Look who it is!

by Alan Carr

  To be honest, I don’t think I’ve got the edge to be a footballer. When I look through Dad’s scrapbooks at some of the newspaper clippings, I see a rock-hard defender – in the thick of the action, fearlessly performing sliding tackles and diving feet first onto some poor opponent’s legs. In fact, old Cobblers fans talk of him in hushed tones, looking over their shoulders cautiously as if he might suddenly burst from the undergrowth and tackle them.

  ‘He was terrifying alright’, ‘You’d know if your dad had tackled you’, ‘He could take a man down with ease’ – please don’t make your own jokes up. I suppose what I’m calling competitiveness, he’d probably call passion. In terms of sports, he doesn’t understand why anyone would want to do something for fun.

  Of course I’d love to be earning £75,000 a week, working two days a week and then spending the rest showing OK! magazine my beautiful mock-Tudor mansion. But you’ve got to remember that when I grew up in the Eighties, football was grim, men in cloth caps with no teeth shouting on terraces and throwing bananas at the black players. It wasn’t the ghetto-fabulous existence that we all know and love today, with the fast cars and Louis Vuitton hand luggage. If I’d known I could have lived that kind of lifestyle, I would have endured my father’s stomach crunches and star jumps. I’d have even touched a few more trees.

  One thing that I have been pleased to see, though, is that when it’s cold the Premiership players now wear gloves and leggings. This to me is a personal victory, as I’d proposed these changes at the age of twelve. But did Dad take these pioneering thoughts on board? No, he just said, ‘Only poofs wear leggings.’

  To be fair, though, if that competitiveness is the worst aspect of my father, then I’ve been very lucky indeed. I know Dad would get frustrated at my lack of sporting ability, but then again I was shit! Even the kindliest PE teacher would break out in an attack of Tourette’s and start shouting profanities at me. I’ve had a PE teacher snap a hockey stick in frustration at one of my pitiful lobs.

  You have to remember, I was the only boy at my Upper School to score an own goal at basketball – look, I got disorientated, and once you’ve seen one basket you’ve seen them all. But at times, I’ll admit, I didn’t really help myself. I remember shouting out at a Northampton Town Football match, ‘He’s behind you!’ instead of ‘Man on!’ It wasn’t deliberate, it’s just that I got carried away. I guess you could say I was being passionate – like my father.

  Having a dad in the footballing trade is a bit like having a parent in the army or in the circus: you have to go where the work is. So if there are any children of sergeant majors or bearded ladies reading this, then you’ll know what I mean. I was actually born in Weymouth, Dorset, where Dad had made the leap from player to manager of Weymouth Football Club. To be exact I was born at the Portland Hospital on 14 June 1976. Six pounds ten. I was ‘a beautiful baby boy’. These are my words. I don’t know if anyone called me a beautiful baby boy, but I must have been beautiful at one stage, surely. I didn’t have my glasses or teeth back then, so the odds must be quite good.

  I wonder if, as I lay there kicking my little legs in the air in my cot, Dad was imagining little football boots at the end of them and that my little wrinkled hands would be ideal for throw-ins. Mum once told me of when she was heavily pregnant with me and in bed with Dad one night I gave an almighty kick from inside the womb, so hard in Dad’s back that he woke up. It seems I had cruelly raised Dad’s hopes, and I wasn’t even born.

  I’ve never been one of those people with a really great memory, and for someone as self-obsessed as me it’s a shame. All those wonderful times when I was the centre of attention gone forever – it’s enough to bring you to tears. In fact, I only have one memory of my first five years, and even that’s a bit shaky because I have been known to absorb stuff off the telly and pass it off as my own life. I remember telling Mum about the time I stopped a woman from having a diamond-encrusted necklace stolen and she said, ‘No, Alan, that was Poirot.’ Then there’s another time when I was with Dad at the seaside in Clacton, sitting on his lap as we slid down a helter-skelter. I remember the sky was blue and cloudless and the squawk of the seagulls made me jump and I cried. Even now I’m not sure whether we were down the tip on a sunny day or watching an episode of Holiday.

