Can't Stand Up for Sitting Down (15 page)

Others
turn it into a quiz. ‘No, don’t tell me, hang on … I do know you, don’t I?
It’s Jo Something, isn’t it. No,
don’t
tell me’ — sometimes they get
quite cross — and you have to stand there like a nana while they desperately
try and identify you. Others will take a stab at a name that fits roughly into
one’s area of entertainment.

My top
five wrong identities are:

1. A
bloke behind the counter in a record shop in Devon, who said, ‘You’re a famous
dancer, aren’t you?’ Bloody hell, when have you ever seen a dancer who was
several stone overweight? Maybe he thought I was one of Les Dawson’s famed troupe
of dancers, the Roly Polys.

2. Someone
said to me once: ‘Ruby Wax, hi! Can I have your autograph?’ I did a complete
scribble that was unrecognisable as a name to save their embarrassment. I also
texted Ruby, who I’m sure wasn’t very flattered as she is half my size.

3. Also
on several occasions I have been identified as Dawn French. Very flattered,
frankly.

4. Once
identified as ‘a newsreader’. Mmm yes — Huw Edwards, that’s me.

5. I
once went into a shop in a small town in Wales and the elderly guy behind the
counter said, ‘I’ve no idea who you are, but I heard you were in town.’

The upside of being
recognised for me is that people are usually really nice and friendly It may be
the case that if people can’t stand you, then they don’t bother to come up and
say hello, which is fine by me. I’d rather have that than a mouthful of abuse.

Once
people do know who you are, if you don’t like to be constantly approached,
there are several options:

●
Never go out. This is an option for some, but not for me. I think that once you
have children, you owe it to them to try and give them as normal a life as
possible, and this involves getting stuck into ordinary life. It can be
difficult at times as it’s hard for me when I’m with the children and people
come up for autographs etc. But it’s preferable to not taking on those
day-to-day tasks which are all part of normal life.

●
Go out in disguise. I have experimented with a selection of disguises, but it
seems that donning a big hat or silly coat doesn’t fool anyone. (I have tried
both these.) A bloke in a shop in Tottenham Court Road in London once said to
me, ‘You can take that stupid hat off; we all know who you are.’ He went on to
tell me that Chris Evans goes unnoticed whenever he comes into the shop. Apart
from by you, mate, obviously.

●
Make a plan which avoids major areas of potential hassle.

For me, places where
schoolchildren congregate are always a threat as the peer-group phenomenon
gives them false courage. So I don’t tend to hang round secondary schools. And
as I don’t need to, that’s fairly easy.

When we
had snow one winter, I was walking down the road when I came upon a group of
teenage boys chucking snowballs at cars. Oh, here we go, I thought, there’s one
with my name on it. I decided to wrong-foot them as I saw one of the boys raise
a snowball-filled hand and started to run towards them, shouting, ‘What are you
going to do with
that?’
(Plus some swearing.)

Thankfully
it worked and the snowball was dropped on the road. I then attempted a
completely ridiculous plea for them to stop throwing snowballs at cars, especially
cars with old ladies in them, pointing out that they could be responsible for
killing someone and go to prison, which of course was 99 per cent bullshit.
They looked at me with the teenage boy stare, half defiant, half empty
brain-ish. And then I marched off with as much dignity as I could muster, which
to be honest with you is not much at all. As I walked on down the road I was
aware of a quiet crunching behind me and thought, Oh, here we go again. Now I’m
going to get a snowball in the back of the head. I turned to see two of the
boys looking rather sheepish. ‘Sorry,’ they mumbled. Bloody hell, result.

The
worst places for me are pubs, clubs or crowded areas on a Friday night when
everyone is pissed in a tired, irritable and lary way I do much crossing of
streets with my head down, I dive into shop doorways or go into shops, I squat
on the pavement to do up an imaginary shoelace or I face a wall for no reason,
which in itself must look pretty stupid. But these minor tactics have served me
well and I have had relatively little hassle over the years.

My
biggest mistakes have been:

●
Drinking in a huge hotel bar in Belfast on a Friday night. First of all I met a
singer who was very big in the eighties, completely off his face, who made a
beeline for me, arms out and breathing red-wine fumes right at me, while he
announced with pride, ‘I’ve just come out of rehab today!’ He was followed by
an even drunker bloke who forced his way onto our table, sat on my lap, drank my
drink, snatched my fag out of my mouth and then tried to stick his tongue in
there instead. At this point John, my tour manager, manhandled him off me and
escorted him a few feet away while I regretted the hideous drunken kiss and
felt sick.

●
I once agreed to meet someone in a pub and they were late. As I tried to sit
quietly in a corner looking at my watch and pretending to read a piece of paper
I had in my bag, which was a shopping list, I became a pisshead magnet and
every single inebriated individual in the pub gradually came and sat down at
the table, saying as they always do, ‘You’re fucking loaded, buy us a drink.’
Eventually I could stand it no longer, made my excuses about going to the lay
and legged it from the pub, never to return. I have no objection, by the way to
buying anyone a drink. However, I do have an objection to sitting there and
drinking it with them if they are pissed out of their heads and talking utter
bollocks at me.

