Common as Muck!: The Autobiography of Roy 'Chubby' Brown (29 page)

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?

Soon after I started on my own, Brian sent me on a week-long
tour of Doncaster and Rotherham. There were loads of huge clubs down there – the Clay Lane, the Grangetown, the Belmont, the Yarborough, and largest of all, the Wheatley Hill Working Men’s Club – all full of hairy-arsed miners and rough steelworkers. Before I set off, I rang up the concert chairman of one of the clubs to ask if there were any theatrical digs in the area.

‘There’s one at Rotherham that they all stay at,’ he said. ‘It’s called Pandora’s Box and it’s at 1 Vesey Street.’ I booked a room for three pounds fifty a night and two pounds for breakfast, which amounted to around thirty quid out of my two hundred pound fee for the week.

At the club that evening I arrived first, did my act and had a fair night. South Yorkshire venues were hard clubs full of lads who would get their bollocks tattooed without flinching and I wasn’t nearly as slick as I made myself out to be, so I considered it a fair night in those days if I got half a dozen laughs.

I put my bags in my little red van, asked a copper where Vesey Street was and drove round to the boarding house, my first-ever pro digs. Having paid my deposit and dumped my bags in my room, I walked into the lounge, a big room with a string of sofas and chairs around the walls, a television blaring in one corner and about a dozen lads and lasses all getting well stuck into the drink. In the middle of all of them was a bloke about forty years old with silver hair.

‘All right, son?’ he said.

‘Yeah, thanks.’

‘What you doing, then?’

‘Oh, I’m an entertainer,’ I said.

‘
Really?
What does that mean?’

‘Well, I do the clubs, you know.’

‘You mean you actually stand on stage?’

‘Yeah, yeah, but it’s just a job.’

‘What do you do, then?’ the silver-haired bloke said. ‘Can you give us some idea?’

‘Well …’ I said. I didn’t want to brag or anything.

‘I’ll tell you what,’ he said. ‘Let’s pretend this is a stage …’ He put a cushion down on the floor. By now, everyone in the room had stopped talking and was watching me.

‘Well, what happens is I stand here by the microphone,’ I said.

‘What, like this?’ the silver-haired bloke handed me a broom. ‘And you walk on, do you?’

‘The microphone’s here and I say, “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My name’s Roy Chubby Brown”, and then I tell my jokes.’

‘Really? What, so people laugh at that?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I bet some funny things happen to you in the clubs,’ he said. ‘Yeah, they do.’

‘Well, tell us about them, then.’

So I told them some of my clubland experiences, including what had happened to me a few nights before at Seaton Delaval Social Club when, dressed in a flat cap and miming with a wooden shovel to a Bernard Cribbins song, ‘There I was, a-digging this ’ole, ’ole in the ground, so big and sort of round …’ the concert chairman walked up.

‘Oi, mate,’ he said. ‘When you’ve finished digging that hole, fuck off!’

And I told them about another recent experience at a social club in Yorkshire next to a big wood yard. Halfway through my act, a siren went off and everybody in the club ran to the windows. Outside, the wood yard was going up in flames. Inside, I was talking to the audience’s backs. ‘Eh, have I ever wished I were Joan of Arc,’ I shouted at them. ‘At least you would be facing the right fucking way.’

Halfway through telling my stories, I looked at the silver-haired fella again and thought to myself ‘I know that bloke.’ As I looked around at the other people in the lounge, I noticed that few of them were laughing out loud at my stories. There’d been a few titters, all right, but when I looked closely I realised that several of them were biting their lips.

‘That’s really funny,’ the silver-haired bloke said when I’d finished relating the last of my tales. ‘You know, I’m Johnny Hammond.’

I looked at him and the penny dropped. That was where I’d seen him before. Johnny Hammond was a local legend. He was one of the biggest comics in the North-East and had opened for Andy Williams, Val Doonican and dozens of other big stars. He’d recently won the first
New Faces All Winners Show
.

Pointing at each of the dozen faces around the room, Johnny introduced them. ‘That’s Bobby Thompson, that’s Linseed and Aniseed, those two are Frank and Jessie …’ They were all big clubland names. ‘… That’s Larry Mason …’ He was one of best impressionists around. Now I knew why they’d all been biting their lips.

‘I can also fight,’ I said.

‘Oh.’

‘I’ll knock your fucking …’ And then I smiled and the rest of them burst out laughing.

‘Come and have a drink,’ Johnny said. ‘It was just a bit of a laugh.’

As I sat down, Larry Mason stood up. ‘Goodnight, lads,’ he said. ‘Nice meeting you, son. I’ll see you at breakfast in the morning.’

‘Aye,’ I said as Johnny poured the first drink and we got chatting. He was a lovely man and since he came from Hartlepool, just up the coast from Middlesbrough, we had a lot in common.

Five minutes later, Larry walked in, stark naked with a bowler
hat on his head. With his cock and bollocks hanging out, he stood by the bar, ordered a drink and said, ‘Can’t anyone get any fucking sleep in this house?’

I realised then that they were all nutters like me and that show business didn’t have to be a battleground. It wasn’t quite the cliché of one big happy family – there was too much professional rivalry for that – but we all respected and liked each other and became great mates over the years.

But back then I was the novice, wet behind the ears and eager for advice, which they all happily gave. After years of struggling to get to grips with the strange practices of some of the clubs, at last I was being told the golden rules of the game. Get your money when you walk in a club; always be friendly; learn by watching others; learn when to speak and when not to speak; always make a concert chairman feel like he’s God; say your pleases and thank-yous and don’t talk down to him because he’s the one with the money in his pocket; always be polite to the backing band and always have your dots ready (in those days, I didn’t even have any sheet music); if you’re going to use a club’s drums, give them a fiver; make sure you park your car near the stage door for a quick getaway if there’s trouble; make sure you go to the toilet before you go on, even if you have to piss in the sink; make sure the door’s locked when you piss in the sink; if you’re in a bad mood, don’t take it out on the audience – remember you’re an entertainer, so be professional; if the microphone goes off, use it in your act and pretend it goes off every night; if there’s a fight in the concert room, just say ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I’ll be back on in …’ and go to the dressing room, then get out fast.

There were hundreds of little tips that they passed on to me and I realised then that I could read all the books I wanted and watch every movie I could find, but the real thing about show
business was watching those who between them had more experience than I would ever gain on my own. I learned something from every comedian I watched, but Johnny Hammond taught me the most.

What I really liked about Johnny was that his material was common. He talked about the coalman and the milkman’s horse and things like that. And that was a revelation. There’s a market here for being common, I thought, for being the man off the building site. And what do men on building sites do all the time? They eff and blind. ‘John, pass that fucking brick,’ they say. The swear words fly about like they’re about to be outlawed and pleasantries are never heard. I’d worked on enough building sites to know that the swearing was a release valve from what was often a miserable, back-breaking job. And I guessed that if I took the man off the building site and put him on stage, then the swearing would become a release valve for an audience looking for some relief from the misery and mundanity of their lives.