Here Comes the Clown Read online

  We decided to try and blag a couple of trips out of the show budget. I don’t think that we imagined there would be a second series so we wanted to make the most of what we had. The first trip was to New York. I had no particular ideas of what to do out there but both Sam and I were obsessed with America and so a trip to New York just seemed to make sense. This was pre-9/11, and the crazy airport security that took over American airports had not yet happened, but there was still much suspicion of my big mobile. They couldn’t understand the concept of it and kept asking me to turn it on. I kept reiterating that this was impossible as it was a prop and non-functional. There would then be a long silence followed by someone else asking me to turn it on. Some things never change.

  Once through and in New York, the plan was to do some of the characters we’d been doing in London just with a Manhattan backdrop. It wasn’t as easy as we assumed. Americans were very different to Brits in their public reactions. If I pulled the big mobile out somewhere in the UK and started shouting into it, the British public would freeze in embarrassment and just hope that I would go away. Americans, certainly in New York, were very different – faced with me screaming into my ‘big cell’ they would either shout at me, ‘Hey, buddy, you want to shut the hell up?’ or, as in one case, just punch me hard in the face. Fortunately, the New York gun laws were reasonably restrictive, otherwise things might have got a lot worse. I could imagine the headline:

  Trigger Happy Comedian Gunned Down By Unhappy Trigger Happy Passer-by

  We took the spy character up onto the Empire State Building. I thought that there could be no better backdrop for an illicit bag drop. There were four of us: Sam and me and two runners, Paul Young and Matt Gilbe. I was dressed as the spy and, once on the outdoor observation platform, I started scoping for targets. Sam was hanging around, pretending to be a tourist filming.

  Most of the people up there were tourists and therefore often not English-speakers but I managed to get a couple of decent reactions. About ten minutes in, and I was just approaching a British-looking couple when I felt a firm hand grab my shoulder. I turned round and was immediately put into an armlock by an undercover security guard with clear desires to be in SWAT.

  ‘I’ve seen what you are doing, you and your friend are going to jail, son . . .’

  I panicked. I wasn’t sure if he thought I was a real spy or knew we were filming. Either way we had no permission of any sort. I saw a guy chasing Sam who bolted round the terrace. It turned out later that Sam had thought fast. He’d ejected the tape from the camera and passed it to Paul Young, who had hotfooted it into the lift with Matt and got out of the building. Sam and I were taken to a room where we were interrogated for an hour or so. The guy wanted to put us into this weird cell that they had, an Empire State Prison. Fortunately, he got on the phone to someone and we took the opportunity to bolt. We ran down loads of stairs until we grabbed a lift at about the eightieth floor. The security guards on the ground floor tried to stop us but we got past them and disappeared into the Manhattan crowds. We went for a drink at the Soho Grand to celebrate our freedom. U2 were in the bar with Naomi Campbell – all in all, it was a very New York day.

  I decided that it would be good to film in a ski resort. Unlike our New York trip, I had some specific snow jokes that we could film. I opted for Zermatt, a ski resort that I loved (before the Russians came) – it had the required chocolate-box look with the added bonus of not allowing cars. We packed the trusty Previa with costumes and props and set off from Charing Cross Road, bound for Switzerland. It was a Trigger Happy European Vacation. We stayed at a Bond-like hotel in Zermatt that you accessed by way of a long underground tunnel and then a lift up into the lobby. Much schnapps was drunk upon arrival, and the first day’s filming was cancelled due to extreme hangovers. Ever-resourceful, we turned it into a ‘recce’ day. I’ve had a lot of ‘recce’ days over the years.

  When we eventually started filming, things went well. I spent four hours standing in a snowdrift dressed as a snowman, throwing snowballs at passers-by. This was funny but I nearly lost two toes to frostbite as my shoes were not insulated. I wandered around town, carrying an ordinary plank of wood in lieu of a snowboard and trying to ‘get down’ with other boarders before advertising for my ‘Shki Shkool’ while covered in bandages and plasters.

