Life and Laughing: My Story

by Michael McIntyre

  The fact that everybody had contributed made for a really special family occasion. People were calling up almost every day offering to help in any way they could. I remember Kitty putting the phone down saying, ‘Great news, Michael, my uncle’s girlfriend is a professional horse photographer.’

  ‘Sorry? What are you talking about?’ I said, confused.

  ‘She’s agreed to do the photography at our wedding,’ Kitty said.

  ‘There are no horses coming to our wedding,’ I commented.

  ‘I know, but I’m sure she can photograph humans as well.’

  ‘I’ve never even heard of a horse photographer, what does she do?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know, Michael, she goes to horse races and stuff, she’s like the official photographer,’ Kitty speculated.

  ‘Horse races? I’m not sure about this, darling. Is she going to just take a whole stream of photos at the end of the aisle, like a photo finish? Is our wedding album only going to consist of one photo, you winning by a nose?’

  I thought this was funny and could possibly be used as material, then I considered using it in my speech on the big day. I think I was more nervous about my speech than anything else. All my wife’s family knew I was a comedian but had never seen me perform, and I picked up an air of genuine concern over the financial security of their daughter. So there was a lot of pressure building on my wedding speech to be funny, especially when I found out her father had suggested the speeches be rescheduled for BEFORE the ceremony. I mean, it’s not often a groom has to give an example of his work on his wedding day. If you’re a builder getting married, you don’t eat lunch, cut the cake, have your first dance and then knock up a gazebo on the lawn.

  When the day finally arrived in late September, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. It was beautiful, what the English call an ‘Indian summer’, and what I presume the Indians call ‘summer’. A marquee was set up on the lawn should the weather not hold, and the congregation and I gathered in a small church conveniently and romantically located on the grounds of the house. Kitty’s father, Simon, surprised her with a cart pulled by two ponies that took them the short distance from the house to the church.

  I waited at the end of the aisle for my bride as the organ began ‘Here Comes the Bride’; I turned and there she was, looking stunning. She had her hair up with hair extensions. I was unaware of the existence of hair extensions. She hadn’t told me she was going to do this. I didn’t know what had happened to her, I had heard of nerves making people’s hair fall out, but never double in size. She looked beautiful, my bride. She raced down the aisle at such a speed the organ had only reached ‘Here comes’ before she was by my side. The vicar went through all the traditional vows; at the bit when he says, ‘If there is any reason why these two should not be married, speak now or for ever hold your peace’, I couldn’t resist doing a little comedy look round to the congregation.

  Mr and Mrs McIntyre on our big day at Combe Florey in Somerset.

  We made our sacred vows to one another and had cued up the Beatles’ ‘All You Need is Love’ on a tape player at the back. We kissed as man and wife and after a bit of fumbling with the tape deck at the back of the church, the music played and we walked out of the church to cheers and applause. It was magical. We climbed into the waiting cart to be pulled by the two ponies up the drive to the house, while the guests walked up to the reception. Some of the locals came out of their houses to catch a glimpse of the bride. Surprisingly few photos had been taken at this point, but as soon as Kitty’s uncle’s girlfriend saw the ponies, she bolted to life and took a series of shots of them, in some of which Kitty and I can be spotted in the background.

  This is one of dozens of photos we have of the horses at our wedding.

  Our budget was so tight that something had to give. It was the main course of lunch. We had a starter of cold salmon and salad and we had the wedding cake for dessert. Nobody mentioned the missing middle course. After lunch it was time for the speeches. This was terrifying for me. There was a lot riding on this, almost as much as the Edinburgh Festival. The one piece of good news is that I was on last, straight after Simon. This was the first time I had headlined.

  The pressure ultimately became too much for me, and I treated the speech too much like a gig and started laying into the front row. Within the first five minutes, I had character-assassinated my new brother-in-law, embarrassed the maid of honour and totally forgot to mention my wife. Simon had to interrupt by raising a toast before Kitty initiated divorce proceedings.

