my headset on surrounded by hundreds of other sales people all nattering away about free minutes, off-peak call charges and free in-car chargers.

  I took it remarkably seriously, unlike when I was working at Partizan in my gap year. I desperately needed money. I don’t know what happened to me. I think I became slightly hypnotized by all the jargon and rhetoric from my Dial-a-Mobile supervisors. I became obsessed with selling mobile phones. I went from living my life for laughs to living my life for sales targets. The pay was appalling, but the more mobile phones I could sell, the more money I could earn. I was like a robot.

  About a million times a day, I would pick up the phone at work saying, ‘Hello, welcome to Dial-a-Mobile. Are you calling about the new Nokia 3310, with 600 free minutes per month and free weekend calls to landlines?’

  After a while I started picking up the phone like that at home by mistake. ‘No, Michael, it’s your mother, what are you talking about?’

  It was embarrassing, although I did sell my sister Lucy a phone that way.

  Our flat was unfurnished, so Kitty and I would spend most weekends browsing the showroom of IKEA in Wembley. I spent countless Saturday afternoons clutching my IKEA half-pencil and paper tape-measure, discussing the relative merits of beech veneer and birch veneer surrounded by couples having similar conversations.

  Everything looked such good value in the IKEA showroom. I would constantly be amazed by the
price. ‘Forty quid for this Aneboda coffee table – wow, that’s unbelievably cheap!’

  Then I’d get downstairs to the warehouse and the Aneboda coffee table turned out to be just a pile of wood and some Allen keys.

  ‘Forty quid for this? Are they joking? They may as well have given me an axe and directions to a forest in Sweden. What a rip-off!’

  My first man drawer contained about a thousand Allen keys. Who is Allen Key? I bet he’s amazing at self-assembly.

  My favourite trip to IKEA was when we were looking at beds and the sales assistant asked, ‘Have you decided whether you want the bed?’

  And I said, ‘I’m going to sleep on it.’

  Neither Kitty nor the sales assistant laughed, but I found that hilarious.

  ‘So you don’t want it?’ asked the sales assistant.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘but can I interest YOU in a new Nokia 3310, with 600 free minutes per month and free weekend calls to landlines?’

  Apart from IKEA, Kitty and I also searched the classifieds in the local paper for bargain furniture. We found a sofa bed for £50 belonging to a gentleman in Highgate. We went round to his flat, spending most of the journey convincing ourselves he was a murderer. He showed us into his office, and we both sat on his for sale navy blue two-seater sofa bed for about ten seconds before agreeing to buy it. If only we had sat on it for longer, because after thirty seconds it starts inexorably to turn itself from a sofa into a bed. You would sit on it and gradually lie down until you were flat on the floor.

  It was the early days of eBay, and I found a gorgeous sofa at the unbelievable bargain price of £20. ‘Perfect condition … As new’, the blurb went. The photo made it look stunning. The sofa arrived a week later, in a jiffy bag; it was for a doll’s house. I put it opposite the ‘sofa that turns itself into a bed after thirty seconds’ with the Aneboda coffee table in the middle, and our living room was complete.

  Our bed was Kitty’s old one from her parents’ flat. The good news was that the bed was King size; the bad news was that the bedroom was Queen size. The bed only just fitted into the room and had to be wedged at a slight angle, meaning each morning Kitty and I would wake up squashed against the wall. You know the popular expression, ‘Did you get out of the wrong side of the bed this morning?’ Well, I couldn’t get out of either side of the bed; I had to roll through the door at the end of the bed.

  The kitchen was bogey green with appliances from the Middle Ages, and we mainly ate blue-and-white-striped Tesco value food. In fact, we had so much Tesco value food I suggested to Kitty that I painted the kitchen with blue and white stripes, but Kitty said it was an unnecessary expense. There was a door in the kitchen housing the toilet. The toilet was in the kitchen. Who would design a flat with a loo in the kitchen? Kitty would come home from a hard day at work, kissing me in the kitchen and saying, ‘Hi, darling, something smells good?’

  ‘Oh no, that’s peach air freshener. I’ve just been to the loo,’ I would say.

  The only asset we had was Kitty’s Mini, which would probably have fetched about £500 in Loot. When Kitty had a small collision in Hampstead Garden Suburb that dented the front bumper, the front right wheel was blocked against the bent metal of the car. The result was that the wheel would not turn to the right, as the tyre was blocked. The car was no longer capable of turning right.

  Unfortunately, we only had third-party insurance and no means to pay for the repairs. But not wanting to lose our only asset, we continued using the car only turning left. I would carefully plan each journey with an A–Z, so that we could navigate to our destination without having to turn right. We survived for two weeks until I was pulled over by the police for driving the wrong way around a mini-roundabout. Years later I told this story on the BBC panel show Would I Lie to You?, where one team has to tell unlikely stories and the other team has to guess if they’re true or not. I won.

