My Shit Life So Far (13 page)

I hadn’t really planned to go back but Tommy and Jane turned up at my halls of residence and stuck a postcard under my door telling me to get in touch. Within months I was compering the club drunk and they were my surrogate family. There was a regular techie, Chris Cooper, who was a frighteningly degradedlooking 26. He looked like a 26-year-old man from the Middle Ages and spoke in a low, rasping, sexualised whisper. There was a general Man Friday called Mac—a young artist who liked drinking, as opposed to speaking. The whole crew who formed around the place was bonded to it by their love of the club and much greater love of alcohol, drugs and sex.

I quickly learned that there are two types of comedian. The outgoing extrovert performers, they tend to hang around after the show and try to pull women from the audience. And then there
are the quiet, introverted comedians who have wives and families. They tend to shag the barmaids. Over the years the Stand grew to have two full-time clubs—they’re the best in the country, one in Glasgow, one in Edinburgh. I was to form an almost symbiotic relationship with the clubs’ bar staff. I’d often go down to hang out with them after shows, as they never came to the actual show, preferring the company of those who were as jaded and disgusted by stand-up as I was. I depended on the bar staff to get me drugs, and I tried to pump as many of them as I could. If you were to meet the concept of comedy bar staff on the astral plane it would be represented as a giant, drug-encrusted orifice. That didn’t laugh at your jokes. Anyway, I can’t diss comedy bar staff too much; they’ve been good friends to me over the years. And who knows, maybe I’ll need to shag some more of them in the future.

Coming up to the Edinburgh Festival in that first year, it was decided that the Stand would run every night of August so as to ‘steal a march’ on the festival proper. By the time the real thing kicked off we’d done eight nights in a row and were possibly in the advanced stages of alcohol poisoning. I was so bored that I started going through the bins outside the venue to find stuff to talk about. I’d come on wearing discarded specs I’d found in the rubbish and do half the show through an old picture frame.

Edinburgh itself has always felt a bit inauthentic to me. Like the shortbread-tin side of ourselves we use to attract American tourists. To be fair, the Americans do make great comedy audiences during
the festival—always whooping and cheering. I often think that we should be more heavily medicated as a society. I think it’s every patriotic Scot’s duty to help out American tourists. Latch onto them and let them know about your city:

‘This is Princes Street. So called because it’s owned by the pop star Prince. Here, on Calton Hill, there are all kinds of nighttime events and they’re all free! It’s where they held the auditions to find the Bay City Rollers. And here we have Scott’s Monument. Erected to honour James Doohan who played Scotty in
Star Trek
. If you go all the way to the top, there’s an animatronics model of Lieutenant Uhura reading the Federation Charter. Well worth the climb. This statue of Greyfriars Bobby is the actual dog, who was so overcome with grief when his owner died that he threw himself into a cement mixer. This is John Knox’s house—where he lived before he went off to present
Blue Peter
with Shep.’

Tommy decided to start selling luxury filled rolls at the shows. Probably a bit of a surprise to anybody who’d staggered into a dingy basement near a strip club, largely so they could keep drinking, to be confronted with a choice between GruyÈre and French mustard. Tommy became preoccupied with roll sales. How the shows were doing actually became something of a side issue. One night Mac and I started giving away the rolls to the local homeless, who couldn’t understand what any of the fillings were.

‘Brie and avocado!’ offered Mac to a baffled tramp. ‘…That’s eh, cheese and eh…well, avocado.’

Tommy was enraged when he found out. ‘To the homeless! To the fucking homeless?!’ I managed to pacify him by pointing out
that he was Deputy General Secretary of the Scottish Labour Party and he saw the funny side.

A highlight of that period was Tommy’s appearance on
Masterchef
. The show would always do a wee bit of back story with the guests, and Tommy wanted to be thought of as the sort of person who went on country walks with Irish setters. He wasn’t; he was the sort of person who liked to get drunk and sleep late, so he had to scour Edinburgh for dogs to borrow and persuade Jane to be filmed climbing a hill with them. I watched it drunk and felt like I was looking into a weird new dimension. Everyone used to give their dishes fancy French names but Tommy—a dour bastard but still the most cheerful person ever to come out of Ulster—called his things like ‘Pie and Veg’. Gordon Ramsay was the judge and panelled him. This was in the days before Ramsay was allowed to swear, although he looked like he really wanted to.

