Common As Muck!: The Autobiography of Roy 'Chubby' Brown

by Roy Chubby Brown

  By late 1974, Mick and George started to tire of the stresses of erratic earnings and life on the road, and I was wanting to stretch my wings. I’d already started playing the occasional solo night when Mick and George told me they were packing in Alcock & Brown to form a duo that would give them more time to earn money from their day jobs. Meanwhile, I appeared on television for the first – and almost the last – time.

  I had bought myself a little John Gray banjo-ukulele and would sit in my flat, practising George Formby songs. One day, an agent rang up while I was rehearsing.

  ‘I’ve got a little acting job for you on a programme going out on Tyne Tees Television called Sounds of Britain,’ he said. ‘I can’t get the whole band on it. They just want somebody, a big fella, so I thought of you.’

  The agent explained what would happen. ‘A monkey comes ashore at Hartlepool and you arrest the monkey.’

  ‘What, a real monkey?’

  ‘Oh yeah. It’s from Scarborough Zoo. It’s called Max.’

  I drove to the beach at Hartlepool where the camera crew were waiting with Max, a massive chimpanzee. I was given a policeman’s outfit to wear, ushered into a caravan for make-up and taken to meet the producer, called Heather.

  ‘It’s a history thing about who hung the monkey in Hartlepool,’ Heather explained. ‘What I’d like you to do is walk up and say “’Ello, ’ello, ’ello” to the monkey. Max will just look at you. You then say: “Can I take down your particulars?” And that’s it.’

  We rehearsed a few times. Then they took the chain off the monkey’s neck and he sat there on the beach. Holding a notebook and pencil, I went up to him.

  ‘’Ello, ’ello, ’ello,’ I said. ‘And what’s your name?’

  The monkey reached to grab one of the shiny silver buttons on my tunic, but accidentally grabbed my bollocks instead. Thinking he’d got hold of a button and squeezing as hard as he could, he tried to rip off my testicles through my trousers. I was in agony. The camera crew were on the floor, howling with laughter.

  Eventually, the crew prised the chimp’s hand off my trousers and we nailed the scene in the next take. As I’d been such a good sport, Heather offered me a spot in the studio. A few days later, I was standing in the studio, pissed up, dressed in my Alcock & Brown flying helmet and a multicoloured patchwork suit I’d had made to replace the beer-mat suit because I thought it looked more professional. Playing the banjo-ukulele, I sang ‘Jollity Farm’, a mildly rude song by the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. At the end of the performance, a production assistant came up to me.

  ‘Thanks very much, Roy,’ she said. ‘What should we call you on the credits?’

  I thought for a short while. I didn’t know what to say. Most people knew me as Roy Vasey, but my stage name in the trio was Mr Brown. I was just about to say ‘Just call me Roy Brown’ when I thought why not add my nickname around Redcar?

  ‘I’m Roy “Chubby” Brown,’ I said. And my stage persona was born.

  CHAPTER TEN

  MALTESE MAYHEM

  SHE WORE A red scarf to cover a head made bald by radiation. Her skin was waxy and stiff like plastic. It was obvious that she was very ill.

  ‘We used to come and see you all the time,’ she said as we both sat waiting for our appointment. I smiled and thought I’d crack a joke, but at nine a.m. in a cancer ward the atmosphere’s not conducive to comedy.

  ‘Really?’ I said. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Pauline.’

  ‘Hello, Pauline,’ I said. ‘How long have you been coming?’

  ‘This is my third term,’ she said. A term of treatment was typically six weeks. With maybe a couple of months between each term, that meant she had been coming to the hospital for the best part of a year.

  ‘I read about you in the paper and saw you on the television being interviewed about your cancer,’ Pauline said.

  ‘That’s right. But I’m not too bad now, thanks.’

  We chatted some more, then Pauline was called for her appointment. A couple of weeks later I was sitting in the waiting room when one of the regulars sat down next to me.

  ‘Hiya,’ I said. ‘How are you?’

