- -
- 100%
- +
My parents were watching The Voice and only turning around when they liked the voice of the person they were listening to. My mum wasn’t best pleased, however, as good old Dad had refused to turn even once, instead spending his Saturday night angrily perched on an old office chair, screaming into a wall: ‘Shite, he’s shite, she’s shite, everyone’s shite.’ I once mentioned this on Scott Mills’s Radio 1 show, and someone texted in to tell me you can also have the same ‘play along at home’ Saturday night experience by watching Take Me Out with friends and giving everyone a torch. I can imagine that really kicking off after a few bottles of wine have been sunk. Give it a go – tweet me the results!
NEVER GO CARAVANNING WITH YOUR PARENTS
Parents often say they want to give their kids everything their own childhood lacked. How many times have you seen some rich rapper in a television interview speaking about how they’re going to give their kids ‘all the stuff I never had growing up’? But in all honesty does a five-month-old need Gucci slip-ons? Yes, they look cute and durable, but was your childhood irreparably ruined because you didn’t have a pair of diamond-encrusted slippers? I actually think it’s often the negative experiences of growing up that help shape us. Without the rough do you always appreciate the smooth? I now really appreciate going on proper adult holidays, and that most certainly has a lot to do with my holidays growing up.
You see, as a child my parents made a big decision that would have a massive impact on my life for years to come. A decision more and more couples are making in this modern era. They decided … to buy a caravan. Yup, every summer Mum, Dad, my sister and me would cram ourselves into a four-berth and head off to Loch Lomond, Aberfeldy, Biggar, Aviemore or some other Scottish holiday destination that sounds less like an exotic getaway than a Middle Earth council estate, where you expect to see a bunch of orcs stealing lead from a roof or a bunch of elves drinking cider in the park, but instead witness old people attending bingo nights and families in tents entertaining themselves with games of charades.
So despite their fantasyland names, they were far from the exciting world of the ‘Rohan’ Bronx or the ‘Gondor’ high rises – they were caravan parks. And not just any caravan parks – Scottish caravan parks. The wettest places known to man. If you listen very carefully on arrival to any Scottish caravan park you can actually hear David Attenborough narrating Blue Planet. I mean, most kids return from summer holidays with a tan. I would hobble into class with trench foot. Caravans can’t deal with the extremity of Scottish weather. This is the sort of weather that requires bricks and mortar. In the story of the three little pigs not one of them chooses to stay in a caravan. Not one. And one of those idiots opted for hay. That means a pig, a fucking pig, looked at a caravan and thought to himself, ‘Nah, I’d rather live in a house made of horse food.’
I always think that if you’re buying a place of residence, you want to do it somewhere respectable. When we shot off to buy our caravan we went to a field. ‘An area of open land, especially one planted with crops or pasture, typically bounded by hedges or fences’, that’s what the dictionary defines a field as. Not as ‘a really brilliant place to buy a respectable house’. I would say the only thing of any value that has been bought in a field is a field.
Once or twice a year the Stirling posse would pack up and head off on our epic adventures to mystical faraway lands, such as Biggar, Forfar, Sandylands – the list goes on, and at no stage improves in quality. The other issue was that we had to drag our place of residence on the back of a clapped-out Ford Escort, meaning that speed was never really our friend. Hours would be spent travelling for very little reward (distance). When you are an excitable child off on their summer holidays, nothing quite takes the gleam off a four-hour car journey more than having your dad trot up a small hill to say to your mum: ‘I can see our house from here.’ I remember visiting family friends on our ‘holidays’. Like casually popping in for the day. On a holiday. It just wasn’t right. A holiday destination shouldn’t be a place where you can pop in for the day. It’s a holiday, not someone’s front room. I want to go to Mallorca and join a kids’ club run by a depressed actor like all the other normal children!
