The Sound of Laughter (7 page)

The nuns never mentioned the argument for pro-abortion once and they quickly bundled Natalie Cunningham out of the hall when she informed them
that her sister had had an abortion. I half expected to see Natalie's head impaled on the school gates at home time – come to think of it I never did see her again . . . shit!

It made me realise how dangerous Catholicism could be. When I was at school I was always told that if I was bad God would punish me and in the same breath I was told that God would forgive me for my sins whatever they were. It was a bit like being slapped one minute and getting a big cuddle the next. Catholicism sure knew how to mess with a child's head.

The confusion began to get me down but still I never once questioned my faith. Now I don't want to get all
Da Vinci Code
on you (and I'm sure the publishers, Random House, would prefer if I didn't either, they've have had enough drama with Dan Brown in the dock without Peter Kay ending up in court again! I say again as I did jury service in '96. And I lost a fortune on bus fares that the court wouldn't refund, the swines.) But over the years I've come to the conclusion that Catholicism is rife with hypocrisy and confusion. It's preyed on people like myself while people like myself were busy praying. (Do you like what I did with the word praying there? Hey I don't waste my evenings.)

For example, I was always taught to go to church every Sunday and we did until my mum discovered a loophole in the Bible. It basically says keep the Sabbath
day holy; it doesn't actually say anything about having to go to church. So we just used to watch
Praise Be!
with Thora Hird and have a sing-song.

I also believe that a man called Jesus did walk the earth at one time but I don't think he was the superhero that the Bible makes him out to be. Could he really turn water into wine? Did he raise people from the dead? Well if David Blaine can't survive underwater in a tank for seven days without needing medical attention, then I very much doubt it. I think Jesus was just an ordinary person like me and you (well, I'm comparing you with myself in the hope you're not a mentalist). I believe that Jesus spoke about peace, he spoke about turning hate into love, tears into laughter, war into peace and — hold on a minute, this is Johnny Mathis. Jesus's teachings spread and quickly he built up a passionate following. People hung on to his every word, some would even walk for miles just to catch a glimpse of him. I can only imagine it must've been like that for Henry Winkler when he played the Fonz in
Happy Days.
Ultimately Jesus's success bred contempt, people of power weren't fond of this hip and trendy preacher and before you could say 'Happy Days' Jesus was beaten, whipped, nailed to a cross and crucified. They didn't understand him, so they murdered him, in their ignorance and fear.

But Jesus had the last laugh. Apparently two days later on Easter Sunday he came back from the dead. Well, he'd have been daft not to with all those chocolate eggs knocking around. I mean, look at me, I bought three Yorkie eggs from the Texaco garage just because they'd been reduced to a quid. Pig that I am.

Later, after the crucifixion, Judas, who shopped Jesus for thirty pieces of silver (about £16.50) could no longer live with the guilt of his betrayal, committed suicide by hanging himself from a tree. A scene that ITV decided to cut out of
Jesus Christ Superstar
in their infinite wisdom, when they showed it last Easter Sunday afternoon. So not only did it look as though Judas didn't have a conscience but it also looked as if he got away with it.

The reason I'm telling you all this is that basically I believe in the same principles as Jesus or, as they've now become known in the last few paragraphs, 'The Johnny Mathis Principles'. And these fundamental teachings are at the core of most religions.

Basically we should try to follow the fundamental rules that were laid out for us in the Ten Commandments (obviously use your own judgement when coveting your neighbour's ox). Treat others like you would like to be treated (that obviously excludes people like Gary Glitter). And try to stand up for old people on
public transport every once in a while (no matter how badly they may smell of piss and biscuits). If we all did this then I'm confident that the world will be a better place for all of us.

One thing I've never been keen on is the Catholic Church continually turning to its parishioners for funding. I think people should support their parish when it comes to the odd broken window or maybe the annual trip to Lourdes but why doesn't the Vatican dip its hand in its deep pocket when it comes to the missions and training new priests? Why do the parishioners have to fork out all the time?

The Catholic leaders seem to sit on all of this wealth in the Vatican, and why? What good does it do? Why are all of these priceless possessions gathering dust when the riches they would provide could be put to better use elsewhere? The Catholic leaders tell us that they're there to honour God, but it just doesn't make sense to me when Jesus supposedly led a meagre life of virtual poverty.

