Here Comes the Clown Page 15

  Twenty minutes later we were out and running through the streets with Pete. We grabbed our stuff in record time and sped out of town with Pete looking nervously in the rear-view mirror. We only relaxed when we crossed the state line about an hour later. Catorce had suddenly got a little too Real for our liking.

  ‘Dad, are those Simpsons clouds?’ We were speeding across a flat-calm Lake Rosseau towards Port Carling, intent on a hearty Canadian breakfast of pancakes, bacon and lashings of maple syrup. I looked up from the gleaming controls of my speedboat, my tanned torso taut with tension as my muscular arms guided the vessel expertly between two pine-wooded islands. I turned languidly to my family, who must all have been thinking just how lucky they were to have such a great, uber-manly husband and father in total control of this boat. I was about to agree with my daughter that, yes, the clouds did actually look just like those in The Simpsons title sequence, but I hit the wake from a passing pleasure boat and was flung violently overboard. The emergency cord attached to my wrist cut the motor automatically. The boat came to an immediate stop but Superdad’s ego was seriously dented. Luckily, we were in Canada and no one had a clue that I was a very important UK minor celebrity on my annual Canadian summer holiday.

  This annual holiday was and is my lifeline. I’d flown home from Mexico and tried to rejoin the normal family routine, but I knew that we had a mammoth double filming trip to Australia and then India coming up. I couldn’t quite pluck up the courage to tell Stacey this. Luckily, the Canada break was already booked and came just at the right time.

  My Canadian summer holiday has always been the subject of much questioning by bemused UK inhabitants. ‘Summer . . . in Canada? Ooh, better take some warm clothes and hot chocolate . . .’ Little do these ignoramuses know that Toronto is on the same latitude as St Tropez and enjoys scorching hot summers, rarely dipping under thirty degrees centigrade. I don’t hold this against them. After all, I was once like them.

  The first couple of times that I visited were at Christmas, and all my preconceptions were confirmed – blizzards, ice, drinks freezing solid inside the car, most of Toronto appeared to live underground in an enormous network of tunnels containing thousands of shops – this was not the place for me. Why hadn’t I married a Brazilian, or a Bahamian, or a Maldivian?

  No, I had to choose a Canadian, a polite American, a Ned Flanders to the USA’s Homer Simpson. What was I thinking? Then Stacey started to suggest that we spend our precious summers in Canada. I drew my line in the sand.

  ‘There is absolutely no way in the world that I am wasting my summer by going to igloo land. I want to go to the South of France or . . . anywhere . . . hot, but not Canada. Freezing my nuts off in winter is bad enough but there is NO WAY THAT WE ARE GOING THERE FOR SUMMER, AND THAT’S FINAL.’

  Two weeks later we were all on an Air Canada flight bound for Toronto (official motto ‘Diversity our strength’, although it should be ‘Jeez, it’s cold and windy here, eh?’). I hated not being in control of my life. Having said that, it turned out to be the best decision that I never took – so what do I know?

  Ninety per cent of Canadians live within one hour of the US border. This, in the second largest country in the world. It doesn’t take a geographer to realise that this leaves a lot of empty space to play around in. Canadians, therefore, like to get back in touch with their pioneer heritage by going ‘up north’ and getting back to nature – fishing, hunting, canoeing and playing charades . . . a lot of charades. Or that’s how it used to be anyway. Things have changed a bit since the early twentieth century, when you were in danger of a bear attack if you visited the outhouse. Nowadays, most cottages come with satellite TV, high-speed broadband, industrial barbecues and posh lakeside restaurants. It’s wilderness but with lattes.

  From the moment I arrived, I was smitten. For posh old Canadian hands, it was not quite the simple, elegant destination that it once was. For me, however, it was utter heaven. Three spectacular lakes dotted with pine-covered islands and gargantuan granite rocks – it was a kind of Canadian Swallows and Amazons. Things got even better when I discovered speedboats and water toys.

