by Alan Carr
I’m still waiting.
Chapter Four
PLAYING AWAY FROM HOME
At last it was time to go to London. When I turned up in the city I was 18 and desperate for adventure. So I was a bit disappointed to stay in halls of residence for the first year. Naively, I wanted a house in Camden near the market or High Street Kensington with trendy, bohemian London types, not to stay in a brick purpose-built block of flats on the Cricklewood border. Although a disappointment at first I’m so glad I did end up in halls because that was where I met some of my best and closest friends. Mum was in tears at the gate as we arrived at the halls that Sunday. I had a duvet under my arm and a potted plant ready for my new room. We’d gone to ‘Food Giant’ across the road and stocked up on soups, ready meals, basically anything with ‘just add boiling water’ on the front.
Once I’d popped my aspidistra on the windowsill and had a sip of my Oxtail Cup-a-Soup, it finally sank in. Wow! I was living alone in London. I couldn’t believe it. This was living. My life had just begun. OK, it was Cricklewood. OK, I was doing a course that was taking me in a totally different direction to where I wanted to go. OK, so I couldn’t afford to leave Cricklewood to enjoy this amazing London life, but it was life.
But anyway, I left my new room to meet my fellow thesps. The bloke opposite was called Michael Chicken (that was his real name). A lovely but strange man, he would often eat cat biscuits and had a sign saying ‘Astoroth’ on his door. I think it was something to do with Dungeons and Dragons. He showed me a photo of when he’d scrawled ‘Revenge’ in his arm, but he had carved ‘Revenje’. Later that year he gave me the shock of my life. I was awoken from a power nap by Michael standing over me, dressed as the ‘Crow’ and saying Mum was on the phone downstairs. (Now I know how Minstral felt with the pig costume.) He was a sweet guy, but altogether a bit strange. Usually if your surname is Chicken, you like to keep a low profile, but not Michael, oh no.
The next person I met on my course was a big girl called Helen. She was nice enough but we never really gelled as mates. The last time I saw her, she was trying to remove a one-pence piece lodged in her face that someone had thrown at her during the Middlesex University slave auction. Ironically, it was a penny more than anyone had bid for her.
As you can imagine, seeing these two hardly filled me with joy. I rechecked my university prospectus to see if it in fact read ‘Circus Studies’, but no it definitely had ‘Theatre Studies’ emblazoned on the front. The prospect of spending three years with them seemed quite daunting. After I’d unpacked, we met some other first years. In a desperate attempt to bond and make the best of a bad situation, we went to a local pub. After being asked in the first pub to donate to the IRA, we decided to move on to the next one where Vicki, a bookish girl who lived downstairs, told us that this was the pub where gay psychopath serial killer Dennis Nilsen picked up his first victim. The omens for this course weren’t looking good at all.
My saving grace came the next day when the girl next door knocked to introduce herself. It was Catherine. We had a bit of small talk, mainly about the strange man called Chicken sitting in our kitchen in an off-white muscle top eating cat biscuits. I asked her where she came from, and she replied, ‘Kettering.’ That probably means nothing to you, but it’s a town just ten miles from my house in Northampton, and it was music to my ears. Well, we instantly bonded, united by our contempt for life growing up in the Rose of the Shires. As it turned out, we had gone to the same nightclubs. We both dubbed Reflections ‘Rejections’ – see, I was witty even back then. As it happened, we also had a smattering of mutual friends. It was the beginning of a wonderful friendship that is still going today.
Catherine wasn’t doing Drama or Theatre Studies; she was doing French International Business, and it must have been frustrating for her living among these Drama students. She would often spend hours slumped over a hulking great French business dictionary trying to find the right words, doing yet another essay till the early hours of the morning, and we’d come in ‘exhausted’ after doing two hours of breathing exercises and movement. I don’t think she realised how tiring it is being a tree.
