Here Comes the Clown Page 7

  I had a ‘burglar’ character who was very honest about his chosen career. He would lean out of windows and ask people to hold his ladder while he climbed down with a bag of swag or announce to passers-by that he was about to steal a dog. We actually had quite a problem finding a Beano-esque striped robber’s top. In the end we used a white polo neck and made black stripes by sticking strips of black gaffer tape round it. This just made the burglar look even stranger to anybody he spoke to.

  We drove down to the Cotswolds and ended up in a little village called Blockley. It had loads of big houses owned by people from London who only came down at the weekends. My burglar stopped a local woman in the middle of the village and started asking her which houses were empty in the week. He claimed to be only interested in this information because he was a keen student of architecture. The woman was very forthcoming and pointed out several empty houses including one belonging to the editor of the Guardian. She appeared very calm and completely unflustered by my curious line of questioning. When we’d finished, one of our runners approached her and told her what was going on. She happily signed a consent form and we moved on to another village with a nice bit of footage in the can. About two hours later we finally got to an area with mobile phone reception and we noticed that we had about five messages from the office. We rang them and there was audible panic in our production manager’s voice.

  ‘Some woman has rung the police to say that Channel 4 have paid a black man to wander around her village waving a shotgun and boasting that he was going to rob the post office . . .’

  It appeared that the Blockley lady was neither ethnically aware, nor had she understood any of the explanation that our runner had given her. According to the office, the equivalent of Cotswold SWAT had been dispatched to find us but . . . they’d so far drawn a blank. This was curious since we were driving a blacked-out Toyota Previa with three large squirrel costumes attached to the roof. We weren’t exactly inconspicuous. We eventually handed ourselves in to a confused policeman at Moreton-in-Marsh police station, where we were held for questioning for three hours before being released with a caution and a severe ticking-off.

  Once the second series was in the can and edited, Channel 4 went to town with the publicity. Suddenly there were enormous billboards advertising the show popping up all over the country. This was incredibly flattering, but I did start to wonder whether it was the best thing to do with someone supposedly making a hidden camera show? I had a feeling that, were we to make any more shows, we might need a bigger disguise budget.

  Meanwhile, things had changed up a gear at home with the arrival of our gorgeous daughter Parker. I was now dealing with two wonderful but very life-destabilising events: massive success and a new baby daughter. It was obviously far more difficult for Stacey, who was doing the hard, mother–baby work, but it meant that both areas of my life were now in flux. Experience was teaching me that this was never a good thing. Like a stool, I needed at least one leg firmly on the ground.

  Series Two was an enormous hit, and things really took off. Ironically, this was just when Sam and I were thinking about knocking it on the head. Sam was always keen to move on and do new stuff. He was a very restless individual. For my part, I hadn’t yet learned a valuable lesson. Never make any decision on your future immediately after finishing something. Making Trigger Happy TV was an all-consuming experience that left me drained and empty and this, plus our lovely new family arrival, made it not the time to decide on anything. I should have disappeared for three months and done nothing but a load of strong cocktails and beach time. Sadly, I didn’t have the experience, nor did anybody advise me otherwise, and so we launched ourselves into conversation with Channel 4 about ‘other projects’.

  I wanted to make a series of different ideas: a spoof documentary, a travel show called Breakfast with the President, an offbeat chat show. I wanted to present all these new disparate projects under one umbrella, called Trigger Happy TV Presents – this would allow us to make weird stuff while still letting Trigger Happy TV fans know that, if they liked that show, then they might like this. Channel 4 didn’t like the idea. Eventually we carved out a deal where we could make a spoof doc about my life and a pilot for the chat show as long as we made two Trigger Happy TV Christmas Specials. In hindsight, I should have just made a deal to produce three more series of Trigger Happy TV with a two-year gap in between each series, in which we could pursue our more ‘experimental’ projects. Hindsight, however, is a wonderful thing . . .

