Life and Laughing: My Story (14 page)

Now that’s how you’re supposed to wear swimming trunks.

In the second year, I wasn’t so successful. Maybe after a year as the champ I wasn’t as focused. I’d put on a few pounds. I got complacent. ‘I could have been a contender.’ But I think the real reason I lost was that I fought Ralph Perry in the final. Let me explain what Ralph Perry looked like. Imagine Mike Tyson as a white ten-year-old. I was no match for him. Perry, who later served time for GBH and assaulting a beauty queen, gave me a beating and I lost my crown. I burst into tears when the result was announced and refused to shake Ralph Perry’s hand and told him to ‘fuck off’ in Latin. My dad gave me a long lecture about sportsmanship and told me to use my jab more. But there was to be no rematch. The school woke up to the fact that making kids fight each other was perhaps a bit barbaric and boxing was stopped altogether.

So that just left sports day as the only occasion for my parents to witness my physical prowess. My two sets of parents decided to try to get along ‘for the sake of the children’. So my mum, Steve, my dad and Holly chose my sports day as the starting point for their new positive relationship. The venue was Cannons Park, a large sports field set up for athletics. It started well; my four parents were smartly dressed, the sun was shining and the rumour that Patrick Swayze was my dad was going some way to make up for the Kenny Everett debacle of two years earlier. The problem was that this wasn’t a dynamic which was going to work. There was far too much resentment, pain and anger between my mum and dad and their new sidekicks. It was excruciating to witness them pretending to get on and fake laughing at each other’s jokes.

My event was the long jump and I won. I jumped 3.03 metres, but due to a mix-up the distance was recorded as 3.30 metres. I still would have won, but those extra 27 centimetres meant that I smashed the school record. In fact, I still hold the Arnold House School record for the Under-9 long jump due to this error. Twenty-five years that record has stood. The teachers and headmaster fully expected me to become a professional long jumper. But the time has come to reveal the truth. While I’m in such a confessional mood, I would like to add that I was also on anabolic steroids.

I was so pleased with my record-breaking jump that I rushed into the arms of my dad and then I rushed into the arms of my mum and then I rushed into the arms of my other dad and then I rushed into the arms of my other mum. Then came the surreal fathers’ race. It was agreed that both my dads would compete. This was fine by the school, who had encountered this situation before. In fact there were so many additional parents due to broken marriages, they had to run heats.

My dad took his place on the starting line alongside Steve and the other fathers. There was no starting gun, which was a relief because I’m sure at some stage one of my parents would have snatched it and opened fire on the other. Instead Mrs Orton was responsible for starting the race, ‘On your marks, get set, shoot!’ My dad got off to a bad start, an even worse middle and painfully slow end and finished in last place. Steve won the whole race. My dads had finished in first and last place.

As I celebrated Steve’s win, I didn’t think about my real dad’s feelings. I was too young. Maybe he saw the funny side. It can’t have been easy.

But little did I know that in just two more school sports days’ time, I would have FOUR dads in the fathers’ race (this isn’t true).

9

Girls make up half of the population. Girls are what most boys want. There comes a time when a boy’s entire life revolves around the pursuit of girls. There are girls reading this book: ‘Hi.’ I went to an all-boys school. This was a terrible idea. I learned nothing about girls; they were like alien creatures to me. I had such a late start getting to know the fairer sex that it definitely put me at a disadvantage.

I’m not just saying all schools should be mixed; I’d like to go beyond that. I think as soon as you’re born you should be shown a girl to begin your education. Then at school you should have to study each other’s gender as a subject. ‘What’s your timetable today, McIntyre?’

‘Maths, Geography and then double Girls.’

Also, in addition to French and English, you should be taught ‘French Girls’ and ‘English Girls’. In fact you may as well include ‘Latin Girls’; any information about any girl from history can be beneficial in unravelling the extraordinary complexities of females.

Girls, however, probably wouldn’t even need one entire lesson in ‘Boys’, the teacher rounding the lesson off with ‘… so if they’re grumpy, they’re probably hungry. OK, girls, we seem to have finished twenty minutes early. So you’re free to fiddle with your split ends until break-time.’

