The Sound of Laughter (15 page)

Retribution came calling in January 1991 when I was involved in an armed raid at the cash and carry. Quite a frightening experience and one that quickly made me realise the error of my thieving ways. Catholic guilt kicked in, plus with CID scrutinising the building after the robbery I didn't relish the idea of them catching me climbing out the back of a skip with four boxes of Black Forest gateau under my arm.

It was a Thursday night just like any other when the robbery took place. I was pricing up tuna fish with Kevin Broughton and suddenly we heard Simone in the cash
office screaming over the sound system, 'MR HUSBANDS BOSWORTH!!' Now print obviously doesn't do Simone's panic-stricken squeal justice but suffice to say Kevin and I both knew that something wasn't right.

Quickly, we both ran round into the pop aisle to be confronted by three armed gunmen wearing masks and waving sawn-off shotguns (well, I don't honestly know if they were sawn off but it doesn't half sound exciting). Everybody at the checkout was lying face down on the floor except Bill Sands, a disabled shopkeeper. He just sat in his wheelchair with his head bowed.

What I couldn't comprehend was why the raiders' masks didn't match. We had Pluto, Mickey Mouse and . . . Colonel Gaddafi. Certainly not a well-known trio.

It's funny how you react in that type of situation, but I remember that it took me a great deal of self-control to stop myself from asking them why one of their masks was an odd one out. 1 knew no fear. Nick Ross says that it's common in those situations, especially with so much adrenalin pumping through around your body (and he'd know, wildcat that he is).

One of the gunmen must have heard me and Kevin charge round the corner, because he turned to us and shouted,

'YOU TWO, GET DOWN!'

And with that I dropped to my knees and shouted back at him, 'What? You mean dance?'

I think my reply must have thrown the gunman for a second or two because he didn't reply.

It was surreal, it wasn't happening and I started to giggle as the assailants legged it out of the building. We were both lying on the floor and Kevin was kicking me as I couldn't stop laughing. Once I got home things were completely different though, and I burst into tears in the middle of
Tomorrow's World.
Delayed reaction, you see. Nick Ross says that's also a common occurrence. The man is an oracle when it comes to crime and its effects.

We seemed to be lying on the floor for ages, shell-shocked, after the robbers had fled. The silence was eventually broken by the sound of HB's speaker system as it bing-bonged back in to life.

'Surely to God he's not written a script for this?' I said to Kevin as I rolled around the shop floor in hysterics.

'Ladies and gentlemen,' said HB in a shaky voice, 'I don't know if you've noticed but we've just been robbed. I'd like to ask all customers to calmly make their way towards the main exit. The police are on their way and don't forget we've still got Cadbury's Secrets on special promotion . . .' I'm only joking, he didn't really didn't mention Cadbury's Secrets, but it would have been very funny if he had.

In the swell of the approaching sirens I ran to the wine and spirits department at the back of the building. Rob Grundy and Matt Lennard were busy stacking cases of Heineken Export underneath the cooling fans and they hadn't heard a thing.

'Quick, we've been robbed,' I shouted to them.

'What are you on about?' said Matt.

'There's just been an armed raid on the building – masks, shotguns, the lot. Come on,' I said, beckoning them.

'Fuck off,' said Rob, but then his attention was caught by the sight of Paula Nolan, who was being led to the canteen by two members of staff. She was in a right old state, sobbing and shaking.

Matt waded straight in. He'd been trying to make a move on Paula for some time and he saw this as the perfect opportunity to be her knight in shining armour. For some reason – maybe it was nosiness — I followed them into the canteen.

A few other shell-shocked members of staff from the cash office joined us. They looked like zombies, staring into the distance and shaking. Simone, the wages clerk, had been sick down the front of her tabard and it stunk to high heaven. The kettle was already on the boil when Matt ordered Rob Grundy and me to make some brews.

'I want you to make strong brews and make sure you
put plenty of sugar in them for shock,' he shouted.

Rob and I really had the giggles now and we couldn't help but crack up when I tipped practically a whole bag of sugar into each of the brews. The froth was pouring over the top of the cups and on to the worktop. I passed a cup of tea to Matt and slowly he raised it up to Paula's tear-stained lips.

'Here, girl, drink this, it'll do you good,' he whispered in his Essex accent.

He tipped the cup forward into her mouth, she took a gulp and then spat it out all over his face. Rob and I both collapsed with laughter.

"Will you two just fuck off out of it?' Matt shouted with his face covered in froth.

