My Shit Life So Far

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‘Oh, these are my mountains!’ he cried, gesturing at some tower blocks. ‘And this is my glen!’ He was pointing into a local canal, full of rubbish. It was fantastic.

There were pupils who struggled to get through life at school but it was the same for some of the teachers. There was a maths teacher called Mr Hughes: an unfortunately camp heterosexual who for some reason chose to wear shoes with little golden buckles. Everywhere he went kids sang ‘Mr Hughes, the Elephant Man’ to the tune of ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’. He was a lightning rod for spitballs, paper aeroplanes and any kind of improvised missile.

There was a game where kids would inch their tables forward when the teacher turned to write something on the blackboard. Mr Hughes just didn’t have the personal confidence to address it, so we’d all end up crowded round his legs. Sometimes his face would be pressed up against the board. One time he made a joke.

‘What would you measure a waistline in, centimetres or metres or kilometres?’ he asked.

‘Metres’, said Harriet Adams, a reputedly slack lassie, being deliberately unhelpful.

‘I suppose it might be measured in metres if you were Cyril Smith,’ quipped Mr Hughes, chortling at his own joke.

We all laughed too, and kept laughing. There was an instant telepathic understanding that we were never going to stop. People outdid each other trying to laugh the loudest, the most gratingly, screaming like animals until it started to become genuinely hilarious. Tears were running down faces and people were gasping for air, shrieking. A boy clawed at his throat like he was going to suffocate. Mr Hughes stood entirely passive throughout, staring not at but through the back wall.

Mr Hughes decided that teaching was not for him and left to become a bus driver. Fate is cruel and his route took him directly by the school. People would run out in their lunchtime to the bus-stop and sing the ‘Elephant Man’ song at him when he opened the doors, waving their arms up against their faces like trunks.

Our science teacher was called Mr Clarkson. He was always drunk and would drop things on the floor so he could try to look up the girls’ skirts. Every week he gave a mumbling, incoherent lecture called ‘The Life of a Battery’. It didn’t appear anywhere on the syllabus and even with repetition nobody was ever able to piece together exactly what it was he was saying.

Remember that old joke about the Pope needing a heart transplant? He drops a feather from his balcony and whoever it lands on has to give the Pope his heart. When he looks down he sees thousands of people all blowing desperately. Well, Clarkson had a version of that. If the class grew restless while he rubbed out and redrew his battery diagram he would decide that somebody was getting a ‘punishment exercise’. He’d push a piece of paper down one of those big, long science tables and whoever it stopped at would take the punishment. Of course we all blew like fuck. I remember seeing a mum up at the school complaining about the number of undeserved punishments her son kept getting, not realising it was because he was an asthmatic.

PE was generally dreaded. The teachers seemed to occupy something of an educational hinterland. Nominally a teacher but actually just a guy who likes running and throwing stuff. They were obsessed with getting us to climb ropes and wall-bars, like they were preparing us for a career in the eighteenth-century merchant navy. Our main teacher was a fitness nut called Mr McKean. At our first lesson he gave us a long speech about how flexibility peaked at twelve and explained that we were all stiffening towards death. Then we played dodgeball.

We had an annual football event where everybody played a class that was a year older. It was notorious for its brutality and warming up there was the testosterone level of a botched prison break. I waited for the opening whistle and ran straight at the smallest guy on the other team and hoofed him right in the balls. I had to do laps for an hour but the scene I was running round looked like a kung fu tribute to Saving Private Ryan.

In second year there was a big formal run that everybody dreaded. Five miles round a big cinder-ash marsh. I came 123rd out of 132 boys. The fattest boy in the school was a guy called Chris Katos, whose dad ran a kebab shop. On the second lap I spotted him hiding under a bush at the side of the track, eating an enormous bag of pakora. It was like something from The Dandy.

Our drama class was taken by Miss Skillen – a little middle-aged woman with huge tits forming an obscene shelf at right angles to her body. Occasionally producers would come into the school and host auditions for parts in TV dramas. They can’t all have been like this, but the ones I went to always had English producers looking for people to play stereotypical heavy Glaswegians. I remember they were casting somebody to play a drug dealer and there was an audition piece where boys had to shake down a smaller boy for money. Everybody loved this guy called Gazza Greer, who delivered a performance of some gusto. The role wasn’t a huge stretch for him because he was an actual drug dealer. He came into that room after bullying money out of someone, pretended to bully money out of someone, then went outside to put the hurt on the real world again. He got something like five grand for the film and disappeared from school into a two-year-long party.

Even among the kids who did the auditions, there was an amused awareness of being stereotyped. If Sir Ian McKellen had been born in Glasgow right now he’d be playing a glue-sniffing bouncer with bi-polar disorder. We’re our own worst enemy. Even programmes made in Scotland portray most Scots as loveable chancers on heroin and incapacity benefit. Imagine if every TV show from America was about a cowboy eating hot dogs on the electric chair. Just once I’d love to see a sitcom based on Dundonian transgender ballet dancers living on a barge.

