Nerd Do Well (32 page)

I had already cut my teeth with the Orphans of Jesus at the Dome, when I took a fairly assured five minutes to the Mauretania one Thursday night, having taken the plunge and approached the organisers for the gig. The spot went well and I was invited back to perform a paid ten-minute half spot, subsequently becoming a regular performing full twenty-minute sets, working my way up from opening act to the middle of the show, which was pretty much the best a local performer could hope for.

The Tongue in Cheek’s London acts were organised through a chain of South London comedy clubs called the Screaming Blue Murder, booked and run by an entrepreneurial young woman by the name of Dawn Sedgwick. Dawn provided a steady flow of established acts to close the Bristol shows, whilst booking and running London clubs and fulfilling her duties as an agent. The organisers at the Tongue in Cheek, a hugely supportive and amiable young couple (Melanie and David) and an enthusiastic young DJ and comedy fan called Gary Smith, had mentioned to Dawn that I was currently doing very well at the club and suggested that I call her to discuss the possibility of performing a few gigs in London.

And so it was that in May 1992 I travelled to the big city and performed two open spots, one at the Comedy Store in Leicester Square and the other at Dawn’s Screaming Blue Murder club in Hampton Wick. I slept on the floor of Andy Thompson’s pad in Islington and, he having proved an admirable axeman on ‘My Fair Goldfish’, I made use of his talents again for the shows. The song had killed at the Dome and there was no reason to doubt its effectiveness in the Big Smoke.

The spots went reasonably well, although at the Comedy Store the other comics were a little dismissive and wore their disdain for newcomers on their sleeves even when they were being nice, and the song felt a little out of place in front of the Thursday-night central London crowd. Nevertheless, booker Don Ward gave me some sage advice and invited me back for another open spot at a later date.

The Screaming Blue Murder was much better. It was more experimental and laid-back than the more meat-and-potatoes Comedy Store, and my quirky, unconventional material played well among the easy-going south London crowd. I met Dawn after the show and on the strength of that performance alone she offered to manage me, if I ever made the move to London. I look back on this moment as an extraordinary leap of faith on Dawn’s part, which I appreciated immeasurably. I now had a focus and a goal to get me moving along the path, which felt more and more like the correct one. Bristol had somewhat put me off the notion of becoming a jobbing actor. The course had highlighted the shortcomings of the profession as much as it had equipped me for it and I baulked at the prospect of navigating an ever-struggling arts scene, waiting for the phone to ring. Ironically, after all those years in the education system, I decided to give myself some autonomy and to do the very thing I had done in front of the amassed ranks of the Salvation Army in 1977. Tell jokes.

Living in a one-bedroom flat with Eggy Helen, I continued to perform in Bristol and Bath, saving money from my work on stage and in retail, hoping to earn enough to make the move to London. As my reputation grew, I was booked for larger gigs in the area, opening for Kevin Eldon and Frank Skinner at the Watershed on the Bristol Docks, both of whom I would eventually get to know, particularly Kevin who I have worked with many times and who has become a good friend.

However, the gigs were nowhere near as frequent as they potentially were in London, and selling battery-operated toys hardly generated enough cash to survive, let alone uproot and move to the most expensive city in the country. On one occasion, while moving the furniture round the living room, Eggy Helen and I heard change rattling round inside the plush armchairs and spent several hours retrieving it. By the end of our extensive search, we had recovered thirteen pounds and triumphantly consigned it to a special fund for the hiring of videos and the purchase of wine. The fact that we got so excited about discovering such a small amount of money is a clear indication of our financial status at the time and the utter hopelessness of our desire to move to London.

Helen had aspirations of becoming an actress and there was no doubt that we both stood more chance of realising our dreams in the capital than we did in the sleepy South-West. Life seemed to be uneventfully dripping by and we were both somehow powerless to stop it.

The highlight of our week was generally watching the latest episode of Channel 4’s newly imported show
Northern Exposure
¹⁷
, to which we became utterly addicted. Eventually, a sad event provided us with the momentum we needed to escape. Eggy Helen’s grandfather passed away, leaving her enough money to make the move, which she did, taking me along with her. Whatever the rules of quantum attraction would throw at us in the next few years, even if it ended in a small amount of blood and broken glass, I would forever be in her and indeed her family’s debt.

