Common as Muck!: The Autobiography of Roy 'Chubby' Brown (28 page)

Terry and I worked well together on stage, but off stage it was a different story. I felt resentful as I thought I was always the one who had to be the creative, innovative member of the partnership, the one who came up with new gags, whereas Terry was happy to stick to the tried and tested impressions of the day
such as Harold Wilson, Prince Charles, Ted Heath, Norman Wisdom and Michael Crawford as Frank Spencer.

However, the greatest source of friction between me and Terry ‘14 Combs’ Harris was his vanity. We once had the opportunity of doing a spot on a daytime television talk show in Edinburgh, but we nearly missed it because Terry spent so much time staring at himself in the hotel mirror, just in case there was an attractive woman he could pull at the studio. Also, sometimes I would buy food and drink for Terry all day and then watch open-mouthed when he did not even pay for his fish and chips at the end of the evening.

Terry and I worked so hard that we had little time for fun – and compared with Mick and George, Terry wasn’t up for fun anyway – but there was one incident I’ll never forget. We were playing a series of gigs in South Wales and went to the swimming pool to kill time one afternoon in Cardiff. We were sitting in the steam room when someone I recognised walked in and sat down beside me.

‘You’re Frankie Vaughan?’ I said. I was right. ‘We do a club act,’ I added, explaining where we’d been playing. ‘Oh, by the way, happy birthday.’

‘Has someone told you it’s my birthday?’ Frankie said.

‘I know because it’s my birthday too. We were both born on the third of February.’

‘That’s some coincidence,’ Frankie said. ‘I think it calls for a celebration.’

We left the steam room, sat at a table beside the swimming pool and shared a bottle of champagne. Frankie was a lovely man, a wonderful person. I’ve met many people in show business who have let their success go to their heads. But Frankie was not one of them. A fabulous singer and very good-looking, he looked like a British Robert Mitchum. His wife Sheila must have had her hands full over the years because I think at one
time every woman in Britain wanted to bed Frankie Vaughan. He was utterly charming.

Twenty-five years later, we met again. ‘How you doing, Chubby?’ Frankie said. I’d now made a name for myself and Frankie had recognised me.

‘Do you remember a duo in Cardiff and a bottle of champagne?’ I said. I told Frankie the story of our last meeting.

‘Eeh, I remember that,’ he said. ‘Was that you – the bloke with the same birthday as me?’ And this time I bought the champagne.

Terry and I didn’t last long. I felt I was doing everything – driving us to the gig, setting up the gear, buying all the props and keeping Terry watered and fed – because Terry worked as a car salesman during the day and spent whatever spare time he had with his latest squeeze. The most recent was a girl called Brenda, a bottle blonde with black roots and a flat in Peterlee which Terry had swiftly made his little love nest, forever going on about how great Brenda was in bed.

I would rehearse all day while Terry relied on what he had. It was like a bad marriage in which one partner does everything and the other takes the piss. Terry was getting on my nerves and I was looking for a chance to bring an end to Alcock & Brown when Terry told me he had to go to Canada to visit his sick mam. We’d been together for eight months and I was glad to see the back of him.

‘I’ll work on my own until you get back,’ I said to Terry, thinking that I’d avoid ever re-forming Alcock & Brown with him.

‘Oh aye, yeah,’ Terry said. ‘I’ve been talking to Brenda and she feels that, in the end, I’m better off working on my own. So I that’s what I am going to do.’

‘Are you, Terry?’

‘She thinks I’m carrying the act.’

She thinks I’m carrying the act
. I’ll never forget those words.
Carrying the act!
On stage, I was running about like a blue-arsed fly. I played the drums, piano, banjo and ukulele. I wrote all the comedy sketches, and I rewrote the lyrics to all the advert parodies. All Terry did was half a dozen impressions in the first half of the show. Also, off stage I did
everything
. And Terry had the cheek to say he was carrying the act! I’ve never got over it. The cheeky bastard.

