My Shit Life So Far (21 page)

The thing I look for in a movie is Entertainability…does it have the ability to entertain? Or not? I’m not
asking, ‘Does this movie move me? Are the characters well developed? Is it relevant to my life?’ I want it to be the biggest, loudest piece of shit I’ve seen this week. Other than my kid.

You know what makes ideas great? Cocaine. If they sold it with your popcorn this shit would make a lot more sense to you. Wesley Snipes was so desperate to be famous he allowed us to make him black. And call him Wesley. Thanks for eating my ass, Wo-Ling-Ho.

I take a gun with me everywhere because you never know who you’ll have to shoot. It’s part of my therapy to shoot my reflection three times a day.

I get some of my best ideas during heart attacks. You think you’ve lived? Unless you’ve had a heart attack inside Uma Thurman’s ass, you’ve never lived.

I put forward the concept of a movie that would be a 120-minute shot of a vagina. They said it would alienate our female audience. I said make it Sarah Jessica Parker’s vagina and get her shoes in the shot. People say I see women as sex objects…I don’t. I see them as a lifesupport system for a vagina. I say to women, ‘Your vagina’s not losing its self-respect. Your vagina’s not got any dignity, your vagina doesn’t feel any shame. Just butt out and let us get on with it. It has nothing to do with you. Your only responsibility is not to die during this.’

A director once told me I was decadent. I came in his ears and beat him to death with a peacock.

That experience convinced me that I’d need to go down south to do telly stuff. There was a whole circuit of what are called ‘office pilots’ in London, where production companies film tasters of shows in their offices. I hadn’t quite made the move to live there full time so I was skint for a year, and often playing quite illconceived games in front of an audience of jaded researchers. I remember one where we had to do jokes about what random celebrities might say at their moment of orgasm. I went into a hysterical laughing fit thinking about how much funnier it would be to grab the producer in a headlock and jump out of the window.

For a long time I always stayed in the same hotel in London. The Russians who worked there all got to know me and started to anticipate my idiotic needs. It was a bit like being the Major in
Fawlty Towers
. It was always good looking into the glassy eyes of the sinister Russian duty manager knowing that a man who may well have killed to get his passport was in charge of finding me an ironing board. One night it sounded like a bunch of staff came into the room next to mine and gangbanged a Russian woman against the adjoining door. There were a lot of nods and winks the next day. That’s when you know you’ve become overfamiliar in a hotel. When the staff are staging group-sex pranks to keep you awake. I acted mildly irritated, but had obviously found it all pretty horny, and had a tempestuous wank that comfortably makes my all-time Top Ten.

I don’t understand London’s racism toward Eastern Europeans. I don’t have a problem with a Polish plumber coming
round to do work on my house. They’re cheap, arrive on time and it’s a lot easier to understand what they’re saying than a British workman. I had a Polish worker round at my house last week, and I was more than happy with the service…they knew exactly what they were doing, they were thorough, cleaned up afterwards, and she didn’t have that dead look behind her eyes that you normally get from British prostitutes.

One of the things I tried out for was
Mock the Week
. It was quite impressions-orientated when they came up with it, because Rory Bremner was on it. I couldn’t do any impressions so I didn’t think I’d be in it if it got made. It was good to see Dara O Briain again; I’d been a fan since I’d worked with him in clubs years before. He used to have a really sinister bit where he’d pick a big guy in the audience to shake hands with and then just refuse to let go, as tension mounted. There’s a wonderful juxtaposition in seeing such a delicate, tricksy mind contained in such an enormous body. I see him as being like a French nineteenth-century lady, a wit of some great lady’s salon, who through early scientific endeavour has managed to have her brain transplanted into a gorilla.

While I was waiting to hear back about
Mock the Week
, I got a job writing for Jimmy Carr on
8 out of 10 Cats
. I think it was the first and only job that I really loved. Everybody was really nice. The other writers were better than me so the jokes got written whether I tried or not, and people went out and got you cake. The basic engine of the writers’ room, the fuel that it ran on, was misogyny. We would take that energy, the desire to hurt
women, and turn it into pithy monologues about statistics. The whole experience left me more convinced than ever that sex offenders should be forced to write hundreds of topical jokes per week, to dissipate their fell desires.

