How I Escaped My Certain Fate (11 page)

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I can remember the rough point at which I learned that the Scots do not like to be called Scotch, and have found it a funny word ever since. It was sometime during the period I lived with my grandparents as a child, 1971–5, and we were watching an episode of the Edwardian drama series Upstairs, Downstairs in the back room, which was yet to be knocked through into one big rectangular space, the front room still being a parlour, where tea was served on Sundays, with radishes and tomatoes from grandpa’s garden, and antimacassars hugged the backs of the armchairs in case of a visit from some heavily Brylcreemed freemason. In this edition of Upstairs,
Downstairs
, the family had gone to stay in Scotland, and the servant played by Pauline Collins said to the Gordon Jackson butler bloke, while he was polishing a glass, something like, ‘You must be delighted to be in Scotland, Mr Hudson, what with you being Scotch and all,’ to which he stonily replied, ‘It’s Scots.’ I have no other memories of Upstairs, Downstairs whatsoever. Who’d have thought, that thirty-five years later, the late Gordon Jackson’s words would come back to taunt his countrymen from out of my sneering English mouth?
 

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I am always pleased whenever the opportunity arises to say onstage that I don’t like sport and have no interest in it. In the early nineties, style magazines, nascent lads’ mags and Sunday supplements were thrilled when the ‘alternative’ comedians like David Baddiel, Rob Newman and Frank Skinner began talking about football in their comedy routines in Alternative Comedy clubs, at the Edinburgh Fringe and on Radio 4 and BBC2, where previously football would have been considered of no interest or relevance. Soon there was Fantasy Football, a low-fidelity television
comedy
series that applied the sort of irreverent, witty and intelligent humour usually reserved during the period for the subjects of
politics
, pop, sex and drugs to football, raising the bar considerably in an area in which Jimmy Hill had previously been thought of as a great wit.

But the floodgates were open, and try as he might, with his considered BBC2 series and public love of Samuel Johnson, Frank Skinner could never get the djinni back in the bottle. Football fans and so-called ‘new lads’ began to feel welcome at once ‘alternative’ comedy venues, in their Ben Sherman shirts, and within five years the comedy counter-culture which our illustrious eighties stand-up comedy forebears shed blood to build, in the post-punk shadows of fat working men’s club comics and elitist Oxbridge satirists, was destroyed. Suddenly, sport-loving scumbags began to comprise a significant percentage of any comedy audience. I think it was Fantasy Football and the introduction of football as a subject into Alternative Comedy that ultimately destroyed the values and the unrealised artistic potential of the Alternative Comedy community which I so desperately wanted to contribute to as a teenager. Indeed, all responsibility for the collapse of the entire sixties, seventies and eighties counter-culture in Britain can probably be extrapolated from Fantasy Football and laid at the door of Baddiel and Skinner, who shared a flat, and presumably a door, at the time.

Rob Newman subsequently recognised the monster he had helped to create, and tried to make amends for his crimes. By the end of the decade Newman had changed his name by deed poll to Robert Newman and retreated from the front line to became a humble aesthete, quietly trying to save the world with his thoughtful and moving live shows, and with a carbon footprint the size of an ant’s. But in contrast, today David Baddiel and Frank Skinner have massive luxury homes on the moon and their own private spacecraft made of gold and seal fur. The rest of us, who wanted Alternative Comedy to offer us merely the chance to subsist in an endless utopia of CND benefits and Women Only Cabaret Nights, have only shattered memories and shat-upon dreams.

When I was fourteen, I had a massive poster on my wall of a giant pop-art mouth advertising a Swiss exhibition of abstract art. My friends and family mocked my pretention, but I loved that poster and the hope it offered of an exciting world of thought beyond the boundaries of stifling Solihull. But one day the poster fell off the wall and the dog pissed all over it, ruining it for ever, while my mother laughed. That poster is what the Alternative Comedy dream meant to me – the possibility of a better world. And now it is covered in dog’s piss.
 

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Again, there is an echo of the always apposite Simon Munnery here, who I think planted the word ‘offal’ in my mind with his joke ‘Why do the Scots like haggis? The truth is they don’t. Haggis is just a means of selling offal to tourists.’

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During the Glasgow gig from which this text is transcribed, a foolish Scotchman has misunderstood my deliberate misuse of the word ‘Scotch’, leading to a hilarious improvisation.

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I found here that if I intonated the word ‘braveheart’ as if I thought it should get a laugh, it would only get a groan, but if I threw it away as if it were just an accidental collision of words to which I had given no actual conscious thought, and which only coincidentally echoed the folk name of the Scotch national hero William Wallace, then it would get a big laugh. Audiences, in my experience, are like cats. They don’t respect you if you seem too desperate for their affection, but disguise your desperate need for their love as a kind of bored indifference, and soon they will be
eating
out of your hand.

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I remember some reviews at the time criticising me for doing material about the film Braveheart, which had been released almost a decade earlier. But Braveheart had such a totemic role in the rise of the SNP and the drive towards a Scottish parliament, and is also famous for its typically Hollywood approach to the troublesome niggle of historical accuracy, that I think it’s a great subject in which to package a discussion about Scottish national identity, and by association, all the myths, lies and macho nostalgia that go towards forging any national identity. I don’t really believe that there’s such a thing as dated subject material, or clichéd subject material. There are only dated and clichéd approaches, and even some of them are still funny.
 

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One way of avoiding the ire of the people you are mocking is to refuse them the easy option of assuming that you are ignorant by including within the abuse some detail or turn of phrase that shows you are in fact fully acquainted with their culture, nation, faith or city, and so presumably have made a positive choice to denigrate it from a position of strength, rather than by dint of just not
knowing
anything about it in the first place. I remember a BBC Radio 4 religious bigwig describing an early-nineties radio sketch Richard Herring and I wrote about the primitive Christian mystic and
pole-dweller
Simeon Stylites as ‘ignorant’, but to be honest, if you’re even considering writing a sketch about Simeon Stylites, you’re already some degrees away from a simple position of ‘ignorance’. ‘Bothy’, in turn, is a Gaelic word for a small cottage. Unique to the
Highlands
, these structures are now mainly used as mountain shelters for walkers and climbers. Only someone who really knew their way around the Scotch culture in all its manifest variety would be able, with such casual confidence, to introduce a word like ‘bothy’ into a comedy routine with such obvious nonchalance, and the unruly Glaswegian audience see this and realise that they must submit to the comedian’s iron will.

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This may seem clever to you, but it is a standard move by me, at the point of an unexpected exit by a member of the crowd, to imply that they are leaving to masturbate over the thought of whatever I have just been talking about, though this is funnier, I always feel, if the subject is not actually sexual in any way,
suggesting
that the escapee has some very specific sexual fetish. In recent years, my standard move at the point of an unexpected punter exit is to pretend to assume they have been offended by whatever I am talking about and are leaving in disgust. I usually say something along the lines of, ‘I didn’t pay to hear a man talk disparagingly about … [insert whatever here].’ Since the mid-noughties, this approach has the added advantage of usually seeming like a clever, topical ad-lib, as there is usually some absurd story bubbling along in at least one tabloid concerning an outcry about some largely innocuous comedy routine by someone about something.