My drinking certainly seemed to be a lot less out of place in Scotland. Good old Scottish drinking. Other nations think of us as the great party nation. Oh no, that’s Ireland; and they think of us as kind of depressed. I found that I was drinking more and more, and my behaviour was becoming more extreme. Living in the part of the Venn Diagram where ‘Scottish People’ meets ‘Comedians’, nobody noticed. A key skill for alcoholics is to be able to make light of vomiting. ‘I think I was an asset to that barbeque…burp.’ Once I woke up in Tommy and Jane’s and found that I couldn’t see. Eventually, I realised that this was because I wasn’t wearing my glasses. I had a tribal memory of
vomiting out of a window, so I looked out of the window in the living room. There, two floors below, my glasses stood face-up in a puddle of vomit being eaten by a seagull. That served as a sort of wake-up call and five years later I quit.

My main teaching placement was at a school in Muirhouse. It’s quite a deprived part of Edinburgh, near where
Trainspotting
is set. It was a community high school with really brilliant kids. My principal was an amazing woman called Margaret Hubbard, who pioneered media studies in Scotland and was really insistent on teaching kids to question who produced what they were watching and why. She toured primary schools with a class that taught kids to decode children’s programmes. It was called ‘The Ideology of
Postman Pat
’. She was great. The kids told me that occasionally her back gave out and she’d teach them while lying down in the middle of the floor.

Working in that area gave me a real sense of how marginalised a lot of folk are; how completely not invited to the party. Life there wasn’t terrible but a lot of stuff should have been a lot better. A couple of the kids walked me round their area one day, showed me where they hung out, and it just made me really furious at what the world was offering to them. The place was full of nice, spirited kids and their country just didn’t seem to give a fuck about them.

I had to recalibrate my expectations of the children a bit too. A bunch of the first-year guys started talking to me one day about
the actress Isla Fisher, who was in
Home and Away
at the time. ‘Ooh, do you fancy her then?’ I asked, in the teasing manner I remembered my own uncles employing with me. ‘Got a wee crush on her?’ One of them looked up at me baffled, and blinked, ‘Sort of, Sir. Eh, it’s more that we’d all like tae ride her.’

I spent free periods and lunchtimes with the other students on placement. They were three women who were all beautiful in totally different ways, all immaculately dressed in skirt suits from Next. This led to me teaching many of my classes in a disembodied state of sexual reverie. Once, while my second years were reading a poem, I was only brought back to reality by the sound of my own grinding teeth.

I was never much of a teacher. There were often times when the complete unreality of the whole thing hit me. I’d see myself standing writing at a blackboard like somebody’s teacher. I was somebody’s teacher! It wouldn’t have been a whole lot weirder if I’d quantum leaped into the body of a 1950s housewife. There were only a couple of kids who were really unbearable. I sat them together so that if I felt the need to fart I could walk casually by their table. Kids never really think of teachers as farting, so they’d go absolutely nuts at each other.

There was a wee guy in my third year who was unbelievably gay. Well, maybe not actually gay but certainly destined for gayness. Once, I set that class a short story and got the usual selection of stuff about scoring the Cup Final winner for Hibs or Hearts, winning the lottery and so on. He produced this tempestuous forty-pager about a woman trying to make her way in the
fashion industry of Milan. She was designing a collection on a shoestring while her Cuban ex-lover attempted to blackmail her for sex. He succeeded actually. He ‘inserted himself inside her’ in a shower, in the one scene that the author’s heart didn’t seem to be in.

At the end of that placement there was a school talent show. I did my stand-up act. I’d been going for maybe six months then, so I was alright at it. The place was packed out with kids and former pupils. It was a really wild gig, playing to little kids who responded like a drunken crowd on a Saturday night. You haven’t lived until you’ve done a putdown on a 13-year-old boy from your form class. Obviously, it was about him being a virgin. He’d probably had more sex than me.

