‘The thing about Chris is that he’s funnier than everybody else’ RICHARD OSMAN
CHRIS
M C CAUSLAND
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Keep Laughing
Keep Laughing
CHRIS M c CAUSLAND
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Keep Laughing
PENGUIN MICHAEL JOSEPH
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For Patricia and Sophie
Introduction
It was Wednesday, 4 September 2024, and I was in the back of a car on the way to Elstree Studios to film the opening episode of Strictly Come Dancing. This is where our celebrity and dancer pairings would be revealed to the public when it was broadcast in ten days’ time, and where we would all be taking part in a group dance number.
Spray tans were the hot topic in the WhatsApp group. You could book yourself in for one and many of the guys were all in on this. I had never had a spray tan in my life, but I had made the decision to try to let myself go a little bit, to just throw myself into the show and get involved with whatever was asked or expected of me. The only issue was that I would need this tan to be super-light, as in a week’s time I was filming a stand-up show for the telly and didn’t want to be up on stage, and therefore preserved for ever, hosting that show with a glaringly obvious mahogany sheen.
Of course this reminded me of the Friends episode where Ross has a bit of a nightmare while getting a spray tan. As you will no doubt remember, he keeps turning in the wrong direction and being sprayed over and over again in the face until he has become way more tanned than he had intended.
I remember watching this on the telly, actually watching, when I could still see enough to do so. It was hilarious, and even replaying the scene in my mind was making me chuckle along to myself whilst sat in the back of that car. I could recall Ross’s confusion and frustration as he was sprayed over and over, and ultimately that deep mahogany finish once all the spraying had stopped. It was like re-watching the scene as it was on the telly, a private viewing just for me.
I can’t watch anything these days, without two or three questions popping up in my mind that only Google can answer. I wonder if the internet wasn’t a thing, whether I would still have these questions being a nuisance in there, or whether I only allow them the consideration because I know I have the means of easily finding out the answers? Also, the act of looking these things up is often a distraction from more important things I should really be doing instead, and my brain loves a distraction.
How old is actor David Schwimmer now?
What was the name of the pet monkey Ross had?
Which series was that tan episode in?
It’s not like in those pre-internet days, I would have had to run to a local library and access microfiche archives of historical records and publications to find answers to the questions that, if left unanswered, would have slowly lead to me going mad. It’s not like I would have had to find a record of David Schwimmer’s birthdate and done the quick maths to work out his current age. It’s not like I would have had to comb through back issues of the TV Times magazine until I found a reference to that monkey. It’s not like I would have had to
go into HMV to check the back covers of TV boxsets until I knew the exact series that a specific episode was a part of so that particular itch could be scratched.
The internet is a thing, though, and I was sat in the back of a car with an iPhone, and so had both the time and the means to scratch all of these itches before I arrived at the studio.
He was fifty-seven years old at the time, but is fifty-eight now at the point of publication.
The monkey was called Marcel, of course it was, how the hell did I forget that?
I then looked up the tan episode online to see which series it was part of and couldn’t believe it when I saw that ‘The One with Ross’s Tan’ was episode three of series ten. It was first broadcast in the US on Friday, 3 October 2003, and had been shown in the UK just a few weeks later.
The glaringly shocking truth was that I had never seen that episode. Never seen it, as in actually seen it, with my own eyes, not with any level of sight whatsoever. It was broadcast on the telly three months after I had picked up a microphone and tried performing stand-up comedy for the first time. I was blind by that point, well and truly blind. The chances are that I likely didn’t even catch it when it was first on the telly, but rather some time afterwards on video with my mate Kev, who is Friends-obsessed, collected the whole lot on VHS, and who almost certainly could have answered any of those questions without the need for Google at all.
In that moment I felt as if the rug of what was real had been pulled from under my feet. Like when we find out that
Bruce Willis was actually a ghost all along. Mahogany Ross was in fact just a ghost, an apparition I had conjured up in my mind, and that I had at some point started to believe was real. I had obviously just listened to the episode, and so evocative was the scene and the comedy that I had created my own movie to go along with the audio I’d heard, and here we were, twenty years later, and I had become convinced that the images I had in my mind were the images that had been on the TV and that we had all experienced together.
My mind is a lie. My visual memory is a fabrication. The truth is that there are probably countless memories I have of things I think I’ve seen, but that I just haven’t. During the process of losing my sight, especially in my late teens and early twenties, my imagination would often just fill a lot of the gaps with what it thought was probably there. As more and more sight disappeared and those gaps got bigger, my imagination had more and more work to do, but I don’t think my mind really understood the difference between what was real and what was not, as it filed bits and pieces away for some future time when they might be called upon as part of a memory, or even a book.
When I was in my early twenties I had a fairly imposing rickety old bookcase stood against a wall in the living room. I could see this bookcase, kind of. I could see its dark shape looming in the blurry haze of that current level of minimal vision. Well, I thought I could anyway, because once I had finally got rid of the knackered old thing, condemned it to the local dump, for a while afterwards I could still see it there. Still see the dark imposing shape of the bookcase stood where
I knew it wasn’t. I would have to go over to where it had once been to confirm to myself with my hands that it was not there any more, upon which it would instantly evaporate from my vision, until the following day that is, when it would be back again to taunt me.
For how long had I not seen that bookcase? For how long had my imagination been papering over the cracks and filling in those gaps with what I thought should be there? To be honest, I haven’t got a clue. I realise that the murky ten-year period from my late teens onwards, when I was losing the dregs of my sight and living with the early years of blindness, is probably full of visual memories that are nothing more than my imagination doing its best to give me something to look at.
