The Sound of Laughter (4 page)

I'm not good at exams either. In fact, I even tried to cheat on an exam once in third year. I'd just seen a film at the pictures called
Spies Like Us
with Dan Aykroyd and Chevy Chase. It was OK, a few funny bits, but there was this one scene where they tried to cheat during an exam and that's what gave me the idea.

I was in the middle of revising for my dreaded Chemistry exam. I decided to put my plan to the test. On the day of the exam, I got a scrap of paper and delicately wrote down some answers in the smallest handwriting I could muster. I scrunched the paper up into a tiny ball and then pondered where I could hide it. It had to be somewhere I could whip it out with ease if I was stuck for an answer in the exam. My trouser pocket was too obvious, so was my shirt sleeve. For some reason, and I still can't figure out why to this day, I decided to stick the ball of paper in my ear.

Delicately, I balanced the paper on the edge of my ear, then I sneezed violently and it shot down into my ear and got stuck. I immediately started to panic which is the worst thing you can do in an exam. I grabbed a sharpened pencil and attempted to fish it out but I only
managed to push it further into my head. By this time the other pupils were becoming distracted by the commotion. I looked over to Sister Zar Doin-it in a desperate effort to catch her attention. Eventually she glanced up from her copy of
True Detective
to see me now out of my chair, slapping the side of my head like a maniac. With tears in my eyes and the answers in my ear she sent me to see the nurse.

Our resident school nurse was a she-male, a fella in drag, who only made an appearance a couple of times a year, to check six hundred kids' heads for nits and to dish out the annual TB injection. By now hyperventilating for fear of going deaf, I knocked on her/his door. Stinking of nicotine, 'it' opened the door.

'What's up?' it snapped. Sobbing, I concocted a pathetic story about how I'd been a slave to earache the last few weeks and had only placed paper in my ear because I'd run out of tissues. I don't think it believed a word I was saying for one second. It mumbled something in Latin, looked into my ear with its reusable lighter and advised me to go to hospital. Bloody hell, not the hospital. They had to get my mum out of work. What a complete balls-up.

At the hospital, my mum and a nurse had to pin me to the floor while a doctor ferreted around in my ear with the biggest pair or tweezers I'd ever seen in my life.
I felt like one of the Borrowers. Finally, after what seemed like an hour, the doctor started to drag the paper out of my ear. The noise was deafening. Then suddenly there was a pop, like a cork coming out of a bottle as he removed it from my head. I just prayed to God he didn't open it up and try to read it.

Things didn't work out too bad in the end because I missed my Chemistry exam by going to the hospital. And I managed to get my left ear syringed into the bargain. I've been able to hear perfectly out of my left ear since.

The Wizard of Oz
was approaching fast and the nuns weren't happy when I told them I was going on holiday to Ireland for a fortnight with my mum. This meant I'd end up missing some important rehearsals. But what could I do? We'd had it booked for months. I promised them I'd be back in time for the dress rehearsal.

I'd been going over to Ireland most of my life. Normally we'd fly over but because of the cost we could only go every couple of years. Flying used to be expensive. It's hard to imagine that today with all these budget airlines popping up everywhere. Nowadays you can fly halfway round the world for sod all. I hear people saying,

'How can they afford to fly so cheaply?' and I say,

'Try reaching for your life jacket under your seat
when you're flying into the sea and you'll soon find out.' What do you want when you're paying sod all for your flight? Safety?

This particular Easter the airline prices had got so expensive that we decided to go on the boat from Liverpool instead. Never again. It takes an hour to fly to Belfast on a plane from Manchester. It took eleven hours on the boat. I didn't realise that they travelled so slowly until I ventured up on deck after we'd been sailing for four hours and found I could still see the Liver Building.

It was an overnight crossing and we had toyed with the idea of getting a cabin and our heads down for the night, but my mum's sister Roisin had made the same trip a few weeks previously and said that the nonsmoking lounge had long leather seats that were comfortable enough to sleep on.