The Drama and Theatre Studies course was based at this rather run-down mansion at the top of Golders Green Hill. It had been Anna Pavlova’s old house. Her dying wish was that her house should be used by the council as a centre for creativity and arts. Looking back at some of the shit we came out with, I’m sure she’s pirouetting in her grave. But the house was very conducive to being a centre of creativity. It had wonderful grounds, a lake and two performance spaces – I won’t say theatres, because that will build your hopes up. You could imagine how beautiful the house must have been in its prime – the tall ceilings, the staircases, the air of quiet contemplation in the large study, adorned with oil paintings and murals before a load of excitable Drama students burst through the doors. What a fall from grace. Even the large mirror in the rehearsal room that Anna Pavlova would practise in front of had a massive crack through it by the time we’d finished there. A fat girl had fallen against it in a dance class. The final insult.
I was still envious of the Acting course over at Trent Park. We were hearing stories that they were doing all these dynamic, challenging dramas, and were working nine to five every day. That was exactly the thing I secretly wanted to do, but sadly I wasn’t talented enough for it. I kidded myself that I enjoyed making things out of papier mâché and wire-wooling the gussets of leotards. Although the course wasn’t to my satisfaction, I threw myself into London life. Ivy House’s location was a wonderful spot, right at the top of Golders Green Park. It was the perfect antidote to the grey of Northampton’s industrial estates. There was the park on your doorstep. A short walk up the hill, you had the pub Jack Straw’s Castle, and then the magical Heath spread out before you. Hamp-stead Heath’s reputation has been sullied a bit of late. When you mention the wonderful walks and impressive scenery, people look at you suspiciously; but there is something mystical about that heath, especially at one o’ clock in the morning when you’re looking for your bearded collie in the undergrowth.
It does sound poncey, but after doing two hours of stretching and vocal warming, meandering across the Heath with a copy of Ibsen (unopened) under your arm, you couldn’t help feeling like an artiste, even if you didn’t have the range to back it up.
As it turned out, the two hours of breathing exercises on the Monday and the two hours of designing theatre sets on the Thursday were the entire course for the first few months. A few students left, stating that it wasn’t intense enough, but I loved it. After the intensity of A-levels and the weariness of life in Northampton, I felt reborn. We lived like tourists. We had an amazing amount of free time to see the sights, and we visited all the museums, shopped at Camden Market, pottered around Portobello Road, and went to all the cool clubs, after a few hiccups in the first week. We naively believed the hype about these neon super-clubs in Leicester Square like Equinox and the Hippodrome. But we took one look at the Japanese tourists doing the conga to Ace of Base and turned on our heels. We were young and in London – we only did the really cool clubs. We only went in the week, mind, when it was a pound a drink. We never even ventured there at the weekends, when the drinks could cost as much as £3.00. £3.00!! Oh, the outrage.
At the weekend we went over to Food Giant and bought this lovely champagne with a plastic cork, Château Belnor, for 98p. It was always welcome at Cricklewood Halls. The Drama students would crank up the stereo and dance the night away, while the Business students complained about the noise and asked us to turn it down as they couldn’t concentrate on their French dictionaries. I don’t know what was in Château Belnor, but it would bring out the worst in us. I don’t know if it was the bubbles or the slight whiff of poppers that emanated from the cork-hole. I remember Matt, who was always so sensitive and gentle, banging violently on Thannos’s door and threatening to deck him when Greece gave us ‘nul points’ in the Eurovision Song Contest.
&nb
sp; I remember thinking what a loser everyone else was, and that I was so lucky to be a creative type and not one of those boring Business students who don’t know how to have a good time. Of course, all those Business students had the last laugh when the Theatre students graduated. We’d all be waiting for the Pertemps minibus to pick us up in a layby to take us to some godforsaken industrial estate, while they’d be driving past in their sports cars making deals and having power lunches. Obviously, they’d be on Brut and Laurent Perrier at these power lunches, and I’d have a Château Belnor poking out of my Tupperware box. But that was the future. That was a whole three years away; c’mon, let your hair down!
