How I Escaped My Certain Fate Read online

  * I am always pleased whenever the opportunity arises to say onstage that I don’t like sport and have no interest in it. In the early nineties, style magazines, nascent lads’ mags and Sunday supplements were thrilled when the ‘alternative’ comedians like David Baddiel, Rob Newman and Frank Skinner began talking about football in their comedy routines in Alternative Comedy clubs, at the Edinburgh Fringe and on Radio 4 and BBC2, where previously football would have been considered of no interest or relevance. Soon there was Fantasy Football, a low-fidelity television comedy series that applied the sort of irreverent, witty and intelligent humour usually reserved during the period for the subjects of politics, pop, sex and drugs to football, raising the bar considerably in an area in which Jimmy Hill had previously been thought of as a great wit.

  But the floodgates were open, and try as he might, with his considered BBC2 series and public love of Samuel Johnson, Frank Skinner could never get the djinni back in the bottle. Football fans and so-called ‘new lads’ began to feel welcome at once ‘alternative’ comedy venues, in their Ben Sherman shirts, and within five years the comedy counter-culture which our illustrious eighties standup comedy forebears shed blood to build, in the post-punk shadows of fat working men’s club comics and elitist Oxbridge satirists, was destroyed. Suddenly, sport-loving scumbags began to comprise a significant percentage of any comedy audience. I think it was Fantasy Football and the introduction of football as a subject into Alternative Comedy that ultimately destroyed the values and the unrealised artistic potential of the Alternative Comedy community which I so desperately wanted to contribute to as a teenager. Indeed, all responsibility for the collapse of the entire sixties, seventies and eighties counter-culture in Britain can probably be extrapolated from Fantasy Football and laid at the door of Baddiel and Skinner, who shared a flat, and presumably a door, at the time.

  Rob Newman subsequently recognised the monster he had helped to create, and tried to make amends for his crimes. By the end of the decade Newman had changed his name by deed poll to Robert Newman and retreated from the front line to became a humble aesthete, quietly trying to save the world with his thoughtful and moving live shows, and with a carbon footprint the size of an ant’s. But in contrast, today David Baddiel and Frank Skinner have massive luxury homes on the moon and their own private spacecraft made of gold and seal fur. The rest of us, who wanted Alternative Comedy to offer us merely the chance to subsist in an endless utopia of CND benefits and Women Only Cabaret Nights, have only shattered memories and shat-upon dreams.

  When I was fourteen, I had a massive poster on my wall of a giant pop-art mouth advertising a Swiss exhibition of abstract art. My friends and family mocked my pretention, but I loved that poster and the hope it offered of an exciting world of thought beyond the boundaries of stifling Solihull. But one day the poster fell off the wall and the dog pissed all over it, ruining it for ever, while my mother laughed. That poster is what the Alternative Comedy dream meant to me – the possibility of a better world. And now it is covered in dog’s piss.

  So I hated, as a child, I hated being English. And yet conversely, I always harboured secret cravings for shortbread, offal and heroin.* (You seem to like that.) You know, deep-fried heroin if I could get it. With sauce [‘soss’]. Heroin supper, £2.95.

  * Again, there is an echo of the always apposite Simon Munnery here, who I think planted the word ‘offal’ in my mind with his joke ‘Why do the Scots like haggis? The truth is they don’t. Haggis is just a means of selling offal to tourists.’

  But … So … I think I always knew, Glasgow … I can hardly believe this is happening … I think I always knew that I was a Scotch man. And so I always knew, and … But …

  But … So … I think I always knew, Glasgow … I can hardly believe this is happening … I think I always knew that I was a Scotch man. And so I always knew, and … But …

  AUDIENCE: Scottish!*

  * During the Glasgow gig from which this text is transcribed, a foolish Scotchman has misunderstood my deliberate misuse of the word ‘Scotch’, leading to a hilarious improvisation.

