by Alan Carr
Seeing how despondent I’d got over my Alzheimer’s during the Citylife final, Sarah had – without my knowledge – entered me for the BBC Comedian of the Year. At first, I was put out by it. After the last experience I didn’t want to do any more competitions, but then I talked myself around. Winning a stand-up competition is one way of leap-frogging over your fellow comedians and standing out from the crowd. It was the equivalent of being in a bus lane, whizzing down the inside, giving the V’s to the lorry drivers stuck in the traffic jam. My stand-up was progressing nicely, the times when I was dying on my arse were gradually decreasing, and I was getting more and more confident. I could actually eat stuff now on the day of a gig. Plus, I’d got myself an agent.
I had been doing my usual twenty minutes back at the Buzz Comedy Club, probably for about a pound. Regrettably, I still wasn’t earning enough to leave Barclaycard, but I was getting there. I’d finished onstage and went and sat down to watch the other comedians. I was approached by this tall, slim, attractive, blonde woman.
‘Oh no!’ I thought. ‘My first groupie.’
As it happened, I couldn’t have been more wrong. She was an agent.
‘Hello, I’m Mary Richmond, and I’m interested in representing you.’ I couldn’t believe it. I tried to play it cool.
‘Who else do you represent?’
‘Johnny Vegas, among others.’
‘The Johnny Vegas?’
‘Yes!’
I was incredulous. I took her card and said nonchalantly, ‘I’ll think about it,’ and then skipped all the way back to Ruth’s.
Of course I accepted the offer of representation. Mary Richmond, I found out, ran Big Eye Management with her husband Steve Lock, who was just as lovely as her. Their office was in the Northern Quarter, and I would go there to write. The difference in getting comedy gigs yourself and having someone to do it for you is immense; it automatically gives you a more professional air. It means business, even if you are in an office above a kebab shop. They rang around all the clubs, bigged you up, raved about you, filled your diary, all for 10 per cent of your fee. It was money well spent, plus I got to support Johnny Vegas at the legendary/notorious (delete accordingly) Frog and Bucket Comedy Club.
Naively, I thought his ranting, drunk persona was a sophisticated character that he slipped into once he got on stage, but no, he really was pissed. He turned up with a pack of four Guinnesses in a Spar bag, and after he downed those he moved onto a bottle of red. Then he went on stage and ripped the roof off. I was in awe, at both his stage presence and his liver. It seems I still had a lot to learn.
As the drudgery of Barclaycard filled my days, comedy filled my nights, and before long I found myself in the semifinal of the BBC Comedian of the Year. It was being held in Nottingham at the Just the Tonic Comedy Club. Unlike the Citylife competition, the talent wasn’t just Manchester-centric. I was up against the best new comedians in the country, and guess what? Yes, I was really nervous. I wasn’t the only one. As always, the time just evaporated before our eyes and before we knew it we comedians could hear from behind the velvet curtain the audience taking their seats, and the first act was cued to go on.
Where you are placed in the running order can have a huge effect on how you are received by the audience. If you go on first, the audience may still be cold and you end up becoming a sacrificial lamb, an appetiser before the main course. I was seventh out of the eight, which meant that although the audience would be warmed up they might also be tired and all funnied out. Everyone had had a good one; the audience seemed nice and friendly. There was no reason why I should worry, but of course I did.
Then in what seemed like a flash it was my time to step out from behind the velvet curtain. Sometimes something happens that you can’t explain. I was filled with a confidence that I’d never had before. I was enjoying telling my jokes, I was actually enjoying it. People were roaring, in fact one of the BBC judges fell off his seat with laughter, which I took to be a positive sign. I left the stage with a huge roar of applause. All I needed was for the eighth comedian to be a bit shit, and I was in the final for sure.
He was. Hooray!
