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

by Roy Chubby Brown

  George had done well out of me – something that Sandra never failed to mention, but then she wasn’t the only one who failed to understand the symbiotic relationship between artists and their agents and managers. Convinced that all agents were thieving bastards, Johnny Hammond had taken out an advertisement saying as much in a Sunderland local paper. Johnny had always been very outspoken and very honest. He believed that playing the clubs was no different from working at a shipyard. If you worked at Dorman, Long all week, you expected to walk home with your pay packet on a Friday evening. And when Johnny played a gig, he’d go straight to the club chairman. ‘I’ve just done an hour’s work,’ he’d say. ‘I want paying.’ He wouldn’t let the club get away with delaying payment by saying they’d pay the agent. And he wouldn’t accept an agent’s excuse that he hadn’t been paid yet by a club. As far as he was concerned, he deserved payment as soon as he’d performed the service for which he’d been booked.

  Johnny’s advert didn’t pull any punches. He accused agents and managers of robbing him of his rightful earnings and called on all club artistes to band together to ensure that they got paid on the night.

  About a month after the advert was printed I took a phone call from Johnny. ‘I can’t get any work,’ he said. ‘Nobody will employ me.’

  ‘Johnny,’ I said, ‘you cut your own fucking throat.’

  But in my heart I thought Johnny was right. No matter how successful the artiste, there was always a manager or agent who was not paying them promptly and treating them with contempt. Still, that was how the system worked. And as with any system, you had to abide by the rules. It was no different from working on a building site and having to do what the foreman said. You’d take on the shitty jobs he handed out because if you got on the wrong side of him he’d fire you.

  George was always there for me. Most days I’d see him at the theatre in the evenings and he’d check that everything suited me. After the show, he’d offer constructive criticism, which was a great help. With his encouragement, I changed the way I told jokes. My philosophy about telling gags had always been like my thinking on the bus service: don’t worry if you don’t like the joke I’m cracking because there’s another one coming along in a minute. But I started to put jokes together to tell stories instead of one-liners. It meant learning how to paint pictures in words for the audience.

  George also got me out of a lot of trouble and got me paid when my fee should have been cut. I’d been booked to play at a very smart place in the Channel Islands, the kind of venue that wouldn’t let you in unless you were wearing a dicky bow and dinner jacket, but the audience had been drinking for three hours by the time I came on stage at eleven o’clock. A fight soon broke out. When I shouted ‘Give over!’ from the stage, a barrage of ashtrays and insults came hurtling towards me, so I ran back to my dressing room. George was there.

  ‘I’ve just been paid – the boss gave me your money,’ he said.

  ‘Well, quick, we’ll fuck off, then,’ I said. With our belongings stuffed in our bags, we climbed out of the back window into the car park and ran back to our hotel. We’d finished a couple of drinks in the hotel bar when we spotted a black limousine drawing up in front of the hotel. Four blokes got out.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ George said. ‘Quick, Roy, get back to your room!’

  The nightclub owner’s henchmen had come for their money and George had no intention of giving them it. I ran straight to the lift and went up to my room. Forty-five minutes later the phone rang in my room. ‘You can come back down,’ George said. ‘They’ve gone.’

  Arguing that I’d played most of my set and done very well, George had refused to refund my fee – something I’d probably not have had the nerve to do myself. When the heavies hadn’t accepted no for answer, George had told them that I was unwell and had gone to bed with the money in my pocket. He’d promised them I’d give them the money after breakfast the next morning. After all, he told them, this was a Channel Island and there were few places for us to go.

  At six o’clock the following morning, my phone rang. It was George. ‘Get your gear now – I’ve got us an early flight back out,’ he said. We raced to the airport, glancing over our shoulders as if we were being chased by the Keystone Cops. We got on the plane without being intercepted. When the stewardess came round with breakfast, I asked her what time we’d arrive in Birmingham, where we’d parked our cars.

  ‘Birmingham?’ the stewardess said. ‘This plane’s going to East Midlands.’ Somehow we’d managed to get on the wrong plane. The boarding staff hadn’t checked our tickets, so George started complaining.

  ‘George, it’s our fault. We can’t possibly blame the airline for this,’ I said.