The one thing that illustrates my point better than most is the final scene at the end of
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
(I can't remember much of the film as I was on a double date with Paddy at the time and he was trying to get to second base with Geraldine Sloane. He thought he had his hand on her bust for most of the film
but when the lights came up at the end it turned out to be her handbag. 'I thought she'd had her nipple pierced,' he confessed to me later on the bus home.) After chasing after the Holy Grail for most of the badly CGI'd film, Indiana Jones's quest finally reaches its climax in a cave of some sort. The Holy Grail takes the form of Christ's chalice but instead of one, they are presented with a choice of two. The stupid greedy Nazi goes for the most expensive-looking chalice but it's the wrong choice and he falls to his death (with a badly dubbed scream). But thankfully R Indy knows his stuff, he's studied the subject. He knows that Jesus didn't have a pot to piss in and so he chooses the knackered-looking chalice and lo and behold it's the Holy Grail.

I quizzed Sister Matic about this in RE when we got back to school after half-term, but the only answer that she could provide was 'Insolence', which she screamed at me before throwing a board duster at my head. I was lucky – twenty years earlier she probably would have just pulled out a gun and shot me for asking such a question.

That reminds me of a very funny story I once heard the late, great Dave Allen tell. He said that when he was a child his parents sent him away to a Catholic boarding school deep in the Irish countryside. They drove him up to the gates, he got out with his suitcase and, frightened, he walked up to a huge pair of wooden doors. He banged
on the knocker as hard as he could and eventually a fierce-looking nun answered the door.

'Yes?' she bellowed.

'Er . . . my name is David Allen, Sister, and I've come to stay,' he replied nervously.

'And are you going to behave yourself, boy?' asked the nun.

And then Dave Allen said that he looked over the nun's shoulder and saw a man nailed to a cross hanging from a wall, and said,

'You bet your sweet arse I'm going to behave myself, Sister.'

I was a great admirer of Dave Allen. He liked to send up the Catholic Church and his material was considered very controversial at the time. I certainly sympathised with his humour, being educated by the nuns and having served as an altar boy for a total of seven years, man and boy. I would like to say that I did it for the love of Our Lord Jesus Christ but it was actually because Jason Wallace told me that he'd got a tenner from a widow for serving a funeral.

After a while, though, I discovered he must have been lying because I did a whole raft of funerals and never got paid once. I even used to pretend to cry. I could have got a BAFTA for the heartbreaking performances I gave up at that crematorium.

Being an altar boy also meant that I was on call twenty-four/seven. I'm surprised the priest didn't issue all the altar boys with beepers like they have on
ER.
Because whenever a funeral came in and the nuns got a call, I was dragged out of school and sent up to the church to serve. To hell with my education, Jesus is calling. One minute I'd be in PE, walking across an upturned gym bench and the next thing you know I'd be kneeling beside a coffin pretending to cry.

I also had to serve Mass every Sunday. My mum was so proud, though, seeing me up there in all my altar-boy regalia. Being on the altar gave me the chance to be in front of the congregation every week and was my first experience of being in front of a large crowd. And believe me, I played in front of some packed houses – we could have about seven hundred people in some Sundays.

But if truth be told it wasn't a very glamorous profession; in fact, it was hard work. We had to help the priest serve the Mass, wash his hands, pour his wine, shake his bells – we rarely had time to kneel down. If it'd said 'Slave Wanted' in the job description I'd have given it a miss.

One job I hated doing was the Eucharistic plate. This was a solid silver plate that you had to shove under each member of the congregation's chins when they came up for Holy Communion. It was a disgusting job – I had to
deal with bad breath, rotten teeth and I saw more tongues than a cut-price prostitute.

And tongues of every shape, size and colour too. In fact it would be a good Sunday if you caught sight of a pink one. Especially when everybody had been out on the ale the night before. Most tongues would be purple or puce and you could smell the drink even before they got to the altar rails. Some of the congregation would still be drunk. I remember the priest saying 'The body of Christ' to a bloke who was clearly still legless, to which he replied, 'Cheers.'

We used to get what we called 'the shakers' too. These were mostly old people. God forgive me but how their tongues could shake. It'd be like a scene from
The Exorcist
some Sundays. I'd have to chase their tongues round with my plate in case they dropped the Eucharist on to the carpet. I remember one old dear shut her eyes and said 'Amen' and her teeth slid out of her gob. I had to crawl under the bench to get them back for the dirty bitch.

But there were some perks to the job too. I could bag the best palms for my mum on Palm Sunday. The best ashes on Ash Wednesday. I also managed to get my mum some holy water from Pope John Paul II's private vestry in Rome. My mum loved her holy water, she used to pour it into a font the shape of the Virgin Mary on the
wall near the front door. We used to bless ourselves every morning before we went to school. Only, one time she got the holy-water bottle mixed up with some white spirit that sat next to it under the sink and we had to go to school stinking of turps.