  Yeah, Scottish. Thank you for correcting me, sorry. Er … you know … it was an error I made on purpose for comic effect. And I’m glad that there’s so little trust in me in the room that people are going, ‘He’s a fucking idiot! He doesn’t know … He’s insane! What’s he talking about? He hasn’t done the most basic research.’ But … No … Even despite that, I always knew that I was Scottish … In my heart, in my brave heart, I always knew that I was.*

  * I found here that if I intonated the word ‘braveheart’ as if I thought it should get a laugh, it would only get a groan, but if I threw it away as if it were just an accidental collision of words to which I had given no actual conscious thought, and which only coincidentally echoed the folk name of the Scotch national hero William Wallace, then it would get a big laugh. Audiences, in my experience, are like cats. They don’t respect you if you seem too desperate for their affection, but disguise your desperate need for their love as a kind of bored indifference, and soon they will be eating out of your hand.

  OK, shout out if you’ve seen the film Braveheart. You’ve all seen it, shout out.

  AUDIENCE: Yes!

  OK, now you’ll know more than any other audience I’ve played in the last three weeks that Braveheart is the shittest film ever made, right? It was. It was directed by the reactionary Catholic bigot Mel Gibson, and it’s full of basic, fundamental historical errors which insult your race, and mine by association. Right? Here’s … Here’s just three off the top of my head.*

  * I remember some reviews at the time criticising me for doing material about the film Braveheart, which had been released almost a decade earlier. But Braveheart had such a totemic role in the rise of the SNP and the drive towards a Scottish parliament, and is also famous for its typically Hollywood approach to the troublesome niggle of historical accuracy, that I think it’s a great subject in which to package a discussion about Scottish national identity, and by association, all the myths, lies and macho nostalgia that go towards forging any national identity. I don’t really believe that there’s such a thing as dated subject material, or clichéd subject material. There are only dated and clichéd approaches, and even some of them are still funny.

  Firstly, William Wallace, Braveheart, your national hero, he wasn’t some, you know, noble savage living in a mud hut, we all know that. He was a privileged, educated nobleman, right?

  Secondly, it’s not mentioned by Mel Gibson in the film, but there’s some evidence to suggest that he actually fought as a mercenary for the English as a teenager. That’s conveniently missed out.

  Thirdly, you know that French princess he’s supposed to have sex with? This French princess, in the film, you remember? And the implication is that he gets her pregnant and she marries Edward II of England, so it’s his kid. Now – she was a real historical figure, that French princess. But at the time of the death of William Wallace, Braveheart, your national hero, she was only four years old.

  Now, Glasgow, I’m not saying that William Wallace, Brave heart, your national hero, didn’t have sex with her … You know … He probably did. But if he did – and he did, he definitely did, right – it would have been a far less romantic scene than the one enacted by Mel Gibson in the film Braveheart. It may have happened in a tent, but it would still have been not a romantic scene. Because that would have made William Wallace, Braveheart, your national hero, a paedophile. A Scottish paedophile. The worst kind of paedophile that there is. Coming at you … through a bothy* … with shortbread on its face … muttering unintelligible sexual threats in a frankly incomprehensible dialect.

  * One way of avoiding the ire of the people you are mocking is to refuse them the easy option of assuming that you are ignorant by including within the abuse some detail or turn of phrase that shows you are in fact fully acquainted with their culture, nation, faith or city, and so presumably have made a positive choice to denigrate it
from a position of strength, rather than by dint of just not knowing anything about it in the first place. I remember a BBC Radio 4 religious bigwig describing an early-nineties radio sketch Richard Herring and I wrote about the primitive Christian mystic and pole-dweller Simeon Stylites as ‘ignorant’, but to be honest, if you’re even considering writing a sketch about Simeon Stylites, you’re already some degrees away from a simple position of ‘ignorance’. ‘Bothy’, in turn, is a Gaelic word for a small cottage. Unique to the Highlands, these structures are now mainly used as mountain shelters for walkers and climbers. Only someone who really knew their way around the Scotch culture in all its manifest variety would be able, with such casual confidence, to introduce a word like ‘bothy’ into a comedy routine with such obvious nonchalance, and the unruly Glaswegian audience see this and realise that they must submit to the comedian’s iron will.

