My Shit Life So Far (22 page)

Traveller:
Please can I just buy a train ticket to Salisbury!?

Attendant:
I’m sorry, we close at half-past two.

Traveller:
Well, what have you been doing for the last ten minutes.

Attendant:
Humouring you.

Traveller:
No you haven’t.

Attendant:
Sorry, my mistake. I’ve been humouring myself. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to write a letter to my MP asking for three pints of semi-skimmed milk and a yoghurt.

Obviously Scottish trains have given me some glimpses of Lovecraftian horror. Like the time I saw a businessman trying to chat a woman up by telling her about a free-kick he’d scored at five-a-side that lunchtime.

‘Bang. Right in the top corner, darling.’

Or the drunken bams who met at my table on a train to Aberdeen and explicitly and loudly agreed to shag each other when they got off the train.

‘Life’s too short,’ the woman drawled at me. It will be for you, you AIDS-chasing scumbag.

Having done the festival for a number of years, I always try to stay out of it as much as possible. Like a lot of locals, I find it a bit of a pain in the arse. Yes, it’s good that you can go to see some great shows but having your city look like the evacuation of Saigon is a pretty high price to pay for that. One week, I played a couple of late-night shows at the EICC. There were break dancers on before me. The predominantly Scottish crowd were pretty amazed, but then it was definitely the first time they had seen more than one black person in a room.

I have to say that during the festival the late shows generally start to bite. These are the gigs you do to try to plug your show, or make a bit of spending money. I usually have a Red Bull before every show but it always catches up with me. I always looked forward to the final week of the festival when I struggle to speak because my throat contains my own poisoned pancreas.

That year, I took the unusual step of employing a boy on work experience. He wanted to learn how to become a comedian, so I took him to a bunch of shows to train him up. Hopefully he can replace me after the heart attack/stroke/lone gunman that is surely just around the corner now. I would honestly love to franchise my act out and let someone like this kid take the bullet/lawsuit/fatal sexual disease that I so richly deserve. A lot of comics kindly agreed to talk to him about what they do. While secretly suspecting that I am a predatory homosexual. For all the industry bullshitters in town, at some level the Fringe is still like a medieval circus for the performers. Subconsciously, we are allowing promoters, agents, venues to
make a lot of money from us in exchange for us being allowed to get wrecked for a month.

I have to say that I find the adverts of a lot of female performers at the festival depressingly sexualised. Are these posters telling me I should go to see someone just because they have nice tits? I will, and that makes it even worse. It would be good to see a female performer who had the courage to have a poster where their looks weren’t used as a selling point. That would turn me on even more.

Not learning is clearly quite a big part of my personality. I’ve always hated doing festivals, so I went to Ireland for the Kilkenny Festival. I made the mistake of flying, despite being utterly terrified. I’ve never managed to overcome my fear—generally there’s nowhere I want to visit so much that I’m willing to be fired towards it in a tin box full of other people’s farts.

The security now is as frightening as the flight. You’re not allowed to bring fluids on the plane in case you make an improvised bomb from Coca-Cola and iPod parts. Who’s training Al-Qaida these days, Johnny Ball? If you really want to bring a plane down, get a normal bottle of Sunny Delight and shake it. Of course, airport security is even tighter if you look vaguely Middle Eastern. If you’ve got a turban and a beard, you’re about six months away from having to fly naked on a clear plastic plane.

I can’t begin to explain the different levels of increasingly wild paranoia that flying brings out in me. You think you’re scared of flying? Frightened of turbulence maybe? I panic every second of the ascent as I fear that the plane might contain an altitude-
triggered bomb—something that may not even exist, for all I know. I always fear our own government agencies more than ’terrorists’. You’re looking for possible Muslim extremists on your flight? I’m looking for guys who look like they used to be in the army but now have cancer. I spent the whole of the flight to Ireland eyeballing a little bald man who had a quite futuristic pen that I felt might double up as some kind of detonator. He was reading the Bible, which didn’t help. People say they find prayer reassuring, but if the pilot came on the intercom and told you to put your seatbelts back on, would you really be happy to hear him tailing off into a few verses of the ‘Our Father’? Still, not quite as frightening as him bursting into something from the Koran.

What would be typical behaviour for people who are going to blow up a plane? Apparently, American Airlines are working on cameras which would monitor our faces on flights to check for telltale signs of nervousness. Good job they’ve not installed those yet. On the flight to Ireland I gave a performance that saw me gibbering like Dustin Hoffman in
Rainman
. I’d currently be doing a ten-year stretch in one of America’s underwater prison cities.

