This Is Your Life (13 page)

I had been to a comedy club in Brighton and so I knew the form for all the wouldn't-be comics who'd attempted to start their careers there. Amateur hopefuls were given the opportunity to get up and do an open spot immediately after the interval. The audience usually granted them a short period of time to demonstrate whether they were funny or not. This varied from anything between two and twenty seconds, and then they were booed, heckled, insulted or pelted with half-full plastic beer glasses. What on earth was I waiting for? It was time to make my famous ‘fish' routine a reality.

First of all I would have to book the gig. Rather than risk being seen by Nancy or Dave or any of my friends in Seaford, I enquired about open spots at some of the smaller London comedy clubs. I finally booked myself in for Wednesday week at a club in north London – which gave me ten days to write and rehearse the act, and Arabella a couple of days to write it up afterwards.

‘No,' she said when I rang to give her the secret details of my next appearance. ‘No, no, no, no, no. Wednesday's not good for me. It's Samantha's birthday,' she said in a tone of voice that suggested I too should have this notable date in my diary between Martin Luther King's and St Patrick's. ‘There's a crowd of us going to her house for dinner.'

‘But it's quite late in the evening,' I reasoned. ‘Come along afterwards. Bring them too, if you want.'

‘Can't you make it Tuesday? Hang on – nope, book launch Tuesday, Thursday out again, Friday too late,' and it quickly transpired that she couldn't make any other dates either and so she reluctantly agreed to cut short her dinner party.

‘You will come, won't you?' I said, feeling significantly less important than I had when we'd last spoken.

‘Of course I'll come. The review editor is taking a keen interest in this piece. “Comedy is the new rock and roll. But here comes comedy's punk,” she said.'

I wasn't quite sure what she meant by that – though it left me feeling that the stakes were raised even higher. So the next morning I finally sat down to start writing my act. I didn't have to be in at the language school until the afternoon so I got some blank pieces of paper and tried to think of something funny. Observational comedy, that was the thing. ‘Have you ever noticed how hard milk cartons are to open?' Hmmm. I had a feeling that this observation might have even pre-dated the advent of milk cartons. Something more up to date. Text messaging, maybe. Or digital television. ‘They've got a channel for everything now, haven't they? Next they'll have a special channel for .. . a special channel for . . .' but I couldn't think of anything for which they didn't already have a special channel. Political comedy, maybe. ‘New Labour, eh? They're not as left-wing as old Labour, are they!' It didn't feel very satirical and I screwed up the sheet only to find a used piece of paper underneath, completely blank except for the words ‘Scene Two' written at the top.

Half an hour later an idea was just starting to hatch when the doorbell rang and I could make out the unmistakable silhouette of Doreen Cutbush blocking out any light that
might think of coming through the glass in my front door. There was only one thing you could think on meeting Doreen: This is a woman who loves miniature schnauzers. This was partly due to the fact that she sported a bright yellow badge the size of a teaplate bearing the unequivocal declaration, ‘I love miniature schnauzers'. But there was another clue that was hard to overlook: under her arms she was also holding a couple of panting miniature schnauzers – their moustachioed doggy heads were almost permanent features either side of her colossal waist-high breasts. Doreen was a figure from Greek mythology with a human head and body but with two doggy heads coming out from under her arms. In case you were in any doubt as to her feelings about miniature schnauzers, the big badge was backed up with an extensive collection of further schnauzer insignia: another thirty or forty little metal badges in the shape of her favourite dog breed or boasting membership of the Miniature Schnauzer Club of Great Britain pinned all over the front of her green gilet.

I opened the door and she sighed in her rushed-off-her-feet way.

‘Jimmy dear, are you taking Betty out for a walk today?' This was the opening salvo of a two-part trick question that ensnared me every time. On answering, ‘Er, yes,' I'd create the opening for her to ask if I could possibly take her dogs while I was at it. Bishop to King's Knight 4: checkmate. In fact, I had been planning to dash quickly up to the cliffs with Betty, but taking these dogs for a walk was a more complex operation, as you might expect with dogs that are not really used to walking anywhere. You didn't take them for a walk, you took them for a ‘carry'.

