Twenty-five years later, we met again. ‘How you doing, Chubby?’ Frankie said. I’d now made a name for myself and Frankie had recognised me.
‘Do you remember a duo in Cardiff and a bottle of champagne?’ I said. I told Frankie the story of our last meeting.
‘Eeh, I remember that,’ he said. ‘Was that you – the bloke with the same birthday as me?’ And this time I bought the champagne.
Terry and I didn’t last long. I felt I was doing everything – driving us to the gig, setting up the gear, buying all the props and keeping Terry watered and fed – because Terry worked as a car salesman during the day and spent whatever spare time he had with his latest squeeze. The most recent was a girl called Brenda, a bottle blonde with black roots and a flat in Peterlee which Terry had swiftly made his little love nest, forever going on about how great Brenda was in bed.
I would rehearse all day while Terry relied on what he had. It was like a bad marriage in which one partner does everything and the other takes the piss. Terry was getting on my nerves and I was looking for a chance to bring an end to Alcock & Brown when Terry told me he had to go to Canada to visit his sick mam. We’d been together for eight months and I was glad to see the back of him.
‘I’ll work on my own until you get back,’ I said to Terry, thinking that I’d avoid ever re-forming Alcock & Brown with him.
‘Oh aye, yeah,’ Terry said. ‘I’ve been talking to Brenda and she feels that, in the end, I’m better off working on my own. So I that’s what I am going to do.’
‘Are you, Terry?’
‘She thinks I’m carrying the act.’
She thinks I’m carrying the act. I’ll never forget those words. Carrying the act! On stage, I was running about like a blue-arsed fly. I played the drums, piano, banjo and ukulele. I wrote all the comedy sketches, and I rewrote the lyrics to all the advert parodies. All Terry did was half a dozen impressions in the first half of the show. Also, off stage I did everything. And Terry had the cheek to say he was carrying the act! I’ve never got over it. The cheeky bastard.
‘How much notice are you giving us?’ I said. ‘Because I will need to get somebody else.’ I wanted to stay in a duo because I had enough material for an hour-long double act, but only enough solo material for a twenty-minute support slot.
‘I’m leaving on Sunday.’
‘This Sunday, ya mawky get?’ It was now Thursday.
‘Yeah.’
‘Thanks for letting me know.’
Terry left for Canada – or so I thought. For the next month I worked night and day until I had enough new material to add to my older gags, songs and slapstick. I practised the banjo and ukulele incessantly, playing along to Sandy Nelson tracks until my hands were bleeding, and I wrote hundreds of gags, then honed them down to the best fifty.
I got all my comedy books out and scanned through them for inspiration. I knew I already had a good half-hour act, but most clubs wanted two half-hours and some wanted three half-hour spots. I couldn’t afford the time to work up a full ninety minutes of material, so I relied on some rather hackneyed Paddy and Mick jokes – the comedian’s bread and butter of the early 1970s – and practised stringing them out to make them last longer. A joke about Dublin mission control sending Paddy and Mick up towards the moon in a milk bottle would be stretched out almost to the point at which it snapped and was no longer funny, just to fill time. ‘You know where Dublin is?’ I’d say. ‘It’s in Ireland. Did you know they had a space launch pad there? Well, they tied Paddy and Mick to this rocket …’ and I’d keep it going like that.
I played a few local warm-up gigs in Redcar to bed in the new material. When I came off stage after the fourth gig, I was confident that I could hold a show on my own so I rang Brian’s office on the Friday. ‘Am I out at the weekend?’ I said. I was booked for Sunday night. Two spots at the Excelsior Club, a working men’s club in Newcastle.
Walking into the Excelsior on Sunday evening, I was confronted by a big notice: Top Class Entertainer – Terry Harris.
Terry Harris?
He was waiting in the dressing room. ‘Hey, how are you?’ he said.
‘I thought you were going to Canada?’
‘I’ve been. I came straight back.’
‘Oh, did you?’
‘I’m on at eight o’clock,’ he said. ‘Then you’re on at half past.’