After the terror of the flight, I did the Kilkenny Festival with adrenalin levels most people will only ever achieve during a rape. Everybody there is incredibly nice, and the whole thing has a real party feel. Being a non-drinker made me feel like I was keeping one of the thousands of alcoholic comedians on the circuit away from the time of their life. The drinking was astonishing—even to someone from Glasgow. One night I had to hurdle a guy who was on all fours to get into the hotel.

Typically, you do a bunch of shows there over maybe five days. The first one I did was compered by an act that was an Irish guy pretending to be a German. He auctioned off a bunch of those crap CDs you get free with newspapers, some dishcloths and a whole load of car-boot-sale stuff. It went on for ages and he raised something like a few hundred euros. There was a real tension in the crowd as to where he was going with this. Then, quite suddenly, he gave the money to some woman in the front row and fucked off. What a great way to get introduced. I was almost crying with laughter as I walked up. The woman didn’t pay any attention while I was on; she was just sitting there wondering why the fuck he’d given her all those euros.

I got back from Kilkenny to the news that Tony Blair had finally stood down as prime minister. I liked those photos the tabloids used to run showing how Tony Blair had aged over his ten years in power. Essentially, we were being ruled by a slightly effeminate talking skeleton. I think that this withering came through his addiction to power. As a weak-willed person drawn towards power his need to ‘keep using the Ring’ left him shrivelled and spent like Gollum. ‘Tricksy Gordon! Nasssty Chancellor! He wants our Preciousss!’

A poll when Blair left said that 69 per cent of people reckoned Blair’s legacy would be the Iraq War. I think that ignores his real record of achievement in dismantling the Labour movement. It’s amazing to think that the huge effort he went to creating a massive cash-for-honours scandal will be overshadowed. Blair was said to be saddened that he hasn’t managed to serve
for as many years as Thatcher. Instead he will have to content himself with having killed more women and children than Genghis Khan. Ironically, for a man who is so obsessed with legacy, his memory will live on longer than most politicians—as a ghost story that Iraqi mothers use to frighten their children.

That said, I do think that Blair stands a good chance of success in his new role of Peace Envoy. There’s a real chance that all those different groups in the Middle East will join together to try and kill him. In six months time he could be putting an end to years of suffering as he is sacrificed on an altar in the centre of Baghdad while everyone celebrates like it’s the end of a
Star Wars
movie. It’s said that he might help bring peace to the Middle East in the same way he helped the peace process in Northern Ireland. Then again, he didn’t bomb Belfast with depleted uranium shells and hang Gerry Adams in a shed while someone filmed it on a mobile phone. I think that might have put a bit of a dent in the Good Friday Agreement.

I was supposed to fly out to do the Montreal Festival after Kilkenny but cancelled it. I decided that I was never going to fly again and I never have. I feel a lot more relaxed since I made the decision. A lot of what I thought was stress turned out to be simply the horror of having a flight coming up, so I’m delighted to have stopped. Also, I won’t be dying in a fireball at minus 60 degrees any time soon. Of course, everyone I met who went to Montreal that year would bang on about how it was the best year ever and how they all got to hang out with Billy Connolly! As the great man himself might have said in my position, ‘Fuck Off!’

Mock the Week
had become inexplicably popular, so I went on a massive tour around Britain. I think it was 135 dates in just over a year. To be honest I lost count, along with my appetite, sex-drive and desire to go on living. We did it in two legs. The Scottish leg had the Reverend Obadiah for support and we drove about in a camper van along with a chef (an art student we recruited at a party) and a masseuse (an art student we recruited at a party). How much damage would you imagine Jim could do to a crappy camper van in three weeks? Six grand you say? Spot on.

The idea was to have some fun and we brought a friend to film it as an extra for the DVD. I’d forgotten that this was Scotland in the middle of winter and we all teetered on the brink of a group nervous breakdown. It seemed like I was the only non-drug user on the tour, so I’d get up and go for bracing morning walks while almost everyone else slept off the combination of ecstasy, cocaine and ketamine apparently know as ‘chaos’. The gigs themselves were pretty good. We did a bunch of places nobody had ever heard of bar European funding bodies, who apparently love to throw up a 200-seat theatre in the middle of a wilderness where Ray Mears would starve to death.

We noticed something that set the tone for the whole tour. The shows sold out quickly. I’m really not complaining; the memory
of nobody coming to my Fringe shows is a vivid one and I can’t say how much I appreciate anyone parting with their money to see me. Trouble was, everything gets sold on the internet nowadays, so the people who’d get the tickets were worthy, organised types, the opposite of my target audience. I’d try to bam up front rows that were entirely composed of slightly different types of accountant. The shows still went well, but I got the feeling that the people who would have really loved it, the stoners and Goths and nutjobs, just weren’t in the room.