  Another weird thing about that film is, you know in it, like, um … Fine, leave at this point. Er … It gets, it gets worse. A man leaving there to go away and think about the idea of a paedophile Braveheart in the privacy of a toilet cubicle.*

  * This may seem clever to you, but it is a standard move by me, at the point of an unexpected exit by a member of the crowd, to imply that they are leaving to masturbate over the thought of whatever I have just been talking about, though this is funnier, I always feel, if the subject is not actually sexual in any way, suggesting that the escapee has some very specific sexual fetish. In recent years, my standard move at the point of an unexpected punter exit is to pretend to assume they have been offended by whatever I am talking about and are leaving in disgust. I usually say something along the lines of, ‘I didn’t pay to hear a man talk disparagingly about … [insert whatever here].’ Since the mid-noughties, this approach has the added advantage of usually seeming like a clever, topical ad-lib, as there is usually some absurd story bubbling along in at least one tabloid concerning an outcry about some largely innocuous comedy routine by someone about something.

  Another weird thing about that film is that in it, if you remember, like, er, Mel Gibson makes a big deal about the fact Edward II, the English prince, was gay, right, as if not only did he oppress the Scots, but he did it in a kind of gay way, which makes it worse. But … the irony is, again, it’s not mentioned in the film that William Wallace, Braveheart, your national hero himself, was actually gay.* And … No, he was, sir … And we know this from some information that’s come to light in the last couple of years. Firstly, about two years ago, they found a cache of love letters hidden in a nook at, er … at, er … Glamis Castle or somewhere.† And the letters were exchanged between William Wallace and Robert the Bruce. And they were full of declarations – they were – they were full of declarations of love and details of their, of their sexual encounters, the very vigorous sexual encounters that they had. That’s one thing. Then, about a year ago, they found some, um, graffiti on, er, a wall … on an old Scottish wall, on the wall … on the wall of a broch, actually, which is… the Broch of Gurness, which is a real place in, er … the Orkneys.‡ They found it there. And it said, um … The graffiti, which is real, it existed, it said, er … ‘I am a gay, signed William Wallace, “Braveheart”.’ And the ‘Braveheart’ bit was in inverted commas, so they knew that meant it was real. ’Cause it was like a fun nickname, you know, it was, like, real.

  * Here it was absolutely necessary to use vocal inflections that suggest that Wallace’s homosexuality was entirely acceptable, and not a matter of controversy in any respect. Thus, any audience objections about this apparent abuse of a Scottish folk figure would hopefully freeze in the mouth of the heckler, for fear of them appearing homophobic. It was not difficult for me, personally, to say these sentences without appearing that I had any issues with homosexuality, as I absolutely don’t. At least two of my best friends are gay, and the composer Richard Thomas, with whom I worked for five years continuously, is a minimum of 80 per cent gay. I even enjoy the work of many gay writers and some of the world’s gayest musicians. That said, even though I have lived in heavily multicultural areas for two and a half decades now, I still do not have a huge amount of black or Asian friends, apart from Andrew Mallet, whom I see every Christmas and who is Malaysian or Hawaiian or something. I appreciate that this looks bad and am already working to correct it. I have always got on reasonably well with the Labour MP for Hackney, Diane Abbott, when I have met her on TV politics shows, and may try to cultivate a friendship with her, because as well as being an individual black woman she also represents the black community as a whole, which would help me enormously in meeting my friends diversity quota with the minimum of effort. That said, I said hello to her in the street the other day and I don’t think she recognised me.

  † Again, here I would stave off the psychotic boredom of doing this show for months on end by always changing the love-letter location, but the trick was to find somewhere suitably obscure that would delight an audience by its apparent oddness, but at the same time ring enough bells to get laughs. I suppose that’s a trick many of us employ throughout our standup – trying to employ a reference or a structural device that’s just close enough to the edge of comprehensibility to make the audience feel flattered, whilst at the same time not doing something so arcane that it deliberately freezes out the majority of the room.