  We jumped into our classic Rolls-Royce as confetti filled the air, spent the night at a suite in the Bath Spa Hotel and set off on honeymoon the next day.

  It was perfect.

  The Maldives were like nothing I had ever seen before. We flew to the capital, Malé, and then took a seaplane to our hotel, the Hilton on Rangali Island, that is literally on a tiny island containing only the hotel. It takes about fifteen minutes to walk around it. We had a room on the blinding white beach, but many of the rooms were on stilts in the turquoise Indian Ocean. The service was immaculate; little Maldivian men would rake the sand you had just walked on. The food was phenomenal, everywhere you looked was breathtakingly beautiful. We were in paradise.

  One of the many photos Kitty and I took of each other on our honeymoon in the Maldives.

  The only downside was I forgot that half-board meant that we only had breakfast and dinner paid for. I had about £150 remaining on my credit card. I couldn’t afford to buy lunch at the extortionate restaurants, and there was obviously nowhere else to eat – the closest supermarket was back at Heathrow. So having spent a small fortune of loaned money and travelling halfway round the world, we had to steal food from breakfast every morning to eat for lunch. Kitty would keep watch, and when the waiter turned his back, I would stuff croissants, fruit, yoghurt and mini-cereal packets into our beach bag. One morning we couldn’t swipe anything from breakfast and we got so hungry during the day that I tried to spear fish in the ocean. This holiday of a lifetime had shades of the film Castaway.

  The happy couple, Mr and Mrs McIntyre, returned home looking tanned and hungry. Our lives had revolved around the Edinburgh Festival and the wedding for so long that it felt a bit strange. I was in debt. The loan and credit card had pushed me significantly into the red and Edinburgh had cost about £4,000. It was time for my career to start moving; I needed the money.

  My agent’s office sent me my gig list and to my horror it was the same as it had always been, Jongleurs gig after Jongleurs gig. I couldn’t believe it. I was nominated for the Best Newcomer Award in Edinburgh, but that didn’t seem to count for anything. The truth was that being nominated for the Perrier Best Newcomer Award was quite a minor thing compared with being nominated or winning the main award.

  The next year of my career was no different from the previous one. I continued to open the show at Jongleurs. I was dedicating my career to Jongleurs and they still only rated me as an opening act. I occasionally played other clubs, as before, and loved it, but I would then not be working on Sunday night, Monday night, Tuesday night and Wednesday night, before heading back to entertain Stags and Hens at Jongleurs. All the while, my debts were mounting. I was borrowing more and more money at extortionate rates, using debt to pay off debt.

  I was broke. My mum lent me money, Lucy lent me money, Sam lent me money, I called Paul from a petrol station when my credit card was declined. I sold my grandfather’s old cufflinks he had given me and even tried to sell his old enormous cashmere coat. Although, in fairness, Kitty had been asking me to sell that for years. I’m not exaggerating when I say that our life became quite desperate. I took every gig Duddridge could get me, but it wasn’t enough to get me out of the mess I was in. One night Kitty was seriously ill with a sky-high temperature. I needed to be with her, to look after her, but I left her alone to go to Norwich because we so badly needed the £150 from the gig. My financial situation was spiralling out of control.

&nbs
p; The only thing that kept me going was the next Edinburgh Festival, all my eggs were in that basket. I would be returning as the Perrier Best Newcomer Nominee. Television producers and comedy bookers would see my show. I could be nominated for the Perrier, I could win it and my career would skyrocket. I obsessed over the Perrier Award. This was my chance of success, my last chance. On top of my mounting debts, the Festival would cost me thousands more pounds. If I didn’t get a break at Edinburgh 2004, I didn’t know how I could survive in comedy.

  My agent, Paul Duddridge, still believed in me. He was bankrolling the Edinburgh Festival, so it was to him that I would be in debt. He continued to try to motivate me. Every time we spoke I would feel uplifted afterwards, but it didn’t seem to ever make me funnier. He again booked me into the Pleasance Attic, reflecting how my career had gone nowhere over the past year. The good news was that the Perrier panel was to be chaired by Bruce Dessau, the Evening Standard critic who had championed me the previous year. Bruce was my biggest fan, my only fan of influence. He’ll make sure the panel come to see my show; he’ll support me. It’s up to me now.