Doreen ran the language school where I worked. She had even found me this house to rent a few doors down from her own when I first started. I'd been repaying the favours ever
since. Because I worked part-time, people quite often asked me to help them out or just called round when they fancied a chat, and, well, you have to give people the time of day. I suppose celebrities employ other people to give people the time of day. ‘Her Majesty has asked me to thank you for your letter,' somebody would always reply from Buckingham Palace when I used to write to the Queen about smoking beagles. Famous people don't give individuals the time of day, they give everyone the time of day, all at once. They don't chat with one neighbour, they chat with the whole country, the whole planet even – that's what being a star means. You don't do your neighbour a favour, you do millions of people a favour. So while I might do my bit for humankind by feeding Edna Moore's cat when she was in hospital, Bob Geldof might do a little good deed of his own like organizing a major concert for famine relief. They all have their place in the scheme of things. I mean, who's to say one is more significant than the other?

I'd read all about the determination and single-mindedness of stars on the way up. They never mentioned that they had to give up having time for people, but that must be the price of fame – that you have to keep putting yourself first over and over again. That point had now come for me. I did not enough have the spare time to walk Doreen's miniature schnauzers. I had more important things to do – I had a hit comedy routine to write. I'd just have to be firm and say no. In fact, I would look her in the eye and explain that I was so busy that actually I needed her to walk Betty for me. I gathered up my courage and began.

‘The thing is, Doreen—'

‘Because I've got to go and see my brother,' she continued, ‘in hospital in Brighton. You know, the one with cancer I told you about. . .'

As I helped one of the miniature schnauzers over a particularly large clump of grass, I wondered if I'd ever achieve the destiny I had set for myself. On Odysseus's epic journey he had to defeat a one-eyed giant, or sail between the twin perils of Scylla and Charybdis, or resist the seductive song of the sirens. But you don't get so much credit for overcoming the mundane obstacles that stop you getting anywhere in the journey of everyday life.

‘Lo, see how the hero resists checking his emails, for he is strong of will!'

‘Yea, and marvel at his immense courage as he dares battle with the council over the parking ticket that was unjustly slapped on his Nissan Sunny!'

‘But look, forsooth, now he faces the ultimate foe – the giant lady with the two dog-heads under her arms! Is our hero strong enough to say no to her request to walk her miniature schnauzers?'

‘No, it would seem, he is not.'

It took Odysseus twenty years to sail home, which seemed approximately the time it was going to take me to write my stand-up set. But by the weekend I had the beginnings of a routine and I performed it pacing maniacally up and down my front room. It went like this:

‘The dodo. What a crap bird that was!' I put an anxious note to myself in the margin – ‘topical enough??' – and carried on. ‘So the dodo is extinct. Well, I'm sorry but, like, whose fault is that? I mean, like, dodos – right? I'm sorry but you had it coming.' Maybe laugh here slightly. ‘There must have been a point, right, where, like, there was one last breeding pair of dodos left in the whole world and the sailors thought, Well, what's it to be? Lose this species for ever more to Planet Earth or not have roast dodo a 1'orange for dinner? Well, I'm sorry,
but it's no fucking contest!' (I had tried that bit without the swear word but it didn't feel so funny.) ‘Listen, dodos, you can't fly and you're delicious. I'd say that was pretty crap planning on your part, so tough shit! You're extinct. Get over it! Move on!' And then I would give a little shake of the head as if I still couldn't believe how ridiculous they were, and maybe repeat, ‘Dodos. Crap birds!' just to myself, perhaps pretending to suppress another little laugh at this point. I practised these lines out loud and for some reason found my voice mutating into some weird outraged cockney, somewhere between Bob Hoskins and Dick van Dyke in
Mary Poppins.
I also found that by regularly inserting the words ‘like' and ‘right', I gave the piece an authentic, just-made-up feel.

