Look who it is! (11 page)

So every Tuesday I would hold the basket, and he would point with his one good arm, and I would take the product off the shelf and pop it in his basket. This would carry on every week. At one point, I was thinking of sellotaping five fish fingers to the end of a baguette and somehow strapping it to him and a basket to give him a makeshift arm – anything just to leave me in peace. On the front of the horrible grey polyester uniform we were forced to wear we had to pin an oversized badge proclaiming: ‘Here to Help’. I was glad it was oversized because the more polyester it covered, the better. Because you were wearing the badge, customers assumed you were an oracle.

‘What aisle is the desiccated coconut?’

‘How long do you cook a butternut squash?’

‘What would you have with a pan-fried red mullet?’

‘Where can I find the Holy Grail?’ Enough already!

Some people obviously misread the ‘Here to Help’ as ‘Hello, I’m your bitch!’ That especially applied when the princesses descended from Golders Green in their 4 x 4s, clicking their fingers and stamping their feet at me. I remember one woman wafting her hands in the air, which I think symbolised ‘Pack my bags and take them to the car’. I started packing. I don’t know what came over me, but I saw she had bought her son a Thomas the Tank Engine birthday cake. So without her
knowing, I packed that at the bottom and forced a six-pack of Pedigree Chum down on it. I squashed it down good and proper and smiled subserviently as I took it to her 4 x 4. I wish I had been at that kid’s party when his mum brought out the cake and the kid started screaming because Thomas had a cleft palette and an imprint of a Labrador on his forehead.

Some of my duties would be more mundane, like collecting the trolleys in the Tesco car park, taking back customers’ returns and repricing the food that was coming up to its sell-by date. Sometimes things could get exciting, like when we had a shoplifter or a thief. When a crook used a stolen card fraudulently, a name would pop up on the screen and you would have to ask a supervisor if he could have a word with Mr —. This was a code word for ‘Call the cops’. At that point, knowing we were on to him, the card fraudster would usually just dash for the door, followed by the security guard.

I was also there when the foot-and-mouth crisis gripped the country and the meat aisles were jammed with unwanted beef. No one would touch it. It got so bad, the bosses asked us to appease the customers by saying that our meat was perfectly fine to eat and that you could trust Tesco. I would frequently tell them that Tesco beef was the best in the country, only for them to say tartly, ‘I don’t think I’m going to endanger my family’s life with your beef, thank you very much,’ and then pop lasagne, chilli con carne and moussaka onto the conveyor belt. What did they think it was made of? Pick ’n’ mix?

One day when I turned up for work we were all taken to the cafeteria and told about this brand new innovation, the
Clubcard. For every pound you spent at Tesco, you would get a point on your Clubcard, which could later be redeemed. I thought it sounded like a shit idea, but what do I know?

‘This Clubcard needs to be promoted,’ said Carol Reed, the store manager, ‘and we need some fun and outgoing people to promote it. We need someone who will make our customers go, “Wow!”’ I watched as Carol’s eyes scanned the room: Jacqui with the lazy eye, Ganesh with his minimal English, Phyllis with the wart, and the rest of the team who looked like extras on
Shameless
.

Her eyes fell on me. ‘Alan! You do Drama. Will you come on board?’

‘Will it get me off the tills?’ I replied.

‘Yes.’

‘Count me in, Carol!’

The next thing I know, I’m standing on the Brent Cross petrol station forecourt with a blue Clubcard sash around me asking people if they would like to have a Clubcard. I wasn’t over the moon about the sash, but the previous idea had been to dress me up as a waiter, approaching customers with a tray bearing – yes, you guessed it – a Clubcard. Brent Cross is pretty rough at night, and we would often get gangs of lads shoplifting or intimidating the staff. So I was a little bit worried, standing there like Miss World on a petrol station forecourt. Overall, though, it was a welcome respite from working on the till, and at least I got to stretch my legs away from the beady eyes of Carol. I can’t help thinking that I had a part to play in the success of the Tesco Clubcard. I really excelled myself in those days, going up to unsuspecting Tesco
customers and getting them to sign up. Thanks to my hard sell on that forecourt, the Clubcard was truly the talk of the town.

It was a particularly grim night. I was standing there on the forecourt with my sash nestled between my breasts, that damn puppy fat still clinging on for dear life. What I thought was the glow of two orange headlights caught my eye. As it turned out, it was Dale Winton, coming out of his red sports car parked behind me. I turned on my heel and said, ‘Dale, can I interest you in a Clubcard?’