  ‘I’m pretty good, thanks,’ he said, ‘but Pauline … you know, we lost Pauline at the weekend.’

  ‘The lady with the red headscarf?’

  ‘Yes. She went on Saturday.’

  Life suddenly seemed very insignificant. I’d known lots of people who had died, but that morning I was struck by how life just doesn’t mean anything really. Not a thing. It made me feel like we were put on this planet for a purpose and when we’re finished with, we’re slung out like a bin bag. Straight onto the rubbish heap.

  Sitting in that waiting room five days a week, my mind would whirr like a computer. I couldn’t help it. When you’re frightened and anxious, terrible things go through your mind. Or at least, they went through mine.

  Part of me was pleased to be sitting there, waiting for my daily blast of radiation, because I saw people who were worse off than me and it made me think that I had a better chance than them. I know that’s a terrible thing to say, but I’d be surprised if I was the only one to have such selfish thoughts.

  And although we all sat there sympathising with each other, saying ‘Oh, you poor bugger, I am so sorry,’ I knew that each and every one of us, at the back of our minds, was thinking the same thing – Thank fuck it ain’t me. Thank God I am still here.

  It’s the dark side of what we call human nature. There’s something in us that makes us sympathise and feel concern for someone and genuinely hope that they will pull through their illness, and then, when they die, we go home, sit down in our favourite armchair and think to ourselves thank fuck that wasn’t me. When I felt sorry for Pauline – the eighteen weeks of radiotherapy burning and discolouring her skin, turning her bald, making her unable to eat, confining her to the toilet, making her cough all night – I wondered if it wasn’t all a waste of time. And I wondered why, when the operations and the drugs and the doctor’s attentions and the radiotherapy don’t work, we all don’t just give in?

  So now, when someone says to me that they sympathise with people who have cancer, I want to ask them: have you had it? Because I thought I sympathised. I thought I knew what it was like. But I didn’t until I had it myself. You can’t sympathise or empathise with something you know nowt about.

  And then there are the people who tell you cancer is not as bad as it used to be. They’re the ones that say it was different thirty years ago, when cancer usually meant you had only weeks or months left to live. And because of that, cancer doesn’t get the sympathy that it used to get. But what those people don’t mention is that cancer is still the number-one killer, terminating 135,000 people’s lives prematurely every year and bringing misery to many more families. And what they also don’t say is that cancer discriminates. While I was getting my radiotherapy treatment, I discovered that people who come from deprived areas are at much greater risk of developing and dying from ten of the major cancers than people from better-off areas. When I heard that, it suddenly all made sense. It helped explain why so many people I’d grown up with in Grangetown had died young. And it also explained why, when I was a kid, people used to say that Middlesbrough, with its filthy air, dirty factories and rundown housing, had more hospitals with cancer wards than any other similarly sized city in Britain.

  I didn’t become a solo comic overnight. It was a slow, gradual process that began when I stepped out from behind the drums on the night of an early 1970s power cut at Haverton Hill Working Men’s Club. While the other three members of The Nuts stood in the darkness, waiting patiently for the electricity to come back on, I attempted to keep the audience amused by shouting some jokes out into the darkness. From the moment that evening when the darkness returned the favour with a few titters – and then some guffaws and belly laughs – I wondered if I’d ever be able to keep the laughs coming for a whole set and with the lights on.

  Over the next fe
w years, when I was playing with The Nuts or Jason and Everard or Alcock & Brown, I’d slip in the occasional solo comedy spot when a club was looking for a solo comic. My first proper solo booking was at the cricket club in Redcar, a wooden hut beside a cricket green at the end of Coatham High Street. It wasn’t the Palladium in London or the South Pier in Blackpool, but it was a start.

  From then on, as well as practising my drumming or learning the banjo or rehearsing my piano playing, I started to work diligently on my gags. I set myself the task of writing around ten jokes a day, a practice to which I’ve stuck ever since then. As long as one of the ten jokes is good enough to keep in my act, I’d have 365 new gags a year and my act would never get stale.