These days, my mind still functions extremely visually. I imagine everything around me, but I’m very aware of that. It’s not a conscious thing on my part, it doesn’t take effort or require intent, it just happens unconsciously as my mind still does its best to provide me with at least some visual sense of what I think should, or might, be there.
I can sit working on a computer, like I am now, and still become convinced that I can see the shapes and shadows of things I know are on the desk. There’s the dark shape of the computer in front of me, and I can easily become mesmerised by the blurry colours and shapes of things moving on its screen. I have to remind myself that because my computer talks, I don’t even have the screen turned on, and that It is nothing more than a black rectangle of glass that operates as a rather expensive lid for my laptop. This then causes those blurry colours and shapes to disappear from in front of me,
until the next time my mind wanders enough to be duped again.
Of course I have visual memories from when I could see pretty well, or half decent at least. From my childhood, through to my mid-teens when I was still able to see to some extent, and these memories do enable me to look back on my earlier years with a greater level of immersion than I can for those in my twenties. I do have all the facts, though, even if I can’t trust a lot of the pictures.
So with all that in mind, let’s get started and I’ll do my best to tell you about as much as I can of the funny and interesting stuff that has happened throughout my life, and how I think that I might remember it.
Chapter One
I was born in Liverpool.
I was born on a Wednesday, just about.
I was born twenty-five minutes before it would have been a Thursday, that particular midnight crossover from one day to the next being exactly slap-bang right in the middle of June 1977.
It seems a bit silly to go back as far as your own birth when writing an autobiography. After all, it’s not like we can remember any of it, and surely that’s the point of an autobiography, isn’t it? A first-hand account of life’s events, experiences, triumphs and tribulations – as best as you can recall them anyway: ‘After nine months of solitary confinement I caught a glimpse of daylight and decided to make a dash for it. I charged forward, despite the passage ahead seeming much too narrow, but somehow managed to squeeze myself through to freedom before I was immediately ambushed by giants.’
No. Surely any autobiography that bothers to go back this far is at this point, really, just a biography of some baby. A third-hand account of just some baby we have no memory of ever being, but who would one day become us, once we’d
finally finished booting up properly and were able to access the hard drive. Only then are we able to start archiving fragments of experience for later inclusion in a book.
So why have I dragged you all back here? Well, I do have a point and this just felt like the best place to make it, so sit tight for a moment and let me try and set the scene as best as I can, for somebody who wasn’t actually there, of course.
I did try to look up what the weather was like in Liverpool when I entered the world, but it says there is no recorded data. Considering it was twenty-five minutes to midnight, though, I think it’s fairly safe to say that the sun wasn’t out and that it was probably pretty dark.
I cried. An owl hooted, something like that.
This particular day happened to be precisely three weeks after Liverpool Football Club had triumphed in their first ever European Cup final, so I can only imagine that I felt incredibly disappointed to have missed the occasion.
The nurses would have announced to the room that I had a penis, counted my fingers and toes, and then whisked me off to be weighed. Eight pounds six, not bad!
‘A healthy baby boy!’ they would have proclaimed.
Well, almost, but not quite, because unbeknownst to everybody in that room, this baby’s eyesight had already started to worsen. It wouldn’t happen quickly, it would take about twenty-five years. A slow march over a quarter of a century into a blurry soup of nothingness.
So that is why we’re here, because in this particular moment in a Liverpool delivery room in the middle of June 1977, my eyes were the healthiest they would ever be. What
a shame that I was just a baby and couldn’t really appreciate it, or maybe I could and I just don’t remember it.
I would say that the rate at which my eyesight deteriorated was probably fairly consistent, but in a proportional sense, that is.
This is how I see it, pardon the pun . . .
I think it is simplest to think of it as being in an exponential decline, with my sight roughly halving in acuity every five years, always reducing significantly but never with an absolute zero in its grasp. Retinal cells were dying off, but always at that constant rate of about 50 per cent proportional to the amount of them still remaining.
Those first five years would have taken the biggest hit, wiping out about half of normal vision before I could attempt to read a book that had even the bare bones of a story within it. Books were big and bold, though, so this wouldn’t be too much of a problem yet, but being able to see the blackboard would be a different matter entirely.
This would also be the first real awareness I would have of my condition, as in those years prior to the age of five I was just too young to notice it happening, or to have any understanding of what was in play or what the hell ‘normal’ was meant to be anyway. For me, this was where the deterioration really started and my sight was half gone already.
By the age of ten I was down to about 25 per cent. I could read a book, but only if it had large print and I held it close to my face.
I could play hide and seek, but I was shit at it, and when it was my turn to be on base then all of the other kids knew
they didn’t really need to hide, but just be far enough away so they couldn’t be seen in plain sight.
By the age of fifteen I was coping with about 12 per cent acuity. I’d given up reading anything unless I had to, and even then it had to be magnified onto a special TV screen. Reading was a chore and it was neither fun nor enjoyable.
Playing computer games would become an issue, and soon even football, as I started having to relinquish parts of myself due to the ever-encroaching haze.
I lost about 12 per cent of normal vision over those last five years, which was a lot, but it worked out to be about one per cent every five or six months. That’s not really something you can notice happening in the moment, or even month by month, but certainly something that presents huge changes over these longer periods of time.
As I hit twenty years old I was running on 6 per cent, completely oblivious to the vast majority of the world around me. Relying on my sight now just got me into more trouble than it was worth. I was essentially blind, but still with just about enough sight to pretend I wasn’t, and denial consumed me.