Now, I don’t want to fully destroy the legend that is the family caravan holiday. I’ve got many happy memories of that place. Yes, it was so cold that I vividly remember my mum having to get more dressed for bed than she had for the hike we had taken earlier that day. Yes, the thing was so small and the beds so close together that every time my dad farted I could genuinely feel my hair blow back. And yes, once I watched a child chop a wasp in half. But there was so much fun to be had fishing, boating, climbing, with the friends we made, the weirdos we met and that time my uncle Bill stopped a family from going home in the middle of the night because they thought a power station was going to blow up. The couple stayed, the power station didn’t obliterate us all, everyone was happy!
There is fun to be had in these places, and as a child sometimes it’s important to have to go and find it. Similarly, every time I now find myself on a sun lounger in my all-inclusive Spanish holiday resort, I think back to that tiny little Elddis caravan, and with a wry smile on my face take a sip on my Corona and realise how lucky I am. I’m now a great big adult that can decide where I want to go on my holidays, and sorry you have to hear this, Mum and Dad, but it isn’t fucking Falkirk.
I’m happy with what I had and delighted with what I’ve now got. Now that’s good parenting. I’m not scarred by the hardships of my childhood holidays, nor am I left with some misplaced sense of entitlement after too many trips to Disneyland as a youngster. And thank God for that, because is there anything on this entire planet more intolerable than a spoilt brat?
I’ve spent many years working in children’s television, and there is nothing more heartbreaking than being told someone important is coming to a filming day and they’re bringing their kid with them. I’d like to say at this point that if you’re someone high up in the world of kids’ TV reading this and you have children and I’ve met them, this definitely isn’t about them. It isn’t. This is about those other pricks and their spoilt-rotten little shits. You know the ones I’m talking about? Good, let’s talk about them.
When children grow up around children’s TV they become the most disruptive little gremlins ever to set foot in a studio. Jaded by the magical world of TV at the age of eight, walking about in a pressed shirt and a pair of chinos like they own the place: ‘Mummy, I’m bored, who’s he?’ I’m a Z-list children’s entertainer, you little shit. A lot of this may be me somewhat ‘projecting’ – as my therapist says, it 100 per cent is – but the point still stands that if you show kids too much of a good thing too young then they may well grow up not appreciating the privileges they have. This could lead to them conducting all sorts of wrongs, for example being rude to one of the greatest BAFTA-award-winning children’s TV presenters of all time. I mean, come on, ‘Who’s he?’ Take a running jump, you absolute tool of an eight-year-old. Again, if you work in kids’ TV, definitely not about your kid. They were lovely.
I don’t want this to come across as a weird ‘my parents are better than yours’ humblebrag, by the way. Similarly, if you missed the irony draped over the whole ‘I’m the greatest kids’ TV presenter of all time’, then that is solely down to my limited writing abilities. I know I’m not the best. I’ve met Phillip Schofield, Tim Vincent, Dick and Dom, Zoë Ball, Angellica Bell and Otis the Aardvark – I’m fully aware of the tough competition I’m up against. Let’s just say I’m top 10 and move on.
An important factor in becoming an adult is to avoid constantly internalising and comparing other people’s lives with your own. As a kid that sort of behaviour used to do you all manner of good: ‘But Ahir’s parents let him stay up until nine on a Friday.’ Boom! Next thing you know you’re watching the ‘late’ film on a Friday night like a proper fucking gangster! Isn’t parental guilt a brilliant thing?
Perhaps all our parents did was try to give us the best life possible, and it was us constantly comparing and contrasting with others that created this illusion that we are smothered and over-protected. Parents can’t protect their children for ever. I mean, I know eight-year-olds that have been told to go fuck themselves. You need to do your own thing, let others do theirs and hope for the best. I can’t beat Otis the Aardvark – he’s a talking anteater, for God’s sake. I’m merely a talking man. In the hearts of British children I’m always coming off second best in that exchange.
Now that I am an adult, or at least trying my bloody best, I think quite a bit about what was going through my mum’s head when she was bringing me up. I’m nearly the same age as she was when she had me. Fuck, I couldn’t imagine having a kid right now. Chances are I’d drop it. But she managed it and I’ve never really asked her how. I had been meaning to interview my mum for ages for this book. I had always managed to find a reason to put it off: it was too late, we were too drunk, my equipment wasn’t working properly. I’ve never actually thought, until right now, why I was so scared to sit my mum down in the podcast chair. I guess it’s the intimacy of it that was the real kicker. We’d never talked about anything like that in real detail, and now, like a true millennial, I had decided not only to have the conversation after three decades of my life, but also to record the whole thing. Freud would have had a field day (and not the type where you purchase a caravan). Sure, the microphones are somewhat phallic, but that sick Austrian quack needn’t know that.