  I’ve always prided myself on writing all my own material, never relying on professional comedy writers to supply me with gags. Because I tour constantly and usually visit the same venues at about the same time each year, I add new jokes and drop old jokes all the time so that by the time I return to any venue a year after I last visited it, my act has changed completely and is entirely fresh to the audience.

  Of course, like every comic, I borrowed heavily from other comedians’ acts when I was starting out, but I was always happy to acknowledge it. I once came off stage at a small club where another comedian was playing after me.

  ‘I wrote that gag,’ he said referring to one of the jokes in my act.

  ‘You wrote that gag? Are you sure now?’ I said. ‘When you wrote it, you hadn’t just been watching Laurel and Hardy in Way Out West, had you? Because the bastard line’s in that film.’

  ‘No, I wrote that gag.’

  All comics do it. Maybe they just need a pat on the back or maybe they don’t want anyone to realise they get their jokes out of books or from someone else with a better brain than them.

  When I started writing, most of my material would come from things about which the lads in the band would say, ‘You should say that on stage, that’s quite funny. You should use that.’

  On one particular day we were all in the van, driving through Slaggy Island when a dog walked in front of the van.

  ‘That fucking dog must have seen us, he must have seen the van coming, yet he still walked out in front of it,’ said Mick, who was driving the van.

  ‘It’s probably an Irish Wolf Hound – walks backwards and wags its head,’ I said. I used that joke in my act a few years later and when I appeared on New Faces. After that, I heard it again and again, particularly from other top professional Irish comedians.

  Another gag that was mine was: ‘Have you heard about the Irish Evel Knievel? He tried to jump twelve motorbikes in his bus. He’d have made it but somebody rang the bell.’

  Again, I’ve heard dozens of comics claim it was their joke. I should have copyrighted it, but I’ve never copyrighted anything because I used other people’s material when I was starting out – it would have been hypocritical. The longer I spent in the business, the more I developed my own style and my own ideas. And nothing gives me a bigger thrill than cracking a gag that I’ve written, not one that I’ve heard. It’s what makes any comic want to get up in the morning.

  Every day, I’ll read all the newspapers looking for inspiration. My humour is built on the shared experiences of working-class people, so I’ll look for the kind of stories that everyone will have been talking about – celebrity scandals, big news stories such as the tsunami in Asia or the terrorist bombings in London, titbits from Coronation Street and EastEnders or Big Brother, and whatever’s going on in football. And if there’s anything filthy or salacious, like the schoolteacher who mistakenly took a video of her bedroom antics into school and showed it to her pupils, then I’ll seize upon it with glee because, more often than not, sex makes us all laugh.

  I’ll write a few words about a story from the newspapers on a page of my notebook, then below it I’ll write the first thing that comes into my head. And I’ll keep adding to the list, until I write something that somehow triggers a joke. It’s a hit-and-miss process of word association, but it’s always worked for me. So, in the case of the teacher with her home-made sex video, I wrote: Teacher … sex video … school … pupils … classroom … lessons … maths … history … dinosaurs … extinct. And then the gag came to me: ‘Eee, did you hear about the teacher in Essex who took a home-porn video of her sucking off her husband into school? She thought the video was about the history of dinosaurs, so she put it in the video and played it to her class. And now the kids in that school think dinosaurs ruled the Earth after Miss Jones was fucked up the arse.’

  As long as it makes me laugh, I’ll jot it down in my notebook. I’ll try it out on the audience that night and if it gets a good response and I still like it, I’ll keep it in my act. Some jokes last a long time. Others make people laugh for only a few performances. Then they lose their currency. Others fall flat on their faces and get relegated to the notebook for ever. And on some days when I can’t think of any new jokes, I’ll look through my notebooks and spot something that might not have been particularly funny at the time but which, with a few changes to update it to a current event, becomes a winning gag.

