Authors: Alan Carr
Hypochondria, ironically, is an illness, and Paul had it badly. Guess whom he latched on to? Yes, me. Every phone call would begin with a groan, or an ‘Ooooh!’, and for the next year I was burdened with all his illnesses. Before long, I wasn’t a friend, but a human landfill site for his miseries and
woes, as a result ruining a wonderful friendship. We all have friends like that, dung beetles. Creatures that make it their jobs to wade through shit. I, of course, will be there for anyone if they’re depressed or ill, but some people really exploit this kindness. I find it all a bit wearing myself. Look, look at me suffering, I’ve got it so bad, oh will I ever make it to the dawn? I hope not.
I confronted him once about this, and he replied sharply, ‘Friends are there for the good times and the bad times.’
‘Paul,’ I said, ‘there haven’t been any good times.’
Don’t you think I’m lonely? Don’t you think I’m unhappy? Don’t you think I’m making the best of a bad situation? I don’t go around knocking on people’s doors going, ‘Boo hoo, I’m single, I’m ugly, I hate myself.’ No, I do a tour and charge people to hear me moan.
The last time I heard from Paul was when he phoned me to tell me that he’d just walked in and found his flatmate dead. Charming. This news put me right off my meal-for-one. Why would you ring anyone up out of the blue and tell them that? This was all too much, and I changed my number.
My situation probably would have been a bit more bearable if I hadn’t been struck down by psoriasis. The ongoing brawl that I’d had with my body had entered the next round, it seemed. Funny, isn’t it? How people’s bodies cope differently when they’re run down. Mine has always excelled itself with its perverse logic. You can’t get a decent job, you can’t get a man, you live in a dump, so what does my body say? You know what, Alan? I’ll give you skin like flaky pastry – my treat. If you ever needed proof that your skin gives out
telltale signs of how you’re feeling inside, then look no further than me in that call centre, a scabby battery hen. I suffered with plaque psoriasis, a skin condition that covers you in scaly red blobs, which on my flabby body looked like I’d been self-harming with a bingo dobber.
Plaque psoriasis rarely attacks the person’s face – guess where I got mine? Yes, on my face, and on my body, on my legs, on my arms, believe me, everywhere. It was awful. I stopped going out at night drinking, which as you can probably tell was my one way of letting off steam from such a drab job. I would go out, positive that everyone was retching at my skin. I’m sure they weren’t, but my self-consciousness overpowered me, and I just stayed at home and watched telly.
As with all my humour, the negative experiences of my life after some contemplation and positive retrospection are absorbed into my act and (hopefully) become a funny routine. Identity fraud, rat infestations, being mugged, all real events that have started out as very grim scenarios, but have ultimately saved me from inflicting huge psychological damage on myself as a good punchline. That is definitely true of my times with psoriasis; it eventually became a stalwart of my act, always getting a big laugh and sometimes a round of applause. It made me feel like at least I was coping with it, if not getting my revenge on this horrible, disfiguring skin disorder.
That’s why I found it particularly depressing receiving countless venomous and vile letters from psoriasis sufferers after I joked about it on the Royal Variety Performance. Apparently, I shouldn’t joke about it, it’s a serious condition. I know, twats, I have it! I’ve performed my stand-up shows in front of
hundreds of people, covered head to toe in scabs; I can’t think of anything more empowering to a psoriasis sufferer, can you? Maybe I should just do what they do and lock myself away in a darkened room with a vat of calamine lotion and become a human scratchcard. For God’s sake, psoriasis sufferers, chill out – stop being so flaky. Yes, I know what I said.
* * *
I’d spent a whole year with Cherry and Sarah at that terraced house in Rusholme Place and our lease had come to the end. We all decided that it was time to move on. Sarah and Cherry wanted to start a family and settle down as a couple. Also, we were being terrorised by slugs. I don’t know what attracted them, but slugs were everywhere. You’d open the cutlery drawer and see a slug trail snaking its way across the knives and forks. Some would actually go slithering up the wall. They would be on the bed, they would go in our shoes, and the little buggers were quick – at mealtimes you would have to keep taking a second glance at your food to check that one wasn’t doing the backstroke across your chilli con carne.
