Life and Laughing_ My Story - Michael McIntyre [54]
11
Wow. That was a little heavy. Let’s lighten the mood and turn our attentions to the loss of my virginity. Strap yourselves in. So as I’ve already told you, I wasn’t the most attractive teenager. Girls didn’t fancy me, they laughed at me on trains. By the time I was sixteen I still hadn’t added to my one blender-kiss at the Hammersmith Palais. I didn’t know how to pull girls; for a while I didn’t know how to pull myself. Opportunities were limited. I had no real friends at Merchant Taylors’ but had remained close to my Arnold House friends.
Like everyone else at that age, Sam was totally obsessed with sex. He was, however, more overt about his obsession than most. He had a library of pornography. His bedroom walls were covered in pictures of tits. I, on the other hand, had no pornography. I was too embarrassed to borrow any or, God forbid, buy any. The most titillation I got was watching Felicity Kendall bend down to do some weeding on The Good Life.
That was until we became one of the first households in the country to get Sky TV. When we had Sky TV, they only had one advert on it, for Eagle Star Insurance, which they played over and over again. (It worked, incidentally, as I now have my home insured with them.) The satellite receiver was in my mum and Steve’s room, and they ran a cable to my room so that I could watch the cricket from the West Indies through the night. This set-up meant that the channel could only be changed from the receiver that was in a cupboard next to Steve’s side of the bed. The thrill of early satellite television for me was not the Test Match, but the German gameshow Tutti Frutti, which featured girls stripping between standard fingers-on-the-buzzers Q and A. It was in a language I didn’t speak and the picture quality was poor, but Tutti Frutti was the best show I had ever seen.
Getting to watch Tutti Frutti was not easy. I had to sneak into my mum and Steve’s bedroom while they were asleep, open the cupboard that was less than a foot from the sleeping Steve. The channel would invariably be on number 11 as they tended to fall asleep watching Sky News. I had to change it to 47, RTL. I couldn’t just press 4 and 7; that sophisticated channel changing technology was still at the prototype phase. I had to flick individually through all the channels, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 … until 47. The tension was unbearable, but the thought of German tits kept me focused.
Occasionally Steve or my mother would stir or there would be a noise from the street outside. I would be startled and rush back to my bedroom, only to find I had not yet reached the magic number 47. I may only have reached number 22, the History Channel, or even 46, the National Geographic Channel; interesting, informative and educational they may be, but not the visual stimulus for what I had in mind. So I would return later to complete my mission. I did this every night. I think I watched every episode of Tutti Frutti ever made. I even started to enjoy the game play element, and when Hans Schneider was crowned champion, I was genuinely chuffed for him. Hilariously, after a few weeks an engineer came round to look at our Sky Box because Steve had complained to customer services that there was a fault. ‘It keeps changing itself to some weird German channel during the night.’
I genuinely don’t understand why I never had a girlfriend.
‘I’m sorry, sir, it’s a mystery,’ said the engineer. Well, the mystery ends here.
Sam and I had tried following girls in Corfu without success, but now we had a new plan. We would go to a nightclub. We scanned the clubbing section of Time Out magazine and selected a trendy hotspot just off the King’s Road. The major stumbling block was that we were two years underage. I was sixteen and looked younger. My most adult feature was the hair under one armpit. I thought of trying to comb it across to the other side or cutting one sleeve off a shirt to reveal my manliness, but it