My Shit Life So Far (7 page)

There was a thing I got into the habit of doing that was basically the start of my comedy career. There were two attractive girls in the debating society and I knew the entrance they used to come into school. I’d hang around there most days, trying to look like I’d just turned up for school early and hung around near the gates without going in, like a lunatic. Each time I would have some little stories and jokes and stuff that I’d go over in my head on the way to school. It wasn’t that I thought I could get anywhere with them—they were a couple of years older and one of them was dating a huge and disturbing Chinese guy who worked as a bouncer. It was more that making women laugh was pretty much all they’d let me do to them—so I really threw myself into it.

I was always able to make people laugh. In fact I remember at school being able to make them laugh really hard. Imagine nowadays if you were only happy with your gig if you’d made someone spit their drink out, or made milk shoot out of their nose. If a joke worked with one girl I’d keep it and maybe add something for the next one—working a little bit like a real comedian and driven by horniness. Actually, exactly like a real comedian.

I was really into
The Comic Strip Presents
when it was on Channel 4 and
Saturday Night Live
. I seemed to be the only person in school who watched any of that stuff. It’s easy to forget that while alternative comedy is now the mainstream, at the time it was a real minority interest.

It was watching Ben Elton that first made me aware of green issues. People give him a lot of stick now because he wrote
some Queen musical that causes cancer, but I think he did a really good job of introducing green politics to a generation. Also, he wrote
Blackadder
, so he could write a musical about Ian Huntley and he’d still be alright by me. I’m always amazed that people aren’t more horrified by things like the ice caps melting.

To me it feels like living in a nightmare. It’s just as well Scott of the Antarctic wasn’t setting off nowadays. It’d be a pretty boring journal. ‘Day 1. Got there. Day 2. Came home. Went to pub.’ Now if you get to the South Pole you can bring it home in a flask.

As soon as the sun comes out we are faced with the usual tabloid headlines about scorching weather. Wouldn’t it be great for a tabloid front page to cover hot weather with a picture of a girl in a bikini with the headline ‘Global Warming Forces Desperate Polar Bears to Eat Each Other’? Changing weather patterns mean that animals are going to start to migrate differently. Personally I look forward to seeing Bill Oddie going to do some birdwatching in Norfolk and getting his head ripped off by a puma.

I’m not sure I trust science to get us out of this mess. We tend to put all our faith in science these days. Scientists are planning to build a vault on the moon that contains details of crop growing and instructions for metal smelting so that survivors of a nuclear war or an asteroid collision could restart civilisation. There’s just one small problem I see with this plan—how are a ragtag band of survivors meant to access a vault on the fucking moon? I already have a detailed plan of action for coping with
global warming when it really starts to affect Scotland. I’m going to remove a couple of jumpers.

Actually, I think the most sensible thing to do to find out how the planet is going is to have a friend who’s a scientist. When he takes up smoking it’s time to worry. Or when he suddenly goes for a visit to the moon with all of his scientist friends.

‘Just going for the weekend, John? You seem to be taking a lot of canned goods…?’

I’d say my overall outlook for the future is pessimistic. Here’s a theory of mine. You know how years ago David Bowie used to always be slightly ahead of the curve? He covered the Velvet Underground just before people heard of them, and seemed to be riding each new wave of the zeitgeist? Even
Tin Machine
could be seen as him trying to do grunge slightly too early. Well, my theory is the government captured Bowie and replaced him with a lookalike. They keep the real Bowie in a big glass prison room, like Hannibal Lecter, so they can observe him and predict future trends. I reckon everybody is shitting themselves because recently Bowie developed metal skin and turned Chinese.

The fact there were pretty girls in the debating society convinced me to join and I loved it. In it, the hideous flaws in my personality suddenly turned into virtues. I looked at the debating society in the way that a bank robber looks at an easy score, trying to spot the catch. I was a facetious, argumentative bastard and it turned out that it was a game that required you to be a facetious,
argumentative bastard. The only other boys looked like even bigger losers than me. It just seemed too perfect.

