So Me (18 page)

James knew that usually if I agreed to a date it was only because I couldn’t think of any way to get out of it. What made this one so remarkable was that I couldn’t wait to see Scott again. I tidied my miniature palace – just in case – and headed off to the bar where we’d agreed to meet. I got there on time and sat trying not to get too drunk too soon. I flicked through the free papers you find in gay bars and fought the temptation to look at my watch too often. Scott was late. The large wet towel of shame that comes with being stood up had just started to wrap itself around me when suddenly there he was! Smiling and apologetic, he told me that he had got lost. We chatted and laughed and gossiped all evening. It was that total rarity in the world of dating – we were
both
having a good time! That night Scott ended up with me in my monk’s cot and there were no interruptions.

Scott was only in London for a few days before visiting his cousin in Paris and from there heading back to his life in LA. The whole thing had that heady intensity of a holiday romance, where you throw yourself into a passionate relationship completely because you know you won’t have to reap the consequences. On the Friday morning we said goodbye at my flat. He asked me to get a Eurostar ticket and come with him to Paris for the weekend, but I had to say no. I had rent to pay now and simply couldn’t afford it. I watched him through my window walking away. He turned and waved and I realised I might never see him again. Before he had even walked out of view I had picked up the phone to ring Eurostar. They had a ticket for later that day. Fuck the rent, the ticket was mine!

I left a message for Scott with Stuart, asking him to call me. He rang and we arranged to meet in a bar I knew in the Marais. This weekend was going to be perfect.

I had never been on Eurostar before, and that night I learnt a valuable lesson. A high-speed rail link between London and Paris is a great idea, but it is only good if it works. We were delayed for three hours. I sat looking out at a Kent hedge and it dawned on me that in all my romantic spontaneity I had failed to get a phone number or address for Scott in Paris. He would be sitting in a bar assuming that I had got cold feet and wasn’t coming. My friend Helen, who was still living in Paris with her French husband, was away that weekend so she couldn’t help. I tried directory enquiries to get a number for the bar but they couldn’t find it. It became clear that there was nothing I could do except wait for the train to inch its way forward towards Paris.

I got to Paris and did the only thing I could think of,
which was head to our meeting place, even though by now I was so late that there was no way that Scott would still be waiting. I got the metro, and when I got to the Marais I ran off in the direction I thought the bar was in. It turned out I didn’t know the area as well as I thought. In the past I had always had Stephan and tankards of red wine inside me to help me and sharpen my senses. I turned corner after corner, each street looking as familiar as the last, but none of them was the one I was looking for. I stopped to gather my thoughts for a minute. I was feeling fairly hopeless at this stage, but at the same time I knew there was nothing to do but carry on searching. I chose a street and headed down it. Had I seen that shop before? Was that the same blue building I’d walked past five minutes ago? And suddenly, there was Scott right in front of me . . . Scott! I had literally bumped into him. We hugged and kissed and beamed at each other. What in the cold light of day might have been described as ‘a happy coincidence’ in that dark street in that foreign city in the dead of night seemed like a miracle of cosmic proportions. We were in Paris and we were officially in love.

The rest of the weekend was one romantic cliché after another. Laughing, drinking, talking, fucking, it was like one of those cheap romantic videos they make for karaoke machines. I often wonder what would have happened to Scott and me if there hadn’t been any room on the Eurostar or if our meeting had all gone smoothly and we hadn’t shared our date with destiny when we met in the street. I don’t believe in love at first sight, and yet there has to be that moment when you are hanging above the abyss of love and you decide to let go and plummet out of control towards
total madness. By the time I was sitting on the train heading back to London I was looking in the papers to check on airfares to Los Angeles. There is no better feeling than falling in love; it’s just when you land that it hurts.

