Common as Muck!: The Autobiography of Roy 'Chubby' Brown (2 page)

CHAPTER ONE

A PAIN IN THE NECK

JUST ONE SENTENCE
can change your life for ever. The perfectly timed phrase, the gag that brings the house down just because of the way it’s said, or a few simple words that trigger a gasp of shock. Like any comic, I know them well. But nothing had prepared me for the day I walked into a small, dark room cramped with veneered furniture in Stockton-on-Tees. My first thought was that with a bald patch and a thick beard, the man sitting in front of me looked like his head was on upside down, but this was not the time for silly jokes. The man was Dr Martin and the room was his office. He’d called me in to tell me something serious.

‘Mr Vasey,’ he said. ‘I’ve got some bad news for you. You have throat cancer.’

The room spun as if I’d been hit. For once in my life I was speechless. There’d been no gentle warm-up, no light jabs to soften me up before delivering the bad news. The doctor had delivered a knockout with the first punch. It was cancer, he said. Plain and simple. Matter of fact. No warning. Just the
truth. Maybe it was better that way. But to me cancer meant only one thing. A painful and imminent death. And, with it, the end of everything for which I had worked for many years. Decades of standing in smoky clubs and shouting into a microphone that I held to my stomach had finally taken its toll.

To add cruelty to injury, the cancer threatened to tear the very heart and soul out of me. The one thing that I’d always been able to rely upon was my voice. The gift of the gab was my greatest asset. It had rescued me from trouble, turned many crises into mere close scrapes and prevented skirmishes becoming fights. My voice had propelled me from back rooms above pubs, telling jokes to audiences of two or three uninterested punters, to adoring crowds of thousands at the Palladium and Dominion theatres in London or on the North and South Piers at Blackpool. My voice was my fortune, and now it was going to be snatched away.

The first warning sign had come five years earlier, when two nodules were removed from my vocal cords, a fairly common occurrence for any comic or singer. Now, in 2002, with a tour of Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia and America looming, I had a sore throat that never seemed to get better. Hoping that the nagging pain in my neck was no more than wear and tear, I’d gone to the doctor. The last thing I wanted was to arrive in Australia and find I couldn’t speak.

‘I don’t like the look of your throat,’ Dr Martin had said, shining a light into my gullet. ‘I am going to have to do a biopsy.’

‘How bad is it?’ I asked.

‘We won’t know until we go further down. We are going to have to check down to your chest. Just a little investigation.’

Now, two weeks later, I was sitting in Dr Martin’s stuffy little office, struggling to come to terms with the outcome of that ‘little investigation’. And it had come as a complete surprise. There was no obvious cause. I didn’t smoke and my days of
heavy drinking were long behind me. I would have been no more surprised if he had hit me over the head with a baseball bat.

People say that when you’re facing death, your life flashes before your eyes. And, at that moment, it did. My childhood in Grangetown and the early days playing in bands in Teesside pubs. My first attempts at comedy, then the years spent honing my act on the northern club circuit, working harder than Esther Rantzen’s toothbrush, until I was ready for the big time and ready to become Britain’s most controversial comic. There’d been good times and bad times, but when the kaleidoscope of images came to a rest all that was left was a clear vision of two people: my six-month-old son Reece and my wife, Helen. Sitting in that doctor’s surgery, I thought back to an evening about six months earlier, just after Reece was born. Helen and I were at home, talking things over, when she looked at me seriously. ‘You’ll never marry me, will you?’ she said.

We’d been together for five years. In that time Helen had transformed my life. But I’d been married before and … well … let’s just say it wasn’t a great success. No, that would be telling a lie. Let’s say it was a complete fucking disaster.

‘Well, I won’t say never ever, you know,’ I replied.

‘No, you’ve been hurt too much to marry again,’ she said and I could see the disappointment in her eyes.

‘Now don’t say never,’ I said. ‘Don’t say never, because we might. We just might …’ And that night I resolved to marry Helen.

A few months later, we were packing our cases for a holiday in Las Vegas. ‘Take something nice to wear with you,’ I suggested.

‘Why?’

‘Oh, you know, maybe there’ll be a special occasion when we might need something smart.’

‘Oh, right … right, I’ll pack my best outfit,’ Helen said innocently.

A few days later we were sitting in the bar of the Mirage hotel on the Las Vegas Strip, chatting to a couple who had just got married. ‘How do you go about it?’ I asked.

