Nerd Do Well (4 page)

‘You’ll find I’m full of surprises,’ said Canterbury, his mechanical body swelling with pride. They often quoted movies to each other as a means of expressing affection and
The Empire Strikes Back
was one of their favourites, closely followed by
The Shawshank Redemption
. Canterbury left, with a spring in his step, literally: his feet were cushioned by a system of helical metal coils.

‘Good old Canterbury,’ chuckled Needles, with a smile.

‘SILENCE!’ Pegg trumpeted, whacking the squealer in the mush with the black leather glove. ‘Tell me the whereabouts of the Scarlet Panther.’

‘Sorry,’ apologised Needles. ‘I was miles away.’

‘Where is the Scarlet Panther?’ Pegg reiterated.

‘What about my Fanta Orange?’ challenged Needles, defiance in his eyes.

‘
WHERE
IS SHE?!’

The effect was instantaneous. Needles wilted under the force of Pegg’s demand, his eyes widened and he seemed to shrink in size, and I can’t say for deffo but I think he probably wet himself.

‘The last I heard, she was in the Red City.’ The fight left Needles (like a shameful guff) as he gave up this vital infospurt.

‘Liverpool?’ questioned Pegg.

‘No, Marrakesh, she was in Marrakesh.’ Needles seemed all floppy like a smashed doll.

‘Was? Was?’ Pegg said twice for effect and to cover the fact that he thought the Red City was Liverpool.

‘That’s all I know,’ sagged Needles, his puny shoulders shuddering in a way Pegg could never achieve due to his size and courage.

‘“Was” is no good to me, Needles, I need to know where she is now.’ Softer but no less insistent, Pegg closed in on the pathetic wanker.

‘Can’t you use your
ESTB
and go back to last week? She was walking across the Djemaa el Fna away from the Koutoubia Mosque and towards the souks at 10.15 a.m. last Wednesday.’

‘Shitballs!’ said Pegg breathily.

‘What?’ persisted Needles.

‘It doesn’t work,’ Pegg admitted, cherrying up a bit. ‘It never did. That’s not to say it won’t though,’ he insisted, regaining some of that legendary composure.

‘What about that piece in
Time Out
?’

Pegg didn’t say anything. How could he admit to a lowly informant that he had fibbed to
Time Out
about inventing time travel?

‘You’ll never find her now,’ cheeked Needles. ‘Hell, you wouldn’t have found her if you’d arrived there one minute later. She knows those alleys like the back of her hand.’

‘So do I!’ spat Pegg. ‘I know them better than she does. I bought a riad off Sean Connery in 1998 and I go there twice a year.’

Needles was silent. Top Trumps.

Canterbury appeared at the passage pipe, pushing the drinks trolley.

‘Your Fanta’s here,’ Pegg growled, putting an end to the conversation. Pegg snapped open his Coke Zero and took a long manly slug (unlike Needles, who sipped his fizzy orange like a Brownie). Pegg’s thoughts turned to the Scarlet Panther.

‘She’s out there somewhere. The question is, where? Looks like I’ll be taking a little trip to Morocco. I’d better pick up suntan lotion and some new Birkenstocks – my old ones are well knackered.’

‘What?’ said Needles.

‘Nothing,’ Pegg snapped, embarrassed that he’d said all that out loud. ‘Drink your Fanta or I’ll tip it down the sink in the downstairs toilet.’

‘You wouldn’t!’ gasped Needles.

Pegg’s expression said it all (he would).

This is the first joke I ever wrote. When I say wrote, I mean thought up. I didn’t purchase a small black book at the age of six with the intention of penning a library of classic material, which I would eventually leave in the back of a cab, forcing me to launch a heartfelt appeal to the thieves as part of an item towards the end of the second half of
London Tonight
. For many stand-ups the notion of writing material is actually a euphemism for just thinking stuff up and committing it to memory. Even when I was at my busiest, performing six or seven shows over a weekend, I never physically wrote material down. It existed intangibly in my mind, kept alive by constant performance, like a spinning plate or a campfire maintained by a lonely soul whose very existence depends upon its warmth. Looking back now, years after I hung up my microphone or legs or whatever it is retired stand-ups hang up, I can barely remember a single line of the routines I would perform nightly on the London circuit.

