Tickling the English Page 3

  ‘Oh yes!’ he said, with an open-palmed gesture that seemed to say, ‘Here’s the funny bit, wait till you get a load of this!’ He suddenly looked like he was on Parkinson. I relaxed.

  ‘I asked my wife to fetch me a meat cleaver and she came back… with a carving knife!’

  This he delivered with a shake of his head, as if to say, ‘Ohh, my dozy wife, eh! She can get nothing right!’

  It was very funny but really strange and slightly scary. I found myself furiously trying to make light of it, miming him carving away at this guy’s ear while quibbling with his missus, ‘Look, am I cleaving? Does this look like cleaving to you? No. I am carving. Now do you see the difference?’

  I went on to ask for crime stories 103 times on that tour, and nothing topped that first night. I was still telling that story the following November. I am deeply grateful to the man in row two for sharing it. But if I go out onstage in Warwick on the next tour, and the stage is littered with carving knives, I’m calling off the show.

  Cambridge Corn Exchange

  1 teenage boy doling out Maltesers to his friends, at his own pace

  1 salesman for a ‘natural’ drinks company:

  Me: Are they completely natural?

  Him: A hundred per cent.

  Me: But they’re carbonated. How can that occur naturally? Have you found the world’s first fizzy-water spring?

  Him: Well…

  1 photographer

  1 member of the venue’s box-office staff:

  Me: I’m not making a penny off you, am I?

  After a much more relaxed drive the following day, myself and Damon arrived early in Cambridge, and it is a very pleasant place to kill an afternoon – or four years, I suppose. The few hours I was there I tried to join Footlights to see if it would help my career but I was, sadly, ineligible. The ubiquity of Cambridge graduates in comedy always seemed a bit of a cliché to me; it certainly doesn’t apply in the stand-up comedy clubs and carries no weight on the Edinburgh Fringe, where the Footlights show doesn’t get a higher billing than the Durham Medical Students’ Revue, for example; which would be no billing at all.

  Then again, there was a rehearsal of Mock the Week once where I got all the Cambridge/Footlights graduates on the panel to raise their hands, and only myself and Frankie Boyle were left out, scowling and Celtic. Similarly, Rory MacGrath and Griff Rhys Jones, the other two on our Three Men in a Boat adventures, are also alumni. My presence in this world is hardly an indication of the barriers coming down either, since I’m there as an ethnic, and therefore don’t count.

  That said, there is one academic lesson to be learned, and that is the difference between correlation and cause. The fact that there are so many people from Cambridge working in telly isn’t necessarily a sign of conspiracy; it’s just the natural result of streamlining children from the age of three and having them pushed towards a small collection of universities. I’ll probably mention your crazy education system later, so I’ll leave it for now; just to say, if you are going to have an iniquitous and elitist educational system, well done you for making it sooo pretty!

  Cambridge is a treat to walk around, all lovely, stone aulae maximae and long-scarved cyclists whizzing past. It’s like the futuristic theme park Westworld, but instead of robots playing gunfighters or Roman gladiators, they play professors of medieval history.

  Oxford is exactly the same of course, which I love saying because it’s bound to drive some pedant insane. ‘How dare you!’ they’ll write. ‘Our river bends to the left. Our charter is sixty years older. It’s completely different.’ No, wait, Oxford is different. They have a house there with a shark sticking out of the roof. Oxford wins.

  Oxford also wins because of its theatre, which is giltedged and proper, unlike Cambridge’s, which is modern and converted and was originally used for the exchange of corn.

  Plus, the last time I visited Oxford, I had a man in the front row who described himself as a food scientist. When I asked him if there was anything even slightly interesting about this, he paused, smiled and then said, ‘Well… I did invent the Solero.’

  The roof came off the place.

  ‘What?’ said I, as the applause died down. ‘The entire brand?’

  ‘No, no, no. Just the tropical flavour.’

  ‘That’s really impressive. Did you do that all yourself?’