I had to sit so close to the TV to see even the basic movements of people on it that the static played havoc with my hair. It was long by then, but I couldn’t see myself in the mirror to tell if it suited me or not. My dad would have said not, but who listens to their dad on these matters?
By the age of twenty-five, just a blurry nothing would cloud everything. I could still see something, but that remaining 3 per cent would just be a ‘something’ which was nothing of any use.
Eventually I would reach a plateau, the point at which any further decline was no longer noticeable to me, and where any further halves of almost nothing left me with a fairly similar sense of almost nothing. The relentless loss would stop but my imagination would now take over, painting pictures in my mind as compensation for a brain that was still hungry for things to look at.
Finally, though, I would reach a state of unchanging blindness that I could now try to get used to, although acceptance would still take a while.
It’s probably all a little more complicated than that, but I hope that gives you a rough idea of what was ahead of this almost very nearly healthy baby boy in that Liverpool delivery room on a Wednesday evening in the middle of June 1977. That initial twenty-five years would contain a lot of loss, frustration and shame, but I also had a blast along the way.
My life would then change for ever when, at the age of twenty-six, I would dare myself to pick up a microphone for the very first time. That would prove to be the most terrifying thing I would ever do, until I was to stick on a pair of dance shoes and try dancing on live TV in front of millions. What the hell was I thinking?
Chapter Two
The first memory I have is of putting my hand into something wet. It’s more just a recollection of the sensation, a sliminess, of an initial confusion and surprise, and then of my mum realising that my novelty Donald Duck bubble bath had leaked on the carpet. The Donald-shaped bottle with screw-off head might have begged to be played with, but he evidently wasn’t built for such things and much to my anguish poor Donald’s insides had ended up on his outside. My mum doesn’t remember this, but why would she? This would have been one of countless insignificant things that had happened in her life, whereas for me it must have been a fairly monumental tragedy, I would imagine perhaps on a par with the passing of a close family member.
I think I was somewhere around two and a half to three years old, and in my mind this is the first memory I have of anything happening. We were living in a part of Liverpool called Cantril Farm, first in a flat and then a small house, but I don’t remember anything specific about these homes aside from a few faded snapshots of memories that I know definitely occurred while we were living there.
My mum worked behind the bar in the Hare and Hounds
pub in Liverpool’s West Derby Village, and in one of those memories I’m toddling along a pavement after the back of her legs as she was leaving for a shift, and my dad is sweeping me up from behind as I cried.
I suppose you could call such moments traumatic, and that’s likely why they etched themselves into my memory with such significance that they remain there to this day. It also shows how happy my earliest years must have been when this constitutes trauma: having to say goodbye to my mum as she left for work, and the loss of our beloved Donald, may he rest in peace.
My mum has the same eyesight condition as I do. It’s hereditary and it deteriorates significantly more slowly in females than in males. Yes, I have a sexist eyesight condition that hates men. To be honest, it hates women as well, just not with as much vigour as it hates men.
My mum became a housewife and a full-time mum throughout my entire childhood, I was certainly a full-time job, and for the last thirty years she has volunteered, teaching braille to adults who lose their sight later in life.
My mum would have been about twenty-five when she was still working in the pub, the age I was when my sight had completely left me. I would hazard a guess that maybe it deteriorates twice as slowly in females as it does in males, maybe halving every ten years rather than every five. My sister Louise is in her early forties now and her sight is probably where mine was in my early twenties, so this seems to be about right.
These faulty genes were passed on to my mum via my nan, and to my nan via her father, but where they came from
before that generation or for how many generations it has existed in our family is anybody’s guess. My mum tells me that her grandmother died in childbirth with her tenth child, and her blind grandfather ended up raising nine children on his own, which certainly puts anything I’ve ever achieved into stark perspective.
Prior to my arrival my dad was working in the Barker & Dobson factory, where they made those lovely Everton Mints. He was also the drummer in a band called Pisces, and they would travel the working men’s clubs of northern England with their long hair, moustaches and bright orange crushed-velvet suits with purple trim. My dad tells me that the first time they wore those bright orange suits was for a gig in a Catholic club, which he said didn’t go down very well. There was one eventful show when my dad collapsed off the drums during a performance and had to be rushed to hospital. Talk about living the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle! Although it doesn’t seem quite so exciting when you learn that he was actually suffering from an acutely inflamed appendix . . . but I would imagine that was probably because of all the booze and women, yeah?
When I was born my dad became a fireman, working in both Huyton and Storrington Avenue stations in Liverpool. As a kid, there was nothing cooler than your dad turning up at home in a fully manned fire engine, which he would do from time to time, because it would instantly command the attention and admiration of all the kids in the neighbourhood, and I would feel like that fire engine belonged to me.
On two occasions during my childhood I needed to call
him out on official business . . . well, kind of. The first was when I was walking with my mum and my nan through our local Croxteth Park and decided to take a shortcut through a wooded area. I was about seven years old at this point as my mum was pushing my sister in a pram, and kids back then were actively encouraged to play in wooded areas whenever an opportunity arose. I had obviously popped out the other side before my mum and my nan had managed to take the long way around, but due to my poor sight I thought I’d seen them ahead of me and followed the backs of two strangers through the park, only realising at the end that I was alone. My mum and my nan had spent some time calling and shouting for me when I hadn’t met them as promised, and once they had accepted that I was likely dead they had returned back to my nan’s house to phone my dad, who promptly turned up in a fire engine to locate and retrieve my body.
