My Booky Wook 2 (7 page)
For a torturous ten stretch I hobbled through a steel and glass Hogarthian London with bandaged hands and bare feet, a destitute vagabond, and all the while within my ragged heart an agonised orb of white light hummed and sought its purpose.
I don’t want to worry you, but this journey has never been about Opportunity Knocks or a seat on Celebrity Squares, no. I have a fire in me the flames of which rage further than personal ambition. Even through the parched impecunity of my adolescence and the drivel of childhood I knew beyond the burr of words there lay a place of wonder. I feel it still, now that I have drawn comfort in around me, snug with wealth and chance, praise cosy, I hear yet the call of something higher. Of course there was no way I was about to go all quiet and Trappist, tending some garden within or without until I felt appreciated. So I quested on with jokes and shows, then telly and magazines and now films and arenas. I enjoy it but I know there’s more. I feel there is something wonderful we can do together.
Once in a while, after John Noel had dragged me from the mayhem of addiction, I’d meet someone who saw possibility in me. Lesley Douglas was one such. Lesley is a powerful woman, an old-fashioned impresario who rebuilt Radio 2 in her image as a modern, fun and relevant organisation without alienating its core listeners. Her and John appear trapped in some good-natured quarrel, like bickering siblings playing swingball with Dermot O’Leary’s head.
John coerced Lesley into seeing my stand-up in small venues around London. I was pleased with the work I was doing, a blend of giddy spontaneity and well-honed yarns. After seeing me for the fourth time and with the ever-growing swell of interest in my TV work, Lesley offered me a pilot on cool indie music station 6 Music. Initially I was paired with Karl Pilkington, Ricky Gervais’s savant-ish sidekick, who is an excellent comedic foil and hugely funny in his own right. I suppose Karl maintains the perspective of some articulate bumpkin, straight from King’s Cross, casting yokel wisdom on our urban ways. Karl, though, was already well known for his work with Ricky and Steve Merchant, Ricky’s writing partner, so he had already been branded. I had my own coterie of amusing mates and was double keen to create a wireless wonderland with them.
My mate Greg, known as Mr Gee, a mysterious hard-shelled, soft-centred, confectionery-obsessed south London poet who had done gigs with me in Brixton and held me back from the precipice of unwinnable drug deals several times. Then there was Trevor Lock, Cocky-Locky, an ageless philosophy graduate, a dishy square, tiny, handsome face, a thick brush of Hugh Grant hair and an incredibly diverse, profound knowledge of alternative, indigenous, shamanistic jungle culture. He was a wise nerd. Then there was Matt and his dry, neurotic, mischievous mind, my hoppo, the commentator minstrel of my picaresque misad-ventures for the six years previous. Matt is like a sulky, comedically blessed liability. We have a powerful connection and a deep, annoying friendship. Like all good double-acts we are forever on the brink of never speaking again. It was to make for good radio.
We did a couple of pilots in which I designated Matt and Trev specific roles – Matt was to run the desk (that means he was in charge of the buttons and playing in tracks), while Trevor would take care of listener competitions. In truth both these roles were arbitrary, really they were there to provide me varying surfaces to bounce off, then Gee would sum it all up with a rhyme he’d write as the show was in process.
Once I read of myself, which is a habit I ought work to dispatch, that I was Britain’s first digital star. This I liked. I like being the first, primary or inaugural anything, it appeals to the pioneer in me. Thank God I’m good at showing off and telling jokes, or there’d be a real risk that I’d crop up in The Guinness Book of Records winking into a beard of bees or a bath of beans – anything to feel the Neil Armstrong rush of stomping on virgin moon dirt. This bit of self-obsessed reflection, however, was pertinent. The Big Brother show was on digital TV, the MTV show likewise, and 6 Music is a digital station. This meant that the first audience I garnered had to deliberately seek me out. I wasn’t splashed all over terrestrial telly or bellowing out on commercial radio, I was sequestered off at the esoteric end of the dial, learning, developing a relationship with my audience (some have argued a little too intimately), a relationship that was fortified by the convenient advent of social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. The 6 Music shows we did, due to some foresight from Lesley, were available on the BBC website and through iTunes as podcasts, and this is where they really flourished. The timing was perfect, a generation were learning to consume media in a new, more direct manner, and through sheer luck we were perfectly positioned to capitalise.
