Look Back in Hunger Page 20

  Now, I’m sure this is not an easy image for people to assimilate. It sounds awful and, believe you me, it looks awful. I am not naive enough to think that cruelty of some sort doesn’t go on in psychiatric institutions, but I can honestly say, with my hand on my heart, that I never once witnessed any behaviour of that sort by a nurse, not even the use of slightly too much force.

  The difficulty with big institutions like psychiatric hospitals is that they are bureaucratic and a very narrow set of rules has to cover all situations, which makes creative imagination redundant. One size has to fit all. The staff, as well as the patients, can quickly become institutionalised, and it is easy for hospitals to become closed, inward—looking institutions in which the staff behave weirdly. I fought against this sort of thing all my working life. I wanted staff to look outwards and take into account what was happening in society.

  Given MIND’s remit, there were occasionally times when we would clash with them. One day, someone we knew very well arrived at the department in a highly psychotic state. We knew that the very slightest thing would result in violence on his part, so we were tiptoeing round him as he ranged through the outpatients department, muttering threats and looking very frightening. Initially we didn’t have enough staff to restrain him and he refused to come into a room, so we just had to keep an eye on him and protect the other patients until we could get enough staff together to handle the situation. In the meantime, someone had arrived from MIND for a meeting and was sitting in the middle of it all, watching and appearing to take notes.

  MIND is an organisation set up to protect the rights of the users of psychiatric services, and rightly so. But occasionally our impression of them was that they were actively seeking to witness abusive behaviour. In a situation in which you have to restrain someone, it is sometimes going to look like some abuse is going on, so we were a bit wary.

  Eventually we had enough staff to be safe and we tried to persuade the man to come into a room. He absolutely refused, as he must have realised somewhere in his disturbed mind that we were going to section and admit him. He positioned himself at the far end of the department, a long way from our rooms, so we were forced to approach and restrain him in the middle of a busy outpatients department. And it was a real fight. He was as strong as anything and a huge scuffle ensued, with arms flailing and people being hit. Eventually we restrained him and injected him on the spot with a tranquilliser, right next to the guy from MIND, who continued to take notes. We were never approached by MIND about this incident, so I presume we did the right thing.

  There were several families in the Camberwell area who were a real handful. One big Irish family, who all had alcohol and personality problems, would very occasionally arrive in one big, drunken, threatening mass. One day they all pitched up and when they were asked to come back when they were sober they set about smashing up the place. There were so many of them we felt it was beyond the call of duty to tackle them. Thankfully, there was no one else there, as it was a weekend. So we locked ourselves in a room, called the police and listened to the music of chairs smashing and tables flying.

  In 1987, a friend of my mother’s who ran a nursing home needed an RMN (a qualified psychiatric nurse) to cover the place while she went away for a few days and asked me if I would do it. Despite the fact that I was rather scared of the responsibility, I agreed. I’m a bit crap at saying no.

  The place had a lot of elderly residents, so in some ways it was like an old people’s home, but there were also a few younger people there with physical disabilities and/or learning disabilities . My favourite was a young man who had been in a motorbike accident and had brain damage. He had a customised wheelchair which he operated with incredible agility. He wasn’t an easy character to manage because he had no ability to control his temper at all and he would fly into huge rages during which he would lash out at staff.

  Pragmatically speaking, though, all one had to do was get out of the range of his wheelchair and the problem was sorted. I became very fond of him over a few days and could easily understand the anger inside him. He had gone from a promising life of endless possibility to being shoved in a wheelchair, leading a miserable existence in the company of mainly elderly people. But he did his best to maintain his independence.

  One night, as he did most nights, he went off in his wheelchair to get pissed at a local pub. At about midnight, the doorbell rang and I opened the door to find him in his wheelchair, flanked by two policemen. They had caught him speeding, doing forty miles an hour in a thirty-mile-an-hour zone. He managed this because the home stood on a very long hill that ran all the way down to the sea and if he got himself to the top, he could get up a tremendous speed. I admired his spirit so much and when the police had gone, he and I had a really good laugh about it. They didn’t press charges.

  While I was at the home, the 1987 election occurred and Margaret Thatcher got re-elected. God, what a depressing day that was and what an irony that Britain’s first female prime minister had to be Margaret Thatcher. She was the woman who asked, ‘What has feminism ever done for me?’ Well, dear, if you need to ask that question then you’re obviously not very bright.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  ‘PLEASE WELCOME THE SEA MONSTER’

  I suppose eventually I realised I was edging towards thirty without having had a crack at comedy, and a sort of desperation started to seep in. Besides, the more senior I became at work, the more I didn’t want to go down the road of becoming a manager, stuck in some office ordering toilet rolls and having hair like my grandma’s. I know that’s simplistic, but it seemed that the more qualified you got, the less you used what you’d learned.

