Life and Laughing: My Story (21 page)

Growing your hair isn’t easy. Because hair grows upwards, you have to wait until it reaches a certain length and weight before gravity kicks in and it falls nicely over your shoulders – ‘Because I’m worth it!’ Before that, it will look unkempt and unattractive – ‘Because I’m not worth it!’ During this difficult middle phase, I bought a cap and squashed my overgrown hair inside. Soon the cap couldn’t contain the growing locks and they would sprout out of the back and on the sides. When I removed the cap, my hair would shoot up vertically.

While I was waiting for my hair to grow, a new opportunity to attract girls presented itself. I had started driving lessons and on one of her Sunday visits, my grandmother announced she wanted to give me some money to buy my first car. She was like a fruit machine: every once in a while you’d hit the jackpot. She gave me £2,000 to buy whatever car I wanted. I was so excited. My own car. Freedom. Every day I scanned the pages of
Loot
,
Autotrader
and
What Car?
to find my dream set of wheels.

Quite a few of the students had their own cars and drove to college. They would park adjacent to the school in a parade of the worst vehicles on the road, like a queue for the crusher at the car pound. I wanted a car that would stand out and turn heads. In particular the head of Tina, the girl I met on my first day who had her own airbags to compensate for the lack of extras on whatever car I could afford.

What is the coolest car you can buy for £2k? It was like a challenge on
Top Gear.
I stumbled across the ‘Classic Cars’ section of
Loot
. I hadn’t been checking there as I assumed classic cars cost a fortune. But there she was. There was no photo but the particulars sounded amazing: Triumph Spitfire Mark IV, Royal Blue, convertible, reliable, 6 months’ MOT. It belonged to a man in Kent and as soon as I saw the price, I wanted it. £1,999, perfect, I could even use the pound change for the Dartford Tunnel on the way home.

With my grandma in my Triumph Spitfire. Unfortunately she was the only female I picked up in it.

I bought my Spitfire, and she sat proudly in our Golders Green driveway while I learned to drive. Meanwhile my hair continued to grow, upwards, refusing to drop. I had to buy a bigger cap to contain it. I looked like an idiot, awful, invisible to the Woodhouse girls. But I waited patiently, knowing that soon I would remove my cap and, like a plain secretary taking off her glasses and releasing her pony-tailed hair in slow motion, I would be transformed. At home, I would take the cap off to assess my progress, but still my hair would ping upwards.

After about six months, I had to admit defeat and booked a haircut. But I didn’t want my six months of suffering to go to waste and asked the hairdresser if there was any way to keep the length and give me a style. So he cut the front and left the back long. The net result was a mullet. This was a totally inadvertent mullet. It’s not like I went in the hairdressing salon and said, ‘I want a mullet, please. I want to look like Glenn Hoddle and Chris Waddle when they sang “Diamond Lights” on
Top of the Pops
in 1987.’ I did not say that, but I may as well have.

‘Why did you keep your mullet?’ you are surely asking. Well, I didn’t know what a mullet was, my mullet was accidental, and the fact is my hair looked a lot better than it had for the last six months squashed under various caps. So, believe it or not, I thought it looked good.

This is a recurring theme of my youth. I was desperate to be attractive, so that I could attract attractive women, but I did myself no favours whatsoever. However, I still had my next throw of the dice waiting: my Spitfire. Surely when I parked this car in the parade outside Woodhouse, nestled among the Nissan Micras and Fiat Pandas, girls would see that I’m different, interesting, classy.

When I passed my driving test, I was wildly excited about my new life on the road. On my first drive into college, conditions were perfect. The skies were blue and my little sports car was sparkling in the morning sunshine. After a quick breakfast, I put the roof down and set off, slowly. I could sense the car may have some mechanical issues. There was an unidentified rattling, the distinct smell of petrol, and when I braked, it took quite a while to stop. But there was no denying my Spitfire looked splendid and was turning heads.

