Life and Laughing_ My Story - Michael McIntyre [6]
I have been to Montreal, my father’s birthplace, only once. As has been reported at length in every Daily Mail interview I’ve done, my father died when I was seventeen years old. I recently did interviews with the Daily Mail and Heat magazine back to back in a hotel in Manchester. The Mail grilled me at length about the passing of my dad until I had tears in my eyes. The interview ended, the tape recorder stopped, my tears were wiped, and the Mail journalist was replaced by the one from Heat, whose first question was ‘How do you get your hair so bouncy?’, at which point my publicist jumped in: ‘Michael doesn’t want to answer any personal questions.’
I was in Montreal for the Comedy Festival a few years ago. Montreal is split into French- and English-speakers, and as you can imagine, they don’t really get on. My first introduction to French in Montreal was an unfortunate incident in my hotel shower. When the letter ‘C’ is on a tap, I normally feel pretty confident I’m reaching for the ‘Cold’ tap. However, ‘C’ on French taps stands for ‘Chaud’ which means ‘Hot’. I turned up the ‘Chaud’, thinking it was ‘Cold’. When the water got hotter, I simply added more ‘Chaud’. I was scalded.
This wasn’t the only Anglo-French misunderstanding I encountered in Canada. When businessmen are on the road, often the only highlight is watching pornography in hotel rooms. Sad but true. In fact, checking out of a hotel can feel a bit like confession. ‘Forgive me, Novotel Leeds receptionist, for I have sinned; I watched four pornos. I also had two Toblerones, the Maltesers, the sour cream and chive Pringles and five miniature Cognacs from the mini-bar. And I have one of your towels in my bag.’
Checking in to my Montreal hotel, I had a few hours to kill until the gig so, and I apologize to younger readers, I was contemplating the potentially higher calibre of Canadian ‘adult’ entertainment awaiting me in room 417. The receptionist handed me the key for my room and then enquired whether it was the only key I required.
‘Do you want one key?’ she asked. However, in her thick French accent this became ‘Do you want wanky?’ I was startled to say the least. What kind of a hotel was this? I immediately went to my room for a cold shower, but as you know scalded myself.
Being in Montreal, I naturally felt nostalgic for my dad, but, unlike my trip to Hungary, I was alone. I sent an email to my father’s brother, Hazen. The last I had heard from him was that he was playing a cross-dresser in a Chinese sitcom (my family have had varying degrees of success in showbusiness). In the last twenty years, I had had lunch with him once, when he visited London. It was eerie as he shared mannerisms with my father, as well as his accent and intonations.
Hazen had remarried, to a seemingly sweet Chinese lady who smiled politely through lunch as Hazen reminisced about my dad. He literally didn’t stop talking while his spaghetti meatballs went cold in Café Pasta just off Oxford Street. His wife never spoke. ‘In all the years we’ve been married, she’s only ever said thirty-seven words to me. Two of them were “I do.’’’ He was funny. He spoke about my father’s dry sense of humour and how in the early sixties my dad had come to London as a comedian in search of stardom. And here I was, back in his native Montreal doing the same thing.
In his email, Hazen told me about the neighbourhood where he and my dad grew up in the fifties and places they used to go as kids. In particular, he mentioned my dad’s favourite deli. I searched for the neighbourhood and the deli on a map given to me by the concierge. Having located the deli, I was all set to go when I had second thoughts about my sentimental sojourn. I imagined a bustling deli full of lunching Canadians and wondered what I would gain by eating a pastrami sandwich on my own among them. The fact is, my dad wasn’t going to be there.
But he lived on in me and he also lived on in his other kids. Aside from my sister Lucy, my dad had two further