  I may have been struggling at this time in my life, but I was gathering material for my later career in television. After my Would I Lie to You? tale, our next car, a white Austin Metro Princess that set me back £395, provided me with several stories for my Top Gear interview in 2009. The petrol gauge was broken, so I had to check the milometer and mentally calculate the miles per gallon to know when I needed to refuel. This worked pretty well until the milometer broke as well. Then I had to drive along guessing how many miles I had driven and then calculate the miles per gallon. This worked less well. Needless to say I ran out of petrol several times and spent a lot of time filling up my jerrycan at petrol stations. The first time it happened, I didn’t have a jerrycan and totally forgot that they were called jerrycans. I said to the petrol station attendant, ‘I need a … oh what’s it called? A … you know … thing you put petrol in …’

  And the attendant said, ‘Car?’

  The closest I got was ‘petrol suitcase’. Jeremy Clarkson and the Top Gear audience all had a good laugh at the nightmare that was my life at the time.

  But, for all our financial woes, Kitty and I were happy, deliriously happy together and in love. We lived on the philosophy that ‘love is all you need’, until the bailiffs knocked on the door and refused to take ‘love’ as payment. Then we realized we would also need some cash. My stand-up ‘career’ was not providing any. I made the semi-finals of the ‘So You Think You’re Funny?’ competition after the performance that Kitty had witnessed. But I did not make the final, let alone win it. I continued to do the occasional new-act night, but they were so few and far between that I had little chance of improving. I also suffered terribly with nerves. At the beginning it was new and exciting and I had the excuse of being a novice. But now there was so much at stake, and with every failure my dream of being a stand-up comedian was moving further away and the reality of becoming a supervisor at Dial-a-Mobile was moving closer.

  20

  My fellow new acts were beginning to make an impact in the industry, something I was simply not threatening to do. Hannah Chambers, who gave me my first gig at the Comedy Café, was moving into management. She saw all the new acts walking through her doors and was picking the best ones. She was, and still is, excellent at talent-spotting. Her initial picks from the open-mike nights were Daniel Kitson and Jimmy Carr. I asked her if she would consider me, but despite being encouraging, she simply wasn’t interested.

  The truth is, I wasn’t very good. I couldn’t compete with Jimmy and Daniel. Daniel was honest and open and naturally funny, and Jimmy had wonderfully written material. I was naturally funny, but didn’t know how to replicate this onstage, and my material was average. If I were an agent, I wouldn’t have represented me. There’s a comedy website called Chortle; it’s an online bible for British stand-ups and is extraordinarily comprehensive. I knew it was only a matter of time before the site reviewed me and checked every day. When I saw my name on the front page of the website in the ‘Latest Reviews’ section, I nearly vomited with nerves. I wanted a career in stand-up, and here was the first clue as to whether that was possible. As upsetting and deflating as it was at the time, the review was accurate. It ended with: ‘Michael McIntyre is the equivalent of a Marks & Spencer pullover. Dependable and durable, but nothing to get excited about.’

  I was devastated. I was so desperate for an endorsement, for somebody to see that I was talented. But the reality was that comedians were becoming successful around me, and I was being roundly dismissed. I showed it to Kitty, who was typically positive and wise: ‘What’s wrong with you, Michael? Not only is this just one person’s opinion, it’s not a bad review. Marks & Spencer is quality. You’ve seen the adverts, “This is not just any chicken, this is M&S chicken, the finest, most succulent, tender, juicy chicken.” That’s you, the best.’

  ‘The best chicken?’ I said.

  ‘No, comedian. You’re not just any comedian.’

  ‘No,’ I resisted, ‘that’s the food. Marks & Spencer’s food is the best, the clothes are average. I wouldn’t be upset if I had been compared to a Marks & Spencer
smoked salmon parcel, but I wasn’t. I was compared to a pullover. The food is special, but the clothes are boring.’

  ‘Nonsense, Michael,’ Kitty retorted, ‘Marks & Spencer stands for quality, whether it be the clothes or the food. Everyone loves M&S and everyone is going to love you. Plus, you’re wearing an M&S pullover right now.’

  She had a good point, but it was by no means the review of someone who was destined for the top. Kitty believed in me, but nobody else did, until I performed an open spot at a very small club called the Laughing Club in a pub called the Albany in Twickenham. The club was run by comedy enthusiast Adrian Rox. It was a small function room with about fifty people in the audience, and I didn’t think it went particularly well.

  The following day Kitty’s parents, Simon and Alexandra, were visiting our humble abode for dinner. We were sitting in the kitchen/diner/toilet on plastic garden furniture I’d bought from Homebase and eating Tesco value cornflakes. The phone rang, and I excused myself and went to the living room to pick it up. ‘Hello, welcome to Dial-a-Mobile. Are you calling about the new Nokia, sorry, hello?’

  It was Adrian Rox from the Laughing Club, and he offered me my first paid gig, in Liverpool. I ran into the kitchen but Kitty wasn’t there.

  ‘Where’s Kitty?’ I said to Simon and Alexandra, breathless with excitement.

  ‘She’s in the loo,’ Alexandra said.

  ‘I’m here, darling,’ Kitty said, from the loo, just a few feet from us, ‘I can hear you.’

  ‘I just got a paid gig,’ I announced, beaming from ear to ear. ‘One hundred pounds!’

  I couldn’t believe I was going to be paid for something that I had been doing for free for so long. The fee didn’t include accommodation. We found a B&B in Liverpool for £30, and the petrol there and back cost £80. The £100 is of course taxed at about 20 per cent. So after my first paid gig I ended up owing £30.