This Is Your Life (32 page)

So the only advice I send to my elderly self, Jimmy, is that you try to cling to a fragment of vanity, both physical and social, and make the effort to stand in the post office queue without muttering obscenities. Oh, and if the area of your facial hair has spread upwards, and huge grey tufts are now sprouting above your cheekbones, then it might be an idea to shave those off as well.

But more importantly, when you accidentally come across this final letter in your old age, filed between your money-off catfood coupons and the set of teeth you'd been looking for, I don't want you to start trying to impress the other residents at the Eventide Home for the Elderly by cheating at carpet bowls or forging little scribbled drawings from invented grandchildren. You have been a success; you don't need to lie to anyone. ‘To thine own self be true, and it must
follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man' as you will remember from when you read
Hamlet
. Oh, all right, I admit, I never read
Hamlet
. I saw the quote on the back of a matchbox.

Mine sincerely,
Jimmy

Watching the events of that evening back on video was a compelling and cathartic experience. First and foremost I have to acknowledge that it was one of the most memorable nights of television I have ever witnessed. The viewing figures soared during the course of the night as people watching at home telephoned friends and relations to say what was going on over on BBC1. I realized that my own part in it would be forgotten in the wake of the astonishing return of Billy Scrivens, whose status as Britain's foremost entertainer was now established beyond any doubt. The BBC agreed a five-year deal far in excess of anything they had been offering before his apparent demise, and his Christmas special coincided with the publication of his autobiography, which Billy had been busy writing during his year in hiding.

The enormous church set in which I had performed made perfect sense when you saw how Billy revealed himself to the audience. With an angelic choir singing movingly in the background, the audience was shown edited highlights of Billy's career, climaxing with the news reports of his untimely death. As they were reminded of the day he died, a coffin came up out of the ground, at first barely visible in the swirling dry ice and flashing lights. With the audience moved close to tears by music and the sadness of the montage the coffin was hydraulically raised to the vertical position.

The choir were singing a specially arranged version of Billy's old theme tune, suddenly there was an explosion of fireworks and Billy burst out of the coffin and sang, ‘Hello, Hello, Good to be Back'. The cameras cut to the reaction of the stunned audience, where individuals were covering their mouths in disbelief while Billy ran up and down the aisles so that people could see it really was him. One elderly woman was kneeling in the aisle, kissing her crucifix and giving thanks to God.

Billy then gradually brought the audience down by explaining how this idea had come to him. Every joke was greeted with a fantastic response in the hysteria of the moment. He said that for this year's Star Appeal Night he had wanted to do something more memorable than ever before, and he joked that coming back from the dead hadn't been done for a couple of thousand years. He thanked the handful of people in authority, the Sussex police and Brighton doctors and the coroner, who had been party to his faked demise knowing that their cooperation would help raise a great deal of money for charity. And then in a conspiratorial mock whisper, he revealed that inside this theatre were dozens of celebrities who were still in the dark about this little secret, and that while these stars were performing tonight they might get a little surprise while they were up on stage.

Different stars had reacted in different ways to the shock. Dame Judi Dench had been in the middle of reading a moving speech from a Shakespeare play unaware that viewers had already phoned in and pledged £203,500 to have Billy come up from behind and goose her in the middle of it. ‘Where be your gibes now, your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment. . .' she said as a familiar-looking entertainer came up and pinched her on the bum. Dame Judi put her hand to her chest and said, ‘Oh my goodness,' which I sensed was marginally more dignified than my panic-stricken attempt at running away. Mick Jagger looked so completely unsurprised to see Billy that I wondered if he'd ever been aware he'd been dead in the first place. Elton John looked like he'd really had the rug pulled from over his head. Gwyneth Paltrow burst into tears, while one of the Spice Girls fainted. It really was great TV.

