Look who it is!: My Story

ALAN CARR

My Story

Dedication

To Christine and Graham, my wonderful parents

Preface

Even though he was wearing sunglasses, you could see Kanye West was staring at us thinking ‘What the hell?’ The camp one was wearing a gold lamé tracksuit, and the beardy one was wearing MC Hammer pantaloons made of tin foil. We looked like two oven-cooked turkeys that had just run a marathon. I think he thought we were simple.

It was whilst standing there in The Friday Night Project studio, explaining to Kanye West what ‘dogging’ was, that I had a flashback to when my life wasn’t so surreal, wasn’t so out there, wasn’t so wig-based. Look at me now, for Christ’s sake, standing in front of a mirror, my eyes following the line of my stockings up from my black stilettos to the silver-sequinned négligé. It’s not a dream because I can actually hear myself saying ‘… but would Tina Turner wear this?’ How did this happen? My life was becoming about as real as the plastic tits that had been rammed down the front of my top.

No one told me it would be like this – not that I’m complaining, I just didn’t even know what ‘it’ was. I knew it would be a lot of smiling, waving, good press, bad press, people gossiping about me, but I didn’t realise it would happen at this pace. My life had been pelting along at breakneck speed and, like the costume changes on The Friday Night Project, sequins, feather boas and leather had been whizzing before my eyes, and I hadn’t had time to absorb it.

It was only when the show finished and I sat in my dressing room and had made time for gentle reflection that I realised I’d been in front of millions of viewers dressed as a gimp. It’s telling when you can recognise your outfits from other television programmes. There’s something tragic sitting there of an evening watching Heartbeat and then suddenly blurting out, ‘Hold on, I wore that wig when I was Rula Lenska!’ The Friday Night Project has been a wonderful experience for me, albeit a wonderful experience with a learning curve reminiscent of a cliff face.

I walked into the studio on that cold January Thursday morning, not taking it particularly seriously. It was only when I saw the huge eight-foot portrait of my face next to Justin’s, staring back at me, that it finally dawned on me what I had let myself in for. This was serious. It was like a punch in the stomach. I felt sick. The studio we were filming in didn’t help, either. It was huge and imposing and bathed in harsh lighting. Looking out at row after row of empty seats, which in eight hours’ time would be filled with excited and expectant faces, made the agony even worse. I’d only ever appeared in makeshift studios at the back of production offices, performing in shows that were destined for obscure satellite channels, where often the people in the studio would outnumber the viewing figures two to one. This vast space was all worryingly new to me. Even the rehearsals for The Friday Night Project were done in a room above a shopping centre in West London.

Admittedly, my acting didn’t do the rehearsals justice. A lot of the time the rehearsals would consist of me stumbling over the words on the autocue wearing an ill-fitting wig – mind you, it hasn’t done Brucie’s career any harm, I suppose. The sketches are done one after the other, which is no hardship. But when you’re whipping off clothes at a moment’s notice, donning wigs, and having your breasts adjusted by a saveloy-fingered costumier, on a hot day, you could fool your body into thinking it’s going through the change. If you have someone fabulous at presenting like the lovely Davina or Cilla, the rehearsal can fly by. But if we are saddled with, shall we say, some of our less literate showbiz friends, the show will be begging to be put out of its misery.

Thankfully, those shows are few and far between. But there I go again with my mocking, totally forgetting my first appearance on the first show of the first series at the beginning of January 2006. I wasn’t so hot myself. As you can imagine, the nerves had gone full throttle, not helped by the three energy drinks I’d downed in quick succession in a vain attempt to salvage some vim from some part of my body which wasn’t quivering with fear. The amount of energy drinks I consume before I go onto the studio floor is a bit of a joke with The Friday Night Project team. I love the buzz I get, plus it gives me the added bonus of coming up just as my ‘Topical Barometer’ does. Perfect timing.

So 7.15 p.m. finally came, which could only mean one thing: showtime. People forget how Justin and I and Princess, the production company that created The Friday Night Project, had to build things up after the previous series. We had been left with a vacuum. A familiar brand, but nothing to back it up, an empty shell that needed to be filled not only with ‘stuff’ but ‘entertaining stuff’. After the last series Channel 4 had had a complete clear-out of the main hosts, and Justin and my good self had been chosen as the replacements.

Obviously, being relatively new faces, we were a gamble. Viewers would have to take a chance on us. We weren’t as established as Jimmy Carr and, as we found out to our displeasure, on that first show we couldn’t fill the seats in the studio – we had to cover up the empty places with a discreet black cover. Employing adept camera-work, the director managed to make the studio look full to the brim and fooled our lovely viewers at home that Thursday night at The Friday Night Project was party night. If you believed what you saw on the screen, we were the hottest ticket in town. Justin and I were obviously connecting with someone, though, because after a few shows we were filling all the seats. Not only that, they were turning people away at the door.