●
This was something that I couldn’t have avoided, but I found myself on a plane
from Dublin to London sitting right behind a very pissed rugby team. I didn’t
want them to recognise me as I knew I would get it big time, so I spent the
entire flight with my hands over my face, staring down towards the floor and
looking like I was seriously depressed. I was desperate for a piss as well, but
the agony of getting up and being clocked was a far worse prospect than being
incontinent.

There are also places in
Central London where it is advisable not to go unless you like having your
picture taken by the paps. These are top fashionable restaurants or showbiz
haunts like The Ivy, where several paps hang about outside 24/7 in the vain
hope they will catch Cilla Black with a big bogey hanging out of her nose or
one of Girls Aloud with her pants showing. Also, film premières are not a great
idea — unless you want to run the gauntlet of rows of paps shouting, ‘Over
‘ere, Jo!’ ‘To me! To me!’ ‘Over ‘ere, you silly cow!’ and other delightful
stuff like that.

I was
once at a party with my best friend’s husband Roland (yes, she did know) and I
was approached by a slightly histrionic PR woman who said her client’s car had
not turned up and would I give this celeb a lift in my car. She meant my
chauffeur-driven car, but I always drive myself. I agreed to do it, picked up
my car from round the corner and then discovered my cab fare was Jermaine
Jackson. What a hoot.

We were
ushered outside the stage door and as we appeared, it all went mental. Jermaine
Jackson and his wife were pushed into the back of the car and Roland and I got
in the front. At this point we were surrounded by about thirty paps and a few
had actually got on the bonnet of the car. I have to say it gave me great pleasure
to turn on the ignition and pull away sloughing off a couple of them onto the
pavement as I went. Jermaine Jackson was a sweet, almost childlike person, very
softly spoken and unerringly polite. We dropped him at a posh hotel and he
kindly allowed me to take a picture of him and Roland on my mobile phone. It
gave me a very interesting insight into the life of mega-stars like him. Poor
sod, I really would never go out if I got that level of attention.

Most
people say that if you are famous you have to put up with the side-effects
because that’s what you wanted. Fair enough, but I do feel one should be
accorded some privacy at those times of one’s life when we all expect it.

Having
a baby is one of those times and I found it difficult that I got weird attention
during that period. It is true (as I mention on stage) that someone did actually
come into the labour suite while I was in the middle of things, as it were, and
ask for my autograph. This is bad enough, but the fact that it was a doctor, to
me made it even worse.

I was
once at our local hospital in the Outpatients Department waiting for an
appointment. As usual I was in a corner, face in a magazine trying to be
unobtrusive when a nurse — in her fifties, I would estimate — came and stood
next to me, pointed down at my head and shouted, ‘Look everyone, it’s that
comedian off the telly!’ God, I was so embarrassed I didn’t know what to do for
the best. 1 smiled weakly and just hoped she’d piss off. However, she went and
got a piece of paper and made a big show of getting my autograph. So much for
patient confidentiality.

I
suppose when I’m out and about it is sensible to expect one or two people to
recognise me and to be prepared and have my nice face on. Although we’re all
the same and some days we don’t feel like putting a nice face on, I just have
to work a bit harder.

I do
draw the line at some things and I was a bit pissed off when I had been at the
local dry cleaner’s to discover that some silly cow of a journalist had been
standing behind me and noted down all the items I’d handed in for cleaning. Her
article appeared in the paper the next day Not only that, she’d taken the piss
out of my clothes and remarked on how inappropriate they were for a woman of my
age. I didn’t exactly hand in a gimp mask and a fur bikini so I don’t know what
she was on about. Revenge is a dish best eaten cold they say and I’m sure our
paths will cross at some point in the future and enable me to remonstrate in my
own, very special way.

The fundamental problem I
think we have with the press is one of competing perspectives. Many people
assume that the newspapers are there to report the actual news. In fact, this
doesn’t seem to be true, because lots of newspapers are just comics for
grown-ups and are there to entertain rather than inform. Also, each newspaper’s
output is dictated, firstly by whoever the owner is, and secondly whoever the
Editor is.

I don’t
think it even occurs to a lot of people how obsessionally selective different
papers are about what is ‘the news’ and how they present it. So, one also finds
a strong political perspective in papers, which is kind of hidden beneath the
surface under the guise of faithful news reporting. And as most people tend to
buy a paper which buoys up and expresses their views, they just end up reading
what they want to hear.

My
interactions with the press can be categorised as:

1.
Unsolicited articles or papped photos.

2.
Prearranged interviews to promote particular projects.

3.
The vile, vomitous outpourings of self-regulated monsters. Oh, I beg your
pardon, that’s not very objective of me. I mean, of course, TV critics.

Let’s start with
unsolicited articles that are beyond one’s control. This can be pretty
frustrating and my approach is to ignore them. There’s nothing you can do about
it, so why worry? On occasion, people I know will mention they have seen an
article and then I am compelled to read it, because I have to know what’s in
it. These tend only to be bad. Is there an element of schadenfreude in their
action of informing me about a nasty article? Who knows? Freud would have us
believe that much of what we do and our motives are fuelled by our unconscious,
so I like to think that so-called friends don’t consciously relish my distress
at great big slag-offs of my work and me.