I couldn’t stand most of the students on the English teaching course so I’d hang out with three or four bad hats. Living in halls with people who aspired to teach physical education was fairly wearing on the soul and I was really looking forward to the course finishing.

I hated it at the time, but I think I’d find teacher training unbearable now, especially as bankers are being encouraged to go into teaching. Can you imagine a banker in the school room? ‘OK, so let me demonstrate. I have no apples and you have thirty apples. You give me all your apples. So I have all the apples. HA HA HA LOSERS! I HAVE ALL THE APPLES! SCUM!’ Before taking a pension of four million apples.

Some schools are hiring bouncers to control disruptive pupils when teachers are off sick and supply teachers are brought in.
Classes are a lot better behaved now that pupils are barred from getting in for wearing trainers, and ugly kids are being sent to schools around the corner.

My final placement was a wash-out. The department didn’t want a student there and actually stopped speaking to me. I enjoyed that immensely, often going up to the other teachers and telling them the whole psychedelic plot of a Michael Moorcock book I was reading while they attempted to ignore me. It involved a parallel 1970s earth where the British Empire spanned the whole globe with the aid of giant Zeppelins. The only guy who spoke to me was a predatory homosexual. I finally worked out the key phrase that would make him go away. It turned out to be, ‘I think that you are a predatory homosexual.’

So with nowhere else to finish the final placement, I got put into a primary school for a month or so. Primary teaching isn’t a real job. Getting children to make paintings out of seashells and glitter? That’s pretty much what they’d do if you weren’t in the room. Also, you don’t need to know that much. Just tell them loads of lies and they’ll believe you. I fought against the temptation to tell them that face-painting was invented by the Jews during the war to hide from the Nazis. ‘You are mistaken, Herr Kommandant! We are not Jews! We are TIGERPEOPLE…except him, he’s Spiderman.’

Nowadays, the curriculum in primary schools is to be revamped so that children are familiar with blogging, podcasts, Wikipedia and Twitter. Aren’t kids already familiar with all of these? The average primary-school child is already more relaxed
with computers than a NASA scientist. Talk about putting a strain on the teachers. The only people qualified to teach children aged 7 about how the internet works are children aged 8. Another problem with this revamping is that information technology is moving so quickly that by the time children leave school, websites like Twitter will be as dead as the dodo. Although pupils won’t have been taught what a dodo is; they’ll be saying ‘as dead as MySpace’. Teaching children about information technology is going to replace fad activities, such as reading books and learning about history. That might seem like a dreadful shame to us, but remember that future generations are going to have to fight the cyber wars and, unfortunately, knowing how to download plans for an electromagnetic pulse disruptor is going to be more useful to them than knowing how long Queen Victoria reigned when they come face to face with an army of giant robotic bees.

Actually, my primary-school placement was a great time for me. Everybody was incredibly tolerant of having an idiot, who couldn’t paint or draw, lumber round their classrooms trying to show them how to paint and draw. During the weekly assembly when hymns were sung, I had to sit outside with a wee Jehovah’s Witnesses boy whose parents didn’t want him to take part for religious reasons. Those were great afternoons: a hundred tiny voices singing to Jesus while this little lad with bottle-top specs questioned me incessantly about my life in the outside world.

He said that I should see him throw a cricket ball. I’ve since discovered that this is an almost genetically innate ability some people have. Ian Botham held the world record for years and
then I think it passed to Ian Botham’s son. Anyway, I wasn’t really supposed to but one day when everybody was singing hymns I got hold of a cricket ball and we sneaked out to the field behind the school. There wasn’t a house for about half a mile. I can still see him launching it like a fucking rocket towards the horizon, beaming up at me as glass broke in the distance. We gave each other that man-shrug that says, ‘Nobody needs to know about this. Let us never speak of it again.’

