So Me (34 page)

Before the start of our last ever Channel 4 series we had a big party in London to thank all the people who had worked on
So
and
V Graham Norton
. The venue was near London Bridge under some railway arches, and slowly the big, dank space filled up with hundreds of people. I looked at the sea of faces and was overwhelmed by how many people it had taken to keep the show on the air over the years. Obviously I knew all the researchers and producers, but the people I really appreciated seeing at the party were the guys who opened the curtain for me night after night, the cameramen who were never afraid to let me know at rehearsal whether a joke was funny or not, all the people who didn’t need to care about the show but did. I was going to miss them.

A new set, title sequence and music: we packed our bags and headed off to the States to film the final series. To say that New York was cold is like saying that Hitler was naughty. I’ve never experienced anything like it. We had all been warned about the city’s winter, but somehow our little British coats didn’t seem to work. About a week after we had arrived I was doing a photo shoot for
Hello!
magazine in order to promote the show. I stood on the roof of the Maritime Hotel in Chelsea. Snow lay all around and the wind was blowing off the Hudson river. I had never felt so cold in my entire life. I started remembering a documentary I’d heard on Radio 4 about hypothermia and how just before it killed you you began to feel warm. I was starting to feel warm. I knew that I was going to die one day, but I really didn’t want it to be during a
Hello!
photo shoot. I was beginning to regret my decision not to invite them into my lovely home. The
photograph ended up on the cover and I looked like a freeze-dried pig with an eye infection.

I wasn’t the only one feeling the cold and the desire to be in my lovely home. One Sunday afternoon I went to put something in the bin in the kitchen. A sudden movement and there, running across the room to explore the gap behind the washing machine, was a small mouse. If an alligator had crawled out of my toilet I couldn’t have been more frightened or horrified. Given that I have survived both rats and cockroaches, I don’t know why it affected me so badly, but gasping and flapping my hands like a penguin chick I ran out of the room. I heard a little scuttling sound and, turning around, saw that the fucking mouse was following me. My ensuing scream seemed to convey fairly effectively to the mouse that he was not welcome. He headed for the bookshelves. I leant against the wall, frozen with fear like a teenage girl in a slasher movie. I looked around, suddenly blind to the pristine minimalism of my beautiful house; I might as well have been living in the local council dump. My first thought was that my mother was coming to stay and there was no way she was going to tolerate a room-mate with a tail and a penchant for cheese. I headed off to the corner shop and returned with a couple of traditional mousetraps. I baited them and put one by the bin and the other one where I had last seen my tiny trespasser.

A week passed and there was no sign of the mouse, alive or dead. The next weekend I was having everyone from work over for drinks and I felt that having mousetraps lying around didn’t exactly scream glamour. I decided that the mouse must have gone out the same way it had come in and threw the traps away. The day after the party I was coming down
the stairs and there, standing by the bottom step, was the mouse. It looked at me with a mixture of apology and embarrassment and sheepishly headed off to hide under a chair by the window. This time my fear was replaced by rage. ‘Right, fucker! You are going to die!’ I yelled out loud as I stormed out the front door. I returned with a series of new mousetraps, but these ones seemed much more lethal. They were glue-boards. Rather naïvely I assumed that the glue on the boards also contained some sort of poison or lethal fumes, but, as I was to discover, what they are called is exactly what they are. Boards with glue on them.

A couple of days later I came into the kitchen and there, stuck to the board, was the mouse. Apart from having a large bit of cardboard stuck to it, the little creature seemed very much alive. I considered my options. I had to kill it, but how? I guessed that you were supposed to hit it on the head with a hammer or something, but there was no way I could do that. Perhaps I should just feed it occasionally until it died of old age? It gave a great shrug and I realised that I had better act quickly or it might get away. I can’t believe that animal rights protesters spend their Saturdays throwing paint on women in fur coats when they could be picketing every corner shop that sells glue-boards.