So despite my reservations and fears about what might be said, I decided to sit down and speak to the main woman herself – Alison Stirling, my mother.
Interview with My Mum –
‘I will never make my children old before their time’
ALISON STIRLING
I intended to go back to work, but once I had you I thought, ‘No, there is no way. I don’t want to do that.’ I was kind of brought up in a nursery, and I didn’t think we were going to have a family. I was more shocked than anybody that I would want to give up work for it, but that’s what I wanted to do and so that’s what your dad and I did. That halved the money that came in.
IAIN STIRLING
Yeah, that’s why we had to go on caravan holidays.
ALISON STIRLING
Then Kirsten, your sister, came along 18 months later. The theory was that during the week I would get everything ready so that at the weekend we had family time. People used to say, ‘Oh, I can’t stand this,’ but I used to say, ‘Boring is as boring does.’ And we did a lot. I have to say I felt I loved it, but –
IAIN STIRLING
And you were brill, this is what I’m saying.
ALISON STIRLING
But at the end of the day there is a danger that I sometimes think maybe I didn’t allow you to develop, and, you know, there’s always that ‘If I’d done this, had I done that’ …
IAIN STIRLING
Develop in terms of, like, independently be able to do my own stuff?
ALISON STIRLING
Yeah, get up in the morning. That sort of thing.
IAIN STIRLING
Yeah, this is exactly the point I was going to make. It’s not a bad thing. What I mean is my childhood was amazing and you’re an amazing mum and Dad’s an amazing dad – parents that you know would lie down in traffic for you – but then it also means that when someone says, ‘This deadline was due a week ago,’ I’m now the sort of person to say, ‘It will be fine, someone will sort it out.’ Because in my head I’m going, ‘Mummy and Daddy will sort it out.’ And I think if I were to have kids I would get them to do more. But what I’m saying is that’s not bad. The point I’m making is what was it about? What aspects of your upbringing affected how you were as a parent?
ALISON STIRLING
My dad died when I was 17 days old, and there was my brother, 14 years older than me, and then there were three stepchildren and they were older as well, so, you know, my mother had a lot to do. She needed money, so she went out and worked. So from an early age I was in the nursery, and then when I went to school that’s when she said, ‘Well, we’ll get people in.’ And I hated it. I absolutely hated it. And she was trying her absolute best but it got to the stage that she got me a blackboard. I wanted a bike but we couldn’t afford one for Christmas so I got a blackboard.
IAIN STIRLING
Same letter. It’s still a ‘B’, Alison. It begins with ‘B’.
ALISON STIRLING
So I used to write notes to my mum on the blackboard, things that I would remember from school.
IAIN STIRLING
What, notes like you need to buy milk or like I learned that the sky is blue?
ALISON STIRLING
No, no. About something that happened that day – by the time she came in I might have forgotten about it. So I would write that down and then my mother would write something on the blackboard and it became a wee thing with us, and it was great. But it doesn’t beat coming in to your mum and saying, ‘You know what happened at school today?’ And then your nanna got ill. She got cancer when I was 12 and that kind of turned everything round. She had 18 months to live and it turned her absolutely wild. So she basically started giving things away because she wanted things to be in order and it was a hellish time to go through, and I realise now that I was a carer, but at that point I wouldn’t have known I was. We got a new washing machine and Mum couldn’t use it – I was doing it. So I think that’s what made me think I will never make my children old before their time.
IAIN STIRLING
I mean, I’m 30 years old and still wouldn’t know how to use a dishwasher.
ALISON STIRLING
What is it you said to me when I said, ‘Put that in the washing machine’? You said, ‘Is that the one with the round door or the square door?’
IAIN STIRLING
When was that?
