Life and Laughing: My Story (34 page)

In addition to the usual stress-related illnesses like headaches and sore throats, my body started to fail me in ways it never had before. I came out in a rash all over my body, I had blurred vision and got pins and needles in my face. In my face? Has that ever happened to anyone before, ever? I woke up one morning and couldn’t hear out of my ear. Christine Hamilton (from
I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!
) and her husband Neil (shamed politician) were doing a daytime chat show called ‘Lunch with the Hamiltons’ at the Festival. I was booked to appear on it to help publicize my show to the audience of about 300. I rushed to the doctor’s surgery in Edinburgh and said, ‘You’ve got to help me, I can’t hear out of one ear and I’ve got lunch with the Hamiltons in an hour.’

To which the doctor said, ‘Would you like me to block the other ear?’

I, of course, took that story and put it straight into my show. I expected it to get a bigger laugh before remembering my hearing was down 50 per cent. I was falling apart. Halfway through the Festival, Kitty came up to be with me for the remainder. She took control and stuffed me with vitamins and emotional support. It’s just such a strange life, every day there was one hour that was vitally important to me. The rest of the day, I was preparing for that one hour. As soon as the show was over, I would go to sleep, wake up and have to do it all over again. It was like
Groundhog Day
.

Despite not coping very well physically with the pressure, my shows weren’t suffering too much. I felt I was on track, improvising more than doing material. I got a review in the
Independent
that read:

Michael McIntyre generates most of his material by chatting to members of the audience. As confident as he is quick-witted, McIntyre is a boyish, likeable chap who improvises as effortlessly as Eddie Izzard and Ross Noble except with an additional knack for characters and accents. No comedian makes his job look easier.

This was exactly the reaction I wanted. Most comedians at the Festival had structured shows, rehearsed shows that were the same every night and usually had a theme. I was focusing only on making people laugh as much as possible, I wanted them to laugh until they had tears in their eyes and their faces hurt. That was my goal. I wasn’t interested in props, gimmicks and depth. I’m a comedian; my job is to be funny. I hoped that the Perrier judges wouldn’t penalize me for my lack of a ‘show’ and would reward me for simply being funny.

I was having lunch with Kitty on the last Monday of the Festival. I could now hear out of both ears, but I had an unsightly cold sore. My wife was urging me to relax and enjoy the last few nights: ‘Whatever will be, will be. It’s out of your hands.’ My mobile phone rang; it was Duddridge, telling me that I was down to the final ten and that several judges would be coming to my show for the next two nights before announcing their five nominations on Wednesday. That was the call I was waiting for; it isn’t out of my hands, it’s in my hands.

I was happy with the way the show went that night, mostly material but flashes of improvisation. On the last night before the nominations I really went for it. Confidence was now flowing through me, I felt like I could make anything funny, anything at all. I felt like Neo from
The Matrix
when he starts to believe, and becomes all-powerful. I was playing with the audience for fun and now the audience contained Perrier judges who had my career in their hands. But to me they were just an audience to play with. I asked, ‘What do you do for a living?’

And a rather tall, serious-looking gentleman said, ‘I’m a journalist for
The Times
and I’m on the Perrier panel.’

I didn’t bat an eyelid and set about trying to make the scenario as funny as possible. I kept referencing my chances of being nominated and certainly overstepped certain boundaries, but it was funny, everyone was having a great time. When the show ended, I felt optimistic about my chances. I told Kitty that night that I had given it everything and I meant it. I knew I had new fans on the panel who enjoyed what I did, which was make people laugh with no gimmicks, no structure, no real content, just laughs. Word got back to me that one of the panellists, the infamously tough critic for the
Scotsman
, Kate Copstick, said she would be fighting to get me nominated. Duddridge received a phone call checking my eligibility for the award. Everything was pointing in the right direction.

Wednesday morning was the most excruciating hours of my life. The result had come through at around midday the year before, 12.12, 12.34, 12.40, 12.47. Still no news. No phone call. Every minute that passed, I felt my chances were dwindling. I kept refreshing the Chortle website – if anything had happened, they would reveal it.