  The following day, we hit the slopes only to find out that Paul Young had ‘forgotten’ to tell us that he couldn’t ski. We were forced to improvise and found him a toboggan so that he could follow us down. Halfway down the slope, we stopped and set up a sign that read:

  DANGER YETI

  The joke was not a complicated one. I was dressed as a big hairy yeti and would jump out at unsuspecting skiers about ten metres past the warning sign. I terrified a couple of Japanese groups until the ski patrol turned up. They were not best amused and I was arrested, still dressed as a yeti, and taken down to the town, where I was locked up in what appeared to be the only prison cell in town. Sharing my cell was a Swiss burglar who looked very freaked out to be in a small room with a big hairy beast. I was in there for two hours and he didn’t once look at me directly. He just stayed in the far corner, muttering to himself until my release was negotiated from London.

  On the way back to the UK we stopped in Bruges, the ‘Venice of the North’. For some reason we had a British policeman’s uniform in the back, so I put it on and started wandering around town, trying to think of a joke. In the end what made us laugh was my chatting up a couple of Belgian policewomen. The joke evolved into me being both incredulous and jealous that they had handguns. We were halfway through this patter when a van pulled up next to me and I was arrested by some very aggressive Belgian gendarmes. Filming abroad was definitely turning into a bit of a chore. They rounded us all up and we were all interrogated separately back at the police station. The gist of the charges seemed to be that we were impersonating a policeman and that this was illegal in Belgium. Fortunately our production manager back in the UK, Sarah Banwell, was very efficient and had got some basic filming permit to do stuff in Bruges. She faxed it over and this seemed to placate the police. We were eventually released on the condition that we no longer wandered around dressed as a policeman.

  We’d seen locals take tourists for a trip round old Bruges on horse-drawn carriages. We paid one of them to let me sit next to him and be the guide. Once we had a couple of Americans on board we were off. We went round and round the central square for about twenty minutes as I made up rubbish about the old ‘windowsh’ you could see. The Americans were perfect, very annoyed but just too timid to demand that we stop. I ran the whole, uncut scene on the end of the first Trigger Happy DVD.

  There was one joke that I am still determined to film in Bruges but never have. It is a city of many bicycles, and there are several places where you can rent them. All the bikes look almost identical, black with no handlebar brakes and a little brown basket on the front. My idea was to make an exact miniature reproduction of one of the bikes, complete with tiny corporate signage. I would then rent a real bike, return the next day with my tiny copy and complain that it had shrunk in the rain. Sadly, every time I have visited since, the weather has been perfect with not a drop of rain. One day, however . . .

  Another idea I’d had was to hide a celebrity in each show and then run a competition at the end for anybody who could spot them all. We rang around but nobody was interested apart from Carol Decker, the ex-lead singer of T’Pau. I’d already come up with the concept of sending two people in a bull costume into a china shop. Suddenly it hit me: we could put Carol into the shop pretending to be a customer and she could have . . . wait for it . . . *drumroll* China in her hands.

  Carol was charming and very up for doing it. On the way to the shoot, in the van, she asked what other celebrities we were using. I panicked before namechecking Malcolm McLaren, Plastic Bertrand, Tony Hadley, Yazoo and . . . Prince.

  ‘Prince?’ gasped Carol. ‘As in “Purple Rain”, superstar, Prince?’

/>   I nodded.

  ‘Well that’s cool.’ Carol looked seriously impressed and not a little chuffed to be in that kind of company.

  I kept quiet and we never went any further with the celebrity cameo idea. There never was a competition. Despite this, Carol came back to work for us in the Christmas Specials when I’d knock on random doors, introduce her to old ladies and then try to flog them washing-up cloths. It was all very random.

  The little weird moments made me laugh more than anything. One day, we were filming in a street in Brook Green. I was dressed as the Grim Reaper and the joke was simple. I would ring a doorbell and someone would answer. I would then pronounce, in a deep voice: ‘Mr Jones, it is time . . .’

