Common as Muck!: The Autobiography of Roy 'Chubby' Brown (30 page)

I watched Johnny Hammond like a hawk and learned a lot. The way Johnny told jokes within stories was a lesson to me. Up until then, I’d always been a one-line gag merchant, but Johnny showed me how to link jokes into themed stories. And, in time, I came to realise that Johnny was a straight man telling funny jokes, like Bruce Forsyth or Bob Monkhouse.

Bob was widely regarded as the cleverest comedian on the circuit. Everyone called him the Governor. He was the finest comic this country had for years and his material was second to none. But he wasn’t a funny man. His material was funny, but because he told it in a straight way, audiences admired the quality of his jokes, but they didn’t really laugh.

Tommy Cooper was the other extreme – a funny man telling straight jokes. Audiences laughed as soon as Tommy walked on stage. He didn’t need to say anything. He was just a funny
person. If you listened to his jokes, they were usually rubbish – often intentionally so – but it didn’t matter. Tommy’s act was all about his personality and his personality was hilariously funny.

For me, Ken Dodd was the best comedian of all. He had both strengths. The consummate all-rounder. When I saw Doddy on stage I laughed at him and I laughed at his material. And that, to me, was the benchmark. I wanted to combine the visual slapstick of Tommy Cooper, the clever storytelling of Dave Allen and the one-liners of Bob Monkhouse, but bring it together for the common man, the hairy-arsed builder or factory worker who lives in a council house with little money and not much to do except shag, drink and swear.

But I also knew that if I based my act around the behaviour of the rougher end of society, then I wouldn’t have much of a future on television and would probably remain a club act. I’d already had a few small tastes of the world of telly and I was getting a sense that television and I were not easy bedfellows.

Shortly before the George and Mick incarnation of Alcock & Brown came to an end, I got a chance to audition for
Opportunity Knocks
, the top talent show of its day. I travelled down to London and I found myself in the same room as Little and Large and several other acts I knew from clubland. I performed a five-minute routine in front of two stony-faced television executives in an empty room. With no audience reaction, I had no idea how well I was going down. On stage, you feed off the atmosphere, you feed off the laughs. The audience gives you love and affection. But there was nothing in that room. I might as well have been practising in front of a mirror. It was one of the longest five minutes of my life.

Afterwards, one of the
Opportunity Knocks
executives came up to me. ‘You were good, mate, but you let yourself down there by saying arse,’ he said. ‘You spoilt yourself.’

In those days, I saw myself as a member of a group or duo,
so I didn’t really care that I’d not passed the audition as a solo comic. But a few years later, when I was asked to compete in the 1976 series of
New Faces
, I was determined to prove my worth as a solo comic.

The night before
New Faces
, I appeared before an all-male audience of 1,700 in a club in the Midlands. I was waiting in the dressing room when a skinny black-haired stripper came in.

‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ she said.

‘Don’t apologise to me, pet,’ I said. ‘I’m on with you.’

‘Oh yeah, you’re Chubby Brown aren’t you? I think we’ve worked together before.’

‘Aye, we probably have,’ I said.

The club manager walked in as we were talking, but the stripper took no notice of him.

‘Do you mind,’ she said to me, completely ignoring the manager. ‘I’m busting for a slash.’ And without waiting for an answer, she cocked her arse in the sink in front of two men in the dressing room. As far as she was concerned, we were invisible.

Five minutes later, she went on stage. With 1,700 blokes shouting at her and bawling ‘Show us your tits! Show us your arse!’ she whipped off all her clothes, rubbed cream and baby oil all over her body, then set to work on herself with a vibrator. After twenty minutes, she came back into the dressing room.

‘I
knew
I worked with you before,’ she said as she sat down. ‘I was racking my brains while I was on stage and then it came to me.’

‘Oh yeah?’ I said. ‘Where?’

‘Wallsend Labour Club. I was the singer Carrie-Anne.’

I remembered her. She’d been a great singer. ‘What did you pack it in for?’ I said.

‘Couldn’t do it any more. I lost my bottle.’

The next morning I auditioned for New Faces at a club in
Halifax. Standing in front of a panel at half past nine, I knew that this time I had to be spotless. Not a mention of the arses, tits and fannies that had peppered my act at the stag party the previous night.