  ‘Well, no. But I led the team.’

  Let me put that phrase in context for you: ‘I led the team.’ Edmund Hillary led a team. Ernest Shackleton led a team. Wolverine leads a team. But none of them, for all their strengths, developed the Tropical Solero.

  Throughout this chat, this man’s wife was sat beside him, arms crossed and eyes to the heavens with a look that seemed to say, ‘… And here we go again with the fucking Solero story.’

  Nothing was as neatly hilarious as that on my visit to Cambridge although, notably, a young man did approach me in a bar after the show and asked for a hug. There was no good reason not to hug him, so I did, to the delight of his friends. When he unclasped, he looked up at me with genuine delight in his face, and said, ‘Thank you. I’ve waited a long time for this.’ Then he and his friends left, and I turned to Damon with a bemused look. He just shrugged and ordered another couple of pints.

  Preston Guild Hall

  1 probation officer

  1 young man with his arm in a cast

  1 greengrocer from Blackpool:

  ‘What?! There are people in Blackpool who eat fruit? I presumed it was an entirely candyfloss-and-chips-based economy. Who goes to Blackpool to eat vegetables?’

  1 man who trains insurance people

  Preston doesn’t get quite the same amount of fawning coverage as Cambridge, but it does have a Corn Exchange as well, although it’s a bar now, rather than a theatre, and more famous anyway for the four striking cotton workers shot there in 1842, as I read in my guidebook while Damon drove. This shooting occurred after they had been read the riot act, which is one of those phrases that has been smoothed over by common usage but whose literal meaning retains a surprising amount of force. When facing a riot, a mayor or justice of the peace would stand up in front of an angry mob and read out the 1714 Riot Act:

  Our Sovereign Lord the King chargeth and commandeth all persons, being assembled, immediately to disperse themselves, and peaceably to depart to their habitations, or to their lawful business, upon the pains contained in the act made in the first year of King George, for preventing tumults and riotous assemblies. God Save the King.

  At which point you had an hour to clear out before they started shooting; and when they started shooting, the Riot Act indemnified them against any death or injury caused to the rioters. The Riot Act was only repealed in 1973, although it had fallen into disuse by that time, and rioting itself was no longer punishable by death.

  A version of it is still on the statute books in Australia and Canada, incidentally, albeit in a more modern idiom. The Canadian form hasn’t been read in fifty years, which is just as well, as they only give thirty minutes to disperse. Busy people, the Canadians, they can’t be hanging round waiting for you to get your rioting done. They want to get that water cannon back to the hire shop before six o’clock.

  So here I am on the road from Cambridge to Preston, and enjoying the culture shock of travelling from cloistered academia to grey industrialization. And warming to the task of defending Preston.

  Yes, Oxford and Cambridge are justly proud of their tally of laureates, but can they boast that they were the home of the UK’s first Kentucky Fried Chicken? No they cannot. But Preston can, because it is Preston: City of Firsts!

  In 1816, it was the first city in England outside London to be lit by gas. The Preston bypass was the first stretch of motorway in the country; and it was also the first place that traffic cones were used. Preston Football Club was one of the founding members of the Football League and the first winner of the league, and Deepdale, the club’s home ground, is the oldest continuously used foo
tball league ground in the world.

  Deepdale is also home to the National Football Museum, where I spent a large chunk of the afternoon, marvelling at the sheer brass neck of whoever had collected the memorabilia inside. Blagging cool stuff for a museum was far more straightforward back in the day, when the British Museum could just steal whatever caught their eye and convince themselves that the locals wouldn’t understand it as much. These days you have to ask permission. At least I hope you do; although the idea of a team of tomb raiders with Lancashire accents breaking into old footballers’ homes and stealing their medals is quite appealing.