I never actually used my first joke in any of my stand-up routines. It was site-specific and traded somewhat on my status as a six-year-old child. I remember it very clearly though. I think the process of creating it secured it in my memory forever. It was, after all, a very significant moment for me. The creation of the joke and the subsequent reaction to it by my mum represented the first cycle of a process I would often play out through my childhood and into my professional life as an adult which, according to the number of years spent existing, is what I am now.

I was sat at the dining table at my nan’s house in Gloucester, having lunch with my mum (shortcrust-pastry meat pie and veg). We were talking about school and the various friends I had made, in particular one friend whose father was a dentist.

‘Nathaniel’s dad is a dentist,’ I declared.

‘Where does he practise?’ Mum enquired.

‘He doesn’t,’ I replied. ‘He’s a real one.’

I clearly remember calculating the double meaning of the word ‘practise’ and seeing the opportunity to create a joke that would make my mother laugh. Not in a knowing sense, I wasn’t a junior Groucho Marx; I saw the deliberate misunderstanding as a means of being amusing in a ‘kids say the funniest things’ sort of way. I had no intention of admitting that my comment was wilfully intended as funny. For some reason it seemed funnier to me if I played innocent and worked the humour from an accidental standpoint, so in that sense it was my first stab at character comedy too; the six-year-old me playing a slightly more guileless version of myself. A Simple Simon if you will.

It was around this time that I was suddenly lifted out of my exclusive Gloucestershire private school and supplanted to far more inclusive inner-city pre-school, with a far greater variety of class and ethnicity. Away from the rarefied rituals of Gloucester’s King’s School, the interior of which doubled as Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in the Harry Potter movies, I began to learn life lessons.

One of my clearest memories of Calton Road Junior School involves a girl whose name I think was Karen, all hair and a tartan flannel dress, the faint smell of must surrounding her in an invisible cloud. Without any prompting, she leaned over to me in assembly one morning between hymns and asked if I wanted to hear the rudest word in the world. Intrigued, I nodded, at which point she shielded her mouth with her right hand, in case any morally indignant lip-readers were watching from the gym ropes, and whispered the word ‘cunt’ into my ear. I remember her solemn monosyllabic whisper, the way the ‘c’ formed a glottal rasp in the back of her throat, the way that the word itself sounded like a sort of nasal cough. This alien, magic word I had never heard before seemed dark and portentous to me, like I’d just been let in on a secret, the burden of which I did not wish to carry and nothing would ever be the same again. It made complete sense. I believed her. It sounded like the rudest word in the world.

I never told my mother about it, despite always feeling able to talk to her about anything, and always being keen to impart anything that might garner a reaction.

In fact, even by this tender age, I was already prone to showing off and was often accused of it by my peers, in that slightly bitter way that stifles creativity and shames children into shrinking into invisibility, although that didn’t entirely work on me. Even as a baby, I would do impressions of my grandfather and send my parents into paroxysms of giggles. He was a conductor of brass bands and whenever my mum or dad would ask, ‘What does Pop-Pop do, Simon?’ I would wave my arms in the air, not because I understood the concept of coordinating the mood and tempo of a throng of musicians, but because such an action would elicit a peal of approving laughter, essentially what the comedic mind craves,
an immediate external validation by way of an involuntary, positive emotional response
. At least that’s what my therapist said before I stabbed him in the cheek with a biro.

You could argue that the comic is the most impatient and neurotic amid the ranks of the insecure. Not only do they require approval, they require it immediately, that evident and tangible assurance, asserted by an unquestionable reflex of confirmation: laughter. ‘You love me!
YOU
LOVE
ME!’ internalises the mad clown, whilst looking confident and a tad smug.

Stand-up comics in particular are at the most severe end of this need to be liked. Such is their desire for affirmation, they stand before a group of strangers and risk hostility and disdain in the pursuit of their goal. This becomes easier the more experience you gain. Good stand-ups can go out in front of any crowd with an air of confidence and assertiveness that wins the crowd’s attention before a word has been uttered. Even if, as sometimes happens, the gig isn’t great, the comic is able to rationalise the factors behind this as being anomalous and move on to the next performance with the same self-assured swagger. This comes with time and experience and most budding stand-ups survive on nerves and adrenalin during their formative years; or, if you were me, the promise of boiled sweets.