Meanwhile, HB was at the front of the store being interviewed by a couple of CID blokes. Word had spread quickly throughout the building that it was probably an inside job. Well, that hardly came as a shock to anybody. Graham and Colin from the local security firm had been delivering the same wages at exactly the same time every Thursday for as long as I'd been working there. One of them was an asthma sufferer in his late sixties and the other had an orthopaedic shoe. They were hardly Crockett and Tubbs. Even though everybody referred to them as that once they were out of earshot.

When it came to the suspects there were more ex-members of staff with a grudge than there was money missing. Some said twenty grand had been taken, others said forty. I walked past one office to hear a manager telling an insurance claims officer that somehow the gunmen had not only found time to take the wages but also steal his brand new set of golf clubs out of the boot of his car before they drove off. Bollocks.

'Bing-bong' went the speaker system as HB gave us an update over the microphone.

'I know you're all very keen to get home and the store will be closing just as soon as the police have conducted all of their interviews. In the meantime please help yourself to tea, coffee and biscuits.'

I turned to Rob.

'Hang on, did he just say biscuits?' and before Rob had a chance to nod a response I was in the confectionery aisle ripping the lids off as many biscuit selection tins as I could get my hands on. I opened so many that they remained in the canteen for the next six months. You have to seize chances like these when they come up in life.

I was excited because I thought the BBC
Crimewatch
team might turn up and film one of those God-awful reconstructions that they do, but alas they didn't. I thought it might be my big break into show business,
because they always use the real people in those reconstructions and I would have loved to have played myself. It's very cruel when you think about it, taking a pensioner back to the scene of the crime and subjecting her to the same atrocity all over again. As if the poor cow hasn't already been through enough.

The other thing that makes me laugh about those reconstructions is that they never swear. No matter how violent or excited the villains get, they never use foul language. They say things like 'Get down on the floor, you sponge' and 'Don't you flippin' move you melon'. I thought the whole point of showing a reconstruction was that it's supposed to replicate exactly what happened in order to jog people's memories, not water down the events to appease the television complaints commission.

That reminds me of a friend of mine who got a job working as an engineer at a television transmitter high above Bolton on the moors. It was a desolate, lonely job and he told me that occasionally he used to get people driving up to the transmitter in the middle of the night in order to complain. They'd get out of their cars furious and bang on the door to his hut.

'Have you seen that filth on Channel 4?
Queer As Folk?
You got a damn cheek putting that on.'

'It's got nothing to do with me,' he'd say. 'It's just an
aerial transmitter. Look, I can't even get a decent picture on my portable, mate.'

Anyhow, back to the night of the raid.

Eventually we got our coats on and made our way to the main entrance at the front of the store. HB was there to meet us and he thanked us for dealing with the situation so maturely (it's a pity he didn't know what was about to happen). There were about twelve lads in total from the shift and we all stood in front of HB waiting in awkward and uncomfortable silence. HB thanked us all a second time.

'Like I said, boys, thanks very much, sorry we've got to shut early but I'm sure you understand, given the circumstances.'

Another awkward silence followed as we all stood in front of him waiting.

'Is there anything else I can help you with, boys?' said HB. 'Because I really want to get this place locked up and get home myself.'

There were a few nudges and mumbles from the group and then Paul Higgins said,

'The thing is, Mr Husbands Bosworth, it's a Thursday night and we usually get our wages on a Thursday night.'

'Come on, boys, you've seen the stress and trauma that we've all had to go through this evening,' he replied, a bit incredulously.

'Yeah, I know,' said Paul Higgins, 'but my mum does her big shop on a Friday and she'll lose her mind if I come home empty-handed.'

'But you must be able to appreciate the predicament we're in. Surely you could hang on until the weekend for your wages?' Nobody moved.

Ten minutes later, Simone (who was still in no fit state to do anything) was in the cash office making our wages up out of petty cash, sobbing with a blanket round her and still stinking of vomit. Thinking about it all these years later I can't believe that we stooped so low as to actually make her do that. She handed us our wage packets one by one. They were damp from her tears and, hanging our heads in shame, we left the building. We then had to stop Rob Grundy from going back because he'd opened his wage packet and noticed it was 26p short.

'For fuck's sake, Rob, you're pushing your luck now. Here, I'll give you the money myself,' I said as I dragged him through the car park home.

I got my second verbal warning as a result of that robbery. We used to have a staff signing-in/out book at the front of the store and I got a bollocking off HB after I filled in my hours on the night of the robbery and wrote '4pm till Raid'. The week after, HB assigned Rob Grundy and myself to our new positions: security duty.

