So Me (16 page)

On about the third or fourth day I had a review. It was a good one. That night I came off stage and the comics spoke to me. At the time I thought they couldn’t be bothered to talk to me until the review gave me some sort of credibility. For years after that I couldn’t like Mark Lamarr. Then, when I became a stand-up comic myself, I understood. Despite all the bravado and the pissing in sinks, the balance between doing well or badly on stage is so unpredictable and so spurious that no one wants to jeopardise their chances. Before the review, to have spoken to me would have been to have touched potential failure. Each night they must have heard the thinly populated applause and then seen me appear at the door like some linen-draped comedy albatross. Now I can appreciate Mark as one of the best and most
conscientious comics working in Britain today – oh, yes, and as a nice person too.

That year in Edinburgh I met Simon Fanshawe. As far as I knew he was the gay one with glasses off
That’s Life
and a former winner of the Perrier award for best comic on the fringe. We had lunch one day and I remember being so impressed when someone came into the café and asked him for his autograph. I had no idea at the time what a huge debt of gratitude any gay comic in Britain owes him. Whenever articles are written about gay comedy, they always seem to go straight from Larry Grayson to Julian Clary and me. There are two people that Julian and I owe our careers to and they are Simon Fanshawe and Kenny Everett; Simon for being the first openly gay comic on the circuit, and Kenny for charging at the borders of good taste without stopping to apply for a visa.

I bumped into Simon again in a gay club a couple of nights later, and as we were chatting he told me he ran a comedy festival in Brighton called Laughing Gas and he offered me a one-night gig at the Ship Hotel. I was delighted. Then, by an enormous stroke of bad luck – and who could have seen this coming in a million years? – I got a part in a play. I had so far hidden my burgeoning comedy career from my agent Barry Brown – I was terrified that he might start demanding ten percent of the very little money I had managed to earn – so when I got the call to say that I’d been cast, I couldn’t tell him that it clashed with my big night at the Brighton Comedy Festival. The play was a musical written and directed by Tim Luscombe, called
Eurovision
. Later it would be produced by Andrew Lloyd Webber and become one of the biggest flops ever seen in the West
End, but at the time it was a huge cult success at the Drill Hall, a fringe venue in London. To begin with I tried to get Tim to write me out of it for the one night, but he sucked his teeth and told me that he felt that was impossible. In the end we compromised. I would be written out of the second half and I would miss the curtain call.

I’d planned that particular evening like a military campaign. Nicola and my actor friend Darren got to Brighton early to set up the props on the stage. As the audience for
Eurovision
were still applauding the end of the first act, I was sprinting out into the street where Stephan was waiting in his little Peugeot, the engine running. Driving faster than someone delivering a replacement kidney, he pointed the car south and put his foot to the floor. Not many people can tell you this with first-hand experience, but I can assure you that getting changed into a nun’s habit made of tea-towels in the front of a small French car travelling at speed is not an easy thing to do. This was long before everyone had a mobile phone, so the good people of Brighton simply believed I was going to show up. As we hit more roadworks and heavy traffic, I wasn’t quite so sure.

Finally we arrived in Brighton. Dressed in white, holding my small black handbag, and with my tea-towel flapping around my head, I ran down the sea front towards the Ship Hotel. A burly man in a suit at the door stopped me.

‘Are you Mother Teresa?’

Panting and wiping off sweat with my very handy towel, I assured him that I was.

‘Follow me.’

We raced through corridors and kitchens. I could hear Bulgarian music wailing, I could smell candles, I was on.
The show went down better than it had ever done. I played with the audience and made jokes with local references. The laughs sounded genuine, and not just charitable and kind. I went back to
Eurovision
the next night convinced once and for all that this comedy thing wasn’t just something I was doing while waiting for better acting jobs to come along. It was what I wanted to do for ever.

The next year I headed back to the Edinburgh Festival for the whole three and a half weeks. This time I was in a much smaller venue in the Pleasance called the Attic. Each night I felt like a comedy version of Anne Frank, except more people found her.

One night the stage manager came into the dressing room.

‘Do you mind if there are some people in wheelchairs in the audience?’

