Easily Distracted

by Steve Coogan

  He was never allowed in the living room, but he was relatively respectable and didn’t drink. Sometimes he’d ask to borrow a razor and would disappear into the bathroom. He was an old-fashioned, Roald Dahl-style tramp in an overcoat, and sometimes wore a stained tie with his frayed shirt. His glasses rested on the end of his nose as he read the newspaper in the hallway.

  He always called me ‘lad’.

  ‘Lad, can I have a word with your dad?’

  Mr Stott might need money for the bus, but he’d never ask me because I was a child.

  Once a drunk bloke came to the door asking for money and Mum said, ‘I’ll give you food if you’re hungry, but I’m not giving you money, because I think you’ll spend it on alcohol. I’ll make you a sandwich if you like …’

  My parents were generous and liberal, but they believed that the family was the most important thing. They believed a man should stay married to his wife. Divorce was wrong. As a boy, I was always slightly shocked if someone got divorced. It was almost as if they’d murdered someone. Marriage was a commitment you didn’t just wander away from, it was for life.

  My parents found themselves in a brave new world where the Pill had given women unprecedented sexual freedom and social mores were being challenged. As children we were, of course, aware of this encroaching modern world. But, like London, it was something of a mirage.

  Progress was easier for my siblings and me to accept, but we were nonetheless the last generation to experience the pre-digital age. We grew up in a world that was always looking to the future.

  My dad was rather adept at anticipating the development of technology. By the seventies, technology was already getting smaller and smaller and Dad made a series of predictions.

  One day, he said, we would all have pocket phones. Cordless phones didn’t even exist at this point.

  Secondly, we would all listen to music on a small machine that didn’t have any moving parts. We were baffled. A record went round and round. As did a tape. We asked where the music would come from and he said, ‘Information.’

  Information could be stored on a machine that didn’t have any moving parts. It would be, as he called it, ‘solid state’. But what happened when the machine was switched off? Wouldn’t all the information be lost? That was the issue they were struggling with in the seventies. They knew that magnets could help retain information. And that’s exactly what happens when the iPod is turned off: tiny magnets retain the information.

  He predicted the eventual demise of the internal combustion engine. The electric car, he said, would rise like a phoenix.

  Finally, he predicted the return of trams on the basis of their environmentally friendly nature. They had been removed from cities when cars were seen as the future. The car has been, for a long time, king. We all thought we’d be driving hover cars by the turn of the century. But we’re not and, sure enough, the trams are back in Manchester and other British cities.

  Of all his predictions, freight transport via airships and/or a renewed canal network have yet to materialise.

  Still, he didn’t do too badly in his predictions of the future.

  For a boy growing up in the seventies, the notion of the future was incredibly exciting. When the Pulp song ‘Disco 2000’ was released in 1995, its lyrics were so evocative they reduced me to tears, in particular the line ‘Won’t it be strange when we’re all fully grown’.

  Throughout the seventies and early eighties, my friends and I were obsessed with the year 2000. We wondered what we’d be like and if we’d meet up. I remember thinking that I’d be thirty-four and my life would be over. I wouldn’t be attractive to anyone. If I was lucky I might have a year or two left.

  *

  I have always been fascinated by how we mark the passing of time.

  In a general sense, I think about Joni Mitchell being in her heyday in the early 1970s, just over four decades ago. It’s quite a long time ago, but nonetheless it’s a world that is recognisable. But forty years before that was the 1930s – a totally different universe.

  More specifically, when I was seven, I stood in the playground on my own and imagined how far away the age of eleven was.

  ‘One day,’ I thought to myself, ‘you’re going to be in junior four and you’re going to be eleven. It might seem a long way away now, but it will happen one day. And when you’re eleven, you will think back and remember yourself standing here in the playground, aged seven, thinking how far away this moment is.’

  When I was eleven and about to go to secondary school, I remembered being seven and thinking about being eleven. I used to do that all the time. I’d be cold and wet and happy in the middle of a field in Ireland in the summer holidays, thinking that in a few weeks I’d be in a warm classroom remembering playing in the fields. I’d feel sad and think I should have enjoyed being on holiday more because I wouldn’t return to Ireland for another year. And then I’d remember that I wasn’t yet in the classroom and I could enjoy the moment. I had to drag myself from the future and back into the present.

  I remember 12.34 p.m. on 5 June 1978 very clearly.

  Because it was the moment a self-congratulatory fat boy in the class said, ‘Sir, it’s 12.34 on the 5th of the 6th, ’78.’

  The form master said, ‘So?’

  ‘Well, sir, that means it’s 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.’

  Funny what sticks in your mind.

  During the 1980s I would think about how people in the 1990s would reflect on the previous decade. I was acutely aware that the present would one day become the past. I clearly had too much time on my hands and nowhere to channel my imagination. When I started to work, that sense of wonderment became part of my job, part of being a creative person.

  There’s a story we used in I, Partridge that is true.

  On 31 December 1979, I went and sat alone on a bench under a tree in Alkrington Woods across the road from my parents’ house.

  I thought, ‘This is the last day of the 1970s. No one will remember this decade, nothing defines it. What a shame I’m not sitting here at the end of the 1960s instead.’