The judges put me through to the BBC final, and I was ecstatic. One of my best mates, Karen Bayley, who was also in that semi-final, never fails to remind me that it would have been her in the final if I hadn’t had such a good one. Competitions can be infuriating, as I’d learnt at the Citylife final. You can have complete stormers every night of the year, but in a competition it’s all about how you perform on the night and whether the gods are smiling down. In Nottingham, they definitely were. To add to the excitement, the BBC Comedian of the Year final would be held up in Edinburgh during the famous festival. I’d never been to Edinburgh before and to think that I would be part of that prestigious festival, albeit in a little way, was mind-blowing and spurred me on in my quest to be a full-time professional comedian.
The problem was I couldn’t get the time off Barclaycard. I could get the actual day off, but that meant coming back down to Manchester the day after. I didn’t want to miss this opportunity, so I handed my notice in without a second thought. I was going to quit the call centre the day before the final and become a stand-up comedian full time. This move, although bold, now seemed a bit foolish. I was still an Open Spot, and the most I was earning for a night of comedy was £20. I’d need to work a lot of nights to get near to my £13,000 a year salary. The relief was immense, though, and I felt strangely exhilarated by the fact that I was actually now freefalling through my life without a proper job. All I needed was a can of Tennent’s Superstrength and I’d be like one of those people off Jeremy Kyle, and I loved it. What was I thinking?
I remember my last-ever phone call at Barclaycard. The matter wasn’t even a Barclaycard matter. It was a haughty-sounding woman with a clipped voice and a personality disorder.
‘I want to make a complaint. I’ve gone to use my Barclaycard in a shop, and the woman’s just called me a c**t.’
Oh God. What fresh hell is this? I forget the ins and outs of the story, but the shop owner had called her the C-word, and to be honest, the more I heard this women’s crazy witterings, the more I sided with the shopkeeper. Obviously, this wasn’t a credit card problem, it was a problem between her and the shopkeeper, but she was adamant.
‘I want to speak to your supervisor,’ she barked.
‘I’ll just get her for you.’
It was one crazy person too much, and with a quick scan of the clock, I could see it was 4.30pm – home time, so I gently hung my headset up and tiptoed out through the revolving doors to freedom. In my more malicious moments I like to think that the woman is still there on hold, shouting abuse and waiting for my supervisor.
Chapter Nine
MATCH FIT
The next day I went up to Edinburgh on the train for the competition final. The BBC were paying for our expenses and giving us a room for a week in the centre of Edinburgh’s New Town, and I’d packed for the whole week. I was definitely going to make the most of it.
It’s sad really. Because I’ve been to Edinburgh so many times, I sort of take it for granted now, but when I first stepped off the train at Waverley Station it took my breath away. It was so dramatic, with the Castle high up on the hill, the dark grey cobbled roads snaking wildly around the city and the shadowy passageways and back streets that lead to yet more shadowy passageways and back streets and, if you’re lucky, a cosy little public house. The drama and excitement that I felt inside seemed to be mirrored in my surroundings.
At the Festival it is so easy to immerse yourself in the world of comedy. With a pint in your hand, you could watch the best comedians in the world perform for your delectation. It was my first taste of this kind of lifestyle. I’d never gone to a stand-up comedy club in my life before. I wasn’t really sure what to expect, but what I saw was a revelation. How had I missed it? The after-hours scene in Edinburgh was like a cabaret performance itself, late-night drinking in smoky rooms wit
h burlesque being performed in the corner, world-famous comedians doing stand-up on a box in the back of a pub at half one in the morning. The night time for me is better than the daytime. I saw the sublime Daniel Kitson host ‘Late N Live’, a comedy night that starts at midnight and finishes at three (if you’re lucky) in the morning. It is a bear pit, with the whole audience intoxicated and baying for the comedians’ blood. But Daniel would effortlessly control the audience’s heckles and deflect witty putdowns back at them with great aplomb. When you see someone like that at the top of their game, you realise how far you have to grow as a comedian yourself, with the very real chance that at the end, after all your growing, you still might not get to be that good.
The BBC final was being held at the Pleasance Dome, a huge building with – yes, that’s right – a very large dome on the top. On seeing the cameras, the all-too-familiar butterflies were let loose in my stomach. Sometimes I think my body must have wondered what had hit it. In those days it was constantly on edge, and a solid poo was something to write home about. The wonderful comedian Ross Noble was hosting the final, and he was someone that we all wanted to impress, along with the judges of course.