‘How much notice are you giving us?’ I said. ‘Because I will need to get somebody else.’ I wanted to stay in a duo because I had enough material for an hour-long double act, but only enough solo material for a twenty-minute support slot.

‘I’m leaving on Sunday.’

‘
This
Sunday, ya mawky get?’ It was now Thursday.

‘Yeah.’

‘Thanks for letting me know.’

Terry left for Canada – or so I thought. For the next month I worked night and day until I had enough new material to add to my older gags, songs and slapstick. I practised the banjo and ukulele incessantly, playing along to Sandy Nelson tracks until my hands were bleeding, and I wrote hundreds of gags, then honed them down to the best fifty.

I got all my comedy books out and scanned through them for inspiration. I knew I already had a good half-hour act, but most clubs wanted two half-hours and some wanted three half-hour spots. I couldn’t afford the time to work up a full ninety minutes of material, so I relied on some rather hackneyed Paddy and Mick jokes – the comedian’s bread and butter of the early 1970s – and practised stringing them out to make them last longer. A joke about Dublin mission control sending Paddy and Mick up towards the moon in a milk bottle would be stretched out almost to the point at which it snapped and was no longer funny, just to fill time. ‘You know where Dublin is?’ I’d say. ‘It’s in Ireland. Did you know they had a space launch pad
there? Well, they tied Paddy and Mick to this rocket …’ and I’d keep it going like that.

I played a few local warm-up gigs in Redcar to bed in the new material. When I came off stage after the fourth gig, I was confident that I could hold a show on my own so I rang Brian’s office on the Friday. ‘Am I out at the weekend?’ I said. I was booked for Sunday night. Two spots at the Excelsior Club, a working men’s club in Newcastle.

Walking into the Excelsior on Sunday evening, I was confronted by a big notice: Top Class Entertainer – Terry Harris.

Terry Harris?

He was waiting in the dressing room. ‘Hey, how are you?’ he said.

‘I thought you were going to Canada?’

‘I’ve been. I came straight back.’

‘Oh, did you?’

‘I’m on at eight o’clock,’ he said. ‘Then you’re on at half past.’

Standing at the bar, I watched Terry do all my material. He was doing routines that formed the heart of my act, much of which predated his time in Alcock & Brown and the remainder of which was material I’d written. I went to the dressing room.

‘What do you think of me first spot, then?’ Terry said.

‘You’ve a fucking cheek. It’s all my stuff, Terry. I can’t go on now.’

‘Well, you know, I helped put that together,’ Terry said.

‘No, you didn’t, Terry. And you know it.’

‘Oh … I would have thought you would have put something else together by now.’

‘I have, but it’s only been four weeks. All that stuff that you did there, it’s the first half of my act. You
know
it’s my stuff.’

I found the concert secretary of the club. ‘That lad who was just on, he used to be working with me,’ I said.

‘We were told that.’

‘He’s just done all my stuff,’ I said, with a shrug.

I felt like giving Terry a ploat, but I got in my car and drove off. I never spoke to Terry again. Twenty years later, I saw him at a football match. He had lost all his hair at the front and ballooned in size. He was bigger than me. I looked at him, he looked at me and said hello. I didn’t reply.

Terry tried to make it on his own, but got back together with Sugar and Spice. For all his overweening vanity, it seemed he didn’t believe in himself enough to walk on stage by himself and take a battering. Standing behind a microphone, on stage is the loneliest place on earth if the audience doesn’t like you. If you’re dying and not getting a laugh, well, there’s nowhere worse. Sitting in solitary in a prison cell has nothing on it.

CHAPTER TWELVE

LEARNING THE ROPES

AT LEAST I
was losing weight. What with the liquid diet, the radiotherapy, the alcohol ban and the long walks I took to while away the hours of doing nothing, the pounds were falling off me and physically I felt better than I had in years.