1.05 p.m., the phone rang. It was my mum, I snapped at her, ‘There’s no news, I’ll call you.’ Kitty was feeling as sick as I was.

At least another half an hour passed, and I was losing hope. Nica Burns, the founder of the Award, traditionally calls all the nominees personally, so I thought I was only clinging on to the faintest hope when Duddridge called. ‘Hello?’ I said, as calm as I could.

‘It’s not good news, you haven’t been nominated.’

While I was listening to his words of consolation and support, Kitty ran into the room and I just shook my head in her direction.

I didn’t win the Perrier. I wasn’t even nominated, and now I was in even more debt.

The following day there was an article in
The Times
by two of the Perrier judges who wrote: ‘Only Michael McIntyre stands out from the acts delivering pure stand-up. When his material matches his improvisation – or when he drops it altogether, Ross Noble style – then he might be a major star.’

I hadn’t done enough. I was close, but that counted for nothing. My Festival petered out, and I played to about fifteen people on my last night. I returned to London on the Tuesday and on the Thursday to Jongleurs in Nottingham, first on the bill.

23

The ‘death rattle’ was how I used to describe the sound of the post dropping through the letterbox. Nothing good ever came in the post, just bills, red reminders and threatening letters. Kitty was in the kitchen as I went to see what unopened horrors awaited me. As per usual, there was a pile of brown envelopes with red writing visible through the little window on the front. One of them looked even more threatening than the others. I ripped it open to be met by typical words such as collections, arrears and court. Mostly these were debts I was aware of, but this one was particularly unwelcome. ‘Student Loans Company’, shit. I had taken out a student loan during my first and only year at university. I had honestly forgotten about it, but they hadn’t and I owed them two thousand pounds.

With my wedding loan, credit cards and two Edinburgh Festivals, this made me over £30,000 in debt. Believe it or not, despite my appalling credit record, it was around this time I replaced my ‘sofa that turns itself into a bed’ with the Montana Ice three-seater from DFS on interest-free credit. The deal was that I paid nothing for a year and then paid about £150 for the rest of my life and the lives of any surviving relatives. Like most DFS customers, I only heard the first part about paying nothing for a year. I always thought it was funny that they give you interest-free credit on sofas. If people don’t have the money, they’re hardly going to get off their fat arses and make money if all you’re doing is making their fat arses more comfortable. Interest-free credit on treadmills, that makes more sense.

I debated telling Kitty about the Student Loan letter. She was worried enough about our mounting money problems. I felt I had to; I had to share it with her. We shared everything. I walked into the kitchen clutching my latest debt.

‘Darling, I’ve got some bad news,’ I said.

‘Well, I’ve got some good news,’ Kitty said.

‘What good news?’

‘I think I’m pregnant,’ she said, holding up a pregnancy test.

We were both desperate to start a family, but I was terrified about how to pay for a child. I was sinking deeper under-water financially, drowning.

‘What was your bad news?’ she asked.

‘Oh, forget about that,’ I said, stuffing the letter in my pocket, out of sight.

I then thrust us into even more debt by buying several pregnancy tests to make sure she was pregnant. There were three different varieties in Boots, all different prices. What’s the difference? Don’t they all do the same thing? Does the cheapest pregnancy test just say, ‘Maybe’ and the most expensive one say, ‘Yes, you are pregnant, it’s a girl and it’s not yours, she’s a slag’?

They were all positive. She was pregnant; I was going to be a dad. I had nine months to sort my life out. Nine months to take control of the mess that was my life and provide for my family.

I continued to do the same gigs as before. I had no chance of being spotted at these gigs, but what I could do was improve. I had battled with the dilemma over whether I should improvise onstage or do material.
The Times
had even spelled it out for me. I wanted to improvise, that’s when I was at my funniest. But the time had come to concentrate on my material. I pulled together all the best bits of improvisation, wrote them up as jokes and learned them. The results were almost instant. I suddenly had an act that was killing everywhere I went. I wrote and wrote and wrote. I was basically improvising and riffing, but this time on my own, in front of my computer. I then fine-tuned and edited my thoughts and then tried them out onstage. I soon had hours of material and started to perform completely different twenty-minute sets every night.

