Here Comes the Clown Read online

  We rented a decent uniform but it came with an antiquated ticket machine that looked like it was from the 1920s, so we made our own one. It looked more like a toaster than a ticket machine but just turning it on would terrify motorists and grant us total command of a street. I’d step out of the office onto Charing Cross Road and I became the Terminator. We hadn’t even decided where we were going to film yet. We were just going to wander off into Soho and get started, but I simply wasn’t prepared for the hellish life that is being a London traffic warden. About ten seconds onto the street two different drivers had run up to me and pointed to their cars, saying they were just there for twenty seconds and that it was a medical emergency. Even they knew this was a weak excuse, but I just smiled and said:

  ‘Sure, park as long as you like, it sounds really important . . .’ The look of confusion and uncertainty on their faces was a picture. I walked on, smiling.

  Passers-by didn’t like a traffic warden smiling. I quickly became aware of an undercurrent of abuse floating around me like a foul cloud as I walked:

  ‘Wanker, get a proper job, you fucker, lowlife, shitface, arsehole . . .’ It was non-stop and from all walks of life. One very well-dressed old man stopped as I walked by and said: ‘You really are a fucking horrible human specimen, aren’t you? If I had a gun I’d kill you here and now . . .’, all in a gloriously posh voice.

  I was starting to fear for the mental health situation of traffic wardens. I hadn’t realised that things were that bad. I’d discovered that their headquarters was through an anonymous-looking door in Lexington Street, and Sam and I had toyed with the idea of supergluing their locks and blocking them in their office. Now this just seemed mean. I was now ahead of Sam and the others and walked onto Old Compton Street. There was a fire engine in the middle of the road and firemen were unravelling a long hose and running into a nearby building. I didn’t hesitate. I pulled out a fake ticket and slapped it onto the windscreen of the fire engine. Passers-by and firemen looked on in disbelief. Finally the lead fireman came up to me:

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ he asked.

  ‘You are parked illegally, so I have issued you with a ticket,’ I replied in a monotone.

  ‘This is a bloody fire engine, we’re putting out a fire . . .’ gasped the stupefied fireman.

  ‘There’s always an excuse . . .’ I said, wandering off, ‘. . . and if you’re still here when I come back I’ll get the clampers in . . .’ I was half-expecting to be hit hard on the back of the head with a fireman’s axe but he was too astonished to do anything.

  As per usual with Trigger Happy TV we hadn’t filmed this moment. It had been off the cuff and unplanned – Sam and I called these moments: for the beauty. They were just for our delectation and amusement. It had certainly proved that we had a winning character on our hands, though. I spent the rest of the day giving tickets to people waiting at traffic lights, cars stuck in traffic jams and buses at bus stops. The reactions of most motorists were genius. They hated traffic wardens so much, and for once were so certain that they were in the right, that they argued in a most un-British manner and were not going to stop until the matter went to the European Supreme Court. My last hit of the day was hailing a black cab and then giving him a ticket when he stopped to pick me up. I thought the cabbie was going to have a seizure.

  On my way back to the office I was summoned over to a large Bentley. The driver told me that he had Sir John Mills in the back and that he was waiting to go into a meeting so could he stay where he was for five minutes? I asked for verification that it was Sir John Mills. The back window rolled down and the old thespian himself smiled at me. I saluted and thanked Sir John for all he had done for his country against the ‘filthy Nazis’ and told him that he had special dispensation to stay here all day should he have nowhere to go. Sir John looked a little puzzled but smiled benignly back and rolled up his window. I was glad to have been of service.

  Another successful character was the spy. This was myself dressed up in a trench coat and a hat, carrying a briefcase and looking not unlike Inspector Gadget, approaching people as though to make some prearranged exchange. I would sidle up to someone feeding the ducks at the Round Pond in Hyde Park and whisper: ‘The cows fly backwards over my house . . . you have the package?’ At first they would be startled and then terrified as they realised what they were implicated in. They would stammer that I had the wrong person and I would get all apologetic and hurry away while they stood staring after me.

