My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up (40 page)

Hare Krishna Morrissey

cuss the Bhagavad- Gita, then after I’d left frantically buttonhole some luckless assistant yawping, “you better get me some of those fucking cowboy boots,” before collapsing into desperate tears.

He knows the boots are a temporary distraction from mortality and lives his life accordingly. Looking at the boots now in all their holy glory, it’s difficult not to write to him saying, “Come on mate, you must want these boots really.” If I did he’d just laugh; he had a terrific sense of fun.

Th

e first year or so after I came out of rehab was mainly fla-vored by continuing John Noel–funded escapades into the world of TV. Graham Norton’s company, SO television, agreed to make a Comedy Lab, a broadcast pilot for Channel 4, with us, so we thought we’d get some footage to show them what we were into.

Me and Matt said, “Let’s make a film about them adult baby perverts.” We found one on the Internet—this woman who looked a bit like the housekeeper out of Tom & Jerry—I know you don’t ever see her face, but if you close your eyes and imagine it you get the face of this adult baby woman which is stored in a Jungian brain library we all have access to.

We went to Folkestone to meet her. That woman was no more a provider of an “adult baby service” than I am of trouble-free holidays. What she was can only be described with the words “vicious dominatrix.” Having got hopelessly drunk, she thrashed me with a carpet beater, a shoe and a belt before stripping me naked and attaching clothes pegs to my nipples and prize winning genitals. I don’t know of a baby the world over that would require that service. Then she gleefully poured piping hot wax onto my penis and looked at me as if I was a kill-joy Calvinist when I refused to let her repeat the trick up my anus.

While I received this agonizing treatment, all in the hope that “it’ll be funny,” I caught sight of my beloved Matt, who was 323

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the entire crew that day, in the mirrored wardrobes that flanked the fl oral fleapit where goolies came to die. Far from diligently observing another soon to be “smash-hit TV show” with compassion and concern, he was pointing the camera with one hand while with the other he was boredly texting a chum—utterly desensitized to the constant mayhem that our work comprised.

I’ve dragged that lad through brothels and hellholes across the globe and he’s never once said “thank you”: is that too much to ask?

I’d never before seen the attraction in sadomasochism—“I don’t want to pay money to get sexually tortured, I get enough of that at home”—but after that woman had administered her painful medicine I had to diddle her just to set the record straight.

Kindly she agreed to let us spend the night in her “work flat”

while she cleared off home with her husband, whose mind must be so broad that John Merrick’s cap would perch on his head like a thimble. Matt has always been obsessed with hygiene and mi-croscopic viruses and such, so was rather anxious about dossing down in a bed where a prostitute tortured perverts. I assured him that he was being insufferable and nimbly leaped between the stiff sheets while he neurotically swathed himself in towels like an Egyptian Rain Man.

When we proudly showed the film to John Noel he said, “We’re not giving that to Channel 4—it should be impounded by the fucking police.”

Nik concurred. “Yeah, it’s true mate, you’ve lost sight of what’s normal.” The fools. Me and Matt insisted that we were ahead of our time and began to wait for conventional morality to catch up with our depraved pilot. I used this time to relearn my craft as a stand-up comedian—tentatively doing material into Dicta-phones, going back to The Enterprise pub, then taking on fi ve-324

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and ten-minute open spots in the same sort of places I’d started off in when I left Drama Centre.

Some of the stand-ups, among my contemporaries, who I particularly admire are Daniel Kitson, Ross Noble and Paul Foot (who I did a double act with for about six months), and Andrew Maxwell, he’s very good too. Simon Munnery and Stewart Lee I like because they both slip you information like Rohypnol then touch you up with the chuckles. On telly I love The Mighty Boosh: Noel Fielding is an angelic dream weaver and Julian Barratt a

world-weary connoisseur. And Garth

Marenghi.

