Introduction

or

Your Nearest Exit May Be Behind You

Before we start on this volume of memoir, I should provide some context by mentioning the goings-on in my two previous books, both about my early life.

The first, from 2009, was My Favourite People and Me 1978–1988 (the publisher added the And Me to an already off-putting title). It featured chapters on forty-four people who influenced me growing up. Comedians like John Belushi, musicians like John Lennon, some sports stars and political figures, as well as my Granny Price and my college drama teacher Piers Gladhill, who helped me start in stand-up comedy.

Fighting for light beneath the canopy of my views on so many people were some of my childhood stories, including a search for my mum’s grave when I was sixteen. She’d died from leukaemia ten years previously having not been told she was terminally ill, which meant she’d been unable to say goodbye to her three children.

By the age of fifteen, I was in a state of perennial conflict with my father, older brother and younger sister. Mum was almost never spoken of. I didn’t have any pictures of her. On my sixteenth birthday, in 1982, I inherited a 50cc Yamaha. Now I had the freedom to explore.

I understood that my mother was buried in Harlow, Essex, where my friend Ernie lived. In My Favourite People I wrote about us riding our noisy motorbikes out to Parndon Wood Cemetery, at the end of his road, and  searching in silence through the rows of white headstones, before learning that Mum had been cremated and her ashes consigned to an unmarked grave. 

When my father held that first book in his hands he’d said, ‘I’m a bit worried about how I might come across in here.’ 

But he needn’t have been concerned, since I’d left out so much, including the most significant thing that happened to me, after Mum died, which was being sexually abused by Dad between the ages of roughly eight and thirteen.

Even when the book became the basis for a three-part television series on Channel 4 called Teenage  Revolution, and despite being made aware that the producers were going to interview Dad about my early life, I still didn’t mention that he was a child molester. So, they learned what he thought of my aptitude for cricket (not much) and little else, while he remained hidden in plain sight.

Dad had agreed to be interviewed for television about my childhood; that’s how brazenly secure he felt.

The same year I’d gone to look for Mum’s grave, 1982, Dad remarried and we moved house, to next door. That summer, my Bancroft’s School report stated: ‘He is wasting his time.’ 

My dad had been a pupil at Bancroft’s in the forties, and revered the whole institution, but I dropped out of the sixth form to work in a greengrocer’s owned by a friend of my new stepmother.

After I’d offered my services to our local paper, the Gazette, hoping to become a football reporter, and been abruptly turned away, my stepmother suggested Loughton College of Further Education, where I enrolled in  media studies while also trying a theatre course. 

I was desperate to move out of home and left, in 1984, to take drama at the University of Kent, though this meant leaving behind my first love, Justine, and eventually breaking both our hearts. 

I already knew when I arrived in Canterbury that I wanted to write and perform comedy, but in time understood I’d be better off as a stand-up. I wasn’t a natural collaborator, but I was funny and had no ambition to find a job, having developed an aversion to authority figures (blame my dad) that made most workplaces untenable.

What happened next is, in part, what this book is about. Stand-up went well for me. In case you weren’t there, these are quotes from reviews of my live shows in the nineties:

‘Brilliantly funny’ – The Times
‘Incredibly funny’ – Daily Record
‘Cryingly funny’ – The Telegraph
‘Belly- achingly funny’ – The Daily Mirror
‘Seat- rockingly funny’ – The Guardian
‘Effortlessly funny’ – The Evening Standard
‘Screamingly funny’ – Scotland on Sunday
‘He can’t help being funny’ – The Daily Mirror

There followed a big TV break as Jonathan Creek, after which I was recognisable almost everywhere and became a rich and famous celebrity, so that’s cool, right? 

But the past can never simply be a closed chapter; it travels with us. And despite moving away from home, and finding a lucrative path to tread, I remained complicit in keeping my abuse hidden for decades, staying out of sight as a ‘survivor’ and developing coping strategies, among them alcohol, marijuana and for many years a workaholic devotion to success as a stand- up comedian.

A psychotherapist later told me that my teenage delinquency (shoplifting, graffiti on buses, etc.) might have been a good sign to anyone who knew I’d been bereaved and abused in childhood, since it was evidence I was trying to make space for myself in the world. I wasn’t going under, as many victims do, through self- harm or even suicide.

By my late forties, however, despite having found a funny, talented and beautiful wife, Katie, and with three children we cherish, and even after a happy fiftieth birthday party, I was still struggling with my secret pain.

In September 2016, I took the decision, having been looking at courses as far back as 2001, to apply for a two- year creative- writing MA at Goldsmiths. A choice that became more significant than I could ever have expected, given what came next.

In June 2017, my stepmother revealed to my sister that our father had accumulated huge amounts of pornography featuring exclusively boys. She’d known for years but claimed to have said nothing in order to protect me – a famous person subject to press intrusion – when in reality she was shielding her husband, of thirty-five years at that point, and their respectable life together at the bowls club. 

The revelation transformed my understanding of my abuse.

I considered having my father arrested for historic sexual offences. His porn collection remains stored with a lawyer. The Crown Prosecution Service said a conviction would lead to a custodial sentence but that Dad was unlikely to face trial, since, by the time my stepmother revealed the truth, he was eighty-four and suffering from Alzheimer’s.

I’d just begun to write about my father, in the safely anonymous space of my writing course, but now had the impetus to publish that story and in 2020 my second book came out, taking its title from the phrase my dad used to my siblings if I was ever acting up: Just Ignore Him.

The response to the book has often been moving. Some survivors have told me they were encouraged, by my writing, to share their own childhood traumas with family, and even spouses, for the first time. 

Several people I’ve known for years have told me their abuse stories, having never said anything before. I’m grateful to all of them.

Since Just Ignore Him is concerned with my life in the seventies and eighties, this follow-up, White Male Stand-Up, continues from there. I imagined setting down some funny anecdotes and name-dropping the greats of comedy and television in Britain over nearly four decades, and there is some of that, but soon realised that wasn’t the whole story; and after a worrying visit to the doctor’s surgery, I began to look back in depth. What I saw was a man bouncing around as if inside a showbiz pinball machine, searching for the love of an audience and the sanctity of some replica of family life. 

It had been obvious for years, not least to Katie, that fired in the heated kiln of my childhood, and coexisting with the survivor made there, was an angry boy. His story is prominent in these pages.

If my last book was written on behalf of a damaged child, this one is a record of what happens when baked-in rage is unmanaged. I’ve created and performed comedy for decades, while repressing and suppressing so much. Becoming a comedian, or having any sort of public life, is often about building an edifice. This book is about taking one down, a story of working and living in the presence of a terrible secret and the possibility that everything could be lost in a moment.

Includes jokes.