  So we kicked off with the final two Trigger Happys. We wanted to start the first one with a big stunt, and we asked fans to turn up for a shoot at a location in London. We had about two hundred people turn up at a church where they were all given multifarious animal costumes to wear. At the last minute we gave out some signs, all with random lyrics from Lionel Richie songs on them. Then we herded everybody behind two corners at the end of a long, thin lane and waited for somebody to walk up it. At our signal, the animal crowd leapt into action and poured down the lane and started running towards the man like some surreal riot in Disneyland. Unsurprisingly the man pegged it, closely followed by our motley riot. When it was all over, we had a turkey with a broken leg and severe grazing to a rhino.

  I had an art gallery guard character who sat, bored, on a chair in Dulwich Picture Gallery. I love art galleries – they are awkward places, like lifts, where normal rules don’t apply and everybody feels a little unsettled . . . My guard would sit and stare at people staring at the Old Masters before approaching them to enquire as to whether they’d like to buy a pack of Bic razors or some combs? In another scene, my guard quietly slipped off his chair and started to crawl very slowly out of the room as a silver-haired gentleman watched in utter confusion, undoubtedly wondering if this was really what he had fought a war for.

  I never, ever accepted jokes from members of the public. Mostly this was because they were spectacularly awful, but also I was warned that people would claim that I’d stolen ideas from them, so it was just easier not to take any. We had professional writers who’d come in and brainstorm, people like David Quantick, Jane Bussman, Andy Riley and Kevin Cecil, Bert Tyler-Moore and George Jeffries. Sometimes they would have a great, fully formed idea and sometimes they would spark stuff off one another. I would always know a great one when it surfaced.

  Members of the public would come up to me in the street, tell me how much they loved the show and then hit me with their ‘totally hilarious’ idea. One suggestion (a serious one) was: ‘So you run into a supermarket, naked, pretend to staple your head to the floor and shout, “Help, I’m stapled to the floor . . .”’

  It was as though they had been watching a different show. One exception to this ‘no public’ rule, however, was the gang of giant cats. I was on Kiss FM’s annoying breakfast show, and rather wishing that I wasn’t, when somebody rang in with a ‘great’ idea for the show. I braced myself but, to my surprise, it was a cracker. Six days later, it was dawn in North London as three giant cats started stealing milk from a bemused milkman and people in the close awoke to find their bins being ransacked. Thank you, whoever you were.

  There was a hideous urban canal that ran behind my flat in Westbourne Park in London. There was always something horrible floating in it, and I’d lost count of the number of shopping trolleys I’d seen tossed in. The concept that there would be anything living in there was ridiculous. So we filmed the urban fisherman sketch.

  The idea was simple: I’d wait for someone to walk past before hooking the biggest fish you’d ever seen. To do the joke was more complicated than we thought. The first attempt was using a hollow shell of a seven-foot fish but it filled with water, sank and was impossible to reel out of the canal. We went back to the drawing board and the props department produced a much more realistic fish made of some kind of slimy, dense foam. The problem with this one, however, was that it wouldn’t sink. Undeterred, we hired a frogman to come and hold it down underwater on the canal floor until I jerked
the line. The frogman was unable to hold it down and eventually we needed three frogmen, submerged, to hold the bloody thing down. By now this had become a seriously expensive joke but it made the cut, so I guess it was technically worth the expense . . .

  I tried not to film anywhere that either Sam or I frequented but we made one exception when it came to a little Italian restaurant in Notting Hill Gate called Bertorelli La Toscana. ‘You know we are not a- the famous Bertorelli’s?’ would be how they would endearingly answer any telephone request for a reservation. Both Sam and I ate there a lot. I used to have awkward meals with my dad in there. It was where my divorcing mum and dad took me for a terribly stilted meal. It was also where I’d first set eyes on my wife and the first restaurant that Stacey and I took our tiny daughter Parker to just after she was born (she slept). On the walls were multifarious signed photos to the owners from people like Chris de Burgh, China Crisis, Duran Duran and, in pride of place, Sophia Loren. The front onto the street was a big glass window that gave the diners inside an almost Edward Hopper-type look at night. We both decided to film something in there for memory’s sake and also because it looked so good. The idea we came up with was the Mafia Hit.

