Indecisions, Indecisions

Acknowledgements

Although these acknowledgements relate specifically to the process of writing the book, there are a few more general ‘thank yous' I would like to express. Firstly, my mum, Gill, and my dad, John, for their endless encouragement and support over the years. It has been the foundation of everything I have achieved and a debt I can never repay. My wonderful wife, Maureen, for her understanding and willingness to be literally left holding the baby during the more intensive periods of writing this book. As always, I look forward to her thoughts the most. I should also give tribute to my sister, Katy, whose nerd credentials have often outstripped my own. Thanks for putting me on to all those great TV shows and being Robin to my Batman (I am of course talking about Carrie Kelly, the female Robin from The Dark Knight Returns). My brothers, Michael and Steven, for allowing me to make films with their toys and break them in the process. It was more than worth it for Bogorof the Bad, Parts 1 and 2 (my unseen first features). My agent, Dawn Sedgwick, for looking after me with such tireless devotion and having a confidence in me that even I didn't have. I'm not always the easiest person to motivate but her persistence in bringing out the best in me has never faltered and for that I am eternally grateful. Nods of thanks must also go to Alex Pudney and Nicola Mason Shakespeare who work by Dawn's side, chasing me down with pressing matters as the FBI chase down elusive terrorists. My editor, Ben Dunn, at Century who has demonstrated a seemingly indestructible patience in dealing with me. His enthusiasm, understanding and belief in my capacity to finish and indeed start this venture have been remarkable in light of my infuriating indecision and tendency to procrastinate. Elsewhere on the third floor of the Random House building on the banks of the River Thames, I'd like to thank Briony Nelder for looking after me so completely during the writing process and being someone with whom I could freely discuss the complexities of the final season of Lost. Katie Duce for assisting Ben in helping shape my somewhat shapeless train of thought into, of all things, an actual book. And Jack Fogg, not only for sounding like the alter ego of a Victorian superhero but for being part of the team that made me feel so welcome and, dare I say it, valued at Century. Thanks also go to Tony Kelly, the marvellously intuitive and gifted photographer, who I roped in for the cover shoot and who always makes things fun, and the great Simon Bisley for his spot-on rendition of me and Canterbury. And lastly, although their job has been to feature in this book rather than contribute to it, I would like to thank my dearest friends and closest collaborators for the material and, above all, the love. Michael Smiley, Edgar Wright, Jessica Hynes, Nira Park and of course, my inspiration and best friend, Nicholas John Frost.

The cave seemed to go on forever, a vast tectonic bubble receding to an infinity of shadow. Powerful spotlights lit various areas where trophies and keepsakes hinted at past adventure and an array of impressive vehicles gathered: an awesome assemblage of potential and kinetic energy. Elsewhere, the blackness folded in on itself, swirling into corners, endless, impenetrable, much like the mind of the man who sat at its flickering heart.

The hub was comprised of a central console, surrounded by various readouts and screens. Data from across the globe ticked into the mainframe to be displayed, analysed and evaluated by the figure sat in thoughtful repose amid the array. This was his lair, his base, the place he felt most relaxed, most centred, most at home; it was like the Bat Cave but with faster Wi-Fi.

Simon Pegg scanned the myriad infoscreens, searching, penetrating, squinting in a way that made him even more handsome. Across the feedbank, a dizzying strobe of information flickered before his, steel blue with a hint of rust, eyes. Stocks and shares rose and fell, disasters, wars, a cat attacking a baby on YouTube, an old woman ravaged by hunger holding out her hands in supplication to a faceless militia man, impassively pointing a rifle at her head.

‘It's not fair,' Pegg's bitter mumble cracked across his lips. ‘That cat should be put down!'

‘There's a telephone call for you, sir,' a metallic voice chirped over the intercom.

‘Jesus, Canterbury,' Pegg yelped, ‘can't you make a ding-dong noise or something? It really makes me jump when you just speak like that.'

‘I'm sorry, sir,' apologised the faithful robotic butler, ‘I didn't mean to startle you.'

‘Don't worry about it,' said Pegg, putting his feet up on the dashboard and pretending not to be freaked out. ‘Who is it? Lord Black, I suppose, with another fiendish plot to bring about the end of the world.'

‘No, sir,' replied Canterbury patiently.

‘Good,' huffed Pegg. ‘I hate that twat.'

‘It's your editor, sir. Ben from Century,' replied the automaton gravely.

‘Holy shit,' muttered Pegg darkly.

‘Shall I bring the phone down, sir?' enquired Canterbury.

‘Can't you just patch it through?' whined Pegg like a teenager who didn't want to go to the shops for his mum because he was about to have another wank.

