How I Escaped My Certain Fate Read Free Page A

dominant trope was expressly and understandably against this privileged old guard. In my early days on the circuit, I kept the exact location of my education a secret, as it would have been held against me; on the rare occasions it leaked out, I felt I had to be twice as good to prove myself. *
    * I remember the anarchist comedian and ‘godfather of Alternative Comedy’ Tony Allen being extremely keen to book me for a night he ran in a squat in Hackney after he found out I’d got a 2:1 in English from St Edmund Hall. I’d like to think that the days of fasttracking are long gone, but a disproportionate amount of television comedians who rose to prominence in the last decade do seem, just like in the pre-Alternative days, to be from Oxbridge. Mitchell and Webb, Katy Brand, Lucy Montgomery, Simon Bird, John Oliver, Johnny Vegas and Frank Skinner, for example, all are former presidents of the Cambridge Footlights. What is undeniable is that going to Oxford gave me a degree of confidence, and some organisational skills when it came to writing. But then, I would deny any outright privilege, wouldn’t I? I’m a special case. My excuse is that I’m from a single-parent family, got a full grant, and went to an independent boys’ school on a part-scholarship and a charity bung, so I ain’t the same as all them Oxford toffs. Nobody likes to think their own success is anything but hard won and deserved. I expect even David Cameron and George Osborne maintain, privately, that they’re ‘not like those other Oxbridge-educated Eton fuckers’, and think they have somehow achieved their positions as puce-faced masters of the known universe on merit alone. 
     

    I moved to London to be a comic in September 1989. There was a comedy micro-economy in the city where a few thirty-quid gigs a week, in the tiniest of pub back rooms, almost added up to a living wage. I got a flat in Acton with Richard Herring, with whom I had written some student comedy shows, and two other friends from university. From nine to five, I worked in temp jobs orange-juice packing, data inputting and finally the luxury of fact-checking for a horticultural encyclopedia. Every day I’d hassle the forty or so comedy clubs in Time Out for the live auditions they called Open Spots, laboriously dialling dozens of numbers on the revolving disc of the telephone, round and round, day after day. I don’t think the young people of the twenty-first century, with their mobile telephones , can possibly imagine what it was like actually having to dial phone numbers. Kids today! They don’t know they’re born.
    Maybe I’d be slotted into an unpaid five minutes, anywhere from the thirty-seater Guilty Pea above The Wheatsheaf on Rathbone Place, where various thirties bohemians drank themselves to death, to the sprawling 180 seats of the old Comedy Store in Leicester Square. The stand-up guru John Gordillo, then in a double act called The Crisis Twins, saw my act and liked it, and gave me his private-promoterphone-number list, which seemed like an astonishing act of trust and kindness. Click, whirr; click, whirr. After a few weeks of pestering, most places called back. * Every evening, I travelled home across London on night buses, back when you could smoke and drink on the top deck – epicurean allowances which made the most inconvenient journey a hedonistic pleasure – and I’d feel like I was living the mythical life of some fin de siècle artist, despite the looming threat of another early start at the data-input desk.
      * It took nine months of two calls a day for Jongleurs to give me an open spot at their Battersea club, the only one they had in those days. The gig that night was compèred by Jack Dee, who was about to become famous off the back of some beer adverts. I died and was never allowed back.
     
    In February 1990, after six months in London, I got through the heats of the Hackney Empire and City Limits magazine New Act of the Year competition, and won