Life and Laughing: My Story (33 page)

Duddridge was thrilled, my mum was so proud, Paul thought I was robbed and should have won the main award, and my PR girl said she didn’t like Perrier and preferred Highland Spring.

I was overjoyed with what was a successful Edinburgh, out of the blue. In three weeks’ time, Kitty would be marrying a Perrier Best Newcomer Nominee.

Finally, everything seemed like it was coming together.

22

Everybody chipped in to give us a magnificent wedding. My mum and Steve bought Kitty’s wedding dress, Kitty’s parents provided the flowers and the food, friends purchased our wedding bands, Kitty’s parents’ friends kindly allowed us to use their wonderful country house in Somerset for the reception, other friends made the cake and hired us an old Rolls-Royce, Lucy paid for the wine and LloydsTSB Bank paid for the honeymoon.

I borrowed £10,000 for the holiday of a lifetime to the Maldives. You only ever have one honeymoon, I was marrying the girl of my dreams, I had just been nominated for a Perrier Best Newcomer Award, I was twenty-seven years old with my whole career ahead of me. I was sure I could pay it back.

The fact that everybody had contributed made for a really special family occasion. People were calling up almost every day offering to help in any way they could. I remember Kitty putting the phone down saying, ‘Great news, Michael, my uncle’s girlfriend is a professional horse photographer.’

‘Sorry? What are you talking about?’ I said, confused.

‘She’s agreed to do the photography at our wedding,’ Kitty said.

‘There are no horses coming to our wedding,’ I commented.

‘I know, but I’m sure she can photograph humans as well.’

‘I’ve never even heard of a horse photographer, what does she do?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know, Michael, she goes to horse races and stuff, she’s like the official photographer,’ Kitty speculated.

‘Horse races? I’m not sure about this, darling. Is she going to just take a whole stream of photos at the end of the aisle, like a photo finish? Is our wedding album only going to consist of one photo, you winning by a nose?’

I thought this was funny and could possibly be used as material, then I considered using it in my speech on the big day. I think I was more nervous about my speech than anything else. All my wife’s family knew I was a comedian but had never seen me perform, and I picked up an air of genuine concern over the financial security of their daughter. So there was a lot of pressure building on my wedding speech to be funny, especially when I found out her father had suggested the speeches be rescheduled for BEFORE the ceremony. I mean, it’s not often a groom has to give an example of his work on his wedding day. If you’re a builder getting married, you don’t eat lunch, cut the cake, have your first dance and then knock up a gazebo on the lawn.

When the day finally arrived in late September, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. It was beautiful, what the English call an ‘Indian summer’, and what I presume the Indians call ‘summer’. A marquee was set up on the lawn should the weather not hold, and the congregation and I gathered in a small church conveniently and romantically located on the grounds of the house. Kitty’s father, Simon, surprised her with a cart pulled by two ponies that took them the short distance from the house to the church.

I waited at the end of the aisle for my bride as the organ began ‘Here Comes the Bride’; I turned and there she was, looking stunning. She had her hair up with hair extensions. I was unaware of the existence of hair extensions. She hadn’t told me she was going to do this. I didn’t know what had happened to her, I had heard of nerves making people’s hair fall out, but never double in size. She looked beautiful, my bride. She raced down the aisle at such a speed the organ had only reached ‘Here comes’ before she was by my side. The vicar went through all the traditional vows; at the bit when he says, ‘If there is any reason why these two should not be married, speak now or for ever hold your peace’, I couldn’t resist doing a little comedy look round to the congregation.

Mr and Mrs McIntyre on our big day at Combe Florey in Somerset.

We made our sacred vows to one another and had cued up the Beatles’ ‘All You Need is Love’ on a tape player at the back. We kissed as man and wife and after a bit of fumbling with the tape deck at the back of the church, the music played and we walked out of the church to cheers and applause. It was magical. We climbed into the waiting cart to be pulled by the two ponies up the drive to the house, while the guests walked up to the reception. Some of the locals came out of their houses to catch a glimpse of the bride. Surprisingly few photos had been taken at this point, but as soon as Kitty’s uncle’s girlfriend saw the ponies, she bolted to life and took a series of shots of them, in some of which Kitty and I can be spotted in the background.

This is one of dozens of photos we have of the horses at our wedding.

Our budget was so tight that something had to give. It was the main course of lunch. We had a starter of cold salmon and salad and we had the wedding cake for dessert. Nobody mentioned the missing middle course. After lunch it was time for the speeches. This was terrifying for me. There was a lot riding on this, almost as much as the Edinburgh Festival. The one piece of good news is that I was on last, straight after Simon. This was the first time I had headlined.

The pressure ultimately became too much for me, and I treated the speech too much like a gig and started laying into the front row. Within the first five minutes, I had character-assassinated my new brother-in-law, embarrassed the maid of honour and totally forgot to mention my wife. Simon had to interrupt by raising a toast before Kitty initiated divorce proceedings.

We jumped into our classic Rolls-Royce as confetti filled the air, spent the night at a suite in the Bath Spa Hotel and set off on honeymoon the next day.

