Life and Laughing_ My Story - Michael McIntyre [106]
We jumped into our classic Rolls-Royce as confetti filled the air, spent the night at a suite in the Bath Spa Hotel and set off on honeymoon the next day.
It was perfect.
The Maldives were like nothing I had ever seen before. We flew to the capital, Malé, and then took a seaplane to our hotel, the Hilton on Rangali Island, that is literally on a tiny island containing only the hotel. It takes about fifteen minutes to walk around it. We had a room on the blinding white beach, but many of the rooms were on stilts in the turquoise Indian Ocean. The service was immaculate; little Maldivian men would rake the sand you had just walked on. The food was phenomenal, everywhere you looked was breathtakingly beautiful. We were in paradise.
One of the many photos Kitty and I took of each other on our honeymoon in the Maldives.
The only downside was I forgot that half-board meant that we only had breakfast and dinner paid for. I had about £150 remaining on my credit card. I couldn’t afford to buy lunch at the extortionate restaurants, and there was obviously nowhere else to eat – the closest supermarket was back at Heathrow. So having spent a small fortune of loaned money and travelling halfway round the world, we had to steal food from breakfast every morning to eat for lunch. Kitty would keep watch, and when the waiter turned his back, I would stuff croissants, fruit, yoghurt and mini-cereal packets into our beach bag. One morning we couldn’t swipe anything from breakfast and we got so hungry during the day that I tried to spear fish in the ocean. This holiday of a lifetime had shades of the film Castaway.
The happy couple, Mr and Mrs McIntyre, returned home looking tanned and hungry. Our lives had revolved around the Edinburgh Festival and the wedding for so long that it felt a bit strange. I was in debt. The loan and credit card had pushed me significantly into the red and Edinburgh had cost about £4,000. It was time for my career to start moving; I needed the money.
My agent’s office sent me my gig list and to my horror it was the same as it had always been, Jongleurs gig after Jongleurs gig. I couldn’t believe it. I was nominated for the Best Newcomer Award in Edinburgh, but that didn’t seem to count for anything. The truth was that being nominated for the Perrier Best Newcomer Award was quite a minor thing compared with being nominated or winning the main award.
The next year of my career was no different from the previous one. I continued to open the show at Jongleurs. I was dedicating my career to Jongleurs and they still only rated me as an opening act. I occasionally played other clubs, as before, and loved it, but I would then not be working on Sunday night, Monday night, Tuesday night and Wednesday night, before heading back to entertain Stags and Hens at Jongleurs. All the while, my debts were mounting. I was borrowing more and more money at extortionate rates, using debt to pay off debt.
I was broke. My mum lent me money, Lucy lent me money, Sam lent me money, I called Paul from a petrol station when my credit card was declined. I sold my grandfather’s old cufflinks he had given me and even tried to sell his old enormous cashmere coat. Although, in fairness, Kitty had been asking me to sell that for years. I’m not exaggerating when I say that our life became quite desperate. I took every gig Duddridge could get me, but it wasn’t enough to get me out of the mess I was in. One night Kitty was seriously ill with a sky-high temperature. I needed to be with her, to look after her, but I left her alone to go to Norwich because we so badly needed the £150 from the gig. My financial situation was spiralling out of control.
The only thing that kept me going was the next Edinburgh Festival, all my eggs were in that basket. I would be returning as the Perrier Best Newcomer Nominee. Television producers and comedy bookers would see my show. I could be nominated for the Perrier, I could win it and my career would skyrocket.