  ‘Rubbish,’ George said. ‘I’ll get them to provide us with a free car to take us to Birmingham.’ And he did, even though it was clearly our mistake. So whenever Sandra complained about George, I’d think of incidents such as the flight back from the Channel Islands and ignore her. Without George, I wouldn’t have been paid my full fee and I would have been stranded at East Midlands airport. As far as I was concerned, he was worth every penny of his commission.

  George also supported me when I said that I wanted to have a go at playing a New York comedy club. I was an established name in Britain and for years I hadn’t played a theatre that wasn’t sold out, but I’d always wondered whether I could cut it in America.

  We stayed in a fabulous hotel in New York. Outside my room on the thirty-sixth floor, a veranda looked straight down Fifth Avenue. We were all jet-lagged and in need of sleep, but I was so excited that we dumped our bags as soon as we arrived and took in five different comedy clubs that first night. First stop was Dangerfield’s, one of the world’s longest-running comedy clubs, on First Avenue. I couldn’t believe how bad the acts were. A guy in a checked shirt came on, sat on a stool and tried to tell jokes, but it just didn’t work. He was too good-looking – often funniness and ugliness go hand in hand – and his material was poor. Most of his act was about where he came from. ‘I come from Baltimore, yeah!’ he’d shout and a handful of the audience would whoop. ‘Baltimore, yeah.’ More whoops. It was mindless. Home-town recognition is a big thing in America. When the next guy walked on and said he was a New Yorker, he got a standing ovation. What for? Just for coming from New York?

  We also went to the Comedy Club, to Caroline’s and the Comedy Cellar. They were all similarly scruffy places with dirty red curtains hanging in one corner, pictures of comics you’ve never heard of on the walls and a dozen little tables. In most of them you had to have at least three drinks. With the ten-dollar entrance charge on the door it was an expensive night out. No wonder they were half empty and the atmosphere was lousy. At the Comedy Cellar, six comics did about ten minutes each. Some of them didn’t get a single laugh. They could have taped the show and called it Where’s the Laughter Gone?. Some of them were working their socks off, but they just couldn’t make people laugh.

  Effing and blinding at the front of the audience at the Comedy Cellar was a bloke in a green anorak, heckling throughout. On stage, the poor American comic was lost. He didn’t have any ad libs or answerbacks. I wished I was up there instead of him. After a while, the bloke in the green anorak gave up and came to the bar. It was Bobby Davro, carrying a notepad and a big bag with a load of wires in it. ‘What’s that?’ I said, pointing at his notepad.

  ‘A couple of ideas for my TV show,’ he said.

  ‘What’s that mean?’ I said, pointing at a picture he’d drawn on his pad of a little cow with a mushroom, some grass and a tree.

  ‘It’s more or less …’ Bobby said, tailing off.

  The next night I played a shop-window spot at Caroline’s in front of the cream of New York’s comedy agents. I slightly tailored my act to the locals, but otherwise it was material I’d been using for years. ‘I’m from a little village called England,’ I said as I came on. ‘It’s a lovely place. We have sewers but we never thought to put trains in them!’ I
got a laugh.

  ‘The only thing I know about New York, boys and girls, is that John Lennon lived here, and of course I was a Beatles fan and like Ringo, I was a drummer with a pop group …’

  ‘What Beatles numbers did you do?’ shouted a woman in the audience.

  A few days before we’d left for New York I’d been sitting at home, panicking. I knew the Americans had a different sense of humour and I didn’t have a clue what to say on stage. Then I had an idea. I knew Lennon was revered in New York, so I thought I’d surely get a good reaction as long as I didn’t take the piss. Sitting at my piano, I wrote out a list of Lennon song titles, hoping it would inspire me to think of some good gags.

  As I looked at the list, I realised that I could use the titles to tell a story. Using a few Beatles lyrics to link the song titles, I took twenty minutes to write it. So when the heckler in New York asked what Beatles numbers I played, I took a deep breath and launched into the premiere performance of my Beatles medley.

  ‘Michelle, imagine if yesterday I was a fool on a hill or a real nowhere man,’ I started. ‘Living in a yellow submarine on Penny Lane, I can’t buy me love. I picture myself on a boat on a river on a good day of sunshine with lovely Rita meter maid. She’d be a day-tripper and I’d be a paperback writer.

