Life and Laughing: My Story (5 page)

As indicated by my birth certificate, my dad was primarily involved in the music industry. It was during
Jokers Wild
that he met Clive Dunn and recorded ‘
Grandad
’. He and his partner Alan Hawkshaw (who signs his emails ‘Hawk’) were writing and recording songs. I met Alan when I was about thirteen. He’s a hilarious character. My dad, my sister and I went to his enormous house in Radlett, Hertfordshire. Music had been good to the Hawk, one piece of music in particular. He wrote a thirty-second tune that made him a fortune. Can you guess it?

Here’s a clue … It’s exactly thirty seconds long.

Here’s another … Du-du … Du-du … De-de-de-de … Boom!

Yes, that’s right,
Countdown
.

(I actually met Carol Vorderman once in a lift. I got in and she was standing at the numbers and asked me, ‘What floor?’ If I couldn’t make a joke in these circumstances, I’m in the wrong business. ‘One from the top and four from anywhere else, please, Carol.’)

Those thirty seconds netted the Hawk a fortune. His house had its own recording studio, swimming pool, snooker room. He gets paid every time it’s played, that’s every weekday at about 4.56 p.m. He actually gets paid by the second, so the longer it takes for people to guess the conundrum, the more money he makes. You can imagine him in the eighties, turning on the telly at 4.55 p.m., hoping the contestants can’t decipher the conundrum so that he can afford a better holiday.

Countdown
aficionados (judging by the number of adverts they have for Tena Lady in the break,
Countdown
is mainly watched by women who pee in their pants) will know that if the contestant buzzes in to guess the conundrum, the clock stops. If they correctly identify the jumbled-up nine-letter word, the game is over. However, if they get it wrong, the clock restarts, which means more money for Alan. You can only imagine the excitement in the Hawk household, whooping and cheering when they guess incorrectly, wild applause, back-slapping and champagne corks popping when the tune reaches its ‘De-de-de-de … Boom’ climax.

My sister and I loved Alan as soon as we met him. He was a charming and personable man. Within moments of our arriving, he sat at his grand piano and dramatically played various TV themes he had written that we might recognize, including the original
Grange Hill
. It’s wonderful to see someone so proud of their work, and I have to say his rendition of
Countdown
was one of the most moving thirty seconds of my life. We drove for a pub lunch in his new Japanese sports car, in which he played all his own music, announcing, ‘I only ever listen to my own music in the car.’

As the pub was about ten minutes away, I remember thinking, ‘I’m glad he has an extensive canon of work – otherwise we’d have to listen to
Countdown
twenty times back to back.’

So Alan and my dad were writing music and producing records in the sixties and seventies. In 1975, my father found a song and was looking for a singer. This is basically record producing in its purest form. He held auditions in his small office off Trafalgar Square, and in walked my mum, a bleached-blonde beauty young enough to be his daughter. ‘If you can sing half as good as you look, we’re going to be rich,’ observed my dad.

She couldn’t. Her audition was appalling. If she was on
The X-Factor
, Louis would have said through his giggles, ‘I’m sorry, you look great, but I don’t think singing is for you’; Danni would have said, silently seething over how gorgeous Cheryl looks, ‘It was a bit out of tune’; Cheryl would have diplomatically said, ‘I think you’re luverly, but I think you’re a bit out of your depth singing, sorry, luv’; and Simon would have said, ‘I give up’, and then walked off set, immediately cancelling
The X-Factor
,
American Idol
and
Britain’s Got Talent
, retiring from showbusiness to become a recluse with nobody knowing his whereabouts, apart from Sinitta.

My father’s reaction was less drastic. One thing led to another and before you knew it, I was peeing on the doctor in a hospital in Merton in 1976, which probably came as a relief to the doctor as much as me due to the Sahara-like temperatures.

4

When my mum fell pregnant (an odd expression: ‘Wow, you’re pregnant, what happened?’ ‘I fell … on top of that man’) with my sister Lucy, we moved in search of more space. We found it in a ground floor flat in leafy Hampstead. I know what you’re thinking – Kensington? Hampstead? La-di-da. I know. There’s no denying I had a pretty decent start. This is primarily due to my grandma (‘Helloo, daaarling’) marrying Jim, the wealthy Scrabble-losing stockbroker.