  I was a man on a mission. I was again living with Paul Tonkinson, who had become my comedy corner man. We would talk endlessly about how to get the best out of me. My plan was to play with the audience every night. I would use my mediocre material as fall-back if my riffing and improvising didn’t work. If I could have gigs every night like the one that Bruce Dessau witnessed the year before, I was convinced I would be nominated. I had to be.

  I hit the ground running. On my first gig there was a man with long hair and a long beard sitting in the front row. ‘You’ve been waiting long,’ I said, and I was off. For the first week all my shows were different, dictated by who was in the audience. I was on good form. The problem was that as the Festival went on, I started to feel the pressure. I began to worry about whether there were Perrier judges or critics in the audience. I started to become inhibited. The Festival is long and gruelling, performing twenty-five shows back-to-back without a night off. My anxiety heightened on a daily basis as I knew these were the most important gigs of my life. I started to worry myself sick.

  In addition to the usual stress-related illnesses like headaches and sore throats, my body started to fail me in ways it never had before. I came out in a rash all over my body, I had blurred vision and got pins and needles in my face. In my face? Has that ever happened to anyone before, ever? I woke up one morning and couldn’t hear out of my ear. Christine Hamilton (from I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!) and her husband Neil (shamed politician) were doing a daytime chat show called ‘Lunch with the Hamiltons’ at the Festival. I was booked to appear on it to help publicize my show to the audience of about 300. I rushed to the doctor’s surgery in Edinburgh and said, ‘You’ve got to help me, I can’t hear out of one ear and I’ve got lunch with the Hamiltons in an hour.’

  To which the doctor said, ‘Would you like me to block the other ear?’

  I, of course, took that story and put it straight into my show. I expected it to get a bigger laugh before remembering my hearing was down 50 per cent. I was falling apart. Halfway through the Festival, Kitty came up to be with me for the remainder. She took control and stuffed me with vitamins and emotional support. It’s just such a strange life, every day there was one hour that was vitally important to me. The rest of the day, I was preparing for that one hour. As soon as the show was over, I would go to sleep, wake up and have to do it all over again. It was like Groundhog Day.

  Despite not coping very well physically with the pressure, my shows weren’t suffering too much. I felt I was on track, improvising more than doing material. I got a review in the Independent that read:

  Michael McIntyre generates most of his material by chatting to members of the audience. As confident as he is quick-witted, McIntyre is a boyish, likeable chap who improvises as effortlessly as Eddie Izzard and Ross Noble except with an additional knack for characters and accents. No comedian makes his job look easier.

  This was exactly the reaction I wanted. Most comedians at the Festival had structured shows, rehearsed shows that were the same every night and usually had a theme. I was focusing only on making people laugh as much as possible, I wanted them to laugh until they had tears in their eyes and their faces hurt. That was my goal. I wasn’t interested in props, gimmicks and depth. I’m a comedian; my job is to be funny. I hoped that the Perrier judges wouldn’t penalize me for my lack of a ‘show’ and would reward me for simply being funny.

  I was having lunch with Kitty on the last Monday of the Festival. I could now hear out of both ears, but I had an unsightly cold sore. My wife was urging me to relax and enjoy the last few nights: ‘Whatever will be, will be. It’s out of your hands.’ My mobile phone rang; it was Duddridge, telling me that I was down to the final ten and that several judges would be coming to my show for the next two nights before announcing their five nominations on Wednesday. That was the call I was waiting for; it isn’t out of my hands, it’s in my hands.

  I was happy with the way the show went that night, mostly material but flashes of improvisation. On the last night before the nominations I really went for it. Confidence was now flowing through me, I felt like I could make anything funny, anything at all. I felt like Neo from The Matrix when he starts to believe, and becomes all-powerful. I was playing with the audience for fun and now the audience contained Perrier judges who had my career in their hands. But to me they were just an audience to play with. I asked, ‘What do you do for a living?’