I couldn’t act at all but I got a couple of parts as an extra with a line or two. I was a cheeky young gardener in a Play for Today. There was a bit where a bunch of us were supposed to shout abuse at Russell Hunter, who was the star, as we walked by in the distance. I couldn’t think of anything else to say so I just shouted ‘Clitoris!’ over and over again. You could hear it quite clearly when it went out on telly. I think the producers just couldn’t understand my accent but it baffled a lot of viewers in Scotland.

Later, I was a cheeky milkboy in an episode of Dramarama, starring Mark McManus. Taggart! He slept in his dressing room quite a bit and would occasionally stumble into mine in a dressing gown and ask if I had any fags. There was none of the tedium an adult would associate with being an extra. I was getting paid to be off school. It was like finding the cheat codes for the universe.

Kids had to have chaperones on set, so I got to meet some interesting characters. One woman I had was an adorable 50-something Glasgow mum. She would go on about her passion for Richard Chamberlain (‘a waste of a good man’) and generally gossiped at me like I was cutting her hair. My favourite was this moustachioed socialist guy who would discourse on what he’d do to various politicians and celebrities if he got them alone in a room. If you’re stuck in a Portakabin for long enough with anyone – even a young kid – you’ll eventually just start being yourself. His marriage, he confided, had been in trouble because of his libido, but had been greatly strengthened by the arrival of AIDS, which stopped him wanting other women.

‘Used to be a pretty girl would smile at me and I wouldn’t be home for three days. You caught anything, the doctor gave you a jab and told you not to drink for a while. Not any more. The party’s over.’

I loved people talking to me like an equal. I was always sad when the job was finished and I had to leave the stories and the card games and the bacon rolls. Looking back, that was the start of my interest in show business. I didn’t particularly enjoy the performing but I did love the camaraderie and the sheer variety of folk, endlessly talking shit.

The school had an annual talent show, which my best friend Aiden and I did one year with a filthy act of pretty basic sex material. We were two detectives, talking about our cases as being a bit of a side issue to all the women we’d fucked. It wasn’t even really double entendre; there was clearly only one way you could take it and everybody was horrified. After that they’d make us audition every year for the talent show on our own, and then ban us. I used to look forward to the wee audition, just standing on our own in an empty lecture theatre doing blue jokes to our very elderly deputy head’s flinty, unchanging scowl.

The shows were always compered by two good-looking drama monkeys called Victor and Andy. Their schtick was that one would come on and say, ‘Where’s Andy?’ then go off to look for him while the other came on and went, ‘Where’s Victor.’ I hated those guys and, denied any other role in the show, we’d go and heckle them. I’d like to say it was witty heckling; it wasn’t.

‘Where’s Andy?’

‘You’re a CUNT, Victor!’

We did notice that people in the drama society seemed to be fucking each other. I guess that’s the way of the acting profession everywhere and I salute it. We even thought about getting involved, purely for sexual reasons. I went to a school production of Guys and Dolls as a reconnaissance exercise and decided it wasn’t worth it. There was a girl who was the school’s Sharpay, who was a hirsute lassie routinely referred to as Teenwolf. She had these really hairy arms and kind of lady sideburns. All the guys affected to dislike her but we were all secretly turned on by the fact that she was a known shagger and must have had a muff like Henry Cooper’s armpit.

There was a thing I got into the habit of doing that was basically the start of my comedy career. There were two attractive girls in the debating society and I knew the entrance they used to come into school. I’d hang around there most days, trying to look like I’d just turned up for school early and hung around near the gates without going in, like a lunatic. Each time I would have some little stories and jokes and stuff that I’d go over in my head on the way to school. It wasn’t that I thought I could get anywhere with them – they were a couple of years older and one of them was dating a huge and disturbing Chinese guy who worked as a bouncer. It was more that making women laugh was pretty much all they’d let me do to them – so I really threw myself into it.

I was always able to make people laugh. In fact I remember at school being able to make them laugh really hard. Imagine nowadays if you were only happy with your gig if you’d made someone spit their drink out, or made milk shoot out of their nose. If a joke worked with one girl I’d keep it and maybe add something for the next one – working a little bit like a real comedian and driven by horniness. Actually, exactly like a real comedian.

I was really into The Comic Strip Presents when it was on Channel 4 and Saturday Night Live. I seemed to be the only person in school who watched any of that stuff. It’s easy to forget that while alternative comedy is now the mainstream, at the time it was a real minority interest.

It was watching Ben Elton that first made me aware of green issues. People give him a lot of stick now because he wrote some Queen musical that causes cancer, but I think he did a really good job of introducing green politics to a generation. Also, he wrote Blackadder, so he could write a musical about Ian Huntley and he’d still be alright by me. I’m always amazed that people aren’t more horrified by things like the ice caps melting. To me it feels like living in a nightmare. It’s just as well Scott of the Antarctic wasn’t setting off nowadays. It’d be a pretty boring journal. ‘Day 1. Got there. Day 2. Came home. Went to pub.’ Now if you get to the South Pole you can bring it home in a flask.