Standing at the bar, I watched Terry do all my material. He was doing routines that formed the heart of my act, much of which predated his time in Alcock & Brown and the remainder of which was material I’d written. I went to the dressing room.
‘What do you think of me first spot, then?’ Terry said.
‘You’ve a fucking cheek. It’s all my stuff, Terry. I can’t go on now.’
‘Well, you know, I helped put that together,’ Terry said.
‘No, you didn’t, Terry. And you know it.’
‘Oh … I would have thought you would have put something else together by now.’
‘I have, but it’s only been four weeks. All that stuff that you did there, it’s the first half of my act. You know it’s my stuff.’
I found the concert secretary of the club. ‘That lad who was just on, he used to be working with me,’ I said.
‘We were told that.’
‘He’s just done all my stuff,’ I said, with a shrug.
I felt like giving Terry a ploat, but I got in my car and drove off. I never spoke to Terry again. Twenty years later, I saw him at a football match. He had lost all his hair at the front and ballooned in size. He was bigger than me. I looked at him, he looked at me and said hello. I didn’t reply.
Terry tried to make it on his own, but got back together with Sugar and Spice. For all his overweening vanity, it seemed he didn’t believe in himself enough to walk on stage by himself and take a battering. Standing behind a microphone, on stage is the loneliest place on earth if the audience doesn’t like you. If you’re dying and not getting a laugh, well, there’s nowhere worse. Sitting in solitary in a prison cell has nothing on it.
CHAPTER TWELVE
LEARNING THE ROPES
AT LEAST I was losing weight. What with the liquid diet, the radiotherapy, the alcohol ban and the long walks I took to while away the hours of doing nothing, the pounds were falling off me and physically I felt better than I had in years.
My mental state was another story. The physical symptoms of the radiotherapy – the red-raw swollen throat and the loss of hair – were a breeze compared with the psychological side effects. I felt depressed and listless, I was getting headaches, I couldn’t do my job and I was totally pissed off. There were days when I woke up and had to be at the hospital at nine o’clock and I didn’t want to get out of bed. I’d pull myself together, get dressed and wash, climb into my car and set off. Then, sitting in traffic on the way to the clinic, I’d think: ‘Ah, fuck it. What’s the point of going through the pain and discomfort of radiotherapy? I’m going to die anyway.’
The only thing that stopped me from turning my car around, heading home and giving up was the thought of Mr White. That doctor just saved your life, I’d tell myself, so get out of bed, you lazy fat twat. Get yourself in your car, you stupid bastard. Fucking get down there to the hospital, grit your teeth, you lily-livered coward, and get on with it.
In the end, I kept going for Mr White’s benefit. He saved my life and that was all there was to it. There was no romance to recovery, no fairy dust or pot at the end of the rainbow to keep me going. He saved my life, so I was indebted to him. If he’d phoned up just as the kids were opening their presents on Christmas Day and asked me to see him immediately at the hospital, I would have done it. If I’d been about to go on stage at the London Palladium to receive a gold medal for services to comedy and Mr White had called me into his surgery, then I would have turned my back on the Palladium and done it. At that time, family and work were secondary to his demands. That man saved my life. And for that I was eternally grateful and would never let
him down. That’s just how it was.
Terry Harris did me the biggest favour of my working life. If it hadn’t been for his sudden resignation, it might have taken me a lot longer to summon up the courage to go out on my own full time. I might have drifted into another group or duo. But Terry left me with no choice but to chance my luck as a solo stand-up.
In the mid-1970s there were so many venues that any act could find plenty of work. No one was booked weeks in advance simply because they didn’t need it. Agents would phone up several times a week, offering a choice of gigs. And some towns had so many clubs that you could play two gigs at neighbouring clubs on a Sunday dinner time, then another three gigs that evening at three more clubs a few hundred yards down the street.