Things couldn’t be better. I was in love, and also on the career front things had suddenly dramatically improved. At the previous Edinburgh in 1995, two women had come into my life: Melanie Coupland and Anna Wilkes. They ran a talent management company that was part of the production company TalkBack, which was owned by Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones. After my show one night they were waiting to speak to me. I knew that TalkBack Management were supposed to be very good and that they represented people I really admired like John Hegley, Sally Philips and Angus Deayton. Melanie is dark while Anna is fair, and as they sat on either side of me having a drink I tried to work out what they wanted. Could they really be offering to represent me? I can only imagine how unconvincing my ‘I’ll have to think about it’ was. True, John and Helen had got me gigs and David and Mark had produced my shows, but TalkBack Management were the gateway to the next level and to super shiny telly . . .

So now I had every angle covered: I had a boyfriend and a top showbiz agent. Except that I appeared to be living alone and not earning any money. Scott sent me some cash to put towards an airfare and Nicola offered me some to cover the rent, but I still couldn’t see how I could swing a trip to LA to be with the man of my dreams. Then, as has happened so often in my life in times of trouble, religion came to my aid.

Father Ted
was written by Graham Linehan and Arthur
Matthews and they were represented by TalkBack Management. The second series of
Father Ted
was being cast, and Melanie and Anna asked the boys if there was anything in it for their new Irish client. ‘No’ was the instant response, but Melanie and Anna persisted and eventually got me an audition for the part of Father Noel Furlong. I thought I was totally wrong for the part because I was too young and too Protestant, but I went along anyway.

The good thing about auditioning for Father Noel was that he spoke in long speeches. It was just showing off without the actual acting stuff of dialogue or reactions. The director and producer laughed quite a bit and I knew that it had gone well, but I assumed that I hadn’t got the part when I didn’t hear anything for a few weeks. Graham told me later that after my audition they had said, ‘Well, that was funny, but now we had better find someone who is right for it,’ but they had never got around to auditioning anyone else.

Being in
Father Ted
is the only cool job I’ve ever had. In retrospect I feel so proud and lucky to have been part of what is undoubtedly a classic sitcom, but at the time it was mostly a promise of money to come that meant I could go ahead and plan my trip to LA. The episode of
Father Ted
that I was in would rehearse and film in early January, so just after Christmas I flew into the sunny arms of Scott and California. Again we had a perfect time together. Even his dog liked me. I had no idea how we could make this long-distance relationship work, but I did know that I didn’t want to let this man go.

Back in London I found myself in a rundown hotel behind Tottenham Court Road rehearsing
Father Ted
. It was quite daunting walking into this tight-knit group. Dermot Morgan,
Ardal O’Hanlon, Pauline McLynn and Frank Kelly had already filmed one whole series and had just got back from filming all the location scenes for series two in the west of Ireland. When I walked in, all the talk was about Ardal’s hair. He had got it cut for his wedding but now it no longer matched the scenes they had already filmed. Through the gritted teeth of fixed smiles the production team agreed to get a wig made.

I loved the rehearsals and was made to feel incredibly welcome. If this had been my experience of acting when I had first left drama school, I’m sure I would have stuck with it for longer. This was fun. Ardal, Dermot, Pauline and Frank took their jobs seriously, but they had a laugh about everything else. Of course I suppose we could afford to relax and have a good time because it was a great script, so there wasn’t that terrible anxiety about whether an audience would like it or not.

The episode was called ‘Hell’ and was about Ted and Dougal going on holiday but then discovering that the caravan they had been promised was double-booked with a tragic youth group led by the terrifying Father Noel. It seems an awful thing to say, given that I’m in it, but ‘Hell’ is still my favourite episode of
Father Ted
.

On the third day of rehearsals, I got a call from Melanie at TalkBack. I had a meeting with a production company called Rapido about co-hosting a game show called
Carnal
Knowledge
. The main host was going to be a woman called Maria McErlane. As far as I’m concerned, Maria is up there with champagne and masturbation in terms of things that make life worth living. She is wise and funny in equal measure, and for my fortieth birthday she gave me a card
that said, ‘It’s not homophobia, everyone hates you.’ I had first met her in Edinburgh, and although we had got on I hadn’t expected her to remember me, but when
Carnal
Knowledge
was commissioned as a late-night series for ITV it was Maria who suggested me. A short meeting with her and Peter Stuart and Mark Ford from Rapido who would be making the show, and the job was mine.

