How I Escaped My Certain Fate (17 page)

‘Do you ever get rectal bleeding?’ they asked at the
hospital
. ‘On and off.’ ‘On and off for how long?’ ‘Ten or
fifteen
years, I suppose.’ It hadn’t really occurred to me that I had been ill for some time. But I’d had various ongoing bowel problems since getting ulcerative colitis as a
teenager
, which hospitalised me the day after I first saw The Fall live, the acidity of Mark E. Smith’s onstage persona
perhaps
being too much for a young boy’s stomach to take. And these problems had intensified since I first became
a full-time stand-up, to the point where I stopped even noticing that continuous rectal bleeding, the billowing clouds of flatus and the eternally unstable stools that made visits to the toilet during the nineties and the early part of this century such a constant source of amusement to me and others. The smell of farts hung around me perpetually as if it were, as Frank Skinner said in the most poignantly eloquent moment of stand-up he ever wrote, ‘an ermine cloak’. In retrospect, it comes as no surprise that I should have been heading for hospitalisation. My diet from 1991 to 2004 consisted mainly of Diet Coke, beans on toast, crisps, Wheat Crunchies, margarine, lager and curry. To
paraphrase
the late satirist and crackhead Willie Donaldson, ‘You cannot eat as I have ate and not end up like this.’ It turned out I had a serious attack of an ongoing condition called diverticulitis, a step up from the ulcerative colitis I’d had as a teenager. I was rushed up to a vacant hospital bed and put on a drip and lots of drugs.

During the hours of darkness, the hospital experience had all the oddly comforting and hallucinatory grace notes that I remembered from childhood tussles with rare
diseases
and broken bones. Nurses at nursing stations in the night, lit by softly glowing desk lamps, their soft voices humming just at the edge of audibility. Croaks of pain in the dark from behind drawn curtains. Minimalist cycles of fluttering electronic bleeps and blips. Stomach gurgles and apocalyptic farts. One night, I remember, I staggered to the TV room with my drip to try and watch the first ever
episode
of
I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here!.
I was alone with a cup of tea and the telly, and things were
momentarily
normal. A thin man with a beard came in, wearing just pyjama bottoms and a brown leather jacket with a picture of a wolf on the back. He asked if he could join me. Then he stood between me and the television, pulled down his trousers, pointed out, one by one, the weeping wounds on his legs, and then started to rub petroleum jelly into them in a vivid ooze of blood, pus and the translucent gel. I had to go back to bed. I never did become an avid viewer of
I’m a Celebrity.
When you’re hospitalised in a big city in the NHS system, you realise how many people are not
especially
sick, just lost and confused, alone and with no one to love them.

I lay awake at night, doped and thinking. People get ill. Then they die. I’d been ill and I hadn’t known. Perhaps I might have died? This seems hysterical and banal now, and part of me knew it was hysterical and banal at the time, but that did not make it any less arresting. I did not want to die yet. I had things to do.

I was discharged with dietary advice. For the foreseeable future, try and eat lots of roughage, maybe a baked potato every day. And drink lots of water. No coffee, no
carbonated
drinks, and, the man suggested confidentially, if you
must
have alcohol, something flat and soft like Guinness. Guinness was my favourite drink and I loved baked
potatoes
. I’d be fine.

My mother was away, and she invited me to go and stay in her house to recuperate, so I unclipped my drip,
rescheduled
the remaining Soho Theatre gigs and drove west, to the new-build estate adjoining a once remote little village south-east of Worcester to which she’d retired. I pottered weakly about the empty house, all tidy and quiet, eating baked potatoes and sluicing myself with pints of Malvern water. I was still on a lot of painkillers. I tried to drink but it flattened me. I’d lost so much weight I felt like I was in a different man’s body, or mine, twenty years ago, when I looked like the young Morrissey. I had to pee every twenty
minutes. If I wanted to smoke, I had to stand in my mum’s garden. I was thirty-six years old. One day, I drove to
Hay-on-Wye
and looked for Arthur Machen books, staggering about in a half-dream in the shadow of the hill. One night, I watched
Master and Commander
on DVD, and I enjoyed it, which is unlike me. And from the window of the white fluffy bedroom, always open because the stifling heating was jammed on and no one has ever known how to turn it off, I looked out at the Malvern hills.

Everything was wobbly and trippy. The fields buzzed green and black. I felt ashen and pin-eyed, like an actor pretending to come down from a rave in an
early-nineties
ITV police drama. The skies out there seemed grey and enormous, as if they were coming to crush me into the floodplain of the Severn, deep down with the civil war dead in the flatlands all around Cromwell’s, the insensitive ly named Indian restaurant, and Powick
hospital
, where a Dr Sandison dosed 683 schizophrenics and depressives with LSD in the fifties. I tried to go for walks, but the paths along the sides of the roads petered out or led nowhere, and lorries rattled past alarmingly, because the new-builds had been new-built where no new-builds should be built. I could just about make it as far as either a duck pond in the middle of a cul-de-sac, or an electricity substation on the edge of a sheep field, or a shop staffed by bleached women who sold pork rolls to lorry
drivers
who had stopped in the lay-by, or to the village pub, now a swanky restaurant, the die-hard drinkers crammed around what was left of the bar, trying to avoid eye
contact
. So, after a while, I went home.