I don't know what my Auntie Roisin's idea of comfort was, but we didn't get a wink of sleep all night. The sea was very choppy and we spent most of our crossing sliding up and down the leather upholstery in a storm. We looked like a couple of extras from
The Poseidon Adventure.
It was awful, so awful in fact that last night, when my mum asked me where I was up to with my book and I replied, 'The boat trip to Belfast,' she immediately closed her eyes, shook her head and mouthed the word 'awful'.

As well as enduring the discomfort of the leather seats, the howling wind and the freezing temperature, we also had to listen to the shittiest compilation tape in the world . . . ever. It was on a continual loop for the entire journey. In the middle of the night I resorted to trying to smash the speaker above my head with my shoe and I still get nauseous when I hear 'Moonlight Shadow' played on the pan pipes (mind you, wouldn't anybody?)

Thankfully I had a lovely time in Ireland, but then again I always do. The way of life is much slower over there and it usually takes me a couple days to unwind, but once I've adjusted to it, peace and relaxation are the order of the day. I can honestly say that I'm rarely happier anywhere else in the world.

It does amaze me, though, how laid-back everybody is. You've just got to go with the flow or the lack of it as the case may be. We used to stop at my granny's and some days we wouldn't even get round to leaving the house. We'd have every intention of going out but family would call and after copious amounts of tea and cake we'd always end up falling asleep in front of my granny's big open fire. Next thing you knew you'd wake up to the theme from
Prisoner: Cell Block H
and the day would be over.

When I did manage to leave the house and get out into the fresh air I'd usually find myself walking down
the hill into the local town, Coalisland in County Tyrone. I don't wish to sound patronising but it always seemed to me as if time had stood still – the bus, shops, even the public transport, on the rare occasions it appeared. In fact, apart from the barracks with its sixty-foot-high corrugated-iron fence that looked as though a spaceship had landed in the middle of the town, nothing had changed since 1947. One day I paid a visit to the library and hired out a cassette with my granny's library card. It was an audio cassette of the comedy series Porridge starring Ronnie Barker. I'd seen
Porridge
a few times growing up – it was usually on on Thursday nights after
Top of the Pops.
My parents would laugh at it a lot but I didn't understand it. As I got older I became more familiar with the movie version of
Porridge
that they made in the late seventies.

It held special memories for me as it was one of the few times we all went to the cinema together as a family. My dad took us to the Odeon one night after school.
Porridge
was on a double bill with
Rising Damp
—
The Movie.
I remember my dad falling down in between the seat he was laughing that much.

Maybe that's why I like it so much. I think it's inevitable we inherit some of our parents' tastes. That day I hired
Porridge,
took it back to my granny's house and listened to it. I laughed as hard as my dad had at the
Odeon all those years before. What impressed me the most was the sharp and witty dialogue, delivered with such impeccable timing. From that moment on I became a lifelong fan of
Porridge
and it opened my eyes to the comic genius of Ronnie Barker. It also ignited a spark deep down inside me. Perhaps one day I might be able to be a comic actor like him.

Our holiday drew to a close and it dawned on us that we'd have to endure that bloody awful boat trip back to Liverpool again. Throwing caution to the wind we decided to book a sleeping cabin for the return journey. We also plied ourselves with a cocktail of anti-sickness tablets and sleeping pills before we left my granny's.

Drugged up to the eyeballs, we said our emotional goodbyes and headed for the boat. Little tip for you, always check the date and time on your ticket before you leave. I sarcastically mentioned this to my mum as we stood on the docks watching 'our' boat sail off into the distance. That's the last thing I remember before I passed out.

The rest is just a hazy memory. I do have a vague recollection of my Uncle Rory giving me a fireman's lift up my granny's path but the rest is a blur. After sleeping for seventeen hours we woke around teatime the next day, said our now not so emotional goodbyes once again
and made a second attempt to catch the boat. This time we made it.

But because of the previous day's cock-up I got back a day late for the dress rehearsal. I was in the nuns' bad books and Miss Shambo the school choreographer was furious. She'd spent the weekend teaching the rest of the cast some important dance moves and I'd missed them.