Another factor for leaving my first Manc home was the amount of rat shit we found behind the chest of drawers when we moved it. It seems it’s not just millions of hungry humans that flock to the Curry Mile every year. Evidently, the overflowing bins and curry scraps that littered the cobbled streets around our house were like an ‘All You Can Eat’ buffet to a self-respecting rat, and judging by the droppings, they’d come back for seconds.
Looking for a house is for me one of the most exasperating ways you can possibly spend a day: the travelling around, the disappointment, and – most exasperating of all – the lies! It doesn’t take you too long to decipher what the descriptions actually mean and that ‘up and coming’ means ‘dump’, ‘intimate’ means ‘tiny’ and ‘Chorlton Borders’ means ‘Moss Side’. If you ever see an intimate, up-and-coming, bedsit in Chorlton Borders, do yourself a favour and cross it off the list. After several infuriating bus trips, and countless disappointments, I went to visit a place, a beautiful road off Chorlton Green, and for once it actually matched the description. A grand Victorian house with wonderfully big airy rooms, all high ceilings and large windows and with what I thought was the best feature of all, an eccentric landlady, Ruth.
We instantly clicked. She had been a glamour model in the Seventies and had won numerous awards, including ‘Penthouse Playmate of the Year’ and ‘Oldham Carnival Queen’. That accolade had been won at the age of 30. The age limit for the award was 21, and Oldham Council had found out her real age and demanded the crown back. It was just another fabulous anecdote in the world of Ruth. She was still an attractive woman, with her dark eyes, curvaceous figure and impressive
décolletage
, and it didn’t take much imagination to see how stunning she must have been in the Seventies. I’m assuming it was the Seventies because her age and any reference to precise dates were either never mentioned or destroyed.
Ruth was a lady, and you never ask a lady her age. She was a camp icon in the making, and that was sealed the day I saw her stumble through the door after visiting the cash and
carry, holding countless bags of bleach and toilet rolls and recollecting dreamily in the doorway, ‘I remember when this would be caviar and champagne.’
I knew we were going to get on so well, and that is what we did. Most nights, you would find us with a bottle of wine, putting the world to rights. Sometimes we’d be joined by her friend Cynthia, an ex-bodybuilder in a mac with Mr Whippy hair. We would always get through a few bottles. The trouble is I would go to bed and Ruth would stay up. Still a bit merry on the old wine, she would start ordering things on QVC, and a few days later jewellery, lamps, shawls, facial saunas and gym equipment would all turn up. One day I remember signing for not one, but two massage chairs, which, along with the other stuff, went in the downstairs reception unpacked. It was a real Aladdin’s cave in there, what with all the QVC purchases still in their boxes. It’s what I imagined the upstairs at Argos would look like.
The house, like its owner, had an air of faded grandeur, and subsequently was always in the process of being ‘done up’. The new housecat Mortimer didn’t help. Ruth and I had rescued him from a cat shelter in Stockport. He was a lovely soppy thing, terrified of his own shadow, but would look up at you with such a dumb expression you couldn’t help but fall for his charms. Why would anyone want to put him in a cat shelter? Because he shat and pissed everywhere, we soon found out. He was obviously urinating in the dining room because it reeked of ammonia, and you couldn’t stay there for longer than a couple of minutes before the stench would start burning your vocal cords and making your eyes water.
He’d also done a couple of shits in my room. Obviously embarrassed, he’d tried to cover up his poo with my jumper. Any complaints to Ruth would be met by the usual ‘Ah! He probably got disorientated,’ and you would have to return to your room with a dustpan and brush and retch while you scooped it up and popped it in a carrier. It was impossible to be angry with him – he would stare up with his matted black and white face, eyes slightly crossed, and he was instantly forgiven. We strategically placed cat litter trays around the house to help him with his toilet training, and for a while it seemed to be working.
Ruth had found another tenant from a card in the local newsagent. Her name was Helen Highwater – something told me that that wasn’t her real name. Helen was a hippy who played in a folk band and had turned her hand to interior decorating. I use the term ‘turning her hand’ because, looking at the wonkiness of the wallpaper and time she took to paste it up, you would think she’d only just started that morning.