London was an unknown quantity for Eggy Helen and me. We had stayed with friends in Clapham in the south and I had spent those few days in Islington; otherwise neither of us had any real knowledge of the city. I knew where the
BBC
and the Natural History Museum were, possibly Madame Tussaud’s at a push, but in terms of where to live, we didn’t have a clue.

Acting on a few recommendations from friends who had already made the leap, we bought a copy of
Loot
and spent an intensive week flat-hunting across the capital. On the fourth day we happened upon an ad for a reasonably priced one-bedroom rental in Cricklewood, north London.

Cricklewood was immediately recognisable to me as the home of seventies comedy threesome, the Goodies, and this tiny sliver of familiarity made the journey up to NW2 feel promising. I had been a huge fan of the Goodies as a kid, totally buying into their zany, junior
Monty Python
vibe. I had even purchased one of their albums and listened to it repeatedly in the front room at my nan’s house along with
The Wombles
and
The Story of Star Wars
.

Situated at the quieter end of the bustling high street, the flat was perfect. Clean, modern and totally within our budget, the living room was small but airy, as was the bedroom, and a dark corridor was ingeniously lit by a fortified glass partition window, which allowed light to flow right through the flat to a small but functional kitchen space. The landlord, a roly-poly Irish man, seemed amiable if slightly dodgy and we nodded wide-eyed and hopeful at his request that we present him with five hundred pounds in cash every month without fail or face his jolly Irish wrath.

We took the plunge, signed the contracts and moved in, travelling to London in the back of the removal truck we used to transport our possessions, Rover (still alive at this point) sloshing around on my lap in his bowl. As soon as we arrived, I phoned Dawn and, true to her word, she put me on her books. By this time, Dawn had separated from Screaming Blue Murder and the agency she had worked for and founded an agency of her own, thus Dawn Sedgwick Management was born and as a testament to her tireless work ethic thrives on a much larger scale to this day, with me as her longest standing client. Actors often thank their agents during awards show acceptance speeches and it always sounds somewhat token. I can, however, honestly say that I love Dawn more than the combined ocean of love reserved for my mother, wife, daughter and dog and that is the absolute truth. (
Ben, can you make sure this bit only features in Dawn’s personal copy, not the final version? Cheers. S.
)

I began travelling all round London performing open spots in the hope of getting paid bookings and slowly but surely they began to trickle in. For the first time in my life, I was earning a regular if erratic wage from performance.

Without the head start of an agent and the prospect of paid work, Eggy Helen had to find a job outside her vocational flight path in order to help pay the rent, eventually securing a waitressing gig at Chiquito’s Mexican restaurant at Staples Corner, a few minutes’ drive from our flat.

One evening she returned home from work and informed me that one of the waiters at the restaurant seemed to be quite funny and had a hankering to become a stand-up comic but didn’t know how. She had told him that her boyfriend was a pro (which I was but barely) and suggested we meet and have a chat.

A week or so later, I met Nick Frost on the balcony of his flat in Cricklewood. Helen introduced us and for a moment it felt strangely as though I was on a blind date, saying to Nick, ‘I’ve heard a lot about you.’ He put on a little demonstration of his funniness to impress me, throwing a few impersonations into the conversation and rebounding around the party with confidence. When I left, I spied him fast asleep in an armchair next to a giant speaker, bolt upright and clutching a can of Red Stripe. I couldn’t help smiling. I liked him; really liked him, in fact.

I wrote Nick a list of bookers and clubs to contact (which he still has seventeen years later) and took him to see his first gig, a new-act night at the Cosmic Comedy Club in Fulham.

The compère that night had failed to materialise and the promoter, who had booked me before, asked if I would step in. It was a tough night and I pretty much died on my arse, which didn’t instil Nick with a huge amount of confidence in his new mentor. Determined to prove my worth as a comic, I took him out again the following weekend to the Balham Banana, a popular south London club, which ran two shows simultaneously on two levels. This time, the night was a storming success and Nick seemed suitably impressed with my efforts, almost as impressed as he was by the fact he had given comedian Mark Thomas a cigarette in the dressing room.