The next morning I walked back into rehearsals for
Father
Ted
and told them that I would be making twenty-six episodes of a new game show. It seemed incredible that the change in my fortunes could be so sudden and so complete. It didn’t matter how little I was going to get paid for
Carnal
Knowledge
, any amount multiplied by twenty-six was going to be a fortune for me.

I got back to work, but unfortunately I’m one of those people who gets worse the more they rehearse. By the time we did the final run-through in front of the suits from Channel 4, my performance had gone in a rather worrying direction. The suits huddled and discussed what they had seen. Declan Lowney the director and Lissa Evans the producer approached me. They wondered if I could possibly make Father Noel ‘less frightening’. This was their polite way of telling me to stop playing him as a particularly predatory paedophile. I got the message.

When we got to the studio everything changed. The sets did half the acting for us, and bizarrely they had shipped the old battered caravan they had used for the location shots over to London to be used for the interior. Cameras were stuck through the windows as Dermot, Ardal, my youth group and I piled in as if we were in some sort of
Blue Peter
challenge. Luckily we didn’t have to shoot the scenes too
many times because I don’t think the caravan would have made it. After the final particularly violent dancing scene, we discovered that we had bent the whole thing so out of shape that the door no longer opened. The taping stopped as we all clambered out of one of the windows.

When Melanie told me that Arthur and Graham were going to write me into another episode of the series I was thrilled. That episode was set on a plane and, rather like the caravan, they brought a whole plane into the studio. We sat in rows, faces pressed into cameramen’s bums while the audience sat in rows staring at the outside of the plane. I didn’t have much to do, but I just loved being a part of the
Father Ted
family, if only as a distant relative.

If filming
Ted
had shown me how much fun work could be, making
Carnal Knowledge
showed how much work work could be. Twenty-six hours of television filmed over nine days, one hundred and four contestants telling us every tawdry detail of their sex life . . . each night I crawled home exhausted and with the sort of pounding headache you’d accept if you’d been trying to find a cure for cancer all day, but not if you’d been asking people to draw their favourite sexual position. The worst shows were the ones we did first thing in the morning. An audience that had been picked up from shop doorways stared at contestants being forced to down a couple of bottles of beer. This was our warm-up. Then Maria and myself would come bounding out with our shiny clothes and dull eyes.

In the end we banned doggie-style from the ‘draw your favourite sexual position’ round because we both ran out of things to say about it. I wasn’t sure whether straight people were really that fond of doing it from behind or whether it was
just easy to draw. Despite the paltry prizes on offer, some of the contestants took it all horribly seriously. One night, as Maria and I walked out of the studios to find our taxis, we saw a contestant and her boyfriend’s mother having a full-blown fist-fight in the car park. Apparently the mother felt her son had been ‘let down’, while the girl screamed at her mother-in-law that she was a ‘filthy cow’. For a moment we toyed with the idea of stepping in to try and diffuse the situation, but only for a moment. We drove off as they fought on.

Carnal Knowledge
brought me three things: a great friend in Maria, a fair amount of money, and my first taste of fame. Because the show was on in the middle of the night, our fan base was quite quirky: taxi drivers, students and the bouncers of the lap-dancing club near my flat to be precise. Mainstream we weren’t, but I quite enjoyed my limited notoriety.

The new money meant that I could afford to have a birthday party for my thirty-third birthday and Scott could fly over to be there and meet all my friends. I invited everyone I knew to the upstairs room of a gay bar in Soho called the Yard. I don’t think I had attempted to have a party since the one I had imagined I was having back at university. I remember Scott and I sitting on the tube as we headed into town, both so nervous – him because he thought there were going to be so many people there, me because I thought there was going to be nobody there. In the event it all went well, and although I realised that Jesus had achieved a little bit more than I had by the time he died aged thirty-three, I still felt pretty good. I had lots of great friends, a man I loved and, for the first time in my life, some money in the bank.