Authors: Graham Norton
Melange had finally closed down. When it happened it was almost a relief. Better to have no job than to pretend to yourself you have one even though you are earning practically nothing. On our last night a few of us sat around the bar staring at the empty tables and telling stories that would have made poor Freddie’s hair stand on end.
‘Remember the time you pissed in the man’s coffee but someone else drank it!’
‘Oh, what about the lady with the nut allergy and we forgot to tell the kitchen and her lips blew up like big purple dinghies and she had to go to hospital.’
‘What about those people who left their camera behind and we took lots of pictures of ourselves pointing at their shitty tip and then they came back for the camera.’
We took it upon ourselves not to serve any customers that night – it was going to be our special night. I don’t know who came up with the idea – maybe me? – but we put a sign on the door saying, ‘Please use other door.’ We became almost hysterical watching people walking up and down outside the window searching for the elusive ‘other door’. When we got bored of that we put up another sign that simply
said, ‘Please use Neal Street Entrance.’ That sent people around the block and left us in peace to enjoy our wake. I told that story on the radio once, and apparently Freddy the owner heard it and was very upset. He didn’t understand that it was something we did only once and on the last night. I think he felt that I had single-handedly carried out a cruel vendetta against him and caused his beloved restaurant to shut down. Freddy, if you ever read this, the truth is there was no reason Melange failed in the end, and its success, like all restaurants that do well, was mainly due to a huge streak of freakish catering good luck.
So there I was, with no money, living in a dump and unable to move. And then the council got in touch and told Stephan and me that we weren’t legal tenants. I explained that we had been paying the rent and using the rent book. I was called in for a meeting where I met a man sitting in an office no bigger than a phone box. He had the sort of moustache that was so groomed and pampered that one assumed he preferred it to his penis. I stared at it as he explained that there was no record of our rent and he didn’t know where it was going. When I asked him if we should stop paying rent, he paused and said, ‘Well, I would,’ and licked his moustache.
I walked back to Grange Court, went up to what was now my free home on the eighteenth floor and wondered what I should do. I had no job, but I had no rent to pay. I realised that I could live on very little indeed and somehow use my time to pursue other ambitions. I knew I had to broaden my horizons as far as my career was concerned, and not rely on the few acting roles thrown my way. I decided that I would write something for me to perform. It was as simple and spontaneous as that.
In many ways, the moment we stopped paying rent was a turning point for me. I suddenly had the luxury of having the time and the means to develop my own projects. I still had to make some money to survive, of course, so I did various bits and pieces. A friend of mine called Gill Sheppard had an interior design PR company, and every few weeks I would go in to her office for a day, or sometimes just a couple of hours, to stuff envelopes and answer the phone to journalists who wanted photographs of taps or sofas. In the evening I broke my rule of never working in another restaurant ever again. But at least the place I ended up in was a bit different. It was a pub on the Farringdon Road called the Eagle. Mike Belben and David Eyre had left Melange and without knowing it had started the first ever gastropub. The idea seems so obvious now – a bare bones pub with an open-plan kitchen to one side serving restaurant-quality food at cheap prices and with no fuss – but back then it was radical, and a huge, howling success.
Mike had always backed me in my ambition to be an actor, working my rota around rehearsals or auditions, and now he came up trumps again. He was fine about not giving me a regular job, just the odd shift when I wanted the money or he needed the help. The Eagle was an incredibly liberating experience. I was doing more or less the same job as I had been doing at Melange, but this time I wasn’t relying on or even expecting tips. I saw one huge, glowing advantage to this system – I could be as rude as I liked. While he didn’t exactly encourage this behaviour, Mike had worked in catering long enough to have learnt that the customer was not only usually wrong but also annoying.
‘A smile costs nothing,’ a customer who’d been ordering
in dribs and drabs and therefore irritating me would say.
‘And intelligence can’t be bought,’ I’d retort. Why nobody rabbit-punched me I don’t know.
I was at a dinner party recently and a female journalist turned to me and asked if it was true that I had worked at the Eagle.
‘Yes, I did.’