  I am now glad that I married a Canadian. Every year I pick up my rented speedboat as, for the next three weeks, I’m barely off the water. By boat I can go shopping, out to eat, visit three top golf courses and, of course, swim and play to my little heart’s content. All my kids’ various Canadian cousins join us for our vacation and so I’m kept busy hurling them round the lake all day. When we tire of this, the braver ones join me in a spot of what is known in the UK as ‘tombstoning’. We know it simply as cliff jumping. I’ve got it down to a fine science. I spot a suitable rock, I bring the boat in as close as possible and use the depth finder to check the landing area. When I’m happy, I anchor up – we all clamber up the cliffs and hurl ourselves screaming into the void. This is what summers are all about.

  Even the Canadian ‘lifestyle’ starts to rub off on me as well. I start to wave back at passing boats, I say hello to strangers in the street. I smile at assistants in shops. If I behaved like this back in the UK I’d be savagely beaten. In Muskoka, however, it’s par for the course and I start to get used to it. I almost like being nice. This is clearly very unhealthy but there seems to be little that I can do. This is the place where I am most blissfully and perfectly happy. Every year we talk about moving there permanently. Then Stacey, who emigrated from the country for a reason, reminds me that for nine months of the year the temperature is about minus twenty and we quickly decide to just keep going there on holiday.

  Anyway, after three weeks of perfect summer we had re-bonded as a family and I felt able to tell Stacey about the mega-filming trip I had coming up. She was as cool as she could be in the circumstances. We flew home and I was there for two days. The TV juggernaut waited for no man and my next stop was Darwin, Australia.

  I’d never been to Australia before. I’d always thought I wouldn’t like it. I was wrong. I bloody loved it, from the tropical remoteness of Darwin to the dust-red of the Outback. I think that I’m at my happiest in deserts. I could have happily spent two months driving around the place.

  We had found a superb character for a guide – he was called Harry. He made his living by taking tourists on trips in his boat, from which he dangled large bits of steak off sticks and made enormous crocodiles jump out of the water to grab them. Harry was almost a cartoon Aussie – big beard, Outback outfit and a wicked sense of humour. When we returned to Darwin from our great expedition into the Red Centre, he invited us to his local pub for our last night up north. The pub was called The Humpty Doo and was not for the faint-hearted. When Harry turned up in ‘civvies’, it turned out that he was a member of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club. The Humpty Doo was a hangout for hard-drinking bikers, and we had quite the evening. It started with Pete and me having to down a ‘Darwin Stubby’, which was a giant bottle of beer. We moved on to rum and then things get a bit hazy. Footage reveals that at one stage I was in the bar on a horse while Pete had somehow got astride a water buffalo. Then two Hells Angels drove into the bar on their motorbikes and started doing wheel burns so that, pretty soon, the entire bar was thick with smoke. I remember very little of any of this, which is a shame as it was certainly a night to remember.

  We flew from Melbourne to Mumbai. I rang home from the airport. Parker, by now a smart 6-year-old girl, answered the phone. She’d just helped her school raise some money for a leper colony and was now convinced that I’d catch the disease.

  ‘If you get it, Daddy, what will fall off first? Will it be your nose or your ears?’

  I professed ignorance and tried to change the subject but she was insistent.

  ‘I think it will be your ears, then your nose, then maybe your arms.’

  I tried to interest her in the news that I would be riding an elephant upon my arrival in Mumbai but Dora the Explorer had apparently done that quite some time ago.

  ‘If you lose your legs, will you be able to swim?’<
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  I told Parker that I had to go. I had important research to do in the bar. She left me with this positive thought:

  ‘The good thing is that the tigers won’t eat you because they won’t want to catch leprosy.’

  Mumbai was quite the culture shock. To ease the pain we stayed in the sumptuous Taj Mahal Palace hotel, the place that, just eighteen months later, would be attacked by terrorists in an orgy of hideous violence. We filmed a surreal scene in which we arrived at the hotel dressed in Raj-era uniforms on the back of a large elephant. It was hotter than an oven and on several occasions I worried that I might actually die of heatstroke on the back of this magnificent beast.

