Here Comes the Clown Read online

  An hour later and a carriage appeared from the stables with Manilow and a couple of Harrods flunkies ensconced within it. As we had got there first, prankster etiquette dictated that we kicked off proceedings. I chased after the carriage as it made its way round the square and thrust Hey Hippo into Manilow’s face. I/Hey Hippo asked him whether he was a big fan. Manilow looked very confused but nodded and indicated that he never missed a show. I was then punched hard by a flunky and forced to give up the assault. This was the cue for Dennis Pennis to begin his attack. It was way funnier than mine. He simply ran after the generously nosed singer holding up a large white sheet: ‘Mr Manilow, Mr Manilow – you’ve dropped your handkerchief . . .’ It was one–nil to Pennis.

  The worst moment of my Hey Hippo period was when I joined a queue of journalists to interview Jennifer Saunders, who was promoting a series of Absolutely Fabulous. As we waited, someone tugged on my sleeve. I turned around to see a girl that I’d known at university and that I had had a massive crush on. She was even more gorgeous now.

  Girl: ‘Hey, what are you doing here?’

  Me: (lying my arse off as it was too ‘complicated’ to explain Hey Hippo) ‘Oh, I’m interviewing Jennifer Saunders. I’m an entertainment journalist . . .’

  Girl: ‘Hey, weird, me too. Who do you work for?’

  Me: ‘Uuhhmm, the BBC.’

  Girl: ‘Wow, that’s great. I’m with Reuters . . .’

  Me: ‘Cool.’

  Girl: ‘What are you doing after this? Fancy a drink?’

  Me: ‘Sure . . . Great . . .’

  I couldn’t believe my luck. This total babe had just asked me out and I was working for the BBC. Life was good. Then I remembered that I didn’t work for the BBC and I was about to talk to Jennifer Saunders using a purple glove puppet. It was a terrible habit of mine that I’d never been able to shake. I’d lie at the drop of a hat to avoid embarrassment and always end up in a complicated web of deceit from which I could never escape.

  I decided to let the girl go first and made up some excuse about waiting for some lighting equipment to arrive. I hoped that she would do her interview and then not see me doing mine. Fat chance. I was halfway through asking a bemused Jennifer Saunders, in my weird voice, whether she was a fan when I spotted the girl staring at me. Her mouth was hanging open and not in a good way. When I finished I looked everywhere for her to explain that actually I was a cutting-edge punk comedian beaming to literally hundreds of people on a weekly basis . . . but she’d scarpered.

  There was a rather scary production manager at Paramount called Ping. After a couple of weeks of me doing Hey Hippo she approached me and said that we might have a trademark issue using the puppet. I told her not to worry, that I’d contacted the manufacturers and that they had said it was alright. This was complete bollocks and she knew it because she asked me what the name of the company was. I looked down and spotted the tag on the side that read Gund Toys.

  ‘It’s Gund Toys,’ I told her confidently.

  ‘Where are they based?’ asked Ping.

  ‘The UK . . .’ I replied.

  ‘And who did you speak to there?’ She wasn’t letting go.

  ‘Mr Gund . . . I spoke to Mr Gund himself and he said it was fine . . . no problem at all.’ I smiled at Ping. Ping did not smile back but she did back off.

  Alex Jackson-Long had been listening to the whole exchange and leant in.

  ‘You are a bloody brilliant liar . . .’ I took this as a compliment.

  From then on Mr Gund became my default alias whenever a fake name was needed for anything.

  Man Made News rolled on with nobody very interested in it. We had a phone-in section of the show where viewers were supposed to ring in. Nobody rang in. Eventually I had to go into another room and use the office phone and pretend to be random members of the public. I had an Iraqi character who never understood anything that Diamond said and who wound him up terribly. We never told him that all the phone calls were fake. It would have been too cruel. When the series ended, the whole thing was quietly wound up. This was bad news for me as it meant that I would probably be getting my marching orders. I started filming as much stuff as I could before I lost access to equipment. I made a little series called Snapshots that mainly consisted of me dressed as a giant cat chasing Leigh Francis dressed as a giant mouse in and out of cheese shops in Central London. Nobody was very interested in these and I was getting desperate when salvation came in the form of a man called Dan Brooke.