  We were always on the lookout for new places to film and I’d spotted a little park off the Embankment. As usual, the Previa parked up on the road behind a row of benches just inside the park. Sam then snuck inside and took up his camera position. When we were ready, I wandered in and chose a bench on which sat a man in a suit, eating a sandwich. I waited for a moment before sliding the briefcase along the bench to him. He looked at me quizzically. I indicated that he should take the briefcase. He looked utterly terrified.

  ‘The wind on the tundra is cold at this time of year, yes?’ I looked at him but he was up and gone in an instant. I shrugged my shoulders at Sam and we prepared to go again. I exited the park and waited for someone else to sit on one of the benches. Five minutes later, I was on my way in for another hit when two men grabbed me and pinned me to the ground. I couldn’t understand what was happening? All was soon revealed.

  The park we had chosen was right behind the Ministry of Defence. Most of the people in the park were employees of said ministry having their lunch. The sudden arrival of an unsubtle Soviet spy in their midst had caused quite some kerfuffle and the gentlemen pinning me to the ground were special security from the ministry who had been alerted by the first guy I had spoken to, a senior official who thought he was being ‘turned’. It took a lot of explaining to get out of that situation. We were lucky not to have been arrested, but the situation was so ludicrous that in the end we were given a stern ticking-off and sent on our way.

  As we were so inexpensive we just filmed and filmed. Days ran into weeks, and weeks ran into months. I started to get tired, very tired. I think it was partly from the unusual adrenaline peaks and troughs of this sort of filming. I really enjoyed doing it, but it takes nerve to approach strangers on the street and interact while trying to comedically control the situation. Often it just wasn’t funny, or the radio mike would break or someone wouldn’t sign the consent form (we always had to get consent from people involved in a hit). This would be the most frustrating part – you got an incredible moment and then the person involved wouldn’t sign. I didn’t blame them – I don’t think I would ever sign a consent form – but it was heartbreaking, as you knew that you wouldn’t get another one that good ever again.

  Things were also getting a bit rocky at home. I had split up with my girlfriend Izzy after two years together and she’d moved out of my flat in Notting Hill. The one thing I’ve learned in show business in the last fifteen years is that there are two important parts of your life: work and home. It is very difficult to do one if the other is up in the air. I wasn’t aware of this then. I was young and stupid, and things were falling apart fast.

  We had taken a week’s break in filming and I had gone off to Morocco for a road trip. It was supposed to have been with Izzy but I was now driving through Morocco for hours and hours just thinking about stuff, and this was not good for me. I came back home early. I’d lent my flat out to an old friend, Johnny, who was very surprised to see me back. He had taken the opportunity of having my flat for a week to organise a series of dinner parties. He rapidly tried to cancel these but people were constantly ringing the doorbell. Johnny rang me up the next day when I was in the bath. He could hear I was in a bad way and urged me to join him at an Italian restaurant in Notting Hill Gate, where he had rescheduled one of his dinner parties. I said no, I wasn’t up to it, but he persisted and I eventually agreed. I sat next to a rather gorgeous Canadian girl, who made me feel a lot better about things. I thought I’d p
layed it quite cool but, according to her, I ruined things by driving away on an old blue Vespa that ‘made you look ridiculous’.

  I saw Johnny the following night and the Canadian was there again. We all ended up going to the Cobden Club in Notting Hill. There were too many people about so I asked the Canadian whether she wanted to go for a drink with me somewhere else. She agreed, and I said I’d wait outside for her. Half an hour later and she hadn’t come out. I was about to head home when I plucked up some courage and went back in. This time she came out with me and we ended up in the bar of the Hilton at the end of Holland Park Avenue. The only other person in the bar was ex-footballer Ally McCoist, who sat and stared at us disconcertingly. The Canadian said that she was going off on a day trip the following day. She asked me whether I’d like to join her. I drunkenly agreed, but then forgot all about it. The following morning, I got a phone call from her: was I coming?

