Alanatomy Read online

  Alan Carr

  * * *

  Alanatomy

  The Inside Story

  Contents

  1 My Rump

  2 My Umbilical Cord

  3 My Stomach

  4 My (big) Mouth

  5 My Giblets

  6 My Inside Leg

  7 My Chest

  8 My Crotch

  9 My Mullet

  10 My Index Finger

  11 My Right Hand

  12 My Spleen

  13 My Left Hip

  14 My Balls

  15 My Gut

  16 My Ears

  17 My Vocal Cords

  18 My Arse

  19 My Eyes

  20 My Wrists

  21 My Teeth

  22 My Achilles Heel

  23 My Shoulders

  24 My Tongue

  25 My Bladder

  26 My Back

  Illustrations

  Acknowledgements

  Follow Penguin

  For Max and Isla

  I bent over the table submissively and felt the lady’s calloused hand caress my cheeks through the fabric of my trousers. There was a contemplative pause – and a muffled giggle from the audience. Had she found something? ‘You’re struggling with the book, you are, but you must do it, don’t give up on it.’ I spun round – how did the rumpologist know this? No one even knew I was writing a book, let alone that the words weren’t flowing as freely as I had hoped. The rumpologist smiled knowingly. Karl Pilkington looked unimpressed – mind you, he always looks unimpressed – and as for the Chatty Man audience, well, they were just waiting for One Direction to come out – they were the next guests and were waiting backstage. But seriously, it was a revelation to me, it was as if she had looked into my soul – well, arse – and seen something. She said some other things too: that I was going on holiday next month – I was, Barbados – and that I was on the cusp of something big – but then they always say that, don’t they, it’s the law.

  Sometimes you have to humour these people. I remember when Justin Lee Collins and I went on This Morning and they asked us if we wouldn’t mind having our fortunes read live on air. I love that type of thing and immediately said yes. Would she be using runes, tarot, Ouija board? I enquired. No – asparagus. By throwing sprigs of asparagus on the studio floor and seeing where they landed she could tell our future – a bit like if Nostradamus worked in Whole Foods. Justin immediately backed out: ‘No way, no way – what if she says that we’re all going to die?’ What – with asparagus? That asparagus would have to land pretty violently to predict a death. Anyway, seeing the fear in Justin’s eyes I went ahead with it regardless and it was vintage This Morning – bonkers and yet fun.

  So I had some history in dealing with nutjobs telling me what life had in store for me. Still, the comment the rumpologist made about the book rattled me – maybe I had given up too soon, maybe I should put finger to keyboard one more time and see what happened – but then, even if I did finally finish the book, most authors thank their mums, dads, kids … God, how could I thank a woman who reads arses for a living? What kind of an idiot would actually believe something like that? Well, you’re reading this now, so I guess – me!

  As some of you lovely readers might know, this is my second book. My first book, Look Who It Is, covered my childhood and feral youth, and this book picks up where that book left off, just as I was about to embark on my first-ever presenting job on The Friday Night Project. So there I was all alone, living in Holloway. I’d moved down to London for work, leaving my friends up in Manchester. I’d been travelling up and down that M6 for the past three years and driving three and a half hours plus to get home was taking its toll. I was off my face on energy drinks and ‘Percy Pigs’ and on first-name terms with the canteen ladies in the service station caffs – ‘Hi, Val!’ ‘Hi, Alan! Who was you with on 8 Out of 10 Cats tonight, love?’ over a stale pain aux raisins.

