My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up (33 page)

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One consolation was that the hearing took place at my favorite Bow Street Magistrates Court, where I’d now been held so many times (I think there’d been a bit of shoplifting and drunk and disorderly as well, in the years since that initial Tango ad audition drug fiasco) that I could almost see it as my spiritual home, as well as dear Oscar’s. V

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You’re a Diamond

Lost, as I was, in a sort of psychotropic fog, it was hard to discern that amid the madness of RE:Brand, a kind of ideology was beginning to emerge. The project was so swamped with willful self-destructiveness that I couldn’t formulate anything coher-ent. But I think that humanity, love, self-expression and truth all played a part in it.

The show where this came through most clearly was the “Nazi Boy” episode. The idea was to spend some time with this nit called Mark Collett, who was the leader of the BNP’s “youth movement.” We wanted to find out why an idealistic young man who was supposedly bright and intelligent and had a promising future ahead of him would end up allying himself with such an old-fashioned ideology as ultranationalism.

Less than a year had passed since September 11, and there was still a peculiar tension around regarding questions of racial and cultural difference, that the BNP was trying to capitalize on. It was also around the time that Jonathan Woodgate and Lee Bowyer were awaiting trial for an attack on an Asian student (which took place at a nightclub called The Majestic, which you could see from our hotel window when Matt wasn’t throwing peanuts still in the jar out of the window), so the combination of Leeds and racism seemed pertinent.

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I’d spoken to Mark on the phone a few times beforehand, and he seemed quite personable for a fascist. Going to his house was eerie, though. It was on an old-fashioned redbrick street, but there was a security gate across his door and barred windows, and you thought, “God, this is a person who really does think Britain is on the verge of a race war.”

We went in there and he showed us around. There were all these little bits of pseudo Nazi memorabilia scattered about the house, strange Nordic signs and other things that had an air of white supremacism about them. There was a picture of the skinhead band Skrewdriver—the lead singer had died in a car crash, and Mark was convinced it was some kind of conspiracy.

When we went in his kitchen, no one had done the washing up, and I thought, “how is this man going to help lead a racial-ist revolution if he can’t even keep his own kitchen clean?” Less of the ethnic cleansing, Sonny Jim, and more of the kitchen cleaning.

It was at the time of the 2002 World Cup in Japan and Ko-rea, when all the games were on early in the morning, and we met up with Mark for the En gland versus Argentina match in a packed pub. It was mostly just students in there, but there was also this coterie of racists wearing En gland shirts, which was odd, as in the World Cup the St. George’s cross is around everywhere anyway, but in this context it seemed not so much an acceptable show of patriotic pride, but the manifestation of something a bit more sinister and toxic.

I was drunk and smoking weed. I got Mark a drink, he took a sip and asked, “Is this Carling?” I said, “No they didn’t have that mate, so I got you a pint of black person’s urine,” and laughed at my own joke. It was strange how Mark’s lack of compassion came out in his sense of humor. He was really homophobic, and rude about women, casually damning the marriage of 262

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Lenny Henry and Dawn French, which sometimes I do because I fancy her a bit.

En gland won of course, by the only goal of the game, and the two men—Mark Collett and his handsome but quite threatening sidekick who’d just flown over from Germany (apparently a coincidence, he was an Aryan skinhead who looked quite fierce and hard)—embraced. For all their homophobia, there was a homoerotic subtext to their relationship. Mark was definitely very keen to cuddle after Beckham’s penalty.

I went into the garden, and chatted to other lads from some little town outside Leeds. I asked one of them what he thought about the BNP, and he said, “I think they’re a fucking nuisance—they come round here stirring up trouble between Asians, blacks and us.” I called Mark over, going “come and hear this”: he insisted, “These people are plants.”

They weren’t plants, they were just lads who weren’t racist, so I got on my high horse. “Listen,” I told him, “you’re going to have to confront stuff like this, because your ideas are old-fashioned . . . I’m glad you’ve had a moment of local celebrity, because you’re going to face a lot of conflict and confrontation in your life, the things you believe in are wrong.”