  ‘Listen, do you want to know a secret? I once had a girl or should I say she once had me. She was just seventeen, a Lady Madonna, eight days a week. But boy, she could carry that weight. She was good to me, you know, and I feel fine, like Lucy in the sky with diamonds on a magical mystery tour.

  ‘See, if I fell on the bang, bang, bang, Maxwell silver hammer and was buried in strawberry fields for ever, would you help Eleanor Rigby to pick up the rice in the church where the wedding’s been?

  ‘Would my baby be in black and just get up and dance to a song that was a hit before your mother was born? Oh you’ll get by with a little help from your friends.

  ‘Help, I need somebody. From your friends, I’ve had no reply. We’ll get back, back to the USSR where there’s a revolution.

  ‘See, I’m a loser, I know a place along the long and winding road, it’s an octopus’s garden. You’ve a ticket to ride with the taxman, saying please, please me and wrapped up in chains, getting the taste of honey, he’ll be fixing a hole to stop his mind from wandering.

  ‘You come together because she’ll have been treating me bad. Misery? I’d have been happy just to dance with you. So tell me why, Doctor Robert, I’m a walrus. Tell me what you see as my guitar gently weeps. It won’t be long, run for your life. You can either do that or twist or shout.

  ‘The things we said today, dizzy Miss Lizzy – I mean Mister Mustard ’cos she’s a woman and I love her. How can she laugh when she knows I’m down?

  ‘Hey Jude, it’s been a hard day’s night. Will you still feed me? Will you still need me when I’m sixty-four? You say yes. I say no. I say I don’t know. Take all my lovin’ here and there and everywhere. Don’t hide your love away, it’s getting better all the time.

  ‘I’ve got to get you into my life for the benefit of Mr Kite because I’ve just seen her face on the tip of my tongue. Obla-di Obla-da, let it be, I don’t want to be your man. I should have known better with a girl like you but we could work it out, honey-pie.

  ‘Baby, you can drive my car. Give peace a chance, don’t write to Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts’ Club band in a Norwegian wood on another day across the universe, through the bathroom window. With love from me to you.’

  When I finished the whole room stood up and applauded. For at least a minute, I couldn’t talk but I’d cracked it. I told three more jokes, leaving in all the ‘fucks’ and ‘cunts’. The audience didn’t bat an eyelid. After the Beatles medley, I could do no wrong. I walked off. My ten minutes was over and it couldn’t have gone better.

  George came up to me when I’d changed and was standing at the bar. ‘You’ve been asked to do—’ he said.

  I cut him off straight away. I knew what was coming. ‘George, to be honest with you, I’m too long in the tooth to change anything now. It’s taken me all these years to get established in England. For what would I now want to come over here?’

  ‘But every agent in the room wants you,’ George said. ‘They’re offering you six-month tours of America.’

  I was married to Sandra and I had other ties to home. ‘I can’t,’ I said. ‘I’ve spent thirty years playing shit-holes in Britain. Why would I now want to go around America in a bus?’

  We went out to a restaurant. The biggest steaks in New York, it said outside. Then we went back to our hotel, slept the night, packed our bags and got the first plane out of JFK bound for England. All the way home, George pestered me. ‘You know, it’s there for you,’ he said. ‘If you want it, it’s there for you. It’s up to you. It’s your decision.’

  ‘How much work have you got me in England?’ I said.

  ‘You’re booked for ever. For the next five years at least – everybody wants you.’

  ‘You’ve just answered my question. Why would I need America?’

  I was worried that if I crossed the Pond and returned to the UK five years later, my audience would have moved on and I would have lost my touch. Thirty years’ hard slog would be wasted.

  I’m what I call a one-type comedian. Audiences come to theatres and see my act. That’s it. I don’t do television. I don’t do after-dinner speaking. I don’t do corporate conferences at fancy hotels in London, playing to pissed-up businessmen with cigars and bow ties, waiting to show off how much money they’ve got by bidding fifteen grand for a signed Manchester United ball in the auction. I don’t do any of that.