I can only imagine my father’s face when he found out this beautiful nineteen-year-old had rich parents too. And you can only imagine my grandma and Jim’s faces when they found out their daughter was marrying a thirty-seven-year-old Canadian comedian who went by several different names and whose greatest success was producing Clive Dunn’s ‘Grandad’. The relationship between my dad and grandparents was uneasy, to say the least. My mother recalls how on their first meeting my dad addressed the thorny issue of their wealth, saying, ‘I’m a bit worried about your money.’

To which my grandmother replied, ‘Don’t vorry about it, you’re not gettiing it.’

Relations certainly weren’t improved when my dad sold their holiday home in Malta, which Grandma and Jim had put in my mother’s name for tax reasons. I tried to talk him out of it, but my vocabulary was limited to ‘Ma’, ‘Da’ and ‘Shums’ (my word for ‘shoes’). I threw up on his shoulder, but it had little impact. The Maltese house was sold, and the Hampstead flat bought with the proceeds.

My mother was expecting her second child. I wasn’t. I thought she’d let herself go. I didn’t know she was about to give birth to a rival. I was the centre of attention at home. I was used to having everything my own way. I was the main man. Then one day my mum suddenly lost a tremendous amount of weight and there was this baby stealing my limelight. ‘Isn’t she beautiful?’, ‘Can I hold her?’, ‘Look at those little hands’, ‘Adorable’, gushed friends and relatives.

‘Michael, do you want to say hello to your new little sister?’ my dad asked.

‘Keep that little bitch away from me,’ I tried to say, although all that came out was, ‘Ma, Da, Shums.’

It was a shock to have competition at home, but I had to see the positives of having a sibling and a growing family. Unfortunately, I couldn’t and decided to try to kill my sister instead. According to my mother, up until Lucy was about six months old, I made several attempts on her life. Much like a Mafia hit, I would win her and my parents’ trust before striking. I would gently stroke her cheek, before trying to suffocate her with her own frilly booties. I would sweetly comb her hair, and then bash her in the temple with the brush. I poisoned her rusks with red berries I found in the garden and tried to drown her so many times that we had to take separate baths.

I’m pleased to say I finally accepted my sister and together we got on with the business of growing up in the eighties. But, in truth, there was another child in the house. Our mum. To give you an idea of the age gap, my mum once sprained her ankle and my father rushed her to Casualty, where the doctor said, ‘If you would like to just pop your leg up on Daddy’s knee.’ This pissed my dad off so much he sent my mum straight to bed without a story.

In America, she would only have just been allowed to drink alcohol, but here she was raising two kids and learning on the job. It’s a job she did wonderfully well, with only the occasional hitch. For example, normally an adult would tell the kids to buckle up in the car, but nobody wore a seatbelt in my mum’s mustard-coloured Ford Capri. My sister and I would just bounce around in the back, occasionally clinging on to the front seats for survival. And remember, there were no speed bumps in those days. By the end of a journey, I would often end up in the front and my sister on the ledge in front of the back window with Bronski Beat playing at full volume.

Family cars containing young kids will always be untidy. However, this is usually confined to the back. Not my mum’s Capri. The Capri was filthy in both the children’s area and my mum’s area. Strewn all over the front of the car would be crisp packets, bits of old chewing gum, magazines (yes, she would read at the traffic lights), Coke cans, old lipsticks and cassettes with unwound tape hanging out of them.

Occasionally my mother would clean the car, by throwing things out of the window, in traffic. Once she threw so much litter out of the car at rush hour on the Finchley Road that my sister and I sat open-mouthed in amazement in the back. Literally, she chucked about four magazines into the street while Kajagoogoo blared out of her Blaupunkt stereo. Moments later somebody got out of their car, picked up my mum’s discarded debris, and threw it back into our car. Unperturbed, my mum promptly threw it out again. This continued all the way between St John’s Wood and Hampstead.

Once, when we went shopping on Hampstead High Street, my mother loaded the boot with groceries, put me in the back seat and drove off. A few miles later, she started to get a nagging feeling she’d forgotten something. PG Tips? Shake n’ Vac? Culture Club’s ‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?’ on 7-inch vinyl from Our Price? No, my sister Lucy, who was still in her pram on the pavement fifteen minutes later when we returned. ‘Why didn’t you say anything?’ my mother screamed, blaming me.