‘I’m sure you won’t remember this, but I used to be barred from that place!’
She then told the party about how she had been barred from the Eagle for absolutely no reason in 1991. She had simply tried to order a drink from the wrong end of the bar, she claimed. Polite titters ensued. I stared across the table. Of course I remembered her. She’d been a vile, drunken bitch, and we had taken huge pleasure in telling her that she could never come back. I was disappointed for two reasons: one, that Mike had now relented and let her back in, and two, that somewhere along the line I had made decisions in my life that meant I was now sitting next to her at a dinner party.
I felt for the first time that I had a bit of a life plan going. Often, when I wonder about my inexplicable success, I think back to my years on the eighteenth floor and realise that on some level I had to succeed because failure really wasn’t an option. I didn’t know exactly what plan A was, but I definitely knew that there was no plan B.
Stephan was spending longer and longer stretches in France with his boyfriend, and our television had been nicked months before, so there were few distractions. I sat on the wheelchair I had got from a local junk shop and stared at my typewriter. I knew that what I wrote had to be
funny, but the whole idea of stand-up terrified and appalled me. I absolutely did not want to do stand-up, but I did want to do a show. Characters? Maybe I could do Alan Bennett-like monologues? I tried a few but they all petered out. I ate a lot of Smash potato and did a great deal of wanking.
For some reason, Mother Teresa of Calcutta had always struck me as funny. There is something ridiculous about anybody who is considered completely one thing, be it good or evil. When I was working at Melange, I would often pop a tea towel on my head and pretend to be the sainted old lady. It seemed to amuse the other people at work, but really it was just one quick visual gag and I had never thought of expanding it into anything else. Then, one day, in between the spuds and the spunk, a title for my show came to me. It would be called ‘Mother Teresa of Calcutta’s Grand Farewell Tour’. I still had no idea what was going to be in the show, but I knew that I would buy a ticket to a show with that title.
I started writing, assuming that Mother Teresa would simply be the first character in a sketch with other characters, but I just kept thinking of things for her to say. In my mind she was like a tough old Irish housewife. The sort of woman who would consider herself a Christian beyond reproach, but who would think that anyone who actually believed in the Virgin Birth was more than a little naïve. I knew hundreds of women like this.
I was on a roll, and before it was in any way structured or even fully written out, I asked Mike if I could perform it in the gallery space above the pub. He agreed, but said that he needed a date. I plucked a date out of the air five weeks
ahead. It seemed suitably far off and vague. No pressure. Then, when I was working behind the bar, various people started saying to me that Mike had told them about the show and that they were really looking forward to seeing it. Suddenly it had all become very real and very soon. Pressure.
Maybe it was because I was used to performing with others, but there was something about the act being just me, by myself, that made me uncomfortable. So I wrote in parts for two little sisters. My friend Nicola Reeder would play one, but I thought it would be handy if the other one could play a musical instrument, perhaps a guitar. It seems incredible, but we didn’t know anyone who could play an instrument. I guess we’d all been too busy carrying plates and planning our fabulous futures to find time to actually learn how to do something. Finally Nicola came up with Lorne Widhal Madsen. She was half Danish, model pretty with long blonde hair and she played the clarinet at professional level. It wasn’t exactly the happy-clappy folk mass kind of sound I had been looking for, but the very oddness of it appealed to me. I decided that she should deliver all her lines in Danish with Nicola interpreting them. I suppose I was trying to create a show that was quirky and unlike anything anyone might have expected. I hoped it was going to be funny, but if it wasn’t, at least it would be bonkers.
When I had finished the script I had a read-through with some friends. Such was their keenness to get a sneak preview that they even made the trip to the eighteenth floor in the council estate. They seemed to like it. Rehearsals with the little sisters revealed they had so little to do that in actual fact they made it look more like a one-man show than ever. Oh well, it was too late now.
I went on a PR blitz to promote this tiny one-off show above the Eagle. I had photographs taken of a faceless Mother Teresa looking at a London A–Z, I got press releases printed and (my favourite) I made business cards with just the name of the show and a small scrap of tea towel stuck to it like a holy relic. I sent this eccentric press pack off to everyone I could think of. The fact that I had no idea what I was doing coupled with the very real fact that I had nothing to lose gave me an extraordinary confidence.