  ‡ Again, who could object, here in Glasgow, to a man familiar with specific technical terms for specific Scottish Iron Age archaeological structures in the Hebrides? The exact purpose of these ring-shaped stone structures is not clear, but the Broch of Gurness, in Orkney, is particularly beautiful, and Clickimin Broch in Lerwick is one of the few real attractions of Shetland, where my wife Bridget and I erroneously spent our honeymoon in December 2006.

  So … Now … So, er … Wow, Braveheart, our national hero, was gay. And when – you know – when I was talking about this in Edinburgh in the summer, people were going, ‘Well, why didn’t we know about that, you know? Why …?’ And the reason is ’cause the graffiti and the letters were written in Gaelic, so it wasn’t translated. And people are going, ‘Well, why wasn’t it translated? That’s just the ancient language of our nation, of the Scots. Why wasn’t it translated?’ Well, it wasn’t. What Gaelic actually was, was a very kind of highly evolved form of medieval Scottish homosexual patois. And the clue’s in the name if you look at it, right. Gae-lich. That means ‘gae’ – homosexual, gay – and then ‘lich’ is language or tongue. So Gaelic is literally the language of gays.

  And … you know … I was booed off at the Assembly Rooms for saying this in Edinburgh. But it’s true. And I don’t think it’s … I think it’s really great that, that our national hero, er, William Wallace, was gay. Because Scotland’s always been a much more progressive, liberally minded kind of a nation that’s not afraid to show its feminine side.* And I think that, um, compared to England, which is a very backward kind of bigoted place. And I think that it’s really good that as we enter the twenty-first century, one of your national folk heroes can embody a kind of progressive notion of sexual identity. I think that’s a really brilliant thing. And I wish that some of the English, er, folk heroes, like, er, King Alfred or, or Robin Hood or King Arthur had, had been gay. But … but they weren’t. And … it’s only William Wallace, Braveheart, the Scottish one, that definitely was gay.†

  * Again, this would get derisory laughter from the Scots, and yet at the same time, they were confused as to their correct response. Shouldn’t they be pleased that I am saying their land is liberally minded and progressive? I love the confusion of a room that doesn’t know how it’s supposed to respond. I’d rather the punters scattered like startled birds, flying off into all different directions, than all in one direction, waving their Union Jacks and cheering.

  † I don’t think it’s funny in and of itself to suggest that Braveheart was gay. My point here is that Mel Gibson, and to be honest many small-minded nationalists, are usually engaged in quite macho mythologising of notions of nationhood, of w
hich Gibson’s ugly and homophobic movie is just one example. So therefore it’s funny to turn this on its head, and also to complicate things by appearing to praise the Scottish folk hero for his assumed homosexuality, taking the gamble that while my audience might feel a little insulted by this, their usually impeccable liberal mindsets won’t let them attack the routine in terms that could be misconstrued as politically incorrect. When I played this routine to Scottish audiences that hadn’t specifically come to see me, such as on a mixed bill at the Edinburgh Assembly Rooms late show in August 2005, they were not slow to boo me off and threaten me for saying that their national hero was gay. You see, this is the problem with David Baddiel and Frank Skinner having opened up the exclusive club of Alternative Comedy to football fans – suddenly you can’t assume that the audience is just weedy liberals.

  And of course another …

  AUDIENCE MEMBER: Robin Hood, surely.

  Sorry?

  AUDIENCE MEMBER: Robin Hood, surely.

  Someone, er, said that Robin Hood was, surely …

  AUDIENCE MEMBER: Men in tights.

  And someone there saying ‘Men in tights’. But of course the ‘men in tights’ addition to the Robin Hood legend was made in the nineteen-eighties by Mel Brooks. The, er, facility to make those kind of tights didn’t exist in medieval England. If it had have done, maybe they would have worn them. I’m sure that a thin denier tight is, er, an ideal garment for medieval combat, offering as it does no protection whatsoever to the human leg.*