Horror upon horror, I found myself filling a bucket. I was going to drown the mouse. Using a pair of kitchen tongs I lifted up the board and threw it in the bucket. It was then that I made an interesting discovery – glue-boards float. I now had a mouse on a tiny surfboard floating aimlessly around the bucket. Although the rodent seemed more than happy to ride the waves for the time being, I needed the horror to end. I grabbed the tongs and plunged board and
surfer beneath the surface. I was letting out little involuntary yelps and could hardly bear to look, but when I did the mouse was still alive, staring up at me from the depths of the bucket. I began to doubt myself. Were mice amphibians? After what seemed an eternity the answer finally came back as ‘no’. The whole thing was wildly traumatic. I felt like Lucille Ball starring in
The Silence of the
Lambs
. What made things even worse was that I had seen not only the first
Stuart Little
movie but also the sequel. I sat on the kitchen floor having just endured
The
Passion
of
Stuart
Little
as directed by Mel Gibson.

Apart from my cold-blooded murderer tendencies and the terrible weather, the other main shock in New York was going back to doing one show a week. I still went into the office most days, but usually all I did was check my emails and compare hangovers with everyone else. Not only had my workload decreased but I was also suddenly without my biggest excuse for not drinking – my car. My resolve to behave like a grown-up after turning forty hadn’t lasted very long. On top of that, the old cliché that the city never sleeps turns out to be true. Every bar stays open until 4 a.m. and I felt it was my duty to be in all of them all the time. Every time I spoke to my mother she would say, ‘You looked a bit tired on the show this week.’ It became a slight concern to me which would come to an end first, the series or me.

I found myself increasingly leaving Jon and the team to get on with the day-to-day planning of the shows. I sometimes stumbled into meetings about the show, but mostly I was just told on the day what was planned and what I needed to do. At first I felt very guilty, but then I’m afraid to admit that I began to enjoy it. It felt good that after all these years
of working together, Jon and I were so in sync that I could trust him completely to come up with ideas that I liked and would feel comfortable doing. Although Channel 4 was paying for these shows and we were making them for a British audience, we couldn’t help but see them as ten pilots for our Comedy Central series. Yet again it was hard to feel sentimental about the end of our six-year run at Channel 4 because we were so excited about our new ventures. We went to meetings at Comedy Central where people showed us what the billboards advertising our show would look like, and yes, there would be one on Sunset Boulevard!

In Britain I have been very careful to make sure that any press I do is only about the show. I don’t go to many premieres or showbiz parties, and I tend not to eat in the restaurants that have the paparazzi hanging around outside. Trying to launch a new show in the massive market that is America is a very different ball game. There are so many new shows, so many performers, so many channels that to have any chance of succeeding, you have to do a bit of jumping up and down and waving. For the first time in my life I employed a publicist to help me promote the forthcoming Comedy Central show. I’m still not very clear about what they do, but I knew that I was supposed to have one. People were asking me who my lawyer was, should they speak to my manager as well as my agent? It seemed that starting to work in the States was like learning a new language.

I was very aware that I should have been finding the whole process daunting and nerve-racking, and maybe once we started actually making the shows for America I would, but I have to admit that at that time I was just finding the whole
experience exciting and surreal. I was well aware that I might be just another in a long line of British performers to fail miserably in the US, but that really didn’t bother me. As my experience with the hippies taught me all those years ago, the only true failure is not making the attempt.

The last show ended with no great fanfare or fireworks. I simply thanked the viewers and Channel 4 and signed off for the last time. We had another goodbye party. I was still finding it hard to believe that I wouldn’t be working with the people I’d grown to know so well over the last six years at 4. Katie Taylor, who had been our constant contact person and champion at the Channel, had never seemed like ‘one of them’. She’d always fought for what we wanted and was the poor person who had had to defend us every time we crossed a line or broke some regulation or other. She was also the best present-buyer I’d ever met. Although we’d been at endless parties together over the years, it seemed really sad that she couldn’t be with us for our last ever Channel 4 wrap party when we had it in New York because she had to go to her parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary. And yet she’d still found the time to send us gifts. A real class act.