The second leg was in England with my good friend Martin Bigpig. Martin is a big, tattooed Irishman with an enormous red beard. He started out in circuses and then went into streetperforming. Finally, he went into comedy and it seemed like a piece of piss because he didn’t have to juggle anything sharp or burning, or ride a unicycle while he did it. When I was starting out, Martin was the comedian who influenced me the most. He brought the mixture of audience stuff and prepared stuff that worked in street-performance into the world of club comedy. The sort of structure that you see a lot of acts working with now—doing audience stuff, and having bits of their acts where they can refer back to audience characters they’ve built up—is something that he brought to alternative comedy. Of course there was a little bit of stuff like that going on anyway, but I honestly think comedy clubs would be a fair bit different today without Martin.

We’re good mates and I’d say Martin is pretty upbeat, buoyant even, and I’m not, but I am pretty philosophical. Even so, the tour was absolutely fucking harrowing. Martin got me through it
in the way that an explorer might haul his friend’s corpse out of a jungle. The relentless travelling and Chinese food took its toll, and we started to go to the hotel gyms and pools every day as we sensed the real possibility that the tour might break us.

We tried to think of anybody who toured a lot and still looked fit, deciding that if we just asked ourselves what they would do in any given scenario we would be able to survive the whole thing. Bruce Springsteen was who we settled on and we genuinely made every decision from then on based around what we thought he might do. Often we would waste quite a bit of time when we should have been in the gym arguing about whether Bruce Springsteen would get a sandwich from a garage, or whether he’d try to find a restaurant in the next town.

We had a fictitious tour manager who we’d talk endlessly about as well. Little Chris was a huge, black American guy who had always just left when you came into a room. We’d regale each other with stories about how much he’d hated breakfast, or how he’d popped out to set up our afterparty in Telford. If that tour had lasted five more dates we’d have killed someone.

One problem we had was that people just kept going for a piss during the gigs. Some of those shows were like a bedwetters’ convention. In York, there was loads of heckling which was fun at first, and just everybody kept incessantly going to the toilet. I think people were starting to enjoy getting laid into. Trouble is after about the thirtieth time there’s really not much more you can say about it and it really disturbed the rhythm of the show. At the end, I went into a big, long bit about how I had a part in a movie
where I play a character from York. I told them I had a voice coach and had been working really hard on getting the accent just right, asking would it be OK if I tried it out to see what they thought. Misguidedly, I then went into a really prolonged impression of a spastic. Still getting hate mail from York.

It was only a short while into the tour when my second child was born. My partner really wanted me to be involved in the birth so there was a particularly horrible build-up. One day, we got the bus to an old woman’s house and she gave us a mad talk about childbirth. This involved her putting on Native American music (it wasn’t called America till Whitey got there. I hate this term and prefer the more politically correct Genocidal Residue. Fuck it, let’s go with Red Indian) and then lying on the floor, splaying her legs and holding an actual human pelvis, from a skeleton, over her fanny. That afternoon really went by quite slowly. Also, I’m not sure that the Red Indians had access to reverb technology. I’m sure those CDs are overproduced.

On the day my son was born I came back from a show, sat in the hospital through the labour, then had to go do another show a couple of hours after he was born. I said to everybody that obviously it wasn’t as hard as giving birth. Actually, I felt that it was. Doing the show right after the birth was really weird, running through jokes like I was in a dream and just hoping the right words would come out. I was in the same clothes that I’d been in since the previous night. I said to my partner that the audience could probably smell me. She laughed, ‘They could probably smell me.’

Earlier this year a 66-year-old woman became the oldest new mum in Britain after giving birth to a baby boy. I’m amazed she needed to have a Caesarean section though—you’d think at 66 she would have needed some masking tape down there just to stop it falling out. She said the most important thing is that she is able to give the baby a normal, happy childhood. Which he will have—right up until she dies. It’s going to be unusual having someone in their 70s picking up a child from school who’s not a paedophile.

I’ve been touring a lot since my children were born but I still think I’ve raised them well. The most important thing for a young child is that they get to use their imagination. If their daddy’s not there, that leaves a hell of a lot to the imagination. Also, any time they write and ask me about myself, I say I’m a Transformer. Let their little minds run riot! But at least I’m not like the father of Chantelle Steadman’s baby. DNA tests proved that 13-year-old Alfie Patten was not the father and that the actual dad, 15-year-old Tyler Barker, was facing up to the ‘reality of fatherhood’. That’s if your definition of fatherhood is being a child who neither supports nor lives with his baby who’s gone into hiding with her nationally infamous 15-year-old mother. His experience of fatherhood couldn’t be less like reality if he birthed a child from his right thigh and left it to be suckled by mountain lions. He said that he and his girlfriend were going to share the looking after of their child—share it with the social services, that is. It could be the first case of a child being taken into care with their parents. As the girl may have slept with other young boys, Eastbourne
Council demanded a paternity test. Why? So the CSA can demand they pay three packets of ‘Monster Munch’ a week in maintenance? David Cameron said he blamed Gordon Brown! Christ, is there anyone this girl hasn’t slept with?