‘No, sir,' replied Canterbury. ‘It's on your iPhone, which was down the side of the sofa in the drawing room.'

‘I wondered where that was,' said Pegg, brightening slightly. ‘Bring it down.'

‘Very well, sir,' returned Canterbury, seemingly unaffected by Pegg's erratic mood shifts.

‘Oh, and bring me a Coke Zero,' said Pegg, signing off.

He scratched his chin and narrowed his eyes, knowing full well what Ben from Century wanted and worrying slightly that his editor would think his telecommunications system was rubbish. On one of the infoscreens another YouTube baby emitted a classic guff, firing a cloud of talc into the air from its freshly powdered anus. Pegg laughed hysterically for two minutes before his guffaws subsided and he wiped the tears from his eyes, thus missing CCTV footage of an armed robbery approximately two miles down the road. He eased his demeanour back into seriousness with a loud sigh, and then shook his head with a chuckle, remembering the cloud-farting baby.

‘DING-DONG,' said Canterbury over the intercom.

‘FUCK!' said Pegg, clutching his heart dramatically. ‘I didn't mean say “ding-dong”, I meant get a thing that makes a ding-dong noise.'

‘It seems to me, sir,' reasoned Canterbury, trying not to sound patronising, ‘that any noise I employ to alert you to my presence will sound without warning and give you a fright.'

‘What do you want, Canterbury?' growled Pegg.

‘We've only got those Diet Cokes sir, the ones reserved for guests,' replied his faithful mechanised friend.

‘Gak!' retched Pegg, ‘Everyone knows Diet Coke marketing specifically targets women and effeminates and I am neither.'

‘There is regular Coke sir,' offered Canterbury. ‘The Ocado man delivered a six pack by mistake.'

‘You allowed fatty Coke into this house?' Pegg whispered, secretly pleased.

Canterbury said nothing.

‘I suppose it will have to do,' huffed Pegg quickly, ‘but check the order next time. Remember that whole Volvic/Evian debacle?'

Pegg's response was met with an impassive acknowledgement from his chamberlain and silence fell across the cave once more. Pegg felt a tinge of guilt in his gut and fingered the intercom.

‘Canterbury?'

Nothing.

‘Come on, Canterbury, I know you can hear me,' insisted Pegg. ‘It's not like you can hang up, the com-link's inside your head . . . Canterbury?'

An electronic bell sounded to Pegg's right, making him jump. The door to the elevator opened revealing Canterbury holding an iPhone and a Coke Zero.

‘Why didn't you answer me, Canterbury?' enquired Pegg, barely concealing a smile.

‘I was in the elevator,' replied the stuffy robot who was absolutely nothing like C-3PO, ‘the signal's not very good.'

Canterbury stood at roughly six foot tall; his torso was a barrel of sleek black metal, his arms and legs, an array of titanium bones and functional hydraulics. Despite being a super-advanced A1 processor, driving a fully articulated, humanoid endoskeleton, there was something old-fashioned about his appearance, as if he'd been built in a bygone age or had stepped out of the film Robots, starring Ewan McGregor and Robin Williams. In an effort to make him appear more modern, Pegg had welded a small flashing stud to the automaton's left aural receptor. He had regretted it later but found it hard to remove. It was the eighties when he had installed the accessory, a time when men wearing earrings was cool and not in the least bit twatty.

Pegg smiled that famous smile that inspired instant sexual arousal in women and turned men into benders.

‘I'm sorry I got annoyed about the fatty Coke, Canterbury,' Pegg said.

‘Quite all right, sir,' replied Canterbury, and although not possessing a mouth in the human sense, his oral cavity being represented by a slot, behind which was positioned a vocal synthesiser, Pegg couldn't help feeling his old automated companion was smiling.

‘Your phone, sir,' said Canterbury, passing over the handset. Pegg winked at the shiny butler as he put the iPhone to his nicely sculptured ear.

‘This is Pegg,' said Pegg.

‘Have you done it yet?' said an unpleasant voice at the other end of the line.

‘Mmmmm?' said Pegg innocently.

‘You were supposed to have written the ten thousand words by this morning', the voice continued like a sex pest.

‘Yes, but -'

‘That was the deal, Simon. If you don't meet your deadlines I'm going to have to ask you to return your advance. I don't care if you are a rugged, sexually devastating superhero.'

‘Relax, Ben, I have it all under control,' countered Pegg, his voice suddenly resembling that of Roger Moore (in the seventies).

‘I'm not so sure,' snarled the voice. Pegg detected an air of smugness in the voice of Ben from Century (a subsidiary of Random House Publishing).

‘Are you a bummer tied to a tree?' enquired Pegg smoothly.

