Easily Distracted

by Steve Coogan

  We even drove all the way to Aberdeen and about fifteen people turned up.

  They said, ‘Steeleye Span was here last week and they got 200.’

  John and I just looked at each other.

  In the boot of the Golf we had a projector and a lectern, and a ghetto blaster and a bunch of cassettes that I would give to the sound man at each venue for cues.

  It was complicated: I had to talk each sound man through the cues because I’d designed the show so fastidiously.

  John and I, obsessed with amassing as many strange photos as possible for the show, had driven around in the Golf to take them and then had them developed into slides. John would compère as Bernard Righton, his hilarious, politically correct Bernard Manning creation, while I was changing characters.

  At one point, John and I asked my dad if we could take some photos in his cellar.

  He said, ‘What do you want to do that for?’

  I tried to explain. ‘There’s so much technical equipment down there, it would be great texture as the background of the photos for this handyman character I’m doing. I think it’s got the right kind of feel because it’s full of …’

  He finished off my sentence. ‘… junk? You mean junk.’

  In the awkward silence that followed, John stared at the floor and kicked his heels.

  My dad finally broke the silence. ‘You should just go and take photos outside a substation somewhere. That will look technical.’

  I tried to argue: ‘But it doesn’t really have the requisite detail.’

  Firmly, finally, he said, ‘I’d rather you didn’t. Some of the wiring I’ve got down there is quite unorthodox. If you show a slide at a public event and someone from the council happens to be in the audience and they see behind you on one of the slides how the circuit-breakers in my cellar are arranged, they will realise it’s technically against health and safety regulations.’ He took a breath. ‘They could come round and insist we change it all.’

  We both said, ‘OK then.’

  And that was the end of that.

  But I was allowed to look through the old science magazines that my dad kept piled up in the cellar, and found random black-and-white photos of men with Brylcreemed hair, operating lathes in the 1960s. When the images were transferred onto slides and projected onto a white screen, they had a pleasing retro look about them.

  I took a photo of my Fiat Uno being towed by my dad’s Volvo. And then I switched the cars around, so the Fiat was towing the Volvo.

  Operating the projector myself, I would later ask the audience, ‘What is wrong with the photo?’

  The audience would look baffled; the joke couldn’t possibly be that simple, could it?

  It could.

  The simplicity was part of the joke. It was a very stupid but funny joke.

  I’d point impatiently at the screen with a stick. ‘The car in front is broken down. That’s what’s wrong with the second photo. The Fiat has to be behind the Volvo, not in front of it.’

  I’d switch the slides around again, so the Volvo was once more in front. ‘That’s better. The car that is broken down is at the back, where it should be.’

  John and I dressed up as the health and safety officer Ernest Moss and his son Robin and drove around Manchester with a photographer from Hulme. We would find an image and then write around it. It was really silly and brilliant fun.

  We stood next to a burned-down sandwich bar called the Butty Bar Plus on an unfinished section of the Mancunian Way. We also posed in front of the Stockport Viaduct, and the Stockport Pyramid, which was being built at the time. Later, in the show, I would point at them and describe Stockport Viaduct as the ‘longest brick-built structure in Europe’ and talk about the quite ridiculous Stockport Pyramid. ‘You won’t find Nefertiti in there, but you will find the finest sprinkler system this side of Chadderton.’

  John gave me that line. It still makes me laugh now.

  And we particularly liked Rochdale multistorey car park. We took photos of John standing in the car park and then on a ledge, looking down. I rehearsed the narrative.

  ‘There’s Robin on level three, which is his favourite.’ Beat. ‘He later returned to that level when he threw himself to his death some years later. It’s only now, when I look at his eyes, that I can see he was lost.’

  It was dark and the car park was deserted, but John and I were helpless with laughter.

  *

  As the same time as preparing for Edinburgh, John and I met up with Caroline Aherne at her flat in Didsbury to write a sketch-show pilot for Granada called The Dead Good Show. Andie Harries, then a producer at Granada, thought we might work well together, but it didn’t go to series in the end as we all had other things in the mix.