  I was fourteen and it was the first decade I could remember vividly. It was a sort of orangey, mustardy-brown decade, but of course when you’re still in it you can’t define it.

  I thought about it some more. ‘There are going to be eights at the beginning of the date tomorrow, and I can’t remember when there weren’t sevens. I wonder what I will be doing in ten years’ time.’

  On 31 December 1989, I was at my parents’ house and once more I went into the woods and sat on the same bench.

  I was there on my own, thinking, ‘It’s ten years since I last sat on the bench and what have I been doing? Wow, I went to drama school and now I do voices for Spitting Image and I do comedy onstage and I earn a living.’

  I suppose in my suburban universe it made me feel poetic and interesting. I thought I might be ‘deep’.

  Ten years after that I was in Devon getting drunk with Simon Pegg, celebrating the new millennium. We had a jolly night, but there was a nagging feeling that I should have been under the tree.

  I went back to the bench in 2009 with my daughter, Clare, who was thirteen. I told her how I used to sit there on my own and contemplate the end of a decade; I was her age when I first did it.

  ‘Hmmm, that’s interesting,’ she said, probably while texting someone. She knows how to humour me, in the same way I do with my dad.

  Then I told Neil and Rob Gibbons about my bench experiences. ‘It’s hilarious,’ they said. ‘We can use it in the Partridge book in a slightly different way.’

  I still think about the passing of time.

  When I was about to go onstage in front of 2,000 people, I’d often feel strangely detached and disconnected. Slightly numb.

  It’s a strangely, lonely place to be.

  I’d be standing in the wings, dressed as Pauline Calf, listening to the hubbub of the crowd and feeling petrified. You’re playing for very high stakes, risking ab
ject public failure.

  All these questions would race through my head.

  ‘How did I end up dressed like this?’

  ‘Who are these people? Why have they come to see me?’

  ‘What if it goes wrong?’

  The curtain would rise and I’d walk out in my heels and start singing. It would be like a weird, abstract dream. It’s almost as if the sound recedes.

  My mouth would be moving, but my mind would wander and create a kind of soundtrack in my head.

  I’d look into the audience and start wondering. ‘Is she married to him?’

  ‘She looks a bit grumpy. I wonder what’s wrong with her.’

  ‘He wanted to come, but she didn’t. He’s dragged her along and she’s not impressed. She’s trying not to laugh. Fuck her. I’m going to make her laugh.’

  I was always more determined to win women over than men, possibly because I was worried about Paul Calf’s ironic sexism. To win the approval of a humourless middle-aged woman was probably a sign of the gig having gone well.

  ‘Why did they laugh so loudly at that, it’s not very funny …’

  ‘Why didn’t they laugh more loudly at that, it’s very funny …’

  And then I’d think, ‘What if I forget the words?’

  And then suddenly I would be flying. The exhilaration you feel onstage when the show is going well is something else.

  You feel very alive in those moments.

  You know there’s a killer line coming up and you relish delivering it. You fine-tune it till it’s razor-sharp and the timing is perfect. Sometimes I’d play with the gag and strip it back. Try to get the audience to laugh with the minimum effort.

  The Friday night audience was generally a joy as everyone wanted to be there; couples tended to come on Saturdays and that’s when you got the stony-faced girlfriends.

  Sometimes I would loathe these audiences in equal measure. They would reflect back my own intellectual schizophrenia: I’d be contemptuous of the philistinism of the lager boys for being mystified by some of Alan Partridge’s subtleties, and wishing the chin-scratching Guardian readers would loosen up a bit with my end-of-the pier humour and just ‘have a laugh’.

  Whatever else I might have been thinking, one of my main preoccupations would be time and its inevitable passing.

  I would always end up with the same thought: ‘At some point this gig will be in the past. In a couple of hours’ time, I’ll be sitting in the bar thinking, “It’s over.”’

  CHAPTER 21

  DAD OFTEN NAPPED in the car when he came home from work. The driveway was at the bottom of the garden and his car was just out of sight. Mum would send me to tap on the window to wake him up and tell him tea was ready. He always nodded but didn’t move or attempt to turn the radio off.

  It was a brief hiatus between maintaining IBM System 34s and the maelstrom of a chaotic household.

  After we’d watched Blue Peter and The Wombles, Mum would rap the butt end of a serving spoon against the wall that divided the kitchen from the living room. Like Pavlovian dogs, we would start salivating as we headed for the kitchen table where tea (dinner) would be served.

  Mum: ‘See if Dad’s car is in the drive.’

  I would walk down the garden and knock on the car window. His eyes would usually be closed and he’d be listening to Radio 3.

  Me: ‘Dad, tea is on the table.’

  Dad: ‘All right. I’ll be there in a minute.’

  Mum would send me back out five minutes later.

  Me: ‘Dad, your tea is getting cold.’

  Dad: ‘Right. I’m coming now.’

  Other days he’d come home, have tea, swap his suit for overalls and do heavy-duty DIY. He installed the central heating system on his own. He removed the chimney by renting scaffolding and winching it down. His brother and a friend sometimes helped; no one else could be trusted to do a good enough job and it was cheaper.

