I Used to Say My Mother Was Shirley Bassey (26 page)

In the fracas somehow the stage had got wet, probably from a water glass hurled at the poor journalist, who was hopefully being consoled in the backstage. Someone was going to have to clear it up. After fairly brutally ripping the journalist to shreds and on the audience's insistence, the compere said, ‘Shall I make him come out and mop the stage?' The stage manager appeared with a mop and the barely recovered journalist came back on stage to mop up.

Crowd can be inventive in their bastardry. There is a gig that happens once a month at London's Comedy Store called
The Gong Show
. You have to get on-stage and survive five minutes without being gonged off. Rarely do real comedians try to do this gig because it's not really about material; it's about the audience baiting and heckling people. There is normally a final at the end where anyone who actually makes the five minutes goes head to head and a winner is announced. This gig is such a sadomasochistic experience that often the participants are a bit mental.

One time I was watching this comedy cock fight and the audience noticed that we were getting towards the end and only one person had made it to the five-minute mark. The savvy ones amongst them realized that they would be denied their final blood match and so decided to get behind someone to give them a proper end game. But they didn't choose someone good. They waited for the absolute worst train wreck of a gagsmith to take to the stage and laughed and applauded wildly whenever he said anything or made the smallest gesture. Looking into the comic's eyes, you could see that he knew he was being toyed with as his gags became weaker and weaker and the audience went wilder and wilder. By the end, he would have begged to be booed off and put out of his misery. It was like a firing squad shooting a condemned man in the foot and shoulder only because they wanted him prone for the final killer bullet.

If a heckle is funny, I'll run with it; or if you're challenging a statement the comic has made then fair enough. But often a heckler is just a drunk trying to be the centre of attention. Crowds used to be a lot worse than they are now. About ten years ago, I noticed a distinct change in audiences and comics alike. Gone was the spark of originality and a steady influx of sexist and homophobic jokes started to be delivered under the guise of irony. There is nothing wrong with telling jokes about race, gender and sexual orientation if the intent is clear. You have to be trying to make people laugh and not just do someone down. But at this time in the clubs a lot of the intent behind the jokes was getting blurred and it gave the audience the right to shout out outrageous stuff with the excuse that ‘it's only a joke'.

I was at a late-night comedy club when a female comic, a good friend of mine, took to the stage. It was Friday and the audience were tired and intoxicated. Standing at the back of the room, I watched as the MC introduced my mate. The cheers were notably half-hearted but what happened next made my eyes pop out of my face. Back then the typical male to female ratio in club audiences was 85:15, while the ratio to female comics on a regular bill was even less.

Before she even reached the microphone stand a gruff voice shouted out from the crowd, ‘Oi, ugly, I can smell your cunt.' It was the worst heckle I had ever heard, but the audience reaction surprised me even more. It was met with a chorus of massive laughs and applause, as though it was the most brilliant, intelligent heckle ever told. My mate walked right off the stage shouting, ‘Fuck you! I don't need this!' That was a long time ago and thankfully things have changed since then. For one thing, these days, she says, she washes it before going on stage.

It's not so nice when people decide that they can get away with something that would be considered a hate crime outside of a comedy scenario. I once was playing a gig in the East End of London and someone shouted out, ‘Oi, darky! I never knew, I never fucking knew, that black people were funny!' That took me back, but I wasn't going to get defensive. I just said, ‘Some of us ride bikes. Have been known to ski. Work with rudimentary tools.' All I got in return was ‘Ay? Wassat?' He didn't know what I meant. So I won that one.

When an audience is sitting in the palm of your hands it is a fantastic experience because you are making a connection with them. It's intimate and you interact with them and they interact with you. It's like a table-tennis match and the audience is on your side because after all they want to laugh and play with you too. Just don't forget that you can rehearse a set until it's perfect but you need to be able to chuck the whole thing away if something happens in the room that you weren't expecting. And when that thing happens and the gig gets spontaneous, that's worth a million one-liners.