This basically meant that we both had to take it in turns to patrol the car park until the clocks went forward in March. Talk about locking the barn door after the horse had bolted. I don't know what they expected us to do if we saw an armed gang approaching the store. I mean, I was hardly going to wrestle them to the ground.

It was freezing. I had to wear three layers of thermals some nights just to keep myself warm and I still got a chill on my kidneys. It was also a very boring job, so much so that I secretly began listening to a Walkman, hidden inside my coat. If HB had found out he'd have hit the roof.

'You're wearing a Walkman, you crafty bastard,' Rob Grundy said when he found out.

The next thing I knew, Rob had decided to wear a Walkman too. At least my headphones were discreet ones; black and in the ear, you could hardly notice them under my balaclava. Rob's Walkman was out of the Ark and his bright orange-coloured foam headphones were as subtle as a brick. And he played his music so loud that everybody else could hear it in the car park and so loud one night that he failed to see or hear the security van as it reversed over him. HB caught him red-handed, lying under the wheels of the vehicle listening to Adamski.

A few weeks after the robbery I was on a bus heading into town when a lad called Simon Halliwell got on. I'd
taken over from him on the fruit and veg department just before Mr Short had sacked him for grieving too long.

'All right, Si, how's it going?' I said as he sat down next to me.

'Can't complain. Hey, I saw you the other week,' he said.

'When?'

'That Thursday night during the robbery,' he whispered. 'I would have said hello but I didn't like letting on. I was the one who told you to "get down" when you ran round the corner. I almost pissed myself when you shouted "What? You mean dance?" Have you ever thought of becoming a comedian?'

But all I wanted to know was why he was wearing a Colonel Gaddafi mask.

With two part-time jobs on the go I hardly had time to concentrate on my performing arts course, which was maybe just as well, as things had really started to fall apart at the college. Attendance figures were dropping – in fact, we were now down to a pitiful six students. I'd completely expected a new course to suffer from teething troubles but this was shaping up like the dentist scene from
Marathon Man.

I was now into my second year and we'd only just been allocated a classroom. We'd spent the previous eighteen months alternating between the changing rooms in a gymnasium and a gazebo in the middle of a car park. Neither was any place to learn jazz tap and as a result I had become totally disenchanted with the business of show.

In an effort to boost morale (and get rid of us), our course leader, Freda, sent us all on work placements for a month. I was placed in a secondary school on the outskirts of town to teach drama! Me teach drama? What did I know? I hadn't been taught drama myself. Yet here I was about to teach it to kids only a few years younger than me. Talk about the blind leading the blind.

But every morning I'd get up, put on a shirt and tie and travel on the bus to school with the kids. They found it hysterical, as I'd forgotten to put on my pants on . . . (That was a joke by the way – surely I shouldn't have to be pointing them out in Chapter 11.) I felt like a proper adult — well, a student teacher at the very least. I found the whole experience both exciting and rewarding and it certainly beat trying to find a space in the gazebo back at college.

And when it came to the drama lessons, the pupils at Westhoughton High School really didn't need any encouragement. They were truly fantastic. In fact, if truth be told, I probably ended up learning a lot more from them than they ever did from me.

For my first few days at the school I was an observer in the classroom. And I was totally blown away by their confidence. Even the first-year pupils were remarkable. The drama teacher, Mr Banyard, would split a class up
into small groups to devise short sketches based on a series of themes. 'I'd like you to include the following in your sketches: a wheelie bin, the Taj Mahal and a left-handed screwdriver,' he'd say before sending them off.

Five minutes later they'd return with these brilliant little sketches. The pupils would be incredibly funny and they'd all have a go at doing accents and characterisation. They had enormous self-belief and seemed to relish the opportunity to perform. And if I thought the first-years were good at drama then the fifth-year pupils were in a different league altogether. They were astonishingly good actors, mature beyond their years.

I actually found myself getting quite jealous and longed to join in with them. I regretted having missed out on all of this when I was at school. Mind you, if the nuns had sent us off to devise sketches nobody would have ever come back. Pity really, because if we'd done more constructive things like drama, then maybe the pupils wouldn't have resorted to shoving lighted rags through the convent letter box of an evening.

I've always believed drama to be an important subject. It's not just about play-acting, it's about giving children confidence and ironing out their inhibitions. I realise most of them may never go near a stage again once they've left school, but I guarantee that they'll exude a
charisma and confidence for the rest of their lives as a result of being taught drama.

I thoroughly enjoyed my month at the secondary school and I met some really talented people. Perhaps that's why I was so reluctant to return to my performing arts course. Talk about a comedown. I arrived back in time to start work on our big final-year production. Our dance teacher, Jo Jo, was keen to premiere her musical version of
Highlander,
but seeing as there were only three girls and two lads plus me left we opted for the aptly titled
Little Shop of Horrors
instead.

