‘I will cut your fucking face! Do you want some? DO YOU FUCKING WANT SOME?’
And then I would turn straight back into the elderly posh old man again, as if nothing had happened. The audience – initially startled – would burst into hysterics.
Eager to utilise anything that got a laugh, I had started to incorporate Chumley’s outbursts into the set, regardless of whether anyone was heckling or not. The anecdote would be routinely punctuated with these horrendous, incongruous streams of abuse, often aimed at anyone who was returning from the bar or simply just someone who happened to be sitting in the front row.
As I performed, I noticed Bob Mortimer making his way down to the front. I certainly didn’t scream at him. I idolised him. However, I did allow myself to glance in his direction once or twice and I saw that he was laughing heartily.
After the show I was in the pub upstairs, wondering if and how I could talk to Bob again. I needn’t have wondered. He came over to me and, making no reference to our brief interaction before the show (maybe he had forgotten – after all, I had been wearing the wig), he introduced himself.
‘Hello, my name’s Bob. I work at a production company called Channel X. I really enjoyed your act. I wondered if you have an agent or a phone number I can pass on?’
Did I fly home that night? I might well have done. I might have soared up into the sky, circled a star and then floated back down over London, towards the suburbs. Did I sleep a wink? Did I even need to? History had been made. I had not only met Bob Mortimer – JESUS CHRIST, I JUST MET BOB MORTIMER – but he had asked for my phone number.
I cannot emphasise enough what a pivotal moment this was for me – in my life, let alone my career. I adored Vic and Bob. To me they were gods. They were Lennon and McCartney. And I was to become their drummer.
Sorry, I couldn’t resist.
I still pinch myself.
It was to be a few months before I heard from Bob, but with the confidence that grew from this chance meeting, nothing was going to stop me. Storm or die, paid or unpaid, I got as many gigs in my diary as possible. I didn’t care what or where they were. I pushed and pushed myself, performing every night, twice a night if I could.
And . . . I got better. A lot better. And I decided it was time to call Don Ward again and get that open spot at the Comedy Store back in the diary.
The Comedy Store had played host to every great British alternative comic and you saw their photos lining the walls as you descended the stairs. Paul Merton (then Paul Martin), Jo Brand, Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson, French and Saunders, even Robin Williams had turned up on a few occasions to try stuff out.
I was never going to get a paid booking there, I was too new for that – so it was more a rite of passage. I just had to do a gig there, at least once.
I did it. And it actually didn’t go too badly.
I did shit myself that morning, though – literally – while serving a customer in the shop.
Ah yes, the shop.
I was leading a double life. By night I was a caped crusader, swooping down through the windows of comedy clubs, reducing audiences to hysterics – or goading them into abuse – before disappearing off into the night. And by day I sold pencil cases, rosettes, scarves, ashtrays – anything, as long as it was emblazoned with Chelsea FC.
Chelsea Sportsland, it was called – a name that never sounded anything other than ridiculous, and which irritated and alienated the largely working-class English fan-base, who still ate dodgy burgers and pissed in each other’s pockets at half-time. Chelsea Sportsland reflected the creeping Americanisation of British culture. Saturday nights on ITV were dominated by a new US format – Gladiators; rockers banged heads to the grisly nasal screeching of Axl Rose. London even had its own gridiron team – The Monarchs.
When Sky paid what was then an astronomical £304 million over five seasons for the rights to broadcast games from the brand new Premier League, they featured cheerleaders at half-time. Football fans were unimpressed, and Chelsea supporters were not too happy either about the vision that Chelsea Football Club and Clive Pollard had for a new football shopping experience. Alongside the Chelsea kits, footballs, posters and T-shirts were a load of baseball jackets.
‘What the fuck is this shit?’ asked one of the more articulate fans as he squinted at an obscenely priced and completely pointless Chelsea baseball shirt.
This was pre-Abramovich Chelsea. This was pre-Matthew Harding Chelsea, even. This was the Ken Bates era, when you stood on the Shed for a few quid, screamed at Nigel Spackman for missing a sitter and called Graeme Le Saux a poof because he read The Guardian.
Tony, the shop manager, was a Watford fan. Vince, who also worked there, supported Leeds, and I was, of course, a Gooner, but on a match day we’d all have to sport Chelsea tops – not the blue one, thank God, but their brand new third kit – white with vertical thin red stripes. Beneath it, in an act of defiance, I would wear my Arsenal top, but that would show through, so I’d have to wear a white T-shirt between the two layers. I was roasting!
Before and after the match, the shop would be mobbed. Despite supporting a rival team, I used to hope Chelsea would win purely because it would put the customers in a better mood.
The customers generally seemed to be made up of two different types. There was your rough’n’ready Chelsea diehard, who knew everything about the club and, not unreasonably, assumed I did too. I was often engaged in long, misty-eyed conversations about Peter Osgood and Bobby Tambling, during which I would bluff my way through, pretending I knew who the hell they were.
One of the techniques I employed was to use an all-purpose word of my own invention that would hopefully buy me time or, if I was particularly successful, end the discussion completely.
‘Oh yeah,’ I would say, ‘only one word for that: morditorial.’
Few people want to admit they don’t know what a word means, so I used to get away with that one frequently – and still do, sometimes. Feel free to use it yourself, by all means, though I would request that you don’t ascribe an actual meaning to it, because then it will simply be just like every other word.
#KeepMorditorialMeaningless.
The other type of customer we would play host to was your posh Kensington High Street-type chappie, clearly unfamiliar with the game but keen, as a local, to ‘get stuck in, you know’. I’d lay it on thick with these guys, insisting that real fans bought the whole kit, and the jumpers, T-shirts, cufflinks and ties. I found you could sell them anything.
There was also a third type of customer in the shop – well, just this one guy, really – who was very friendly and had a giant spider tattoo on his face and a large thick swastika on his forehead. He was so nice and funny that I decided he surely must have had the tattoos done when he was young and incredibly stupid. He was a different person now. One day a Motown song came on the radio and I started humming along.
‘We don’t sing that stuff, mate,’ he said. I changed the station.
I toiled in Chelsea Sportsland by day and toured the comedy clubs by night. On that morning in the winter of 1992, now a seasoned pro with a full two months of stand-up experience under my belt, I woke up in a cold sweat. I was calling my own bluff. I was actually going to play the Comedy Store.
As usual I grabbed two scalding strawberry Pop-Tarts (another recent American import) fresh from the toaster, wrapped them in silver foil, got in Vince’s freezing-cold clapped-out Citroën and gave him two shiny pound coins to pay for petrol. He drove us to the shop – which took the best part of an hour. On the way, as ever, we raged about the villainous Tory government – Major, Portillo, Lilley and Co. We shared the hope that one day Labour would displace them and knew that when they did Britain would run perfectly again.
Our manager Tony had gone to the toilet. I had been left in charge of the shop, as Vince hadn’t been working with us for