I began my phenomenally unsuccessful pursuit of the opposite sex when I was about twelve years old. Sitting outside the school gates on a wall, in her crimson uniform, clutching her violin, was twelve-year-old Lucy Protheroe. She was
Christie Brinkley
,
Princess Leia
,
Wonderwoman
and
Princess Aura
rolled into one. Lucy’s younger brother was at my school and every few days she would collect him and walk to their home just around the corner. From the moment I saw her, it was like a thunderbolt had hit me. The problem was that for her (to continue the analogy), there was no change in the weather conditions; maybe a slight breeze, but nothing more.

I was becoming more independent and had started to take the number 13 or 82 bus from Golders Green to school. These were the old-style London buses, the ones with a conductor and that you just jumped on and off. Nowadays if you miss the bus, the doors close, you curse and you wait for the next one. In those days, you never felt like you’d missed the bus as you could hop on at any time when it stopped in traffic. I would see a bus in the distance in traffic and go tearing after it. It would tease me by always being close enough for me to think I could catch up. I once chased a bus for my entire journey to school.

School finished at 4.30 p.m. and from 3.30 onwards my heart was aflutter at the prospect of Lucy perched on the wall outside. Every day I walked through the school gates and looked to my right to see if she was there. If she wasn’t, I would be deflated for a few moments but soon be daydreaming again about seeing her the following day while sitting on the bus home (or running behind it). If she was there, I would try, and fail, to be cool.

The first problem was the fifty-yard distance between us. I would see her and smile and she would see me and smile. So far, so good. Then I had to walk to her with her staring at me. I knew how to walk, I had been walking for about ten years at that point and had been practising walking throughout my day at school. But I felt so self-conscious under her gaze that my walking skills abandoned me. My normal straightforward walking style was temporarily replaced by a swagger that even Liam Gallagher would have laughed at. I also struggled with direction, often colliding with other people, painfully smacking my hand against a lamp post or brushing along the hedge that ran from the school gate to the wall she was perched upon.

By the time I reached her (covered in leaves and with a sore hand), my mouth would be so dry from nerves that occasionally no words came out at all, just a sound similar to the one a dog makes when you accidentally step on its foot.

We would have an awkward conversation while she would flick her hair from one side to the other. This hair flicking was really quite something. She had fair hair in a bob and would move all of it to one side of her face and then a few moments later flick it back to the other side. I don’t know if this was a habit or if she couldn’t decide which side looked better; all I know is that it made me look like a tennis spectator, regularly shifting my head to the left and right to follow it. It only added to the hypnotic effect she was having on me.

Between her bobbing hair, she was beautiful. I was fresh-faced, narrow-eyed and chubby. I may not have looked like Matt Goss from Bros but I was determined to maximize whatever attributes I did have. My best feature was, and is, my perfect teeth. The problem is that I don’t know if teeth are that high up the list of what girls find attractive. But it’s all I had, so I felt I needed to show them off. I would thrust them out of my mouth, like a Bee Gee at the dentist. So I basically looked like a Chinese Bee Gee watching the tennis dressed as a ladybird wearing Kylie Minogue’s hot pants. I hoped she fancied me.

She didn’t.

We had one ‘date’. I flew her to Paris on a private jet and we watched the show at the Moulin Rouge and spent the night at the Ritz. Not quite. We went to the Odeon cinema in Swiss Cottage. Our romance was as successful as the film we saw,
Slipstream
starring Mark Hamill. Exactly. She said there wasn’t the right chemistry between us. I was devastated, heartbroken, and blamed my chemistry teacher.

Lucy was just the first in a long list of infatuations with girls that never came to fruition. In fact until I met my wife, Kitty, when I was twenty-two years old, my love life may have been the least successful in history. Teenage girls simply weren’t interested in me. Nowadays, I have plenty of teenage girls screaming my name at my gigs, waiting outside and trembling when they meet me. Where were they when I needed them? If only I had released my first DVD when I was thirteen.