In the midst of all our American excitement we would occasionally remember that we were actually supposed to be thinking up a new show to do on the BBC. At the time of writing we still have no idea what it is, but hopefully when this book is published it’ll be on the air and not a complete disaster. In Jon and God we trust.

Looking forward seems like a very natural and almost healthy thing to be doing at this stage, having spent so many months delving into my past as I’ve worked on this book. I’m very
struck by how I haven’t lived my life in a straight line, but in fact I think we all do this – we’re constantly passing Go and starting again. We may not pick up £200 each time, but we always seem to collect some more emotional baggage or, if we are very lucky, a little bit of wisdom. There have been so many beginnings and endings in my life so far, and where I’m at now is simply the start of a new round.

Earlier this year I went back to attend an anniversary party at Stardance in San Francisco. Maybe if I hadn’t been writing this book I wouldn’t have bothered, but I’m so glad I did. Everyone was there – Erica, Geoph, Mindy, Jem, Obo, even a heavily pregnant Faith Shines Help. We looked at old photos, I admired the new basement, we laughed about my cooking . . . but what struck me was that none of them remembered, because they had never known, how important they had all been in my life. To them I was just some clueless Irish boy who had passed through the house along with countless others, but to me it had been a major turning point after which, I had always believed, I became a very different person. As I picked at the vegan buffet and chatted about a new retirement home that was opening for activist pensioners, it dawned on me that in many ways I was wrong. Despite all the lessons and memories I had taken away from Stardance, I had been a fish out of water then, and, in very simple terms, I was still.

After the end of the filming in New York, I packed my laptop and headed off to Cape Town for some sun and one last burst of writing. I got back this morning, and as I write this I’m sitting tanned but tired, surrounded by boxes and dust in my new London house. I have been trying to finish this book for months, but now that I’m finally at that point
I find I’m not sure how to. There isn’t a single certainty in my future, and yet I feel very calm. Perhaps the American show will fail, maybe the BBC will hate everything I do for them, but how bad can that be? Hopefully nobody will get hurt in the process and I will just get on with doing something, anything, else.

Writing the story of my life has been hugely enjoyable for me. Like everyone else I can find things to moan about, so it was wonderful to look back and see that I’ve lived the life of my dreams – and not many people get to say that. Yes, there has been some rain along the way, but mostly, overwhelmingly, it has been sunshine. I’ve won awards, I’ve been turned into a waxwork in Madame Tussaud’s, I’ve leg-wrestled John Malkovich, been slapped by Sophia Loren, danced with Tony Curtis. I’ve loved and lost and hope to love again, and now, it seems, I’ve written a book.

Thank Yous

T
HIS BABY HAS TAKEN ME
a bit over nine months to produce, but like all babies it didn’t just pop out on to the shelves all by itself. Huge thanks to my übermidwife Katy Follain from Hodder & Stoughton for her incredible patience and encouragement. I’m also very grateful to Rowena Webb and all the other doctors and nurses at Hodder for the design and marketing and all the other jobs I didn’t even know they were doing.

Melanie Coupland, who held my hand and yelled ‘Push!’, not just while I was trying to finish this book but also during all my working life; Dylan and Tracy, and everyone at TalkBack – thank you.

Graham Stuart and Jon Magnusson, my showbusiness husbands: without you work would be work; with you it is the greatest fun in my life – well, apart from wanking.

Thanks to the legions of researchers, associate producers and producers who have given up so much of their time, energy and passion just to try and make me look good. A special thank you to my assistant Alex – it’s a lonely, dirty, thankless job, but, as they say about oral sex, someone’s got to do it.

My friends – old ones like Niall, Mike, Helen, Nicky, Maureen, Stephan, Gill and Darren, and new ones like Maria, Carrie, Carl, Daz, Tim, Daniel, Dennis, Jamie, Leslie,
Louise and Craig and so many more – I don’t know why so few of you ended up in these pages. You are really important to me, just not when I’m writing a book, it seems.