  Whoever answered the door would invariably say something like: ‘I’m not Mr Jones, you must have the wrong door.’

  I would then answer: ‘Are you not Mr Jones of number 38 ***** Road?’

  The confused person would say: ‘No, this is number 40, you have the wrong house.’

  I would then immediately drop the menacing voice into a normal one and politely whisper: ‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ and then they would watch out of their door as I went next door.

  I rang on one door and an elderly gentleman answered. As he opened the door I realised that he was blind. Obviously he didn’t see the Grim Reaper but just asked who was there? I didn’t want to freak him out so I put on my poshest voice, apologised and told him that I had the wrong address and not to worry. He was fine about it and shut the door as I walked away. It was then that I spotted the small CCTV camera in the corner of the porch. I imagined the man’s son or daughter popping round and checking the footage, only to see their father talking to the Grim Reaper at the door with no sound to explain what it was all about . . .

  Once we’d finished filming, we then started the mammoth task of editing our months and months of footage into six shows. It was a long and often torturous process, but I loved being in an edit. It was where you took all the random puzzle pieces and fitted them painstakingly together to make the big picture. Music played an enormous part in the success of Trigger Happy TV. I’d always longed to be musical, but lacked much ability. I was the singer in a band called Hang David in the late Eighties, but we never got anywhere, save a mini tour of the USA where we supported the Tom Tom Club at CBGBs and played a twenty-two-minute version of The Cure’s ‘A Forest’ to twenty drunk rednecks in Binghampton.

  I may not have had much talent as an actual musician, but as a listener I definitely had more form. Most importantly, I was not a music snob. If I heard a song – on the radio, in a film, at someone’s house – and got that wonderful, addictive feeling of needing to hear it again and again, then that’s what I’d do. It didn’t matter if it was Napalm Death or Men Without Hats. Music could and still can touch me like nothing else – it made a massive connection with me on the inside. It made me alive.

  I despised people who would dislike a song because it wasn’t ‘cool’. That was bollocks. Music was music and I loved a perfect pop song as much as any angsty indie opus. I could never really understand other people who didn’t ‘feel’ a song the way I did. I’m terrible on other people’s music systems – I play one song and people like it, and then I can’t switch off – I have to keep playing another and another and get really annoyed if everyone in the room doesn’t stop what they’re doing and demand to know what each and every song is . . . I guess I should have been a DJ, but they are invariably awful people.

  So when it came to making Trigger Happy TV, it just made total sense to me that I should put beautiful, haunting tracks over almost every sketch. It was the closest I’d get to linking the music that I loved with me. It was almost like remaking pop videos for my favourite songs, except with me blagging as the star. I’d grown up with a fairly mainstream taste, mostly drawn from my elder brother and sisters – The Beatles, Supertramp, Queen, David Bowie, Jacques Brel, Pink Floyd, Dylan, The Stones, Neil Young and Simon & Garfunkel. Once I started making my own choices, the list just grew and grew. Huge infatuations included – Pixies, House of Love, Prince, James, The Cure, Mercury Rev, Psychedelic Furs, Spear of Destiny, The Sound, JJ72, Grandaddy, Grant Lee Buffalo, Babybird, Tricky, The Church, Suede, PJ Harvey . . . the list goes on. I still fall in love with a new album practically every week. One day, however, I could put it all on the screen.

  I cut Trigger Happy TV to the music. Often I’d leave things to go for longer than they should – comedically – so that they would fit a tune. This was a problem when the show was sold abroad as, due to cost constraints of licensing the original soundtrack, people just plonked random soundalike soundtracks on top. The show needed to be listened to with the original music as I’d spent weeks and weeks getting it exactly right. It helped that our editor was my old friend Dave Frisby, the drummer from Hang David. Unlike our time in the band, in the edit we were in total synch.