  I was dressed in an all-white suit, seated at a central table and surrounded by tables of real diners, like some lonely Mafia don on solo date night. As I tucked into a vast bowl of spaghetti an assassin, dressed all in black, walked in, produced a silenced pistol and shot me. I fell headfirst into the bowl of spaghetti and the assassin walked calmly out of the restaurant. What I hadn’t anticipated was that the pasta would be scalding hot. The moment my face hit the bowl my skin started to melt. I knew that we only had one shot at the scene and so had to keep my face immobile until I was certain that the assassin had cleared the frame. These laughs came with a price: a trip to the hospital and second-degree burns to my face. The looks on the diners’ faces were priceless as, first the assassin killed me, and then, after about twenty seconds, I jumped out of my seat clutching my face and screaming blue murder. Bertorelli La Toscana, like so many good things, is gone now. In its place is a faceless Tex-Mex bar. How I miss it.

  With the two Christmas Specials in the bag, Sam and I embarked on a couple of what, in hindsight, were clearly vanity projects. I was finding the whole situation of being a ‘celeb’ rather stressful. It was undoubtedly fun, but it came with a very weird set of rules that nobody ever explained to me. My way of coping was to make a spoof documentary of my life. I thought it would be funny to send up the life that people assumed I was now living. Looking back at it now, it was hideously self-indulgent and should never have been made. It must have meant very little to anybody not privy to the in-jokes of the Trigger Happy TV production team. It was an attempt to show that I wasn’t some dumb prankster but that I had a sensitive, artistic side . . . Whatever, it was a mess and I apologise wholeheartedly for it.

  The doc started off with me recreating a Trigger Happy TV shoot: the tortured portrait artist in Trafalgar Square. We’d got Hugh Cornwell, the ex-lead singer of The Stranglers, to pretend to be the sitter who got angry with me taking the piss and threw me into a fountain. It went downhill from there. The premise was to satirise the ludicrous things that people assumed that I did as a celebrity. If anything, it just turned out to be eerily prescient. We got Ronnie Corbett to come and do a cameo with me on a golf course. The joke was that I was very into the world of charity golf. I now do like golf and have taken part in the occasional charity event. Similarly we filmed a cheesy ad for Joly Finance, a dig at celebs doing ads for loan companies. Seven years later, I would find myself in Israel in a swimming costume, making a TV advert for on-line poker. Life imitates art.

  We filmed a real signing in HMV in London. Actual punters were queuing up to get a photo and an autograph and we put up a large sign with rules like:

  Don’t look at Mr Joly. Don’t attempt to shake hands. No beards.

  while I sat guarded by a giant squirrel and wearing one of those Michael Jackson surgical masks. It was a dig at those celebs who had gotten too big for their boots. Ten years later and I caught myself having a huff about being described as a ‘prankster’ by Jonathan Ross in the intro of his chat show.

  If I think back to what was happening on that day in HMV, however, it was madness. I’d flown in from a quick holiday at La Mamounia in Marrakesh. On the flight, I’d read a review of the new Trigger Happy TV in the Sun that described it as ‘the funniest TV show since The Simpsons’. Upon arrival at Heathrow, I was picked up by taxi bike and driven straight to HMV in Oxford Street, where people were queuing up for the signing. I was trying to spoof my whole situation but I think I was suffering from Ricky Gervais Syndrome. A basically decent person tries to stay normal and balanced by constantly taking the piss out of their success, by being ironic and pretending to be a cocky wanker. In the end, people just see a cocky wanker.

  We definitely had fun making these shows. The problem is that there is a reliable formula that suggests the more you have fun making something, the less fun it is to watch. This was when I first met Robert Smith from The Cure (see next chapter for hideous details). I also met Damien Hirst. I’d bumped into his American wife, who told me that Damien adored Trigger Happy TV. So I wrote in a confused cameo for him in Being Dom Joly.