Sarah and Cherry and Karen Bayley, the comedian, had come up to support me, which took the edge off some of my nerves at least; you can never underestimate the sight of a smattering of friendly faces in an audience. The final started and my body went into auto-pilot fear, worry, nerves, stress, but this time I was resilient. The humiliation of drying up at the Citylife final overrode my fears and I went on stage determined.
I had been watching through the gap in the curtain. I could only see three of the judges, Dr Graeme Garden, Ralf Little and Sean Lock, and they hadn’t laughed hysterically at any of the acts so far so I knew there was no clear winner. I could also see that each of the acts had brought mates, and they were only laughing at their friends and remaining stony-faced for the others. Please, Cherry, Sarah, Karen, don’t let me down – laugh! I stepped on stage and gave it my best shot.
As with all those early gigs, I can’t remember much of what happened in those seven minutes. The blood seemed to be rushing around my head so fast, it had drowned out the audience. Whether they were clapping or booing, I will never know, but whatever they were doing it must have been positive because to my complete shock – I won.
Yes, I won, and the man who beat me in the Citylife final, Justin Moorhouse, came second. I was over the moon and so proud that I hadn’t fluffed or cocked it up again. I ran straight to the phone and told Mum, who advised me cryptically, ‘Don’t do anything stupid now.’
If I thought the final was a blur, the party afterwards was even more of a blur. There was a bit of friction as I went into the party. The girl at the door refused to let me in to the party. ‘I’ve just won the BBC New Comedian of the Year.’
‘Anyone can say that.’
Which I totally understand, but when you’re standing there holding a bright pink award with ‘The BBC New Comedian of the Year’ in your hand, the odds are considerably in your favour.
She grudgingly let me pass. Cow.
The party was great. I got VIP tickets which meant I could get free drinks in this special room only for VIPs. I walked in nervously and saw Trev and Simon from ‘Swing Your Pants’ fame at the bar, which left me in awe. I nervously sat down with Cherry, Sarah and Karen, drank the free drinks and tried not to do anything stupid. The rest of the week was such fun. I got to do interviews with different papers and magazines, people stopped to chat in the street and Nan rang to say that she’d seen my name on Teletext.
* * *
I was walking on air, and on the way back to Manchester on the train I couldn’t quite believe what had happened to me. The excitement only began to fade once I’d stepped out onto the Piccadilly Station platform – I didn’t have a job. I’d sacked off Barclaycard in a fit of pique and now I couldn’t pay my rent. However, rent was the last thing on my mind when I returned home and opened the door to my bedroom.
I found my possessions covered in a layer of dust and debris littering the floor and a massive gaping hole in the side of the wall. I could see the garden from my bed. Ruth had been ‘doing up’ the house again, it seemed, while I had been away, and rather than give the wall a fresh lick of paint she had chosen to use a demolition ball. Yes, the room was quite dark, and the skylight that was in the roof only let in limited light. Ruth in her wisdom had decided to put another window in, without telling me, while I was in Edinburgh. She said it was meant to be a surprise, and she was right – it was a big surprise. The hole was lower than expected, so once the window was put in the neighbours around the back would be able to see not my face but my body from the waist down, which is probably the part of your body that you would want covering up, especially when there are people sunbathing and children playing in the gardens below.
We’d also got some new flatmates, Eva and Pauline, which didn’t help in any way to rebalance the madness. They were both German. They did not know each other, but had both responded to Ruth’s advert separately and liked the house. You couldn’t have had two more different flatmates. Pauline was a stick-thin, pink-haired punk with piercings, and Eva was this curvaceous nymphomaniac who worked at Little Chef. Eva was lovely but had a voracious sexual appetite, and when not bringing blokes home with her from the Little Chef would scour the lonely hearts for more single men. I lost track of the amount of times I came down for breakfast to find some shifty-looking Little Chef customer muttering under his breath ‘only popped in for an all day breakfast.’ I don’t know if Ruth believed that the string of gentleman callers that turned up at the house every week, or the ones that rang the landline, were her ‘friends’ or ‘work colleagues’, but she certainly didn’t let on. There were a few times when she came close.