  But my music choices started to become a big problem. I would choose a track only to find that permission to use it had been refused – this was always so frustrating. We had some very weird moments, like when we waited on the phone while someone called Paul McCartney for permission to use a song (he said yes) or persuading Gordon Lightfoot to let us use the ‘most requested’ song on the soundtrack – ‘If You Could Read My Mind’ – on the DVD. I was unaware that Gordon was a seriously big cheese in Canada and when permission was initially refused, I sent his management a copy of the show so that they could see how brilliant it was. I imagined Gordon was living in some hut in the middle of nowhere and he would be thrilled when a local delivery boy ran up his dirt drive shouting, ‘Gordo, Gordo, they love you in England!’ I even started thinking about getting him to rerelease the song with us doing the video, a possible Christmas Number One? We waited and waited and there was no reply from Canada. Finally I rang his people myself. They said no. I persisted and asked why? Had they not shown the show to Gordon? They said yes, Gordon had watched the show and he thought ‘it was a bunch of crap’. That was very much that.

  The worst moment was around the title sequence. I was obsessed with Elastica and their debut album, and I wanted to use the track ‘Connection’ for the titles. I’d already commissioned someone to make the titles to correspond exactly to that tune when news came in that permission had been refused. Once you had a track in mind, it was difficult to think of anything else. I rang Sam and we both decided to drive into the edit to try other music. As we drove up Portobello Road I spotted Justine Frischmann, the lead singer of Elastica, standing at a cash-point. It was so weird and fluky. I didn’t hesitate. I jumped out of the cab and approached her. She looked nervous of me.

  ‘Hi, you don’t know me but I’m making a comedy show and I want to use your track for the titles and your record company said no and I’m asking you to rethink . . .’

  I was panting and must have looked a bit weird but she wrote down her address and told me to drop a copy of the show off and she’d have a look. We made a copy and popped it through her letterbox with an explanatory note. The next day the track was cleared. It taught me to be persistent – often people at record companies just couldn’t be bothered and said no without thinking simply because it was too much work for them.

  The soundtrack would become an integral part of Trigger Happy TV – we released three soundtrack CDs and they sold like hot cakes. I was so chuffed about that. In a sense, I was more interested in music than comedy. The music gave the show an indie soul, an outsider attitude. It was probably the thing I’m most proud of.

  Remarkably, nobody from Channel 4 interfered with us in the edit at all. We were left alone until we eventually had six shiny new programmes ready to hand over. Sam’s OCD brain had nearly exploded after he had itemised every clip we had onto bits of coloured card that indicated whether something was Talky or Music or Both or Bitty. He also had sub-genres like Running Gags and Strands. It made sense to nobody else but us. When we’d finished, we handed the shows in to Channel 4 and waited.

 
When the news came back, it was insane. The show was going to air in the New Year on Friday nights, between Friends and Frasier. This was crazy stuff. This was prime time, and we hadn’t expected anything like this. I became stupidly nervous and disappeared off to Toronto with Stacey, where I spent a very weird Millennium night eating Chinese takeaway and watching the world explode into fireworks. I didn’t know what to expect. I watched Scarface on New Year’s Day, that scene where Pacino looks up into the sky and sees the blimp with the words ‘The World Is Yours’. Was it? Or would it all screw up as usual?

  Back in England, I woke up and looked out of the window of my All Saints Road flat to see a wall of posters with my face on them. I’d come up with the idea for a teaser-type ad campaign where we just had photos of me with phrases like ‘Don’t Trust This Man’ and ‘This Man Is A Liar’ emblazoned underneath. They were very effective, especially as Channel 4 had ‘arranged’ for them to be flyposted so they looked all edgy and underground. I spent the day driving around London taking photos of the posters – very uncool. In my office at home, I have a photograph of my flat and the people in it watching the first moments of the first show going out. The photo caption reads:

  9.03pm – 14 January 2000

  Sam and I were a bit ignorant as to just how lucky we were when the show took off. We had nothing to compare it to and just didn’t realise how unusual the show’s level of success was.