  The depth of exhibits is quite astonishing and 95 per cent of them could be prefixed with the words ‘the actual’. There are the actual balls from the 1930 and 1966 World Cup finals, the actual replacement Jules Rimet trophy (after the original was stolen) and, most impressively, the actual jersey worn by Diego Maradona in the 1986 ‘Hand of God’ match. The thrill of seeing that jersey in a case in front of you can only be a fraction of the emotion that Diego must have felt when he received a letter from an English football museum requesting it. He must have turned to whoever was standing near and gone, ‘No way! You’re shitting me, right? This is a gag, isn’t it?’ To the best of my knowledge, there is no glass case in Hastings containing the arrow that killed Harold.

  If the presence of Diego’s shirt is an impressive act of humility, there are plenty of other victories for the English to bask in here. The greatest quote in the entire museum is one attributed to Sir Neville Henderson, British Ambassador to Germany, when offering his binoculars to the man sitting next to him during England’s 6–3 rout of the host nation in Berlin in 1938.

  ‘What marvellous goals,’ Sir Neville is reported to have said. ‘You really should take a closer look at them.’

  The man sitting next to him was Hermann Göring.

  The museum should lay to rest one old chestnut, though. The English didn’t invent football. They codified it, which is a different thing altogether, and a less emotive thing to shout about when you next fail to qualify for the World Cup. You didn’t invent football because you didn’t invent the ball, or kicking, or fields. We should only be grateful that the Victorians didn’t gather together in a room and write the first rules for the use of the wheel, or fire, so that you can claim credit for that as well.

  Villages have been dragging, pulling, kicking and running against each other for millennia; you just happened to be the ones with an empire when the upper class took an interest. It was Cambridge University who initiated the first rules, in 1848; a further fifteen years passed until the formation of the FA, and even then the game was sufficiently unrecognizable from the modern game that one of the delegates, Blackheath, lost a vote to retain shin-kicking and promptly left to turn their schism into rugby instead.

  Don’t get me wrong: you’re great at the codifying. In a burst of rule-making, Victorian England laid the modern format for almost all the major sports we still enjoy. Football, rugby, cricket, hockey and tennis – all codified by the English in the nineteenth century. So pernicious was the English influence that, in 1887, the Irish took the same inter-village kick-bollock-scramble that was football and codified a slightly but sufficiently different game, Gaelic football, so that proper Gaels didn’t have to play English sports.

  And how did the rest of the world compete with this? The Australians wrote the first Aussie Rules code in 1858, the Canadians did the same for Ice Hockey in 1877 and the Americans came up with Basketball and Volleyball in 1891 and 1895. All that the entire continent of Europe came up with in the nineteenth century was Olympic Handball, and that’s just some weird, lame thing that won’t sell tickets at the 2012 Games. It’s a relatively poor return for the rest of the globe.

  So the English are the undoubted champions at writing up a rule book. And, backed up by the machinery of Empire, handing the rule books out. This is often taken to prove your oft-stated love of fair play. My arse. You just liked telling people what to do; or you just liked telling them that they were doing it wrong, even though they’d been doing it that way for millennia.

  And I’m sorry if that sounds harsh, but I’m telling you this for your own good. A hundred and twenty years later, whenever an English team is beaten, the line bemoaning ‘this, in a sport we invented’ still gets trotted out. You’ve got to snap out of this. It’s like you want to pour vinegar into the wound. It’s a bit like having Maradona’s jersey in the middle of the national football museum. Had to pile on a fresh layer of pathos, didn’t you? Couldn’t just enjoy a nice day out at the football museum. Had to have a little bit of disappointment in the middle of it. I’ll have to keep an eye on this English tendency to look on the dark side.

  *

  The theatre in Preston sits on top of a shopping centre – a deserted shopping centre by the time my crowd started coming in, which added to the slightly surreal mood surrounding the place. This wasn’t helped by the battery pack on my radio microphone slowly dying, which led to remarkable whooshing ocean noises coming out of the PA system throughout the first half. I had to stop the gig repeatedly, for fear the audience might get too relaxed from the new-age vibe we’d created and doze off.