‘It’s OK, darling. I’ve got one.’

He was lovely then as he is now. I haven’t ever mentioned that first encounter to him, but I was so starstruck. He was the first celebrity I’d seen since I’d moved down to London. Yes, I’d seen Geoff Capes at Overstone Solarium, but this was London, where they all lived. Celebrities are like buses: you wait for one and then two come along at once. Who do you reckon I saw the next day? Dr Fox! Yes,
the
Dr Fox. He was with a pretty woman, and I remember his fox cufflinks winking in the glare of artificial light that bathed the shop floor. I was thinking, ‘Please, please! Come through my checkout!’ Frustratingly, he went to the next checkout along. I felt like a lover spurned, and I was itching to leave my till and ask him whether he wanted a Clubcard. I knew I was part of something, a phenomenon.

The phenomena kept on coming. I was also working at Tesco Brent Cross when it became the flagship 24-hour store. Impressed? I know, I know, at times my life seemed to imitate Forrest Gump, but whereas he was present at all history’s
momentous occasions I was at all the shitty ones. BBC News was there and everything, and I had put my name down to work through the night. It was such a monumentally historic event that only a select few would be chosen. After much consideration, I got to work on Checkout 12. There was I, Alan Carr, working at the first ever 24-hour supermarket in the United Kingdom.

Of course, once all the excitement had died down and all the checkout people, including myself, realised that it was just an ordinary shift (obviously), the rest of the night felt like wading through treacle. Tesco Value Treacle, at that. A few curious shoppers turned up to see what the fuss was about, but mainly it was drunks and stoners with the munchies. It was left to the staff to tell the winos, ‘Yes, the supermarket is 24-hour, but the alcohol licence only lasts to 11 o’clock and if you want alcohol you’ll just have to burn off some Benylin. It’s in Aisle 5, next to the sanitary towels.’

It was my last-ever night shift, and it really was a drag. It was popular with the people who needed money fast. They could work through the night. One checkout girl used to take speed at the beginning of her shift because she was trying to save up for a car. No, the 24-hour shift was too much for me, and I returned to my usual daylight hours. I left at 10.00 p.m., just as all the shelf-stackers emerged onto the floor in their grey tracksuits, those mysterious, mute, nocturnal people who disappear when the sun comes up.

Middlesex University made its money by taking in plane-loads of rich foreign students. Let’s face it, they weren’t going to make any money from the talent, so there was always a
fresh influx of victims. I remember one poor Chinese girl. She had just waved her parents off and turned around to walk into her room, when out of nowhere she was drenched head to feet with a washing-up bowl of potato peelings that Matt had lobbed at Melissa, but missed. They didn’t even apologise, they just laughed. I know it’s horrible, but food fights were the order of the day. Someone would flick a kidney bean at someone’s head to provoke a reaction, then it would be flicked back twice as hard, and before long one poor innocent would be sitting there wearing a plate of Rogan Josh as a brooch. Looking back, I feel such a moron. It was hilarious at the time, but the other students must have looked at us with such contempt, and rightfully so. That old adage is true, though: the devil makes work for idle hands.

You must be thinking, ‘Why is he bothering telling us about food fights?’ The honest answer is that we had more food fights than we actually did work. You were more likely to have a shepherd’s pie catapulted through your window than open up a theory book. We were useless scum, we were the students that people talk about in the
Daily Mail
, spongers, always down the pub, doing little or no work. A food fight was the highlight of the day, but to be fair the source of our food didn’t help: Food Giant. It’s probably a blessing that most of the food ended up on the walls. I remember buying a pack of fish fingers for 59 pence. It had on the box, ‘May contain less than 15% fish.’ That’s big bread-crumbs, I thought.

We were annoying, and we were bored. It seems that not only were we content to ruin our own prospects, we had to
bring the others down with us as well. One irritating Japanese girl, Business student probably, always used to have her power ballads blaring out through her windows. Celine, Bonnie Tyler, Whitney, which, as you can imagine, can grate after a while. We spied on her through her window and saw that she had the same stereo as Finn, a fellow Drama student. So we lined ourselves up on the stairs opposite and with his remote control started operating her stereo through the window. You should have seen her face as we changed CD track, turned it down, turned it up, froze Bonnie mid ‘Holding Out for a Hero’, and turned on Kerrang FM. It was harassment, but it was funny harassment. Her bemused face was a picture. It took her ten minutes to realise it was us, and we were supposed to be the thickos!