  So I had decided to take the plunge and move to the Big Smoke, through gritted teeth I hasten to add. I loved Manchester – I had a wonderful network of friends, had my favourite pub, my favourite bar, my favourite curry house – and I so wanted to resist moving, but you have to go where the work is. If the M6 was the umbilical cord for me, nourishing me, keeping me attached to my Mancunian womb, then the Brent Cross shopping centre was the vagina from which I was sprung. The umbilical cord had to be snipped at some point, so I left Manchester and moved to Holloway. Why Holloway? Well, it sounded like Hollywood (shallow, I know), and the estate agent said the area was Crouch End Borders – apparently if you stepped over the mattress and turned left at the dead cat you would be in Crouch End. They must have seen me coming, but I wasn’t to know. I remember ringing up to pay my council tax and correcting the bloke when he said ‘Holloway’ –‘Oh no, Crouch End Borders,’ I said, and he suppressed a laugh. He must have thought I was one of those deluded Hyacinth Bucket characters who names their two-up two-down ‘Hedgehog Cottage’ or their bedsit ‘Downton’. I can imagine the postman coming through the gate muttering under his breath, ‘Who does he think he is?’

  As always when you move to a new area, you start finding your feet – you discover your nice neighbour, your not-so-nice neighbour, your favourite local baker, your favourite local newsagent and, in my case, your favourite local halfway house two doors along. A group of men would always be sitting outside leaning nonchalantly on the wall in various states of delirium, making comments to all the passers-by and watching the world go by. It got to the point where I could gauge my level of fame by the amount of money they would ask for when I passed. When I first arrived in Holloway it was a gruff ‘lend us a quid’ but by the time I left three years later it had gone up to a grand! ‘C’mon, you know you got it,’ they pleaded – with an air of desperation and cider.

  In the early days, though, feeling isolated, miserable and out on a limb, I decided to fill the void by getting off my arse and earning some cold hard cash. As Britney so eloquently put it, ‘You want a Lamborghini, sip Martinis, look hot in a bikini, you better work, bitch!’ and that’s exactly what I did. I threw myself wholeheartedly into work mode. Corporates, stand-up gigs, you name it, I did it, but for the most part I loitered on the outskirts of terrestrial television and flirted with the burgeoning new satellite channels that were multiplying before my very eyes. There seemed to be a new channel appearing every day and although it was all very exciting I don’t think anyone really understood that they had to actually fill the channel with, err, umm, something? Some content perhaps? You can’t just have that test card with the girl holding a piece of chalk and a blackboard and a sinister-looking puppet. They were desperate and when people are desperate they call me. I shamelessly popped up on anything and everything.

  My particular forte was those awful talking heads programmes – two hundred and fifty quid for a couple of hours’ work – I’ll pop that in my bumbag, thank you very much. Look, money was money, and I was mercenary. I would talk about anything if the price was right – well, if the price was two hundred and fifty quid. Women’s rights, the sixties, international terrorism, Spandau Ballet – you name it, I would appear and hold forth on these and other subjects till the cows came home. It didn’t matter if I wasn’t even born when the actual event happened – I would still say I was there, and put in my two pennyworth: ‘Emily Davison told me she was going to throw herself in front of the king’s horse at the Derby, I told her not to but she wouldn’t listen – typical Emily.’ Who cares? I didn’t, neither did the producers and neither did the four stoners watching at quarter past three in the morning.

  Like the way stand-up comedy had exploded in Manchester in the early 2000s, all of a sudden the growth of satellite channels had mushroomed and there was this need for all the dead air to be fi
lled. I guess I was in the right time at the right place – or maybe the wrong time and wrong place depending on whether you want to make a living filling dead air.

  Now, we’ve all watched those ‘before they were famous’ shows and thought ‘Really?’ Shaking our heads and laughing as pre-celebrities down on their luck dressed up as chickens for pasta sauce adverts or were pulled out of a canal as a dead prostitute in Taggart, but the truth of the matter is that it pays the bills. It’s only the snootiness of hindsight that makes you cringe. I was once a sperm on roller skates for a segment on teenage pregnancy. Sadly, I got cut from the montage as I couldn’t roller-skate and kept hanging on to one of the other sperm’s tails – if we’d gone into an egg we would have had twins. Of course, that would be looked back on now with an arched eyebrow and a grabbing of pearls but I got paid more for that afternoon than I would have got working four days in the factory packing shampoo.