I like to think that by serving on the altar I've more than done my bit towards securing my place in heaven. And what a vision of heaven it is too. Millions of people queuing in single file up an endless white marble staircase, there's plenty of mist and tireless angels fly to and fro on administration duties. If you've ever seen the film
A Matter of Life and Death
with David Niven then you'll know what I'm on about. And if you've never seen that film then you've certainly missed a treat. Take a tip from me and keep a lookout for it. They usually show it in the afternoon before Channel 4 racing.

Hopefully, I shouldn't have to queue up for too long before I get to the pearly gates (like I say, being an altar boy is a bit like having one of those fast-track passes that Alton Towers do, remember wink, wink). And my idea of heaven is that I get to settle back in front of a large television and watch the best bits of my life all over again. All of my friends and family can sit with me too and hopefully we'll be able to settle any outstanding arguments about who said what and when. I can also stop the tape once in a while and go for a swim in a pool
full of Vimto. I always wanted to do that, especially on a summer's day, so I could swim and drink at the same time. I might as well request it when I get to heaven because I wrote
to Jim'll Fix It
in 1982 and heard sod all back.

I know it might seem hypocritical of me to talk about a heaven after all the criticism that I've thrown at Catholicism, but at the end of the day I can believe what I like, it's my life. I like to believe in a God of some kind, in some sort of higher being or force. Personally I find it very comforting plus it also gives me somebody to talk to on long train journeys when there's no phone signal.

And if I do get to my heaven and find that it doesn't exist then it'll be much too late to do anything about it and hopefully I will have lived a deluded but happy life. I also won't be able to complain to anyone because there won't be anyone there . . . except maybe Jonathan Ross because, let's face it, he's fecking everywhere these days. In fact, he's around a lot more than Jesus Christ.

I was never a fan of PE at school and I don't recall asking to be physically educated. It just seemed to happen and before I knew it my mum was sewing my initials on to the front of a gym bag and I was being forced to leap over a horsebox and perform a forward roll. That's what they classed as games. My idea of games were Connect 4 or Ker-Plunk. If it had been up to me physical education wouldn't even have been on the curriculum. It would just have been something that you did after school if you hadn't got a life.

I would rather have spent the time learning something more important like first aid or sign language, two subjects that should be on every school timetable in the world surely? PE was just an opportunity for the fit kids
to show up the fat kids. Not that I'm saying I was a fat kid. I've always been naturally big-boned, or cuddly as Mum preferred to call it as she fed me my eighth Wall's Viennetta. There's always been a stigma attached to being overweight, especially when it comes to physical education. I was the last to get picked for any kind of sports and then even that usually resulted in a heated argument between the two team captains.

'We're not having him, we had him last week.'

It was a vicious circle and I was at the centre of it.

'Oh, don't mind me, you just argue among yourselves,' I mumbled as I filed my nails.

They could bicker as long as they wanted as far as I was concerned. I think the reason I developed a lack of enthusiasm towards PE was because people who liked PE had a lack of enthusiasm towards me. But I didn't mind, because the longer they bickered the less time we'd have for games. And anyway, it didn't matter because whoever got me I'd still always end up being put in a goal of some kind.

It turned me off football for life. I don't completely hate the game, I like watching the World Cup, particularly when they show the highlights to music with some Cameroon player doing a funny dance when he scores or footage of the England team blubbing when they get kicked out (as if it's come as a shock to them).

I think the public was given a wrong impression of me when I did the John Smith's 'Ave it' advert a few years ago. It was the one where all these highly skilled footballers performed various ball skills in a circle – balancing it on the back of their necks, flipping it into the air – before finally one of them passed it to me and I just toe-bunged it over a garden fence. The director wanted it done it in one continuous take, so we all had to get it right. It only took two takes to film. On the second take I was so impressed that I'd managed to boot the ball, I shouted out, 'Ave it!' They decided to keep it in and that's how the Ave It! catchphrase started. It became the buzzword during the World Cup of 2002, shouted at me wherever I went. Slowly this began to fuel the myth that I was a football fanatic. I got invited on to a load of football talk shows and also to a lot of games. I declined them all until I got a chance to take my nephew to Manchester United. He's a massive Manchester United fan. It was his eighth birthday and I knew he'd be over the moon. I told him I was just taking him to the Manchester United shop to get him some merchandise for his birthday. We went to the shop and bought a few things, but then instead of going back out of the main entrance, I led him out of a fire door and up a staircase. We went through another set of fire doors and came out in the directors' box.