As I worked on Saturdays, Wednesday was my day off from Barclaycard, and I would usually spend the day washing my clothes or lying on my bed reading. This much-needed ‘me time’ would often be interrupted by Helen’s singing. Her voice was haunting, but not in a good way. The first time she ‘sang’, I started looking for Mortimer to see if he was in pain. Because she was wallpapering the hall, the higher she went up the stepladder, the closer the voice got. It seeped into my room like carbon monoxide from a dodgy boiler, and, ironically, she was a dodgy boiler.
* * *
Sarah and Cherry’s decision to get themselves a new place and start a family prompted me to focus on my own life. Like the time I had worked as a degreaser on the outskirts of Northampton, something had come to shake me up and tell me to take control of my life. I was 24 and working in a call centre. Same old story – shit job, shit money blah blah blah. I was determined to make a break for it. Something really had to give. Surely one day I would be able to experience a job I enjoyed. One of the cruellest things about working in the call centre was the amount of time you had to think. Sometimes you could sit there for seven hours just thinking, re-evaluating all the life choices you’d made that had led you here to this one place in time. With customers reading out their Tesco Clubcard number instead of their actual credit card, it could seem a lot longer than seven hours.
What was I going to do? I can’t actually pinpoint the time I chose to become a stand-up comedian. I sort of just fell into it, which is no help to anyone reading this for guidance on how to become a comedian. I think it was just a series of signs, of flashing green lights that frustratingly pointed to a career that after the nerves of the King’s Head I’d vowed I’d never pursue. The germ of the idea had been floating around for years. I would always tell stories around the table to my friends, sometimes true, sometimes embellished, and that would always get them all laughing. Barclaycard customers would laugh at my voice and ask if it was a hoax. At first this was hurtful, but then it made me think, ‘Why not use my voice for good instead of evil?’ Then I would start to remember how well my routine at the King’s Head had gone and what the
gypsy fortune-teller had said. These instincts were all saying, ‘Go on, do stand-up comedy. It makes sense.’
So I looked through the local listings magazine and found an ‘Open Spot’ night at the Briton’s Protection. I rang them up, and they told me to come down on the Wednesday night. Although it was a week away, I instantly felt sick and couldn’t eat for the whole day. I wanted to pull out on the day, but Sarah and Cherry said they’d accompany me and give me some moral support, so I went along regardless. I didn’t have jokes as such back then. They were just stories about the call centre and my travels around Mexico and Thailand that had made people laugh around the dining table and that I hoped would have the same effect on the people in the room.
The Briton’s Protection’s Open Spot night was in a dingy room above the pub of the same name. I arrived all nervous, eyes bulging and green with nausea. I looked like ET, and I sat meekly at the back of the room after giving my name to the compere. I soon realised that none of the people in the audience was a member of the public, they were all Open Spots themselves. I foolishly thought that this would create an atmosphere of back-slapping, friendly camaraderie where anything goes.
I couldn’t have been more wrong. As I finally made my way to the stage and sheepishly performed my routine, the other open spots just stared icily at me, cold as stone, unimpressed. I came off stage after what seemed like ages, dumbstruck, still no clearer about whether what I had said was funny or had even made sense. It had been a brutal introduction to the world of Open Spots. It was bitter, dog eat dog, a
battle for survival, and unsurprisingly seven years on some of the people in that room are still jobbing Open Spots. How depressing is that?
My next one was at the Queen of Hearts pub in Fallow-field, the student heart of Manchester, and that gig couldn’t have been more different. For a start, there were proper people who wanted to laugh rather than to sneer, and it was hosted by Toby Hadoke, a lovely man who was and is so supportive of comedy and, thankfully, of me. The gig was a success, and it filled me with enough confidence to carry on, to think that in fact I might have something here. If I’d had another gig like the one at the Briton’s Protection, I would have given up. No, in fact, I would have topped myself.
I must have been buoyed up by that response, though, because I entered the
Citylife
Comedian of the Year Award. It was a brave move, as it was to be my third gig.
Citylife
was a magazine that annually held a competition to find the best new Manchester comedian. Even though the magazine was only available in the North West, its Comedian of the Year had a serious pedigree. Caroline Aherne, Jason Manford and Dave Spikey had all entered and subsequently won, while Johnny Vegas had entered and been beaten to second place by a young comedian called Peter Kay. To an up-and-coming comedian this award was important and in the North West hugely influential.