  Channel 4 had obviously seen something in me because they started using me more and more frequently and I was often to be found on 8 Out of 10 Cats with my brother Jimmy (ha ha – well, everyone else says that to me at least eight times a day so I might as well use it to top up my word count). The exposure from 8 out of 10 Cats did wonders for my career. I started getting noticed in the street and my stand-up ticket sales got a hearty boost too, all thanks to the wonders of television. Plus it was a lot of fun to film even though Sean Lock scared me.

  One night on the show I ended up sharing the panel with the comedy legend that was Joan Rivers. In the dressing room as I plonked myself down in the adjacent make-up chair I was in awe as I was a huge fan of hers. I was expecting an acerbic barrage of one-liners slagging off my cork wedges and cut-off denims but instead I found a woman who was really sweet and supportive, almost motherly. Sadly, that was the only time I got to work with her. I would have loved to have had her on Chatty Man and we had been making genuine inroads into getting her to appear on the sofa (well, when I say inroads, we kept pushing the fee up!) but she died before this appearance would come to fruition.

  Come to think of it, 2016 is turning out to be one of those awful years; we’ve already lost David Bowie, Sir Terry Wogan, Ronnie Corbett, Victoria Wood, Prince and Caroline Aherne at the time of me writing this and summer is barely over. I don’t know about you, but losing Victoria Wood and Prince on successive days hit me really hard and by the time that gorilla was shot at that zoo for protecting that child I was up to my eyeballs in muscle relaxants screaming ‘Stop the world I want to get off!’ Just as I’d managed to process Victoria’s death, here it was: breaking news that Prince has been found dead at Paisley Park – and I burst into tears again. If you’ve read my previous autobiography you’ll know I was a huge fan of both of theirs, especially Prince.

  I think my dad always saw my fixation with Prince as rubbing salt into the wound. Not only would I rather stay in my room and listen to music than be outside kicking a football around but my favourite musician was someone who sang in falsetto, wore stillies and had a penchant for bumless trousers – Really? My poor father would come into my bedroom with a morning cuppa and see Prince on the wall, Lovesexy era, naked astride a very phallic-looking orchid … well, it must have been hard. Oh, Prince will be sadly missed, I genuinely was a HUGE fan. I didn’t just listen to ‘Purple Rain’ on Smooth FM, I’m talking Dirty Mind, Lovesexy, Parade, Sign O’ The Times – I even listened to the rubbish ones like Graffiti Bridge. It’s hard to explain to people who haven’t seen him live just how magical it was – it was like a religious experience. I had seen him only last year at an intimate gig in Koko with my friend Melissa – also a huge fan. I rang her up on the day he died and we reminisced about the mind-blowing evening we’d experienced.

  ‘I really wish I’d taken a photo of him,’ she said dolefully.

  ‘You did,’ I replied, ‘but you got hit with a stick.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ she said and we both laughed.

  Prince notoriously hated being filmed at his gigs and his people would shine lasers into the lenses of cameras or hit you with a stick, as Melissa found out to her dismay. Melissa had whipped out her iPhone and had been tantalizingly close to getting a photo when she was rapped on the knuckles by what can only be described as a cane – the kind you find holding up tomato plants in garden centres. With a yelp she’d dropped her phone.

  I will treasure that night now, I’m so glad I saw him and took it all in through sober eyes. Me and Justin had seen him on his ‘21 Nights’ residency at the O2 years back and we’d finished off three bottles of rosé before he even came on. I cannot remember a thing – can’t even remember him coming on stage. The only thing I remember about the night is getting home – a white van pulling up outside my house, the door sliding open and me being thrown out on to the pavement by a gang of men. I have no recollection of who drove the van, who threw me out, what had happened in the van. No idea. Mind you, Justin fared even worse. He said he remembered being sick and getting the bus home – he lived in Bristol!! Anyway, at least I got to see Prince again and this time it was civilized and very mature, and you’ll be pleased for my kneecaps to hear that I got an Uber home rather than being slung out on to the pavement, so overall a decidedly more memorable night.