The many nights drinking in pro digs had put several pounds on my waistline. Tipping the scales at twenty-two stone in those days, I thought I couldn’t avoid mentioning my weight, so I wrote a song especially for the audition called ‘It’s Awful Being Fat’.

‘It’s awful being fat,’ I sang. ‘I’m trying to diet to lose a bit of fat. People say I suit it, well, it’s just the way I’m sat.

‘I breathe in all I can and I try to look my best, but the fat still sticks through the holes in my vest.’

I played the piano and told a few jokes. ‘You know, we were that poor where I grew up, I once opened the oven and next door was dipping their bread in the gravy,’ I said. ‘Christmas Eve, we’d all sit around the fire. If it got really cold, we’d light it … and then we’d get the Bible out. You know, a big thick book like that burns for three hours.’

‘Fabulous, fabulous, lovely,’ a very camp stage manager said at the end of it. ‘We’ll be in touch.’ A few days later, I got a letter detailing a date for when I should record my appearance in front of the
New Faces
panel.

Before the recording, they asked me to take out the joke about the Bible, but other than that I stuck to the same act as at the audition. It all went very well, except for a painful moment in the song, when the lid of the piano slammed down on my fingers.

At the end of my five-minute routine, I told the joke I’d just written about the Irish Evel Knievel who tried to jump twelve motorbikes with his bus and would have made it but someone rang the bell. Then I stood stock-still on the stage, the spotlight trained on me, and waited for the panel’s verdict.

Tony Blackburn was first. ‘I think he’s very funny, this lad, I’d
like to see him over an hour,’ he said. I thought it was the best compliment I could have hoped for, but I only wished he’d been one of the 1,700 punters at the club I’d played the night before. Then he would have seen what I was like over an hour.

All the panel, which also included Mickie Most and Dave Dee, gave me good scores, but at the end of the show I was pipped to the post by a country band called Poacher that went on to win at the Country Music Awards and become a big name.

I’d hoped that
New Faces
would have lifted me out of the club circuit, with its sadistic concert chairmen and uninterested audiences. I was disappointed as I drove back to Teesside, but it was still a lot easier than standing at the bus stop at seven a.m. in the pouring rain, getting to ICI and carrying bricks up and down ladders, mixing darbo and cement for laggers, carrying and fetching and arguing and being on time and having to clock off and go home and fall asleep in the chair – all the things that a normal Teesside everyday bloke would do. Show business promised a little bit of excitement, as long as I had the bottle to do it.

A few days later, I was in my little red van, driving back from a music shop in Slaggy Island, when I passed my auld fella standing outside Baxter’s, the bakery on Bolckow Road in Grangetown from which as a kid I’d bought that sack of broken biscuits with a stolen pound note.

I stopped on the other side of the road. ‘Dad!’

‘Hiya, son!’

‘How are you doing?’ Dad was wearing a long grey mackintosh and a flat cap, a fag wedged in the corner of his mouth. Typical Andy Capp.

‘I’m fine, fine.’ Dad had been retired two years. ‘What you doing?’

‘I’m working tonight. I’m at the Stockton Engineers’ Club.’

‘Oh right. How’s Beryl? Is she all right?’

‘Yeah, she’s fine.’

‘Betty’s just sent me down to get some bits,’ he said, holding up a bag of scones and tea cakes.

‘Right, well, I’ll probably speak to you tomorrow or the day after.’

That night I was on stage at the Engineers’ Club when I noticed a policeman standing at the back of the hall. He walked over when I came off stage.

‘It’s your dad, Roy. He’s had a heart attack,’ the copper said.

I rang home. Betty said Dad was in hospital but stable, and that I should wait until the morning before visiting him, so I immediately drove back to the Ponderosa, the filthy dump of a doss-house that all the neighbouring Redcar residents hated and where I had a flat. Early the next morning Beryl came round from her house. She was crying.

‘What’s wrong?’ I said.

Beryl couldn’t speak, she was crying that much. I put my arms around her and comforted her. When she’d calmed down, she spoke. ‘I’ve just had a message,’ she said. ‘Your dad’s died.’

I started crying myself. ‘It was only yesterday morning I was talking to him,’ I said.