As I approached college, my heart raced and my engine struggled, but we were going to make it. I had timed my arrival to perfection, it was the busiest time, the road was filled with students, and every one of them stared at me in my convertible classic car as I parked directly outside college. It was like I was pulling up on pole position at the Monaco Grand Prix. It was exactly how I’d imagined it would be. All the cliques of Woodhouse froze, open-mouthed, staring at the new me.

I shut the car door; the rearview mirror trembled from the reverberation, but clung on. I swung my rucksack over my shoulder and walked towards the school gates in what seemed like slow motion. My self-conscious walk to Lucy Protheroe on the wall outside Arnold House did not return. I felt surprisingly confident and strode purposefully. Then I saw Karim Adel, typically, surrounded by groupies. They were all staring at me in amazement. Karim opened his mouth to speak. He had never spoken to me; already I was being noticed, accepted.

‘Niiiice …’ he said slowly. I was so sure he was going to say ‘car’ that I started waving and nodding like the Queen in her motorcade. But then the real reason for all the open-mouthed staring became apparent. ‘… mullet!’ Karim finished, to giggles from his groupies and lots of laughing and pointing from what felt like everybody else in Finchley.

The only positive from this latest humiliation was that Tina didn’t witness it. My new mobility meant that I could drive to the hairdresser in my lunch break and immediately remove my mullet. After a false start, the mullet-less me was now on a mission. I was desperate for Tina to see me in my hot wheels. Every day when I drove in, I looked for her. Finally, one morning I spotted her. But what was I supposed to do? I couldn’t hoot, I didn’t know her. I couldn’t exactly call out to her, ‘Hi, it’s me, the guy who was looking for room 42. Look how cool I am, do you want a lift somewhere, like my bedroom?’

So I decided to rev the engine in the hope that the sound would make her turn around and see me cruising with my roof down and my conventional hairstyle blowing in the summer breeze. But for all the Spitfire’s sporty looks, the engine size was only 1300cc, like a Mini. I had noticed that when I dropped down a gear the engine made a growling sound. So I whacked the car from third to first gear for maximum effect. It worked, and the car erupted with a magnificent roar. However, the sound did not get Tina’s attention. Nor did the crunching sound that followed, the sound of the gearbox breaking.

I now couldn’t get the car into any gear, so I just sailed in neutral for as far as the momentum took me, then stopped in the middle of the road. The cars behind me started hooting and shouting at me to get out of the way. Thankfully, this still did not get Tina’s attention. I put my hazard warning lights on (only one worked so it actually looked like I was indicating) and got out of the car apologizing profusely to the traffic behind.

I had seen people pushing cars to the side of the road when they had broken down, so I started to push my car. But I forgot that there should be someone in the car, to steer it. So when I pushed my car, it just rolled away and crashed straight into the side of a parked Mercedes. This did get Tina’s attention. I had fantasized endlessly about Tina behaving like a girl in a Diet Coke advert as I bombed past her in my sports car, but here was the reality. She watched me push my car into another vehicle while being abused and sworn at by commuters.

It seemed that every time I envisaged a scenario whereby I was cool, it would backfire. But I never got disheartened. I was young, filled with optimism, exuberance and hope. I was seventeen, on the threshold of officially becoming a man. I had my whole life ahead of me.

But before my eighteenth birthday my life would be changed for ever.

13

My dad had started to come to London regularly to generate some income. It wasn’t easy as time had passed and the faces in the industry had changed. He was an older big fish in a small pond that now had new fish in it (I think I’ll leave the fish and pond analogy alone now). He was searching for an idea or a show that could resurrect his career. He contacted Kenny Everett, Barry Cryer and others he used to work with, but they had moved on.

I remember being with him in the flat he borrowed in London when he visited. He was on the phone to Barry saying, ‘Let’s make magic again, Baz.’ I was seventeen years old and wrapped up in my own nonsense (as laid out in the previous chapters), but I knew that the magic he and Barry had created was over, and he probably knew it too. It must have been soul-destroying for him trying to go back, but he was desperate.