  While we were sitting around writing the pilot, however, I played a brilliant trick on John.

  He had taken a break from writing to do an interview with Mark Radcliffe on Radio Manchester. Caroline and I listened in as John did an impression of Tony Wilson. Caroline has always been able to make me laugh, mostly by relentlessly taking the piss out of me, but this time our focus was on John.

  He kept sniffing, insinuating that Tony was taking cocaine.

  Caroline immediately said, ‘Why don’t you ring up Radio Manchester as Tony Wilson and complain?’

  I rang Liz, the producer, straight away.

  ‘It’s Tony Wilson here. I just heard John Thomson doing impersonations of me on the radio and insinuating that I was taking cocaine. I’m a big fan of John’s, but this time he’s gone too far. Unless I hear a retraction on the radio in the next half an hour, you’ll be hearing from my lawyers on Monday morning.’

  Liz stuttered a profuse apology. We tuned back into the radio and Mark Radcliffe was at great pains to point out that it was John Thomson doing an impression of Tony Wilson and not Tony himself.

  Liz had obviously been spooked.

  Mark kept on saying, ‘Just to reiterate one more time, it was just John Thomson doing an impression. We love Tony. We’d love to have him on the show.’

  Caroline and I couldn’t stop laughing.

  I phoned Liz and told her it was me who’d made the earlier call, not Tony. She said I should’ve been on instead because my impersonation was much better than John’s.

  When John came back to the house, Caroline and I asked him how it had gone.

  He sighed and hung his head. ‘Tony Wilson might be suing me.’

  Caroline and I were both mock incredulous.

  He continued. ‘He said he was a big admirer of my work, that a lot of my work was brilliant …’

  He started exaggerating, bigging himself up. And then talking slightly hysterically about lawyers.

  I asked if he was absolutely sure it was Tony Wilson, and he didn’t even pause to consider it. He was sure.

  I said, ‘Just think about it, John. It could’ve been a prank.’

  John: ‘No way.’

  ‘Who knew you were doing the show?’

  John: ‘No one. Just you and me. Maybe Rob Newman could do an accurate Tony Wilson, but he had no idea I was doing the show.’

  ‘Let’s ring up the producer and check to see if it really was Tony or not.’

  I rang Liz. ‘Hi, it’s Steve Coogan here. I’ve got John here, who’s very concerned …’

  She was laughing at the other end of the phone.

  John took the phone, all beleaguered. Then he looked massively relieved.

  He put his hand over the phone and mouthed, ‘It was a prank.’

  I told him to ask Liz who the prank caller was. She told him the caller was sitting in front of him.

  His face changed.

  He yelled, ‘You fucking bastard!’

  But, in time, he got his revenge.

  *

  In 1993, I was staying in a provincial hotel after a gig. I was something of a philanderer in those days, and I secreted a girl I’d met in Edinburgh into my hotel room.

  Just as we were settling in, I had
a phone call from reception.

  ‘Good evening, Mr Coogan. Are you aware of the fact that we don’t allow additional guests in the room unless you’re willing to pay a supplement?’

  I said, rather tartly, ‘Why are you making the assumption that because I have a guest in my room she is staying over? She is a friend of mine.’

  The female receptionist refused to listen. She insisted a further charge would be added to my bill.

  I went ballistic. ‘How dare you talk to me like this! This is shoddy behaviour from a reputable hotel. I want to talk to the manager. Right now.’

  The manager came on the line. He was apologetic and asked if he could send some champagne up.

  I said, ‘I don’t want champagne. I will be checking out of the hotel as soon as I’ve packed, and I don’t expect to be presented with a bill.’

  The manager kept on apologising, but I wouldn’t change my mind.

  The girl and I went downstairs to reception.

  I said, ‘We’re checking out.’

  The receptionist looked mystified. ‘May I ask why, sir?’

  I was livid. ‘Because of the appalling behaviour of the staff at this hotel. It’s atrocious.’