‘What?' Ben replied.

‘Answer the question,' insisted Pegg patiently. ‘Are you a bummer tied to a tree?'

‘No,' faltered Ben.

‘BUMMER ON THE LOOSE!' trumpeted Pegg, terminating the call with a triumphant flourish.

Pegg chuckled, then looked across at Canterbury, a hint of sadness in his eyes.

‘Looks like I'll be going up to the office for a while,' Pegg sighed. ‘Will you be OK?

‘Of course, sir,' replied Canterbury. There was an almost imperceptible catch in his voice, a flicker of static in his vo-com that others would have missed. Pegg heard it, though, and it warmed his heart.

‘I guess I won't have to drink this after all,' Pegg winked at Canterbury, handing back the fatty Coke. His face stiffened as he punched up the recent calls menu on his phone and dialled the number for Century.

‘You win for now but believe me, four-eyes,' whispered Pegg to his bespectacled literary contact, ‘this isn't over.'

‘I'm glad you've decided to see sense, Simon. I expect those ten thousand words in the morning.'

Pegg hung up without saying goodbye, which was impol ite and he knew it. He also did the finger at the phone and said a rude word.

‘Will you be gone long, sir?' Canterbury enquired.

‘Not if I can help it,' replied Pegg, standing up to reveal his great body which was muscular but not too big (like Brad Pitt in Fight Club). ‘I just need to find a little inspiration.'

Indecisions, Indecisions

I

t was never my intention to write an autobiography. The very notion made me uneasy. You see them congesting the bookshop shelves at Christmas. Rows of needy smiles, sad clowns and serious eyes, proclaiming faux-modest life stories, with titles such as This Is Me, or Why, Me?, or Me, Me, Me. I didn't want to do that, it's not really me. And who cares anyway? I don't and I'm the faux-modest sad clown with the needy smile and serious eyes who has to write the damn thing. There's something presumptuous in writing an autobiography, as if people's interest in your life is a given. Fair enough if your life is full of orgies; and murder and murder orgies, you can assume a little interest from outside; that stuff flies off the shelves. However, geeky boy comes good? I didn't see the appeal.

What I actually wanted to do was write fiction about a suave, handsome superhero and his robotic butler. The story of a tricked-out vigilante, with innumerable gadgets, a silver tongue and deadly fists; like Batman without the costume and a more pointed ‘gay subtext'. Sure, it's not particularly original but it's far more interesting than my life. I don't even have a robotic butler. Not any more.

The literary public would be far better served with heroic tales of daring, midnight infiltrations and hip-smashing sexual prowess. The man I met from the publishing company, however, thought it would be better to write something a little more personal, more real.

‘Oh boring,' I screamed at him, clearing my desk in one decisive swipe. How could my own mundane personal experi ence possibly outstrip the adventures of a man with a bullwhip and forty throwing knives concealed in the lining of his snug-fitting dinner jacket? ‘Trust me,' said Ben, winning me over with a smile that reminded me of Indiana Jones and subsequently that I had subconsciously stolen the bullwhip thing from Raiders of the Lost Ark.

I liked Ben as soon as I met him. He was big, specky and friendly. Like a Guardian journalist who had turned into the Incredible Hulk while maintaining his smart, liberal sensibility, rather than succumbing to dumb monosyllabic grunts, like someone who writes for Nuts magazine. I knew we were going to get on after our first meeting, during which my dog Minnie honked up a disgusting heap of canine spew all over my office sofa. He laughed nervously and pretended not to be nauseated by the stink, for which I was immediately grateful. Minnie isn't a sickly dog, she chucks up with a corresponding frequency to myself (once every few months) and she doesn't even drink as much as I do. I appreciated Ben's tolerance of her gastric faux pas and thus trusted his judgement of my proposed book idea.

An autobiography then, I chin-scratched, weighing up mild naffness in the face of not writing anything at all. Ben offered an angle: an account of my journey from ordinary nerd to nerd participating in the world that made him nerdy in the first place. I liked this. The circularity appealed to me as a narrative device. I am often struck by the irony of my adult life in light of my childhood passions. Also, I secretly intended to ignore his suggestion and write about the superhero anyway. Resolving to humour him with the biographical stuff and sneak the real book in between the cracks. It might just work.

Much is what of written about me, usually during spurts of promotion, seems to dwell on the idea of an ordinary, guy-next-door, non-Hollywood, unattractive loser, somehow succeeding in this fabled land of facile opportunity, despite being handicapped by having red hair (I don't) and severe physical deformity (my wife thinks I'm handsome). So many articles begin with a passage about why I should not have succeeded, due to my lack of ‘Hollywood' good looks, as if that has anything to do with being an actor.