Although I was encouraged that at least I'd now written something, I still had a problem with the length. I timed what I had so far and it fell short of the twenty minutes I'd been aiming for by nineteen minutes and twelve seconds. Maybe if they laughed a lot that would pad it out a bit. To be honest, I didn't have the faintest idea how the audience would react. Wasn't it all a bit dodo-ist?

On Monday I was at work all day, and during the morning coffee break Nancy told me that her daughter was now back at school.

‘That's good to hear,' I said, adding, ‘I'll tell you something, dodos were crap birds, weren't they?'

‘What?'

‘You know, dodos. OK, so they're extinct, well, I'm sorry but, like, whose fault is that? I mean dodos – right? I'm sorry but you had it coming to you. You can't fly and you're delicious. I'd say that was pretty crap planning on your part, so tough shit! You're extinct. Get over it! Move on!' I chuckled.

She stared at me for a second, not even cracking a smile. ‘Sorry, what are you talking about?”

‘Well, it just struck me as a funny thought.'

‘Except that the dodo was the first significant animal to be hunted to extinction and now we are losing hundreds of species every year.'

‘Mmm, good point,' I nodded.

I had tried the same routine out on Chris. He'd just looked concerned and said, ‘Dodos? Extinct? When did that happen then?' I hadn't told Nancy or any of my friends about my situation. Perhaps I was embarrassed to reveal the depths of deception I'd got myself into, or maybe it felt unlucky to talk about my performance beforehand, but for the time being I had to keep it locked up inside. Not that I would have had any trouble making Nancy believe me; her generous spirit meant that she always gave people the benefit of the doubt. The downside of this admirable trait was that it made her chronically gullible. She could be convinced that Narnia was a former Soviet republic or that Princess Michael of Kent was so called because she hadn't been allowed to change her Christian name after her sex change. I think she quite liked me teasing her, but everyone did it. I once caught her putting a tea bag in a casserole ‘to add flavour'. Several hours later I finally convinced her that this was not normal culinary practice, and that what she had seen her mother place in a stew all those years ago was in fact a
bouquet garni.
Her mum had obviously only been joking when she said it was a tea bag, but Nancy had been cooking Coq au PG Tips ever since,

I put the dodo routine to one side for a while and that night spent a couple of hours trying to come up with some more stuff. What about my famous ‘fish' routine that New York's
Village Voice
had called the ‘Hey Jude of British stand-up
comedy'. Fish, they're funny, what could I say about fish? ‘Have you ever noticed, right, how fish, like, have all these different fins? There's the dorsal fin, the pectoral fin, the pelvic fin and the tail or caudal fin.' No, too dry. Most fish have an anal fin; that might get a cheap laugh, I suppose. OK, I'll come back to the fish. I tried to remember funny things that I had said in the pub but it wasn't the same out of context. ‘Anyway, there's this big German girl at the language school where I teach and there was a crowd of us in the pub one evening and she knocked back this pint of bitter in one go and then let out this huge burp and I said, “That finishing school was a waste of money!”' Well, you had to be there, really.

And then I tore up the top sheet of paper and screwed it up and stared and stared at the blank nothingness in front of me. Several times I was close to ringing Arabella and telling her not to come and to scrap the feature and forget all about it. But then I thought about the possibility of really being someone, about what it must feel like to be a person of real significance, about how illogically proud I'd been when I'd read back those fictitious American reviews. I was closer than I had ever been in my life to really achieving something. Which was why I was so terrified. Because now I was faced with the imminent possibility that I might fail.

There was of course another reason why I wanted to be famous. From where I was standing, it seemed to unlock everything. I'd not been in a proper relationship for years. Why should anyone be interested in a part-time English-as-a-foreign-language teacher in his mid-thirties with nothing to his name except a neurotic dog and an assorted collection of Allen keys left over from self-assembly furniture kits? Everyone knows that fame makes a man attractive. You only had to look at the contrast between the plug-ugly Billy
Scrivens and his stunning wife to see just how famous he must have been. Fame was the ultimate in ostentatious peacock-feather mating displays. Fame wouldn't Just bring status and respect and money and purpose. It would mean an end to being so bloody lonely all the time.