  He insisted on meeting me for lunch before agreeing to do the scene. We met at J Sheekey, a very plush fish restaurant in Central London. When he arrived, the enfant terrible of British art was very, very, very pissed. He ordered a stupidly expensive bottle of wine and then, after ten minutes or so of awkward chat, went a bit . . . mental. Without warning, he stood up and shouted: ‘Who wants to see my stomach cancer?’ before whipping out his scrotum sack for the entire packed restaurant to admire. There was a stunned hush around the room but you could see that everybody was thinking: ‘I can’t wait to tell everyone about this!’

  When he eventually settled down I took the opportunity of getting Damien to draw something on a matchbox. He drew two rabbits shagging with the words, ‘I love Trigger Happy TV’ and signed it. I’m pretty sure that will just about pay for the bottle of wine one day . . .

  About a month later, and Hirst arrived at the shoot with a horrible entourage. They had all just flown in from the Monaco Grand Prix and once again were utterly slaughtered. The shoot was an unpleasant nightmare, with one of the Hirst entourage swearing and being really rude in front of a couple of very young extras. I thought I was bad, but there was still clearly far, far to travel . . .

  In one scene from the documentary, I went to open a school event. My dry-cleaner’s in Notting Hill Gate were fans and had asked me whether I would open the fete at the school that their kids attended. I agreed on the proviso that I could film it for the spoof doc. On the day, I turned up with an actor who was going to play the part of the headmaster. The idea was that we would film me refusing to open the fete until I’d been given a large cash payment. This we would film separately in a corner of the school playground. Unfortunately, a local reporter who was covering the ‘story’ overheard this discussion and didn’t realise that it was for the documentary. She splashed with the story the next day:

  Trigger Happy Comedian Demands Cash Payment Before Opening Junior School Fete.

  It was funny, but obviously people thought it was real. I was starting to tread a very thin line.

  Channel 4 seemed a little wary of the documentary when we’d finished editing it. They eventually slipped it out at about 11pm one night. It got some decent reviews but the warning signs were there. Things were falling apart. Next up we went into the studio and recorded a pilot of Dead Air, my surreal attempt at a chat show on acid. I describe a little of what it was about in the next chapter. Suffice to say that it was as unplanned and ill-thought-through as the documentary had been. There were occasional moments of greatness, but overall it was a mess and I could see Channel 4 starting to panic.

  Just as this was unravelling, I got a call. The BBC wanted to meet. The King of the BBC, Ala
n Yentob, had summoned me to the River Café. Things were getting interesting. At the lunch, it quickly became apparent that the BBC wanted to sign me up for a big deal. I couldn’t believe my luck but I tried to look like I needed persuading. Yentob is well known for name-dropping but I was astonished at the sheer Olympian level at which he operated. One minute there was a story about Mick Jagger in the loo at Tom Stoppard’s and then we were onto him being responsible for the Everly Brothers getting back together. I hadn’t realised that Yentob had been responsible for directing one of my favourite documentaries, Cracked Actor, which followed a coke-fuelled David Bowie on a Ziggy Stardust comedown tour of the USA. I happened to mention how much I loved said doc and, to my surprise, received a box-lot of Yentob’s documentaries sent to my home the following day. It was a valuable lesson in how not to be shy in promoting your genius.

  After some, but not overly protracted, negotiations the deal was done and Sam and I were off to the BBC for a three-series deal. I would imagine Channel 4 was relieved. We, however, were no longer the punk outsiders playing around on the fringes of comedy. We’d now joined the establishment.

  Chapter 4

  No More Heroes

  They say you shouldn’t meet your heroes, they can only disappoint. This is not entirely true but it’s never an easy thing to do – trust me, I’ve been there.

  The very first event that I was ever invited to as a ‘celebrity’ was the Orange book awards at the V&A. Now, I have no interest whatsoever in the Orange book awards (unless this tome gets selected, in which case they are a highly valuable contribution to literature) but the invitation looked glossy and expensive, and my wife Stacey was up for a night out on the town as we’d just had our first baby.