Life and Laughing_ My Story - Michael McIntyre [112]
‘I’m sorry, but you’re only one centimetre dilated, you’ve got quite a long time to go yet.’
She was right. Kitty endured another fifteen hours of contractions. She was determined to have a natural childbirth but was exhausted and eventually asked for an epidural. An epidural is an anaesthetic that, when it works, numbs the pain. It worked. The last couple of hours, Kitty was calm and in relative comfort. She pushed and pushed and eased our little messy baby boy out into the world.
Welcome.
‘How the fuck am I supposed to pay for this?’
I cradled him in my arms in the hospital. I gazed into his little eyes (already bigger than mine) and held his new hand in mine. I looked at him with all the love I have ever felt. He looked back at me in a way that seemed to say:
‘Can you afford this?’
In that instant in the hospital, I knew I had to take control of my life. I couldn’t take control of my life for myself, but I could do it for him. My son. Everything had to change.
I immediately started to look for an alternative, more conventional style of management. I had stuck with Duddridge for four years, and it just hadn’t worked out. He tried hard to make me understand his philosophies on how to find success, but I now had my own philosophy. I wanted to work every night of the week, I wanted to be as good as I could be through hard work, not mantras and proverbs, and I wanted to get out of Jongleurs.
I asked around and researched the biggest agents in the business and one name came up, over and over again, Off The Kerb. What was so attractive about Off The Kerb was that they represented not only comedy legends, like Lee Evans and Jack Dee, but were creating new stars seemingly every year: Sean Lock three years previously, Dara Ó Briain the year before and that year Alan Carr was emerging. It was obvious to me that they were the best in the business, and I set my heart on them representing me. Oh, and if I needed any more convincing, they also represented Jonathan Ross, the then darling of the BBC.
I got their phone number and spent the day trying to pluck up the courage to call them. Off The Kerb have their finger on the pulse of live comedy; not only have they been representing comics of all statures for twenty years, but they also run their own clubs all over the country. So it reflected my low standing that when I called up, although they had heard of me, nobody at the office had seen me perform. I spoke with Danny Julian, who put me at ease within moments. I was a nobody, calling him out of the blue, but he agreed to watch me perform.
It was his job to find the stars of tomorrow, it was his job to take all calls seriously, and he was good at his job. He said he would book me in for a gig and come to see me with his boss, Joe Norris. It was as easy as that. I was elated when I put the phone down. Elated because I had taken that first step and elated because I knew I couldn’t fail. I may have spent years in the wilderness, years of making no impact whatsoever, but I had also spent years developing a twenty-minute set that was now near perfect.
I was so confident that Off The Kerb would take me on that I called Duddridge and we separated amicably. I owed him money for the two Edinburgh Festivals. None of the major banks would lend me the money, so I went to the only people who might, DFS. I found out the bank they used and sure enough they gave me the money. (HFC, by the way, in case you need a loan; the rate of interest was about a million per cent.)
Off The Kerb booked me into their toughest gig at Canary Wharf. I met Danny Julian and chatted with him beforehand. We hit it off immediately. He had just had a baby too, and we compared notes on sleepless nights. What I didn’t tell him was that most of my sleepless nights were because I was worrying about my financial