  Luckily, the probation officer was there to get everyone nice and stressed.

  ‘Have you ever lost anyone?’ I asked.

  ‘We lost someone today.’

  ‘I’m sorry? There’s a prisoner on the loose, today?’

  ‘Well, it’s more of a parole violation, really.’

  ‘What the fuck are you doing here then? Why aren’t you off shutting down airports, or blocking ports? What’s the nearest airport?’

  ‘Blackpool or Manchester.’

  ‘I think we can eliminate Blackpool airport. If he’s fleeing the country, I don’t think he’ll gamble on catching that one flight a day to the Isle of Man. What kind of criminal is he anyway?’

  ‘A burglar.’

  There is nothing more relaxing to an audience than finding out a burglar is on the run the very night they’re sitting in a theatre on top of a shopping centre in Preston. A thousand people suddenly started mentally listing all the windows and doors in their homes, and trying to remember whether they’d locked them. To distract them, I turned to the boy with the cast on his arm.

  ‘How did you get that then?’

  ‘I’m being bullied at school.’

  Bang goes your national reputation for fair play. I offered him up an inspirational speech.

  ‘I knew a boy once, round about your age. A nice kid, but quiet. Bookish. Wasn’t one of the cool kids, do you know what I mean?’

  I stared at the boy, and we shared a poignant moment.

  ‘Do you know what became of that young man?’

  The boy looked at me and said, ‘No.’

  And I looked at him and said, inspirationally, ‘Yeah, neither do I. We lost touch after school.’

  Our sound problems made the show run over by at least thirty minutes and, after this marathon effort, I felt I should apologize to the stage manager after the curtain had come down.

  ‘It’s almost eleven. Sorry about that, that’s a bit of a marathon. Once I’m out there, you just can’t stop me talking, I suppose,’ I offered, in a semi-humble way.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about it,’ he said. ‘We had Ken Dodd in last week and we didn’t finish until 1 a.m.’

  ‘Jesus! How bad were the sound problems that night?’

  ‘Oh, there were no problems. Ken does a five-hour show. Every show. Five hours.’

  And he left me, digesting this information, and feeling a little less smug about my ‘marathon’ show.

  One weekend into the tour, and the random nature of our travels was already giving me headspins. Tours don’t get booked thematically. If you’re lucky, the venues are at least close to each other. Usually, though, you joke about the crazy loops and random criss-crossing you have to make while moving around the country.

  ‘Where are we this week? Oh, we�
��re doing the Golden Triangle. You know, Bristol, Grimsby and Woking.’

  At least the show was bedding down, I reasoned, as I did yet another post-mortem with Damon in a hotel bar in Preston. Routines had been moved, stories trimmed and the odd new gag added.

  At the end of the weekend, it seemed to be coming together. I was happy with the show, and mellow with a whiskey in my hand, until Damon offered an opinion, in his other job, as late-night voice of reason.

  ‘That Tayto story still isn’t working, by the way.’

  ‘Fuck you.’

  Chapter 4:

  Tickling the Cities

  Our next gigs were all in the country’s major cities. In any travel book about England, this would be the spine of the trip. A classy writer would hold these jewels back or, at the very least, sprinkle these famous names throughout the text. My itinerary gets them all out of the way in the first full week. In a way, this is no bad thing. What can I tell you about these places that you didn’t already know? The comedy shorthand has already been written on England’s big cities:

  Newcastle: funny accents, don’t wear coats.

  Liverpool: funny accents, sentimental.

  Manchester: like to hang around independent record stores in parka jackets.

  Birmingham: probably Asian, or a lap-dancer.

  These prejudices are relatively harmless, I suppose, depending on how you handle the Asian lap-dancer one. And if there is one thing I’ve learned about the English, it’s that you’re usually loath to give up a comedy prejudice. Germans putting their towels on all the sun-loungers? Never experienced it myself, but perhaps if you got up earlier, there might be chairs left. Can’t see how it’s the Germans’ fault, really.