My tour ended on a fairly bizarre note. The final gigs were at the Hammersmith Apollo in December 2008. Right at the start of the show a drunk ran up onstage dressed as Santa. I made it clear I wasn’t particularly amused and eventually he turned round and started to dismount from the high stage. Seizing the moment I gave him a cowardly shove in the back, so he landed painfully on the floor. As I turned to the baffled crowd I saw the shocked face of a 10-year-old boy, who’d just watched me scream ‘Fuck off!’ at Santa.

When the DVD of my tour launched, I entered show business properly for the first time, and was doing the endless, pointless interviews with local radio and phone interviews with the
Daily Star
’s TV supplement. The real problem, other than the fact that nobody reads, listens to or cares about any of this shit, was that after talking to more than two or three people I would invariably lose it and start lying or just spouting the plots of my favourite comic books as if they were things that have happened to me. I sat in an office in a warehouse on an industrial estate going pretty full-on mental for about a week. Here’s an example of a phone-interview transcript:

1. Who’s your favourite
Star Wars
character, and why?

-3PO, although I hate it when he rapes those student nurses. Often, when I talk about this to friends, we wonder if it was actually
Star Wars
that I watched.

2. When were you last sick?

Towards the end of a brutal bestiality scene in what may have been
The Empire Strikes Back.

3. If you could have a super power, what would it be?

To travel between the dimensions at will, always uncertain whether my power is actually just schizophrenia.

4. Would you rather have no legs or no arms?

I reckon no arms would be easier as I could still keep my hobbies, hillwalking and masturbating with my feet.

5. What makes a kick-arse night out kick proper arse?

Ecstasy. I’m supposed to say good mates or something, right? On ecstasy I could have a kick-arse night out with Ronan Keating and Ariel Sharon.

6. What is the first album you ever bought?

Buddy Holly’s
Greatest Hits
in Woolworth’s. The assistant sniggered at me for buying it, but later that year she was bending over stacking shelves and I saw one of her tits. Swings and roundabouts.

7. What would your funeral be like?

A zombie-themed fancy-dress affair where the mourners eat rice pudding from my open skull.

8. Who’s the biggest arsehole famous person you’ve ever met?

I try to see the good in everyone. I struggled a bit with Dom Jolly though, the talentless fat cunt.

9. Have you got any phobias?

I am terrified of heterosexuals, going senile and heterosexuals.

10. Without looking, how many MySpace friends have you got?

Thousands—and I’m certain that one day one of them will kill me. Unless I start wearing a condom.

11. What’s the worst idea you’ve ever had?

Killing Jill Dando.

12. What’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever said to a girl you liked?

‘Jill, I think Crete is a marvellous holiday destination. If you don’t give it a good review, who knows what I’ll do.’

13. What’s the most illegal thing you (or ‘a friend of yours’) have ever done?

Probably a bit of bullying I did on a little ginger kid at school. Not technically illegal until they can produce a body. As I tell his family when they picket my gigs, he might have just run away.

14. What have you seen that you really wish you could un-see?

Bonekickers
.

15. What’s the worst injury you’ve ever received, and how did it happen?

I once broke my wrist trying to mime the word ‘fisting’ during charades.

16. Why should people buy your new DVD?

It’s pretty much a shot-for-shot remake of
The Poseidon Adventure
, but with mice.

17. What’s the punch line to your favourite-ever joke?

‘That’s the last time I do any experiments on…GIANT CRAB ISLAND!!!’

It was around this time that the whole Jonathan Ross/Russell Brand debacle was hitting the news, and I got dragged into it by a variety of idiots. Russell Brand is actually one of my favourite celebrities. The manner of his death will give Michael Hutchence back his dignity. I think that whole ‘debate’ was just a distraction from the banking crisis, the war and the looming recession. It was something everybody could have an opinion about that we all knew didn’t actually matter in the real world, where things had just started to look pretty scary. Anyway, the Director-General of the BBC was on
Newsnight
and the presenter brought up me doing a gag on
Mock the Week
. It was ‘Things the Queen Wouldn’t Say’ and I’d said something along the lines of ‘I am now so old that my pussy is haunted’. The Director-General gave a look much like someone had set fire to his arse hair. For anyone who wasn’t a broken-spirited, thought-collar-wearing shitsack of conformity, the whole thing was quite a good laugh really.

Anyway, it was a joke that went out about two years ago. My argument would be that if the Queen’s pussy wasn’t haunted then, it must be by now.