I’d been going out with a girl since working in mental health, and after I finished teacher training we got married. Why? I was drunk. I was drunk for the courtship, proposal, wedding and most of the year-long marriage itself. I know that I should probably em and ah a few regrets here but, to be honest, drunkenness is quite a good way to approach marriage. Relationships are largely about blotting out other people’s failings, having an idealised version of somebody to relate to. It’s so much easier not to notice those failings when you can’t see your own face in a shaving mirror and sleep like a well-fed hamster. Fuck it, I tried. Oh no, wait a minute. I didn’t.

I read recently that the secret to a happy marriage is for a man to marry a woman who’s far more attractive than him. This is according to the results of a scientific investigation carried out by…a really ugly scientist. This is the follow-up to his earlier studies, ‘Why scientists should mate with supermodels’ and ‘Why men with tiny cocks make the best lovers.’

During the marriage we lived in Bromley. It’s in Kent, but is really a suburb of London. Basically, if you ever have to go there and you really can’t get out of it, kill yourself. I’d kill myself if I had to change trains there. Nobody between the ages of 18 and 30 lives there; only the occasional acid casualty living with their
parents will have failed to get the fuck out at the first opportunity. It’s so incredibly nondescript that I would feel foolish trying to describe it. Avoid.

We had a dog, a little cocker spaniel. As I only worked doing stand-up at weekends, I spent a lot of time with the dog, until I found that I was starting to look and behave like a dog. One day I shaved off all its fur and arranged it in the shape of the dog on the living-room floor, even putting its little collar on. When my wife came home I pretended it had been in an accident and she burst into tears. I still have no idea why that relationship didn’t work out. That dog will be dead now. I’m talking about the spaniel, rather than my ex-wife. I read that the world’s oldest dog just turned 21. It’s a dachshund and it struggles to see, hear and walk. That’s not really a dog is it? That’s a draft excluder that shits itself.

Paul Marsh lived in Bromley at the same time and so we got to hang out a bit. A typical evening involved Paul renting a video that he thought looked good. To me the same video would look like it had been made as a satirical joke about creativity entropy. He would then lose interest in it during the first ten minutes and play his guitar really badly as I watched in rapt horror. Pretty much anything that would normally dissuade you from renting a film will encourage Paul to get it. It’s British? Cool. It’s been directed by Keith Allen’s brother? Yes please. It features a lingering nude shot of an elderly Michael Caine? Give me two. In this, as in so many other ways, Paul has often made me wonder if he is an alien trying to work out what’s normal. There’s a key phrase
that I’ll say one day that will make him think that his cover’s been blown and he’ll have the whole planet incinerated with a few incomprehensible words into his shirt-cuff microphone.

I just couldn’t be arsed getting a teaching job and just drifted into doing comedy full time. I had a contract to do a thing called ‘The Comedy Network’, which was basically a whole load of university gigs. These were incredibly variable. One night you’d be playing packed gigs to 500 people in a theatre set-up, the next you’d be standing in a corner of a freezing bar talking to one table of baffled foreign students. To be honest, it was usually the latter.

My first tour was with Paul Sneddon doing his Vladimir McTavish act, which confusingly is not a character. I compered and the other act was SeÁn Cullen, doing a character called Dame Sybille. He was an old lady of the English theatre relating bizarre and almost entirely improvised anecdotes about her life in show business. It didn’t matter how unpromising the room or the crowd looked, he would improvise almost the entire thing, even though the character had a lot of funny stock lines. He was unbelievably gifted. One particularly grim-looking group, which comprised a handful of science students and the venue bouncers, got treated to a bizarre treatise on Dame Sybille’s life among the Native American Indians. She had been a Dr Moreau-like figure among them and had, for some reason, bred a race of horses with human hands. It ended with a thrilling denouement where
the Indians turn against Dame Sybille and she climbs up a large rock only to hear the horses with their human hands climbing up behind her. The Chief confronts her at the top but says nothing; he simply makes his horse stand on its hind legs and slap her in the face.

