I Am What I Am (7 page)

A good deal of this business depends on networking and forging relationships. Learning how to do this is an important skill. After all, you may not be right for the part of the gay lead in a US sitcom, but a friend of a casting director, who once worked with you on that other show two years ago, thinks you would be perfect for the role of a rakish sci-fi hero.

One of my favourite staying-in-touch stories from working as a judge is also a lovely romantic one. Denise and Lee Mead began dating after
Any Dream
was over and Lee had won. In the late spring of 2009, they were married. Immediately after the ceremony, Denise sent me a text from a tropical island to announce that they had tied the knot. I was thrilled for them.

Back in the spring of 2008, after my concert at the Hammersmith Apollo – which was staged, in part, to promote my album
Another Side
– Lee and Denise came backstage, having watched my performance. For fun, I gave them both concert T-shirts with my face on them.

One night a few weeks later, when Den and I were judging on
I’d Do Anything
, Den came into my dressing room before the show. She was giggling even before she’d sat down. She told me she’d put on the JB concert T-shirt before going to bed. In a moment of, um, passion, Lee had looked up and seen my face smiling down on him.

‘Fantastic, fantastic, fantastic!’ exclaimed Denise. ‘Get it off! Off! Off!’ cried Lee.

I could hear my mum and sister laughing when I put my ear to the bathroom door. Refrain from going ‘Ewww!’ You know as well as I do that it’s a fact of life that women travel like wildebeests and go to the bathroom in herds, especially when they’re in restaurants and clubs, but when they’re at home they rarely pee in pairs. I had to check. It was getting close to midnight on a Saturday night and my mum, my dad, Carole, Scott and I were getting ready for bed. The main bathroom in my house in Sully was certainly big enough to accommodate two people brushing their teeth, but for my plan to work I really needed to be sure that Carole and Mum had gone in there together.

They had. Check.

I reached above the bathroom door and found the spare bathroom key. Don’t ask me why there’s an extra key. I think it may have something to do with making sure children don’t get themselves locked inside, but I did not build this house. Scott and I only bought it in the autumn of 2008, and although we love it, we do have plans to renovate in the future and add features that will make it even more our own. Until then, many of the quirks of the house remain. Like the fact that the bathroom can be locked from the inside and from the outside.

I locked the door. Check.

My dad and Scott were my fellow conspirators in this midnight game to terrify my sister and my mother. Insert Dick Dastardly laughter here. While I locked the bathroom door, my allies moved silently into position. Scott headed to the sliding doors at the rear of the house with the broom, a flashlight and my black hooded North Face ski jacket. My dad was a decoy in this plan, so he ducked into the
bedroom that has become my parents’ room whenever they visit, and he quickly got his pyjamas on. He found his book and sat on top of the bed, looking as if he’d been reading for hours.

Positions. Check.

The five of us had just watched the movie
Paul Blart: Mall Cop
, a silly, laugh-out-loud comedy in which Kevin James plays a slightly hopeless mall cop who tries to foil a gang of crooks from robbing the mall. Watching the film had made us all a bit squirrelly. Not that my family needed an excuse.
¹
Add to this collective state of mind that we are a very competitive family, we love to play games, and no one likes to lose. The words ‘surrender’ or ‘I give up’ rarely feature in my family’s vocabulary.

Our house in Sully is laid out a bit like an ‘I’, with two courtyards on either side of the main artery of the house, the entrance and a few other rooms along the top, and the widest living space running across the bottom, facing the lawn, the pool and the sea. The three bedrooms are on the side of the house with the smaller, more closed-in courtyard, and the bigger of the two courtyards has become the dogs’ area, because it’s the safe space that Jack, Charlie and Harris have access to via their doggy door in the laundry room when no one is home.

I’ve always loved it when my family can come and visit me, and now that I have a house and so much space to share, over the past year it’s been a busy abode. During the spring and summer of 2009, for about three-plus months, my parents lived with me. The main reason for their extended visit was so they could be part of my concert tour that spring, but they also decided that because they’re both in their later seventies, the trip across the Atlantic was only going to get more difficult in the coming years. They might as well travel while they still can. I seconded that.