‘Just go down to City Hall, queue up, give them your details, they give you a licence. Then you go to the church, hand in the licence and you’ll be married in five minutes.’

‘That easy?’ I said. ‘How much did it cost you?’

‘Twenty-eight dollars. If you want a car it’s thirty dollars. Fifty dollars if you want a ring and the car. And sixty-five dollars if you want to be married by Elvis Presley.’ It sounded like Argos. A bit tacky, but at least it was quick and cheap.

Back in our suite, I took Helen in my arms. ‘Do you want to get married?’ I asked her.

‘What, now?’ she said, her eyes widening.

‘Tomorrow.’

‘Are you joking?’

‘No.’

Helen took a step back to be able to look me straight in the eyes. ‘You’re not joking, are you?’ she said.

‘No.’

‘Gosh.’

Helen hadn’t said yes, but she didn’t need to accept my proposal. I knew she wanted to get married and that I’d taken her so much by surprise that she didn’t know what to say.

‘We’ll have a look tomorrow night,’ I said.

‘Right,’ Helen said with a look of shocked surprise. ‘We’ll do that tomorrow, then.’

On 30 April 2001 we took a taxi down to City Hall and for two hours stood in a queue of gooey-eyed couples, each of them holding hands and grinning inanely. Inevitably, it got us talking. ‘Ehh, what’s he doing with her? Will you look at the face on
him. She could do a lot better.’ Or: ‘He’s old enough to be her grandfather.’ And even: ‘Is that two lesbians there, holding hands?’

Eventually we reached an office with a row of six desks. Behind one of the desks, a clerk asked us our names and our dates of birth. We signed an application form, paid the fee and that was it. We were licensed to get married.

Back at the hotel, I rang George Forster, my manager. ‘We’re getting married,’ I said.

‘You what?’ George gasped. ‘Getting married? Well, I couldn’t think of a better woman, but what’s she doing marrying a funny bugger like you?’

We chatted for a while, then George rang off. A short while later, the phone rang. It was George again. ‘What time you getting married?’ he said.

‘Six o’clock.’

‘Right. And where will you be before then?’ I thought George was going to send some flowers for Helen.

‘We’ll be in the foyer until about quarter to six,’ I said. ‘We’ll have a drink and then we’ll get a taxi down to the little church. We’re getting married at the Little White Wedding Chapel.’

‘Oh, right. Well, good luck, then,’ George said. ‘I hope it goes well.’

Helen and I took our time getting dressed. I put on a white suit with a white silk shirt, a white tie and a white trilby. I thought I looked like a proper Mississippi gambler. And Helen, also in a white suit, looked a million dollars. On the dot of six o’clock, just as Helen and I were finishing our glasses of champagne in the foyer, a little bloke with silver hair and a moustache approached us.

‘Chabby, innit?’ he said in a thick cockney accent.

‘Yeah?’ I said, wondering what this little east Londoner was doing in the Mirage.

‘My name’s Dave,’ he said.

‘Er, hello Dave,’ I said, still flummoxed.

‘I’m Tom’s driver.’

‘Right … pleased to meet you.’ I hadn’t a clue who Tom might be.

‘Tom sends his very best wishes.’

‘Oh right, right,’ I said, ‘Tom who?’

‘Tom Jones,’ Dave said. ‘I’m Tom Jones’s driver.’

‘What,
the
Tom Jones?’

‘I’ve got a couple of tickets for the show,’ Dave said, nodding. ‘And I’ve got a limousine outside.’

Dave drove us to the Little White Wedding Chapel, where we were given the choice of being married by Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis or Marilyn Monroe lookalikes. We thought it made a farce of marriage, so we chose the bog-standard wedding – a bloke in a dicky bow. We signed a register, walked into a little room and stood behind a black couple who were getting married before us. The woman must have been forty stone. She was so over-weight that she had to sit through the entire ceremony. The groom was as thin as a rake. From behind they looked like the number ten.

And then it was our turn. It was over before I’d blinked. In a couple of minutes we went from Roy and Helen to Mr and Mrs Vasey. We posed for a few photographs outside and paid ten dollars for a video. In all, it cost us less than a decent meal.

Then Dave whisked us in the limo to the MGM Grand Hotel and led us backstage, straight through to the green room. And there he was. Tom Jones. Standing there, sipping a drink, and looking like a proper superstar.