I played my first gig as a full-time fully fledged solo stand-up at Newport Working Men’s Club in Middlesbrough, a lovely little venue with a small stage and a red velvet curtain. I was familiar with being the front man, walking on stage to face an audience. But now it was different. Until that evening, I’d always walked on with a band or partner behind me. And if I’d been doing a solo spot, the pressure hadn’t been on me because I was only the support to the headline act. If things were going badly, I could turn around to the lads in the band and crack a joke – ‘I’m fucking struggling tonight, aren’t I?’ I’d say to the bass player and it would usually get a laugh – but now there was no one to lean on, no safety net. I walked on that night and there was just me, the microphone and the microphone stand. It was a competition with the crowd that I wanted to win. I had tried and tested material which I knew the audience would laugh at and I knew I could always rely on slapstick – walking up to the microphone, pretending to trip up, looking around and saying ‘Who put that matchstick there?’ – but now my big problem was my nerves. I’d never had trouble going on stage before, but now that I was the solo headline act my bowels took over and I found myself running for the bog, always needing a shite before I went on.
It took me many years and more than two thousand performances to get a grip on my nerves. Only then did I feel that I’d earned the right to be up there on stage. After years of sold-out performances in front of packed houses, I realised it wasn’t my fault if on one night the audience didn’t laugh at gags that had worked dozens of times before. As long as I stuck to the same formula every night, then I’d know what to expect. But if I veered away from my usual set, it was very difficult to predict the audience’s response.
I’d been out on my own for about a month when a leg came off my most treasured stage prop, the papier mâché black and white dog called Spunk. I would stand beside Spunk, shout ‘Fetch!’ and give it a kick up the arse to send it scuttling across the stage towards the dressing-room door. On this night, I gave it a particularly hard kick. Flying up in the air, the dog did two somersaults high above me and landed on its feet on the other side of the stage. Thinking the aerial acrobatics were intentional, the club erupted with applause. I could have tried the same move a thousand more times, but I wouldn’t have been able to repeat it and I even forgot my next line, I was that gob-smacked.
When I came off stage, I discovered one of the dog’s legs was cracked. Beryl, the girl I was living with at the time, had a brother-in-law called Terry who was a bit of a dab hand at DIY, so I asked him to repair it. Two days later, Terry rang me to say he’d fixed the dog and offered to drop it off at the club I was playing that night.
I got to the club. It was packed and I was on with a couple of singers and a group. As I was waiting to go on, the concert chairman walked into the dressing room. ‘The girl singer plays piano, so I am putting you on first to warm up the audience,’ he said. ‘By the way, a bloke has dropped your dog off. It’s near the microphone stand on the stage.’
I could see the dog near the microphone stand, which was where I usually placed it, so I got changed into my patchwork suit, flying hat and goggles.
After the concert chairman announced me to the club, I walked on stage and launched into a song about being a dog.
‘It’s awful being a dog, walking up and down the street,’ I sang. ‘All you ever see is other people’s feet …’
At the end of the first verse, I shouted ‘Fetch!’ and kicked the dog up the arse. It didn’t budge an inch, but the audience laughed, probably because the dog was ignoring my orders. My foot, however, was in agony. I wanted to double up with the pain of it, but I had to continue the act as if nothing had happened while inwardly screaming with agony. After half an hour, I limped off stage and phoned Terry from the backstage payphone.
‘What the fucking hell have you done to my dog?’ I said. Terry, who had a double-belt-and-braces approach to DIY, had built a frame of metal tubing inside the dog and put iron bars in each leg. The dog was stronger and steadier than it had ever been, but it also weighed so much that I could hardly lift it.
‘You fucking twat,’ I said. ‘You’ve broken my toe.’ I was limping for about three months. I still kept the dog in my act for years, but the days of kicking it were long over.
On other occasions, an unexpected turn of events or a spontaneous ad lib could have a less successful outcome and I would need real bottle to rescue the gig. The worst thing any comedian can do is say something really stupid, like making a joke about Hillsborough on a Liverpool stage. I was accused of that, but it wasn’t me. It was another comedian – I’m not that stupid. And during the Falklands War I was accused of saying ‘I am going down like the Sheffield.’ Again, I didn’t say it but, because I am known to be crude and controversial, newspapers often point the finger at me when a story goes round about a comedian saying something offensive.