  The same thing happened when we filmed a weird dream sequence in Goa in which Pete was, once again, on an elephant and was hunting me through the jungle. I was dressed in a furry tiger suit and so hot that I needed medical assistance and immediate rehydration at the end of the scene. India was not the place to film in. Everything needed to be done very slowly so as not to heat up. This was tricky because the moment I arrived in Goa, I wanted to get the hell out of the place as fast as I could. I was tired and run-down from the constant travelling and drinking.

  We’d taken a hellish eleven-hour train journey down to Goa only to find yet another kind of hell awaited us: hippies. If there was one tribe that I detested in my youth, it was the Boomshanka Brigade, the public school idiots who went off to India and Thailand to take mushrooms and go on and on about how ‘really amaaaaazing’ everything was. They’d return home in stinky hippy garb speaking a weird form of pidgin English in which they’d constantly implore you to ‘Take a chill pill’ or ‘Mellow out, dude’. The number of times that I longed to kick these culture jumpers unconscious eludes me, but it was an awful shock to arrive in Anjuna only to find that they were all still at it.

  We travelled on to Hampi. This was a very special place – a secret river valley dotted with staggering ruined temples and opulent palaces. It looked like the real-life set of The Jungle Book and somehow we were in King Louie’s palace. We made our way through the narrow, worn stone streets towards the river. We met an elephant that, when given a banana, tapped you on the head with his trunk as a blessing. Once at the river, cool stone steps led us down to a little bamboo coracle that glided us across the river. As I watched the tall towers and boulders of Hampi slip away behind us, somewhere, far above us, a temple bell rang. I was in the footsteps of E. M. Forster. I was the last great Indian explorer. Jesus, I was fast turning into a hippy.

  We reached the far shore and disembarked, camera crew in tow. A loathsome-looking German hippy in plastic sandals was waiting for the ferry. He stared at our cameras with obvious displeasure.

  ‘You are totally ruining the purity of our existence by coming here,’ he said.

  I was so blown away by the sheer banality of his statement that I made him repeat it. He didn’t because he had more to say . . .

  ‘Television is the work of the devil and you are all lizards . . .’

  The crew and I looked at each other, shrugged and then trudged off towards the next location. He probably had a point.

  We flew home from India – Pete, to Newfoundland and me to the Cotswolds. We knew that we still had one more show to film but I wasn’t sure how we were going to cope. It was going to be a European road trip from London to Prague and we were leaving in two weeks’ time.

  While home, Fifth Gear, Channel 5’s answer to Top Gear, contacted me. They wanted to see if I’d be interested in road-testing a tank for them. I couldn’t resist and the road-legal behemoth was delivered to my house the following day. The villagers looked suspiciously out of their windows as it was offloaded into my drive. This clearly confirmed their suspicions that it was only a matter of time before I started behaving like Keith Moon.

  The director wanted me to go on a mission in the tank and I suggested that I might do the school run in the thing. They loved the idea, and so after a little practice I set off to pick my kids up. It all went quite well until I started up the imposing school drive. The tank then developed a leak and started spewing oil all over the place under the horrified gaze of the headmaster. Unfazed, I parked up outside the building and enjoyed watching the faces of my kids as they came out. My daughter, Parker, was mortified and immediately went back inside and hid. My son, Jackson, however, was in seventh heaven and I ended up driving him and a friend home with him popping out of the turret and waving to his friends. I felt like a good dad for once.

  Sadly, the following day I went to pick him up in my usual car and he came out only to burst into tears when he saw it.

  ‘But . . . where’s the tank?’ he wailed.

  Being Superdad was not always easy.

  Speaking of motor vehicles, Princess Productions, with whom most communication had now broken down because of the different directions we wanted the show to go in, had got us a Lotus Esprit in which to do the Prague trip. I had other ideas and managed to blag an enormously luxurious Jaguar XJ8. I’d been reviewing it for the Sunday Times and they’d kindly extended the loan.