* * *

If I’m honest, the novelty of doing nothing all week soon wore off and the shifts at Tesco weren’t doing anything to alleviate the tedium. So when we finally got to perform some plays we thought all our Christmases had come early. The plays we performed encapsulated all the different theatrical genres. One semester it would be the absurdist play,
The Maids
, by Jean Genet, Shakespeare’s
Measure for Measure
and Edward Bond’s
Saved
, which featured possibly one of my worst performances ever.
Saved
was part of the political theatre genre. As I am possibly the least political person there is, I knew there would be problems. It had been banned by the Lord Chamberlain in the Sixties and had quickly gained
notoriety, mainly because the play contains a graphic scene where the protagonist stones a baby to death.

I was as shocked as the next person to be given the part of Len. Obviously, playing against type can offer an actor a chance to show the true gamut of his emotions. However, as I had to stone a baby to death in this role, I really didn’t know where to begin. In my opinion, it was the worst piece of casting in the history of theatre since Cliff Richard stepped onto the moors in
Heathcliff
the Musical
. I only got the part because the director had had a row with the lead and out of spite gave him the role of the long-suffering husband who had to spend all his scenes behind a newspaper, tutting. How easy is that? I had to kill a baby. I don’t know whether it was naivety or arrogance that made me accept the part, but I did. I had to play an impressionable young man with a dark side. I remember thinking, ‘I can’t do brooding.’ I don’t think I’d ever been brooding. I could look arsey, but something told me that wouldn’t be good enough.

The play started out on the wrong foot. I had to come on intoxicated and have intercourse on the sofa with Pam, who was played by my flatmate and fellow Drama student, Julia. Apart from Ruth with the green eyeshadow, I’d never kissed a girl before, let alone touched a breast, so I really had to concentrate. Whilst caressing her nipples I didn’t look lustful; I just looked like I was retuning a video. As I slipped my hand up her blouse and tried to unhook the bra (I knew the hook was at the back – I’d seen it on
On the Buses
), I grunted like a wild animal, admittedly one with its leg caught in a snare.

After sex, I had to get up arrogantly and light up a cigarette. Personally, I can’t stand smoking, and this fucking play was beginning to get on my tits. Smoke a cigarette, stone a baby, touch a tit – all I needed was to swim with a couple of Great Whites in a tank and I’d have faced all my fears. It was supposed to look like a post-coital cigarette, but the director complained that the way I was holding it was too reminiscent of Bet Lynch opening up at the Rovers Return. The problem was, as I didn’t smoke it didn’t look natural. There is a way, admittedly cool, that smokers handle the cigarette and matches with aplomb. But I couldn’t stop shaking when it came to light the damn thing. I wasn’t nervous, it was the thought of touching another pair of breasts in the matinée.

It wasn’t only my fault. The supporting cast was just as out of place. Miscues, badly positioned props, wrong lines. I remember in the pivotal scene where I bumped into a gang of lads in a park and was slowly brutalised, Melissa, who played my mother, walked on set with a teapot and shouted, ‘It’s on the table!’ That was a reference to the next scene, where I popped around for dinner. After her awkward realisation, Melissa slowly sidestepped off, watched by a tittering audience.

The night before, it was me who messed up. I was seated at the dinner table and said, ‘That looks delicious,’ before she’d actually put the trifle and custard on the table. What a complete disaster! And this was before I had to stone that bloody baby.

Finally, that dreaded scene came. I was alone in the park, and the baby was upturned in its pram, crying. It was down to
me to deliver this important and iconic scene with gusto and brooding introspection. I slowly picked up the pebbles and began to throw them. All those hours of motivation and rehearsals could not mask the fact that I throw like a girl. To be honest, the audience were on the edge of their seats mainly because of the fear of getting stoned. I kept missing the pram, and it was a miracle that I didn’t wipe out a St John’s Ambulance person. The pebbles started pinging off the walls, and some of the women in the audience had started covering their faces with their handbags. Not one hit the bloody baby. If this had been real life, the baby would have survived scratch-free and gone on to do its GCSE.