Scott and I have always enjoyed my family’s visits and we never feel as if we have company when any of them are staying with us. In fact, sometimes we can forget we have company – or, should I say, for a few hours the company can occasionally think that we’ve forgotten about them.

A recent case in point: when Carole visits, she usually stays in the guest room directly next to our master suite. One night, she was startled awake by some very aggressive moaning, loud sighing and what sounded to her like chests being beaten and wild animals being skinned alive in our room. I was making the noises: I admit it. Of course, you can imagine what Carole was thinking …

She proceeded to scramble for her Bose headphones and switched on the noise reduction. She claimed it didn’t help. She cranked up the tunes on her iPod. The clamour persisted for about twenty-five minutes. Early the next morning, when our paths crossed in the hallway, she gave me this weird, eye-crinkling look.

I didn’t think anything of it. I was completely unaware of her annoyance.

‘I had
the
worst heartburn I have ever had last night,’ I told her over my shoulder, continuing on my way to the kitchen. ‘I seriously thought I was having a heart attack. I thought I was dying. Scott thought I was dying. At one point, I even had Scott punch my chest ’cause I thought my heart was stopping.’

‘Oh, thank God,’ she said, ‘I am so glad to hear you say that. I thought you’d forgotten I was next door and that racket was you two having rowdy sex.’

‘What do you mean, “thank God”?!’ I exclaimed. ‘You’re okay with the idea that I might have been dying – just as long as I wasn’t having loud sex?’

‘Well … yeah,’ she said.

Luckily, that experience hasn’t put her off staying with us in Wales – nor the rest of my family. And it’s easy to see why. Along with more space in our Sully house than our London maisonette, there’s easy access to golf courses and shops, so my mum and dad, especially, have been visiting more often and staying longer. They are capable of entertaining themselves when I’m off working in London, and as long as my mum has her glass of sherry at 5 p.m. and my dad has his single malt, they are quite content to sit by the sea and enjoy my hospitality.
²

They still have a good sense of humour, they still know how to have fun, and each of them takes on a couple of chores around the house when they’re here. As long as my dad was around, garbage never lingered and the dogs’ poo never sat for too long in the courtyard, which was a very good thing given my plan that Saturday night.

No shite in the courtyard. Check.

As soon as my mum and Carole tried in vain to get out of the bathroom, I knew and they knew that a game was in play.

‘The buggers have locked us in here,’ said my mum.

‘They’ll be hiding somewhere,’ answered Carole. ‘I’m not going out there. We need a plan.’

But I knew they would come out – because not to come out would be to admit defeat. That never happened in our games.

Quickly, I unlocked their door, dropped the key, dashed out through the patio doors and took my position with Scott in the smaller courtyard outside my parents’ bedroom, where I put together my home-made Scarecrow Man with the broom and my North Face jacket.

Meanwhile, inside the house, I could hear my sister and my mum come out of the bathroom and quickly dart into my parents’ bedroom, where they were surprised to see my dad.

Remember, I was hiding in the courtyard directly outside my mum and dad’s bedroom.

‘Where is he?’ asked my mum.

‘He’s not in here,’ answered my dad, who is the master of deception and the king of hide-and-seek in our family, and lies through his teeth in these situations. Last Christmas – yes, last Christmas, when he was seventy-six – he fell behind the washer and the dryer during a game. Also, when I was home on a break from filming
Titans
for CBS, and I was visiting Clare and Turner in Milwaukee, I was playing hide-and-seek outside with them and their friends. My dad encouraged me to climb onto their low-hanging garage roof and stay flat and still. The kids, he said, would never find me. He was right. The kids eventually gave up and went inside to bed – and my dad had to come out and help get me down.

Needless to say, my sister and my mum were sceptical of my dad.

‘Get up, so we can check,’ Carole insisted. ‘You’re in on this with them.’