There was a gig in Newcastle where they put all the acts up in a flat for a few nights while they worked over the weekend. One morning, this comic got up and told us all about this terrible nightmare he’d had. He’d been booked to do a show in a pub somewhere but there was no stage so he had to stand on bales of straw but there was no microphone, so he just had to shout as people talked at the bar. I pointed out that we’d all done much worse gigs than this in real life. When we got talking, it turned out one guy had done a show standing on top of a car in a car showroom during the day, as people walked by trying to gauge if he was a schizophrenic. Another bloke had done a gig where he turned up only to be bundled into a van and driven up to a group of a dozen elderly people in a car park. The van reversed towards the crowd and the back doors were flung open—him standing slightly hunched in the back doing his act.

I’ve got my own share of horror stories. There used to be a festival in Glasgow called Mayfest and there was some kind of bylaw that if pubs put on entertainment that wasn’t music they would get a late licence for free. I suppose the idea is that boozers would stick on scenes from
Death of a Salesman
and people would be culturally enriched as they got drunk and gubbed handfuls of dry roasted peanuts. In practice, bar owners stuck on
stand-up to exploit the loophole. You’d have to do five minutes so they could get their licence, but it paid £50 and you could do a few in a night. I did one in a big converted church on the South Side. There were about 300 people in on a Saturday night. The DJ just went, ‘Here’s a comedian’ and handed me his mic, which was tethered to the mixing deck by about two feet of cord. I crouched there and did some jokes and everybody seemed to be laughing uproariously, albeit slightly in the wrong places. When I got off, one of the punters explained that everybody was laughing at a laser that somebody had centred on my forehead, making it look like I was in the sights of a sniper’s rifle.

The worst gig I did was one in the Harbour Arts Centre in Irvine. There had been a music festival on somewhere during the day and they just let all the festival-goers in for free. The organiser looked out into the room and gave me this little satisfied nod. It was like she was saying, ‘If there’s one thing I like to see before a gig, it’s bodies swaying and lurching around the room like a challenging level in a zombie game.’ She got up and for some reason tried to do a raffle, then it was me. I think I tried a putdown on some heckler and he just walked up onto the stage and started screaming—it was a comprehensive emotional breakdown of some kind. There was actually foam on his mouth and I just stood there and watched him, suddenly completely bored. I managed to get him to sit down just by pointing wordlessly at his empty chair, like he was a trained animal. In reality, this cunt could only dream of the education that had been lavished on a good sniffer dog. It was hopeless. I managed to get a bit of hush,
then said, ‘You people need to get yourself a fucking karaoke machine’, dropped the mic and walked off through this booing mob.

What I’d forgotten was the rider. I got outside and then had to walk calmly back through the crowd to get the box of booze from the dressing room. People were going nuts, screaming in my face and stuff. Fuck it, I was going to need to drink if I was staying in Irvine. I was staying next door in the B&B and so, it turned out, was a lot of the audience. I woke up the next day, having drunk the rider, to see that I had piled all the furniture in the room against the door to thwart their efforts to get in there and kill me. I had no memory of what must have been a reasonably challenging evening. Good old booze.

I’d recommend that everybody try bombing on stage at least once. People are always chasing new highs; what about new lows? I can assure you that dying on your arse is a low you won’t believe. I heard of a guy who died during a benefit gig for victims of miscarriages of justice. An old guy came up and put his arm round him at the bar. He felt a bit better until he realised that he had done so badly he was being commiserated with by one of the Birmingham Six.

I played for a big chain of clubs called Jongleurs for a bit. They’d only book me for their easier clubs and always put me on first. I loved that. I’d have hated to get any more work from them; there wasn’t a moat and chicken wire across the front of their stages but you felt it would have helped sometimes. They were really strict about everybody doing twenty minutes. I was terrified
that they’d promote me to their rougher venues or to headlining the ones I was doing, so I always did as short a set as possible. In fact, if I thought it was going too well I’d stop doing jokes and just chat about my day for a bit.

There was a rough venue I’d compere a lot called The Frog and Bucket, in Manchester. It’s on a really rough street, the sort of place you’d go to hire a hitman. Once I got mugged when I was going down there. Two junkies grabbed me; they both had knives but I managed to somehow wriggle free and get to the front door of the club. They had some truly startling security at that club and even in the midst of the shock of it all, I laughed to see some full-on maniac of a doorman with a telescopic truncheon run off up the road looking for the guys.