Mark got all arsey and refused to film with me any more. Th is

was a bit of a drag because the other episodes had left a certain amount of collateral damage for the grown-ups we worked with.

Homeless James kept hanging around at the Vera offi ces, asking for money for shoes (drugs), and these rappers that I got a bit obsessed with, called The Joint Squad, they really are jolly good, kept turning up there and stinking the place out smoking skunk. I’d left a lot of chaos in my wake, and we couldn’t really afford for anything else to go wrong.

When Matt and Will went back to film without me the next day—which was the condition of his compliance; I suppose I 263

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was lucky not to be sent back where I came from—they asked Mark questions about his frankly gorgeous sister. “Would you rather she had it off with Russell or a black person?” His reply was, “I think I’d rather she died.” A ridiculous answer in which no one wins. I would’ve said both. At once. In a saucy new show called Russell’s Interracial Sex Bonanza.

In a way the burblings of one racist are irrelevant, but Mark Collett was emblematic of a moment, and it’s disturbing to learn that five years later he’s become a councilman. I was pleased with that show though—I think because it’s not as complicated as some of the others—and it got a lot of positive feedback when it was eventually screened.

The one really signifi cant RE:Brand episode that I’ve not discussed yet—and it’s notable that I’ve avoided it so far, even though I wasn’t doing so intentionally—was the most complex of the lot. “Dad Fight.” Yes, before Bob Mortimer fought Les Dennis, before Ricky Gervais fought Grant Bovey, I took on my own dad in a televised boxing match.

Because we didn’t have much time or money to spare, we just trained for a couple of days at a kick boxing gym called Paragon, in Shoreditch, East London, near that Brick Lane flat I lived in at the time. They were lovely lads those boxing trainers, with the sort of boisterous optimism that I now know to be typical of people in that trade.

“Yeah we can do a lot for you in a couple of days,” they said, and I’d turn up there stinking of vodka and go on a treadmill and do shadowboxing and a few drunken press-ups—all red-faced and bleary and puffed up like a toad. There was a certain amount of jogging and skipping in too-tight shorts. And my dad—bless him—agreed to do the same.

I’d phoned him up and asked, “Dad, will you have a fight with us for a TV program I’m doing?” I explained to him a bit 264

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about the Oedipus complex, and the idea that to become a man you must kill the father; I used the example of Star Wars. He said “Yeah, alright.”

It was unfair to have involved him because, while a big, healthy man in his youth, he was now getting on a bit. We both had head guards on, and we did three three-minute rounds.

Boxing’s fucking knackering. You’ve got to admire boxers for being incredibly fit. Just doing it against your own aged dad is exhausting enough. Mind you, if you’re drunk it don’t help.

The first couple of rounds were a bit tentative, then I started to really go for it and hit my dad quite hard, and he fell to his knees; the program just ends with us talking, afterward. I just said, “Shall we go down the pub and chat up some birds? Do something we’re both good at.” And that’s exactly what we did.

It’s available on YouTube.

There were a couple more shows. One was called “My Old Tart?” where me and this lovely elderly actress called Wendy Danvers (I think she was eighty- one) went on a trip to East-bourne to explore the idea of sexuality in old age. I tried to seduce her. That was quite lighthearted. We sort of hung out and might have gone to some strip club or other, and then we were on the beach and I kissed her and told her I wanted to have it off with her, and she just said, “Oh, don’t be silly, Russell.” Finally we troubled the paralyzed motorcycle stuntman and heartthrob Eddie Kidd for a few days, with me adding his willy to those I touched over the course of the series when helping him to wee.

Enough was enough. RE:Brand was finished. Vera were over-joyed that it was over and done with at last, and they didn’t have to have us and our demented entourage hanging around in their offi

ces anymore. Matt had to go and get some other job, which he hated, and I went back to doing catastrophic stand-up gigs.