Washed and dressed, I drove round to Dad’s house. Parked in the street outside, a black funeral director’s van with blacked-out windows contained my auld fella lying in a box. Inside the house, Betty and my sister Barbara were waiting, crying. I hugged them both. ‘Why?’ I said. ‘It doesn’t seem right. What has he ever done to hurt anybody?’

Betty told me what had happened. As usual, Dad had gone to the club at half past seven. At half past eight he was back home, complaining of not feeling well. He went upstairs and lay down on the bed. At about nine o’clock, Betty heard a long, low groan and a wheeze come from the bedroom – they call it the death rattle, don’t they? – so she ran upstairs. When she went in, Dad
was unconscious. Betty rushed my auld fella to hospital and he died that night. It was 3 September 1976. Dad was sixty-eight. He’d worked all his life, never taking a day off from the steelworks, then he’d retired and two years later he was dead. It struck me that was no kind of decent life.

All Dad’s workmates and all the lads from his club came to the funeral. There’s not much to say about it except that it was incredibly sad. I looked at his casket and struggled to make sense of it. I couldn’t believe I wasn’t going to see him any more. Even now, thirty years later, I can see him as clear as if it was yesterday, standing on that corner outside Baxter’s bakery with his flat cap and bag of scones. And I can still see him when I was a boy, pegging it along the street on his bike after work, making his way home to where I’d cleaned and hoovered and cooked us egg and chips for tea. It seems only yesterday that I was waiting outside his club, hopeful of a tanner to buy a bag of chips or a bottle of pop, waiting for Dad to come and pat me on the head and send me on my way.

Sometimes you don’t realise just how much somebody means to you until you haven’t got them any more. We’d been together from when I was born. Dad was the one person who’d always been there. He’d been father and mother to me, and for a time I’d been son and wife to him. He’d been the one who took me to the football matches. He was the one who held my hand and who sat in the garden with us. When he had a bit of spare cash, Dad was the one who took me to the seaside or on a trip with the club or to Blackpool on holiday.

I don’t really know how I functioned in the months after Dad died. Everywhere I went, there were memories of him and of all the times we shared together. In the end, I had to force myself to stop thinking about it because I was getting nothing else done.

When Dad was cremated a few days later at Acklam crematorium, Barbara and I were asked if we wanted a plot with a stone
in the garden of remembrance. Neither of us had any spare cash. With a string of bills owing, a van to run, maintenance to pay for Judy and the two boys, I was still pink lint even though I worked every hour God sent. It breaks my heart that I didn’t have the money then, but I didn’t and there’s no point in looking back.

Dad left everything to his new wife and her children. Barbara and I didn’t get a penny, so Betty asked us if we wanted to choose one of his belongings. I took a pocket watch that had been presented to my auld fella by his club. I kept in a drawer for years, until my house was burgled one night and the watch was pinched. I was certain that I knew who did it – he was a right rogue and he’d left his socks on the kitchen doorstep – but I couldn’t prove it, so I never got it back. It was all I had left to remember my auld fella by and again my heart was broken.

Even after Dad died, my mam was forever criticising him and she was probably right, but I could never fault my auld fella. Whatever had gone on between my parents, he was still my dad. Most of my friends and just about everyone I work with are forever going on about their parents and they never seem to have a good word to say about their mothers or fathers. I never felt like that. I’ve never yet met a man who says ‘I can’t wait for the weekend. My dad’s coming over. I don’t half love him.’ They don’t know how lucky they are.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THREE’S A CROWD

I WAS FULL
of good intentions but once I got to the cancer clinic and lay down on the radiotherapy machine, fear and depression would often get the better of my resolve to recover. When that happened, there was one nurse who made all the difference. Nurse Noleen would sit beside the radiotherapy machine, clutch my hand gently between her own hands and speak to me. When she did that, I felt like a million dollars. ‘Now, are you all right?’ Noleen would say. ‘Is your weight all right? Has it been checked this morning? Are you sleeping well?’ She had some kind of supernatural ability to make me feel calm. Listening to Nurse Noleen was like taking some great big tranquilliser pill.

‘Is your hair all right? It’s not falling out, is it?’ Noleen said one day.