But I did make a joke about Diana, Princess of Wales, the day after she died. I knew I had to be careful, but with Diana dominating every news bulletin, I thought there was no way I could ignore her tragic death, so I made a harmless crack about Princess Diana holding on to Prince Charles’s ears, then I said: ‘Let’s hope it’s not windy on the day of the funeral, it might blow Charlie away.’
I thought I was on safe ground – after all, the joke was about Charles, not Diana. A few faint titters and a handful of halfhearted boos broke the silence, but most of the audience just stared at me open-mouthed. Clearly I had overstepped the mark.
‘Ah, come on,’ I said, desperate to rescue the very uncomfortable situation. ‘What difference has Diana made to your life? She was only going to marry the playboy son of an Egyptian shopkeeper. And she’s had more cock than there’s handrail on the Queen Mary.’
Up on stage, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up and I was in a cold sweat. I don’t know what made me say something that tasteless so soon after Diana died, but I had an instinctive sense that something really crude was more likely to break the tension than a few mealy-mouthed comments. Moments later I knew I’d said the right thing when I heard a ripple of recognition – the audience seemed to be conceding that I had a point – and then a round of warm applause rolled around the theatre as the audience relaxed. It was only a joke, after all.
Another night, I was at the British Legion Club at Larkhall in Scotland, about forty miles from Glasgow, the night Scottish fans invaded the pitch at Wembley and stole the goalposts after Scotland beat England 1–0 in 1978. ‘I’m not a comedian,’ I said as I walked on stage. ‘I’ve just come to get the fucking goalposts back.’ About twenty glasses flew through the air at once, not one of them hitting me. I ran off stage and locked myself behind the dressing-room door.
Of all the audiences, those in religious clubs were the hardest to second-guess. A joke about religion would work in one Catholic club, but not in another. It was a lottery. I played one Catholic club where the colour television had been stolen from the lounge. Pointing at the crucifix above the stage, I said: ‘Oh, I see you caught the cunt that stole your telly.’ I was booed and hissed off stage. I was booked to play Christmas Day dinner at another Catholic club. Nobody was laughing, so looking up at the crucifix, I said: ‘Why aren’t you laughing? It’
s your birthday.’ Everyone in the club gasped, but then they laughed and the rest of my act went down like a dream.
Another time, I was playing the Stella Maris Social Club at Washington in County Durham. Not being religious, I didn’t know Stella Maris was another name for the Virgin Mary. It was a beautiful club with the plushest red curtains I’d ever seen, but as soon as I walked on stage the audience hated me. By the time I got to the end of my opening line – ‘Why’s this a religious club? You’ve certainly not got three wise men on the committee’ – most of the seven hundred punters were booing or calling for me to get off the stage.
A large crucifix dominated one of the walls. ‘Are you talking to me or him?’ I said, pointing at the cross and trying desperately to be funny in the face of total hostility. ‘’Cos we’re both stuck here, hanging about.’
A bloke out of the audience came flying up to the stage. ‘Off!’ he shouted. ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself.’
But I soldiered on. ‘If I had met Mary before Joseph, she wouldn’t have been a virgin,’ I said. I could hear myself wheezing and breathing. The room was that quiet, I could hear a mouse passing by on tiptoes. After fifteen minutes I’d had enough and walked off. The same bloke who’d shouted at me on stage came into the dressing room, his hands pressed together in front of his chest as if he was praying.
‘May the Lord forgive you,’ he said.
‘What for?’
‘May the Lord just forgive you and cleanse your mouth with soap.’
‘Oh right, thank you very much.’ I knew it took all sorts, but this was ridiculous. What on earth was a Catholic club doing booking a comedian with a reputation for dirty jokes?
Common As Muck!: The Autobiography of Roy 'Chubby' Brown Page 22
