Common as Muck!: The Autobiography of Roy 'Chubby' Brown (39 page)

Within a month of returning home from our New York honeymoon, all the warnings I’d had about Sandra started to come true. She turned what should have been the happiest
years of my life into a misery. I could tell some horror stories, but the last thing I want to do is relive the intimate details of that marriage, the worst mistake I ever made.

I’ve never been able to work out why I stayed with Sandra for so long when it was obvious to everyone around us that our relationship was rotten to the core. Someone once suggested that my mother’s desertion of me when I was a kid left me unable to form intimate relationships with women. By 1990 my mother was in a nursing home, still banging on about my father. He was a bastard, he was a pig, he was a bully, he was an alcoholic, he was … she always had sommat to say about him and she never forgave him for whatever it was that pulled them apart. Although she wouldn’t tell me, I was starting to get an insight into what it might have been. Looking out of a window at a bit of parkland one day, Mam snorted and pointed at two dogs. ‘Look at that there,’ she said with disgust.

I looked closer. The dogs were having it away. ‘You shouldn’t be looking at things like that, Mother,’ I said.

‘Bloody homosexuals.’

‘You’ve got good eyesight, haven’t you?’ I said. The dogs were about two hundred yards away.

‘That’s because they’re just like your father.’

‘Now hang on, Mother, I’m getting a little bit sick of this now. Every day you have a go, but my father was not a homosexual. Of all the things he was, he was not a poofter.’

‘Yeah, but he was a dirty dog.’

‘C’mon, Mother, you must have loved my father at some time.’

‘
He
threw our love away,’ she said. ‘
I
didn’t.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘Your dad would get into bed and I would go to cuddle him and he’d say get off and push me to one side.’

‘Really?’

‘I felt unwanted,’ said Mam.

It was the only time Mam mentioned anything to do with her break-up from Dad and I was left wondering whether maybe my auld fella had been seeing a barmaid at the club or whether it was something else. I never found out and my mam wasn’t one for revealing much. She’d been in the nursing home about six months when she needed to go to hospital, so I offered to pick her up after she’d been seen by the doctor. When I arrived she was sitting on a bed, waiting for me and bossing the nurses around. I carried her bags to my car, Mam stopping nurses she knew to show me off to them. ‘He’s that comedian, you know,’ she said as if I wasn’t there. ‘That Chubby Brown.’

Driving in the car towards Redcar, I asked her how she felt.

‘I’m fine, I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Lovely, but I can’t wait to get back to my own bed. I’m more comfortable in it.’

‘Well, you know we love you,’ I said. ‘Me and Barbara.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I know that and I know you’d do owt for me and I love you too. You know that, don’t you?’

‘Of course I do, Mother.’

‘I do. I love you and our Barbara and I miss you terribly …’

Mam had never talked like that before. It was the first time I’d heard her say that she loved me or my sister.

I dropped Mam off at the nursing home at four o’clock. At half past six, I was sitting in my house when the phone rang. ‘Is that you, Roy?’ a woman’s voice said. I could hear someone crying hysterically in the background.

‘Yeah.’

‘It’s the matron, Roy. I’ve got some terrible news for you. Your mother passed away at six o’clock this evening. Your sister’s here. I think you should come down.’

I was stunned. I went down to the nursing home. My sister was in a terrible state. I comforted her. I didn’t know what to say. For once, I was lost for words. We took Mam to the morgue,
then I went home, opened a bottle of whisky and sat thinking about all the things I wished I’d said to Mam before it was too late and why my life with Sandra had become such a mess.

Maybe I had hung on to Sandra because when we were teenagers she’d been the first woman I’d got close to after my mother left home. Maybe that’s why I was still putting up with Sandra and her criticisms of George, who was her public enemy number two after me.

George had helped me rise from the relative obscurity of the clubs to national notoriety and selling out theatres from Penzance to Aberdeen. It’s something for which I’ll always be thankful. But when I told Sandra that George was taking thirty per cent of my theatre income, she was outraged.