  My early memories are all seaside-centric. When I try to recollect some of those days, I get little flashbulbs of a Punch and Judy show or the curve of a brightly coloured windbreaker or of myself sitting on the beach sipping a bottle of tea, which apparently was my favourite drink as a toddler.

  What I do know is my favourite donkey on Weymouth beach was Pepper and my parents would have to take a detour around the amusements because I would run off into the arcade and lose them among the noise and crowds. They would find me each time in the same motor car clutching the steering wheel.

  It can be lovely to hear relations talking about your early years, the sentimentalism tugging on your heart strings, just the act of remembering warming you up.

  ‘What do you remember about my childhood, Nan?’ I asked recently, all dewy-eyed and expectant.

  ‘You always jumped in shit!’ she cackled.

  Dogshit, donkey shit – any kind of shit, I would just love to step in it. There was one time when my parents had just bought me some brand new shoes from Clark’s. I came out of the shop all excited. Then I spotted some dogshit and without any hesitation jumped in, both feet first. The shoes were so caked they had to be thrown in the bin, which still makes me feel guilty because I realise now how skint my parents were at the time and how they struggled to make ends meet. But why couldn’t Nan talk about my first word or the first time I walked – away from a piece of dogshit?

  Other memories bustle for attention. Every morning when I was little, I would stand and look out of the window that overlooked Weymouth beach to watch my father go to work and wave at him as he got into his green Mazda. Sometimes, Dad would say that I would become distracted by the beach, and he would drive round again and again to try to get my attention. My eyes would finally leave what was happening on the beach and reconnect to my father in his car and I would carry on with my waving and he would drive off to work.

  For someone who swore that they could never do Dad’s job, our lives have eerily mirrored each other’s. The ridiculous amount of travelling we both do is testament to that. I find it strangely comforting to know that if I’m in some weird village hall performing on the other side of the Pennines, he’ll be somewhere twice as obscure up a mountain watching a football team in the Dordogne.

  Funnily enough it was this incessant travel that bonded us: sitting around the dining table we would often discuss in great detail the benefits of the M40 or ask, ‘Have you been on that new flyover yet?’ while Mum’s eyes would slowly glaze over and she’d try to stick her head in the oven. It also took me a while to recognise back then that the moodiness and sharp exchanges we’d get every Friday night weren’t Dad being grumpy, but merely his anxiety about the game the next day. This is pretty similar to me now as anyone who’s had the misfortune to approach me before I go on stage can testify, receiving a glare or a curt ‘leave me alone’ for their troubles.

  * * *

  Dad was away quite a bit when I was a kid, but that did mean I could spend a lot of time with my mother. Before my brother Gary was born it was often just us two in the house and the bond that usually connects mother and son became that little bit stronger. People say I look more like my mother than my father. Stop! Get that image of Olive from On the Buses out of your head – my mother is an attractive woman, I’ll have you know. One thing that we share is our sense of humour, and growing up I remember the house just being full of laughter. My mother is very much like me when telling a story; she will get to her feet and start mimicking the person, taking on the different characters and voices.

  I remember when my father was away at a match, asking my mother how she met him. She says she was sitting in the stands at Dartford Football Club
watching a match where Dad was playing. When Dad scored a goal, he ran over to the stand and pulled a moonie at the supporters.

  ‘What did you think about that?’ I asked her.

  ‘I thought, “What an idiot!”’

  Well, I guess that’s an icebreaker in anyone’s book. Most romances start with a furtive glance across a crowded room, not by exposing yourself to your loved one. Anyway, my mother not only fell in love with that idiot, she married him.

  Dad must have been doing something right at Weymouth, because he was asked to become manager of Dartford, so not for the last time in our lives we were on the move. Now when you’re poor, having a beach on your doorstep and bright, delicious sunshine for what felt like 24 hours a day can take the edge off having empty pockets. Dartford sadly didn’t have any of these things going for it; the tunnel is a wonderful man-made phenomenon, admittedly, and the Thames can be a majestic thing up by the Houses of Parliament, but down near Dartford it looked as grey and weary as the people.