They eventually found me still alive and walking all the way back to where I had started, a bit confused as to why my dad was there with all of his mates, but a lift in a fire engine was a lift in a fire engine so all in all a pretty good day.
A few years later when I was about ten we had to call him out again as I had become ridiculously stuck in a basket. It was a small moulded plastic basket with lots of square holes all over each side. I took my left hand and I pushed all of my fingers through these square holes right up to my knuckles, but the holes pinched them in place so that I was unable to pull them out.
So, what did I do with one hand firmly stuck in a basket?
Well, I pushed the fingers on my other hand through the other side, so that now I had both hands firmly locked into an improvised Chinese-style finger trap. I couldn’t budge them loose, and now they were starting to lose blood supply and turn purple. My mum couldn’t free them either so, with no other options available to us, she phoned the fire brigade, or rather my dad, who promptly turned up on a fully manned and equipped fire engine to rescue his idiot son from a small plastic basket.
My parents had to put up with a lot from me when I was a kid, as I was naughty and I was noisy and I never ran out of energy. I was climbing the walls at the best of times, but any episode of a favourite show, such as The A-Team or Knight Rider would have me diving over furniture and behind the couch doing my best to re-enact whatever I’d been watching while providing a full range of sound effects and theme-tune accompaniments.
My sister has always been pretty chilled out and good as gold, but she wouldn’t turn up until Chapter Five. Even with a seven-year age gap, though, you would have struggled to tell which of us was the oldest from behaviour alone. When she was four and I was eleven we would fight over who might have been occupying the other’s half of the TV viewing area. We would sit on the floor in front of the TV and draw an invisible line from the centre of the screen into the room to illustrate by how many centimetres we thought the other had encroached into our own personal space. Honestly, she was so childish. Even now she’s trying to encroach into the story three chapters before she should. I rest my case.
Our eyesight condition is possibly called retinitis pigmentosa, which is not as sexy as it sounds, and I say ‘possibly’ because I’m not entirely sure any more that that is what we have. RP is a genetic condition that comes in many flavours that lead to a variety of ways in which it can be inherited or will reveal its symptoms. Ours is dominant, which means there’s a 50:50 chance of inheriting it from a parent who has the condition. If you inherit it, there’s a 50:50 chance you can pass it on to any children you have, but if you don’t inherit it you can’t pass it on. It doesn’t hide or skip generations or anything as cunning as that.
About ten years ago I participated in the 100,000 Genomes Project, a humungous undertaking to map and better understand a range of rare genetic diseases. I waited seven whole years for the results of my participation to be posted out to me, and after all that it came back as inconclusive. They were unable to identify any faulty genes and I got the all clear. Seven years to be told they couldn’t find anything wrong with me.
Now here’s why I say ‘possibly’. At some point in the last twenty years I remember being told by a specialist that they thought I had something called cone rod dystrophy, which I assumed was one of those many flavours of RP, a subtype of RP, so to speak. It is only now when writing this book that I have looked up CRD and learned that it’s not a type of RP, but something entirely different. Reading about it, though, and CRD does seem to fit the pattern of my family’s sight loss more than RP, so there’s a chance that that specialist was right. There are no cures or treatments for either, and
they are pretty similar, so it doesn’t really make a lot of difference, does it?
Because of the family history, sight loss and blindness were always just part of normal life growing up. My nan never let her blindness faze her, well certainly not in front of me anyway. She would laugh about misfortune and frustration and set the tone for how my family would try to relate to our sight loss.
When I was a teenager, probably around thirteen, my dad was cleaning the inside of the living-room windows.
‘Here you go, hold this for me,’he said, and I opened my hand to take what he was offering me.
He dropped something small and light into my open hand but I couldn’t tell what it was. I fiddled, poked and rolled it between my fingers to see if I could figure it out but I didn’t have a clue.
‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘Oh, that? It’s a dead wasp.’
My parents broke out in hysterical laughter as I flung the hideous dried corpse as far away from myself as I could manage and ran off to wash my contaminated hands. I hated insects and creepy-crawlies, and the fact that I’d been playing with a dead one trying to work out what it was because I couldn’t see it, well, they thought that was the funniest thing in the world. Somebody phone social services.
Even now when I reminded them of this they broke out into almost the same amount of laughter as they did back then. Some people never grow up.
My grandad was a drunk, and although he was fairly
harmless, I would imagine he was a lot for my poor nan to put up with. As a kid I would regularly be able to find coins scattered on the floor and under furniture from where he had fallen over the night before.
‘Whatever you can find you can keep,’ she would say. ‘It’s his own fault.’
I believe that my other grandparents, on my dad’s side, were pretty decent ballroom dancers back in the day, so maybe I inherited a few of those genes from them. My dad’s dad died when I was eleven months old and so I have no memory of him. When he died, though, there was a concern that he might have had tuberculosis so I was promptly given my BCG inoculation when I was still in a nappy, which gave me a glorious pass from pain as a teenager when classmates were having to go for the jab. Thanks, Grandad!
We moved from Cantril Farm to a house in West Derby Village when I hadn’t yet reached four years old. The house was a two-up two-down that cost fourteen thousand pounds in 1981. It consisted of a living room, a kitchen, with a small bathroom off it, stairs, two bedrooms, and that was it.
I have so many good memories of that house. Despite its tiny size, single-glazed windows, and lack of any heating, aside from a gas fire in the living room, my memories of being there are very warm and cosy indeed, although my mum tells me that it was often bloody freezing.
