My Booky Wook 2 (14 page)

It was good material I did there, the Ian Huntley stuff, I always had a fascination with the tabloid demonisation of criminals. It was an indication of how far I’d come: I could do successfully at the Albert Hall material that at the Gilded Balloon just a few years earlier got me bottled off the stage and hospitalised. I’d subsequently learned how to be respectful around such subjects and where the lines are drawn, and also that once people are laughing they are a lot more tolerant of risqué material. Here is the material I performed that night, it was built around some hilarious, genuine letters from the Sun’s “Your View” section.

I like the Sun a bit, I’ve read it all my life. I think of the Sun as a friend, but have you ever had a friend you fucking hate? My favourite bit is the letters page, “Dear Sun, the page where you tell Britain what you think.” Not just any thought like “Move arm now, or eat breakfast this morning” – preferably a thought that might inspire hatred or antipathy towards people who are slightly different.

This is a story that concerns Ian Huntley practising witchcraft in his prison cell. When I read that I thought, what is the point of that story, because I, like most people, made my mind up about Ian Huntley when he killed those children. “What? Ian Huntley’s practising witchcraft? Oh, you’re joking … I liked him … you build them up then knock them down, don’t you?”

Let’s not query that source.

“Where did you get this information?”

“This desperate criminal told me it.”

“Did you give him any money?”

“Yeah, I gave him some money as an inducement to tell me the story.”

“Yeah, that’s alright, we’ll print that, then we’ll give them some fucking bingo – they’ll love it.”

If you’re going to have a father-figure in prison, probably best to have one that isn’t also a paedophile. He may abuse that position.

Here are just some of the letters elicited by that story. The first one is from Dave Franklin, who I happen to know wrote it with this expression on his face:

That’s what the situation in the Middle East needs – heavily armed paedophiles. Have we not done enough damage in that troubled region? What we need to do is get Peter Sutcliffe in a tank and unleash him. Tell you what, let’s get Rose West, take her to Basra, get her pissed, give her a jar of anthrax and let her wander round like Ophelia.

I do not think that Dave Franklin should be dabbling in international diplomacy, he lacks the aptitude. His brand of knee-jerk reaction isn’t what’s required.

“Dave, Dave, you’re not a bright man, are you? Never speak again, you are essentially an oxygen thief.”

Next letter, different tack but no less sublime. It begins thusly:

Often – not talking about freak occurrences, right? On the way in tonight I saw five people practising voodoo, three of them were destroyed by it. Look at the statistics.

That’s a heavy thing to hope for. And then to send it to the Sun, which is not a metaphysical newspaper. This is a proposition that if it came from Dante would confuse you.

“Do you know what I hope happens to Ian Huntley? I hope he destroys himself.”

“How?”

“This is the good bit. By opening a doorway to a world beyond the knowledge of mere man. A world so baffling and complex that whilst Ian Huntley can perceive it – he has after all just opened a doorway to it – he can never know it, he can never integrate it into his understanding of what is, because he is a mere man. If he were a meerkat, he’d have a better vantage point.”

Now I don’t know much about voodoo … but I think that is an improper solution.

The reason I’m interested in dark subjects is that I think it’s in the extremes and the margins that the interesting matters lurk. The quotidian has been dealt with on its own, it doesn’t need to be explained, it’s understood. Extremities of behaviour, sexuality and experience are what prickle my hackles. That’s why there was that difficult transition to national fame, because my sensibilities are a little bit cult, a bit off key, but my ambition is mainstream. I don’t just want to do an approximation of what already exists in the culture, I want to do things that are disturbing, unsettling and unusual, primarily funny – I want to be able to talk about anything that captures my imagination.

By the end of that year, when I did The Big Fat Quiz of the Year with Noel Fielding, Jonathan Ross and David Walliams, there probably weren’t many people in the country who didn’t know who I was. There’s never a point, though, of reclining in a bath and thinking, “I’ve done it,” and sinking down under the suds like in a Flake commercial – it always feels ongoing, it feels constant, because whenever those achievements are being made you’re thinking about whatever you’ve got to do next. And as I’ve already indicated, I fancied another bash at becoming a genuine movie star – such as you might find in a cinema or a rehab clinic.

We had agreed to do 1 Leicester Square on MTV out of what most people would think of as absurd optimism, believing that it might lead to more opportunities – perhaps in Hollywood. Remarkably, as per Nik’s prediction, it did, it led to the life-changing meeting with comedy movie star and cash factory Adam Sandler. Sandler, “The Sandman” as he’s known, is a compassionate fella and, far from thinking me an oik who didn’t listen to the answers to questions he’d moments before posed, Sandler liked me.