I have never watched The Friday Night Project, or any other programme I’ve been on, for that matter. I can’t stand watching myself, I find it uncomfortable, I start begrudging my camp-ness. The critics had slated the programme – it’s a Friday late-night entertainment show, of course they’re going to hate it! What were they expecting? World in Action? Even so, I could tell the show was going down well because, say what you want about the Great British Public, they’re not backward in coming forward. If they like you, they will tell you they like you.

Shopping, eating, catching a show, attending a funeral, ‘ALAN, WE LOVE YOU!’ will come out of nowhere and pierce the atmosphere like a pin. You will look up and, more often than not, there will be a gaggle of girls wolf-whistling and waving, poking their heads out the back of a Cortina window – a bit like dogs do when they need some air.

We were starting to get audiences who were real fans. The first few shows had been uninspiring audience-wise, plus we had noticed that a handful of the seats in the studio were suspiciously vacant once the ‘Coat of Cash’ had happened. For those of you who don’t know it, the ‘Coat of Cash’ is very simple. A ‘celebrity’, a term used loosely, runs into the audience with a coat covered in fivers and tenners, and the audience has to rip the money off. The audience go wild at this point, and it is pure chaos as people try to get their money’s worth off the poor coat-wearer.

However, when it was over, the penny finally dropped: some cheeky bastards in the audience had grabbed the money off the coat, had got their bags and decided to go home. It seems some of the audience were using us as an ATM, handing out free money to people who didn’t give two hoots about the show. Tight bastards. Thankfully, as the show’s success grew, so did the enthusiasm of the audience, and we got people there who enjoyed the show whether they had grabbed a handful of fivers or not.

Over time the undesirables were ruthlessly rooted out. With this new burst of love from the audience, our confidence grew and so did the studio. We went up to the biggest one at London Studios. We were on hallowed ground. This was where Ant and Dec filmed their Saturday Night Takeaway, this was the pat on the back we needed.

Justin and I were both thrilled. I felt I had finally shaken off the demons that said I wasn’t good enough. I had been so worried at the beginning of the run that I couldn’t do it. Justin was naturally upbeat, enthusiastic and a born conversationalist. He made it look so easy, thriving in what is essentially the pretty stark surroundings of a studio. I doubted whether I could keep up with him, let alone possibly say anything that would make the final cut. Justin can literally talk about anything, plus, amazingly, sound like he gives a shit, which is a fantastic skill to have when you’re faced with a dreary A-Lister intent on plugging their CD, perfume, clothing range, film. Delete where applicable. Whereas Justin can throw himself wholeheartedly into the conversation and chug it along with his cheeky chat and upbeat nature, I tend to switch off and look completely bored shitless which, I admit, isn’t ideal. I bet you can’t wait for the ‘Alan Carr Chat Show’, can you?

But I made a concerted effort to talk more, engage myself with the guest and earn my place upon the sofa. Believe it or not, towards the end of that first run I started to enjoy myself. I actually looked forward to the recording and, as it happens, I wasn’t making a tit of myself. In fact, Justin and I were making quite a good partnership in this thing they call ‘presenting’. We were doing just fine together, we were becoming a right old double act, and my fears that I was the new Syd Little had been unfounded.

Whether it’s performing ‘Doctor Who on Ice’ with Billie Piper, or rapping on a mock R’n’B video with Mariah Carey, or singing a duet with Mel C at an EastEnders pub in Magaluf, it is only when it stops that you can finally take in the bizarreness of what I used to call my life. If I actually took it in whilst I was in the middle of these more surreal moments, I think my head would explode. Maybe after all it’s a good thing that I let myself get swept away by it all. Maybe I’m afraid that if I pinched myself it would bring me round from this dream-like state, and I would wake up and find myself back packing shampoo in Northampton. Even after all I’ve been through, I still worry that it will end tomorrow and I’ll get banished to some industrial estate in the middle of nowhere for having too much fun. So I do what I do best – I pop on my costume and carry on regardless.

So I’m back in the studio, and for the eighth time that day I change into my outfit. Staring at the monstrosity that looks back at me in the mirror, it’s hard to comprehend firstly that the shy little boy from Northampton has come so far, and secondly that I would make such an ugly woman. Not disheartened, I slip on the négligé with no complaints, pop on the black stilettos, let Sue the make-up lady smear my lips with cherry-red lipstick, and I am ready.

With a quick glance in the mirror to see that Justine has pinned the shaggy brown wig to my head, I make my way to the back of the stage reciting the lyrics of ‘Simply the Best’ over and over again. As I pass through the backcloth to the wings, one of the stagehands mutters sarcastically, ‘Look who it is!’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘It’s Tina!’

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