It was a disaster waiting to happen. Due to the lack of male students I ended up playing a total of six parts including Seymour, the dentist, and the voice of the man-eating plant. The plant itself was played by Troy who was from Ghana. He was a disabled exchange student with a spine defect. He spoke very little English and rumour had it he'd originally come to the college to learn joinery but got out of the lift on the wrong floor.

Due to a lack of funds we had to hire the man-eating plant costume from a local amateur dramatics society. Their costume was ten foot tall and we lost our £50 deposit after we had to 'adapt' their costume to fit Troy's motorised wheelchair. The image of Troy inside that costume wheeling around the stage to 'I'm a Mean Green Mother from Outer Space' will stay with me for ever.

We wasted so much rehearsal time adapting costumes that we never actually got round to having a proper run-though. Then the night before the show I went on a coach trip to watch Sting in Newcastle (it was a belated Christmas present – don't ask). Sting was crap; I nodded off during 'Roxanne' and I later read a review that described Sting as sounding 'like a drunk in a broom cupboard. He'd lost his mojo and was apparently spending too much time knocking about with blokes with CDs in their mouths.' (But I think you're great, Sting, just in case you're reading this.)

Our driver got pulled over for speeding at Scotch Corner and we didn't get home until half six in the morning. I was shattered and I overslept, missed the dress rehearsal and ended up getting to college just in time for the first (and last) performance of the show. The gymnasium was packed out with parents, friends and anybody else we could drag in off the street.

Francis was chaotically working both sound and lights and it was just one cock-up after another. Wrong lights, wrong sound cues, and when the tape snapped on the reel-to-reel player I had to resort to an impromptu singalong with the audience. I did a medley of hits from
Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
and a heartfelt version of 'My Name is Tallulah' from
Bugsy Malone.

With the technical hitch rectified, we soldiered onwards towards the finale. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Troy positioning himself in the wings and having a last-minute spray with WD-40. And as the music kicked in he came speeding onstage in all his man-eating-plant regalia. The audience applauded the costume but then Troy came to a juddering halt.

In all the excitement he'd neglected to recharge himself during the tea break. So there I was on stage pretending to be chased by a stationary disabled man dressed as a man-eating plant.

The song was supposed to climax with the plant exploding. I reached for the pyrotechnic charge hidden underneath Troy's back wheel and pushed the button. Nothing happened. The way things had been going I wasn't surprised in the slightest. I tried it again. Nothing. Shocked and confused, the audience stared at me in silence. Time stood still.

Then as the rest of cast reluctantly joined me onstage to painfully take their bows, the charge ignited and Troy exploded into a shower of sparks and smoke. Too much smoke as it happened, because the next thing we heard were the fire alarms and we all had to evacuate out on to the front street. What a balls-up!

I've no idea what passing motorists must have thought they saw on the pavement that rainy night in
June. Seeing a group of people huddled around a charred man-eating plant on wheels. Who knows? What I do know is that whenever I have a nightmare you can bet Troy rolls through at some point in that man-eating plant costume.

Because the course was drawing to a close, I'd taken it upon myself to start applying for proper work several months earlier. I went to the library every Monday and browsed for jobs in the
Guardian
media section. I also wrote to every television company in the IBA guide. Yorkshire, Carlton, Grampian, etc. They would have all got a letter and CV from Peter Kay at one time or another.

Then one day I actually got a reply. A lady from Granada Television in Manchester rang me up. She was secretary to some bigwig called Grant Spencer and they were looking for a new runner to work in the editing department. I realised it wasn't acting but after the
Little Shop of Horrors
fiasco I'd decided perhaps my future lay behind the scenes. It seemed safer all round.

Anyway, at least I'd had a reply. I was excited enough just to get a call from Granada Television, the Hollywood of the North and home to
Coronation Street, Brideshead Revisited
and
Albion Market.

So I went for the interview. I was very nervous.

'What an amazing view,' I said to his secretary as we
travelled up to the seventh floor in the lift.

Well, I had to say something to disguise the fact that I'd just farted and thought that any form of conversation might eliminate her sense of smell.

'Oh look, you can almost see our house,' I said and farted again.

I shook hands with Grant Spencer over a bottle of Perrier that sat on his desk. Then I pumped once more before I settled myself back in a chair. What was wrong with me? I had been nervous before but this had gone beyond a joke.