  On Sundays after church we’d be introduced to all sorts of interesting people. In the late 1970s I met a woman in her eighties who had survived the Titanic as a teenager; she talked about the mayhem on board and the noise of the ship going down.

  On another Sunday, Dad pointed someone out as we were leaving church.

  ‘That man told me how a toilet cistern worked when I was a child,’ Dad said. ‘He explained how simple the mechanics of a ballcock are. He opened my eyes to engineering.’

  Dad built everything in the house. He made a stool by fixing a bathroom tile to some reclaimed wood. You can’t reach the bath taps while you’re in the bath, a safety measure designed and installed by my dad in the sixties to prevent us kids from turning the hot tap on. I thought all bathrooms were like that until I left home.

  When he put the central heating in, he lifted the floorboards to lay the pipes. He was so proud of the pipe junction work that he wanted to lay a sheet of Perspex above it so that he could roll back the carpet to show it off to visitors.

  Instead he wrote detailed notes explaining how he’d built the central heating system, sealed it in polythene and placed it under the floorboards.

  He said, without a glimmer of a smile, ‘When the central heating breaks, I won’t be alive and I want whoever fixes it to know exactly how I put it together.’

  One of the most exciting things about the early seventies was the power cuts that came as a result of the miners’ strike and the three-day week. There were candles everywhere and an open fire in the lounge. Until, that is, Dad rather spoilt the effect by rigging up an emergency lighting system wired to disused car batteries.

  I have acquired some of Dad’s wisdom over the years and, according to my daughter, I put my hands behind my back when I’m studying something technical and I look just like him.

  As a precaution, when touching anything live, Dad would fiddle with equipment he was unsure about using only his right hand. He would keep his left hand firmly in his pocket in case an unexpected electrical charge crossed his heart.

  He once resolved a tricky technical issue with the microphone pack I used on live tours. A tiny mic was taped to my cheek and the wire ran down to a battery pack on my belt. I would put the battery pack in a condom to keep it dry, but the sweat would still make its way into the battery pack and fuse it. I couldn’t figure out how to solve the issue, so I mentioned it to Dad.

  ‘Just turn the battery pack upside down and put a loop in the wire,’ he said. ‘That way the sweat won’t fuse it.’

  It’s a simple enough solution, but it took an engineer to solve it. I’ll never be as scientific as my dad, but I have at least inherited a sense of how the built world works.

  When I was a sometime actor in Los Angeles in the 2000s, I drove my hired sports car to the gym one morning. I found myself looking at the structure of the gym car park and wondering why the concrete cross members went into a hole instead of joining up with the wall. I realised the beams were suspended on tiny rollers to protect the car park in the event of an earthquake.

  I wasn’t even discussing it with anyone, I was standing on my own in this semi-lit car park. I’m not remotely embarrassed by my techie moments: I have great admiration for the beauty of good engineering.

  When I was growing up, I didn’t see Dad for hours at a time because he was in the cellar working on one thing or another to improve the house. He couldn’t stop fixing things; he still says there aren’t enough hours in the day.

  He once salvaged a couple of discarded phones and rigged them up inside the house for us. Stuff that was a bargain or free was the subject of endless discussion.

  When he worked at IBM he would always rather fix a part on the computer than replace it. He was obsessed with built-in obsolescence and wary of buying new things for the sake of it. He thought there was something slightly distasteful and vulgar about showing off new things.

  I was very aware that we couldn’t just have anything we wanted. Especially if it could be made from scrap for virtually no cost. Dad was thrifty – the Formica ki
tchen table was ex-army, cost a tenner and is still in use half a century later; the carpet in the front room was only replaced after seventy years – and he embraced recycling long before it became fashionable and the thrift and recycling of the post-war years finally dovetailed with the environmentalism of the new millennium.

  In the early seventies, he constructed a Wendy house out of a huge wooden mainframe computer box. He salvaged it from work, took it apart so that it would fit in the back of his Volvo, and put it back together with brass screws that would resist the rain. The ‘diddy house’ is still standing in my parents’ back garden nearly fifty years later.

  As a kid, I much preferred the diddy house to playing soldiers at war. I would play with girls in the diddy house, pretending I was an adult. I liked the drama of it. It was far more enticing than soldiers killing each other, although I’m sure some of my peers considered me a bit of a sissy.

  My dad once found an old, battered pedal car, stripped it down to the metal, resprayed it, added electric lights that turned on and off, and made rubber bumpers from old strips of pipe insulation. I watched him doing it up and it was worth the anticipation – much more gratifying than just wandering into a shop and buying a new one. I can still recall the smell of paint on this good-as-new pedal car as I climbed into it for the first time.

  We never had new bikes – we had to fix them or make new ones out of the component parts – and Mum had to make do with the 1950s washing machine. She still uses the kitchen knife she bought on holiday in Wales in 1975. It’s not even an especially good knife. It doesn’t even have a bolstered shank where the blade meets the handle.

  And of course my mum had her Morris Minor, which my dad liked because it was so robustly engineered and could be kept on the road for ever.

  ‘They forgot to build in the obsolescence!’ my dad would say with great satisfaction.