  As it happens, we weren’t there for long because Dad became manager of Nuneaton Town Football Club, so yet again we were on the move. Dad, Mum and I journeyed up the M1 in the Mazda. We stayed in Northampton instead of Nuneaton due to the fact Dad had played there in the Sixties and thought it would be a nice place to live.

  He was right, it was nice, just nice. Not a little bit naughty, just nice. We moved onto the Moulton Leys estate and lived in a house in a cul-de-sac that overlooked a cornfield. The cul-de-sac was a perfect example of suburbia: young families, pets, people washing their cars every Sunday. We even had our own peeping Tom. He would walk his dog at night and throw a ball up the drives, go to get it and then try to catch a glimpse of a woman through the parted curtains. We knew this because we saw him most nights.

  In fact, Mum and the woman across the road, Sue, tried to catch him out one night. Sue left her curtains open and her lights on to lure the pervert while Mum kept our house in darkness and looked out of the window to catch him red-eyed. After a few seductive curtain twitches from Sue had proved fruitless, Mum peered out a bit more closely, but it was only when she looked down that she realised he was actually peeping through her own window. She screamed and he ran off, which left us terrified but strangely excited. Mum quickly rang up Sue and they laughed about it together nervously, feeling triumphant and yet a little bit dirty.

  Those were some of the things that Mum and I would get up to whilst Dad was away – stupid, silly things that would make us laugh. They say the devil makes work for idle hands, but he also dabbles in finding work for skint hands. If we’d been able to afford to go to the cinema, we wouldn’t have had to amuse ourselves by capturing local sex pests like some kind of Hetty Wainthropp. The following Christmas, I got an Atari and that kept Mum and me busy till all hours playing PacMan, Space Invaders and Wizard of War.

  I used to support Nuneaton Town Football Club and, believe it or not, I used to look forward to the matches, even though they were an unfashionable non-League side. I even used to go to the training nights, where I would have the whole football ground to myself and sit in whatever seat I wanted. I would even climb up the goal nets and splash about in the huge players’ baths. I could do anything I wanted because Dad was the boss. I would obviously knacker myself out on those nights because I remember lying on the back seat of Dad’s car with his sheepskin over me, driving back to Northampton and feeling very safe drifting off along those country lanes.

  Mohammed Ali once came to Nuneaton Town Football Club when I was little. It’s true, it’s true – I’ve got photos and everything. The chairman, by some amazing wheeler dealing, got the boxing legend to officiate the ground. I didn’t know who he was back then. I knew he was a boxer, but his fame had sort of passed me by. What I do remember is that he was upbeat, said hello to everyone and took the piss out of Dad’s baldness, with Dad laughing along jovially. I remember him shaking slightly, which of course we now know was the beginning of Parkinson’s. I just wish that at the time I’d understood the importance of meeting such an icon. I wonder if he feels the same about me now that I’m on the telly. I guess I’ll never know.

  We were getting quite a name for ourselves in our little cul-de-sac, mainly because we had brought a cat with us from Dartford, Big Puss. We were never inventive with names in our house, and if we’re honest, cats don’t do anything anyway, so Big Puss was quite an apt name. He was a big puss, just a big fat puss. And vicious. Ever since he’d moved to Northampton he’d been terrorising people and cats the length and breadth of the estate.

  It was a miracle that he was even with us then. By the time we had arrived at Northampton and we were trying to find our house, he had eaten through the cardboard box that had been meant to hold him in and he wasn’t happy. Mad with rage in fact, he pounced claws first onto Mum’s face and in a moment of panic she threw him out of the car window.

  I was distraught. Can you imagine first seeing your mum savaged by your own pet cat and then seeing it thrown out of a window? I was only five and could have been traumatised for life. I thought the last I would ever see of Big Puss would be his tail whizzing past the wing mirror, but then guess who stalks, six days later, around the side of the house? Big Puss! Via some amazing tracking system that cats seem to have in their head, he had traced us to our new home. What a clever cat! I shouted joyously, ‘Big Puss! You’re alive!’ and ran over to cuddle him, and he bit me. That was Big Puss for you – hard as nails.