'Right,' he said, startling me into another breakage of wind, 'I'm going to cut to the chase. I'm not going to bullshit you, Paul (I was far too nervous to correct him), it's not a glamorous job. Basically you'll be working six days a week making tea for the editing staff downstairs and you'll get £58 for the privilege. It's a crap job for shit money but it's a foot in the door and the last runner we had is now working in Spain on
El CID
with Alfred Molina so, hey, there's potential.'

I nodded, shook his hand, farted and left. The secretary didn't come back down in the lift with me and frankly I didn't blame her.

Travelling home on the bus I found myself sinking into depression. I had a very tough decision to make. I'd arrived at a career-changing crossroads in my life. Finally
there was an opportunity to work in television, to get a foot in the door as Grant had suggested, but financially I just couldn't afford it.

Fifty-eight pounds a week? I know that money isn't everything but it's a start. The weekly bus fares to Granada would cost me half of that alone and what did that leave me for my driving lessons? Not enough. I truly believed that passing my driving test would open just as many doors in the long term. I was bringing in three times as much as that with my other dead-end jobs, but that's all they were, a dead end. What a dilemma.

Later that day back at home I got a call from Grant Spencer's secretary. For a second I thought she might have been calling to have a word with me about the state of my bowels, but she wasn't. She rang to say that after interviewing several candidates she was pleased to offer me the job.

Both elated and devastated, I declined the job there and then and regretted it as soon as I put the phone down. I felt like I'd thrown away my one chance, a decision I let haunt me, and I punished myself with 'what ifs' and 'maybes' for a very long time. I began putting any thoughts of my ever being in show business to the back of my mind. Anyway, who was I trying to kid? I had to be realistic. I was just an ordinary working-class lad from Bolton who made people laugh on their
lunch breaks. I could never compete in the big leagues. It was time for me to face facts: I had no business in show business.

Despondent, I threw myself into work and took on a third part-time job.

I don't know if you're familiar with Netto. They're a chain of cheap supermarkets that have been popping up all over Britain for a number of years now. And when I say cheap, I mean cheap. A friend of mine won a trolley dash around a Netto store once and when he got to the checkouts and the woman tilled it up the total came to £11.20. Now that is cheap!

Working for Netto wasn't the end of the world, but I could certainly see it. My badge said 'Shop Floor Assistant' and on the opening day I assisted the shoppers through the automatic doors of Bolton's first Netto superstore. What a shithole.

No matter how much I tried to make a go of this job it really was the pits. I think what made it worse was the whole Granada TV thing still echoing round my head. I continued to torture myself about it, particularly on busy Saturday afternoons, surrounded by kids up the freezer aisle, screaming for Mini Milks. You'll never know how close I came to tipping them head first into the freezer and sitting on the lid.

Occasionally I'd get the added excitement of shelf stacking or rotating the fresh milk in the fridges, but other than that my designated job was working the cardboard crushing machine in the back of the warehouse. Now that was a monotonous job, it was crush, crush, crush all day long.

I did it so much that I used to dream about it in my sleep. So now I was crushing practically twenty-four/seven. Only I didn't get paid for the night shift.

I had friends who worked in the cake factory over the road and they'd told me how they dreamed about work. They put cherries on top of Bakewells as they went by on a conveyor belt and when they shut their eyes at night all they could see were cherries floating past. I never thought I'd end up the same.

My dreams were slipping further away from me. I now had money for driving lessons — in fact, I had more money than I really needed – but absolutely no time to spend it. Between the garage, the cash and carry and Netto I had one afternoon off every fortnight on a Tuesday. On an average day I started at 6 a.m. and finished at 10 p.m. The work was relentless and I'd like to tell you I was happy but I wasn't.

The wages at Netto matched the food – cheap. I only stayed because the store was near home. We had a lot of managers too and in the four months I worked
there we had seven. They'd arrive from other branches with a head full of fancy ideas and then leave when they realised the budget constraints. But they also knew they could get labour for a lot less than they were paying me.

Due to a clerical error at head office I'd been on £3 an hour since the day I signed my contract. That's why the managers attempted to make it their mission to get me to leave. Luckily they all left before me.

The other shop-floor assistants were on the disgraceful wage of £2 an hour. They were mainly students with debts up to their eyeballs. Then Tony Billingham arrived. He was a nasty piece of work in my opinion – wore Paco Rabanne and kept ferrets. He found out about my clerical wage error and offered me a deal. He said I could either work seven hours a day at £2 an hour or four hours a day for £3 an hour. Reluctantly, I took less hours at the £3 an hour. I think he really wanted me to tell him to stick the job up his arse, but I didn't give him the satisfaction.