  I tried to shake off my hangover and met her at a train station. It turned out that we had a ticket to Rye. Now, I had no idea whether Rye was a dump or a nice place? She worked at the Sunday Times and had asked some of the ‘boys’ on the sports desk where she should go in the UK. They’d suggested Rye. I groaned inwardly. If I’d been one of those ‘boys’ and a trusting Canadian blonde had asked me where to go, I’d have sent her to the ugliest place I knew for a laugh. I was now convinced that Rye was going to be a nightmare. As it turned out, Rye was OK – the ‘boys’ weren’t as nasty as I was. The place was a little odd in that it had all the trappings of a seaside town except that the sea had decided to retreat about three hundred years ago, leaving the town high and dry. We spent the whole day there, wandering around aimlessly with me wondering how to make a move without being rebuffed. I still hadn’t when we returned to London and went out for dinner.

  I must have finally plucked up the courage, as the Canadian was called Stacey and, six months later to the day, I asked her to marry me. It was the best decision I ever made.

  So, I was now in a new relationship with my beautiful Canadian, but I still wasn’t in the best mental state. I was worried that this new relationship wouldn’t work out and I was back at work with the break having done me no good whatsoever. If anything it had stressed me out more. I was a mess. Things finally came to a head just round the corner from Sloane Square tube station. I was filming stuff while dressed as a ludicrous Dutch tourist. I was wearing shorts, a red mac and a tall Union Jack hat. The joke involved me just approaching people and asking nonsensical questions using a dodgy phrase book. Weirdly, it was a funny one and plenty of it made it to the final series. I stopped a black cab and confused him with my questions, before hopping into the back seat despite his protestations and announcing in a thick Dutch accent: ‘My egg must be boiled . . .’

  When I got out, my brain was boiled . . . I walked over to Sam in a panicky daze. I was having a massive anxiety attack. I’d had them before in my year off after school and a couple of times since in my twenties, but I couldn’t believe that it was happening to me now. It was a difficult experience to describe, a sort of floaty feeling, almost a disassociation with reality, an out-of-body experience. It was like having a really bad, paranoid trip but without having taken any drugs. Mental illness is a country so hard to describe to those who haven’t travelled there.

  It was frightening and I just wanted to get away, to run away and hide in my flat where I felt safe. I told Sam that I had to go. He looked at me as though I was mad. We were on a roll, getting funny stuff and, whereas I was inherently lazy, Sam was a borderline OCD workaholic and wanted to crack on.

  ‘I have to go, Sam . . . Sorry . . .’ And go I did.

  I went home and didn’t get out of bed for days. I couldn’t talk to anyone. Everything was spinning out of control. I was waging a vicious personal battle for domination of my head – all this in the middle of production.

  Soon, Absolutely knew that something was amiss and that I wasn’t just ill. I was dispatched to a Harley Street doctor with a clinic that looked more like a Renaissance brothel than somewhere medical. I tried to explain what I was going through. I told him about my previous panic attacks and used very inadequate descriptions like: ‘It’s like this invisible band is tightening around my head . . .’ I was trying desperately to hang onto something – sanity, control, whatever – but it felt like if I were to let go then I would fall into some bottomless abyss from which I’d never return. It was utterly terrifying. The doctor listened to my ramblings, asked me some questions about my state of mind and then announced confidently that I was suffering from clinical depression and that I should be immediately hospitalised.

  Trust me, there is nothing guaranteed to depress you more than being diagnosed as having clinical depression. The doctor wanted me to check into his special hospital, but the very idea of it freaked me out more – I just wanted to go home and hide from the world, not check into the cuckoo’s nest. Eventually he stopped trying to insist that I enter hospital and prescribed me some pills, something called paroxetine (Seroxat), a cousin of the new wonder drug Prozac and a member of the SSRI family. In simplistic terms, they increase the extracellular level of the neurotransmitter serotonin by inhibiting its reuptake into the presynaptic cell, thereby increasing the level of serotonin in the synaptic cleft available to bind to the postsynaptic receptor. More scientifically speaking: I had low serotonin levels and these pills upped said levels and should make me feel better.