  Big Puss would terrify the other cats in the neighbourhood, but that was too easy for him – it was the humans he loved to hurt. You would see him in the alley opposite, sprawled out against the wall, his fluffy ginger stomach just waiting to be stroked. A little girl or boy on a scooter would come over and touch that fluffy stomach and then he would pounce and a scream would ring out. Five minutes later the parent would be knocking on our door.

  ‘D’you know what your cat’s done? Look at that bite mark! And that’s after I’ve mopped up the blood. That animal’s a menace. What are you going to do about it?’

  Mum’s answer would always be: ‘Well, you shouldn’t have touched it.’

  To be fair, she had a point.

  Before long the Carrs’ cat was enemy number one. We caught our next-door neighbour hitting him with a broom after he had attacked her Persian, and later he was even shot in the head with an airgun. Needless to say, he survived. If anything, the shooting just made him a bit more mental. It was only a speeding car in our village ten years later that finally killed him off. Big Puss was a nasty piece of work, but I still miss him.

  Eventually the time came when I had to go to school. My first school was Booth Lower and it was on top of what then felt like a massive hill. It isn’t a massive hill at all and now I always laugh at how short it is, but walking up it at the age of five it felt like Kilimanjaro.

  I wasn’t really ready to go to school. With Dad always being away training or playing the away games, I had bonded too closely with my mother and would start crying hysterically every time she dropped me off. It wasn’t the actual dropping off that did it – it was seeing her pass by the window afterwards on her way back home. It was like watching her in slow motion, and once she’d crossed the window I would just bawl my heart out.

  The teacher was quite sympathetic at first, but that soon changed when my tidal wave of tears flooded into the following week. ‘Alan Carr, pull yourself together!’ Mrs Bellinge roared at me – which made me cry even more. It got so bad that the teacher had to have words with my mother, but after a while, when I realised that my mother would actually be coming back to collect me, I stopped crying.

  After that, though, I really got into this school lark. Every day seemed to be sunny and we would dress up and play games in the ‘wild area’, which felt like a jungle then but was actually a piece of land that the caretaker couldn’t be bothered to look after.

  I had started making friends, lots of friends. Tellingly, they were all girls. I had no interest in mixing or
playing with the boys. I can’t remember it being a conscious decision; like now, I just feel comfortable in female company. Sometimes the group of girls would grow and grow, and from afar it must have looked like a proper harem. It must have been alarming for my parents to see this seemingly endless conveyor belt of girls I would invite for tea.

  ‘Can Sarah come for tea?’

  ‘Can Kelly come to tea?’

  ‘Can Justine come to tea?’

  ‘Is Sarah your girlfriend?’ Mum would ask.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Kelly?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Justine?’

  ‘No. Just friends.’

  One of my best friends was Jenny, an intelligent boyish girl, who was teacher’s pet. It was not long before she started coming to tea, like so many girls had. We had the same sense of humour and really got on. Little did I know, we had more in common than I thought. We lost touch when she went to Northampton School for Girls. I did see Jenny again, but it was in very strange circumstances. Unknown to me, she had had a sex change and became a homosexual called Daniel. Obviously, I never heard about that on Friends Reunited, so you can imagine my shock when I spotted her, sorry him, sitting on the Tube opposite me with a beard. I must have shocked the other commuters when I started jumping and pointing excitedly, shouting, ‘Jenny! Jenny! It’s you, isn’t it, Jenny?’ Anyway, that’s what the future held, but back then we were just two innocent seven-year-old misfits enjoying each other’s company in the playground.

  Straight after the football season ended, we’d always go on holiday – to shiver on the Norfolk coast, sheltering from the wind and rain on a caravan park in Great Yarmouth. Great Yarmouth was grey, windswept and grim. I lost track of how many Frisbees I lost one ‘summer’. Dad would buy one from the park shop and pass it to me, I would get ready, all excited, to pass it back to him, and as soon as it left my fingers the gale force wind would whisk it off to Calais.