‘Of course not,’ I assured her, though I did silently wonder about fire regulations. They might find some burly men to carry them up five flights of stairs, but if tongues of flame started licking around them, these people were going to be toast on wheels. I decided that very early on I would make some jokey references to them to show that they were up for a laugh and that the rest of the audience could relax. Not a problem.

Once on stage I looked over to the three wheelchairs, which seemed to be taking up about half the room. Before I could say anything, one of the disabled people let out a weird, high-pitched moan which sounded a little like whale music. This was accompanied by a rather startling head roll. This was not a group of friends out for a laugh, this was a severely handicapped group, and if the whale sounds and rolling eyes were any indication, I didn’t think I’d be engaging
them in any sort of witty audience banter. As the show went on I strained to interpret each new outbreak of marine music, but it was impossible. They were so random. Sometimes I thought it might be a laugh, occasionally a heckle, but mostly I felt they were cries from the heart: ‘Who the fuck thought it was a good idea to drag us up five flights of stairs to see this fool? We were promised a possible miracle cure!’

It’s true that there had been quite a few misunderstandings surrounding my alter ego. The idea of a show about Mother Teresa may not have been immediately obvious, but it shocked me how many people got the wrong end of the stick. Hotel receptionists would look confused when I showed up after doing a gig at some arts festival or other. ‘Oh, we were expecting Mother Teresa.’ Now I’m sure the lady was all for humility, but I really doubt that the world’s foremost living saint would be booking herself into the Travel Inn while in Bristol.

On another occasion, I was delighted to get a call from a researcher at BBC Scotland. She worked on a show that was hosted by an Irish singer called Dana. It was a religious programme, and they told me they were very keen to do something about the show.

‘Does Dana have a good sense of humour?’ I asked.

‘Oh yes, it could be a very light-hearted piece.’

‘Great.’

I was amazed that this Dana woman was evidently so open-minded and had such a dry, deadpan sense of humour. What a fun and ground-breaking religious programme this must be?

A letter arrived from the researcher a few days later and alarm bells started to go off in my head. This wasn’t deadpan,
it was serious. They thought they’d be interviewing the real Mother Teresa. Someone with, I presume, a university degree and who had been employed by the BBC had been flicking through the programme for the Edinburgh fringe and had seriously thought that Mother Teresa was abandoning the poor of Calcutta for nearly three weeks to appear in a sixty-seater attic. I wrote the researcher a letter on behalf of Mother Teresa apologising that she was unable to write it herself but she was very busy, what with trips to the laundrette and watching
Countdown
. The penny must have dropped. Almost by return of post I got a brief note sadly informing me that the programme was now overbooked and there would be no time for the interview with Mother Teresa. It will be a lifelong regret to me that my Mother Teresa never got to meet Dana and her great sense of humour.

Some work did come out of doing the show. I began doing a ‘thought for the day’ on Craig Charles’s breakfast show on London’s Kiss FM, and lovely Simon Fanshawe had me on his Radio 5 show. But it was becoming clear that while my live performances worked fairly well, it was a very niche audience and it wasn’t clear to anyone, including myself, what else I could do with my show.

Back in London I met a producer called David Johnson. He became my comedy agent. David is a great big, lovable bear of man and I couldn’t imagine being in Edinburgh with any other promoter now. David has a fairly unique approach to promoting his shows. He settles into the Assembly Rooms bar and tells everyone he speaks to that they must go and see his clients’ shows. I know that on the surface this doesn’t sound like very effective marketing, but that is to underestimate the vast numbers of people David knows and the
sheer man-hours he puts into this endeavour. He and his then business partner Mark Goucher, an immaculately groomed man, a Cher to David’s Sonny, worked out of a tiny basement office just off Tottenham Court Road.

And work they did. Venues were booked, posters made, gigs booked. Sadly, they needed me to make money for them to make money, and while they never lost faith in me, they certainly lost money while promoting me. Happily, some of their other ventures like the Reduced Shakespeare Company,
Trainspotting
and ‘Puppetry of the Penis’ subsidised their little debt-spinner. Doubtless it was through some sort of desire to widen my appeal that David and Mark encouraged me to drop the tea-towels and write something more accessible.