  The girl I was with was sitting out of earshot on a sofa in the lobby.

  The receptionist politely asked if I knew the names of the staff members I’d spoken to. I didn’t.

  I was becoming increasingly impatient.

  The receptionist was trying to calm me down, but I was apoplectic.

  One of her colleagues appeared with a fax. ‘This might explain the situation, sir.’

  The fax was for my attention. It had one word on it, in giant block capitals.

  ‘SUCKER’.

  I suddenly remembered that I’d been on the phone to Patrick Marber before the receptionist had called my room.

  Just before I’d hung up, he’d said, ‘Have you got a girl in the room with you?’

  I said, ‘Yeah, I have.’

  I was standing at reception, looking at the fax and thinking to myself, ‘Oh fuck.’

  The receptionist said, ‘Would you still like to check out, sir?’

  I said, ‘No. No, I don’t. I’m very sorry for being so rude.’

  She laughed. ‘It’s OK. You’ll just have to think of a way to get them back.’

  I went over to the girl and told her that everything had been sorted out.

  I later found out that Patrick had rung John Thomson with an idea of how to get me back for the Tony Wilson trick. He had given John the hotel phone number and John had got Zoë Ball to ring and pretend to be the receptionist.

  I had been so cross that I hadn’t noticed her giggling as soon as I asked to speak to the manager.

  Nor had I recognised either of their voices. Without even leaving Patrick’s flat they had made me look like a total dick. They were over the moon that I’d made everything worse by having a stand-up row at reception.

  It was an elaborate prank, but it worked perfectly.

  We were finally quits.

  *

  As Edinburgh approached, Patrick came up to Manchester and stayed with me, and we rehearsed at Bury Metro Arts.

  I was sometimes late, but I did at least try to get there on time. Patrick was bossy and strict from the outset, but he says I was easy to believe in and just needed someone to crack the whip.

  I was more disciplined than John, who could be sloppy at times, but Patrick was more ruthless than either me or John. He’d insist on routines being cut down or binned altogether.

  Patrick always seemed to be shouting, ‘Cut that! That joke doesn’t work!’

  I’d try to argue back, saying I liked the joke.

  He would simply respond with: ‘It never gets a laugh. You’ve got to make sure the show is funny. No one will miss that joke if it’s not there.’

  I always had the final say, but Patrick knew that he not only had to organise us and give us notes. He knew we needed to treat it like a theatre show. He’d never directed before, but he knew how to do the light and sound and he has an organised mind.

  When I was road-testing the show with John, we’d got it down to seventy-five minutes. Ruthless, brilliant Patrick shaved a further fifteen minutes off the show, which was called Steve Coogan in Character with John Thomson.

  He says now that he was never as confident as he pretended to be. But I believed in him, and he thought I was a genius – his word, not mine – and so it worked.

  His genius was this: he told me to drop Gavin Gannet and replace him with Alan Partridge.

  I initially argued against it. I didn’t think Alan was a good enough character to put onstage. He was, at that point, just a voice on the radio. Patrick insisted and I relented.

  As I’ve already mentioned, John’s compère character was Bernard Righton, his politically correct Bernard Manning, very of its time.

  A typical Righton joke was: ‘A black man, a Pakistani and a Jew are in a pub having a drink. What a wonderful example of an integrated community.’

  John was incredibly funny. Just fantastic.

  Pauline Calf didn’t yet exist, but I did Paul Calf, Duncan Thickett, Ernest Moss and Alan Partridge. I was twenty-six and too young to be playing any of them really. Alan and Paul Calf were both in their mid to late thirties, while Ernest Moss was probably in his mid-forties.

  But I couldn’t wait till I was slightly older and looked more suited to playing these characters. I knew I would have a future because nothing I was doing was dependent on my youth. I didn’t have the problem of being a pretty boy who would inevitably age.