Billy Connolly was the first stand-up I really got into, as a teenager—particularly that special he did on LWT. I love his enthusiasm and spontaneity. He and Richard Pryor (alongside Bill Hicks, of course) were probably the two stand-ups I was keenest to emulate at this stage in my career. Pryor has that anecdotal element too, and I’d always loved the way he acted out different parts to bring the whole thing to life. But the most important thing about him, for me, was the way you could tell so many of the things he talked about were backbreakingly painful—real traumas from his life—that he somehow alche-mized into comedy.

Throughout this period, as I was gradually feeling my way toward a stand-up persona that would work for me, John Noel was not just a patriarch, but a kind of staunch, ever-present, dominating figure in my life. For the first eighteen months after I came out of rehab, he paid my rent and gave me a generous allowance of about a thousand pounds a month, so I could write some new stuff without having to get a job. He nagged me about paying my bills, though.

One morning I was just in my flat, lazing around in my pants, when the doorbell rang. I went and opened it, and there stood a 325

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burly bailiff character in a woolly hat, and some kind of smartly dressed handler; they claimed they were there due to nonpayment of council tax, and they’d have to take either £500, or goods of equivalent value. I nodded politely before slamming the door in their faces; I dislike bailiffs as I remember them turning up when I was busy being a toddler, troubling my mum for money. I called John, who was the barrier between me and problems of this nature. He said, “I fookin’ told you to pay your bills.” Th en

there was another moment when the one who was there for carrying and fighting put his foot in the door and was quite pug-nacious when I tried to shut it. John told me to let him speak to them. I was relieved because he uses willpower to change facts as part of his job.

“You’re gonna have to let them take your TV.” “Oh no, I love that telly, my programs, my precious programs.” They oafed their way in and yobbishly unplugged it from the Sky Box, the Play-Station and the video, knocking loads of things over in the process. I called the council and haughtily said, “I’m sure I’ve paid my council tax, I don’t know what’s going on.”

After they louted out with my TV set, I fought back the tears and rage and went to John Noel’s offices. I phoned the council incessantly, each time more puffed up with rage. “I’ve paid my tax, you better resolve this, I play golf with the mayor.”

I waited while they found my fi le and, when I told them about the company the bailiffs were from—“Camden Reclaim”—they said they’d never heard of it.

I unleashed a decade of distilled fury, desperately trying to get my TV back. Then John called me and Nik into his offi ce, sat me

down in front of a portable TV, pressed play on his VCR and, to my astonishment, the image that appeared first was my face—opening the blue front door of my flat in my underpants—then the boorish hateful TV-stealing bastard bailiff s.

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“Well this doesn’t make sense,” I thought, trying frantically to reconfigure my understanding ontology. Then, looking at the smirking Northern faces of John and Nik, the pointless truth began to dawn. Not only had John employed these two actors to come round my house and wind me up, he had also hired three cameras, so he could capture my humiliation from a number of diff erent angles. There was one concealed in the bailiff ’s woolly hat, one in their van and one in the house opposite. He had done this for two reasons: first and foremost for a laugh. He does stuff for a laugh all the time. Nik is a sensitive man and I later learned he’d been against this vindictive and unnecessarily expensive prank, which had employed, in addition to the actors, a producer, a researcher, a runner and several of my neighbors. And a distant second to remind me to control my finances.

I didn’t take this lesson well, my surly response prompting,

“Fookin’ hell Russell, where’s your sense of humor? You’re supposed to be a fookin’ comedian.” I swore revenge. “I’ll get you John, I’ll use my cunning and my talent and I’ll avenge this affront.” John got onto his hindquarters like a bear would. “I’ll use all my resources and power to destroy you.” “ ’Ere you two, pack it in.” Nik, the voice of reason. I’ve yet to get revenge and, since then, John has tried to get that tape broadcast as part of every TV show I’ve done—“Russell, you could put that on Big Mouth, it’d be fookin’ hilarious.”

One of the reasons I’ve found it easy to forgive him for this is that I wouldn’t have been doing that show without him. Because John Noel also looked after Davina McCall and Dermot O’Leary, he was quite powerful in the Big Brother set up. When he found out they were planning a new debate show to accompany it—Efourum, it was called—he put me forward for it. Th e

people making the program knew of my work and my reputation, and were therefore cynical.