I've no idea how familiar you are with
The Wizard of Oz
but while on their way to the Emerald City, Dorothy and co. are attacked in a forest by some creatures known as the 'Jitterbugs'. They're insects of some kind, or in our case third-year girls in tank tops and ra-ra skirts with their faces painted green. The Jitterbugs supposedly possess your body and make you dance until you drop, or in my case, just drop. Because Miss Shambo said it was too late for me to learn the dance routine and that I'd just have to sit on the stage like a good little Lion while everybody else cavorted around me to 'Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go' by Wham!

'Don't you think it'll look stupid with everybody else dancing except me?' I said to Miss Shambo.

'Yes, I do, but everybody else has rehearsed the steps.' As far as I was concerned I might as well sit on the stage holding a sign up saying 'Sorry, folks, but I was on holiday when they rehearsed this'. In fact, I actually started to make one in Art but ran out of glitter.

Opening night, I nervously sat backstage having some last-minute fur stapled to my helmet and listening through the air vent to the audience filing into the assembly hall. It was my first big performance since the moon landings of '84.

Before I knew it I could hear the orchestral strains of 'Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead' and then, once again, I felt the familiar cold hand of a nun as she touched my tail and she led me towards the darkened stage.

'We'll have to stop meeting like this, Sister,' I whispered into her veil, but she gave me no response.

I leapt out from behind a cardboard bush and roared 'Put 'em up' in my best American accent. It got a few laughs. So far so good. Then came the Jitterbugs. Wham! started playing right on cue and I immediately dropped to the floor as Miss Shambo had ordered, but as I sat watching the cast jitterbugging around me, I thought, hold on, this isn't right, and I could feel the adrenalin rushing through me. There was only one thing to do, so I leapt to my furry feet and like a Lion possessed I began to dance. I hadn't a clue if what I was doing was good or bad, but what I did know was that it was getting big laughs from the audience.

With the laughter ringing in my ears, I jumped off the stage and danced out into the audience. I had no idea why, or where I was going, I just knew that I was on to
something good. I headed towards my family. 'Hello, Mum,' I shouted and gave her a wave. By this time the place was rocking and the audience were in hysterics. They knew this wasn't in the script.

I danced passed the Mayor and the governors, all the while avoiding eye contact with Miss Shambo who was sat in the corner furiously scribbling notes. I made my way back on to the stage and noticed a couple of trees representing the forest (well, they were actually second-year girls with American tan tights over their heads covered in bits of green tissue paper). I had an idea forming. I knew it was quite naughty but if I pulled it off it would bring the house down. I danced to the back of the stage, straight up to a tree and cocked my leg up. The room exploded. I held my leg in the air for a few seconds pretending to urinate.

'Aw, you're dead, Miss Shambo's going to kill you!' said a girl's voice from inside the tree, but I couldn't have cared less. The sound of laughter was deafening now and with that kind of a reaction what I was doing couldn't be all that bad. But Sister Sledge gave me a right bollocking during the interval. She collared me backstage and said,

'Is that what you're going to be when you grow up, a comedian?'

I wanted to say, 'Yes Sister, it is,' but it was hard for me to talk with her hands round my windpipe.

Ten years later in Marks & Spencer I bumped into that same girl. She said hello, I said hello back.

'You don't remember me, do you?' she said. I had to confess I didn't. 'You pissed on me in
The Wizard of Oz,'
she replied, a little bit too loudly for my liking in the middle of Blue Harbour. 'My mum and dad always said you'd end up a comedian,' she added and walked off.

Wham! reached their climax and I returned to my original position at the front of the stage and sat back down. The whole room shook with applause. It felt good.

Being in the show seemed like academic suicide at the time. In fact, that's exactly what it turned out to be. I got one GCSE in Art and Dorothy went back to Kansas.

But I've never regretted it for a second. Performing in the show opened my eyes again to the true potential I had for making people laugh. Not only was I glad that I followed my instincts and played the part but I also got to keep the Lion costume (and wear it sixteen years later on the road to Amarillo).