Time Out
wrote a little feature about the upcoming event, and then on the day the Radio 4 show
Loose Ends
called. A producer called Alison Vernon Smith thought it might make a good feature for the show. I told her as much about the show as I knew, and she seemed to think it was funny. She would be down and she would bring her reporter for the piece, Emma Freud. Emma Freud! She did stuff on the telly! There was going to be a celebrity in the audience!
Finally the night came. I bought and borrowed cushions and placed them in rows on the floor of the gallery. Then I put lots of candles around the room, started the pre-show music of some wailing Bulgarian choir and waited. Soon the little room was packed. When I say ‘packed’, I mean about fifty people showed up, but in a space that small that meant standing room only. To indicate the start of the show, Lorne walked into the performance area and played halting esoteric jazz on her clarinet. Nicky wandered slowly around the room lighting the candles. It didn’t say comedy, it didn’t even say show. If I had been sitting in the audience that night my heart would have been sinking fast. In alternating Danish and English Mother Teresa was introduced, and in I walked, draped head to toe in Irish linen tea-towels.
By the end of the show I had learnt two things: it was forty-five minutes long and people really seemed to like my Mother Teresa.
I was giddy with excitement. Fifty people, mostly fairly good friends admittedly, liked my show. Emma Freud interviewed me and told me to ring her. A woman called Judith Dimant who worked for a venue called the Pleasance in Edinburgh came up to me and told me how much she liked the show. People bought me drinks. The handsome friend of a friend slept with me. The accolades were pouring in.
I did the show twice more above the pub. True, there were slightly fewer people and laughs on both occasions, but they were still successes, and friends who had witnessed my failed drama career looked relieved. I had found the thing I was good at, and as sure as awkwardness follows sex, my career would, I was sure, take off. I seemed to be right. I had hardly taken off my tea-towels and started wondering what to do next when I got a call from Judith Dimant. There had been a cancellation for the midnight show in the cabaret bar at the Pleasance. Did I want to do two weeks at the Edinburgh Festival? I ironed my tea-towels and packed my bag. I was taking the show on the road.
8
A Little Something off the Fringe
A
UGUST 1991: I EMERGED FROM
Waverley Station. The city of Edinburgh loomed above and around me with an imposing, confident grandeur that struck me as out of place in a city in the UK. It had the air of a small European principality: the festival had arrived and old women with newly washed and set hairdos in see-through plastic rain hoods gave way to shiny-haired boys and girls who had leaflets for hands. I had never been tempted to go to the festival as a punter, finding the whole idea of it too daunting, but now I was here for a reason.
I had no idea how lucky I was with my accommodation. While all the other first-timers were shacked up four or five to a room or in campsites outside the city, I swanned around in an enormous, beautiful flat which belonged to the family of a woman I had worked with at Melange. Zebra-skin rugs, pictures in silver frames sitting on a baby grand piano – I might have had the good grace to feel guilty except that I knew that come the end of the festival all the shiny-haired kids would return to leafy loveliness and utility rooms, while I would be creeping into a fire-charred lift designed to accommodate coffins.
I also didn’t realise how lucky I was to be fast-tracked straight into one of the premier venues on the fringe. It was
still hard to get audiences and reviews, of course, but at least I stood a better chance than most other first-timers. I did twelve nights. The show started at midnight and somehow I managed to make it last for an hour. The audience seemed to be mostly made up of people who worked at the venue and a handful of pissed people who couldn’t get into anything else.
Every night I came off stage and went into the dressing room where the next show’s comedians would be waiting. It was a late-night line-up of stand-up comics compèred by a greasy-haired, baby-lipped man called Mark Lamarr. I would pack my tea-towels up, and they would ignore me and share private jokes. They made me feel like I was back on the rugby field in Bandon Grammar School, and yet this time I knew deep down that it was different. I might not have been ready for the first eleven, but I could at least play the game. I knew that I had a perfect right to be there.