Nik’s foresight, my peculiar presenting style, and the astonishing approval of Adam Sandler, now meant I had an extraordinary opportunity and a difficult decision. I wanted to embrace this chance without offending my adored affiliates, as I’ve decided to work with them for the rest of my life, so obviously I had to consult Nik.

Nik was cool about it. “Yeah, we can pop over to America and see if we can get you in films,” he said in his typical gung-ho manner. At this stage Nik had not yet metamorphosed into the swarthy man mountain-mountain man, glimmering, ultra-competitive bayonet of charisma that he is now. This was still in his scruff-bag, beach bum, wet-eyed chancer phase. And I was a volatile, sex-mad egomaniac. A trip to Hollywood at this stage could do more harm than good. We were on the next flight.

†

There’s gotta be a way! He who dares wins! There’s a million quid’s worth of gold out there – our gold. We can’t just say “bonjour” to it.Derek TrotterIf you give me the chance, I’ll destroy America for you
- Johnny Rotten

Seriously, Do You Know Who I Am?

The lesson that fame is subjective is a painful one to learn. I’d spent my entire life chasing its elusive blessing like a sunburned tramp pursuing a butterfly made of booze, only to discover that if you pop across the English Channel to Calais, British fame is as much use as British currency.

“Monsieur, I should very much like to take your daughter upstairs. And I’ll have that camembert an’ all.”

“Alors!! You stinking English scum, my daughter will go nowhere with you – I ’ave never seen you before and your haircut is, ’ow you say … ridiculous.”

“Do you not watch Big Brother’s Big Mouth? No? May I still have the cheese? I’m prepared to pay …”

Yes, anonymity was hard enough to endure the first time, but to have it revoked by foreign travel, why, it’s worse than a driving ban – it’s like losing your blowjob licence. Plus I’d organised my entire personality around fame, not to mention my physical appearance – my haircut for heaven’s sake! Without fame my whole persona doesn’t make sense. Without fame my haircut just looks like mental illness. So once me and Nik landed in LAX, I was no longer an edgy comic with a bright future, I was just another lunatic with access to strong hairspray.

Upon this trip, on these gold-paved streets, Nik and I began to forge a grown-up business partnership. He’d already shown himself to be the equal of his Darth Vadar, bare-knuckle father John Noel, our patriarch, when he’d expertly secured me the Brit Awards, which took some cunning and turned out to be a crafty move.

Me and John Noel had begun to argue; he’s a force and a natural dictator. I’ve been in meetings with him where TV shows were commissioned on the basis that the head of comedy didn’t want to have his nut-bag kicked in. He was the perfect tough-guy father to get me off drugs and on to telly. Me and Nik, his son, were already mates and Nik worked at the agency, so once my career had momentum it made sense to move the emphasis and control over to Nik, a diplomat and charmer who wouldn’t swagger round Hollywood pinning people to walls. So John remains for me like Don Corleone, an overlord surveying our progress, but he’s not on the front line with a flick-knife.

Quarrelling between me and John was actually always very loving and manageable; I never forget what he’s done for me and what I owe him. Conflict is often favourable to complicité – combined we’re a terrible force when we agree, that’s when problems really start. For example, John and I used our combined might to turn a molehill into a mountain on my radio show, giving the BBC an irritating headache that in the fullness of scandal they would come to regard as minor. A tumult was invoked when me and John agreed that my friend Ade Adepitan, the wheelchair basketball player, tennis player, TV presenter and joie de vivre beacon, had been treated badly by the Movida nightclub in London’s West End.

Ade, my West Ham brethren and Stratford’s finest son, told us that he’d been denied entry to Movida on account of his chair and the door staff there had used racist language, I think including the N-word, and had unforgivably called him a cripple.

Me and John were incensed, we both love a row, and John especially loves sticking up for the dispossessed – how else would I have become a client? So our combined truculence was turned upon this ghoulish boutique of vacuity and prejudice.

I decided to do no more research into the incident and invited Ade on to the 6 Music show as a guest. We urged listeners to boycott hateful, racist Movida. After the broadcast, the nightclub approached the BBC and told them their version of events. Which was essentially: “That Ade Adepitan fella’s a dangerous loose cannon.” They claimed he came at the door security in his wheelchair, fists blazing, firing off expletives like Gordon Ramsay in a Happy Eater; after which the BBC cut the Ade interview and Movida hate campaign from the podcast.