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surrounded its making, in some ways it’s the most sustained and powerful thing I’ve done so far. On the tapes you can see that I’m sort of deteriorating. I’ve got a bloated, permanently sweaty look to me, and I have the distant expression that junkies often have—be they a Big Issue seller or a corporate lawyer—just the appearance of being absent.

Yet somehow all the madness is being channeled toward some higher goal. Some of those programs are literally unbelievable—there’s some jaw-dropping stuff in them, which I’m still proud of now, even despite the embarrassment it causes me to see myself in such a state of obvious disarray (I’m still trying to think of a way of releasing them on DVD which wouldn’t get me dis-owned by everyone I know). They weren’t much reviewed at the time, though Dominik Diamond from the Daily Star said RE:Brand was the best thing he’d ever seen on TV.

People used to come up to me in the street and tell me they loved it. Obviously it was only ever seen by tiny audiences, because it was on a ridiculous satellite channel that, almost as soon as RE:Brand had been broadcast for the first time, went out of business. They pulled the satellite out of the heavens, and broadcast no more. V

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Call Me Ishmael. Or Isimir.

Or Something . . .

While RE:Brand was the zenith of my preemptive “Vegas Elvis”

period (do the decline into bloated egotism before anyone knows who the hell you are, then it can be a secret), Cruise of the Gods, a one- off BBC comedy special, would go down as the nadir.

I’d convinced the agent Conor McCaughan, whose clients include Paddy Considine and David Walliams, to represent me for acting work. He came and saw me do stand-up a couple of times in Edinburgh—when I was being all mad and reckless and injuring myself—and really liked it, as well as on that night-marish evening at 93 Feet East.

My friend Karl Theobald had wisely advised me to be wary of those who give me approval when I’m in a self-destructive mode. This is how he characterized the ensuing dynamic: “Oh yeah, look at him go. Wow! He’s like a runaway train. Go on Russell, wooh! Tear it up. He’s wild; he’s dangerous! He’s un-stoppable! . . . He’s done what? Sorry, Russell, you’re fired.”

And so to the 2002 Baby Cow production Cruise of the Gods, starring Rob Brydon, David Walliams, Steve Coogan and me—in a much, much, much, much smaller role, but nonetheless present on the boat throughout the trip.

Cruise of the Gods was filmed on a ship sailing the Aegean Sea 267

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for three weeks, visiting Greek islands and the Turkish port of Istanbul. I was in no fucking state to be going anywhere on my own, but it was a great job and an amazing opportunity. Coogan was huge at that time, Rob Brydon wasn’t doing badly either and while David was not that famous yet—he’d done Rock Profile on the telly—I was really looking forward to working with him.

The story concerned a TV science-fiction convention, held on a cruise ship, where obsessive fans of a Star Trek–type show would get to meet the heroes of the program they had watched in its heyday, ten to fifteen years before. The central theme was the interaction between these aged and jaded stars. I can’t remember the exact intricacies of the plot; I didn’t read the script.

But it should not be assumed that I embarked on this cruise ship with a bad attitude: quite the reverse. I put myself through a mild heroin withdrawal before going on board (falling back on whiskey and grass), as I thought it would be stupid to take hard drugs on the boat. I said to Martino, who demonstrated his limitless compassion by remaining my friend after the carnage of RE:Brand, “I don’t want to get in any trouble on this job. I want to be known as the bookish actor who just kept himself to himself.”

Martino encouraged this. “That is a good ambition to have, Russell. If you can achieve it, you will have done well.” So off I went with that goal in mind. Within a week, I had been fired and sent home in disgrace.

Part of the problem was that I was so busy congratulating myself on not doing hard drugs that I just got pissed and stoned all the time instead, but that was not all there was to it. Some of the details of what happened on that boat are sketchy, but one thing I do remember is that the cruise ship wasn’t exclusively 268