‘Gig on the Green’ was a festival that used to be on Glasgow Green in the summer. An interesting part of town, it meant that there was a broad mix of studenty, music-loving types and people who were there to rob them. I turned up and the tent was packed with people waiting for the compere Phil Kay, who is hugely loved in Scotland for being an unpredictable genius and maniac. Phil was late and the organiser just wanted me to go straight on, but I got them to hold it for a bit. Eventually, Phil turned up and just walked straight on to this huge, football-ground roar. The first thing you could hear as it died down was one of the crowd shouting, ‘Show us your dick!’ Phil immediately replied, ‘I’ll show you it if you get up here and wank it for me!’ and actually got it out. There was a big gasp from the crowd and this bloke, fair play, decided he was going to honour his commitment to get up there
and wank it for him. Realising he’d need some momentum to get past security, he sprinted right at the stage and was in the middle of an impressive leap as two bouncers intercepted him and drove him face first into the ground like a fencepost. All I could hear through the chaos was ‘…please welcome Frankie Boyle!’ I shook hands with Phil as I took to the stage, trying not to look at his exposed penis.

A weird side of stand-up is that you get to spend a lot of time in places that nobody ever goes. You wait to go on in corridors filled with beer barrels, or rehearse on fire escapes outside venues. The same is true of the places you go to on your way there—the motorway services, the coffee shops in railway stations. I’m probably one of the only people in the country who knows this, but Leicester station has the most purgatorial cafÉ in the UK. It has the usual depravity of fruit machines and Formica tables but seasons it with a set of framed photos running all around the walls of famous people who come from Leicester. Gary Lineker, he’s from Leicester. So is David Attenborough and the snooker player Willy Thorne. The fact that none of these people chose to stay in Leicester is irrelevant. So what if they thought that it was better to move away from Leicester? The final face is Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man. It says a lot when a town takes pride in being the birthplace of a hugely deformed circus freak. Even he pissed off to London. And it’s not even him; it’s a photo of John Hurt in the movie. The UK’s National Space Centre is in Leicester, because proximity to the town gives scientists an added incentive to come up with technology to get off the planet.

Dope smoking is similar to stand-up in that way. You get to see a lot of unusual psychogeography, smoking joints in alleyways and on patches of waste ground. I remember once getting stoned behind an old tumbledown wall in a Glasgow park and thinking that I probably had my own name in the language of the local stray cats. Another time there was a murderer on the run in Glasgow and every time I went for a joint I’d panic, thinking ‘If I was a murderer this is exactly where I would hide!’

Travelling around Britain as a stand-up I really noticed how public space has been colonised. Every park or public garden seems to be seen by councils as a missed opportunity to sell lattes and Cornettos. I remember reading some Scottish politician bemoaning the fact that Loch Lomond attracted hordes of visitors but didn’t have anything for them to buy. They built a big shopping centre on the banks and of course nobody shops there. Because it’s a shopping centre and they’ve turned up to see a fucking lake. I hate that attitude of wondering how you can make things pay. It’s a sickness. Queuing in a railway station to pay 30 pence to take a piss makes me feel like a shambling animal in an abattoir. And Ryanair have recently announced that they are going to charge passengers to use their toilets, although they seem to prefer it when people refer to them as planes. A pound to go to the loo on their planes?! Michael O’leary has obviously never eaten his own airline food. How long before he installs coin meters in the chairs just to keep the plane flying?

Another thing I soon learned from my early days on the road is that a tiny but determined minority of stand-ups are compulsive
liars. Everybody knows who these guys are and most people really look forward to car journeys with them, just for the sheer, wild, Michael Moorcockesque unreality of it all. There was one guy who told me that he was a black belt in aikido, but had to retire after cutting off his big toe with a sword. As he sat in front of me wearing sandals. He also told me a story about a friend of his who jumped off the Pompidou Centre in Paris into a bucket of water.