Life and Laughing_ My Story - Michael McIntyre [110]
I became so confident in my material that I could also improvise, knowing that if it didn’t take off I could fall back on my now bulletproof jokes. Then with my wife heavily pregnant, I reached rock bottom. For four years I had been going on first at Jongleurs, every once in a while I would be on second. Progress. But this weekend I was something called Jongleurs’ ‘spare’. This is when you are a sort of substitute in case another comedian can’t make it to one of the London Jongleurs venues in Camden, Battersea or Bow. I had to go to Camden Jongleurs and wait until they either called me to tell me I was to perform at one of these London venues or, more likely, go home. I couldn’t believe it, this was worse than being on first, now I wasn’t even on. I was being paid not to work.
I hated Jongleurs dressing rooms when I was working, but sitting there as a substitute was far worse. I couldn’t wait for the phone call telling me that I could go home. As the evening went on, however, it appeared that the headliner hadn’t shown up. The venue manager gave me a heads-up: ‘Get ready, Michael, there’s a problem with the headliner, you might have to go on.’
‘Finally,’ I thought. ‘I’ll headline this show, blow the roof off and show Jongleurs that I can do it.’
Then Jongleurs called me. ‘The headliner isn’t going to make it,’ the booker said.
‘I’ll headline, no problem,’ I said.
‘No, we’re sending another act over from Bow. You’ve never headlined before, we think it’ll be too much for you.’
Insult to injury. I had given Jongleurs years of my life, performed hundreds of times for them, and here was the result. They thought it would be ‘too much for me’ to headline a show. I left Jongleurs that night feeling dejected and frustrated. It was a stormy night, rain was pouring from the night sky. I felt like such a loser; things couldn’t get much worse. Of course they could. I had a flat tyre. Shit! I had to change the tyre of my Austin Metro Princess while getting soaked through.
Cold and drenched, I took the spare tyre out of the boot. What a sight we were, the spare comedian fitting the spare tyre. The tyre looked more like a rubber ring. It turns out that my spare tyre was only a temporary measure designed to get me to the nearest garage. On the side of the tyre it read: ‘Maximum speed 40 mph’. The tyre was so flimsy that if I drove over 40 mph, it would burst. After a great deal of blasphemy, I attached the rubber ring tyre to my car and raced home at speeds up to 40 mph.
Kitty was asleep when I opened our front door, passing unopened bills before I climbed the stairs and sat on my interest-free-credit Montana Ice DFS sofa, with my head in my hands, my wet hair dripping on my rented carpet. How was I going to get out of this? I needed a miracle.
On 29 June 2005, I got one. My son Lucas was born.
He was born at UCH hospital in central London in the early hours of the morning. Thirty hours earlier Kitty and I had been lying in bed watching the film Ray starring Jamie Foxx when she started to get minor contractions. Our local hospital was the Whittington in Highgate, about ten minutes’ drive away, but we had decided to have the baby in central London at UCH, about half an hour away with no traffic. We opted for UCH because my mother’s wonderful doctor, who had delivered my three little brothers, worked there. However, a few weeks into Kitty’s pregnancy, he retired, and it was too late for us to change hospitals.
‘I feel weird, Michael, I don’t know what’s happening,’ Kitty said, clutching at my arm.
‘That’s because you never concentrate, darling. It’s quite simple; it