  I’ve seen what happens when British comics branch out into pantomimes and game shows and corporate gigs. They lose touch with their core audience. And when the game-show producers and the businessmen no longer want them, they think they can go back to their roots. They book a season of theatre gigs and no one turns up because the public has forgotten what they do. It happened to Les Dennis and it’s happened to other British comics. And once that starts and the newspapers get hold of the story and follow you around, waiting to see you fail, it’s all over.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  MARITAL MELTDOWN

  MY MIND’S GOING ten to the dozen from the minute I get into my car for the drive to the hospital. Buzz buzz buzz buzz buzz. Every six weeks it happens. A visit to Dr Martin and a camera down my throat. Two days before it’s due, I start to panic. What if he says it’s come back? What if he says he’s got to remove my last vocal cord?

  As I drive through the gates my hands start to sweat. My back is sticky and my heart pounds in my ears. I tell myself it’s no worse than going to the dentist; that it will be fine. But I can’t help it – the fear takes over.

  Entering the hospital is like stepping into Alice in Wonderland. Real life is left behind and I walk into a strange dream. In the long grass, I’m relying on other people to tell me I’m all right. ‘Everything’s OK,’ I want them to say. ‘Come on in and sit down.’ I watch the nurses scuttling around with clipboards under their arms. ‘Mr Robinson: room three, please,’ a nurse announces. ‘Mr Thompson: room five. Mr Vasey – ha ha ha. We’ve conned ya!’

  My stomach’s rumbling and my head’s light – no eating for twenty-four hours before the investigation, only a needle in the arm to make me even more woozy as the camera goes down.

  It’s the uncertainty that gets to me, the heart-stopping moments when there seems to be trouble. ‘Say aaah,’ Dr Martin says, his voice slow and echoing through the fog of the sedative.

  ‘Ahhhhh,’ I say.

  ‘Say it again, please. Aaahhh …’he says.

  Why? I scream inside. Surely once was enough? What on Earth could be so wrong that you couldn’t see it the first time? ‘Aaaaaaaaahhhhhh,’ I say, hoping it’ll do.

  ‘I’m going to have another look,’ he says. My heart nearly stops.

  ‘Ahhh,’ I say.

  ‘Aye, that’
s fine’ he says. ‘That’s fine … I’m very pleased. Excellent progress. Well done.’

  Suddenly I want to fuck all the nurses and buy them all champagne. Music! Wine! Song! Let’s all have a wank! I’m that excited. I walked in the hospital five foot ten; now I’m six foot six. I want to shout out to every passer-by: ‘There’s fuck-all wrong with me, you know!’

  When I arrive home, a letter is waiting. It’s about Dessy, a friend from Guisborough, a great lad who taught the kids to box and to play football. He’s dead, the letter says. Lung and bowel cancer. He lasted eight weeks.

  A few days later I go to the funeral. I know everyone there. ‘How are you doing?’ they say. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m OK … so far.’ It’s a fact. How long will I live? How long is a piece of string? It depends how long you cut it. There are no answers. You might as well ask if there’s another planet in the universe just like Earth with human beings, televisions, Hoovers and cars. We just don’t know where or when it finishes.

  I knew I’d made the right decision not to try to break America almost as soon as we arrived back in Britain. George rang me to say I’d been voted the Club Star Awards Comedy Entertainer of 1992. It was a clubland award, voted for by all the club secretaries and organised by The Stage, the main British show-business journal. I was told that I’d won it mainly for my ad libs and putdowns. I was made up. It was another poke in the eye for those carping critics who dismissed my act without ever having seen a Chubby Brown show, saying that because it was crude and offensive it couldn’t possibly be funny.

  The more videos and theatre tickets I sold, the more the critics wanted to knock me. They were delighted when I was run off stage in Gateshead in the opening minutes of a show in the early 1990s when, at the height of the child-abuse scandal in the North-East, I opened my show by saying, ‘I’m surprised that there are so many of you here – I thought you’d all be at home fucking the kids.’ And they loved it when lefty do-gooder councillors in Middlesbrough banned me from playing at the local town hall. I thought it was ridiculous. After all, which was more offensive? A council that let a comic tell crude jokes at its town hall? Or a council that presided over thousands of kids still growing up dirt poor in run-down Grangetown and Slaggy Island estates with little chance of a decent education or a proper job?