  Round about this time, a friend of mine, to whom I constantly moaned about wanting to do comedy, told me to get off my arse and do something about it, using words to the effect that we don’t get a second go at life. I suppose the combination of being twenty-nine and him telling me to pull my finger out did spur me into some sort of action. So-called ‘alternative comedy’ was in its infancy, with the birth of the Comedy Store and numerous little clubs springing up all over London.

  The Comedy Store was the glamour end of the comedy market because of its Americanness. It had a very in-your-face logo of a red laughing mouth and everything about it screamed American import. Although in the eighties it was considered part of the alternative comedy scene, in some ways it was quite mainstream. It didn’t really epitomise so-called ‘alternative’ values. It was quite expensive to get into, it was situated in the heart of the West End, it employed bouncers and it tended to attract an out-of-town crowd from the suburbs of London rather than a regular, faithful audience. There were two stand-up shows on a Friday and Saturday, an early one at 7.30 and a late one starting at midnight.

  The other comedy clubs (apart from Jongleurs, which was similar to the Store in some ways but catered to a more upmarket crowd of City types and people from Clapham) were a much more eclectic mix, ranging from a vegetarian café on the Archway Road, to a room above a pub just off Carnaby Street, to a Labour club in Finsbury Park called the Red Rose. They all had their own particular character and audience—some friendly, some snooty, some aggressive, some apathetic, some wild and some miserable.

  I didn’t really go to comedy shows at that time. I didn’t want to watch it, I wanted to do it. I found it frustrating to watch it when I wanted to have a crack myself and I didn’t want other people’s influences to seep into what I was doing. So I avoided comedy, weirdly. I don’t have the male comic mentality, which seems to be quite common and involves watching everything your favourite comics have ever done endlessly on DVD.

  Work was changing. The NHS was being transformed by Thatcher and I wasn’t sure I could tolerate it. Gradually, sections of the NHS were being shaved off and farmed out to private companies.

  As luck would have it, another friend, coincidentally the girlfriend of Mr Get-Your-Finger-Out, was organising a benefit for Greenpeace or some such charity and she suggested that th
is was finally my opportunity to try out a bit of stand-up without having to make any effort whatsoever. It was on a plate for me.

  So I decided to go for it. The benefit was being held in a nightclub in Soho. (My experience since has taught me that nightclubs are not really the best places to do comedy benefits in. It’s not that there’s something intrinsically bad about them, but comedy just doesn’t seem to work so well as it does in a ‘proper’ comedy club.)

  I was blissfully ignorant of the ins and outs of live stand-up comedy, and so I set about preparing my five minutes. I’d been told that there were three booked comics to perform first and I would be on at the end. This just would not happen in most comedy clubs. New performers doing what is known as an ‘open spot’ or ‘guest spot’ tend to be put in the middle of the bill, to shield them from an unwarmed-up audience or a completely pissed-up one.

  I didn’t know what sort of stuff to do for my little five-minute act, but I had two weeks or so to come up with it and thought I should stick to what I knew. I prepared five minutes on Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis because I remembered it from college, but I suppose it was slightly above the grasp of most ordinary people and bloody dull to boot. The problem with stand-up material is that you cannot try it out on anyone other than a comedy audience. And however much your friends tell you that you are hysterically funny, it is impossible for them to judge your one-liners in an unbiased way.

  The night finally arrived and, even though I didn’t think it was possible, my anxiety increased somewhat, rising to an almost unmanageable level by the time I arrived at the club to do my bit.

  The Soho nightclub was a slightly dingy place. It had a surface glamour, but beneath that there was a faint smell of stale beer and fags. This is what nightclubs are all about. They’re usually dark so you can’t see the peeling paint and slight scruffiness. I suspect people are encouraged to get drunk so that it doesn’t occur to them, in a massively depressing way, that they are in a painted box with surly staff, trying to have a good time but failing miserably on that count more often than not.

  The shape of the venue was all wrong. A makeshift stage had been knocked up and the lighting was the normal club lighting so the act on stage didn’t particularly stand out. There were around 200 people there.

  It began to dawn on me fairly early on in the evening that the audience was not a particularly good one. They were a bit listless, hot and chatty, and this wasn’t helped by the fact that the sightlines weren’t great and the acoustics were crap as well.

  As the evening went on and the pure, unadulterated fear in the pit of my stomach began to get out of control, I medicated myself with lager and the edges of the world became more blurred as the evening went on. The show began to run really late. Several times I considered just forgetting the whole thing and walking out of the place, never to return to the world of stand-up, but something made me stay there. Eventually, it was time to go on. It was midnight, everyone was pissed, I was pissed, and through the haze I heard the compere announce my name. At that point, I thought it would probably be a success if I could actually stand up for five minutes and not piss myself.

  Almost the second I set foot on stage someone at the back started to heckle me with the words, ‘Fuck off, you fat cow!’ As it was my first time, I’d assumed that at a benefit people would be nice and I had not considered having to deal with hecklers, so I had no idea what to do. I started to struggle very badly through my prepared material. Quite a lot of people obviously didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about, and my heckler didn’t just stop at one ‘Fuck off, you fat cow!’ He repeated it over and over and over again, until after a couple of minutes I couldn’t take any more and I did fuck off.