I knew that for George I was the goose that laid the golden eggs, but I also knew that George was the farmer without whom that goose wouldn’t prosper. Whenever someone criticised George, I said exactly what I’d always said: ‘You don’t know George like I do’ and ‘I’d rather have him working for me than against me.’

With such a miserable home life, I’d come to rely heavily on George’s friendship and support. Thanks to his guidance, I’d become a household name, selling out every theatre months in advance. At last I was getting the recognition that I’d always wanted. I was spotting my name all over the place.
Viz
started featuring a comic strip called
Chubby the Foul-Mouthed Fish
for which I’d been the inspiration. I was reading the
New Musical Express
when I saw that one famous guitar hero cited me as the best medicine for a guitarist who had become very big for his boots after becoming a star. ‘What he wants to do is lock himself in a room with a Chubby Brown tape for half an hour and get back in touch with reality,’ the guitar hero said.

A while later, I went to a Simply Red concert. Standing about twenty yards from the front with all the young girls dancing
around me, I was approached by a bouncer. ‘Are you Chubby Brown?’ he said.

‘Yeah,’ I said.

‘Mick wants a word.’

‘Mick who?’

‘Mick Hucknall.’

‘He wants to speak to me?’

‘Yeah, he spotted you.’

‘Ah, fuck off!’

‘No, really. He did.’

After the show I went backstage. Mick Hucknall came over with a glass of champagne. ‘I’m a big fan,’ he said. I couldn’t believe my ears.

And while trying to pass time on an afternoon before a gig, I picked up a book called
Vile Filth
in a bookshop. It had sections on the most vile kings, politicians and celebrities. One section was headed ‘comedians’, so I immediately turned to it. ‘Britain’s most vile comedian is Roy Chubby Brown,’ it said at the top of a whole page about my act. When I saw that, I thought: Wow! I’ve made it at last.

It was a real buzz to sell out a theatre and then, on the night, to see touts selling ten-quid tickets for fifty pounds. Although I’d get my bouncers to move the touts on, I was fascinated, finding it hard to believe that I was responsible for that. Things were going so well for me from the late 1980s to the late 1990s that at times it seemed like it was happening to someone else. I’d stand on stage, watching the entire audience rocking in their seats, whole blocks of people rolling forwards as they laughed, and I’d wonder what the hell they were laughing at. I would have told the joke sixty times before and could no longer hear the humour in it. Here we go again, I’d think to myself as I started telling the joke once more. However, for the audience it was the first time they’d heard it and as long as I didn’t fluff it and as long as I got
the timing right, they’d all laugh so precisely on cue that it was like pushing a button. It made me feel like God.

I had watched my ticket prices rise like a meteor from a quid to two pounds to two pounds fifty to a fiver to ten quid and on up to seventeen or eighteen pounds. And the higher the ticket price, the more control I had over the audience. If I was persistently heckled or if the audience was really rowdy I’d simply walk off stage, go to my dressing room, sit down and have a cup of tea. I’d give them ten minutes, then I’d walk back on stage and it would be like a different audience. They calmed down simply because they were worried that I wouldn’t come back on stage and they had paid good money for a ticket. It always worked.

I produced some of the best material of my career in that golden era. After years of fighting to be heard in clubs, at last the audiences were listening attentively, hanging on every word. I was working seven nights a week and squeezing in two Saturday shows during three-month summer seasons in Blackpool. When I wasn’t on stage, I was working on the material. And like a body that needs exercise to stay fit, I was writing better gags simply because I was working my comedy muscle all the time.

The demand for new material stepped up a gear in 1990, when George suggested that we should make a video. For many years I’d produced audio-cassette tapes and records of my performances that I’d sold after shows. Television executives had picked up on my nationwide popularity and invited me onto late-night shows with the proviso that I tamed my act for a television audience. I appeared on
The Danny Baker Show
, which I enjoyed because Danny Baker had the guts to bring on guests that other shows wouldn’t touch with a bargepole and because he was a very nice fella.

I appeared with Barbara Windsor (who said she was a big
fan – ‘I love him! I love him!’ she kept on saying) on
The Word
, a late-night cult programme for teenagers and twenty-year-olds. They interviewed me in Tenerife, asking me about political correctness while I lay beside a pool at the Palace Hotel.