I once overheard an actor being interviewed on TV-am. The telly was in the next room but I heard the interviewer (I think it was Richard Keys) ask what advice he had for any budding actors who may have been watching and fancied having a go at it.

'I'm afraid you can't just have a go at acting,' the actor snapped back at Richard. 'If you want to be an actor then you've got to eat, sleep and breathe acting, that's if you want to be any kind of success.'

I remember that scaring the shit out of me. I didn't want to eat, sleep and breathe acting, I just fancied having a go at it. You can imagine my relief when I ran
in from the kitchen to discover that the actor being interviewed was Burt Kwouk. But nevertheless it did make me think, maybe I was fooling myself on this performing arts course?

College could be fun sometimes, I have to admit, but I was finding it hard to settle in and I wasn't really enjoying myself. The other students were friendly enough but they seemed pretentious and angry. It was the first time a performing arts course had been set up in Bolton, and of course like all things new, there were a few initial problems. In this case the staff members. It felt as though nobody had actually sat down and thought about what running a performing arts course would entail. As time passed by we slowly began to get more and more suspicious about the tutors' qualifications. Did they know anything about performance? One tutor in particular took us for theatre workshop every Tuesday afternoon. I'll call him Mr Delaney (as that was his name). Unfortunately for him he was a severely cross-eyed man, who we discovered also taught horticulture to disabled people on the other side of town. He'd then drive over to us for the afternoon session with soil under his fingernails and spit on his shoes.

Straight away we didn't see eye to eye. In fact, it was more eye to ear where he was concerned. He'd already
thrown me out of one of his lectures because I said I thought that Shakespeare was only famous because of his last name. God forbid you'd have an opinion.

Mr Delaney resented me for being funny. I remember he completely blew his top in a lecture once. Grabbing me and leaning right into my face, he shouted,

'I crack the funnies in here, Mr Kay, and don't you forget it.'

The truth was Mr Delaney wasn't funny. His jokes were just a series of smutty innuendos and double entendres. He also had a fascination for all things farcical. He thought it was hysterical and he would drop everything (including his trousers) at the slightest hint of performing a farce.

Personally I can take or leave farce. All that running around half naked and tripping over next door's dog never did it for me.

I was never a huge fan of
Fawlty Towers.
I enjoyed the sarcastic, witty banter between Basil and Sybil but I was never too keen on the farcical element. When the guest dies in 'The Kipper and the Corpse' I really just want Basil to call a meeting of all the guests and announce that tragically due to circumstances beyond his control a guest has sadly passed away in the night. I do realise this ruins the whole point and would cut the episode down to ten minutes but I'd prefer that to
twenty minutes of Basil and Manuel running from room to room with a dead body in a hamper. It drives me mad.

So you can imagine how frustrated I was to discover Mr Delaney had entered us for the annual Bolton Drama Festival
^*2
and told the organisers that we'd be performing a farce.

The play was called
The Wages Of Sin
and coincidentally it was written by an Andrew Sachs. Now whether this was the same Andrew Sachs who played Manuel in
Fatuity Towers,
I'm still none the wiser.

I was cast as Lord Peregrine Fortune-Mint, a wealthy eighteenth-century landowner with a shotgun and a penchant for the type of scantily clad maids who like to bend over. Not unlike Mr Delaney who also seemed to have a lingering enjoyment of the maid-bending-over scenes. In fact, it was all we ever seemed to rehearse.

'Now watch what I do,' he'd say in his thick Wigan accent. Then he'd approach the maid gropingly from behind with a naughty look on his face. Licking his lips and outstretching his hands, he leaned forward. Just then his wife walked in and caught him.

I'm referring to the character's wife, of course, not Mr Delaney's. She was shacked up with a marriage guidance counsellor in Clitheroe or so I heard.