This piece of good fortune, however, was not then garnished with market-driven plasticity, for the show itself in content was a rambling anarchic shambles where the three of us would harp on about our daily lives and torment each other like a bunch of dopey mates on a Sunday morning – which is what we were. It wasn’t a contrivance, it was legit. The only production came in the form of a few items, like competitions and the occasional (much too occasional, the station’s core listeners would argue) record. The BBC would give us grown-up producers to curtail us and to massage the mayhem into something resembling radio, but I always kicked against authority, usually our stewards would buckle like substitute teachers, and we’d continue with the chaos.
For an idyllic few months, while my fame buzzed along at a manageable level – a growing audience on Big Brother, a devoted MTV following – the 6 Music show was free-form fun. Perfect. We had the piratical spirit of Radio Caroline, it was naughty but in harmony with its listeners who stayed in constant email contact, sending requests and enquiries and flirting with us on MySpace. Me and Matt would bully the impossibly English Trevor about his specs and tank tops and incompetence around women, me and Trev would rile Matt about his hypochondria, and the pair of them would forever try to puncture the fast-expanding bubble of my pomposity. We thrived in the slipstream, sailing up the iTunes charts till the mainstream came a-calling when Kate Moss’s brief fly-over provided a GM boost to the natural crop. When Jonathan Ross, the king of chat, the icon of proletariat triumph in the bourgeois world of television, wanted me to be a guest on his Friday night chat show.
With that appearance and the subsequent brouhaha, the merry burble beneath the radar became a jagged siren that could not be ignored. Fame seeped in through every crack, soon the radio show was sodden with references to my new and exciting life, and we went to the top of the iTunes chart, replacing Ricky Gervais’s record-breaking podcasts.
I was resolutely single and suddenly women were available and I did not sip like a connoisseur, I barged through the vineyard kicking over barrels and guzzling grapes as they grew. Chianti, Bordeaux, Champagne, Thunderbirds – it’s all the same to me, frenzied and famished I chewed through glass and clenched the soil.
This is the kind of conduct that the News of the World and Daily Star relish. Soon the Sunday rags oozed with tales of my misdeeds, ghosts of the past rose from their graves, slung on a négligé and sputtered up half-truths for lazy bucks.
The machinery of celebrity grinds into life with alarming pace and clarity. I was abstracted from myself, cast as Lothario and condemned for crimes of their creation. One night after a gig an attractive girl accompanied me home. Once there I assumed there might be some canoodling, instead she snooped about the place like she’d been sent to flush out a mouse. It was agreed that we’d never be wed and she cleared off. Forty-eight hours later I was astonished to see an exclusive piece in the Sunday Mirror in which she recounted the experience in vulgar detail. It transpired that she was an undercover journalist, UNDERCOVER! Like I was running a sweatshop, or an illegal whelk-picking operation.
Has journalism sunk so that the practitioners of the profession of Bob Woodward and Charles Dickens are truffling out scoops by pretending to be up for bum fumble? Not to expose a terrifying circle of nonces or racists but simply to gain entry into one man’s private life? Would John Pilger, to expose corruption in the developing world, turn up at the palace of some sweltering general smothered in peach lip-gloss with his quim all waxed? I should coco! He’s a professional. She didn’t find much of note, only observing that I had a flat-screen TV and a Jacuzzi (I had neither) and that the cat’s food was in a bowl on the floor – where the hell else would it be? If you put it on the sideboard he can’t reach it and if you put it on the ceiling it falls out.
A few weeks after appearing on Jonathan’s chat show he invited me to his home. It was a glimpse of a possible future. His wife Jane is beautiful, doting and fun, his children are confident, polite, cheeky and balanced (that’s their characters not their names, he’s not that mad), and the house is a vibrant den of pets and pleasure. I saw there a chance to break the chain of dysfunction of which I was the conclusion and to which I still clung.
Could I settle with a beautiful girl who truly loved me and build something real, that would remain after the fanfare and nourish my heart like a Tuscan supper instead of surviving on instant soup and blue drinks? I could not, I was blazing through thin air, spun out on vertigo and fellatio.