Kitty’s pregnancy proved to be a fertile source of material, what with her coping with morning sickness by consuming ginger and Coca-Cola and her bizarre craving for the smell of rubber. One of my best jokes was about Kitty becoming pregnant:

I’m having a baby. It’s not easy to make a baby, my wife and I were trying for fifteen months. I say months because it’s a cyclical process, you have to wait every month for your opportunity to make a baby because of the way that women function. At the end of every month she would say to me, ‘Go to Boots and get the test, get the pregnancy test,’ and I would say, ‘Why? Why don’t we just wait and see if it grows within you, I think that’s the best and the cheapest of our options.’ ‘No, Michael, go to Boots and get the test, I want Clear Blue, because it’s the best, I don’t want any of the other shit.’ It’s £13.99! And I had to get it every month … I could have got broadband, that’s what really pissed me off.

I became so confident in my material that I could also improvise, knowing that if it didn’t take off I could fall back on my now bulletproof jokes. Then with my wife heavily pregnant, I reached rock bottom. For four years I had been going on first at Jongleurs, every once in a while I would be on second. Progress. But this weekend I was something called Jongleurs’ ‘spare’. This is when you are a sort of substitute in case another comedian can’t make it to one of the London Jongleurs venues in Camden, Battersea or Bow. I had to go to Camden Jongleurs and wait until they either called me to tell me I was to perform at one of these London venues or, more likely, go home. I couldn’t believe it, this was worse than being on first, now I wasn’t even on. I was being paid not to work.

I hated Jongleurs dressing rooms when I was working, but sitting there as a substitute was far worse. I couldn’t wait for the phone call telling me that I could go home. As the evening went on, however, it appeared that the headliner hadn’t shown up. The venue manager gave me a heads-up: ‘Get ready, Michael, there’s a problem with the headliner, you might have to go on.’

‘Finally,’ I thought. ‘I’ll headline this show, blow the roof off and show Jongleurs that I can do it.’

Then Jongleurs called me. ‘The headliner isn’t going to make it,’ the booker said.

‘I’ll headline, no problem,’ I said.

‘No, we’re sending another act over from Bow. You’ve never headlined before, we think it’ll be too much for you.’

Insult to injury. I had given Jongleurs years of my life, performed hundreds of times for them, and here was the result. They thought it would be ‘too much for me’ to headline a show. I left Jongleurs that night feeling dejected and frustrated. It was a stormy night, rain was pouring from the night sky. I felt like such a loser; things couldn’t get much worse. Of course they could. I had a flat tyre. Shit! I had to change the tyre of my Austin Metro Princess while getting soaked through.

Cold and drenched, I took the spare tyre out of the boot. What a sight we were, the spare comedian fitting the spare tyre. The tyre looked more like a rubber ring. It turns out that my spare tyre was only a temporary measure designed to get me to the nearest garage. On the side of the tyre it read: ‘Maximum speed 40 mph’. The tyre was so flimsy that if I drove over 40 mph, it would burst. After a great deal of blasphemy, I attached the rubber ring tyre to my car and raced home at speeds up to 40 mph.

Kitty was asleep when I opened our front door, passing unopened bills before I climbed the stairs and sat on my interest-free-credit Montana Ice DFS sofa, with my head in my hands, my wet hair dripping on my rented carpet. How was I going to get out of this? I needed a miracle.

On 29 June 2005, I got one. My son Lucas was born.

He was born at UCH hospital in central London in the early hours of the morning. Thirty hours earlier Kitty and I had been lying in bed watching the film
Ray
starring Jamie Foxx when she started to get minor contractions. Our local hospital was the Whittington in Highgate, about ten minutes’ drive away, but we had decided to have the baby in central London at UCH, about half an hour away with no traffic. We opted for UCH because my mother’s wonderful doctor, who had delivered my three little brothers, worked there. However, a few weeks into Kitty’s pregnancy, he retired, and it was too late for us to change hospitals.

‘I feel weird, Michael, I don’t know what’s happening,’ Kitty said, clutching at my arm.