ALISON STIRLING
You were in your teens.
IAIN STIRLING
I was easily in my teens. Oh my God.
A SHORT BIT OUTLINING HOW PARENTING HAS CHANGED
To help us understand how parenting has changed over the generations I’m going to use some terms to talk about each generation specifically. Once we’re all on board with that code we can plough on with my hilarious content! The three main generations I’ll be looking at are millennials (that’s me), who roughly speaking were born between 1981 and 2002, Generation X (my parents’ generation), who were born in the years 1961 to 1980, and finally baby boomers (my grandparents), who were born from 1941 to 1960. There, hopefully that’ll save some time.
Parenting has seen massive shifts over the years. For me, the biggest affecting millennials is the shift from a fairly laissez-faire attitude towards a much more hands-on modern approach. Indeed, Generation X were known as the ‘latch-door kids’ because their baby-boomer folks were often out working or socialising, so the kids had to let themselves in when they went home after school or being out with their friends. Many Generation Xers lived with their parents in a manner more akin to flatmates than legal guardians. Take my mum, for example, communicating with her own mother through a blackboard like some sort of post-war WhatsApp messenger.
In fact in the 1980s parents’ need to be away from their children and near their peers led to the construction of many age-restricted communities where adults could hang out in child-free zones, such as holiday resorts, and the rise of the infamous ‘kids clubs’ that are still popular to this day. Parents could go lie on a sun lounger while their kid was taken off to play with some out-of-work actor in his mid-twenties dressed like a clown or a prince (royalty, not the pop star). To many this might sound like sloppy parenting, but I bet it sounds like heaven to the modern kid who constantly has to keep their parents updated on their movements via their mobile phone, or can’t post anything online because they know their parents have set up secret online accounts just so they can keep an eye on their comings and goings. Want to go to the cinema on your own? Of course you can! Well, I mean, Mum and Dad will be there, obviously, but they’ll sit a few rows back.
KIDS ARE SHIT AT STUFF
On the face of things it would seem that this overprotection is born out of a parent’s need to protect and serve their precious little ones. But I mean, how can I, or any millennial for that matter, hope to embrace adult life when Mummy and Daddy are still willing to do your washing when you’re well into your thirties? In fact, after the podcast was recorded with my mum, she made us mac and cheese while I was on my phone.
But a sort of misplaced love isn’t the only factor at work here. Although it is an undisputed fact that children are beautiful and fragile presents from God that need to be protected and nurtured, there is no getting away from the truth that they take fucking ages to do stuff. Watching a child getting dressed (and please only do so if the appropriate social and legal norms are in place) is one of the most excruciating processes in the history of mankind. They don’t know which hole to stick their head through in a T shirt, socks are approached with a level of concentration that should be reserved for bomb-disposal experts and you can dream on if you think these dafties are getting anything on their person should that garment involve buttons. So at the end of the day it is much easier for Mum and Dad to dress the dithering idiot themselves, thus saving an invaluable half an hour. This time can then be spent doing fun ‘parent’ things like not sleeping or wishing you still had disposable income.
If any of you question whether or not parents dress their children out of love or necessity, simply watch a mother putting shoes on her toddler. It remains one of the most barbaric acts I have ever seen performed by one human on another. And I say that as a man who’s spent two long weekends on lads’ holidays to Amsterdam. Viciously smashing Thomas the Tank Engine strap-ups onto the soles of unsuspecting three-year-olds is not the action of someone in love, but rather of a women who is 20 minutes late for a swimming lesson.
This same notion applies to all aspects of life. You name it, kids are shit at it: setting the table, taking in the washing, doing homework. All activities can be sped up tenfold by simply doing them yourself. But this ‘overprotection’ comes at a price. Millennials are growing up not learning necessary life skills that will help them function in the real world and that will help them move out and go on to live their own independent adult lives.
Similarly parents can find solace through constantly caring for their offspring and this can cause them to turn into someone who not only creates a reliance on their services but craves it – the ‘devouring mother’. Having served others for so long she becomes obsessive, controlling and even violently scared of the idea of being alone. Mum might complain about my dirty pants and constant iPhone antics, but what would she do without me?