Its address confused me at first, ‘2 Craigside Avenue’. I’d only ever heard it said out loud so didn’t realise that it was the number two. I remember thinking it was ‘To Craigside Avenue’ and wondered how the postman would know that
the letters were for us if they were only ever addressed ‘To’ the street.
Each side of the street was one long terrace with the front doors opening straight out onto the pavement. Ours was one of the end houses, and in my opinion the best house on the street. On our side everyone had a small square back garden, while on the other they had a tiny concrete back yard. As one of only two houses occupying an end position on what was clearly the best side, ours had side access via a gate at the front that would take you through a passage at the side of the house through to that back garden. Point proved.
My dad would smoke cigarettes in that tiny house, and it seems nuts now to even think that was the norm for smokers back then, but it was, and a tall standing ashtray was positioned next to the couch.
We would soon have a commemorative photograph album of Prince Charles and Lady Diana’s wedding, with a big Union flag on the front, that we had got from my dad’s Embassy tokens. Not only was smoking perfectly acceptable indoors back then, but it was rewarded with a whole range of tat you could select from a catalogue when you’d smoked enough to earn the privilege.
Shortly after moving into this house, I met Neil. He was my age, in fact almost exactly. He was just two days older than me in 1981 and remains so to this day. We met when we were fast approaching four and we’re still the best of friends as we approach the final lap of our forties.
The story goes that I actually went knocking on all of the doors on my street enquiring as to whether there were
any children living there that I could play with – adorable, I know. Neil didn’t live on my street but just around the corner, but I believe that it was my proactive efforts to find a friend that led to me being pointed in his direction.
Friends from the age of nearly four. We would do almost everything together over the coming years, including moving to London, going to university, a thousand different concerts, and even having our kids at the same time, although this bit wasn’t planned.
Neil is six foot seven and, despite being a skinny waif like me throughout his twenties, he is a lot bigger built, these days. You can see him featuring as my mystery guest on Would I Lie to You? during a story about how I accidentally handed my own keys in to a lost property office after I dropped them without realising it, then didn’t recognise them as mine when picking them up off the ground.
He loved standing there and trying to keep a straight face as David Mitchell did his best to pretend to know him, while Lee Mack baited David about how there was no chance that anybody like Neil would ever hang around with anybody like David.
One thing we would never do together, though, was attend the same school. Neil’s family was Catholic, and mine Church of England, and it was this that determined the schools we attended.
Chapter Three
To say I had a difficult relationship with school from the outset would be a bit of an understatement. On my very first day I point-blank refused to enter the building with all of the other children, so my mum had to pick me up and carry me inside to try and facilitate some kind of hostile handover with the poor lady who was to become my first ever teacher. Apparently she’d had to do exactly the same thing two years earlier when trying to drop me off at a nursery for the first time. I have no memory of this, but she tells me I also refused to part company on that occasion as well. As my mum and the lovely old lady who ran the nursery had tried to force that particular handover, I reached over, grabbed hold of the lady’s blouse with two hands, and then ripped it wide open, sending her buttons pinging off in all directions.
Back in the school, though, and despite all my kicking and screaming, this handover was eventually carried out with everybody’s buttons remaining intact, but I wouldn’t imagine with anybody really feeling good about any of it.
I do have a few memories of my very first week in school. Of being taught how to sit on the floor with my legs crossed, in the way that kids sit cross-legged on the floor in school. I
had honestly never sat like that before and had no idea how to do it, so when the teacher told us to sit on the carpet with our legs crossed I just did exactly what that sounded like. I sat on my bum with my legs stretched perfectly straight in front of me and just crossed at the ankles. I looked around, and all of the other kids were doing something weird and different but I couldn’t figure out what it was. Somehow their feet were pulled up and almost tucked underneath them while their bent knees were poking out to the sides.
Where did they learn how to do that? I thought, as my new teacher tried to fold me into the correct position.
I remember the first book I had to read to my teacher. A bit of a search online tells me that it might have been from a series called ‘Look and Say’ that consisted of various coloured levels with multiple books in each level. Obviously the complexity would build as you worked your way through the various books and levels. Level One was red, and book one of Level One was simply called Look.
Look wasn’t just the name of the book though. It was the only word written on each and every single page of that book. Every page had a picture of the same boy pointing at something with the word ‘Look’ written alongside him. I remember standing there at the teacher’s desk just saying the word ‘Look’ over and over again while she turned the pages seemingly riveted to the story, and even at the young age of four I quite clearly remember thinking that this was a rubbish story.
Despite the incredible level of patience my teacher must have been blessed with, I still managed to get into trouble,
constantly. I was a disruptive kid in school, disruptive to the class, and I spent quite a lot of my early education just stood up facing a wall. This was often the punishment for lower-value crimes, but for those instances when staring at a wall just wouldn’t cut it, a visit to the headmaster was required.
My first trip to see him came in my very first week of school, because I had . . . I am ashamed to say this but I had bitten Gillian Pearce on the hand. I think she tried to wrestle a toy off me during an indoor play time, and as my two hands were busy trying to secure possession of said toy, I mobilised my mouth to get involved.
Sometimes you need to really feel shame to know that something was wrong, and I certainly felt ashamed of myself on that particular day, and I’m pleased to report that I have never bitten anybody since. Well, not unless they’ve asked me to. That’s a kinky-sex joke. Nobody has ever asked me to. For somebody who ended up in trouble as much as I did, I had an extraordinarily high level of compliance with certain rules when I first started school, specifically when it came to the ways of the toilet.