And herein lies my initial reluctance to pen something biographical as opposed to fantastic. I'm not entirely comfortable with the ‘fame tax'. There seems to be a consensus these days, a received wisdom, unquestioned even by those who are victim to it, that all actors do what they do because they want to be famous. Not because they enjoy the process but because they crave the product - not even the product, the consequence of the product, which is fame - and by this compulsion are considered to be ‘show-offs', deserved of some kind of punitive comeback for their desire to be adored. It is as if some ancient rule setter folded his arms back when the concept of celebrity was emerging and said, ‘OK, you can be famous, but by way of payment, you must surrender your private life and be willing to talk about it as if everyone is entitled to know.' I don't think that's particularly fair.

I hate it when I am asked about my family. I get all sweaty and agitated and subtly try to deflect the question towards my dog, whose private life I am willing to sacrifice because she doesn't read heat or watch E!. She doesn't consume any kind of media, be it entertainment or factual, although she did once watch the opening moments of John Carpenter's The Thing, mainly because it was on a really big TV and involves a husky dog running across a snowfield being chased by a helicopter. She wasn't particularly concerned with the narrative context - a seemingly innocent and ordinary dog is pursued across the tundra by desperate Norwegian scientists who, we later learn, rightly believe the hapless pooch to be a shape-shifting alien life form intent on assimilating the entire human race. To Minnie it was just a dog running around in the snow. If she thought anything it would have been ‘When did it snow? And where did that big window come from?' Of course she thought neither because dogs can't process abstract concepts, as much as we'd like to think they can. How could she think in such sophisticated terms? Her favourite pastime involves eating socks. See, there I go again. It's like a linguistic screen saver. Whenever my brain switches off I start talking about my dog. It happens all the time in interviews, as this extract from a recent interrogation demonstrates.

Journalist: So, you recently had a baby. What's it like being a father?

Me: My dog likes eating socks!

However, this book will require me to talk about my private life as well as my working life, since the two are inextricably linked. Events in my private life have greatly affected my creative decisions over the years, and in early life my decision to be creative. As such, this book is likely to be associative, in that it will hop around like a dog with a sock, as different events call to mind various forebears. For instance, when I was very small I used to fantasise about having a dog, to the extent that I used to confer with the phantom pooch while walking down the street. This eventually crept its way into Spaced, a sitcom I wrote with my friend Jessica Hynes (nee Stevenson). Midway through the first series, Jess's character Daisy decides she wants a dog, having played out similar fantasies to my own as a small girl. The dog she eventually purchases is a miniature schnauzer, which she calls Colin (played convincingly by a two-year-old bitch called Ada).

Years later, I decided to similarly realise my childhood fantasy and add a dog to our family unit. Due to my wife Maureen suffering a mild dog allergy, we needed a breed that didn't shed. I immediately thought of Ada, who had not only been a delight to work with but also didn't leave hair everywhere. So, in May 2007, we drove out to a farm in Buckinghamshire and adopted a seven-week-old miniature schnauzer bitch. Her Kennel Club name was Wicked Willow but we called her Minnie. That's a double circle right there: life is imitated by art, which in turn is imitated by life, life then directly affects art due to my pushy stage-mother insistence that Minnie break into cinema. She was fired from Howto Lose Friends & Alienate People (2007) for being too boisterous, cut out of Paul (which was shot in 2009), but finally made it into John Landis's period murder comedy Burke and Hare (2010), in which she expertly portrays a Regency period street mutt. Strange to think such consequences were born from the idle fantasies of a dogless child.i That was pretty personal, although it was still about Minnie.

There have been many of these moments of circularity in my life. I have so often found myself in situations whereupon I internally lament not owning a time machine that would enable me to travel back into the past and inform my younger self of future ironies. It's actually been a long-held fantasy of mine. We generally experience life in increments; we learn gradually as our reality evolves; there are rarely great leaps that shock us. Take the iPod for instance. If my older self had appeared in my bedroom, out of a glowing, electro-static ball in 1980, just as my ten-year-old self was lowering the needle of his red briefcase record player on to the tar-black surface of Adam and the Ants' Kings of the Wild Frontier and produced a sleek little super matchbox that could hold not just Messrs Ant and Pirroni's second, and arguably best, album, but the entire back and future catalogue of not just Mr Ant but twenty thousand other dandy highwaymen, I would have seen it as being some kind of joke (that's if the sudden appearance of an old me in an electro-static time

ball hadn't already convinced me otherwise).