Seeing myself die on stage during the first part of my
performance did not seem so bad in context. You knew the audience was waiting for something else more exciting to happen, and as a viewer you were concentrating on the door at the back of the stage. My attempts to run for it were generally taken as a brilliant piece of comic improvisation and after that the audience was so completely hyped up that I think if I'd performed my entire act in Norwegian they still would have laughed and cheered at every word. I draw the line at the stuff about Vulcan fish or dodos deserving to be extinct – that would have died whatever.

There was a little feature on what Billy had been doing for the past twelve months including some footage filmed at the cottage outside Seaford, which to my relief did not feature me creeping around downstairs and going through all his papers while he was upstairs in the bath. However, Billy had not spent a year as a total recluse but had gone out and about in disguise. We were treated to some footage of him in a rather ludicrous false beard sitting reading the newspaper outside a café and walking across Trafalgar Square. It must have been a bit of a shock for him to have to queue for the cinema, to be told there were no tables available in the restaurant, to have to start
paying for everything.

Having had twelve months to plan his comeback show, Billy didn't overlook a single detail and the jokes and set-pieces kept coming all night. Then at the end of the evening all the celebrities and myself were summoned back to the wings ready for the grand finale. I had been sitting alone in my dressing room, surrounded by empty lager bottles, repeatedly calling Nancy's home phone number and her mobile but getting no reply from either.

A Beatles tribute band played onstage while Billy circulated in the wings, chatting and laughing with various other stars. I
caught Stella Scrivens's eye across the crowd and she half smiled and raised her eyebrows knowingly at me before continuing a whispered conversation with a TV chef. She was running her hand up and down his lapel as she talked and he panted like a puppy dog and giggled. Honestly, some men are so gullible. Thank goodness I saw through her all those minutes ago, I thought.

The wings were filling up, and the stage manager was miming ‘Hush' to the less scary of the celebrities. Near by, Billy was holding court to a circle of old showbiz friends when a young runner came up and brought him a bottle of mineral water on a tray. Without even noticing her he took a swig and his eyes seemed to bulge as he swallowed.

‘Is this still?' he snapped at her.

The runner looked terrified. ‘Is this still what?' she stammered.

‘Don't fucking joke with me,' he said, even though I don't think she had meant to. ‘I asked for still; this is fucking sparkling. How fucking difficult is that, you useless piece of shit?'

The stage manager heard a raised voice and said ‘Shhh!' and Billy spun round and caught his eye and the SM realized his mistake and said, ‘Sorry, sorry, do carry on.'

Billy shook his head in disbelief and then casually resumed his conversation where he had left off. The runner took this as her cue to leave, bursting into tears as she passed me. I tried to offer her a consoling smile but she was too embarrassed to make eye contact with anyone. Actually, I wouldn't have minded drinking the water because I realized I was feeling quite drunk.

The tribute band finished their penultimate number and then we were prodded back out under the spotlights. The
church interior was gone – we were now standing in a replica of the set for Billy's TV show. I found myself holding hands with David Beckham and George Michael and singing along to ‘All You Need Is Love' as everyone swayed from side to side. When I watched the tape I noticed I was the only one swaying the wrong way. When the singing of the international anthem was over, Billy walked down to the front of the stage to thank the audience for making it such a memorable evening and I listened and nodded, and about two minutes into his speech I realized I was still holding George Michael's hand so I let go. Having heaped praise on all the people in front of him, Billy turned to thank the people with him on stage. Touching piano music was playing and on the giant screens on the back of the stage there was a succession of black and white still shots from Billy's funeral. ‘I'm just so grateful still to be alive and to be able to do so much to help all those British kids,' said Billy. And then the sad music was turned up as pictures of Billy holding hands with disabled children were flashed up on the screen. ‘Charity' is the backstage pass that says ‘Access All Areas', I thought. No grounds of taste are out of bounds if you are going there on behalf of charity. And then I remembered how I had justified the deception involved in doing my advert by deciding to help out Nancy. I'd wanted to do something I shouldn't, so I did it for charity. There were plenty of ways I could have helped Nancy more directly than that. Refraining from telling her daughter to go and get herself pregnant was possibly one of them. The recording of Nancy crying on my mobile phone still ran round in my head as I watched slow-motion footage of Billy pushing a wheelchair. The passenger was not in shot.