My issue related to what was allowed, and what was not allowed, when it came to doing a poo at school. Basically, I wouldn’t do a poo at school. I would often return home absolutely desperate to go and would sometimes only just make it to the toilet in time before my school uniform would have needed burning in the garden.
My mum couldn’t understand why I was returning home so desperate for a sit-down visit to the bathroom when there were toilets in the school.
‘Why don’t you just go for a poo in school?’ she asked.
I told her I wasn’t allowed. I told her we had been given the rules around going to the toilet and that these rules were very strict. I then proceeded to tell her that we had been told in no uncertain terms that the urinals were for doing wees in and the toilets were for doing poos in, and my mum was obviously confused by my issue.
‘Well, yes, that’s right, but what’s the problem?’ she asked.
‘Don’t you see?’ I said. ‘I can’t go to the toilet for a poo, because whenever I do a poo a bit of wee comes out and we can only do a wee in the urinals . . .’
My mum tried to assure me that doing wees was absolutely fine in the toilet, and there would only really be an issue if I tried to do a poo in the urinals. I wouldn’t budge on this at all, though. She hadn’t been there and that was what we were told.
My mum actually had to go into the school and explain to my teacher what I thought the toilet rules were and ask her to set me straight on this issue before I had an accident on the way home. My teacher then had to sit me down and explain to me exactly what my mum had already tried to tell me, which was basically to do whatever feels right but just don’t shit in the urinals.
This could probably be seen as a prime example of literal thinking that today might raise a few flags for a youngster, but back then it was just seen as being a little bit weird and quirky, and possibly cute – yeah, let’s go with cute.
It’s absolutely bananas to me that I have ended up as a performer for a living. It was never a dream of mine to be on
the stage one day. If I’m honest, I hated performing when I was a kid.
I always disliked being part of school assemblies and endof-term concerts, concerts being such a grand term for what were essentially ramshackle and tuneless events that seemed to fit no other purpose than to make parents regret ever having children in the first place. I never liked being up there with a roomful of people staring at me, and as I grew older I always just found it all a bit naff.
Performing was not something I ever sought out as I reached my teenage years. No drama clubs or auditions for me, no secret yearning to be lit under stage lights or thrust onto the TV screen: performing stand-up would come almost entirely out of the blue and would surprise me as well as everybody who knew me.
My first ever time in front of an audience was a bloody disaster, literally. I was approaching the end of my first term in school and was still a whole six months away from becoming five years old. I was an angel in the chorus of angels. Picture the scene, me, an incredibly cute – yes, we’re sticking with cute – blond, freckly kid dressed in a little white frock. Back when I was in school, the chorus of angels was the bit for all the kids who didn’t get a proper part so were just corralled together into one big ensemble of leftover kids.
There aren’t too many proper parts in a school nativity, are there? Mary, Joseph, the three shepherds and the three wise men, the innkeeper, if you can call that a proper part with just the one line of dialogue.
‘Sorry, we’re completely full. You might want to try booking in advance next time.’
These days, it’s a little different and there is often a part for every child. You are just as likely to see a kid dressed as a squirrel or a tree as you are one of the wise men.
‘Ooh, you’re the Christmas hedgehog,’ you might find yourself reacting to your own child’s exciting school nativity news, while hoping it’s not going to be up to you to find them the costume.
I was stood there on one of those long wooden benches you get in every school hall up and down the land, one of those long benches with the two little nobbles on either end.
I wonder if those benches are all made by the same company or if there are several companies that are all sharing exactly the same design. I must remember to google that at some point, but not now: I’m being good, I’m writing a book.
I was stood there with all of the other leftover kids, a sad little row of angelic rejects just waiting for our moment when we would no doubt have praised the Lord as one through some kind of ritual chanting, or murdered a fairly miserable hymn that did much the same thing but was dragged out over several minutes and to piano accompaniment.
I don’t know whether it was the pressure of the situation that got to me, it being my first time in front of an audience, or whether I’d just had my finger too far up my nose looking for lost treasure, but all of a sudden I experienced what can best be described, under the circumstances, as the ‘holy mother’ of all nosebleeds. Just as the baby Jesus was being
introduced to the three wise men, there was an eruption that took place within me that seemed like it caused 20 per cent of my blood supply to burst out of my face in a single instant.
I immediately started screaming in the middle of this nativity and frantically shaking my head from side to side, spraying angels to the left of me, and angels to the right.
From the perspective of the audience it looked like there had been a drive-by shooting and that several of the angels had taken fatal hits. Maybe those three wise men had actually been three wise guys instead, capeesh?
One of the teachers came rushing in and grabbed me from that bench I’m resisting googling because I’m writing a book, and airlifted me out of Jerusalem, or Bethlehem, or Nazareth, or wherever we were meant to be, and carried me out of the hall under one arm before dumping me in an industrial-sized sink in the school kitchen until I was completely drained of the remaining 80 per cent of my blood.
As a comedian, I’ve been at plenty of shitty horrible gigs over the years – more on these later – where I would have loved somebody to come racing in, airlift me out of the room and dump me in a massive sink until it was all over.
Thankfully, though, that childhood nativity is the only time my nose has ever bled on stage. The mad thing is I’ve never even sneezed. Thousands of gigs over twenty-odd years and I have never once even had to stifle a sneeze on stage. I think there must be some subconscious process going on that shuts down a lot of my natural bodily functions while in performance mode. I don’t know whether this is to do
with focus, adrenaline, or just that I am so incapable of multitasking that my brain has to stick itself on ‘Do not disturb’ for the duration of any set. Never sneezed, never broken wind, never once even needed to hold one in while on stage, and that’s remarkable, considering that if you ask my daughter she will tell you that ‘Farty-pants’ is my middle name.