Remember when only a few people had mobile phones. Generally regarded as an object of derision, you would occasionally see business types clutching these ridiculous grey bricks to their faces and mutter to yourself, ‘What a prick.' Nowadays, an eyebrow hardly flutters when we see a ten-year- old child happily texting away. You probably wouldn't notice anyway; you'd be too busy downloading an app that could definitively pinpoint who it was that had just farted in your Tube carriage.

Wouldn't it be great to grant someone the joy of truly appreciating the future, of surprising them with a turn of events that wasn't heralded and predicted through logical development? Getting to meet and work with Steven Spielberg was the culmination of many events, which had pretty much prepared me for it, and yet, if I could have travelled back in time and told the excitable young boy who had just watched Raiders of the Lost Ark that one day in the future the man who created this brilliant piece of cinema would call you on your mobile phone (I probably wouldn't even notice the mobile phone part, I would have been so apoplectic with joy at getting to speak to the man who so spectacularly melted all those Nazis), I can only imagine the sheer joy and excitement that would have consumed me. It's not as if I didn't throw a complete nerdgasm when it actually happened, but to my younger, less mature self, with no idea where my career would take me or even a real idea of what a career might be? Surely, I would have burst into flames and melted like a Nazi right there and then. Thus, I will revisit those key times during childhood and retroactively try to inspire the wonder that would have been, had I been given access to an electro-static time ball, let's call it an ESTB (the idea and name for which I have copyrighted, by the way. In case I accidentally invent it in the future which, believe me, I do).

Despite all of this divulging of long-held secrets, what you won't be reading about in this book are salacious details of, say, for example . . . my first sexual experience.

Warning Signs

M

y first sexual experience involved a girl I shall not name, so as to preserve her dignity. Let's call her Meredith Catsanus, which, let's face it, couldn't possibly be her real name or that whole dignity-preservation thing would be a complete waste of time.

Meredith and I had been friends since the age of seven. Even at such a young age I felt the first tentative stirrings of physical attraction towards another human being, rather than towards a picture of Princess Leia or my Tonto action figure^ when he wasn't wearing his little beaded suede two-piece outfit with the fringe. There was something about Meredith that really fascinated me. Possibly the fact that she looked a bit like Barbra Streisand, but perhaps more the way her hair fell down across one side of her face, covering her right eye, making her look cute and demure, or perhaps to hide a hideous disfigurement (like Batman's popular adversary Two Face, he of the bisected personality/physiognomy). I was seven years old and would have found all possibilities equally appealing.

Aside from that tender romance with Carrie Fisher's profile page, which I tore out of Look-in magazine, I hadn't experienced romantic love before the age of seven. It's fair to say not many have. I had an odd crush on a boy called Ross but it wasn't motivated by any infant manifestations of sexual lust. He was just really lovely and I wanted to be near him. He was about three years older than me and I remember following him around the playground on one occasion, just aching to be his friend.

I also used to frequently snog my friend Kyle because it made all our other friends hoot with laughter. I hadn't been rendered homophobic by received notions of masculinity at the age of six and I had no problem doing ‘film star kisses' with another boy if it meant getting a big laugh.

I had no intellectual understanding of sexuality other than the strictly hetero goings-on in films and shows I'd glimpsed on grown-up television while playing on the floor with my Steve Austin rocket and bionic operating theatre. There were the rumblings of future impulses implicit in the tiny waves of pelvic vertigo I felt with naked Tonto or read the section about the Romans in my pop-up book of history. At my sixth birthday party, my mother entered Nan's austere front room to find Kyle and myself going at it in the middle of a circle of screaming children and broke us up as though we were fighting, barely concealing a wide smirk of confusion on her face. I'm not sure if she was worried that I might be gay or just thought the behaviour was inappropriate for a children's party, no matter what the sexual orientation of the participants. I'm going to ring her and ask her now.

She says she doesn't remember, so it can't have been all that shocking to see two six-year-old boys locked in a passionate embrace on an armchair in the front room while other children clapped and laughed in some bizarre exercise in mini-pops dogging. It strikes me as something I'd remember if I caught my daughter putting on a display of sapphic passion for the amusement of her friends, but then Mum was always pretty liberal and progressive. As I am of course.

I did experience an icky sense of unease witnessing John Duttine from Day of the Triffids kiss a man in what must have been a Play For Today in the late seventies. It wasn't disgust though, more a primal fear of something to which you cannot relate, like gay men get around vaginas, or lesbians experience if they are unfortunate enough to stumble upon a cock. I'm not sure how my mother would have felt if she had interrupted one of the exploratory games I played in the shed with a number of the girls that lived in my nan's street, despite them being ultimately more socially conventional. Those very early forays into our sexuality that we all experience and which we seldom discuss unless under the umbrella euphemism that is ‘doctors and nurses' have nothing to do with romantic love and are inspired by ancient curiosities buried deep within our DNA. I recall being no older than seven and getting naked with a girl my age on her bunk bed, just because it felt right. Grander concepts such as romance and love were beyond my understanding and separate from this strange little automatic event. It wasn't until a year later, when a young woman with Danish pastries on either side of her head knelt down in front of a walking dustbin to record an important message, that love truly came to town.