A lot of unusual characters make the decision to become stand-up comedians and often people who are extroverts on-stage are introverts off-stage. They can be quite deep, often very intelligent. I was travelling with a well-known comic recently and a fan came up to him and, after talking to us for a minute, he said to the comic, ‘You're not very funny in real life.' This comic just turned to him and said, ‘Mate! Get a grip! IT'S AN ACT!' Maybe the fan thought he was being cute, but he got the whole concept of stand-up comedy wrong. As I said before, it's only meant to
look
easy.

For the most part my on-stage comedy persona is very similar to my off-stage persona, but every performer lives a bit of a double life. Comics' lives are the opposite to other peoples' lives. We go to clubs and bars to work. Our busiest times are in the evenings, at weekends and at Christmas. In fact, when I was first starting out in comedy, my dad was the first to notice that I was keeping very strange work patterns. I knew he'd hate the idea of me doing comedy, so I actually started out by telling him that I was a minicab driver. However since he noticed that I would always dress up in smart suits before leaving, plus I didn't have a car at the time, I knew this fiction wouldn't last for ever.

‘Stephen. What is going on in your life? Where are you going dressed like that night after night? Do you really drive a taxi?'

Eventually, I sat him down, took a deep breath and said, ‘Dad. You're right. I've been living a double life . . . I'm a stand-up comedian.'

He said, ‘Phew! I thought you were gay!'

I
N MY OPINION
, L
ONDON
is the best city in the world. The old buildings that crowd the centre are a reminder of its glorious past. The nightlife is good enough to give you a hangover for a week and it was on the arts scene that I first performed as a comedian. If you come to London then you've got to spend some time exploring it, but to me the best thing about the capital is the diversity of the people. Nowhere else in the UK or maybe even the world can you find so many different nationalities and cultures all living pretty much in peace and side by side. New York in the USA has a similar mixture of peoples, but over there people seem confined to specific areas. So you've got Latin barrios, black neighbourhoods, white enclaves, Middle Eastern districts, gay villages and Chinese quarters. Here in the UK it's a mash-up of cultures.

Today my local chippy is owned by a Chinese couple who just shout at each other all day long in Cantonese as they fish pickled eggs out of the jar. The local Chinese takeaway is run by an Indian who plays loud Bhangra in the kitchen. My local Indian serves omelette and chips! Maybe Londoners have an identity problem. They don't know quite who they are supposed to be. I was walking down the high street the other day and I heard a voice shout out: ‘Yo! Steve! My bredren! I saw you on
Live at the Apollo
last night! You was bad, yo!' And that was a white kid talking.

These days, on the surface, London can be a pretty tolerant place. You can hear a dozen or more languages being spoken and there are shops and restaurants that cater to every race colour and creed. I was once ordering a kebab from a Kurdish restaurant in North London and they had ‘sheep's member' on the menu. I'm guessing it had something to do with getting into some kind of secret society and nothing to do with eating the cock of a sheep (an animal with questionable hygiene that gave us the word ‘dingleberry').

If you really want to get a taste of the melting pot that is London then the best place to look is the world-famous London Underground, where you can see all these different people running around getting to work in the morning or going home at night. The Tube is very deep but don't be afraid of the morlocks; we call them ‘buskers' and although a lot of them look like they haven't seen natural light for years they don't live in the tunnels and they don't eat people. In fact, the buskers are a highlight, so if you want to catch a fully grown man playing the ukulele half a mile underground then come to London!

They even considered getting stand-ups to entertain people on the Underground just like the buskers. But this would never work out because there is a Golden Rule that no one is allowed to talk once they've paid their fares and gone through the turnstiles on ground level. If you talk, no matter what you are saying, then everyone immediately thinks that you are a madman. Even if an Underground employee says that the train is delayed or that you have to evacuate because of a fire, you look at him askance thinking, What mental hospital have you escaped from with your bright orange high-vis jacket and walkie-talkie?'

