Newcastle didn’t exactly work out for me as I had planned. I enjoyed my first term there, and I liked the people that I met. However, I had gone to study an English and History degree having achieved a ‘B’ in my History and an ‘Ungraded’ in my English A-levels.
The English grade had shocked the school to the extent that they had paid to have the paper remarked. They had predicted at least a ‘B’ grade, but when the paper was returned it was clear why the ungraded mark had been given. Somewhere in the exam my brain had turned to mush, and my mild dyslexia had gone berserk: I had written some words backwards, some upside down, whilst others were just illegible. Although I certainly am not the greatest speller in the world, and had been tested for dyslexia on a number of occasions, I had never before displayed such a meltdown.
I have always put my inability to spell down to the fact that in junior school we were taught to spell phonetically, which means speaking the word slowly as you spell it. The problem with such a process is that if you speak with an accent as thick as mine, and live in an environment where you are not surrounded by the written word to counterbalance your exposure to these sounds, then it is easy to make mistakes. I was 10 before I realised the word ‘there’ did not have a ‘d’ in it.
What happened that day has never happened since, and it is still inexplicable to me. But, using the grades I achieved in General Studies and the Law exam I did at night school as a trade-off, the school had somehow convinced Newcastle Poly they should allow me to do a degree in a subject that I failed at A-level. Which you have to say is no mean feat.
I began the course in Newcastle full of enthusiasm. It was my first time living away from home and I immediately fell in love with the city and its people. To this day, it is one of the first places I look for when I have a tour booked. I was living in the student hall of residence and threw myself into the social life that this presented. I gained a casual girlfriend called Anne and managed to get myself into the first XI football team, which provided a great social network. It also provided fantastic trips away, as Newcastle Poly sports teams were generally regarded as quite strong.
On one particular trip, we were to play against Edge Hill University, a teacher training college near Ormskirk. I can’t remember the score, but I know we won, and what I can remember is that after the game we went to the student union for a drink – only to find out the ratio of girls to men at Edge Hill was roughly 4 to 1. We had a whip-round to convince the bus driver to allow us to stay a few hours longer, and at the end of the evening we returned to the team bus triumphant. Every single player (apart from Lawrence, who played in goal and whose cousin attended that college and to whom he’d had to talk all night) had got at least a snog. It was a fantastic feeling to be amongst a body of men who had arrived in new lands and challenged the local men to do battle on the football pitch, emerging victorious and then finding pleasure among the local women. It was probably the closest I will ever come to being a Viking.
Despite the fun I was having in Newcastle, I was quickly becoming disillusioned with the course. In truth, my experience in literature has been limited to books that I was forced to read for school rather than books I wanted to read; it was only during my A-level course that I had begun to read books for pleasure. Prior to that, if it was not a comic book or a Roy of the Rovers annual, I never read anything.
I regret those wasted years, and I am pleased that my three sons are avid readers. I still don’t read as much as I would like, but I attempt to have at least one book always on the go. This does also lead to the accumulation of a mass of books that I have started on a train journey somewhere and never finished. I used to feel guilty about not finishing books but, as I’ve become older, I have come to the conclusion that this is not my fault – if the book was any good, I would have finished it.
This could be a very pragmatic way to explain my laziness, or it could simply be true. Books are the only thing that you embark upon feeling responsible for your own enjoyment of it; even if the first 50 pages are rubbish, there is a sense of defeat if you don’t finish it. That doesn’t happen in any other art form; it certainly doesn’t happen in comedy. You can’t be rubbish for 20 minutes to the extent that the audience get up and leave without seeing the conclusion of your act, and feel totally reassured that on their way home they will think it’s their fault.
No, as a comedian it’s your job to hold the audience’s attention. This is a responsibility I take on in my job, which I have now assumed for other aspects in my life: films, plays, TV programmes and books. Although, as a comedian, if you are losing the audience, you will soon find out because someone will tell you. That is the valid role of the heckler, to make you aware of any failings you had not realised yourself. But you can respond to a heckle, and at times it allows a comedy gig to step up a pace. You often find the act becomes sharper and quicker once the comedian has dealt with the heckle. It’s not the same for an author. I have often shouted at a book, ‘This is shit … is that all you’ve got?’ and I have never noticed it change the book at all.
So when I embarked upon a degree in English, it is probably fair to say my literary experience was more limited than most of the people in the room. The history elements of the course I really enjoyed, but the English element I found unbelievably frustrating.
During the first term, we concentrated exclusively up on the mammoth poem, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. For those unfamiliar with the work, all I can say from memory is that it is a story about a sailor who leads a ship to safety with the aid of an albatross. There is a wedding involved, and somewhere the sailor goes a bit mental and shoots the bird with a crossbow, hanging it around his neck, and gets lost again. I am sure there is much more to it than that, but even now I am not prepared to find out what because my relationship with the poem was tainted by the experience of sitting in a seminar room whilst a tutor asked us first-year students to explain the interaction between the sailor and the bird:
‘Why does Coleridge feel the albatross can communicate with the mariner in a way other people can’t? What is the connection that binds them, man and beast, together? Why should the bird return when the gift of flight means he could leave any time? He is the master of his own destiny, but binds himself to the ship – why would he do that? What is Coleridge trying to tell us about ourselves and about him through the actions of the albatross?’
These and many more questions were put to us over a period of weeks. Although in their own right they would potentially be worth a discussion, everything is tarnished when you know Coleridge was an opium addict. When I suggested that being a smack-head and writing about ships meant that Coleridge was basically doing the eighteenth-century equivalent of shouting at buses whilst sitting on a park bench drinking Special Brew, it was clear that my days with the literary intelligentsia of Newcastle Polytechnic would soon be over.
Having made the decision to leave the course, I then faced the dilemma of what to do. I really wanted to enrol on the sports science course where I had a number of friends. The sports science faculty offered me a place, but suggested that as I had done a term already I would have to switch the following year.
So, after three months in Newcastle, I returned home with a place on the sports science degree to start in September.
Little did I know when I left Newcastle that day, I would never return to the poly.