At Jonathan’s house, when the canine riot abates and he talks, you can see why he has become the host of a nation’s Friday night. Where confidence ends some new quality is assumed that smoothes you through the evening, relaxed and entertained. Jane will once in a while roll her eyes more deftly than he’ll ever roll an “R” and reminds him that he’s being daft, but they both know it’s thoroughly amusing. Jonathan seemingly himself selects which will be the UK’s next comedy phenomenon, he did it with Vic and Bob, Little Britain, Ricky Gervais, The Mighty Boosh, and now he had chosen me. He has a fine sense of humour – not only is he funny, he also recognises it in others. He has maintained his relevance for decades and, even though he was thought of as cool and edgy when I watched him as a kid, he has now, whilst the country’s most highly paid broadcaster, kept that edge and remained relevant. He is a good bloke. One night after I’d sought sanctuary at his house he gave me a lift home in some daft orange car which, had he not been driving, I’m sure he could’ve worn. The unfamiliar domestic comfort I’d experienced had heightened my awareness of my teetering solitude. For a moment fame felt scary. Jonathan sensed my disease.
“How you coping with it all?”
“Yeah. It’s alright. I feel bit lonely sometimes. A bit exposed.” Jonathan employed compassion. As much compassion as a millionaire entertainer in a sports car, puffing on a huge cigar, can ever be expected to show. He exhaled.
“When you get famous,” he began, “they give you a lot.” The millions, the car, the cigar? I wondered. “But they also take something from you.” He inhaled. “And you don’t ever get it back.” The car then filled with smoke and Jonathan gave me a smile that suggested he’d be there for me if it ever got too tough. I didn’t know just how close.
The kiss and tells ripened through the summer, and every morning paper brought a new harvest. Barely did I have a kiss that didn’t entail a tell. To me though it didn’t seem pejorative, it merely helped the narrative which they’d concocted, in which I was complicit, that I was a wild man Lothario. These terms were actually used – wild man, oddball, sex insect, spindle-limbed lust merchant, sex inspector; I may’ve invented some of them, but that was very much the tone. It suited me, though; it was a type of notoriety that I enjoyed. The more right-wing papers used me as an icon of moral decline. In the Daily Mail I was second only to immigrants and paedophiles as the most dangerous entity to have breached our shores. “Lock up your daughters,” they bawled. If, when you encounter that kind of hysteria, you’re viewing it through a lens of agonised memories of discontent and rejection, it kind of feels like approval. Bruce Dessau, a respected comedy critic, interviewed me for a proper paper and said, “You realise you’re a phenomenon, don’t you?” I genuinely didn’t. I’d noticed now that my lifelong self-obsession seemed to have crept into a consciousness beyond my skull. But as my life has been a devotional pursuit of success, its arrival is only noticeable piecemeal, or when an icon appeared upon the horizon.
“Noel Gallagher was here asking for you,” said the ecstatic barman at the pub in the West End of London where I was doing stand-up, almost clambering over to embrace me. “He asked what time the gig was on and if you were definitely performing, then he left.” Noel Gallagher, yob poet, spitting lyrics and epigrams and scoring a decade with what I’d call nonchalance – if it wasn’t so French and he wasn’t so English. David Walliams lives in Noel’s old house in Belsize Park, Celebrity Strasse. When Oasis ruled the world “Supernova Heights” was his Camelot. My drama school was round the corner and at night I’d take penniless romps down that road, sometimes drunk, sometimes tripping, and sometimes I’d not even be high so I’d try and get a buzz off the fumes of his success. I’d look through the wrought-iron gates and imagine what marvellous excesses went on behind the frosted glass. Now Noel Gallagher had come looking for me. I quizzed the barman. “It was definitely him, was it? I mean we ain’t that far from London Zoo – phone and check they’ve done a roll call at the monkey house.”
Noel has got a brilliant sense of humour (I hope), he came that night and we hung out with his partner Sara (too good for him) and my dad (about his level), we talked about football mostly and I was touched by his awareness of the impact of his persona. People that famous can obviously be intimidating, and sometimes instead of speaking I’d just stare at him and run out of stuff to say. Noel would fill these gaping junctures with the sort of questions a hairdresser might ask just to keep the chat going – “Been on holiday this year?” or “Do you want some mousse for that?” But I shan’t forget his surprising social dexterity and compassion in what could’ve been an awkward situation – certainly if left to me. Because as he spoke and smiled and swigged, my mind strolled down memory lane to five years earlier, to Drama Centre in Camden. I was transported to the drunken 3am vigils I’d observe when staggering back from some crack-shack. Noel’s gaff and Oasis represented hope and escape for a lot of people, that’s why it’s a fucking good name.