  I really didn’t want to take any pills, but having looked at the list of possible side effects . . .

  • nausea/vomiting

  • drowsiness or somnolence

  • headache (very common as a short-term side effect)

  • bruxism (teeth grinding)

  • extremely vivid or strange dreams

  • dizziness

  • mydriasis (pupil dilation)

  • changes in appetite

  • insomnia and/or changes in sleep

  • excessive diarrhoea

  • weight loss/gain (measured by a change in body weight of 7 pounds)

  • increased risk of bone fractures by 1.7 fold

  • changes in sexual behaviour

  • increased feelings of depression and anxiety (may provoke panic attacks)

  • mania

  • tremors

  • autonomic dysfunction including orthostatic hypotension, increased or reduced sweating

  • akathisia (agitation or distress)

  • suicidal ideation (thoughts of suicide)

  • photosensitivity

  • paraesthesia (pins and needles)

  • cognitive disorders

  . . . there seemed little to worry about. Even the faint hope that some wonder pill could make me feel better was enough for me to give it a go. Not only that, but Trigger Happy TV production had ground to a halt while people were still being paid. The insurance company had been informed and they certainly weren’t going to keep this unknown quantity of a production in limbo forever. This panicked me even more. Had I got this far, got my own TV show, only to have some bloody anxiety disorder screw it all up? I couldn’t sleep and this in turn got me more and more worried. I’d go through every possible outcome in my head and each ended badly. The doctor had said that the paroxetine would take a bit of time to kick in – I wasn’t sure if I had the time. I was also very doubtful it would work at all.

  Two weeks passed and I was getting worse, as was the news from the production office, who said that they had been given a deadline: one more week and then the entire production would have to be cancelled. To make matters worse, I could see that Stacey, my new girlfriend and a woman who very much worked on the ‘pull your socks up’ life philosophy, was also starting to wonder just what the hell she had got herself into. I started to imagine Sam and everyone else on the team sitting around, gossiping about me and all agreeing that they’d always known I was a freak, a nutter, unstable, homicidal: ‘Always something not quite right about him . . .’ Mental illness leaves you
not only paranoid but ashamed. This is ludicrous, but it’s how it is. I hope it changes.

  As it turned out, I found out later from Sam that they had spent the ‘down time’ filming a music video for some indie band on Camber Sands and then did somebody’s wedding video. Apparently they’d had a brilliant time. It was heartening to know that my mental breakdown had provided positive opportunities for someone.

  Then, just as all seemed lost, I woke up one morning feeling a tiny, little bit better. I couldn’t put my finger on it. I don’t know if it was the paroxetine or not. I don’t know if I would have got better anyway. All I knew was that things seemed a little brighter, there was a tiny chink of light at the end of a long, scary tunnel. I had four days until the insurance deadline. The following day and things improved again slightly. The day after that, I felt almost normal. On the insurance decision day . . . I went into work. I still felt different but I could just about cope.

  It had been a seriously tight-run thing. I dread to think what would have happened had I not got better. I never talked about it at the time, because the press instantly labels you under the ‘mental health nutter’ banner and it comes up in every interview you do and starts to define you. It’s criminal that the stigma around the issue prevents so many people from talking about it, especially as it’s rare to meet anyone in showbiz who hasn’t suffered from it. I read about Matt Johnson, the lead singer of The The, when I was having anxiety attacks in my youth. He talked about having the same sort of thing and it really helped me to know this. I thought, if he could make an album like Infected then all was not lost, I could do something too. Having something like this is a weakness, just as is a heart condition or a dodgy hip. It’s an Achilles heel that hits you when you least expect it. But I think it makes me stronger. If I can defeat stuff going on in my own head then I can take on anything that the big, bad world throws at me. I strongly believe that a touch of madness is necessary for good comedy. I’ve stayed on paroxetine ever since. I’ve not wanted to wean myself off it as there appear to be very few downsides and I haven’t had any serious issues since. Three days after I was back at work, we started shooting again. Nobody ever mentioned anything about it – it was all very British.