I was furious and John backed me. The two of us got on our high horses like angry cowboys with a cause and refused to let them release the podcast of the show without the Ade content. The Beeb stood firm, saying that their guidelines clearly stated that Movida had a “right to reply”, and it would be biased to deny them that right. To which John, ingeniously, responded, “Guidelines? You don’t have to listen to them. They’re only there as a guide. Like a girl guide or a guide book or a guide dog. The guideline is there if you want it, but you don’t have to obey it. A blind man could just kick his dog into a ditch if he felt like it – it’s only a guide.” John saw the BBC’s code of conduct as a mild-mannered Sherpa who he could cuff around the bonce and march past to the summit of his self-will.

I myself, in a display of hypocrisy equal to Chris Brown demanding a job at a battered women’s refuge, went to Movida a couple of months later despite my demand for a global embargo. The embargo had been prematurely imposed before I learned that glamour models use it as a place to get drunk and vulnerable. This caused me to dramatically revise my policy and hurtle to the entrance in the dead of night, like Ade Adepitan, demanding entry, hammering my fists on the door – “Let me in, you fuckin’ bastards, there’s floosies in there,” I wailed. Unfortunately, they did.

So now I work with Nik, who is a very strong character with a clear vision. You can see that he has learned at his father’s knee, because he’s got the purposefulness of his dad, but he’s less splenetic, more considered. Nik Linnen doesn’t make decisions on the basis of emotional reactions; I do, I will gamble everything on a single passing urge.

It was with Nik that I headed to LA to meet Adam Venit of the legendary Endeavor talent agency, fictitiously portrayed in the TV show Entourage. Arriving in LA is strange anyway, because you’re tired and jet-lagged and baffled and it feels too big and you’re aware of the expanse of the land. That’s what I always feel when I’m in America, that I’m in a big place that’s humming with difference, and being held together and pulled apart with the exact same intensity, so that it’s constantly taut and vibrant, buoyant with its own suppressed explosion of diversity.

Nik and I stayed at the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Strip, on the advice of Courtney Love – I learned that Courtney Love’s considerations when it comes to hotels are very different from mine. I prioritise comfort, good food, diligence and a willingness to provide for any whim. Courtney prioritises “the vibe, man”.

The Chateau Marmont is one of those hotels where you’re supposed to feel grateful they’ve let you in. Well, that annoys me for a kick-off. I begrudge them on my groundless suspicion that if I took my mum there, she might feel uncomfortable; so, insanely, I act on the spurious and frankly “made-up” basis that they’ve undermined my mother in their snooty hotel. “The stuck-up bastards!”

“Sorry, what are you saying?”

“How dare you treat my mother like that!”

“Your mother?”

“Yes, my mother, who in my imagination you’ve just horribly derided.”

“I see, sir. But she’s not here.”

“Yeah, because in my imagination you drove her away – you snob – you better hope that John Noel doesn’t find out.”

John Belushi died at the Chateau Marmont, and Marilyn Monroe stayed there. It’s so beset with death and tragedy that it must be a fun place to hang out, right? For some reason a celebrity death lends cachet to a hotel which would not apply in another context. If I heard that Flipper the dolphin had had his blow-hole clogged up with dog biscuits while inexplicably staying at Battersea Dogs Home, I wouldn’t be straight on the blower demanding a basket for Morrissey, but for some reason people are prepared to cough up the shekels for the chance to sleep in John Belushi’s old sick.

I got the second-best suite they had, like the twerp I am, to give me something to aim for and to keep some tooth-skin attached to the fast-fading notion of humility. On the first night, I realised that because it’s so cool there they don’t make an effort to please you. It’s not as bad as the Chelsea Hotel, in New York, where they stop just short of punching you in the face when they give you your room key – no wonder Sid killed Nancy, he was probably bored of waiting for room service. At the Chateau Marmont the plumbing was bad. I’m not a person who’s highly attuned to plumbing, I don’t plumb. I’m not one to go through life noticing valves and pipes and placing my palm on radiators, but I will notice if when you turn on a tap it sounds like something from There Will Be Blood – a silence, then a rumble, then a gurgle … and then Daniel Day-Lewis roars up, his face covered in oil, barking on about how he’s gonna “drink my milkshake” – “You can fuckin’ have it, mate, I’m lactose intolerant.”