When Lucy rejected me, I was heartbroken. ‘There’re plenty more fish in the sea’ tends to be the consoling wisdom of your friends. But it was useless.

‘I don’t want a fish,’ I would squeal with my head in my hands.

‘It’s just an analogy,’ my friends would explain.

‘Well, it’s a shit analogy, fish stocks in Britain have reduced by 10 per cent due to overfishing, the EU have tried to step in and introduce quotas, but it’s no use, I’ll never meet another girl.’

That summer I went to Corfu with my best friend Sam, who had forgiven me for beating him in the boxing (it wasn’t just a beating, it was a devastating display of my superiority). Sam is properly posh, he’s the real deal. He has lords and ladies on one side of the family and royalty on the other. He’s in line to the throne, although it would have to involve a lot of unforeseen deaths or a bomb at a Royal wedding he was running late for. I spoke just as ‘proper’ as him. As you know, my dad was Canadian and my mum from Hungarian stock. I don’t have Sam’s pedigree, but in his presence I too sounded like an aristocrat.

I’ve always picked up other people’s accents very easily. The problem is that rather than use them as an impression I tended to keep them. Without a doubt I get this from my mum, who embarrassingly takes the accent of whoever she is talking to and starts speaking like that herself. This led to countless cringeworthy scenarios during my youth. If she was in an Italian restaurant and the waiter said, ‘Whatta can I getta you?’ she would reply, ‘I woulda like a Spaghetty Bolognesey anda Garlico Breado, thank you, yes, please.’ What made it worse was that she wasn’t that good at accents and would sound more like Manuel from
Fawlty Towers.
(I’d like to add that Andrew Sachs, who played Manuel, is a very fine actor, and I’d like to wish him and his family well.)

The worst was when she addressed Pila. Pila was a very sweet little Filipino lady who cleaned our big Hampstead house during the few months we were rich. Pila could barely speak English, so in return, my mum would barely speak English back to her. ‘Mis … Kati … would … like … me … do … now?’ Pila would hesitantly enquire.

‘Pi … la,’ my mum would respond equally slowly, ‘must … you … now … very please … do … How do you say? … Ironing?’

The habit nearly became dangerous in a newsagent when my mum was buying some magazines from a six-foot dreadlocked West Indian man. ‘Whatsup, Blood,’ rapped my mother, ‘I is lookin’ to buy dis here readin’ material, Jah Rastafari.’ Luckily Steve and the newsagent were old friends from Brixton, and he managed to diffuse the situation.

So Sam and I went to Corfu sounding like Princes William and Harry. We went with his parents, Hugh and Harriet, his brother Luke and his friend from Eton (wait for it …) Quentin Farquar. Hugh always wore corduroy trousers that were one size too small for him, even on the beach. Harriet was lovely jubbly, Luke was like Sam, but older, and Quentin was a perfectly named posh wanker.

I’ll never forget Quentin turning to me on the flight and embarrassing me. ‘You’re quite plebby, aren’t you?’ he mocked. ‘I bet you say things like settee rather than sofa, and serviette rather than napkin, and toilet rather than loo.’

I didn’t really know what he was on about. His class teasing made me afraid to speak for the remainder of the flight for fear of saying the wrong thing. In hindsight what I should have said was ‘Hey, stupid name snob, what does that say?’ and pointed at the ‘Toilets’ sign on the plane. ‘It doesn’t say “loos”, does it? Have you got on the wrong flight? This is Pleb Airways, mate. You’re fucking with the wrong fake posh boy. Why don’t you ask Sam what happened in the boxing tournament?’

When in Corfu, Sam and I were on the hunt for girls or, as Quentin called them, ‘top totty’ (I think Quentin is probably still a virgin). We both had suntans and Ray-Bans and were feeling confident. Sam’s dad rented us a couple of Vespas, and we hit the local town. It was actually more of a historic village. But we weren’t perturbed. We had until nine o’clock, our Corfu curfew, and were determined to make the most of it. We scoured the streets. If we had been ‘on the pull’ for elderly Greek men playing cards, we would have been in luck, but other than them the streets were deserted.