In January, I set off to tour the cool hipster comedy venues the uncharacteristically sympathetic booker Charlie Briggs had scoped out. I was determined to downsize
from the scale of the ‘comedy is the new rock and roll’ era, which was when I’d last toured a show, and to do
everything
myself, to see if, this time, I could make it
worthwhile
. I was booked into nearly thirty rooms of between one and two hundred seats, hand-picked by Charlie as a base to build from. Advertising was minimal, because
suddenly
there was MySpace and a website with a mailing list, new methods of direct mass communication that hadn’t really existed last time I’d been on the road. I drove from Travelodge to Travelodge in my Mini Metro, listening to The Fall and John Lee Hooker albums from the fifties. And the blurb I wrote for the tour flyer and press release read like a personal manifesto: ‘After an enforced lay-off from performing, and bewildered by critical acclaim in a world he never made, the “fifth best stand-up of his generation” returns in search of clarity, self-respect, and
immediate
sensual and intellectual gratification.’
*
(The ‘fifth best stand-up of his generation’ was an unattributable quote I made up, to combat the fact that everybody seemed to have similar things on their posters these days.) And after years in the slow, detached process of commercial theatre with
Jerry Springer: The Opera
, I was, genuinely, in search of ‘clarity, self-respect, and immediate sensual and
intellectual
gratification’.

I asked Josie Long to open for me, a young comic who talked about paintings and the wonder of science onstage, swore loudly and pathologically in tea rooms, and appeared to make most of her own clothes. Josie was one of the acts
I’d been impressed by when I started back on the circuit. She hadn’t toured before, and being away with someone who was interested in what Aldershot town centre would be like, for example, leavened the deadening effect of the driving. And there was an element of the miner’s canary about her role in the proceedings. On the rare occasions when the crowd didn’t go for Josie’s open-hearted surreal spiel, I knew that despite Charlie’s and my best efforts to book a tour that connected only with the hot freaks of alterno-Britain, we were in a venue full of sports fans and squares, and I was going to have to work hard.

It was a cold, harsh winter, and I was still shaky and weak. I sat at the wheel, gurgling back the prescribed
bottles
of water, necking painkillers, looking for baked potato stands in windswept city centres and stopping every thirty minutes to empty my distended bladder into any available space. In Glasgow, after I’d jumped out of the car in a
traffic
jam to piss up some wheelie bins by a multi-storey, a now soggy junkie crawled out from behind them, in the midst of injecting heroin into his forearm, and said, ‘For fuck’s sake, man!’, but with an air of resigned and
philosophical
acceptance, as if we were both in this together.

The tour had a frosty, somnambulant quality. Before a lovely gig above a pub in the little Derbyshire town of Wirksworth, we walked to the Nine Ladies stone circle on a snowy Stanton Moor, through the tree houses and
smouldering
fires of frozen eco-protesters who were trying to prevent an American-owned quarry edging any closer to the stone circle. The locals left them food in boxes at the bottom of the hill. The Actor Kevin Eldon joined us for a non-cost-effective trek to the Isle of Skye, where we drew thirty people, still more than I’d played to in Dundee five years earlier. And in Lincoln, there was a heavy snowfall
during the gig. I went back to my room, a monastic cell you could rent cheaply from the bishop in the actual
cathedral
cloisters, and Josie stayed and played snowballs in the grounds of the university with the audience. She was
having
enough fun for both of us, which was good, as I was perpetually shattered.
*

The gigs, though, were great, and worked much better than they would have done in the partially filled municipal hangars I’d become used to. At the end of the tour, after I deducted all my costs, I think Josie’s support fees of £100 a night added up to only a little less than I’d made myself. But I had made something. For the first time in fifteen years this was a wedge of live work that had been absolutely and incontrovertibly worth doing. ‘Come back next time,’ said the promoters of these real places with their hand-reared audiences who actually liked comedy. There was a whole world out there of enthusiastic comedy promoters and discerning comedy consumers that my management had never connected me with. And people liked the show.

After seeing
Stand-Up Comedian
in Edinburgh and wrongly imagining I would soon be huge, a DVD outfit called 2entertain paid my management company’s
production
company to film
Stand-Up Comedian
for
commercial
release.
*
I saw enough from whatever fee my manager’s production company were paid to make the DVD to pay off the mortgage on my flat. (I never thought to ask, or don’t remember being told, what the actual fee paid to my manager’s production company was, although I am sure this must have been discussed with me.) The DVD’s executive producer tried to convince my manager, who he also was, to make me film it at the Bloomsbury Theatre to save money, and not to worry about spending any of the budget on making it good as all live comedy DVDs ‘were always shit anyway’. But I managed to
persuade
both of him to let me film it in the more intimate and tense surroundings of The Stand, Glasgow, which worked perfectly.
†