It was great that people went out and got you food, but we all started to get badly out of shape. Once we had somebody go to Greggs. I ate four chocolate doughnuts and an apple turnover. I went for a sauna that evening and started tripping; it felt like I could zoom my vision into extreme close-up, like a powerful photographic lens. We all kept talking about having an ‘abs challenge’, the idea being that knowing we’d have to display ourselves to the office meant we’d get rid of our bellies. We all secretly knew that our devotion to Nando’s would have made any such contest a blasphemous obscenity. I think Jimmy would win that nowadays as he has lost quite a lot of weight. Sadly none of it off his head, so he looks like a fucking Pez dispenser.

Recently, I was doing a guest appearance on a show and ran into one of the guys I’d worked with on
Cats
. He told me about a joke they’d written about the Special Olympics that hadn’t got in. ‘At the Special Olympics this week, somebody was injured during the hammer throwing. But nobody could work out who it was.’ Somehow that really made me miss them all.

Shortly after landing the job writing for Jimmy Carr, a couple of the shows I’d been trying out for actually got made. One was
FAQ U
, a sort of topical discussion thingy on Channel 4, and the other was
Mock the Week
.
FAQ U
was made in Bristol, so I had to go and live there for three weeks, nesting in a hotel bedroom that I turned into a masturbation furnace. I was a writer for the episodes that I wasn’t on and wrote jokes for Justin Lee Collins, who struck me as being both a really nice guy and the opposite of talented. He looked just like the lion from
The Wizard of Oz
and we’d all keep trying to get Bert Lahr, the name of that actor, into the script out of boredom.

I was pretty surprised to hear that
Mock the Week
was getting made and that I was in it. It was welcome news. I’d bought a flat in Scotland to be near my daughter and was largely broke. Most of the regular guys who’re on it now were about from the start. Dara and Hugh were on every week, and Andy Parsons popped up regularly. Russell Howard hadn’t yet appeared but he was becoming increasingly popular across Britain for a series of unbelievable stunts on rocket-powered rollerskates, and it was getting more and more difficult for the producers to ignore him.

It was interesting to get to know all those guys and to have my eyes opened to the world of the big-league TV comics. Every
regular on the show is as obsessed with showing off their martialarts abilities as they are with flaunting their bisexuality. Hugh Dennis will regularly warm up for shows by stripping naked and throwing kickboxing combinations that stop inches from my face as I try to tear my gaze from his incongruous black genitals.

Andy Parsons is even more extreme. He stands in the wings waiting to go on and insists that everybody smash things off his tensed abdominals. Once I hit him with a chair until my hands were sore and he didn’t make a sound, tears running silently down his amused face. Nobody enjoys this part of the build-up, not even Andy.

Dara is a man of gigantic mirths and gigantic melancholies. Often he will parade a woman around the green room who he insists is his mistress. It is perfectly obvious to everybody that it is several large joints of meat that Dara has sewn together. Nonetheless, we are all expected to show deference to this chimera, paying her compliments and kissing her sausage fingers when introduced. Occasionally, we are introduced to the ‘child’ of this blasphemous union. Dressed in the immaculate uniform of a top boys’ school, it is clearly a Staffordshire bull terrier. Relentlessly questioned by the terrified production crew about its hobbies and hopes for the future as Dara gazes balefully on, the poor thing looks demented.

One of the peculiarities of panel-show comedy is the way that we are all expected and encouraged to shout over each other. On many shows you are given Red Bulls in your dressing room, sometimes even on set, without asking. I often think it must be
weird for the viewers to see a bunch of people screaming witticisms as their hearts thrum in their chests like dying budgerigars. I have long accepted the real possibility that I will have a massive stroke while guesting on a David Mitchell-hosted celebrity news quiz. Slabbering and palsied, I will still attempt to drool out some funny reasons why something may or may not be the odd one out while everybody shrieks over the top of me like the soundtrack to a monkey gangbang.

Then I was awarded perhaps the ultimate accolade: a gig on Belgian TV.
Mock the Week
is shown on some late-night channel so I am vaguely recognisable on the streets of Belgium. You read that right. I hope it has made you pause to consider what you have achieved with your own life.

I was met at the airport by a guy who looked exactly like Antoine de Caunes, in a Fiat with his beautiful boyish assistant. As we sped off through the thick fog he played ‘You Spin Me Right Round’ at full volume as we all stared ahead impassively. It was the most intensely European experience I had ever had.