My childhood was dotted with examples of on-stage disaster or humiliation. The holy mother of all nosebleeds was just one of many.
During one performance my only job was to crash two cymbals together at a specific point in one particular song. My contribution had been boiled down to this single moment so they could still say I was involved in some way, but so they could also keep that involvement down to an absolute minimum. This is risk management 101, but it didn’t work.
Mr Wilson was my music teacher, a rotund man with what seemed like impossibly small feet for his level of rotundness. It seemed inconceivable that he was able to stand on his own without just toppling forward. If he were an ornament you would think that surely he must have come loose from a base that had once offered him stability, unless you were just meant to lean him up against a vase or something like that.
Whenever he talked to me, I would make sure that I was stood slightly off to one side, just in case the natural laws of physics were suddenly to kick back into gear and he was to come toppling down in front of me. I would then only need to calmly take a small step out of the way rather than leaping for my life.
Mr Wilson had tried to teach me to play the piano. He had spent the best part of a school year doing so before asking me to stop.
‘I don’t think this is for you,’ he had said. ‘After a year we really should be further on than just playing the very basic single notes of “Jingle Bells” with one hand.’
He had a point and, to this day, a very basic ‘Jingle Bells’ with one hand is still all I can play on a piano. He mightn’t have been able to teach me much, but what he did teach me is still in there somewhere, because if I ever cross paths with a piano around Christmas time I can’t help but have a festive tinkle. If I’m honest, the time of the year is irrelevant as I’ve done it in August. It’s all I’ve got, after all.
Mr Wilson had so little faith in me to contribute anything musical to the performance, beyond a single crash of cymbals at one specific moment in one specific song. I mean, it’s not like I could mess that up, is it? Do you see where this is going?
My main job was to wait quietly for my moment and not interfere with the rest of the ‘concert’. The problem with this plan, though, was that just waiting quietly was so boring. So impossibly boring that I started to fidget and fiddle with the cymbals that I had strapped to my hands.
I would always fidget and fiddle. I had been a chronic nailbiter since as far back as I can remember and I still struggle with it today, but if there was any object to hand I would fidget and fiddle with that until I likely broke whatever it was I was fidgeting and fiddling with. I could never just sit still or wait quietly as the stillness would be unbearable. I would always have to see what happened if I poked or prodded. I
would pry, peel, pinch and press, flex, flatten, fold and flick. I would stretch, squeeze, shake and spin whatever I could get my hands on, and I would generally do this until something went snap. Have you figured out where this is going yet?
I realised I could use my fingers on the outside of the cymbals to spin them really quite fast, as far as they would spin before the central pin holding them onto the hand straps would become wound tight with tension, and then I would spin them back the other way. I would do this until the tension in that central pin would again build to a point where all spinning would come to a halt, upon which I would fire the two cymbals spinning back the other way with great force. I repeated this spinning game over and over. Little did I know it, but each time weakened the integrity of those central pins that were holding the cymbals to those leather hand straps. I mean, surely you’ve figured it out by now.
My moment finally came closer, closer and closer. I stopped spinning and waited. I waited for the moment upon which I was going to smash those cymbals together like nobody had ever smashed two cymbals together in the whole history of cymbal-smashing. Closer and closer, the moment was here! I flung my arms apart to enable the biggest smash of cymbals that my tiny frame could manage. Immediately, the central holding pins broke free and the two cymbals went flying off in opposite directions into the roomful of parents and teachers. I was just left there on the stage with my arms still flung wide apart, but with two now vacant leather straps hanging limply from each of them.
One cymbal careered off to the right, over the top of the audience as everybody ducked for cover, and crashed into a side wall. The other took a similar route to the left of the hall with everybody over there also ducking for cover, everybody apart from one lady who rather bravely managed to stop the cymbal dead in its tracks with her head. The cymbal hit the lady right in the side of her head and both cymbals came crashing to the floor making a humungous smashing noise only slightly after when I should have made the noise myself. It was barely noticeable and, in terms of the timing, I almost got away with it.
There was nothing anybody could do to blame me, though. I was just the poor kid who had enthusiastically flung his arms apart to smash those cymbals together as he had been instructed. Nobody knew about my secret spinning game, and nobody would find out: that would be my little secret. If the unfortunate lady had a problem, then she could take it up with the cymbal manufacturer for what seemed like an obvious quality-control issue in their cymbal-making factory.
I think I’m safe now, as I believe that the statute of limit ations has passed on cymbal-related head injuries from the 1980s. Plus, that lady is no longer with us: she died shortly afterwards from completely unrelated brain injuries, honest.
The legal team has asked me to make quite clear that this lady did not actually die from being hit in the head by a flying cymbal. Talk about sucking all the fun out of a joke.
On a brighter note, though, I can tell you that those school benches were commonly known as Balance Benches,
and they were manufactured by multiple companies based on a standardised design that best suited the requirements of schools primarily for PE and assembly purposes. Right, it’s done. I’ll be able to sleep tonight.
Chapter Four
The first memories I have of my eyesight not exactly being as it should relate to the blackboard in school. I could see the blackboard, I could see that there was writing on the blackboard, but I often couldn’t make out what that writing was. Sometimes it would look like white squiggles with no real rhyme or reason or definition to it, a chalky soup of mystery notations that no amount of squinting or craning my neck forward would bring into focus. After all, if my sight was just half of what it should have been and I was sat a few feet away from the thing, then craning forward a few extra inches wasn’t going to make a lot of difference, was it?