  When I look back at my notebooks from the early days, when I was playing my first solo gigs, the topics of my jokes are not that different from today. In those days, there were more jokes about clubs and club chairmen because I always played clubs and because clubland was a big fixture in the lives of my audiences, but otherwise the subject matter was the same: work, football and women. The only thing that has changed is that almost all the jokes were one-liners, whereas nowadays I tell more stories and sing more comedy songs.

  ‘My girlfriend’s a wardrobe – tall with drawers.’ That was my opening line in those days. I’d then knock off eight to ten more gags in quick succession.

  ‘She walked in tonight. The committee man said: “Are those your tits or are you smuggling coconuts?”

  ‘I told him that the doctors had put her on a stable diet – she needs her oats twice a day.

  ‘I treat my women like dirt – I hide them under the bed.

  ‘I had two girlfriends at the same time. Surrender Brenda and Give-In Kim. They named their bras after Middlesbrough Football Club – plenty of support but no cups.

  ‘Brenda wouldn’t hurt a fly, unless it was on the front of your trousers.

  ‘When I met her, she said she was thirteen. “That’s okay,” I said. “I’m not superstitious.”

  ‘Kim had a tattoo on her chest: “In case of a sexual assault: This Way Up.”

  ‘I took them both fishing. My mate said: “Did you catch anything?” I said: “I’ll let you know in two days’ time.”’

  And so it would go on right through my set. A quick-fire onslaught of one-liners built around the basic things we all had in common. I’d grown up on a rough council estate and I knew that most of the club audiences were just like me. They’d all been snotty-nosed, raggedy-arsed kids who hadn’t worn a uniform to school, who didn’t take any notice of the teacher and who had left school without having learned anything, not even how to spell. So there was no point in trying to make them laugh with smart-alec jokes and sophisticated witticisms. Like me, they used humour as a way of getting away from the miserable realities of their lives. By turning everything into a joke, they made their lives more bearable. And because our lives were crude and harsh and unrelenting and unforgiving of any weaknesses, our humour was that way too.

  Playing solo gigs was more satisfying – I got all the applause, I had full control of the act and I got all the money – but it also meant that I took all the abuse on my own. Pit-village clubs were the hardest venues of all, places like Blackhall Colliery, Easington and Houghton-le-Spring. Many of the miners had never experienced life outside their little village and they didn’t have time for reading newspapers or watching television. I used to think half of them weren’t even aware the Titanic had sunk, so there was no point in talking about things in the news. The outside world meant nothing to them. The miner
s were down the pit for eight hours a day and all they wanted in the evening was three or four pints of beer and a laugh before going home.

  In the pit clubs, everyone had their own seat and woe betide anyone who came in and sat in Archie’s chair. ‘Archie’s been sat there for the last sixteen year,’ they’d say. ‘He’ll be in at ten to eight.’

  And sure enough, at ten to eight the door would open, Archie would come in and you’d be told, ‘You’re sat in my seat, mate.’

  The attitude of the pit clubs to outsiders could be seen in the way they treated visiting acts. At Peterlee Rugby Club, I had to get changed in the ladies’ toilet. Until then, I’d always thought it was impossible for women to miss the toilet bowl, but in Peterlee there was piss all over the floor. Conditions were just as grim on stage. Faced with miners’ attitudes, my jokes had to be as simple as possible, talking about things we all had in common, like women and drink and shitting and fucking. I had to go there cap in hand, arse-licking all the time just to get more work. If I succeeded in a pit village, they liked me for life. If they hated me, I’d never go back.

  Standing at the urinal in the toilet in a pit-village club, midway through the evening, I was tapped on the shoulder by a miner. ‘I didn’t think much of your first half,’ he said. ‘In the second half, can you tell some jokes we know?’

  That was typical.

  I was playing Easington Colliery, a mining village between Hartlepool and Sunderland, where I’d been booked for a Sunday lunchtime in a club notorious for the ferocity of its members. Sunday lunchtimes in pit-village clubs always followed the same ritual. The doors would open at 11.30 a.m. to an all-male audience. A comic would come on first, then a stripper, then another comic, and finally another stripper. The comics, however, knew the audience were really there only for one thing: the girls.