  Dan was from an advertising background and had been brought in to promote the Paramount Comedy Channel. He had the idea that, rather than use his budget to pay for advertising, he could finance me to do funny stuff that would get the channel publicity for what it was supposed to be – funny. He called me in. Could I get the channel into the news? Oh yes, I replied with the confidence of a man who had personally spoken to Mr Gund. ‘Go and do it,’ he said. So I did.

  My first problem was that I couldn’t afford a proper camera crew. It was prohibitively expensive for my kind of off-the-cuff, seat-of-the-pants filming. What I needed was a partner in crime. I went out for a celebratory drink with my then girlfriend Izzy at a pub called The Engineer in Primrose Hill. Izzy and I lived together in my flat in All Saints Road. We were pretty anti-social and didn’t go out much. Her best friend was a girl called Dido, and she and her boyfriend Bob were regular guests to the flat. I knew that Dido was a backing singer in her brother Rollo’s band Faithless but I never paid much heed to this. I dimly remember her playing a demo of her debut solo album one night but I think I rather rudely talked all over it. Then her song ‘Thank You’ was used on the end credits of the film Sliding Doors, Eminem heard it and the rest, as they say, is history. I shall long remember the hedonistic nights we all spent together – we’d play bridge and I’d cook meals from the River Café Cookbook – the very epitome of the crazy rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle that Dido went on to define.

  Anyway, I met Izzy in the pub and I was buzzing, I couldn’t stop talking. I had this amazing offer to go and film weird, funny stuff but I had this problem. I needed a cameraman. It was frustrating and I didn’t know what to do. Suddenly, the barman, a long-haired, blond, rather intense-looking guy, leant over.

  ‘I could do that,’ he said, staring at me slightly threateningly.

  ‘Sorry, do what?’ I replied.

  ‘The camera stuff. I could be the cameraman you need.’ He was still staring manically and I had to break the gaze.

  ‘Are you a cameraman?’ I asked him.

  ‘Oh yeah, I do it a lot and this sounds right up my street.’ He looked very confident as he dried pint glasses. I had very few options.

  ‘OK . . . Do you want to come to Paramount Comedy Channel on Rathbone Place on Monday morning and we’ll give it a go?’ I had nothing to lose.

  ‘Sure . . . See you then. My name’s Sam.’

  Sam was Sam Cadman. He was an artist and had never used a camera before. In the best Gundian tradition, however, this was not going to get in his way. He borrowed a camera over the weekend, read the manual (a very Sam thing to do) and turned up on Monday morning ready to go. Where I was lazy and unfocused, Sam was hyper-motivated and organised and we soon discovered that we had a very similar sense of humour – very dry, slightly surreal. Dido would have approved – it was a Sliding Doors moment. Had I not gone to that pub, that night, everything in the last fifteen years would have been so different.

  So now I had Sam, his camera and a radio mike . . . but what to do? Paramount decided to air an interstitial (a telly word for the stuff between programmes) show called World of Paramount. Up until then, the channel showed a lot of US shows and didn’t make much itself. Now we had a three-minute weekly slot. The year was 1997 and there was a general election in the offing – Tony Blair and New Labour were coming. So I set up a fake political party called The Teddy Bear Alliance and we used this as the basis for an anarchic election campaign in which we pestered everyone in sight. I organised
two hundred teddy bears to march on Parliament brandishing signs with random slogans like ‘Single European Honey’ and ‘Say No To Fleas’ on them. We kidnapped the Tories’ chicken mascot that was following Tony Blair around and I stood for election in Kensington & Chelsea against Alan Clark. The official in charge of the election really did not want me standing and ruining his big night. I was standing as Edward Bear and he said that, as it was not my real name, I was ineligible. So, off I went to some solicitors and changed my name to Edward Bear by deed poll. I never bothered to change it back so presumably my legal name is still Edward (Teddy) Bear.

