I seem to have leapt straight from primary school to part-time employment, which is poor form on my part. To do so would be to miss out secondary school, the most embarrassing years of anybody’s life. Secondary school is a minefield of humiliation and your first year there is particularly tricky. A single event during that first year can shape how your classmates view you for the next five. It can mould who you are as a human being, especially if it takes place in front of literally everybody else in your entire school year at exactly the same time.
Every Monday a different year seven form group would put on an assembly for the rest of the year sevens. Most of the time the assemblies were about a serious subject and were informative and you’d just switch off for the whole thing while kids took it in turns to read facts from pieces of paper. Then one Monday, one form group changed assemblies for ever. Mr Martin’s class knocked it out the park; they pulled out all the stops and put on their very own version of Shooting Stars. That was it: they didn’t try and teach us anything, they just wrote an amazingly funny assembly. To this day it’s probably the greatest live performance I have ever seen.
Two kids called Danny and Craig played Vic and Bob and were flat out hilarious – at one point they did a joke about Mr Martin’s pubes and got away with it. Another kid nailed it as George Doors, they had the Dove from Above; a nerdy kid called Matthew played the Geek of the Week and danced sideways across the stage while the rest of his class sang ‘Geek of the Week’ and he totally owned it to the point where everyone in our year respected him and I’m pretty sure no one ever gave him any grief for being a geek ever again. For the rest of the day all I did was think about how funny that assembly had been and how much I wished my class had done something like that. The good news was that next Monday it was my class’s turn to do the assembly and we were all in agreement: we had to do something as funny as Shooting Stars.
We did struggle to think of something radically different to be honest. We knew it was really funny that they had recreated a TV show in their assembly and we all wanted to do the same, but we couldn’t agree on a specific show to send up so we compromised and decided that our assembly would consist of one of us playing somebody watching TV and flicking through the channels and the rest of us would act out all the different shows. Ambitious but potentially a good idea. So we divided into groups of four with each group assigned a TV show which they were to write a sketch about.
My group were given EastEnders. I personally have never seen EastEnders. Still to this day I’ve never seen it. Back then I’d never seen it AND I was eleven, so wasn’t as good at guessing what EastEnders might be like as I am now. All I knew was that Mr Martin’s class were funny so we better be funny. I asked the other kids in my group what was going on in EastEnders right now.
‘Ian Beale is obsessed with the environment and being green,’ said Joseph. ‘The Mitchell brothers are beating people up,’ said Luke.
I nodded and began to write. I had to make this good, I couldn’t have another Cub Scout Circus Show or Woodcutter and the Christmas Dove on my hands. This had to be so funny that everyone would forget all about Shooting Stars. I did what I should’ve done when I learned to juggle and I followed my instincts. As I read it back to myself I knew this would be even funnier than actual EastEnders itself. And I had written it in five minutes flat. Three minutes longer than it took me to learn to juggle. Because if you want a job done well you’ve got to put the time in.
Monday rolled around and it was time for the big assembly. The rest of our year were sat on the floor, cross legged, waiting to watch what we’d come up with; some of the kids were still reminiscing about how incredible Shooting Stars had been the week before. The kids who put on the Shooting Stars assembly were sitting in the audience too, looking like bona fide celebs, lapping up the praise. Well, enjoy it while it lasts, because now it’s our turn to shine.
One of my classmates walked out onstage, sat on a chair and pretended to flick through TV channels with a remote control. Each time they pressed a button, a different kid would rush out and say a couple of words, imitating something from a TV show (this was just to establish the premise, no big laughs just yet) and then we moved on to some longer sketches. To be honest, I can’t remember what any of the other kids’ sketches were, what shows they were sending up, who was in them – nothing. All I was focused on was how much we were about to melt people’s minds with the EastEnders sketch that I had written all by myself, without any help from anyone else. Just me.
All I know is the sketch before us ended and that was our cue to begin.
Luke and Leavan walked on to the stage as the Mitchell Brothers, talking to each other like tough guys. The audience were silent, taking in all the info while we set the scene for them. Then, from the other side of the stage, I entered, playing the role of Ian Beale, wearing a big green padded coat. As we crossed paths the Mitchells threw a chocolate bar wrapper on the floor. I stopped in my tracks, staring at the litter in disgust.
‘Oi!’ I shouted. ‘Are you going to pick that up?’
‘No,’ said Phil Mitchell.
‘Pick it up!’ I retorted.
‘What you gonna do about it?’ said Grant Mitchell.
‘Nothing!’ I boomed. ‘But . . .’ and then I ran offstage.
The room was silent for about thirty seconds and then . . . I returned! Running full pelt back on to the stage, having taken my big green coat off and tied it around my neck like a cape, ‘. . . Eco Man will!’ I shouted to utter silence.
Then, with my hands on my hips, I continued, ‘You messed with Eco Man and his sidekick – The Bin Bag!’ Then my friend Joe ran onstage wearing a bin bag (we had cut a hole in the bottom of the bin bag and put it over his head like a poncho).
The Bin Bag made a high-pitched noise that sounded like, ‘Meep Moop!’ Also to silence.
What followed was a ten-minute-long comedy fight where Eco Man and The Bin Bag beat up the Mitchell Brothers and every time I punched someone I would shout ‘Eco Man!’ really fast while The Bin Bag ran around, constantly making Pingu-type noises. This entire fight sequence also played to silence. The sketch ended with the Mitchell Brothers in a pile on the floor, me with my foot up on their lifeless bodies, The Bin Bag doing a victory dance next to me, to pure and perfect silence.
The Bin Bag
Every single person in the school year had watched the entire sketch without making a peep. They hadn’t laughed or, to be fair, heckled; they just stared at us, trying to figure out what they’d just seen. Because (and I only realised this once we were onstage performing the sketch for the first time), we hadn’t established that the programme we were sending up was EastEnders. At no point did we tell the audience that this was meant to be EastEnders. We didn’t use the EastEnders theme music at the start of the sketch and we didn’t say any of the characters’ names at any point, so no one knew we were Ian Beale and the Mitchell Brothers; as far as our audience were concerned they had just seen us perform a note perfect version of an obscure show called ‘Eco Man’ that actually existed.
After the performance one of the girls who’d been in the audience asked me where they could watch the original TV show. I told them we were doing EastEnders and I was playing Ian Beale and finally I achieved the laughter I had been so very hungry for while on stage. She told some other girls and they found it equally hysterical. I was pretty sure they weren’t laughing for the right reasons and the reasons they were laughing for were probably bad, but at this point I’d take anything. For about six months after that those girls would call me Ian Beale (or his alter ego, Eco Man) in the corridor whenever they walked past. And yeah it was pretty mean of them but I’ll say this – Mr Martin’s class never got ‘Shooting Stars’ yelled at them on the way to their maths lesson. So maybe I could console myself with that? At least my work was standing the test of time. Come to think of it, it’s not like Matthew had been able to follow up his Cub Scout Circus Show juggling act – he’d been a flash in the pan! Little did I know that I was about to experience a hit of my own and I’d soon discover that being a big success wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.