It was perfect.

The Maldives were like nothing I had ever seen before. We flew to the capital, Malé, and then took a seaplane to our hotel, the Hilton on Rangali Island, that is literally on a tiny island containing only the hotel. It takes about fifteen minutes to walk around it. We had a room on the blinding white beach, but many of the rooms were on stilts in the turquoise Indian Ocean. The service was immaculate; little Maldivian men would rake the sand you had just walked on. The food was phenomenal, everywhere you looked was breathtakingly beautiful. We were in paradise.

One of the many photos Kitty and I took of each other on our honeymoon in the Maldives.

The only downside was I forgot that half-board meant that we only had breakfast and dinner paid for. I had about £150 remaining on my credit card. I couldn’t afford to buy lunch at the extortionate restaurants, and there was obviously nowhere else to eat – the closest supermarket was back at Heathrow. So having spent a small fortune of loaned money and travelling halfway round the world, we had to steal food from breakfast every morning to eat for lunch. Kitty would keep watch, and when the waiter turned his back, I would stuff croissants, fruit, yoghurt and mini-cereal packets into our beach bag. One morning we couldn’t swipe anything from breakfast and we got so hungry during the day that I tried to spear fish in the ocean. This holiday of a lifetime had shades of the film
Castaway
.

The happy couple, Mr and Mrs McIntyre, returned home looking tanned and hungry. Our lives had revolved around the Edinburgh Festival and the wedding for so long that it felt a bit strange. I was in debt. The loan and credit card had pushed me significantly into the red and Edinburgh had cost about £4,000. It was time for my career to start moving; I needed the money.

My agent’s office sent me my gig list and to my horror it was the same as it had always been, Jongleurs gig after Jongleurs gig. I couldn’t believe it. I was nominated for the Best Newcomer Award in Edinburgh, but that didn’t seem to count for anything. The truth was that being nominated for the Perrier Best Newcomer Award was quite a minor thing compared with being nominated or winning the main award.

The next year of my career was no different from the previous one. I continued to open the show at Jongleurs. I was dedicating my career to Jongleurs and they still only rated me as an opening act. I occasionally played other clubs, as before, and loved it, but I would then not be working on Sunday night, Monday night, Tuesday night and Wednesday night, before heading back to entertain Stags and Hens at Jongleurs. All the while, my debts were mounting. I was borrowing more and more money at extortionate rates, using debt to pay off debt.

I was broke. My mum lent me money, Lucy lent me money, Sam lent me money, I called Paul from a petrol station when my credit card was declined. I sold my grandfather’s old cufflinks he had given me and even tried to sell his old enormous cashmere coat. Although, in fairness, Kitty had been asking me to sell that for years. I’m not exaggerating when I say that our life became quite desperate. I took every gig Duddridge could get me, but it wasn’t enough to get me out of the mess I was in. One night Kitty was seriously ill with a sky-high temperature. I needed to be with her, to look after her, but I left her alone to go to Norwich because we so badly needed the £150 from the gig. My financial situation was spiralling out of control.

The only thing that kept me going was the next Edinburgh Festival, all my eggs were in that basket. I would be returning as the Perrier Best Newcomer Nominee. Television producers and comedy bookers would see my show. I could be nominated for the Perrier, I could win it and my career would skyrocket. I obsessed over the Perrier Award. This was my chance of success, my last chance. On top of my mounting debts, the Festival would cost me thousands more pounds. If I didn’t get a break at Edinburgh 2004, I didn’t know how I could survive in comedy.

My agent, Paul Duddridge, still believed in me. He was bankrolling the Edinburgh Festival, so it was to him that I would be in debt. He continued to try to motivate me. Every time we spoke I would feel uplifted afterwards, but it didn’t seem to ever make me funnier. He again booked me into the Pleasance Attic, reflecting how my career had gone nowhere over the past year. The good news was that the Perrier panel was to be chaired by Bruce Dessau, the
Evening Standard
critic who had championed me the previous year. Bruce was my biggest fan, my only fan of influence. He’ll make sure the panel come to see my show; he’ll support me. It’s up to me now.

I was a man on a mission. I was again living with Paul Tonkinson, who had become my comedy corner man. We would talk endlessly about how to get the best out of me. My plan was to play with the audience every night. I would use my mediocre material as fall-back if my riffing and improvising didn’t work. If I could have gigs every night like the one that Bruce Dessau witnessed the year before, I was convinced I would be nominated. I had to be.

I hit the ground running. On my first gig there was a man with long hair and a long beard sitting in the front row. ‘You’ve been waiting long,’ I said, and I was off. For the first week all my shows were different, dictated by who was in the audience. I was on good form. The problem was that as the Festival went on, I started to feel the pressure. I began to worry about whether there were Perrier judges or critics in the audience. I started to become inhibited. The Festival is long and gruelling, performing twenty-five shows back-to-back without a night off. My anxiety heightened on a daily basis as I knew these were the most important gigs of my life. I started to worry myself sick.