Anyway, before we explore that major obsession, let's get back to Meredith Catsanus. I have a clear memory of the first rumblings of sexual tension between us on a field trip to Gloucester Cathedral in 1978. I had attended a school attached to the cathedral as a very young child and found myself possessed of the confidence one feels in familiar surroundings, among those for whom the setting is new.

Meredith's mother, Mrs Catsanus, had accompanied us as a volunteer helper and her presence bolstered my old-boy boldness. I found it very easy to make her laugh by being mischievous and cheeky in a charming way. Wonderfully for me, Meredith found this skill endearing (we were at that age prior to parental validation being the kiss of death). My mother-charming antics took the form of various impressions and jokes, including my reciting of the tongue twister, ‘The cat crept into the crypt and crapped', although I didn't say the last word because it was way too rude for an ecclesiastical field trip. Besides, Meredith's mum responded to the innuendo with a fit of giggles, whereas I suspect if I had actually said ‘crapped' I would have been reprimanded on the spot.

This device was something that in later life I would employ in my stand-up routines and then in my film and TV work. Not the joke itself, although it's a stone-cold classic, but the idea that an audience were capable of putting the constituent pieces of a joke together themselves, arriving at the punchline before it is delivered, if indeed it is delivered at all. This perhaps was my first experience of collaborative comedy. Allowing Meredith's mother to know where I was going without actually going there and thus getting away with using a naughty word having inferred it rather than actually said it.

It's interesting that the memory of entertaining Meredith's mother remains so clear for me while countless other childhood events have evaporated. Perhaps its significance as one of my earliest comic devices is the reason it still twinkles in my reminiscences.

It certainly connected Meredith and myself in a pre-flirty flirty way and led to a relationship that would extend almost into adult life, depending on your definition of the word adult. Although I was thrilled and fascinated by girls, I was far more inclined to run across a building site, making the noise of a TIE fighter. All the juicy stuff wouldn't start happening until after Return of the Jedi.

And so, jump forward with me six years to 1984 (a year after the release of Jedi). I was fourteen years old, and living in a small village called Upton St Leonards in Gloucestershire. Actually, I'm lying, I didn't so much live in the village as in a newly constructed extension to it, which would eventually sprawl itself into the centre of Gloucester. Fortunately for Gloucester, much of the area is broken up by hills, on which it would be impossible, not to mention sacrilege, to build. At the time, the quaintly named Nut Hill and an area of farmland adjoining industrial grounds owned by the chemical company ICI separated Upton St Leonards from the neighbouring village of Brockworth. For the fit young boy in a hurry, the short cut was easy. A few fields, a number of fences and a seemingly disused airstrip, and I was in a whole new village, where a raft of new possibilities easily outstripped the meagre offerings available in my own leafy hamlet.

If one were feeling really daring, there was a treacherous bike ride down a winding two-lane road which was as exhilarating on the down as it was exhausting on the way back. I chose the second option that day and mounted my faithful Raleigh Grifter, knowing its heavily treaded wheels would be delivering me to something more than a kiss.

I had lived in Brockworth for four years as a youngster, so I knew it well. I was schooled there and continued to be schooled there into secondary education, after we had moved to a different area, delivered to the door of Brockworth Comprehensive by the Bennetts coach, which picked up the catchment kids on weekday mornings. To go there during leisure time felt adventurous and exciting. The village is bigger than Upton and the youth population was almost entirely comprised of school friends, acquaintances and bitter enemies. Meredith lived in Brockworth as she had always done and it was for Meredith's company that I cycled to Brockworth on that stifling summer's day.

By this time Meredith and I had experienced several on again/off again moments. In 1982, she'd had her hair cut like Lady Diana for which I teased her mercilessly. I realised during my persistent barrage of jibes, which included the stinging but covertly affectionate moniker Lady Doughnut, that I fancied her and subsequently I asked her ‘out'.

Meredith turned me down, probably I realise now because of the whole Lady Doughnut thing; and a year later, probably out of pique, I did the same

when she asked if I wanted to go ‘out' with her. It was another year before we buried the hatchet and started ‘going out' - that widely used euphemism for tentative teenage relationships. A relationship that generally involved ‘hanging out' and occasionally ‘getting off ' with each other (what is it with these euphemistic prepositions?).