  John and I, Henry Normal, Caroline Aherne, Dave Gorman, Lemn Sissay and ‘Guitar’ George Borowski, who is name-checked in the Dire Straits song ‘Sultans of Swing’ – ‘Check out Guitar George, he knows all the chords’ – were all performing at the Greenroom in Manchester, at the same time. John and I did three warm-up shows together there, and the progression between each show suggested it was going to be really good.

  It was quite a simple show – some silly slides and some well-crafted characters – but it was quite original at the time because straight stand-up was still very much in vogue.

  By the time we got to Edinburgh in the summer of 1992, the show was as tight as a drum. It was unrecognisable from the show I’d done with Frank as support two years earlier.

  I wanted to show those bastards who’d given me bad reviews how good I really was.

  We were in a small venue called Gallery 369, which was adjacent to the Gilded Balloon before it sadly burned down twenty years ago.

  Although I had dressed up as Alan in front of a small audience for the pilot of Knowing Me Knowing You with Alan Partridge, this was the first time I had properly introduced him to the public.

  A review in the Independent from 18 August only slightly hedges its bets:

  Sandwiched between a gallery of grotesques from Steve Coogan (a voice from Spitting Image), Thomson’s growling, beer-bellied banterer brilliantly subverts audience expectations with crass racist, sexist or superannuated jokes for which the punchlines never come. Coogan, meanwhile, specialises in repellent oiks, from a lecherous drunk to the supremely patronising sportscaster Alan Partridge (‘Of course, women are allowed to compete in the Olympics, which gives the whole thing a bit of glamour’). The material is variable, but the timing is flawless.

  The first one or two shows only drew an audience of six or seven, but by the end of the week the venue was full and it was almost impossible to get a ticket.

  And yet, when we were nominated for the Perrier, we didn’t think we’d win.

  CHAPTER 47

  I DIDN’T HAVE much experience of drugs in my late teens and early twenties. Apart from a terrible acid trip once when I was working on Spitting Image. I went to a party, took two tabs and went bonkers.

  At first I thought it was great because I was dancing with everyone else. As soon as I got in a taxi home, though, I felt like I was on a roller coaster. I was convinced the
driver was laughing at me as he took me on a ride to hell. He was definitely looking over his shoulder at me and sniggering.

  Once I was home, the paranoia grew.

  I started talking into the Dictaphone I kept handy for recording ideas. ‘I’ve just taken some acid and I think I’m dying. I want to leave this last message in case anyone finds it.’

  There was a car magazine lying around, and the driver on the front appeared to be waving at me.

  I looked in the mirror and my face started to melt.

  I asked Miles, my flatmate, for help. I was utterly convinced I was dying and that he hated me.

  He nonchalantly said, ‘You’re just having a bad trip. And I don’t hate you.’

  He thought he was helping by giving me a bottle of water, but it turned into a slithering snake in my hands.

  Eventually it wore off and I realised I was neither disliked nor dying, but I never took acid again.

  I didn’t start taking cocaine until I was living in Edinburgh in the summer of 1992. And even then I didn’t buy it; people just kept giving it to me and I kept accepting it.

  And then, the week before the Perrier winner was announced, I had a truly terrifying cocaine-induced panic attack.

  I’d been up all night doing drugs, and when I sat down to have breakfast I started to feel dizzy. My blood-sugar level had dropped really low and I was on the verge of blacking out.

  I could feel pins and needles in my left arm and my heart was thundering.

  I was surely having a heart attack.

  Patrick and Simon Munnery put me in the car and drove through red lights to get me to hospital. I cried all the way.

  Patrick later told me he really thought I might die.

  When we arrived, the nurse put me on a gurney and then left me lying there. The panic intensified. I was having a heart attack and no one seemed to be paying any attention.

  I couldn’t stop thinking, ‘I’m going to die. This is it. My headstone will say: “Stephen Coogan, born in Middleton in 1965, died in Edinburgh in 1992, aged 26 years.”

  What a waste!

  Finally, a doctor appeared. He examined me and very quickly said, ‘You’re fine.’