I returned to Woodhouse to find that just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, Tina had had a breast reduction. I had never even heard of such a procedure. That should be illegal, this is a man’s world, we can’t be having that. Tina’s shrinking tits were the talk of the college. Apparently her assets were giving her back pain so she was medically advised to reduce their size. If I was her doctor, I would have recommended back exercises or perhaps finding a hobby that involved lying down. Why didn’t she come to me? I would have helped her support them, taken some of the strain off her back, that’s the kind of guy I am, always thinking of others.
The world was suddenly a very different place, but I had no time to dwell, my A-Levels were rapidly approaching. This was the culmination of school life. Everything would come down to three grades, three letters that defined my academic abilities. A peculiar thing that happens before A-Levels is that teachers predict what grades students are going to gain. Despite displaying no psychic abilities before this point, they suddenly start to predict the future. These predictions are then put to universities, who may or may not make offers to students.
I simply wasn’t prepared for my exams. Not only had I lost my father but I had changed schools mid-term and the standard of teaching at Woodhouse was a lot poorer than at Merchant Taylors’. In Biology, for example, the ‘teacher’ copied the textbook page by page on to the white board without saying a word. We then had to copy from the white board into our pads. At the end of the two years, we had each compiled handwritten versions of the textbook.
The net result was that I was ‘predicted’ low grades and subsequently rejected by every university. This annoyed me. I thought the ‘prediction’ procedure was scandalous. They had no way of knowing how I would perform in my exams, and if they accepted ‘predictions’, couldn’t I tell them about the Tarot card reader? Maybe that would have helped my cause.
The atmosphere at college was dominated by revision for the exams. Suddenly everybody was studious. The kebab shops were empty and the library was full. It was suggested that Tina had worked her tits off. This, after all, was the reason we were there. I got my head down and started cramming, but feared it was too late.
My exam results were exactly as predicted. I got a C in Chemistry, a C in Biology and a D in Geography. This meant two things: my future was in turmoil and my teachers may actually have been psychic. Most of my friends were taking a ‘gap year’ between school and university. I told everybody I was taking a gap year, but in truth I had no place at university, so the rest of my life was lining up to be a series of ‘gap years’.
I had no money, and my grandma was in no mood to reward me for failing my exams. So I started working as a labourer for some builders who had installed my mum’s new kitchen. I was told to wear ‘something you don’t mind getting ruined’, so I put on my elephant T-shirt that had so far helped me pull precisely zero girls. I arrived for my first day in my Triumph Spitfire, which was surprisingly still working, although the fuel tank was leaking petrol into the car. Believe it or not, I was oblivious to petrol being flammable (I was lucky to get that C in Chemistry) and was lighting up cigarettes while driving.
You might be questioning why I took up smoking, given my dad’s struggles with cigarettes. Well, as with everything else I did, it was another attempt to pull the opposite sex. Seasoned seducers advised me that ‘Have you got a light?’ is a wonderful chat-up line. I tried it a few times when I was a non-smoker, and it didn’t have quite the impact I’d hoped for.
I would sidle up to a hotty and ask, ‘Have you got a light?’
To which she would say, while fluttering her eyelashes, ‘Yeah, sure.’ So far, so good. She would get out her lighter and spark up a flame.
And I would just stand there awkwardly.
‘Don’t you have a cigarette?’ she would ask, confused.
‘No, I don’t smoke,’ came my baffling reply.
So I started smoking, and guess what, they’re really addictive.
I started my building career on a family house in Hendon. It seemed that one of the occupants was a person called Jeremy who had also just done his A-Levels as there were cards scattered all over the mantelpieces. ‘Dear Jeremy, congratulations on your exam results, good luck at uni’ was the general theme. I spent my first two days sweeping the driveway before being promoted to painting one of the bedrooms. It appeared to be Jeremy’s bedroom as congratulations cards dominated the room. This wasn’t a high point for me. Whoever this Jeremy was, he had passed his exams and was off to university, and here I was painting his bedroom. I was up a ladder rolling eggshell emulsion on the walls when Jeremy himself walked in.
Shit. I knew Jeremy. He was in my class at Woodhouse. What an unfortunate coincidence.
‘Jeremy! You’re Jeremy, this is your room,’ I said, stating the obvious and struggling to keep my balance on the ladder.
‘Are you a painter now?’ Jeremy asked, confused.