In a way, I was helping to seal my own fate. I was getting incredibly lazy. I didn’t go to London’s Glittering West End at all to watch the hot new plays by the hottest new playwrights. That would mean giving up a night of drinking. I didn’t even put on plays in my spare time to get myself an Equity card. I was blasé about life in London, and anyway, I wanted to be at the front of the stage, not behind it, which is shameful. Even though we only worked a four-hour week, to our shame we never read the plays we were supposed to. We’d turn up oblivious to who was in it, what happened and why. Instead, we would sit down with a packet of Hob Nobs and watch daytime telly. Besides, when we weren’t focusing on stage sets, sound and directing, the acting modules of the course (which were minimal at best) would concentrate on such styles as Kabuki theatre or August Boal’s Invisible Theatre. I just wanted to be in Hollyoaks.
* * *
Not surprisingly, as I was such a social butterfly, my social outgoings were becoming enormous, and my evening journeys to Food Giant for Château Belnor were becoming more and more frequent. The guilt of doing absolutely nothing in term-time began to jar with my conscience. Mum would ring up asking what I’d been up to, and I didn’t have a clue. I’d start making things up just to throw her off the scent, but you could tell in her voice she wasn’t falling for it. I couldn’t act to my own mother let alone an audience of theatregoers, but she was right to be cynical: I wasn’t doing anything. After a while, doing nothing became exhausting, and I thought that it would be best if I got a job. At least then I’d have some money. My flatmate Karen was working part-time at Tesco Brent Cross and said that there were jobs going – would I be interested? At £4.80 an hour the money was good, plus it was double time on a Sunday. I was very tempted to say the least.
I went to see the store manager, Carol, a woman with dyed red hair and a pinched expression. The photo of her, near the store entrance, welcoming the customers in to ‘her store’, was sadly, like the food in the discount aisle, past its use-by date. It had been airbrushed within an inch of her life. It was Dorian Gray in reverse. She took me behind the scenes of the shop floor and quizzed me.
‘What attracts you to working at Tesco Brent Cross?’ she asked with a straight face.
‘Er, I love pushing trolleys around a car park in tight grey poly-cotton trousers?’
I got the job. Result! And with a ‘10% off’ loyalty card, I felt like the King of Brent Cross.
The money came in very handy, and I quite liked sitting there gossiping with the customers, scanning their shopping and learning all the different food codes – 7710 for bananas, 10 for a clove of garlic and 3245 for Braeburns. It was fun – well, for about ten minutes it was fun, then it really began to drag. That was before Tesco turned into the monster that we all know today. I’m sure it was a monster back then, but its fangs weren’t quite as sharp and its grip over the high street wasn’t quite so tight.
Tesco was intent on pushing the ideal of ‘customer service’, the belief that the customer is always right, even if said customer is mentally ill. I used to dread Tuesdays, because that would be the day Stan would come to shop. Stan, for some reason, had taken a shine to me, not in a fruity gay sense, but in an OAP/youngster-type capacity. The problem was that he only had one arm, and every time he wanted something off the shelf he would have to put the basket down, take the product off the shelf, pop it in the basket and then pick up his basket and carry on. As you can imagine, this got very tedious for him, but we couldn’t allow a one-armed pensioner to push a trolley unaided around a superstore.
So every Tuesday I would hold the basket, and he would point with his one good arm, and I would take the product off the shelf and pop it in his basket. This would carry on every week. At one point, I was thinking of sellotaping five fish fingers to the end of a baguette and somehow strapping it to him and a basket to give him a makeshift arm – anything just to leave me in peace. On the front of the horrible grey polyester uniform we were forced to wear we had to pin an oversized badge proclaiming: ‘Here to Help’. I was glad it was oversized because the more polyester it covered, the better. Because you were wearing the badge, customers assumed you were an oracle.
‘What aisle is the desiccated coconut?’
‘How long do you cook a butternut squash?’
‘What would you have with a pan-fried red mullet?’
‘Where can I find the Holy Grail?’ Enough already!
Some people obviously misread the ‘Here to Help’ as ‘Hello, I’m your bitch!’ That especially applied when the princesses descended from Golders Green in their 4 x 4s, clicking their fingers and stamping their feet at me. I remember one woman wafting her hands in the air, which I think symbolised ‘Pack my bags and take them to the car’. I started packing. I don’t know what came over me, but I saw she had bought her son a Thomas the Tank Engine birthday cake. So without her knowing, I packed that at the bottom and forced a six-pack of Pedigree Chum down on it. I squashed it down good and proper and smiled subserviently as I took it to her 4 x 4. I wish I had been at that kid’s party when his mum brought out the cake and the kid started screaming because Thomas had a cleft palette and an imprint of a Labrador on his forehead.