One of the producers took me for lunch with some friends of his. They were really great, incredibly friendly people on that show. Over lunch they started laughing about all the stereotypes there are about Scottish and English people and how there were no stereotypes about Belgians. I was startled. ‘But there are! Everybody says that Belgians are boring…’ There was a collective wince. They looked genuinely crushed at this information and started talking to each other in worried Dutch. They even called over a friend from another table and imparted the harrowing
update. He took it like a bereavement. I was glad I hadn’t got to finish my sentence, which was going to be ‘Everybody says that Belgians are boring paedophiles.’

I’d come over a few days early for the show, to have a bit of a holiday. On the first night I managed to contract horrendous food poisoning and lay in my hotel room for three days hallucinating. Somehow there were mosquitoes in the room and they fed on my drugged, sleeping face. That’s how I ended up appearing on a Dutch-language television show feeling mentally ill and with a face so swollen by insect bites that it resembled a baseball catcher’s mitt. My memories of it are quite dreamlike. I had to listen carefully for my introduction and ran on after hearing my name blurted out in Dutch. I quickly gauged that nobody could understand a fucking word I was saying. I’d read a bit about racial tensions in Belgium and banged on about that for a bit, only realising later that it was actually something I’d read about Germany. Basically, I am now recognisable on the streets of Belgium as somebody who’s been on telly doing an impression of the Elephant Man having a nervous breakdown.

Eventually, I moved to London but strictly just for the short term. It was a shame to leave Scotland as it was actually an interesting time in Scottish politics. Apparently Tommy Sheridan had a bug put in his car. I’d love it if it turned out it had been put there by his wife. You have to respect any man so keen to look like the rest of the proletariat that he will toast his own body. At certain points in his basting cycle it used to look like the Scottish Parliament was being addressed by a jobbie with a face. Yet he
seemed to be one of the few politicians who cared about the people he represented. I remember hearing a radio phone-in show he did for a bit. There were lots of people phoning in complaining about the state of their back courts and so on. He’d discuss everything as being of equal importance, whether what got brought up was the euro or someone’s benefit problems. It’s a rare politician who can understand that you don’t give a toss about the Maastricht Treaty if your giro hasn’t turned up. It was a great show, especially for Scotland, where the benchmark in radio entertainment is usually some tit with a mullet phoning up Greggs and pretending that he’s Sean Connery.

It was also around this time that the SNP won the Scottish Parliamentary election, but much was being made of the fact that despite the fact that the SNP was in power, there was no real ’buzz’ about independence. ‘People aren’t really talking about it in the streets,’ we were told. This kind of skirts round the fact that this is Scotland, so people aren’t really talking to each other much in general. We’re a country that knows that people need to choose the right moment to open up to one another. Ideally when one of us is drunk and the other one is dying.

Perhaps independence will one day mean that Scots who have gone south to seek their fortune return home—leaving our streets choked with tramps. If we could repeat our successes of the past in the fields of science and industry then anything might be possible.

We could harness our amazing natural-energy resources, and then divert those resources into building a Terminator we can send back through time to kill Geoff Hurst’s mum.

At least Alex Salmond looks Scottish, as if his heart pumps about once a day and his liver is fighting the Alamo. I suspect that, like Moses, he will not be the one to lead us into the Promised Land, although I do think he makes an interesting leader. If only for the excitement of seeing how long a man can survive under that pressure with the cholesterol levels of a fried egg. He looks like a selfsatisfied cat that’s about to ask you a riddle. It’s surely a measure of his ability that I seem to remember him standing down for a few years but have no memory of who replaced him. The Nationalists may as well have spent a couple of years being led by an animatronic eagle, for all I remember of that man (or perhaps woman).

I quite surprised myself by starting to go to musicals in London. Yes, I know. Some people just hate them. That musical theatre dumbs things down is well illustrated by the fact people now refer to the French literary classic as ‘Les Mis’. It’s like
Les MisÉrables
is too much of a downer. Let’s start referring to
The Grapes of Wrath
as ‘Grapey Wrathy’, or
Crime and Punishment
as ‘Ruski Murder Funtime’. Personally I just think that musicals are good for the economy. Airlines and hairdressing salons can’t physically employ all of Britain’s homosexuals.