  Anyway, I digress – back to those early Channel 4 days. It seemed like everyone suddenly wanted a piece of me and I lapped it up. Soon I was appearing on all sorts of things. I was offered the role of team captain on Would I Lie To You? but I was so bad at lying that I had to pull out. Secretly, they must have been relieved because I was ruining the whole show. I just couldn’t lie. At best I would go red, at worst I would come out in hives. Sometimes I would get myself in such a tizz I would forget what actually was the truth and just say anything to get me out of the lie, and that’s why I’ve never been used as a drugs mule. How can those people on Jeremy Kyle just sit there, silent, stony-faced, when they are being given a lie-detector test? Oh, I know – heroin. But anyway, Would I Lie To You? was not for me and I was eventually replaced by Lee Mack, who is just perfect for that role – not that I’m calling him a bare-faced liar but you know what I mean.

  Of all the television programmes and pilots I did, two that definitely bear mentioning are Flipside and FAQ U – not because they were particularly good or groundbreaking but because they were presented by my future co-host Justin Lee Collins. Flipside was very simple – we would all sit on chairs watching telly whilst commenting on what we were watching whilst being filmed. Basically, it was a precursor to Gogglebox – yes, Justin and I were the Sandy and Sandra of the noughties. FAQ U was a discussion show filmed in Bristol, which was a bit of a schlep, and once you’d paid your petrol out of the fee it was more or less charity work, but it was exciting to be on the telly. We all sat round on some sofas and discussed certain subjects and topics, some random, some topical, and just hoped what came out of our mouths was funny.

  An awful lot has happened and a lot has been said about Justin in the years since we worked together on those early shows. All I can do is talk about my experiences with him. Me and Justin instantly hit it off. We had the same sense of humour and would bounce effortlessly off each other. He made what could have been some real slogs into a lot of fun and we went on to enjoy four years together in a TV partnership. You see, now here’s the dilemma. In 2012 I got the shock of my life, as I’m sure you did too, when Justin was convicted of harassing an ex-girlfriend. The details of the case, and the taped recordings of his abuse, were difficult to listen to – at some points they were like the rantings of a madman, both alarming and creepy – and yet totally alien to the person I’d shared a whole chunk of my TV life with. I wanted to go over to him and shake him and say ‘What the hell are you playing at, Justin?’ It really is hard to imagine that this is the same guy. So I am in a quandary when writing this. What do I do? Do I cut out all the laughter, the fun times and the adventures? Or do I pretend I knew all along that something wasn’t quite right and that I had my suspicions? It would be conven
ient for my story but then life isn’t convenient and sometimes good people lose their way. I can’t deny that he made me laugh and that he was one of the most generous, kindliest people you could ever meet, I can’t, I can only tell it like it was. I could stick the boot in but I don’t want to do that. Ironically, he used to do these really funny nostalgia shows, called Bring Back … Star Wars or Bring Back … the A-Team – now I think he needs to bring himself back and find himself again.

  The thing is when I knew him he had only love for the ladies and always seemed to be in a state of arousal. I remember him asking me out to meet an old school friend of his and this buxom blonde with huge breasts, considerably younger than him, was there propping up the bar; the next week, I got asked again, ‘Will you come with me and meet my old school friend – she’s waiting for me in a bar in Soho,’ and yet again there was another buxom beauty, curvaceous and blonde. ‘School friend? Really? Which school did you go to, St Trinian’s?’ Oh, I do miss Justin and his erections.

  I was trying out material for a new stand-up show the other day – I’ve no plans to tour as such but it was a bit of a muck-about on stage, tentatively trying out new and very sketchy material that I’d thought up on my travels. It was an out-of-town venue and there was a write-up about it in their local newspaper. Well, I couldn’t believe my eyes, there it was, bold as brass, in black and white: ‘veteran comedian’. Veteran! The pince-nez nearly fell off my nose. I beg your pardon, veteran comedian – some people might be shocked at ‘comedian’, but as we all know, haters gonna hate. Anyhow, I was outraged – I’m a whippersnapper, I wear hoodies!! But after having a bit of a moment I realized that I’ve now been doing stand-up comedy for fifteen years and have been on television for eleven years. So although ‘veteran’ is maybe over-egging the pudding, I have been round the block.