I had already come to the conclusion that Billy Scrivens was the most dreadful man I'd ever met, but out there on that
stage I decided that I was taking part in the most vulgar, distasteful event I had ever witnessed. I wondered if it may even have been the lowest point in the history of Western civilization, or perhaps the second lowest after Elton John singing a hastily reworded version of
Candle in the Wind
at a funeral in Westminster Abbey in front of the entire British royal family. Holding back the tears because he had in fact survived his own faked death, Billy returned to paying tribute to us suckers who were gathered on stage to pay homage to him. ‘For these people are not just the most wonderful and talented group of people you are likely to find gathered together anywhere on the entire planet,' he said, ‘they also all happen to be my very dearest and closest friends.' He paused for dramatic effect. ‘Every. Single. One of them.'

There was a slightly weak sycophantic round of applause and I winced at his sickening insincerity when I thought of how one of my real friends must be feeling right now. At this point you might say that something inside me snapped, except that I don't think it did snap: it reconnected, it healed, it mended.

‘I'm not!' I said, emboldened by too much strong lager. ‘I'm not a friend of yours! You said it was great to see me again, but you have never had so much as a single conversation with me before tonight.'

Billy looked momentarily surprised to be interrupted but there was a glint in his eye. He seemed to relish the prospect of a verbal duel here live on stage.

‘Celebrities don't have conversations, Jimmy. They just meet up and say, “Enough about me. What did
you
think of my show?”'

The audience laughed heartily at this. Some might even have imagined my intervention was scripted. But even if I was
inadvertently making him look even better, I wasn't going to stop now.

‘Ah yes, but I'm not a celebrity, you see. I was lying when I claimed I had known you before you died, and then I lied about being a stand-up comic. I forged my reviews, I invented a career, I falsified an entire celebrity lifestyle because I wanted to be famous.'

There was a nervous half-laugh from one or two people in the audience but nothing more. Even Billy could not come up with a brilliantly apposite punchline to that and for the first time ever I saw him momentarily lost for words. Now in his eyes there was almost an expression of pleading. ‘Why are you doing this, Jimmy?' his eyes seemed to say. The lines on the autocue machine were maniacally scrolling up and down looking for this section of the script. The theatre was incredibly quiet, though from the headphones of a cameraman I could hear the distorted, frantic screams of some remote director. I didn't dare pause for another second. ‘In fact, I never performed a single joke in public before tonight. So I am not your friend, Billy. If anyone's interested, my friends are Nancy, Dave, Chris, Norman and Panda and everyone else back in Seaford,' I said, thinking I had better stop soon because this was starting to sound like a dedication on the Radio 2 Breakfast Show. ‘And if you're watching, Nancy, don't worry, it's going to be OK.' And proud that I had made such a speech without slurring my words I made a dignified exit from stage, which was only slightly spoiled when I failed to remember the two steps down from where we were standing at the back of the stage, which caused me to fall flat on my face. And that was the last laugh I ever got as a celebrity stand-up comic.

Having already seen Billy come back from the dead that evening, the audience was suspicious that this whole speech
might be part of another elaborate scam. They refused to be impressed or surprised, choosing instead to wait for Billy to explain what on earth was going on. When I watched the tape later I couldn't help but be impressed by what he said after I had walked off the stage.

‘Knock, knock!' he shouted to the audience.

‘Who's there?' they dutifully replied.

‘Jimmy!'

‘Jimmy who?' they shouted back.

‘Hey, that's show business!' he said, gesturing to where I had disappeared, and then got on with the show. And that old gag kind of said it all.