A few weeks later, Nick took part in the new-act night at the Cosmic and did extremely well, only being pipped at the post by another act who had brought along enough support to win the audience vote at the end. Nick’s set was only slightly less well appreciated by a gaggle of Chiquito’s staff who had secured the night off to cheer him on. I can clearly recall Nick performing a routine about built-up shoes and parading around demonstrating how someone might walk with an orang-utan sticking out of his arse.

Over the next six months he performed ten gigs in all. Five were great, five were demoralising and nightmarish, and at the end of the tenth set, he decided that it wasn’t for him, which frustrated me enormously because in the short time I had known him I realised that he was possibly the funniest person I had met in my entire life.

Despite his reluctance to pursue stand-up, he continued to come to my gigs, and by the time I had parlayed my stand-up career into television, he had seen me perform hundreds of times; he can still recite passages from my set and remembers much of it better than I do. We quickly became inseparable and it all seemed to make more sense to me than any previous friendship, despite our differing backgrounds and experiences. Two years my junior, Nick was like no one I had ever met before. He was blissfully unpretentious and unshackled by the strictures of political correctness. The African chefs at Chiquito’s loved him precisely because he could expertly impersonate the variety of sub-Saharan dialects that flew around the kitchen, which he did without a shred of prejudice, making him the subject of much finger-snapping and screaming laughter. If I broadened Nick’s horizons culturally, then he broadened mine socially, and crucially taught me how to chill the fuck out.

Over the next few months, I introduced Nick to as much comedy and film as I could, constantly taking him to the cinema or watching videos and going to live performances whenever we could afford it. It seemed odd to me that I worked in comedy and yet the most talented comedian I knew was a waiter at a local restaurant. His natural ability outstripped that of anyone I had encountered on the circuit and I was convinced he had something extraordinary to offer. I resolved to find some way other than stand-up to showcase his talents.

Meeting Nick under such a peculiar set of ‘coincidences’ threw up a lot of questions for me at the time; predominantly, if there is no fate and our interactions depend on such a complex system of chance encounters, what potentially important connections do we fail to make? What life-changing relationships or passionate and lasting love affairs are lost to chance?

I met my wife on holiday; ten years later we have a daughter. That means that our daughter’s very life was determined not just by my and Maureen’s decision to go to Thessalonica, Greece, but our decision to go into whatever travel agent we booked the holiday at in the first place at the precise time we did so. Then again, the very fact that we both made that series of decisions suggests that we had something in common in the first place and that synchronicity was slowly drawing us together.

Plainly it isn’t an exact science, despite it being a complex interaction of micro-decisions and corresponding thought; perhaps it doesn’t always work and we pass by some potential soulmates like the proverbial ships in the night, never quite connecting. Then again, perhaps the system is tenacious and continues to run like a computer program on an infinite loop, so that if at first you don’t meet, you are drawn back together for another try.

After Maureen and I met, we realised that, despite the fact that we had never actually met before, we had not only dated friends we had in common but also been in the same place at the same time on several occasions, mainly at gigs where we assembled due to a simple fact that we share a similar taste in music (cultural preferences being one of the more obvious pretexts of quantum attraction).

On another occasion she spotted me in Camden Market, while shopping with her then boyfriend, recognising me from the TV. The boyfriend was a
Spaced
fan and would often eschew Friday nights out on the razz in favour of staying in and watching the show, much to her chagrin. The next time we saw each other was at Gatwick airport, shortly before leaving for Greece. It wasn’t until the day we returned to the UK that her decision to sit at the back of the transfer bus resulted in our meeting. Nick and I had made the same decision one stop earlier and so, after a number of near misses, I met the woman who would become my wife and the mother of my child. If Nick and I had not retained that same school-kid desire to seek out those seats, I would have missed her again, but then that tiny, seemingly meaningless decision was another part of the sequence that eventually led not only to us meeting but subsequently discovering we lived just ten minutes from each other in north London.