They then made my dad stand in front of them while they whipped open the closet doors, pulled back the duvet and checked underneath the bed for me. Once they’d decided I was not in the room, they figured there was a good chance I’d be in the other bedroom. The two of them then proceeded to march my dad into the next room, where they forced him to carry out a similar search.

I was, of course, watching all of this from outside in the dark courtyard, waiting for as long as it would take until my mum and Carole would give up and get into their beds. My dad was our inside man to ensure that Scarecrow Man could exact his wrath as soon as they went to bed.
³

But things did not go according to my best-laid plans. First of all, I forgot that the jacket I’d grabbed had a fluorescent tag on the zipper, and, second of all, I completely underestimated my opponents.

Suddenly, I glanced into one bedroom and then the other – and discovered they were both empty. No dad, no mum and no sister. Shit. I sent Scott around to the back of the house while I ran to the front. He met up with me back in the courtyard.

‘All the doors are locked.’

Through the bedroom window, I could see the three of them in the hallway, laughing – including my dad, the traitor. Later, my mum told me she’d spotted the glowing tag on my jacket through the window.

Oh, well played. Well, played. But not well enough. I darted to the other side of the house and cut off the power. First the pool lights went out, then the outside lights, and then all the electricity inside the house. Everything went dark.

‘You bastard!’ Carole yelled.

The only way inside, as far as I could figure at that point in the siege, was to crawl across the dogs’ courtyard in the hope that my mum and Carole had forgotten to lock the sliding door that opens onto the main hallway that runs the length of the ‘I’. I took off my white T-shirt
so I wouldn’t have any reflection from the moon. I stretched out flat on the ground and inched my way across the courtyard like I was in a James Bond movie, or maybe a taller Tom Cruise in
Mission: Impossible
, or maybe just John Barrowman, entertainer and nutcase.
⁴

I could see my mum and Carole standing in the dark hall – giggling, yet scared enough that they were still holding my dad in front of them as if he were a shield.

I almost made it to the sliding door. I was so close, but Carole spotted me and immediately leapt across the hall and locked the sliding door. I heard my mum laughing and saying, ‘This is like that Bruce Willis movie where the family is taken hostage.’

‘By a couple of clowns,’ my dad chuckled.

Ten minutes later, I found my way into the house – how, I will never reveal, because this game may not be over. I dropped down onto the bathroom floor, and crawled towards Carole and my mum, who had climbed into the whirlpool bathtub to limit their exposure on three sides, in a vain attempt to stop me from sneaking up behind them. When I did finally leap out at them, even though they had to know I’d been coming – stealth is not my middle name
⁵
– they still screamed like maniacs and pounced on me.

When we finally turned the power back on, and settled into our respective bedrooms,
⁶
I had gravel burn on my chest from crawling across the courtyard, dirt and grime on my shorts and my knees, and scratches on my hands from climbing through a window, but I won – and that’s all that counts.

Scare the hell out of sister and mum. Check.

★

‘If I had a hammer …’

Lee Hays and Pete Seeger, ‘If I Had a Hammer’

1 How to cook fish sticks (in the event I’m a survivor of the apocalypse and that’s all there is to eat).

2 How to rewire a phone (especially one chewed through by a certain dog when a certain partner was not paying attention to that certain dog’s actions).

3 That saying too much is usually better than saying too little.

4 That you could have a very serious ailment and not even know you have a very serious ailment and your highly trained doctor may not even know you have a very serious ailment, but whining and worrying about this very serious (and non-existent) ailment can make you feel much better.

5 That a new furnace can be a beautiful thing (it’s not a classic Mercedes, but I do like to be warm in winter).

6 That two men are always better than one (I mean as partners … um, as a couple … oh, never mind, just read on).

7 That I couldn’t live without him.

I
n the mid thirties, the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, hung out in what is now our guest bedroom in London. At that time, Thomas was in his twenties and in the infancy of his career. If you know anything of his reputation, you’ll know it’s likely Thomas spent more time in the nearby pubs than he spent penning poems in our front room, but inebriated or not, Scott and I have been told that Thomas’s blithe spirit on occasion returns to the house.