My mental state was another story. The physical symptoms of the radiotherapy – the red-raw swollen throat and the loss of hair – were a breeze compared with the psychological side effects. I felt depressed and listless, I was getting headaches, I couldn’t do my job and I was totally pissed off. There were days when I woke up and had to be at the hospital at nine o’clock and I didn’t want to get out of bed. I’d pull myself together, get dressed and wash, climb into my car and set off. Then, sitting in traffic on the way to the clinic, I’d think: ‘Ah, fuck it. What’s the point of going through the pain and discomfort of radiotherapy? I’m going to die anyway.’

The only thing that stopped me from turning my car around, heading home and giving up was the thought of Mr White. That doctor just saved your life, I’d tell myself, so get out of bed,
you lazy fat twat. Get yourself in your car, you stupid bastard. Fucking get down there to the hospital, grit your teeth, you lily-livered coward, and get on with it.

In the end, I kept going for Mr White’s benefit. He saved my life and that was all there was to it. There was no romance to recovery, no fairy dust or pot at the end of the rainbow to keep me going. He saved my life, so I was indebted to him. If he’d phoned up just as the kids were opening their presents on Christmas Day and asked me to see him immediately at the hospital, I would have done it. If I’d been about to go on stage at the London Palladium to receive a gold medal for services to comedy and Mr White had called me into his surgery, then I would have turned my back on the Palladium and done it. At that time, family and work were secondary to his demands. That man saved my life. And for that I was eternally grateful and would never let him down. That’s just how it was.

Terry Harris did me the biggest favour of my working life. If it hadn’t been for his sudden resignation, it might have taken me a lot longer to summon up the courage to go out on my own full time. I might have drifted into another group or duo. But Terry left me with no choice but to chance my luck as a solo stand-up.

In the mid-1970s there were so many venues that any act could find plenty of work. No one was booked weeks in advance simply because they didn’t need it. Agents would phone up several times a week, offering a choice of gigs. And some towns had so many clubs that you could play two gigs at neighbouring clubs on a Sunday dinner time, then another three gigs that evening at three more clubs a few hundred yards down the street.

I played my first gig as a full-time fully fledged solo stand-up at Newport Working Men’s Club in Middlesbrough, a lovely little venue with a small stage and a red velvet curtain. I was familiar with being the front man, walking on stage to face an audience. But now it was different. Until that evening, I’d always walked on with a band or partner behind me. And if I’d been doing a solo spot, the pressure hadn’t been on me because I was only the support to the headline act. If things were going badly, I could turn around to the lads in the band and crack a joke – ‘I’m fucking struggling tonight, aren’t I?’ I’d say to the bass player and it would usually get a laugh – but now there was no one to lean on, no safety net. I walked on that night and there was just me, the microphone and the microphone stand. It was a competition with the crowd that I wanted to win. I had tried and tested material which I knew the audience would laugh at and I knew I could always rely on slapstick – walking up to the microphone, pretending to trip up, looking around and saying ‘Who put that matchstick there?’ – but now my big problem was my nerves. I’d never had trouble going on stage before, but now that I was the solo headline act my bowels took over and I found myself running for the bog, always needing a shite before I went on.

It took me many years and more than two thousand performances to get a grip on my nerves. Only then did I feel that I’d earned the right to be up there on stage. After years of sold-out performances in front of packed houses, I realised it wasn’t my fault if on one night the audience didn’t laugh at gags that had worked dozens of times before. As long as I stuck to the same formula every night, then I’d know what to expect. But if I veered away from my usual set, it was very difficult to predict the audience’s response.

I’d been out on my own for about a month when a leg came off my most treasured stage prop, the papier mâché black and
white dog called Spunk. I would stand beside Spunk, shout ‘Fetch!’ and give it a kick up the arse to send it scuttling across the stage towards the dressing-room door. On this night, I gave it a particularly hard kick. Flying up in the air, the dog did two somersaults high above me and landed on its feet on the other side of the stage. Thinking the aerial acrobatics were intentional, the club erupted with applause. I could have tried the same move a thousand more times, but I wouldn’t have been able to repeat it and I even forgot my next line, I was that gob-smacked.