Ruth had come into the kitchen one morning and said to the man sitting with Eva in the kitchen eating breakfast, ‘Hello, what is it that you do?’
‘I paint.’
‘What do you paint?’
‘Women. Naked women.’
Ruth managed to muster an ‘Oh’.
‘I usually have them just wearing kitten heels or stilettos.’
The atmosphere was electric. Thank God Mortimer had started pissing next to the fridge or I wouldn’t have known where to look.
* * *
Now I was ‘Alan Carr, BBC New Comedian of the Year’, I naively thought that things would change, but they didn’t. I had one meeting with the BBC’s Jon Plowman, the producer of some of my favourite comedies ever, such as The Office, Absolutely Fabulous and The League of Gentlemen. It was one of those meetings they give you, just to save face. You turn up and have a cup of tea. They do it to give you the impression that the wheels are turning, when in fact it’s the scenery moving. To be fair to the BBC, what could they offer me? I’d just won a competition with seven minutes of comedy. No one gets their own show after just seven minutes, you don’t even get that after seven years of comedy, (well, OK, I did with my Ding Dong, but let’s not go into that right now) but I was new and I naively thought that The Alan Carr Show was just around the corner.
They were impressed with my stand-up, they loved the fact that I talked about call centres. It was ‘now’, it was very much in the general public’s minds. I didn’t dare tell them that it was my job, well, it had been ten days ago, but I let them talk, sipping my tea expecting every next sentence to start, ‘We have a show for you primetime Saturday night …’
It never came, but they loved my call centre material nevertheless. The news that call centres were relocating to India to save money, and British workers were losing their jobs, was all over the papers. I was talking about what it was like to work in those very call centres. It seems by complete accident I’d ridden the zeitgeist. For once in my life, I was this trendy comedian talking about the week’s hot potatoes and the issues that counted. Can I have my primetime show now?
However, my comedy was appreciated elsewhere. Don Ward of th
e Comedy Store had spotted me playing in a half-empty room at the Frog and Bucket and had decided to give me my own Sunday show at the Manchester Comedy Store. Once a month I had carte blanche to hold a cabaret night. I was so excited, but as usual nervous. Sometimes being given carte blanche is worse than being told what to do. What or who would I have on the bill? Would we have a band, or a celebrity, and how much do you charge? When does the night start? I could see it was going to be a tough one. The Comedy Store helped out loads, what with the bookings and everything. I’d already come up with the name ‘Alan Carr’s Ice Cream Sunday’, and the flyer was printed with me holding aloft a Mr Whippy ice cream, à la Statue of Liberty.
When it came to booking the acts, I knew I wanted a whole different selection. I didn’t just want comedians, I wanted the whole gamut of performers that ply their trade upon the stage. I told them what I wanted, they rang around and if it was within the budget we would have them. The nights were definitely different. No one could say it was boring. We had headlining stand-ups, we had contortionists, jugglers, celebrities, lap dancers, rappers, it really was a smorgasbord of talent. Obviously, the level of quality would fluctuate wildly, but it would always be fun.
I had an amazing coup one night. We had booked Neil and Christine Hamilton for the ‘Celebrity Interview’ part of the show where I would pull out a leopard-skin sofa and chat to the celebrities for about twenty minutes. Now, as we all know, a Neil and Christine Hamilton interview is not really something that conjures up ‘hottest ticket in town’, but that Sunday morning splashed all across the News of the World was the luridly eyeball-popping story of an alleged sexual assault at a sex party by the Hamiltons, the very people who were on my show. Of course, it was all lies, but the salacious details of Christine sitting on the victim’s face whilst Neil ejaculated over her breasts strangely seemed to attract my kind of audience and the Comedy Store that night was packed to the rafters with fans and, dare I say it, perverts.