‘Hey, I’ve been trying to kill that bitch for months,’ I said, although this came out as ‘Ma, Da, Shums.’

After I moved to Tanta in Egypt with my Lebanese Catholic parents Joseph and Abia … (Oh no, I’ve slipped back into Omar Sharif’s autobiography. What’s wrong with me?)

In my teens, I fell ill (nothing serious, don’t worry) and checked in at the doctor’s surgery reception in Hendon. The receptionist handed me my medical notes and said, ‘Please give these to the doctor, and you’re not allowed to look at them.’

‘Of course not,’ I lied.

Moments later, out of sight, I had a flick through my little malady memoirs. I got quite nostalgic about my ‘pain in the abdominal area’ of March 1987, my ‘blurred vision’ of May 1985 and my ‘soreness in left ear’ of November 1983. What surprised me, however, were the first few entries. ‘Michael not talking. Parents worried.’ ‘Michael still not talking, just grunting. Parents increasingly concerned.’ ‘Michael only saying a few words. Worrying rate of development. Should be monitored. Only says “Ma”, “Da” and “Shums’’.’ I was shocked to find out that my early medical history was remarkably similar to Forrest Gump’s. Apparently my sister spoke before me despite being two years younger. Her first words were ‘Is Michael retarded?’

My younger son, Oscar, is nearly two and only has one word, ‘hoover’, which he calls ‘hooba’. Out of all the things in the world, why ‘hoover’? My oldest, Lucas, who is four and a half – his first word was ‘car’. I have no idea why, but I suppose you’ve got to start somewhere. Maybe they’ll go into business together one day and run ‘McIntyre Brothers’, a car valeting service.

So my memories really start to kick in at our Hampstead flat, which I remember to be quite dimly lit. Maybe at my parents’ height this was ‘mood lighting’, but from where my sister and I were crawling, it was just dark. The flat was in a big old Edwardian building that also contained three other flats.

The room I remember most is the living room. This is odd, because it’s the only room that my sister and I were strictly forbidden to enter. I became obsessed with the living room, presumably because it was out of bounds. The living room was darker than the rest of the house, with dark green sofas and lots of plants. Because I was only two foot tall, to me it was like an indoor night jungle with soft furnishings. ‘Don’t go in there, that’s Mummy and Daddy’s special room.’ Special room? What goes on in that mini-Jurassic Park of theirs?

My wife and I do the same today with our kids. We don’t let them in the living room because it’s our special room that we want to keep nice. I’m sure many people reading this can relate to keeping the front room child-free. But if I’m honest, my wife and I never go in there, and nor did my parents ever go in theirs. Let’s face it, the country is filled with homes, each with an immaculate room that nobody goes in. We buy and rent accommodation and don’t use all of it. The only time we’ve used our living room, and the only time I remember using the living room in my childhood Hampstead flat, was on Christmas Day. It’s a room reserved for one day of the year. This is OK if you live in a mansion, but this was a cramped flat. It made no sense to me as I toddled around that we’d cordoned off part of it for just one day of the year.

One dinnertime, while enjoying a beef broth vegetable medley compote, I addressed my parents: ‘This living room situation is a joke. Why don’t you sub-let it? I was chatting to a girl at playgroup, and she says her parents do the same thing. Maybe we could solve the homeless problem if we, as a nation, open up our unused front rooms? We’d have to kick them out on Christmas Day, but the rest of the year would be good for them. And that’s another thing. If it’s just a “Christmas room”, why don’t you leave the Christmas tree and decorations up all year? And why have you got so many plants in such a dark room, have you never heard of photosynthesis? What kind of people are you?’

Unfortunately, my rant sounded more like an episode of
Pingu
, and my dad just muttered, ‘We should go back to the doctor, his speech isn’t improving at all.’

My parents’ actual room was not out of bounds. Every morning my sister and I would climb into our parents’ bed. I would always go on our dad’s side and Lucy would always go on our mum’s side. I don’t know why it was always this way round. All I know is that, with all due respect to my father, I got the bum draw, almost literally. We must have been very young at this time; in fact this might rival Poo-gate as my earliest memory. I love cuddling my two boys but seldom wonder what the experience might be like for them. They are little, soft and wonderful. I am not.