I performed my first stand-up comedy set (I say set, really it was a single joke) as a seven-year-old, stood in front of a weekly gathering of old women at the local Salvation Army centre. Staying with my nan over the summer holidays, I would always accompany her to the Home League on Tuesdays, where she would sing hymns and socialise with similar cloud-haired, lavender-soap-smelling old dears who had nothing better to do. I can’t remember if I was invited up on to the lectern to tell a joke or if I suggested to Nan that the service needed a little comedy to counterpoint all the hymn singing and tambourine battering, but step up to the mike I did. Unbeknown to me, it was a journey I would take many, many times and not just at the Salvation Army building on the Bristol Road.

Looking back now, I realise that the grinning faces of the elderly were as much a result of them seeing a cute little boy as they were a response to my joke telling. I doubt the ones at the back could even hear me amid the clatter of humbugs rebounding off their dentures. I felt an enormous sense of triumph every week as I stepped down from the podium to join my proud nan and receive a series of light to intense cheek squeezes from my leathery admirers.

In terms of material, I was essentially regurgitating jokes I had heard on
Tiswas
and
Des O’Connor Tonight
. The latter’s material would invariably be the product of an unreconstructed seventies TV comedian, for whom casual racial stereotyping was a vocation. I clearly remember recounting a Jim Davidson gag centred round his West Indian character, Chalky White, which came complete with a bewildered, high-pitched comedy patois to seal the deal. It’s incredible now to think of Davidson telling his Chalky stories to a hysterical Des O’Connor, who would roll across his couch, tears streaming down his orange face.

The purveyors of such material to this day cry political correctness gone mad, when criticised, complaining that it’s all in good fun and shouldn’t be ruined by the whinging liberality of those who would rather not offend and ghettoise minorities. Ultimately it boils down to motive. Satire can be regarded as such when meant as satire, but may become racist when intended as racist. We shouldn’t be frightened of the differences between us. The old right-wing notion of ‘political correctness gone mad’ only really comes into play when we start to censure merely for referring to the idea that one group of people might be different from another, as though admitting variation is wrong.

A few years ago I was browsing the comedy section in
HMV
and saw a video for one of Jim Davidson’s live performances, the cover of which showed him stood at a urinal between two big black men. The black men were looking down, presumably at Jim’s derisory penis and laughing, while Jim looked at the camera with a sad expression as if to say ‘Oh no, I’ve got a tiny cock’. This was Jim’s misguided attempt to assert his non-racism, to compliment black males by conceding that they have all got giant cocks to make up for implying they are stupid. This was his concession, the promotion of another racial stereotype to compensate for the other. For me, it demonstrated the huge margin by which Davidson missed the point of his own transgressions and marked out the deeply ingrained, casually racist ideas that inhabited our collective consciousness at the time and how easily children accept this received wisdom as inoffensive.

Perhaps the term ‘racist’ is misleading, since its connotations somewhat exceed subtlety. Perhaps a new term has to emerge that isn’t as extreme or inflammatory. ‘Culturally irresponsible’ maybe. Not very catchy though, is it? Knobhead works well.

It’s not really fair to call a seven-year-old child a knobhead. I certainly didn’t feel like a racist back then. I would have been horrified at the accusation. My best friend was black! I’m not just saying that in a ‘some of my best friends are black’ way. He really was. ‘Is’ I presume, he’s not my best friend any more, not but because he’s black, but because I moved away. Quickly, move on to the next chapter, this one is going to explode in a shower of sweaty, white middle-class guilt.

Anyway, the amassed ranks of the Salvation Army Home League certainly didn’t care, as they guffawed at my Chalky White impression. I was only little, but surely they were old enough to know better. It seems to me that, in the seventies, most old people were racists, which is ironic, considering they had all survived a desperate war against fascism, only decades before. Wait, I’m probably being ageist, how do I know what their political proclivities were? Now I’m the one being ignorant. They were probably laughing at the fact that I could barely see over the lectern. They were probably humouring me because I was a cute little boy. What else were they going to do? Throw rotten fruit at me and shout ‘Piss off, you little Nazi’?