This doesn't mean that people don't do other wildly inappropriate things on the Underground. Many women seem to think that a hot stuffy underground train whizzing around at thirty miles an hour is the perfect, most sanitary place in the world to apply make-up. I recall watching in complete amazement as one woman managed to put on lipstick, eyeliner, mascara and also brush her long flowing locks on a particularly bumpy Northern Line train. She was completely oblivious to the fact that she was moulting like a rabid dog all over anyone within a mile of her and that she resembled an evil clown by the time she got off. Of course, no one said anything to her because of the Golden Rule.

This tradition of total silence means you can have a moment to yourself, can read a good book or play my favourite game, which is trying to guess the life story of the people standing next to you. Or, if you get bored of that, then you can try to figure out who would eat who first in the event of an accident and everyone getting stuck on the train. Or you can try to guess who would hook up with whom in case of the same event. Or if that's not your cup of tea, then you can play another good game which is trying to read the free newspaper of the person sitting next to you.

There was one time when I broke the Golden Rule of not talking to people on the Underground and sure enough I met a mad person. It was when I was just starting out doing stand-up and I was travelling to a gig and trying to read the newspaper of the person next to me. It's a challenge because although the papers are completely free and are thrust into your face as you're entering the Underground, passengers, once they've got them, treat them like their last will and testament. However, I've built up many years of practice and have it down to a fine art. You have to keep your face forward and totally expressionless. Don't move any of your arms and legs and try not to breathe too hard. Basically, act like someone's injected Botox into your brain. Then you have to imagine that your eyes are on stalks and slant them over as far as you can to get a glimpse of the headline story.

I only managed a sly glance before the man next to me grunted and shuffled awkwardly, as he tilted his free paper further away from me. It must have been my psychic presence alone trespassing on his front page that he was disturbed by. With so many people squashed together on the Underground there is a lot of psychic energy flying around. You share air, elbow room and sometimes it even seems like you are sharing thoughts with your fellow passengers. It was then that I heard a laugh opposite me. I looked up and caught the eye of a very attractive black girl. She looked down as our eyes met, but was still grinning broadly.

How long had she been watching me? Why didn't I spot her earlier and did she now think I was the worst newspaper rubber-necker in history? I kept her gaze, while trying not to appear like a weirdo (not an easy task). She was smartly dressed and had a closed book on her lap. I wanted to see if this lovely early-twenties beauty had a sense of humour and I saw the opportunity for a joke. I opened my eyes as wide as I could and stretched my neck in an exaggerated way, pretending I was trying to read the cover of her book. Bingo!

Tossing her head backwards, she laughed again, this time using her hand to cover her mouth to try and stifle the sound. Good manners, I thought – so unlike the heathens who think nothing of sneezing, coughing, yawning or eating on the Tube without covering their mouths. I liked her dress sense too. Normally, everyone on the Tube is sweaty and irritable because they're still wearing their overcoats, hats and scarves from outside. The cute red hat and matching red gloves she was wearing made me think she was style conscious. In hindsight, it should have made me suspicious that this stunner seemed to be dressed for the hot Tube and not the freezing weather of the street.

I was trying to keep her laughing and so my moves got a bit more jerky and exaggerated. Rarely has this sort of thing happened to me. A random encounter that grows into something more just like that? It was like something out of a silent movie and I was getting a bit carried away by the attention she was giving me. I hadn't felt this way about a woman in ages. People often ask me if I'm attracted to women or to men. I think that's a stupid question. A better question would be – are men or are women attracted to me? Secretly, I hope both are, but when I find someone sexy who is giving me the eye then I'm going with them (if they'll let me).

I've had relationships with women and with men, but if I have to choose one or the other, these days, I have to say I'm gay. There's no two ways about it. All my brothers and sisters know, but I didn't come out to my parents for years. In fact, I'm not sure that I've exactly come out to my mum even now. Her attitude to sex and sexuality is just to ignore it completely. If my mum were to walk in on me having sex with a bloke, I'm sure that she'd say something like, ‘Stephen isn't gay! That boy he is having sex with. He is the gay one!'