  Pete and I had both lived in Prague. I’d been working there as a diplomat for the European Commission in the early Nineties during my short-lived ‘serious’ period. Pete had come out to visit me and ended up moving there to become a full-time slacker/novelist. This final show was probably one too many. We had a new director, a woman who had very strong ideas about how she wanted the show to be. Not only did I disagree with this vision, but we had been making the show for so long that we sort of directed it ourselves and it must have been very hard for her to deal with. It all ended in tears in a hotel room in Munich with Peter dressed as a woman and me in lederhosen. It wasn’t very pleasant. I wish I could have handled it better.

  To make things weirder we had a production coordinator, Lora, who, for some wonderfully odd reason, had a phobia of pylons, windmills and bridges. This made our progress through Europe very tricky. She would be driving the crew vehicle when she would suddenly spot something like a wind turbine (‘Like evil triffids,’ she would mutter), and she would freeze and bring the van to a halt by the side of the road. The only way we could continue was to put her in the back and completely cover her with a blanket before driving out of the danger zone. Our curious cortege wound its way across the Continent.

  We started off in Belgium. I adore Belgium and seem to always end up filming there. The Belgian tourist board had also noticed this and contacted me to see if I’d be interested in some free holidays in their country in return for me writing about the place? I declined but offered them a new slogan: ‘Belgium – it’s not as shit as you think.’ I never heard anything back.

  We raced the sedate Jaguar around the Nürburgring like it was a Formula One car. In Bavaria we found a brewery that allowed people to come and bathe in vast vats of beer. We couldn’t turn this opportunity down but I wish we had. Not only was swimming in beer not quite as pleasant as I’d imagined, but four locals in tight Speedos unexpectedly joined us. I suspected that they had rather been looking forward to a little ‘schwinging’ session and it all got a bit awkward. Pete and I made our excuses and slipped away into the night.

  Upon our arrival in Pilsen, home of the mega-brewery of the same name, we immediately got to work on a rare scene that I’d actually thought about back in the UK. Normally we’d have organised things to visit and then we would make up the scenario as we went. This one, I felt, was a winner. We wandered around town posting big signs that read:

  PISS-UP

  TONIGHT

  AT THE BREWERY

  ENTRANCE FREE

  Then we set up a party room in the middle of the labyrinth of cellars and tunnels underneath the brewery where they kept the beer. We had party balloons, streamers the whole shebang. Nobody turned up. It was galling to learn for absolute certain that we couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery.

  Pete and I finally rolled into Prague with a heavy heart. This was the last show in the series and, hard as it ha
d been, we had persevered and made what I thought was a really original and funny series. I remain exceptionally proud of it and very annoyed that we couldn’t use the original music on the DVD. I did briefly toy with the idea of pitching a drugs sequel called Dom Joly’s Bad Trips. Stacey finally put her foot down. This was probably a good thing, as I would now be dead.

  Chapter 8

  Reality Bites

  In full camouflage gear, we started yomping across fields towards the rear of Elizabeth Hurley’s property. Ingrid was huffing and puffing and it was all good stuff. When we got to a fence near the edge of the property we hunkered down to wait. Suddenly, there was movement in the Hurley household and the lady herself, plus assorted hangers-on, came out into the very field we were hidden beside. Hurley and her mates were attempting to round up some cows. This made for great piccies – it was real City Slickers stuff.

  Suddenly, someone in the Hurley group looked our way. I ducked down but he must have spotted something as he started striding towards us. Ingrid, the camera crew and myself all lay as still as possible in the trench – we were partially covered by bushes but not brilliantly. The guy came right up to the other side of the fence. There was silence. Finally, I had to look up – he was staring at me in total confusion.

  ‘Hello,’ I said.

  ‘There are people hiding in this ditch,’ he shouted incredulously back to the group.

  ‘RUN!’ I shouted.

  Ingrid, the camera crew and I stood up and legged it back across the fields to our car, while I heard someone on the Hurley side shout for security. It was total chaos. We finally got to our car and jumped in and zoomed off. About a minute down the road a large 4x4 went racing past us with two thuggish-looking guys inside. We’d got away, but only just.