Life and Laughing_ My Story - Michael McIntyre [8]
My mother, who has produced no novelty records about family members, was beautiful. I’m basing this on old photographs. In every one, she looks stunning, but let’s be honest, she would have weeded out any less than flattering photos over the years and destroyed them. This is what women do; they constantly edit their photo albums so that history may remember them looking their best. Old people basically get the best photo from their youth and use it as a sort of publicity shot – ‘Look at me, I could have been a model, I had an 18-inch waist, I got asked for ID at the pictures when I was thirty-two.’ That’s the great thing about being old – you can say what you like to your grandkids. Not only because they weren’t there, but also because they’re not really listening.
My mum, Kati Katz, a teenage pregnancy waiting to happen.
Personally, I am particularly un-photogenic. Cruelly, it is suggested that people who are not photogenic are ugly. I had some stand-up material along those lines about passport photos and how people hide them claiming, ‘It’s a terrible photo, I’m really ugly in it, I don’t look anything like this.’
If this was true, they wouldn’t get past immigration, but the fact is they do. The immigration guy never says, ‘You don’t look anything like this photo. This photo is of an ugly person. You, on the other hand, have a sculpted beauty that brings to mind a young Brando. I will not let you into this country, you gorgeous liar.’ No, they look at your ugly photo and then look at your ugly face and let you go to baggage reclaim.
I’ve been lucky enough to be photographed by some seasoned snappers, but it is very difficult to get a good shot of me. I would say that I am happy with about 1 in 10 photos of me. I would say that my wife is happy with maybe 4 in 10 photos of her. Therefore the odds of getting a good photo of us together are 0.4 in 10 (I wasn’t just reading the word ‘BOOB’ on my calculator in Maths). To put it another way: very unlikely. The odds on a family photo where my wife, our two boys and I look good all at the same time: impossible. The result is that there are very few photos of my wife and me together that haven’t been deleted or destroyed by one of us.
To get a photo of my wife and me together, somebody else has to take it. On our honeymoon in the Maldives, we kept taking photos of each other; me in bed alone, her swimming alone, me in a hammock alone, her in a jacuzzi alone. The woman in Boots, Brent Cross, developing our holiday snaps must have thought we’d each gone on an 18–30 singles holiday and not pulled. Who was I supposed to ask to take our photo? I’ve never really taken to asking waiters when you have to explain that your camera works in exactly the same way as every other camera on earth – ‘it’s the button on the right’ – and it still takes them so long to work it out that you develop a slightly annoyed smirk, ruining the photo.
Having no photos of us together on our honeymoon simply wouldn’t do. So on the last day when I had one photo remaining on our disposable camera, I asked a sweet gentleman called Nizoo who was delivering room service if he could take a photo. ‘Of course,’ he agreed, before standing up as straight as he could and smiling inanely at us. He was under the misapprehension that we wanted to photograph him. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that it was us I wanted him to photograph. The upshot is that the only couple who appear in my honeymoon photos are Nizoo and myself.
I imagine the woman in Boots, Brent Cross, sitting in the darkroom thinking, ‘Ah, sweet, he met someone right at the end.’
My mother may also have looked good in 1976 because she was nineteen years old. Yes, I am the result of a teenage pregnancy. My father, on the other hand, was thirty-seven. He was a cradle snatcher, which was good for me as I was now sleeping