The woman who ran the debating society was called Pat Slaven. She is a truly wonderful woman and if I ever invent a time machine I will go back in time and marry her. Right after I’ve finished fucking the young Diana Rigg.

I took the whole thing really seriously, as I honestly saw it as a chance to impress girls. Yes, I saw what is now clearly the club least attractive to women as a chance to impress girls. How many people have lost their virginity to a woman who gasped ‘Great speech!’ as they came? Possibly less than none. I’d just do lots and lots of jokes, largely because I rarely understood the arguments involved.

There was a real ethereal quality to the days of the big debates. I’d wake up really early with nerves and find my mum warming my good shirt by the fire and putting my shaving stuff out. It was a lot like doing comedy gigs later on: the nervousness dominated my whole day. On the bus trip to the school we’d be debating against, everyone else would be having a laugh but I’d be trapped in my fear bubble. Afterwards I’d be really excited, high and relieved, and there were often girls to talk to on the way back. I’d be back in my jokey mode, looking for the funny side of everything in the way that only an ingratiating virgin can. In hindsight, they must have all have thought that I was some kind of manic depressive.

We were one of the few comprehensives who’d do well in the debates, because we had such a good coach. After the first
round or two you’d be up against a bunch of public schools.

Scotland’s public schools are pretty Lovecraftian: archaic and bizarre institutions dedicated to the production of humourless young adults. I’d never send my kids to public school, partly because I think it’s socially divisive, but mainly because I think they generally produce shallow people. When my kids have their nervous breakdown in their twenties (everybody seems to have a nervous breakdown before thirty, but culturally we are trained not to mention this) I don’t want the friends they have to fall back on to be a bunch of cunty, CV-padding, tax-discussing Scottish dentists and lawyers.

I used to quite enjoy standing underneath baroque paintings of former headmasters, debating in my stiff C&A shirts and NHS specs. I felt like Alf Tupper, Tough of the Track. We won a few gongs and got a glimpse into another world, a world of different nerds. Nerds who knew that their school bullies would one day work for them.

I suppose debating was my first real encounter with the class system. There was a guy from one public school we knocked out of a competition who refused to shake hands afterwards because we were comprehensive kids. The next time I saw him he was a left-wing student leader organising an antipoll tax sit-in at Glasgow Uni. I sometimes wonder if anybody really has principles or if they’re all just chasing different kinds of sex. Life isn’t just a choice between Conservatives and Socialist Workers. It’s also a choice between fucking a muscular polo player at an Oxbridge ball or being rattled in a
caravan by your yoga teacher at a weekend of environmental awareness.

We are, of course, ruled by genetic inbreds. Most aristocrats have DNA so damaged they could join the X-Men. When I walk through Knightsbridge I feel like I’m on a mini-break in Chernobyl.You can tell what class you are by this simple test. There’s a fox in your back garden. You’re upper class if you get on a horse and chase it with a pack of hounds. You’re middle class if you make your children draw a picture of it to send into
Blue Peter
. You’re working class if you beat it to death with a shovel and make soup out of it. Upper-class people go to Oxford or Cambridge, middle-class people go to any other university. Working-class people go the university of hard knocks: Dundee Abertay. If my grandfather had died working down the Strathblane coffee mines, if Strathblane even had a coffee mine, he would be turning in his grave, rather than exposing himself to care workers in an Alzheimer’s hospice, which I believe is what he’s doing right about now.

The thing that really gets me about our upper classes is this: what’s wrong with using an attic to store old lampshades and games of KerPlunk? What’s this obsession with hiding inbred mutant children in the attic? That’s the reason why you never see a member of the upper class in an episode of
Cash in the Attic
.

‘This is a very unusual piece, do you know what it is?’

‘Oh, that’s Edward and Charles, the Siamese twins. I’d quite forgotten they were up here.’

* * *

There wasn’t just a class divide in Glasgow—when I was growing up it was also pretty racist. Asian shopkeepers would get abuse and black footballers had bananas thrown at them. I don’t know if the attitudes behind that have really gone away; maybe people are just better at hiding those feelings.