Delaney spent so much time perfecting the maid scenes that he seemed not to notice the dwindling attendance figures, as one by one students resigned from the course. This meant that Delaney had to step in at the last minute and play the narrator, a part that he openly relished. Before you could say 'Ooo-er, Missus,' we were off to the Bolton Octagon for our first and final performance. The show was a farce, on more than one level. My heart sank when I saw the quality of some of the other performances that night. They were all thoughtful, funny pieces written and performed by children, some of them half my age. And then there was us. Students from Bolton's prestigious performing arts course, topping the bill with an out-of-date farce and a cross-eyed gardener.

But, as Freddie once sang, 'The Show Must Go On'.

The script required my character to have a moustache and, as funds were short on the old make-up front, I decided to take a trip to a local fancy-dress shop. I was after a real corker of a moustache and luckily they had one very much like the one I'd imagined in stock. Sadly though, it was light brown instead of black.

'We haven't had any black ones in for a while,' the girl
behind the counter confessed. 'I get them from a friend of mine in Hull. She's a taxidermist and –'

I quickly raised my hand to shush her as she'd already provided me with too much information. I counted my change and made for the door.

'Can I interest you in some fake dogshit?' she shouted. 'Two for one this week only?' But I was gone.

Backstage, I eyed up some black-coloured greasepaint on a shelf in the dressing room. I fingered some out of the pot and smeared it on to my light brown moustache. It did the trick and with my newly blackened facial hair I winked at myself in the mirror and headed for the stage.

The lights dimmed, the audience fell quiet and through a small slash in the curtains I could see Delaney taking centre stage. There were a few initial chuckles from the audience but they quickly subsided when they realised that they were in fact Delaney's real eyes and not for comic effect.

Personally I was glad to hear any kind of laughter from the audience as I knew how barren the comic desert was that lay before them. Delaney, in his role of narrator, proceeded to introduce characters:

'Please would you welcome Lord Peregrine Fortune-Mint.' That was my cue.

I bounded out from behind the curtains to take my
opening bow. So far so good. Next it was the turn of my wife, Lady Penelope Fortune-Mint, and sure enough Sonia Cassidy entered as gracefully as a baby elephant and took a bow.

The script then said we embraced and kissed. We'd choreographed it over a hundred times in the boiler room at college. I took her hand, spun her towards me, leaned her back and gave her an enormous kiss on the lips. Then I tilted her up and span her back out to face the audience. That's when they started to laugh and laugh and laugh. I was astonished by the reaction, it was only a kiss. Maybe I'd misjudged the play after all and the night wasn't going to be as painful I'd envisaged. But then I turned to the equally confused Sonia to find that she now had a moustache. Shit! The black greasepaint had rubbed off on her top lip during the kiss and now I realised why the audience was hysterical.

But Sonia was still confused. Subtly I nodded towards her top lip but she was helpless without any kind of reflection. We got through our lines as best we could despite the distracting howls of laughter. I could see Delaney angrily glaring at me from the side of the stage. Well, I think it was me but I couldn't quite tell, as he had one eye on Sonia and the other on my shoes. Either way I knew I was in for a bollocking.

After the show I couldn't tell who was more upset, Sonia or Delaney. I apologised to them both, and tried to reassure them that at least it had got big laughs but neither one of them was having it. My only regret was kissing her so soon. If I'd have known it was going to bring the house down I'd have saved it for the finale.

Something else happened to me that night as I waited nervously in the wings. It was the first time I'd ever done any kind of performing outside of school and occasionally I found myself glancing around, looking for a nun to take hold of my hand and lead me to the stage, but I suddenly realised that those days were over and that's when it hit me. I missed school.

It became clear to me why I'd failed to settle into the performing arts course. Deep down I expected to be returning to school. It was as if I was on a long holiday and soon it would be September. After twelve years of education this sudden change was a slow shock and a massive adjustment. What I was feeling was grief. It wouldn't have been so bad if I hadn't enjoyed school so much, but I did, and now all I wanted to do was go back.

But I couldn't even return for a visit because the nuns demolished the school the day after I left. Well, not them personally, but as far as I was concerned they might as well have driven those JCBs themselves. It was sacrilege.

School had been a very happy time for me. Sure, there were ups and downs, but on the whole I seemed to spend most of my time either laughing or making other people laugh. I also made some brilliant friends who I still cherish to this day. Well, two of them.