  And a rather tall, serious-looking gentleman said, ‘I’m a journalist for The Times and I’m on the Perrier panel.’

  I didn’t bat an eyelid and set about trying to make the scenario as funny as possible. I kept referencing my chances of being nominated and certainly overstepped certain boundaries, but it was funny, everyone was having a great time. When the show ended, I felt optimistic about my chances. I told Kitty that night that I had given it everything and I meant it. I knew I had new fans on the panel who enjoyed what I did, which was make people laugh with no gimmicks, no structure, no real content, just laughs. Word got back to me that one of the panellists, the infamously tough critic for the Scotsman, Kate Copstick, said she would be fighting to get me nominated. Duddridge received a phone call checking my eligibility for the award. Everything was pointing in the right direction.

  Wednesday morning was the most excruciating hours of my life. The result had come through at around midday the year before, 12.12, 12.34, 12.40, 12.47. Still no news. No phone call. Every minute that passed, I felt my chances were dwindling. I kept refreshing the Chortle website – if anything had happened, they would reveal it.

  1.05 p.m., the phone rang. It was my mum, I snapped at her, ‘There’s no news, I’ll call you.’ Kitty was feeling as sick as I was.

  At least another half an hour passed, and I was losing hope. Nica Burns, the founder of the Award, traditionally calls all the nominees personally, so I thought I was only clinging on to the faintest hope when Duddridge called. ‘Hello?’ I said, as calm as I could.

  ‘It’s not good news, you haven’t been nominated.’

  While I was listening to his words of consolation and support, Kitty ran into the room and I just shook my head in her direction.

  I didn’t win the Perrier. I wasn’t even nominated, and now I was in even more debt.

  The following day there was an article in The Times by two of the Perrier judges who wrote: ‘Only Michael McIntyre stands out from the acts delivering pure stand-up. When his material matches his improvisation – or when he drops it altogether, Ross Noble style – then he might be a major star.’

  I hadn’t done enough. I was close, but that counted for nothing. My Festival petered out, and I played to about fifteen people on my last night. I returned to London on the Tuesday and on the Thursday to Jongleurs in Nottingham, first on the bill.

  23

  The ‘death rattle’ was how I used to describe the sound o
f the post dropping through the letterbox. Nothing good ever came in the post, just bills, red reminders and threatening letters. Kitty was in the kitchen as I went to see what unopened horrors awaited me. As per usual, there was a pile of brown envelopes with red writing visible through the little window on the front. One of them looked even more threatening than the others. I ripped it open to be met by typical words such as collections, arrears and court. Mostly these were debts I was aware of, but this one was particularly unwelcome. ‘Student Loans Company’, shit. I had taken out a student loan during my first and only year at university. I had honestly forgotten about it, but they hadn’t and I owed them two thousand pounds.

  With my wedding loan, credit cards and two Edinburgh Festivals, this made me over £30,000 in debt. Believe it or not, despite my appalling credit record, it was around this time I replaced my ‘sofa that turns itself into a bed’ with the Montana Ice three-seater from DFS on interest-free credit. The deal was that I paid nothing for a year and then paid about £150 for the rest of my life and the lives of any surviving relatives. Like most DFS customers, I only heard the first part about paying nothing for a year. I always thought it was funny that they give you interest-free credit on sofas. If people don’t have the money, they’re hardly going to get off their fat arses and make money if all you’re doing is making their fat arses more comfortable. Interest-free credit on treadmills, that makes more sense.

  I debated telling Kitty about the Student Loan letter. She was worried enough about our mounting money problems. I felt I had to; I had to share it with her. We shared everything. I walked into the kitchen clutching my latest debt.

  ‘Darling, I’ve got some bad news,’ I said.

  ‘Well, I’ve got some good news,’ Kitty said.

  ‘What good news?’

  ‘I think I’m pregnant,’ she said, holding up a pregnancy test.