I think conversations were had and I was moved to be sat at the front of the class, but this didn’t entirely solve the problem. I was told that I could get up out of my seat as and when I felt I needed to, something that was forbidden to all of the other children without express permission from the teacher, so I could take a much closer look and investigate these squiggles from any distance I deemed fit.
Even at that young age, though, I remember feeling very self-conscious about it and embarrassed by this special concession to the normal rules. I would often rather remain in
my seat and just guess what I thought the squiggles might say rather than finding out for certain.
It’s remarkable how primitive eye tests and knowledge were about my eye condition back in the early eighties. My very first eye test at about the age of four consisted of the specialist dropping a handful of ball bearings on the floor and telling me to pick them up, like he was throwing a handful of grain down for a chicken to feed on. On my successful completion of this task he reported that there was absolutely nothing to worry about and that my eyesight was perfectly fine, and possibly that if I was a young chicken I would certainly not go hungry, although this last comment I can’t be 100 per cent sure of.
Nobody in my family seems to know why, but when I was five years old I was given a pair of glasses. Now, the thing about glasses is that they correct problems with the lens of the eye by placing fully functional machine-engineered prescription lenses in front of your underperforming rubbish biological ones. My problem, however, was nothing to do with the lenses at the front of my eyes, but rather the retinas at the back of them, and glasses would have done nothing to help with this. Putting a pair of glasses on me was like giving a pair of orthopaedic shoes to somebody whose legs were broken and just hoping that these new prescription shoes might somehow help them walk better.
So why was I given glasses? Who the hell knows? But there I was at the age of five sporting a pair of brown plastic NHS ones that came in a hard leatherette clam-shell case that smelled stuffier on the inside than a shoe shop on a summer’s day.
This was my second year of infant school, year two, as it was known back then because logic still meant something in the school-year numbering system. These days, that would be year one as the first year of infants is now just known as Reception, which I think is a little confusing when the school also has an actual reception.
As part of a post-Christmas assembly that our class was putting on for the rest of the school, each child needed to stand up and say something that was new in their life and that they were grateful for. For most kids this meant just standing up and saying something they had received for Christmas that they were especially happy about. I know, very materialistic, but this was a Church of England school, not Catholic, so I think there was a general acceptance that Jesus was nothing without Santa.
The must-have toys for boys when I was five years old were things like Star Wars figures and vehicles, Lego sets, Action Man and Matchbox cars, which were all the rage, not accounting for anything as awesome as a bike or any football paraphernalia whatsoever.
My teacher thought it would be a good idea for me to shun this convention and that I should stand up and tell everybody about my brand-new pair of glasses. Now let me be clear: I had not received these glasses for Christmas. Santa was not in the business of eye health back in 1982 and my parents had not pretended he was. These had obviously been prescribed at some point around the festive period by an overly optimistic eye doctor and my teacher thought it would be good for me to claim them as my most exciting of new acquisitions.
But wait, that’s not all.
‘I don’t think you should call them glasses,’ she said. ‘I think you should call them spectacles. It would be far more special to call them spectacles.’
Even back then I remember thinking that ‘spectacles’ was a bit of an odd choice of word for a five-year-old kid from Liverpool to use, but she was fairly insistent and, to be honest, I probably thought that surely she must know best.
One child got up and told the school that he’d got KerPlunk for Christmas and everybody cheered. I had also got Ker-Plunk for Christmas, and Buckeroo. A girl in my class stood up and announced to everybody that she’d got a new Barbie doll, and everybody clapped like she’d made it herself.
The theme did deviate slightly from Christmas presents, with one child who had just moved house telling everybody how happy he was now he had his own bedroom, which brought a cheer, and another informing the school of a new baby sister, a younger sibling being something many of the kids in the school could relate to, so they all clapped this new arrival. Generally speaking, though, the work of Santa featured very heavily in this assembly, with kids taking turns to stand up and announce the exciting new toy they had just received, before it was my turn.
I stood up, and in the proudest clearest voice I could manage, I announced to the whole school that I had got a new pair of spectacles.
Rather than the cheer or the round of applause that had followed each of the other children’s announcements, I received laughter, laughter from the entire school. Laughter
from every child sat cross-legged on the floor, all of the children in my class who were up front alongside me and, to be honest, probably many of the teachers as well.
‘I got a new pair of spectacles.’
Of course they laughed. Not only is it a weird thing to stand up and announce alongside toys and new houses and baby sisters, but it is a ridiculous way to say it, ‘spectacles’, like I’d used a word from an era gone by. It’s not even like I was standing up and announcing I had received the gift of better sight because, as we’ve already established, the spectacles were a pointless addition to my face and did absolutely nothing to help in that regard.
Even back then I knew the difference between a room full of people laughing at me and a room full of people laughing with me. I knew that this was certainly the first of those two things, and in that moment, I wanted the world to open up and swallow me whole, or at least to be turned invisible for ever.
I might have felt too self-conscious and embarrassed to get up and investigate the blackboard more closely, but this is the first moment I can remember of feeling humiliation and shame related to my less-than-ideal eyesight. Nobody was laughing because I couldn’t see very well, or even because I had glasses on my face, it was simply because I’d said ‘spectacles’, but for me in that moment the two things were inextricable.
It’s actually quite mad that I can whisk myself back to that moment over forty years ago and still relive it to some extent. With our earliest memories it does seem to be those moments of relative trauma that bed themselves in deepest,