Life and Laughing_ My Story - Michael McIntyre [29]
In hindsight, I think my parents’ marriage breakdown was inevitable. I’ve met them both, and they genuinely had nothing in common. I’m surprised it lasted as long as it did. Although my mum was spending a lot of time with Kenny and his friends, it was only a matter of time before she met a heterosexual man. People who are single are often encouraged to ‘get out there, don’t just wait for Mr Right to come knocking on your door’. Well, in my mother’s case, Mr Right smashed the door down, installed a new one, then painted and rag-rolled it. They were in love and determined to start a life together, a life with Lucy and me. My home was broken. The Hampstead house was put on the market.
Let’s just put the divorce to one side for a moment. Park the divorce. I want to talk about house prices. It was 1983 and we owned a substantial house in Hampstead. I also want you to put the décor of the house to one side. Park the décor. Park it next to the divorce.
Because of a wonderful website, with which I became obsessed when I was house hunting called houseprices.co.uk, you can now find out the price of homes sold anywhere in the UK. We sold our Hampstead house in 1983 for £330,000, a substantial amount of money at the time, even today. At the peak of the market in 2007, the same house was sold for £4.2 million. Here’s a question: why the fuck didn’t the Tarot card reader mention that? The house increased in value by £160,000 a year. Would this knowledge have saved my parents’ marriage? (I’ve just un-parked the divorce.) I don’t think so. But maybe it would have prevented them from selling their goldmine with hideous interior. (I’ve just un-parked the décor.) For that kind of money, Steve could have built a dividing wall and they could have split the house. Lucy and I would still live with both our parents, and in twenty-five years we would all walk away millionaires.
It wasn’t to be. The house was sold, bizarrely, to the Osbournes. Any relation? Yes, it was them, the actual Osbournes. Sharon and Ozzy and little baby Jack. Kelly Osbourne had just been born at the time. This is from Sharon’s autobiography: ‘Ozzy arrived for the birth and I took him to see somewhere I found in Hampstead. It was Victorian, semi-detached with a garden, not enormous but somewhere to put the pram … It needed a lot doing to it, but the price was good and it had great potential.’
This is an historic moment: the overlapping of two celebrity autobiographies. It’s interesting, the different perspectives. For Sharon, the house was ‘not enormous’; for me, it was ‘enormous’. Sharon felt it ‘needed a lot doing to it’; for me, it was ‘hideous’. It also said in her book that it was the first place that felt like a family home. The house certainly had the potential to be one; unfortunately, we were the wrong family. I doubt that when my father bought all the different flats and sat down with his architect, he said, ‘I want to create the perfect family home, for the Prince of Darkness.’
I had obviously never heard of Ozzy Osbourne. It may not come as a shock to you to learn that I never went through a ‘heavy metal’ phase. For all I knew, Black Sabbath was just another date in my mum’s Filofax. Before the MTV television series that endeared Ozzy and his family to the world, he was primarily known for eating the head of a bat. When my mother told me to tidy my room ‘because a man who bites the heads off bats is coming round to look at it’, I thought it was a threat. I’ve never cleaned my room so well in my life. Inspired by my mother’s Capri cleaning, I usually just threw rubbish out of the window, but this time I had the place immaculate. ‘All right, I’ll do it! Please don’t let the man bite my head off.’
The proceeds of the house sale were divided equally between my parents