I walked up to the school one night during the demolition, climbed over the construction fence and jumped down into what would have been the Art department. Art was the only subject I passed in the end and that was only because I slipped the moderator twenty quid. I'm joking. Actually I was quite good at it and I'd come a long way from drawing cars on the front-room floor with my felt tips. (My mum still blames me for ruining that carpet.)

I continued walking through what remained of the school. It was eerily quiet and very surreal, especially when I found an empty bulldozer sitting in the middle of the dining hall. The nuns would have had a fit if they'd seen it. They'd mopped that floor every day for the last five years.

Contrary to popular myths I was also quite partial to a school dinner. I understand where Jamie Oliver OBE is coming from but personally I could never get enough of chips, beans and Turkey Twizzlers.

And you couldn't argue with the prices. When I was at school you could get a starter, main meal, pudding
and carton of Vimto all for less than 50p. You've got to go to prison to get value for money like that these days.

I was also a sucker for seconds, even though it wasn't allowed. I'd tell the nun on the checkout that she'd given me the wrong change. She'd give me another 50p and I'd get straight back in the queue and buy another dinner. Magic. You can never have too much Manchester tart. Paddy McGuinness will back me up on that one. Only he won't be talking about the pudding.

If the dining hall was full and you just fancied a quick snack you could always opt for a tuck-shop lunch. Within easy reach of all amenities, you could pick up a carton of orange, a bag of cheesy corn puffs and a Texan, again for less than 50p. I sound like the presenter of a travel programme now. Our school tuck shop used to be run by Sister Swingout. She was an elderly nun but sharp as a tack when it came to business. Aided and abetted by two girl prefects, she had a strict no-nonsense policy and I would often find myself at the cold end of her ice pops.

Nevertheless, we'd get great enjoyment from winding her up, confusing her by asking for sweets that didn't exist.

'Have you had any Purple-Headed Warriors, Sister?'

or

'Have you got any of those Strawberry Strap-ons, Sister?'

She'd just shake her head in confusion.

And if we weren't inventing confectionery, then we'd just ask her for things she didn't sell like 'A Wham bar and twenty Benson & Hedges please, Sister', or 'A Highland toffee and a Packet of Three'. She'd just swear at us in Latin and chase us away with her mop.

I tried packed lunches for a few months but they weren't for me. I never found two spam sandwiches and a Munch Bunch yogurt very filling. There's only so much you can cram into an
A-Team
lunch box and I'd still always end up having a proper hot dinner as well. I was a growing boy at the end of the day.

But all that was gone for ever and there wouldn't be any more school dinners. I sat aloft the bulldozer, looking around at the empty room. What a waste. Surely they could have used this building for something else, evening classes or maybe they could have turned it into an enormous Whacky Warehouse for kids.

It wouldn't have needed adjusting that much, just fill the library up with coloured balls, stick a bumpy slide on the side of the convent and they would have made a fortune. I think the nuns would have probably objected, not that there were that many of them left to object any more, as the Sisters of the Divine Virginity were falling short on their recruitment drive. Well, what did they expect? There were no bright colours, no sex and no
dental plan. I mean, what's the incentive? We used to send them a valentine card every year from Jesus, just to keep their spirits up.

This decline had been taking place for the last ten years, since someone had decided to change Mount St Joseph from an all girls' school into a mixed comprehensive. The nuns had had things cushy until 1980 but then the lads arrived and it all went tits up for the nuns. Talk about a shock, they'd never seen such behaviour in all their holy lives. And by the time I arrived in '84 things had gone from bad to worse. The nuns were dropping like flies and the defiant ones were on double novenas. It reminded me of that film
Dangerous Minds,
but without the rapping or Michelle Pfeiffer.

There were a few rotten apples in my year and when I say rotten I mean proper mentalists, who thrived on rule-breaking and bucking the system. They would go to any lengths to tip the nuns over the edge of insanity. From setting desks on fire to urinating on books (or vice versa). Every day was a different box of delights at Mount St Joseph.