Of course, some people ask how many more musicals do we have to put up with before Andrew Lloyd Webber can actually afford that plastic surgery? A lot of prejudice against musical theatre comes from people looking at Andrew Lloyd Webber and going, ‘My God, you are so ugly.’ But just because a man looks like his face was carved off his skull by a diseased butcher, put in a piÑata, beaten for six hours with a hockey stick, and the
resulting slop piped back onto his head like icing on the ugliest cake the world has ever seen—sorry, I’ve forgotten my point. But I’ve always tried to find the positive in everything, and musicals are no different. If it weren’t for Elaine Paige then there would never have been a toilet break during
The Two Ronnies
.

I actually prefer musicals to the theatre. You need the songs because that’s when you can eat your sweets. Imagine sitting through a Harold Pinter play trying to get through a bag of Maltesers. Waiting through all the pauses just so you could finally have a crunch. You’d never be able to relax.

The following year,
Mock the Week
moved to having a longer run in the summer. When there’s fuck-all news. Basically it starts just as parliament closes and ends just as the party-conference season starts. It was particularly awkward for me as I’d already booked myself in to the annual howl of inchoate horror that is the Edinburgh Festival. I did my show most of the week, and would take the train down to London on Mondays and Tuesdays to film
Mock the Week
. The train really started to do my head in. Perhaps after so many years of doing it I’d just run out of patience. It seemed that the GNER has bought some stock from 1950s Russia, which rattled down to London like a dying breath. Actually, the West Coast Line from Glasgow to London has just been finished after ten years. They had to build the tracks just in front of the 9.20 to Euston that left in 1998, and managed to get in ten minutes early.

While commuting on the trains I started to become aware of things you would only notice through extreme boredom. Like the way women hate travelling facing backwards because of primal memories of being carried away from their settlement on the shoulders of Vikings. Then there are the announcements every ten minutes about what’s available in the buffet car. We know what’ll be available in the buffet car. It’ll be the sort of stuff that’s always available in a buffet car. We’ll be surprised if you don’t sell crisps, we’ll be surprised if you’ve got a roast duck on a rotisserie spit.

Miles Jupp is one of the few people who hates trains more than me, having a higher innate sense of what being treated decently entails. A few years earlier we wrote some sketches for a radio pilot and all the sketches reflected our shared horror at trying to interface with the world. Here’s one of them that was set in a railway ticket office.

Attendant:
Next.

Traveller:
Can I have a ticket to Salisbury, please?

Attendant:
Ah yes, it’s lovely at this time of year. No, hang on, that’s last month I was thinking of. And I wasn’t thinking of Salisbury, I was thinking of the Dominican Republic. Smoking or non-smoking?

Traveller:
Non-smoking, please

Attendant:
Oh, they’re all smoking.

Traveller:
Well, why did you say smoking or nonsmoking then?

Attendant:
We pride ourselves on always offering a choice.

Traveller:
Right, well can I get a ticket please?

Attendant:
Single or return?

Traveller:
How much more is the return?

Attendant:
It’s not more—it’s less.

Traveller:
Really?

Attendant:
Yes.

Traveller:
Well, I’m not planning on returning, but if it’s cheaper…

Attendant:
Oh no. You have to return.

Traveller:
Why?

Attendant:
Because when you get to Salisbury the doors don’t open. It just comes straight back.

Traveller:
The doors don’t open?

Attendant:
Not at stations, no. They’re open for the rest of the journey. They have to be. Everybody’s smoking. It would become unbearable.

Traveller:
Is there any benefit in getting this train at all?

Attendant:
There is a trolley service.

Traveller:
If I get a single then? Will I be able to get off at Salisbury?

Attendant:
Oh yes. Not the station itself obviously, but if you time your jump right you could land pretty near to the station.

Traveller:
So none of you trains actually stop at Salisbury station?

Attendant:
No. They used to. But we had a lot of problems with people getting on and off.

Traveller:
Look, is there any way I can get to Salisbury safely? Is there a bus service?

Attendant:
Sir, this is a TRAIN station. Would you go into a baker’s and ask for a handful of meat? Would you leave a note on your doorstep saying ‘Dear Mr Travel Agent, two first-class flights to Orlando’