‘Yes, at the moment I’m doing some painting,’ I replied honestly, before trying to jazz up my responsibilities, ‘and … sweeping.’
‘How weird … running into you … in my bedroom … painting it,’ Jeremy correctly pointed out. ‘Oh, OK, well, see ya.’
Jeremy then ran off to celebrate his exam results while I finished decorating his bedroom.
He was embarrassed for me, but I wasn’t. I found it funny. I could see the comedy in the situation. I enjoyed telling people the story of how I had done so badly in my exams I was now painting the bedrooms of my former classmates. I was starting to make people laugh with little anecdotes and stories from my life. People were beginning to refer to me as ‘the funny guy’. I would mimic people and do impressions. I was constantly riffing on life to others and even to myself. I started to look for comedy in every situation. I would stand on my terrace in Golders Green at night, smoking cigarettes and chatting to myself, making myself laugh. Funny was starting to be my thing.
My dad’s old personal assistant, Pete, offered me a job as a ‘runner’ at his production company off Ladbroke Grove. It was a lovely circle of life that I should be working for him at the same age he was when he worked for my dad. It was good to get a little razzmatazz back into my life. Showbiz had been sorely lacking since my dad was making The Kenny Everett Show. Steve’s job in ‘computer-aided design’ just didn’t have the same ring. Pete’s company was called Partizan, and they made music videos for the likes of Björk, Radiohead, Annie Lennox and Massive Attack.
I was basically a dogsbody. Making tea and coffee for the producers, delivering things around London, doing whatever needed to be done. I worked alongside two other ‘runners’, Jamie and Steve, and the receptionist, Zelda. Being a runner is the entry point in the media – most successful people in film and television start out as runners. I was fortunate to land the job; every day we received CVs from well-qualified graduates desperate to make the tea that I was making. In fact, I’m sure they could have done it better – my tea-making was appalling. My toast-making was so bad, I had a tutorial from Pete on how to ‘Butter all the way to the edges’. I think if it wasn’t for nepotism, I would have been fired pretty early on.
Jamie and Steve were desperate to become directors, and Zelda was desperate to become a producer. I was just having fun. I was discovering my sense of humour and becoming addicted to the sound of laughter. It seemed to me that the whole of life was just there so that I could try to make it funny. I was also trying to impress Zelda. She was a 22-year-old bubbly blonde with a wicked sense of humour of her own. Despite her being in a long-term relationship with her ‘drummer in a band’ boyfriend, she became the latest unrequited love of my life. We pranked and laughed our days away. My time would be spent working in the office or on set when there was a shoot.
The first music video I worked on was for the Big Breakfast puppets Zig and Zag. Some savvy record producer called Simon Cowell thought he might be able to land a hit single with a novelty record. The song was called ‘Them Girls’ and the video featured a club scene with a few boys but predominantly sexy girls dancing around Zig and Zag, as they sang, ‘Them girls, them girls, they all love me.’ I was the runner on the shoot, which meant I was literally run off my feet from very early in the morning until very late at night. My job was to be on hand to help everybody from the director to the caterers.
My Spitfire was now not only leaking petrol but also brake fluid, so I would have to fill up on both several times a journey. The studio was in Bow, and I was running so late that I didn’t have time to fill up the brake fluid. When I arrived the brakes were so soft I sailed fifty yards past the crew entrance and finally stopped at the artists’ entrance. There were about a hundred models arriving, and I was mistaken for one. I think it was more the car than my face, or maybe my coat. My grandmother had given me one of my grandfather’s old coats. It was a very expensive black pure cashmere overcoat. I loved it and hardly ever took it off. I certainly didn’t look like your average ‘runner’.
I should really have said something. I was late, I was in trouble, there would have been people looking for me, I was badly needed on the shoot, but before I knew it, I was whisked into a communal dressing room surrounded by naked models. NAKED MODELS! Naked models who seemed to be flirting with me a bit. One girl asked me to help her out of her dress! She moved her long dark hair to one side as I unzipped this gorgeous woman from behind.
‘Michael!’ cried Jenny, one of the production assistants who was organizing the extras. ‘What are you doing? Everyone’s looking for you!’
‘Sorry, I was just helping …’ I scooted out, leaving behind a half-zipped beauty and returned to my actual job of production slave.