  We mainly targeted the Tories in the election as they were in power but I have no particular political affiliations. We were bipartisan nuisances. Once the election was over and New Labour swept into power, we knew who we had to go for. I had a copy of the famous Vanity Fair edition in which Patsy Kensit and Liam Gallagher lay in a Union Jack bed – ‘London Swings Again’ read the headline. Tony Blair was rebranding Britain as Cool Britannia. I’d always been anti on-trend stuff and so we targeted Cool Britannia. I called the project War of the Flea, after a book about guerrilla warfare by Robert Taber. It seemed to encapsulate just what I wanted to do.

  War of the Flea – the guerrilla fights the war of the flea, and his military enemy suffers the dog’s disadvantages: too much to defend; too small, ubiquitous, and agile an enemy to come to grips with.

  My first target was Peter Mandelson, the oleaginous mastermind behind the New Labour project. Mandelson was known as a master of the Dark Arts and so I thought it might be fitting for him to have a large following in the underworld. London at Large informed us that Mandelson was due to attend the opening of some modern, trendy furniture shop in Tottenham Court Road that very week. This was only two minutes’ walk from our offices. It was fate. We dressed up as Frankenstein’s monster, the Grim Reaper, assorted vampires and the Devil himself. Then we booked a paparazzo to turn up and take the pictures. There was no point in doing a publicity stunt without documenting the thing properly and you couldn’t rely on someone else capturing it.

  It all went too well. Mandelson turned up on time and was greeted by us like a fifth Beatle. He looked most confused and fled into the store. We tried to follow him in but were prevented by security. We then pressed ourselves up against the shop windows screaming our appreciation of him like maniacal teenybopper fans. When he eventually exited we threw black confetti at his feet and all tried to hug him. The money shot was the moment he got back into his chauffeur-driven Jag and he froze at the door surrounded by this chaos. The following morning the photograph was on the front page of the Guardian and the Paramount Comedy Channel was credited as being responsible.

  We’d hit a rich seam with Mandelson as all the newspapers hated him and longed for anything to splash on him. I found out where he lived by going through every name in the Kensington & Chelsea electoral register. It took me ages and I couldn’t find it until I eventually checked the Westminster roll and found him. The house itself was the one that would later get him into trouble because he purchased it using an interest-free loan from a political colleague. We arrived early one morning and planted a mock Millennium Dome in his front garden. This made the headlines again. We were on a roll. Next, I had a thirty-foot statue of Mandelson made and we erected it overnight on College Green in front of Parliament before twelve of us carried it through London’s Trafalgar Square and then tried to donate it to Mandelson’s Millennium Dome Exhibition.

  The number of people who watched our little episodes was tiny but they were quite influential. I met Noel Gallagher a couple of years later and he told me that he and Liam used to avidly watch our stuff. We’d had a go at Liam. He’d been arrested after the Q Awards for possession of cocaine following a night out on the town. We hired a really good lookalike and took him round all the places Liam had been the night before. We made him go in and apologise to confused receptionists and embarrassed owners for his behaviour. His final line was always: ‘You didn’t find any talcum powder here, did you? I left it somewhere . . .’

  Liam had also challenged Mick Jagger to a fight in an interview and so we turned up at his North London house with thirty people wearing Mick Jagger masks and demanded that he come out and have a scrap. To our delight, he told us to ‘foook off’ on the intercom.

  One day we came into work to find that the new leader of the Conservative Party, William Hague, was having his stag party at the Carlton Club in Mayfair. We quickly organised some strippers and got to the event in time to bum-rush Hague as he arrived. All we had to do was turn up at a news event and do something funny and the national news outlets would lap it up. It didn’t matter if they knew why or what you were doing it for. I once chased Jeffrey Archer down the road dressed as a gorilla and throwing bananas at him. The redoubtable BBC (now Channel 4 News) reporter Michael Crick chased me, having filmed the incident. He demanded to know who we were in his rather pompous manner. I didn’t reply and he got increasingly irritated.

  ‘If you don’t tell me, then I won’t use the clip on my report.’