Disney films always manage to capture this idea brilliantly, whether it be the Evil Queen in Snow White or Ursula in The Little Mermaid. The lengths to which the devouring mother will go to maintain control over those that once relied on them are not to be underestimated. Admittedly the actions of our Disney characters aren’t exactly the same sort of thing you see happening as a result of a Gen Xer’s over-parenting, but to be fair to Walt (Disney) I think we can all agree that The Little Mermaid wouldn’t be nearly as good a film if Ursula’s evil deed was agreeing to pick Ariel up from the bus stop every day after school because she didn’t like the walk … sorry, the swim. If Ariel had been walking she wouldn’t have wanted picking up – that girl bloody loved a good wander!
As children begin to rely on their parents more and more to give them assistance through life, so parents begin to rely on their children to give them purpose to theirs. This cycle can lead to children not leaving home until much later in life. It is mutually beneficial for both parties so long as life is preferable ‘in the parental home’ or ‘under the sea’, depending on what literature you’ve read on the subject. And then there are several changing social factors:
A rise in house prices means children don’t move out until later in life.
Parents are having fewer children, so that each child gets more attention.
Parents are having kids older, when they’re more settled, so are more likely to stay in with their kids than go out and socialise.
An increased focus and pressure on giving children the correct moral compass.
Parenthood is something I think about more and more as I get older because for some unknown reason my friends keep insisting on having bloody kids. Making babies, on purpose. How adult is that? ‘OK, babe, I’m going to start leaving it in.’ I mean, they possibly put it in a slightly more romantic way, but you get the idea.
As a comedian who is forever trying to rid himself of his dreaded ego, other people’s children can be a real stumbling block on my path to enlightenment. Mainly due to the fact that most of my friends seem to like their children more than they like me. Me! How long have you known your kid? Like a couple of weeks? We’ve been friends since freshers’ week, you ungrateful bastard. What has your kid ever done for you? Every day you have to tell that thing to stop crying, wipe its bum and put it to bed. You’ve only had to do that for me twice. It was my birthday and you had given me a bottle of rum as a present – in many ways you only had yourself to blame. I mean, this shouldn’t even be a competition. Your baby can’t talk, I’m the voice of Love Island. I’m objectively better. That baby has never ‘cued the text’ or ‘paged Dr Marcel’. I should be top of your list all day, every day.
I guess I just question anyone who can feel something so strong towards someone who’s done so little. I know I’m a Liverpool fan and will follow them wherever they go despite a relative dry patch, trophy-wise, over recent seasons, but boy do they play good football and Jürgen Klopp is a total BABE. Seriously, even if you aren’t a footy fan you need to check out my main man Jürgen. The guy is like the dad you’ve always wanted. I mean, who wouldn’t want a dad called Jürgen? Am I right? Even if, like me, you have an incredible father who would quite literally lie down in traffic for you, a day spent watching Jürgen stare out the opposition from the halfway line while they do their pre-match warm-up is one of the most heroic pieces of needlessly alpha behaviour you will ever see. Try not to whisper ‘Daddy’ under your breath while he does it. I dare ya!
So while Liverpool can reward my love and loyalty even in the absence of any silverware, what can your baby do? It can’t even talk! The thing could be a prick. We don’t know yet. Half the people in the world are pricks so it’s statistically likely that your baby is an arsehole. It hasn’t even expressed a view. I mean, it could be a racist baby. You don’t know. It is bald and white, so it’s already got the uniform.
THE RACE TO ADULTHOOD
I used to dread the idea of getting older. There, I said it, I’m getting older. As much as it pains me to admit, the inevitable passage of time is slowly catching up on me. Hangovers are, not necessarily becoming physically worse, but the sadness that I feel the day after is really increasing – the dreaded ‘beer fear’ is getting more and more intense as I start to wizen with age. It’ll take more than a Lucozade and some screaming into the shower head to abolish that voice in my head asking, ‘What the hell are you doing with your life?’ In my early twenties the voice was a gentle whisper that I could ignore; when I hit 29 it bought a megaphone.