The degrees of what it was one actually got ‘off were in equal parts uncertain and legendary in the retelling from the more confident, sexually liberated boys. Tales of fingering and even blow jobs would filter back to the slightly naive kids (of which I was one) at the back of maths, and not always just from the boys. One particular girl used to regale me with stories of how she would ‘gobble off her boyfriend, leaving me slightly breathless and dry-mouthed as I tried in vain to understand quadratic equations.

Meredith and I finally succumbed to each other; indulging in a mammoth snog session on a sofa at some party, where guileless parents had abandoned their house to their teenage children, thinking it would never amount to anything more than pass the parcel and pop music, rather than the bacchanalian love-in it would inevitably become.3

Eventually, Meredith and I agreed that we were going steady; although, once again, neither of us was entirely sure what ‘steady was. We had been friends for so long we often just fell back into each other's company when we weren't with other people.

On that fateful day in '84 she was wearing a sleeveless tigerskin-print T-shirt and was all of thirteen years old. We disappeared off to a remote part of a field which I'm pretty sure was part of the ICI empire, making it so much more daring. Not only could we have been caught, we could also have been prosecuted. Although most likely we would have been chased away by a grumpy security guard, imaginatively nicknamed Hitler by the local hoods. Canoodling plus trespassing certainly added that extra bit of exhilaration, and both of us knew, through an unspoken understanding, we would be progressing on from what usually constituted these little trysts.

We kissed for a while and nuzzled each other's necks, copying what we had seen people doing in films and TV shows. Almost as though the needle had stuck on the LP of grown-up sexual activity, limiting us to the first few bars, a never-ending prelude to a song we weren't quite ready to sing along with. That day, however, I decided to nudge the record player and touch her boobs. Not just honk them seductively but actually lift up her T-shirt, undo her bra and feel them, skin on skin. After the fortieth lips-to-neck cycle I changed rhythm. She didn't resist.

I remember her skin smelled like Boots. Not the footwear, that would be off-putting, rather the popular high street pharmacy. The Gloucester branch boasted a sizeable perfume and make-up department, where I had loitered many times waiting for my mother to finish buying toiletries. I appreciate that implies some odd collision between the Oedipal and the Pavlovic but now really isn't the time to get into that.

Meredith had sprayed herself with one of those aerosol perfumes for young girls that supposedly inspired men to go to enormous lengths to deliver flowers with breathless, dopey smiles. Flowers were possibly the last thing on my mind as she permitted me access to her bra strap, which I had no idea what to do with. I had never even seen one on a girl my age, let alone touched one. Meredith obligingly took over with an awkward smile and facilitated our blushing journey to whatever base boob contact qualifies as.

Afterwards, as I cycled home up over Nut Hill, I was suddenly racked with a sense of shame and regret. I don't know why I felt so bad about what I had done. Maybe I was worried about what my mother would think if she found out (there I go again, skipping through the psychoanalytical minefield), or I was just disappointed with the slightly embarrassed cessation of activity once we had travelled the distance we were prepared to travel at this point in our sexual growth. Whatever the reason, it was with a heavy heart that I pedalled up the difficult hill back towards Upton St Leonards.

About halfway up, the road becomes uneven, requiring a hazard sign at the roadside to warn motorists of the possible danger of tackling road humps. The sign is a red triangle with two symmetrical bumps in the centre. I had seen it many, many times on my travels to and from Brockworth, but today it proved a stinging reminder of my tentative step towards sexual maturity. As it loomed towards me over the hill and I spied those two suddenly significant mounds framed in that scarlet triangle, I closed my eyes and uttered the words: ‘Oh God, what have I done?'

I'm not sure why I felt that way. It lasted only a few days and I never felt like it again as I progressed towards adulthood. It makes me laugh to recall it. My guilt and penitence in the face of this (hazard warning) sign from God seems hilarious to me now. God uses lightning and seas of blood to administer lessons, not the Department for Transport.

I actually waited for the feelings of guilt and remorse to return many months later, after the girl who lived in the house opposite mine came round one night and helped me fully understand what those conversations at the back of the maths room had been about. It was something of a shock. A year before, she had visited the house for a quick snog and protested angrily when my hand had found its way up her jumper (I must have been ready to get back on the proverbial tit bike). Now she was round again, and within a few minutes of necking on the bed, yanked my trousers down around my knees. Twenty-eight minutes later, I waved her off, shut the door and waited for the shame and regret to creep through me. It never did. I felt pretty good. Well, I would, wouldn't I? I'd just got gobbled off.