My nephew's eyes lit up as he gazed up at the footballers in the room. I hadn't got a clue who most of them were but I did recognise Bobby Charlton, Denis Law and the late George Best. And I could feel the hairs go up on the back of my neck. We must have looked like a right couple of freaks stood in the corner with our mouths gaping open.

We had a couple of cracking seats in the directors' box — the view was amazing and so was the atmosphere. So long as no one tried chatting to me about the offside rule I knew I'd be OK. Then I felt my nephew's elbow poking me in the ribs.

'What's up?' I asked.

He just gestured past me with his eyes. I turned round to find a familiar-looking man sat by the side of me and we exchanged smiles. I turned back to my nephew and whispered to him,

'Who is it?'

'It's Roy Keane,' he whispered back out of the corner of his mouth.

I turned back to smile again and this time he held out his hand and offered me some spearmint.

'Go on . . . Ave it!' he said and laughed.

Manchester United played badly that day. My nephew was fed up with the result. What I found awkward was that every time Leicester scored Roy Keane would get
increasingly irate. He'd sigh and tut, look at me and shake his head. The more they lost the louder he got. I'd just shake my head in agreement with him and mumble comments like 'What are they playing at?' and 'Come on, lads, what are you doing? You're throwing it away,' but I hadn't got a clue what was happening. I was more interested in one of those airships that was hovering above the ground rotating a variety of birthday messages.

Ironically, my nephew plays football in the same playground where I used to avoid it twenty years earlier.

I preferred to spend my playtime over in the corner of the schoolyard behind the boiler discussing the latest video releases with Darren Leech and Ryan Shannon. We were video mad – video recorders were all the rage at the time, the new big thing. Everybody was getting them. We used to compare notes about what films we'd seen, what was coming out and who could get what on pirate. It always tickled me that expression – pirate. 'A mate of mine can get it on pirate.'
ET
was the pirate video that everybody wanted to watch at the time. My dad managed to get hold of a copy. The quality was absolutely appalling but the whole family and a few of the neighbours gathered to watch it in our front room. You couldn't make head nor tail of it, let alone cry. I think my dad cried, though not because ET went home at the end but because the pirate copy had cost him a
fiver from a bloke down the club. It wouldn't have cost that much more to go to the cinema and watch it properly in all of its glory.

Darren Leech was heavily into video nasties. If it was banned you could bet he'd seen it.
The Burning, The Evil Dead, The Driller Killer —
quite an achievement for a boy of ten. He'd regale us with the stories of the latest slasher film he'd seen, acting out the scenes for us in violent detail, and he'd always drag his stooge over, poor old Barry Clegg, and force him to play the part of the victim.

I'd like to tell you that these dangerous games had no long-term damage on either of the boys but I'm afraid I can't. The last time I saw Barry Clegg he was collecting trolleys in the rain at Safeway's and Darren Leech is currently on remand for attacking his stepfather with a two-speed hammer drill. I rest my case, Your Honour.

Our video recorder was a Panasonic, model number NV 2010. (That'll probably mean nothing to you but it meant everything to me.) I loved that video. In fact, when my parents told me they'd paid their deposit for it at Rumbelows, my eyes lit up and for the first and only time in my life I performed a backflip (I was quite supple for a big lad).

I could hardly contain my excitement on the day standing at the window waiting for the delivery truck to
arrive. The video was so big it took two of them to carry it into the lounge (or the best room as my mum liked to call it).
^*3
It was a true silver dream machine. What a beautiful beast. It had a twenty-one-day programmable timer and came with a remote control on a wire. I was speechless, all I could do was stare at it, as it sat nestled in its new home, a specially constructed pine video unit from MFI that my Dad had put together the weekend before. It also sported a top drawer with enough room for over thirty VHS tapes.

That night we recorded
Top of the Pops
and
Tucker's Luck
(a piss-poor spin-off from
Grange Hill)
and we watched them back to back three times in a row, just because we could. I remember my dad losing his mind as one point because I pressed the pause button.

'Don't do that, you'll break it,' he roared at me from his armchair.

He would go mental if I pressed the pause, fast-forward or rewind buttons. It's as if the manufacturers had included them in an effort to encourage parents into bollocking their children a bit more often.

I was hooked, and slid helplessly into the world of home video. While other lads were buying the latest sports gear and doing keepy-uppy in their backyards, I was buying blank videotapes and scouring the TV guides, with a black felt tip in my hand, searching for things to record.

The lads at school were very materialistic when it came to sports equipment. They were always trying to outdo each other with the latest trainers or sports bags. It had to be a name – Adidas, Reebok or Nike. My sports bag just said 'sport' on the side of it. Nothing else. People would sometimes ask me what kind of sport I liked. I'd just point to the bag and say I like sport, all sport, sport in general.