  I continued to ignore him and hurled one last banana at a retreating Archer before hopping into the back of our vehicle and disappearing. The clip of our attack ran in full on Newsnight that evening with little explanation.

  One day, Sam and I were walking down the Edgware Road in London when we saw a big display outside a mobile phone shop. One of the objects in the display was a two-and-a-half-foot plastic mobile phone. Larking about, I picked it up and told Sam that I should use this as my new mobile. He laughed and I walked off still holding it in my hands. The shop owner ran out and started chasing us, the thieves of his big plastic display phone. We both scarpered, running as fast as we could while carrying our stupidly heavy booty. Eventually we hopped on a bus and made good our escape.

  We hopped off at the top of Soho Square. It was pub time but, as we walked down Oxford Street, we spotted the larger than life (media code for fat) Australian DJ Jono Coleman being interviewed by a camera crew. Coleman was jabbering on and I just acted instinctively. I got in the shot behind him, raised the big mobile to my ear and started shouting into it. ‘HELLO!! WHAT?! I CAN’T HEAR YOU BECAUSE THAT ARSE JONO COLEMAN IS TALKING TOO LOUDLY . . .’

  It stopped traffic. Everyone on the pavement stopped and laughed. Jono Coleman stopped mid-flow and stared on in confusion, as did his camera crew. I continued: ‘THAT’S BETTER. I CAN HEAR YOU NOW. THE ARSE HAS STOPPED TALKING . . . NO, I’M ON THE MOBILE, IN OXFORD STREET . . .’

  I wandered away from Coleman down the street, with Sam hooting with laughter and following me. The Big Mobile was born, although we wouldn’t actually use it again for a while.

  As far as I remember we vaguely tried to theme every War of the Flea show.

  • We had Politics: which mainly consisted of harassing Mandelson.

  • We had Music: I went down to Piltdown Farm in Glastonbury and interviewed Michael Eavis while dressed as an idiot DJ. I kept namechecking classic Glastonbury sets by fictional bands – ‘Loaded Manchobo . . . what a performance . . .’ Poor old Michael Eavis could only nod and agree with my increasingly odd memories.

  • We had Food: celebrity chefs were the new black. I gate-crashed Michelin restaurants dressed as a Michelin Man. ‘You look after me, I’ll look after you – you get my drift?’ I once said to an appalled Michel Roux while subtly showing him a star hidden inside my jacket. It was during an interview with Antony Worrall Thompson that I started my habit of just running away in the middle of celebrity interviews. Originally, it was just because I’d had enough and wanted to escape. What I enjoyed was listening to the tape of Sam pretending to be a freelance and ringing a fictitious office to complain about my behaviour. ‘I don’t know. I turned up and then he started acting oddly. Then he went crazy and ran away. It’s all very embarrassing and incredibly unprofessional . . .’

  • We had Technology: in which we set up gold email boxes next to real post boxes and rang Sir
Clive Sinclair pretending to be Bill Gates, challenging him to a game of Tetris.

  • We had Art: in which we got the artists Gilbert & George to autograph a plastic turd. We then travelled to Paris and placed said turd in the middle of their exhibition in the French capital. It caused quite the sensation and people gawped at it for a good couple of hours until the authorities removed it.

  Everyone we showed the mini-series to seemed to like it. We couldn’t wait to show it to the powers-that-be at Paramount. A new American guy had come over from the States and had pretty much taken over the channel. He was the man we had to present the series to. Confidence was high when he finally came down to the edit for a viewing. Confidence drooped rapidly, however. We screened show after show without even a hint of a chuckle from the Yank. He just sat there looking bored and pissed off. When it was over he said, ‘Thanks, guys, good stuff, we’ll talk soon,’ and left the edit.

  We knew things hadn’t gone well but couldn’t guess just how badly. A couple of days later we got a call from someone else we knew at Paramount who called us into their office. The American, it turned out, had hated the whole thing, said it looked ‘cheap’ and was terrified about lawsuits and legal problems.

  ‘You guys have got all the release forms and stuff you need for everybody in the series, right?’ he asked, staring at us as you might at someone who had recently shat on your lawn.