I used to think of Scotland as particularly racist but when I went to England I found it much the same. The other night a cabbie in London recognised me and asked if I ever got censored on the grounds of political correctness. I mumbled something about occasionally having things toned down and he said:

‘I know. You can’t call a coon a coon or a poof a poof, can you?’

It was amazing. This guy actually lives in a reality where everybody on
Mock the Week
is doing jokes about Obama’s fiscal-stimulus policy and what we’d really rather be doing is saying, ‘He is a coon.’ Of course, neither country has anything on Ireland, which has a set of cheerfully racist attitudes worthy of the Third Reich. Then of course, there’s Australia. It’s ironic that Australians are so racist. Kind of hard to defend the proposition that black people don’t belong in your country, when the white people keep dying from skin cancer.

When I watched the infamous
Celebrity Big Brother
that featured the bullying of Shilpa Shetty I started to consider that I might be one of the few people who isn’t into racism and that I had totally underestimated its current level of coolness. One thing is certain, it doesn’t do ratings any harm so we’re going to try to build as much racism into the next series of
Mock the Week
as
possible. Naturally, Hugh Dennis has raised objections but that is just the behaviour of a typical Chinky. Racism really does open up new markets to the canny performer. Jade Goody went from being an unknown in India to effigies of her being waved in the streets.

I’ve always been pretty broadminded about other cultures. For instance, I’m in favour of the full-length burqa as it allows me to masturbate in Tescos. The spectacle of British politicians playing to the assumption that we are all racists sickens me. I’ve come up with my own British Citizenship Test exam paper that would help make sure the applicant will fit in with the culture.

1. Spot the difference between these two cartoons of Mohammed.

2. Why has your country never voted for us in Eurovision?

3. Have you ever looked at the ingredients on
Ready, Steady, Cook
and thought ‘I could make a bomb out of that’?

4. You’ve just picked up a newspaper on your way to the Tube. Expecting to be shot?

5. Write down ten well-known British swearwords. On the house of your local paedophile.

6. A TV presenter has been involved in a sex offence. Do you find this (a) horrifying, or (b) a bit of a laugh?

7. Your mother has just died. How long do you spend talking to the doctor about football?

8. If you fail this British Citizenship Test, will you accept a taxi driver’s licence?

Earlier this year Carol Thatcher was booted off
The One Show
for comparing a black tennis player to a golliwog. To be fair she does live in Knightsbridge, so the last time she saw anyone black was probably on a jar of Robertson’s jam in the Seventies.When she saw Obama’s inauguration speech she just thought it was just a long advert for marmalade. Her mother was just as confused. During the Brixton riots Margaret Thatcher thought she was watching the director’s cut of
Noddy
.

Carol Thatcher obviously lives in a twilight world where everyone is a cartoon figure. She probably thought
The One Show
was being presented by Shrek. Actually for months so did I. Carol comes from a different generation; no doubt as a kid she had a golliwog—who shined the family silver, tended to the horses and gave her mum a right good seeing to once a month when Denis had gone to work.

Actually, the Queen recently came under fire for selling golliwogs. A palace spokesman said, ‘We apologise unreservedly. They’re a historical anomaly from another time. But they are the royal family and they’ll do what they like.’ The palace has now banned golliwogs from its royal shop in Sandringham. When Prince Philip heard this he said, ‘Quite right too, and it’s time to add public transport and restaurants to the list.’ Is it the dolls that are offensive or the name? Perhaps they just need to be rebranded. I suggest a name change to ‘Urban Barbie’. Carol believed she was sacked from the BBC because of a longstanding vendetta against her mother. Ridiculous. If the BBC really had a serious grudge against Margaret Thatcher surely they would
have invested billions of the licence fee into developing an injectable dose of Alzheimer’s disease that fellow guest David Frost could have secretly administered to her when she appeared on a 1987 episode of
Question Time
. Oops, have I said too much?