  I can’t really remember what I felt afterwards, insulated as I was by vast amounts of alcohol. People were randomly patting me in a three quarters sympathetic, one-quarter admiring way, probably not because of my material, but rather for just getting through it without crying. Many people have asked me since how on earth I got over such a humiliation and carried on. Well, the truth of it is that I was so off my face, I don’t particularly remember it being that humiliating. Afterwards, I tried not to think too much about it or my entrails would twitch and I would blush, sitting there on my own in my bedroom.

  I subsequently found out that my tormentor, the very clever heckler, was in fact another comedian on the circuit. He came as a pair with another comic and they had a reputation for being somewhat anarchic and encouraging events that they were at to descend into chaos. But to shout ‘Fuck off’ at a fat woman isn’t that anarchic in my book. Men have been doing it for years. It’s extraordinarily boring if you’re on the receiving end of it, because you’ve heard it so often, and yet they think they are the first one ever to say it to you.

  This first comedy performance took place in the summer of 1986 and I felt like I needed a little breathing space before I had another crack at it, so I left it until the autumn before I stepped on stage again. During this time I met Malcolm, a performer and club promoter, with whom I had a relationship for a while. He was known as a ‘character’, given as he was to massively unpredictable bouts of out—of—control behaviour, but he was enormously entertaining and funny. At the time, he was part of a comedy group whose most famous number was ‘The Balloon Dance’, a charming line dance by a trio of naked men with balloons covering their genitals. As the dance progressed, they would snatch at each other’s balloons, with hilarious results.

  On my first date with Malcolm he was arrested for jumping a red light at the Elephant and Castle and was stuck in the cells for a few hours. That set the pattern for a chaotic friendship that lasted a long time. Malcolm drowned in the Thames some years ago and every time I drive over it, which is a lot, I think of him.

  I decided that, at the very least, I should have a bash at a proper comedy club with a slightly different act which was perhaps a bit simpler and a lot funnier. So I managed to get a five-minute spot at a comedy club in New Cross in south London. It was a bit of a relief to get in there and find that the audience were expecting comedy, they weren’t drunk and they were sat in rows looking reasonably un-homicidal.

  I’d completely changed my five minutes, throwing out all the Freud rubbish and preparing a selection of one-liners. I called myself the Sea Monster, because I didn’t want people at work to find out what I was up to. The reason I chose the Sea Monster was because it was utterly ridiculous and a friend of Malcolm’s used to call me that, in a fond rather than abusive way (I hope). I had managed to work a joke round it too, to do with a boyfriend who wanted us to split up so I said that I had made certain promises to him, the final one being that I would become a stand-up comic with a ridiculous name.

  I wanted an opening line that had a bit of drama to it, so I worked out something very unpalatable. I wore a big, white, baggy T-shirt and just before the compere announced me, I put a blood capsule from a joke shop in my mouth. As I came onto the stage and stood in front of the mic, I started coughing violently and what looked like blood shot out of my mouth and all over my T-shirt, at which point I said, ‘Oh dear, must give up smoking.’

  Well, I thought this was hugely amusing and so did roughly half the audience. The other half just thought it was tasteless, which it was. However, it set me off on the right track and, for only a second gig, it went shockingly, surprisingly well. At the end of the show, a woman who was putting a Christmas variety show together at the Gate Theatre in Notting Hill came up and took my number and asked me if I would do three nights there. I was gobsmacked. My first booking. Couldn’t quite believe it.

  My strategy vis-à-vis how I would progress was to do the easy clubs first. I figured there was no point launching into the difficult clubs and being demoralised by being murdered on stage. I had started to meet a few comics and chat to them, and I learned that the clubs considered to be really hard at the time were the Comedy Store in Leicester Square, Jongleurs and the Tunnel Club, which sat very unattractively at the en
trance to the Blackwall Tunnel, an area reminiscent of some futuristic, industrial wasteland.

  The Comedy Store wasn’t easy, mainly because it had a late show that started at midnight. It tended to attract groups of women and men, some on stag and hen nights, and it was especially appalling on a Friday night, as the late-night audience would have been drinking solidly since they got out of work.

  Jongleurs in Battersea (there are now loads of them, but there was only one in the eighties) had a reputation for attracting young, urban professionals (or yuppies) and that was enough of a nightmare in itself. Wealthy, cocky and extremely irritating would be my in-depth analysis of them. So not my favourite place.

  The Tunnel Club had an identity of its own and was blessed with an unruly, pissed and rather clever audience—as one, they would randomly pick on an act and do their best to destroy them, whether they were any good or not. I once saw them lay into Harry Enfield, who was doing brilliantly, and then give someone who told a ten-minute joke in Serbo-Croat a standing ovation.