My dad had left London at the height of his powers, and now he was returning to a changed landscape. His tea boy when he worked in the record industry was now running a major label. From when my parents got divorced to when he left for America, he had had a personal assistant, Pete. Pete was a kid then, eighteen years old. He was always around my dad, driving him, buying his cigarettes, doing his washing. Now Pete was running a successful music video production company.

Lucy and I were so excited to see our dad on these fleeting visits. We would go to the cinema and out for pizza. We argued a bit because I was a teenage pain in the arse, but it was a joy to see him. He seemed optimistic about his new ideas and projects, but I could sense his unrest and worry. He talked a lot about money, mistakes and bad luck. He was still smoking constantly. I watched him puffing away on his little borrowed patio and he looked distracted and frail. He made an effort with Lucy and me, but seeing him alone with his thoughts, it was clear that he was deeply troubled.

Just when it seemed hopeless, it looked like the show that got him started in comedy would return to save him.
Jokers Wild
had last aired in the seventies, and now twenty years later the show was to return. My dad was to produce a modernized version called
The Hecklers
. It was a pilot for the BBC, but if it went well it would be good news for everyone. My dad would be working again, and if a series was commissioned, he would have to move back to London. For Lucy and me, this was a wonderful prospect because, although he was visiting regularly, we were also saying goodbye regularly, which was always painful.

The Hecklers
was to feature new comedians, so my dad, who was now totally out of touch with the UK comedy scene, had to go talent-spotting at London’s comedy clubs. I didn’t know anything about stand-up comedy. I had only seen three comedians on TV, and although I enjoyed them, I didn’t have an epiphany or anything. I saw the American Steven Wright, who delivered a stream of monotone one-liners (‘I bought some batteries, but batteries weren’t included’). I’d also seen Lee Evans and Lenny Henry in their live shows, but my mum and Steve were laughing so much I didn’t catch many of the jokes.

When my dad came to London, he went out every night to comedy clubs to unearth the stars of tomorrow. Lucy and I would spend the day with him before he’d drop us off in his rented car and say he was off to the Comedy Store in Leicester Square or riffling through an
A–Z
to locate clubs in Greenwich, Balham and Battersea. I had never heard of comedy clubs, I had never even heard of these places in London, but one day I would. He was going to a club called Up the Creek in Greenwich, the Banana Cabaret in Balham and Jongleurs in Battersea. In the years to come I would play these clubs hundreds of times, and I don’t think there was a time I set off in my car that I didn’t think of my dad setting off to the same place.

This was an era when Eddie Izzard was the king of stand-up but refused to appear on television, and Tony Slattery refused to do anything that didn’t involve appearing on television. So after extensive scouring for talent, my dad finalized the line-up for the pilot. The unknown comedians would be Mark Steel, Steve Coogan and Richard Morton, and the host, you guessed it, Tony Slattery.

My dad bought himself a new black jacket for the pilot. This became my first experience of live comedy, and I had never laughed so much in my life. Each comic performed a few minutes to introduce themselves to the audience, and they were all hilarious. Tony Slattery, in particular, was hysterical.

Everybody seemed thrilled with the pilot, but, as with all pilots, Dad would have an uncomfortable wait before the powers that be made their decisions. While he was waiting, he continued to come to London to drum up business. In November 1993, Lucy and I said goodbye to him on the steps of the flat he borrowed in Maida Vale. We weren’t upset, as he already had another visit scheduled for soon after Christmas.

That Christmas he sent Lucy and me our presents, and we got up early together before the rest of the house awoke to open them. We didn’t want to open them with Mum and Steve because our relationship with our dad was very separate and personal to us. We knew he was struggling financially so didn’t expect much, but his presents were lovely and thoughtful, especially the book about how to fix classic cars. We spoke later that day to wish each other a Merry Christmas.