‘Hello there, Chubby, how’re you doin’?’ he said. It was a shock. He had a lilting Welsh accent. I didn’t expect him to talk like that. I thought that living in America might have
rubbed out his accent, but he sounded just like a lad from the valleys.

‘Congratulations to you both,’ Tom said. And he gave Helen a big hug and a kiss. Helen is a massive Tom Jones fan and I could see she was on a different planet. And as for me? Well, I was gobsmacked. I was thinking I was going to wake up any moment. This is fucking ridiculous, I thought.

Tom opened a bottle of champagne and gestured to a buffet table piled high with a mountain of shrimps and enough roast beef to feed twenty people. ‘I had this put on for you,’ he said. ‘Have something to eat, then I’ll sort out a table for you at the show.’ While we tucked into the buffet, Tom disappeared to prepare for his audience. A few minutes later one of his staff tapped me on the shoulder and led us through to the auditorium where a table was reserved for us centre stage, right at the front.

The lights dimmed, the band started up and Tom came on. I knew he was good, but this show was amazing. What a voice. And the band! The drummer was something else and the bass player was superb, really loose and funky. From the moment Tom started singing, everyone was on their feet. It was a magnificent show. When the curtain came down we were ushered back into the green room, where a new bottle of champagne had been opened. About a dozen young lasses, all top-class pussy, were milling around. Tom walked across the room towards Helen and me.

We chatted for a while, then Tom said: ‘The first time I saw you was on a tour bus after a show in Munich. One of the crew put your tape on and I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I said: “Who the fuck is this?” Once I realised what you were all about, I was in hysterics. Since then, every year we’ve had your video on the tour bus. My son’s a big fan as well.’

Tom told me how he’d had a phone call that afternoon from
his son Mark, who had been playing golf in Spain with my manager’s son, Michael. Between them they’d hatched a plan to surprise Helen and me with a couple of tickets to Tom’s show.

We chatted for a while, then Tom left, and Helen and I were left looking at each other, not quite believing what had happened to us.

‘It’s telling everybody, isn’t it?’ Helen said when we got back to our room. ‘Who’s going to believe that? Who in their right mind is …’

‘If I tell the lads we spent our wedding day with Tom Jones,’ I said, ‘they’ll go “Fuck off! Tom Jones my arse! More like fucking Tom Pepper!” They’ll never believe it.’

I kicked off my shoes and Helen got straight on the phone to her mother, her sister and all her friends. ‘Just run up the phone bill,’ I said. ‘Aye, go on.’

She was on the phone for about two hours. ‘You’ll never guess … Tom Jones … and he gave me a kiss … went to his show …’ I could hear the excitement in her voice.

Tom invited us back to his hotel the next day but I thought it was time to make ourselves scarce. We were grateful for what we got and we’ll never forget it. It’s a memory Helen and I will always share, but I knew we had to recognise the rules. Don’t get too familiar. Celebrities like Tom Jones, they’ve got fifty million in the bank and a whole different lifestyle to the rest of us. I’m not in that league, but I’ve learned that money creates big divisions. It’s like the lottery winners who come off council estates and think they’re going to keep the same friends. They’re not. They’ll move to bigger houses next to bank managers, surgeons and lawyers. They’ll lose touch with most of their old friends. It’s just human nature, a fact of life.

And there was one thing about which we’d been absolutely right. When we got home, many people wouldn’t believe that we’d met Tom Jones and that he’d put on a wedding buffet for
us. A few weeks later, I was talking to a chairman from one of the working men’s clubs in Middlesbrough, a club I’d played dozens of times when I was starting out. Like many committee men, he was incapable of believing a word any act would say. He was one of the old school; he had no fingernails where he’d been scratching his way out of the coffin that morning and he couldn’t pay anyone a compliment.

‘I remember when I booked you for fifteen quid,’ he said.

‘Yeah,’ I nodded. It was a familiar refrain, that peculiarly British habit of chopping down tall poppies. And club chairmen could be the worst offenders.

‘How you getting on?’ the chairman said.

‘Oh, fine, thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ve just been to Vegas. We got married.’

‘Aye.’

I pulled out a photograph. ‘You know who that is, then?’

‘Tom Jones,’ the chairman said.

‘Exactly.’