Because the Edinburgh fringe programme goes to press months before the actual festival, year after year I would have to come up with a performance title and then set about trying to write a show that in some way related to it. My first outing post Mother Teresa was the tastefully named ‘Karen Carpenter’s Bar and Grill’. This was more like the show I had originally intended to write: a series of monologues loosely tied together by a story, albeit a hastily thrown-together one. To be fair it didn’t really work. There were a few funny ideas, like a fly-on-the-wall documentary about a closet heterosexual, a weird sequence where Karen Carpenter was abducted by aliens who travelled the universe in a giant Fray Bentos steak and kidney pie tin, and a few jokes that I’m ashamed to admit I still use today.

It wasn’t until the next year, in 1994, that I finally bit the bullet and wrote a show featuring me as myself. At last I was the one standing there talking to the audience, and I
really liked it. The show was called ‘Charlie’s Angels Go to Hell’, and it was based around my travels in America and my time at the hippy commune. The idea was that Charlie’s Angels were my moral guardians and came to my rescue when I found myself in any situation that was out of my depth. I don’t remember any individual bits of it as being particularly funny, but as a whole it worked. It was my biggest success in Edinburgh to date. Good reviews, sold-out shows – it made me feel legitimate.

There is an odd, insular thing that happens during the festival, where it’s easy to forget about the outside world. If it’s important in Edinburgh, then it’s important everywhere else. I can only assume that that is what David and Mark were thinking when we decided to transfer my little hit show from Edinburgh into the West End. True, it was only the Arts Theatre, a smallish venue by anybody’s standards, but it was still the West End. Although we all probably sensed impending doom, it wasn’t the sort of offer you can turn down, so the posters were printed and the invitations for the opening night sent out.

On my way to the theatre I stopped at a phone box and rang my parents in Bandon just to make sure that they were there – I didn’t want them showing up and surprising me, because what would have seemed like a nice idea would have gone horribly wrong. They still didn’t know that I was gay and, as I have stressed in the preface to this book, there are still things I think they’d rather not know about my life.

The lights came down at the end of opening night and the crowd erupted. I was in shock. I walked around the party afterwards numb with happiness. My little show was a West End smash. The next night I walked out to an auditorium about a
quarter full – obviously word had not reached the world at large yet about my amazing hit show. The music started and I performed my strange opening dance number. I came to a stop, panting slightly at the front of the stage. Just before I began to speak I heard a man in the audience say very loudly ‘Daft queen’, and apart from a few coughs that was the last I heard from the audience that night. Not a titter.

The show dragged on for three weeks, and the responses I received most nights were somewhere in between the ones I got on the opening night and those on the second night, but ticket sales never really picked up and finally David and Mark broke the welcome bad news to me – my run had reached the finishing tape. Oddly, because the reviews had been all right, most people didn’t know what a disaster it had been. The posters looked good, I had got a lot of publicity from doing the show, so apart from having to do the actual performances, it had been very good for my career.

Thanks to Simon Fanshawe’s ex-producer Will Saunders, I was regularly doing interviews on
Loose Ends
by now – not celebrities, just people I think Ned couldn’t be bothered to talk to. The female judo champion was given to me when the show went to Hull (‘Not the first time I’ve been tossed by someone wearing big pyjamas’), and in Taunton I got Mr Sheppy the cider maker (‘Mmm, tastes familiar. Is it Cox?’). I loved doing the show and really enjoyed all the people who worked on it. Sitting in the pub after the show with Ned was a real treat as he told us endless stories of theatrical luminaries behaving badly.

Once
Loose Ends
went live to South Africa, and in case of a technical disaster Emma Freud and I were called into the London studio on standby. If anything went wrong we
were to introduce some pre-produced clips of old shows to fill the airtime. The show began, and Emma and I sipped our coffee and listened politely. I think it was while a South African poet and MP was telling an anecdote about singing in parliament that we grew a little restless. Emma, pregnant at the time, decided to show me some breathing exercises. Soon we were both on our backs recarpeting our pelvic floors. In the distance I could just hear one of Ned’s guests saying something about how the world had become much smaller when suddenly South Africa seemed to have fallen off the edge of the earth and Radio 4 listeners could just hear Emma and I panting and groaning as we got up from the floor. A puzzled nation assured itself, ‘No, it’s Graham Norton, they can’t be fucking!’