Life and Laughing_ My Story - Michael McIntyre [68]
The world was suddenly a very different place, but I had no time to dwell, my A-Levels were rapidly approaching. This was the culmination of school life. Everything would come down to three grades, three letters that defined my academic abilities. A peculiar thing that happens before A-Levels is that teachers predict what grades students are going to gain. Despite displaying no psychic abilities before this point, they suddenly start to predict the future. These predictions are then put to universities, who may or may not make offers to students.
I simply wasn’t prepared for my exams. Not only had I lost my father but I had changed schools mid-term and the standard of teaching at Woodhouse was a lot poorer than at Merchant Taylors’. In Biology, for example, the ‘teacher’ copied the textbook page by page on to the white board without saying a word. We then had to copy from the white board into our pads. At the end of the two years, we had each compiled handwritten versions of the textbook.
The net result was that I was ‘predicted’ low grades and subsequently rejected by every university. This annoyed me. I thought the ‘prediction’ procedure was scandalous. They had no way of knowing how I would perform in my exams, and if they accepted ‘predictions’, couldn’t I tell them about the Tarot card reader? Maybe that would have helped my cause.
The atmosphere at college was dominated by revision for the exams. Suddenly everybody was studious. The kebab shops were empty and the library was full. It was suggested that Tina had worked her tits off. This, after all, was the reason we were there. I got my head down and started cramming, but feared it was too late.
My exam results were exactly as predicted. I got a C in Chemistry, a C in Biology and a D in Geography. This meant two things: my future was in turmoil and my teachers may actually have been psychic. Most of my friends were taking a ‘gap year’ between school and university. I told everybody I was taking a gap year, but in truth I had no place at university, so the rest of my life was lining up to be a series of ‘gap years’.
I had no money, and my grandma was in no mood to reward me for failing my exams. So I started working as a labourer for some builders who had installed my mum’s new kitchen. I was told to wear ‘something you don’t mind getting ruined’, so I put on my elephant T-shirt that had so far helped me pull precisely zero girls. I arrived for my first day in my Triumph Spitfire, which was surprisingly still working, although the fuel tank was leaking petrol into the car. Believe it or not, I was oblivious to petrol being flammable (I was lucky to get that C in Chemistry) and was lighting up cigarettes while driving.
You might be questioning why I took up smoking, given my dad’s struggles with cigarettes. Well, as with everything else I did, it was another attempt to pull the opposite sex. Seasoned seducers advised me that ‘Have you got a light?’ is a wonderful chat-up line. I tried it a few times when I was a non-smoker, and it didn’t have quite the impact I’d hoped for.
I would sidle up to a hotty and ask, ‘Have you got a light?’
To which she would say, while fluttering her eyelashes, ‘Yeah, sure.’ So far, so good. She would get out her lighter and spark up a flame.
And I would just stand there awkwardly.
‘Don’t you have a cigarette?’ she would ask, confused.
‘No, I don’t smoke,’ came my baffling reply.
So I started smoking, and guess what, they’re really addictive.
I started my building career on a family house in Hendon. It seemed that one of the occupants was a person