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I had to go for an audition where they showed me a bit of footage from a previous Big Brother and I just had to say what I thought about it and muck about with researchers pretending to be guests or audience members. That went really well, but they were seeing lots of people for the job—I think the excellent brown-eyed chum of mine Simon Amstell was one of the final few—and before they would finally off er it to me, John had to sign a personal contract guaranteeing that I’d be no trouble.

John says he always has to convince people that I’m not mad.

This is because I am. A bit. I was first diagnosed as depressive when I was still at Grays school, and our GP said I ought to take some kind of mood-stabilizing drug. When I got arrested and cut myself in the course of that cannabis-farming episode, the police made me see a psychologist—as they always do when you’re self-harming—and he said, “Yeah, you’ve obviously got some form of mental illness.” Then I saw some kind of counselor at drama school and he said I was manic-depressive.

I’ve never had a sustained period of medication for mental illness when I’ve not been on other drugs as well. It’s just not something that I particularly feel I need. I know that I have dramatically changing moods, and I know sometimes I feel really depressed, but I think that’s just life. I don’t think of it as, “Ah, this is mental illness,” more as, “Today, life makes me feel very sad.” I know I also get unnaturally high levels of energy and quickness of thought, but I’m able to utilize that.

I think that’s one of the reasons I adore Tony Hancock so much—not just for his hubris and

self-involvement, but

because there’s something so truthful about the melancholy of him. There’s an episode of Hancock’s Half Hour where he’s talking to Sid James (who I also really love, but not in the same way—just as I’ve always favored Peter Cook over lovely Dudley Moore, who was born at roughly the same time as my dad, and 328

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came from the same place. I suppose I must be more strongly drawn to the romantic Don Quixote archetype than the San-cho Panza realist), and Hancock says, “Oh I might as well do myself in—I might as well just hang myself ”—and, in the end, he did.

When he’s talking about how depressed he is with that hangdog expression and those beautiful glassy eyes—“Oh, stone me”—that is so En glish and so beautiful to me. I’ve always had the analogy that people who are depressed are often funny in the same way that En gland is a seafaring nation because we’re an island; because you adapt to your circumstances, and if you’re miserable you’ve got to become funny to fucking keep afl oat.

I took Ritalin (the stuff they use to calm down hyperactive kids) for a while when I was still using other drugs, and that was awful. The analogy I generally employ for the way it slowed my mind down is that instead of the right word being readily to hand, I’d have to go up in the attic to look for it, but in fact it was more dramatic than that. What it was really like was severing the tendrils from the heavens that connect me to creativity.

When I’m onstage or on TV, and everything’s going well, I feel like there are these electric, celestial tentacles dangling from on high and I can swing on them, like Tarzan on his creepers. But Ritalin severed those tentacles—just lopped them off .

So when I’d finally got myself all clean and free of drugs of all kinds and I finally got that Big Brother job, it looked like a chance to prove myself. It was four shows a week for nearly three months, and it was quite a lot of exposure, not to mention money.

Nik and John filmed me when they told me the news; they’d created such a lovely nurturing environment for me—taking me on daft skiing and snowboarding holidays, even though I can’t do either and bloody hate the cold. They had a camera set up to 329

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record the moment, because they thought I’d start whooping and yelping and leaping about. They were so proud and excited for me, and I just went, “Oh, that’s good.”

When I started doing that Efourum, I always thought I was going to say something mad on air. This anxiety was born of a long history of saying ridiculous things in public. Like that time at the Edinburgh Festival where I’d gone onstage and said odd things about child abuse, expressing complicated views about societal as opposed to individual responsibility: views which when I was on heroin I tended not to express very succinctly, so it came out all aggressive and ill-conceived.

Happily, the first series of Efourum was relatively uneventful, except for when Kitten came on, who was a supposedly radical lesbian anarchist character in the house. Kitten had been thrown out in the first week, and people had told me I needed to watch her. When she came on the show she was being all boisterous and sulky, but I really controlled her, and when she got in a bit of a strop and stood up and walked off the show, I just made a joke about it and carried on.