But mostly I turned down any television offers, partly because I didn’t really enjoy it but mainly because I was reluctant to give away some of my best material for a pittance. With fans clamouring to see me on television, the obvious answer was a video of a stage performance. The first in what would become an annual production was
From Inside the Helmet
. ‘The BBC is here tonight,’ I told the fans, pointing at the cameras around the stage. ‘This is Bill, that’s Bob and Colin’s at the back.’

Filmed live in Blackpool, it remains one of my favourite videos. With no fancy camera angles, it’s raw and pure. Just me and a camera. My voice was in good shape and the material had been extensively tried and tested over the previous three or four years, so it was very strong. It was a solid sixty-minute set with no mistakes and it sold like hot cakes.

Videos lifted my earnings to another level. Within a few years of releasing my first one, I was among the bestselling video artists in Britain, my tapes often at the top of the charts, outselling big names such as U2 or the Rolling Stones. What with the shows and the tapes, the money was rolling in and I could buy the kind of things I’d never dreamed of twenty years earlier when I’d been a labourer in Middlesbrough – cars costing more than I’d previously paid for houses and artworks to put on my walls. Meanwhile, George moved house again, inviting us to his house-warming party.

George had done well out of me – something that Sandra never failed to mention, but then she wasn’t the only one who failed to understand the symbiotic relationship between artists and their agents and managers. Convinced that all agents were
thieving bastards, Johnny Hammond had taken out an advertisement saying as much in a Sunderland local paper. Johnny had always been very outspoken and very honest. He believed that playing the clubs was no different from working at a shipyard. If you worked at Dorman, Long all week, you expected to walk home with your pay packet on a Friday evening. And when Johnny played a gig, he’d go straight to the club chairman. ‘I’ve just done an hour’s work,’ he’d say. ‘I want paying.’ He wouldn’t let the club get away with delaying payment by saying they’d pay the agent. And he wouldn’t accept an agent’s excuse that he hadn’t been paid yet by a club. As far as he was concerned, he deserved payment as soon as he’d performed the service for which he’d been booked.

Johnny’s advert didn’t pull any punches. He accused agents and managers of robbing him of his rightful earnings and called on all club artistes to band together to ensure that they got paid on the night.

About a month after the advert was printed I took a phone call from Johnny. ‘I can’t get any work,’ he said. ‘Nobody will employ me.’

‘Johnny,’ I said, ‘you cut your own fucking throat.’

But in my heart I thought Johnny was right. No matter how successful the artiste, there was always a manager or agent who was not paying them promptly and treating them with contempt. Still, that was how the system worked. And as with any system, you had to abide by the rules. It was no different from working on a building site and having to do what the foreman said. You’d take on the shitty jobs he handed out because if you got on the wrong side of him he’d fire you.

George was always there for me. Most days I’d see him at the theatre in the evenings and he’d check that everything suited me. After the show, he’d offer constructive criticism, which was a great help. With his encouragement, I changed the way I told
jokes. My philosophy about telling gags had always been like my thinking on the bus service: don’t worry if you don’t like the joke I’m cracking because there’s another one coming along in a minute. But I started to put jokes together to tell stories instead of one-liners. It meant learning how to paint pictures in words for the audience.

George also got me out of a lot of trouble and got me paid when my fee should have been cut. I’d been booked to play at a very smart place in the Channel Islands, the kind of venue that wouldn’t let you in unless you were wearing a dicky bow and dinner jacket, but the audience had been drinking for three hours by the time I came on stage at eleven o’clock. A fight soon broke out. When I shouted ‘Give over!’ from the stage, a barrage of ashtrays and insults came hurtling towards me, so I ran back to my dressing room. George was there.

‘I’ve just been paid – the boss gave me your money,’ he said.

‘Well, quick, we’ll fuck off, then,’ I said. With our belongings stuffed in our bags, we climbed out of the back window into the car park and ran back to our hotel. We’d finished a couple of drinks in the hotel bar when we spotted a black limousine drawing up in front of the hotel. Four blokes got out.

‘Fucking hell,’ George said. ‘Quick, Roy, get back to your room!’