I know what you're thinking. What an absolute hypocrite! I open the book by railing against the notion of pimping my private life, then immediately don a felt fedora with a feather in it and whore out my secrets for cheap laughs. Intimate stuff too. Details of childhood sexual exploits, involving bras and fellatio. Truth is, I'm feeling my way along; it's a learning experience for me as much as it is for you and it's helped me understand something key. It's not talking about personal details that unsettles me, it's filtering personal details through someone else that makes me want to talk about Minnie. A stranger with a different agenda and priorities might distort, misinterpret or misuse the information, but if this information comes straight from the horse's mouth, that being the definitive subject - brain zero, me, me, me - it's not so bad.

‘I'm supposed to be writing a book, you mongrel!' roared Pegg at the shrunken figure sat before him in the reclaimed dentist's chair.

‘What's stopping you?' sneered Needles, a twitchy little informant who often featured in Pegg's adventures. ‘Writer's block?'

‘Gah!' inarticulated Pegg, betraying a frustration he had dearly hoped to conceal.

‘Excuse me, sir.'

Pegg spun round, fire in his eyes. The black glove clutched in his manicured hand hung in the air like a floppy bat, ready to swoop down and give Needles another slap in the cake chute.

‘What is it?' Pegg insisted through gritted teeth. ‘I'm kind of in the middle of something here!'

‘I'm sorry, sir,' trilled Canterbury, failing to subtract an air of haughtiness from his computerised vocal nodes. ‘I know you don't like to be disturbed when you're interrogating a potential informant. Hello, Needles.'

Needles leaned out so he could see Canterbury beyond Pegg's hulking mass, which was muscular but nimble, like Oliver Hardy if he worked out.

‘Hi, Canterbury,' said Needles with an apologetic smile.

‘I was wondering if I might provide some refreshments?' Canterbury enquired with the kind of immaculate poise that could only issue from an ACH (automated cybernetic humanoid, designed by Pegg).

‘Do you still have the SodaStream?' enquired Needles.

‘I think so,' replied Canterbury. ‘Although I fear it has been secreted in some high cupboard, along with various other novelty food-preparation devices.'

‘That's a shame,' lamented Needles.

‘We don't have time for this!' Pegg blustered, silencing them both. ‘He can have a can of Fanta Orange and that will be the end of it.'

‘Yes, sir,' conceded Canterbury, with a slight inclination of his thoracic servos. ‘Coke Zero for you, sir?'

‘What do you think?' Pegg growled with a throaty rumble that surprised even him (although he didn't show it for fear of losing credibility in front of Needles). Almost imperceptibly, Canterbury's neo-carbon-fibre shoulders sagged as he registered the disappointment in Pegg's velvety Patrick Stewart- style voice.

‘Very well, sir,' he offered, with a hint of self-admonishment. He was almost back in the transit tube before Pegg stopped him.

‘Canterbury?' Pegg blurted.

‘Yes, sir,' he replied.

‘That lasagne you made last night . . .' Pegg's voice faltered slightly. His internal monologue cursed his weakness, then for some reason reminded him to get more bottled water for the cave and to tape Mythbusters.

‘The lasagne, sir?' offered Canterbury with just a hint of concern, bringing Pegg out of his personal reverie.

‘It was . . . It was delicious,' Pegg admitted, eyes fixed on the floor. ‘I thought it was Marks & Spencer's, until later when I went to the kitchen for a Tunnock's Tea Cake and noticed you were steeping a dirty baking dish.'

‘That was washed and stowed immediately after you retired, sir. I had to soak it,' assured the worried service-bot.

‘It's OK,' Pegg reassured him with a smile. ‘That doesn't matter. The point is, you made an amazing dinner last night, that, if I hadn't discovered to the contrary, I would have assumed was shop-bought. Impressive, most impressive.'

‘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).

A Little Racist

T

his 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 pre­school, 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 self­assured 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'?

The realisation of my error came a few years later when I started my comprehensive education and my form teacher, Mr Calway, the first Guardian reader I ever met, quickly gathered that if he let me stand in front of the class and tell a joke every Monday morning, I would be easier to control, having vented my nervous energy through the catharsis of performance. He was a smart guy.

When I pulled out an old Chalky gag one Monday, Mr Calway (Gareth as I now call him, although still not entirely comfortably) explained exactly why the joke I had told was unacceptable. I listened very carefully, taking in everything he said. Five years later, for my English oral exam, I gave a five-minute oration on subliminal racial prejudice and got an A. So I guess some good can come of telling racist jokes, stolen from the telly. If I had relied on my dentist gag at the Salvation Army, I might never have learned such a valuable lesson or indeed got such a big laugh. Know your audience, I say - Jim Davidson certainly does.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 870