News of my indiscretion travelled throughout the production, and all but a few found it hilarious, and most of the male crew congratulated me on being a bit of a stud. But my out-of-control antics were soon to jeopardize my job.
Partizan was becoming quite successful, mainly due to one of their directors, Michel Gondry, who was and is a phenomenally creative Frenchman. He would go on to direct one of my favourite films, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, starring Jim Carrey, and indeed win an Oscar for it. So the company started to diversify and produce commercials directed by Michel. For me, this only meant that I would be delivering and picking up packages from advertising agencies as well as record companies. Very kindly, Pete occasionally allowed me to drive his company Mercedes when on these deliveries.
On the day in question, I was delivering a package to the agency Saatchi & Saatchi. Saatchi & Saatchi was run by brothers Charles and Maurice Saatchi. While sitting in traffic, en route, I heard on the radio that Maurice Saatchi was leaving the agency. ‘That’s interesting,’ I thought, ‘I’m on my way there now.’ So I listened closely to the news about how he was being ousted from the company and would probably start a new one. The big question seemed to be, would his major clients like British Airways follow him.
When I arrived at Saatchi & Saatchi, it was a media circus. Outside the main entrance were cameras, news teams, reporters. I was only dropping off a package, so I double-parked the car and ran in unnoticed. On the way out, however, all the cameras, lights and reporters focused on me, standing on the steps of Saatchi & Saatchi in my expensive cashmere coat.
‘What do you think the future is for Saatchi & Saatchi?’ I was asked, mistaken for an advertising exec.
Well, you see, they asked me a question, so I chose to answer it. I was filled with all the information I had just heard on the radio and said, ‘I don’t think there is much of a future.’
Obviously, everybody else had been saying, ‘No comment’, because as soon as I spoke, there was a media scrum surrounding me, microphones were thrust into my face from all angles, BBC, Sky News, ITN, etc.
‘Maurice was the lifeblood of this agency,’ I continued, repeating exactly what I had heard a commentator say on the radio just minutes previously. ‘I think many of the major clients will follow him out, certainly British Airways will.’ This was massive news; they were scribbling, jockeying for position around me.
‘What do you do here?’ somebody shouted at me.
‘Well, nothing now, I’ve just resigned,’ I said then, cool as a cucumber. I beeped open Pete’s double-parked Mercedes, jumped in it and sped off.
I was exhilarated by my latest joke and told everybody in the office. Pete summoned me and told me in no uncertain terms that what I had done was very funny, but if it came back to him and Partizan in any way, he would have to fire me. I nervously watched the news that night, but nothing was on it. My job was safe, I could continue with my reign of mischief.
One reign that was about to come to an inevitable end was that of my Triumph Spitfire. My car struggled to stop in perfect driving conditions, so when snow and ice entered the equation, there was little hope. Driving home from work in wintry conditions, I applied the brake and skidded serenely. While skidding, I couldn’t remember the advice I had been given; was it to brake, not brake, pump the brakes? By the time I’d remembered, I’d crashed into a parked Volvo Limousine.
I have honestly never seen a Volvo Limousine before or since. Volvos are renowned for their strength and limousines are renowned for being long. So it was hard for me to avoid this long strong car. The result was that my car crumpled into an unsalvageable heap, offering no resistance whatsoever. It was almost as if the car committed suicide, like it had been waiting for the right car to crash into and spotting a Volvo Limousine was too much to resist. I was unhurt, as was the Volvo. I may not have remembered the skidding rules, but I did remember being told that if you’re involved in an accident, do not accept responsibility. The fact that the car I crashed into was unoccupied didn’t seem to affect my denial of blame.
The limo was parked directly outside its owner’s house on West End Lane in West Hampstead. He heard the impact and came rushing outside.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he cried.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ I said, leaping out of my wreckage.
‘Have you been drinking?’ he accused me.
‘Have you been drinking?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but I’m having dinner with my family. Are you insane? I’m allowed to drink and eat. Have you been drinking and driving?’
We exchanged details, he returned to his dinner and I awaited rescue. I had lost my car, but I had another funny story to add to my expanding repertoire. The next morning when I went to Partizan, I wasn’t depressed to be on the bus. I couldn’t wait to tell Zelda and everyone else how I’d hit the only Volvo Limousine ever made and blamed it on a man who was eating dinner at the time. The story got big laughs and that made me happy.
Making people laugh made me happy.