Some of my duties would be more mundane, like collecting the trolleys in the Tesco car park, taking back customers’ returns and repricing the food that was coming up to its sell-by date. Sometimes things could get exciting, like when we had a shoplifter or a thief. When a crook used a stolen card fraudulently, a name would pop up on the screen and you would have to ask a supervisor if he could have a word with Mr —. This was a code word for ‘Call the cops’. At that point, knowing we were on to him, the card fraudster would usually just dash for the door, followed by the security guard.
I was also there when the foot-and-mouth crisis gripped the country and the meat aisles were jammed with unwanted beef. No one would touch it. It got so bad, the bosses asked us to appease the customers by saying that our meat was perfectly fine to eat and that you could trust Tesco. I would frequently tell them that Tesco beef was the best in the country, only for them to say tartly, ‘I don’t think I’m going to endanger my family’s life with your beef, thank you very much,’ and then pop lasagne, chilli con carne and moussaka onto the conveyor belt. What did they think it was made of? Pick ’n’ mix?
One day when I turned up for work we were all taken to the cafeteria and told about this brand new innovation, the Clubcard. For every pound you spent at Tesco, you would get a point on your Clubcard, which could later be redeemed. I thought it sounded like a shit idea, but what do I know?
‘This Clubcard needs to be promoted,’ said Carol Reed, the store manager, ‘and we need some fun and outgoing people to promote it. We need someone who will make our customers go, “Wow!”’ I watched as Carol’s eyes scanned the room: Jacqui with the lazy eye, Ganesh with his minimal English, Phyllis with the wart, and the rest of the team who looked like extras on Shameless.
Her eyes fell on me. ‘Alan! You do Drama. Will you come on board?’
‘Will it get me off the tills?’ I replied.
‘Yes.’
‘Count me in, Carol!’
The next thing I know, I’m standing on the Brent Cross petrol station forecourt with a blue Clubcard sash around me asking people if they would like to have a Clubcard. I wasn’t over the
moon about the sash, but the previous idea had been to dress me up as a waiter, approaching customers with a tray bearing – yes, you guessed it – a Clubcard. Brent Cross is pretty rough at night, and we would often get gangs of lads shoplifting or intimidating the staff. So I was a little bit worried, standing there like Miss World on a petrol station forecourt. Overall, though, it was a welcome respite from working on the till, and at least I got to stretch my legs away from the beady eyes of Carol. I can’t help thinking that I had a part to play in the success of the Tesco Clubcard. I really excelled myself in those days, going up to unsuspecting Tesco customers and getting them to sign up. Thanks to my hard sell on that forecourt, the Clubcard was truly the talk of the town.
It was a particularly grim night. I was standing there on the forecourt with my sash nestled between my breasts, that damn puppy fat still clinging on for dear life. What I thought was the glow of two orange headlights caught my eye. As it turned out, it was Dale Winton, coming out of his red sports car parked behind me. I turned on my heel and said, ‘Dale, can I interest you in a Clubcard?’
‘It’s OK, darling. I’ve got one.’
He was lovely then as he is now. I haven’t ever mentioned that first encounter to him, but I was so starstruck. He was the first celebrity I’d seen since I’d moved down to London. Yes, I’d seen Geoff Capes at Overstone Solarium, but this was London, where they all lived. Celebrities are like buses: you wait for one and then two come along at once. Who do you reckon I saw the next day? Dr Fox! Yes, the Dr Fox. He was with a pretty woman, and I remember his fox cufflinks winking in the glare of artificial light that bathed the shop floor. I was thinking, ‘Please, please! Come through my checkout!’ Frustratingly, he went to the next checkout along. I felt like a lover spurned, and I was itching to leave my till and ask him whether he wanted a Clubcard. I knew I was part of something, a phenomenon.