We weren't the richest family by far but it's not that we were poor. It's just that I wasn't arsed when it came to all that label competitiveness. I was probably the only person I knew who enjoyed wearing a school uniform. To me they were like overalls and I couldn't see the point of getting your normal clothes dirty when you had a uniform to wear. If you paid l0p on the last day of term you were allowed to wear your own clothes. Most schools do it (and I think they do it in the armed forces). I'd turn up in my uniform and they'd say,

'Why are you in your uniform? You could've worn your own clothes for 10p.'

I'd say,

'These
are
my own clothes,' and they'd walk away confused, but I knew I was right.

I only succumbed to materialistic temptation once. I had to go to the optician's. I wasn't keen on going as the last thing I needed in my uncool life was a spazzy pair of National Health glasses, but my mum insisted. She'd caught me squinting my eyes watching
3-2-1
(well, who wouldn't, it was shit). While we were walking back from the opticians, we passed a local sports shop and I fell in love with a pair of Nike trainers in the window.

They were white and when I say white I mean blinding white. The golden rule in '87 was the whiter the trainer, the cooler you were. My mum bought them for me as an early birthday present. I put them on and went back to school in the afternoon. Usually if I had a morning appointment I would have tried to blag the whole day off school. But now I had my new white Nike trainers to show off, I strolled down the road and through the gates like John Travolta in
Saturday Night Fever.

There were a few stares and mumbles as I walked by but I didn't care. It was a beautiful summer's day. There wasn't a cloud in the blue sky above me and I was cool for just once in my life. I got to class and before I could sit down Big Mouth Gareth Riley decided to take the piss.

'Hello, Kay, I like your new Nick trainers.'

A few stifled laughs followed.

'If you open your eyes smart-arse you'll actually see they're Nike,' I replied smugly.

'No they're not, they're Nick's.'

He said it so indignantly that I had no choice but to casually glance down and read them. Shit! He was right. They were Nick trainers, a piss-poor copy of Nike for piss-poor people who couldn't read. Perhaps the trip to the optician's wasn't a bad idea after all. Ah well, at least I got to be cool for about ten minutes.

But 1987 turned out to be the summer of being uncool for me and the trainers incident wasn't the only embarrassing thing to happen. As you've probably gathered I wasn't a fan of physical education. In fact, I would say and do anything in order to try to get out of my weekly games lesson. Fake illnesses, throw myself down flights of stairs. I even paid Steven Marshall a pound once to write me a note supposedly from my parents excusing me from PE. He was famous for his adult handwriting. I was so convinced my plan would work that I even got the note laminated for future use. But old Mr Donaldson, my PE teacher, was no fool – he already had a stack of similar letters in the same distinctive handwriting.

Undeterred and desperate, I tried the oldest trick in
the book and told him that I'd forgotten my PE kit. He just calmly walked over to the corner of the changing room and said,

'That's all right, Mr Kay, just get something out of the bin in the corner.'

PLEASE GOD, NO, NOT THE BIN! The bin was a huge red barrel that had sat in the corner of the changing rooms since before the school had been built. A skull and crossbones had been scrawled on the side of it. What lurked inside the bin fuelled the nightmares of every boy in the school who had ever contemplated skiving off PE. It was full of dirty, discarded and stinking PE kits. Now whether these PE kits had been discarded on purpose or by accident wasn't clear, but one thing we did know was that the rancid smell that emanated from that bin was enough to put you off lying for life. I can still taste it in the back of my throat today. It was a mixture of stale sweat, urine and heartache.

Teachers understood the power of that bin. They knew no child would ever succumb to the suggestion of getting something out of it. In fact, they'd sooner cut their own hands off or, as I did, hastily reconsider.

'Whoops, sorry, sir... oh look, I've just found my PE kit here at the bottom of my bag, well, what do you know, it was there all along,' I said sheepishly, pulling a creased pair of shorts from under my
A-Team
lunch box.
I'd sooner play football in a creased pair of shorts than a pair stinking of somebody else's shit.

We never had a football pitch at school so every Thursday we used to walk over to the local park.
^*4
The only problem was this was
my
local park and that would cause me an enormous amount of embarrassment over the years. Occasionally friends of the family crossing through the park would see me, and suddenly I'd hear, 'Yoo-hoo, Peter,' and because the pitch was a public right of way the game would have to stop while a lady pushing a pram or pulling a tartan shopping trolley would come over for a chat about the weather or Britain's involvement in the bombing of Libya. It didn't make me a very popular person with my teammates.