Life and Laughing_ My Story - Michael McIntyre [94]
The kitchen was bogey green with appliances from the Middle Ages, and we mainly ate blue-and-white-striped Tesco value food. In fact, we had so much Tesco value food I suggested to Kitty that I painted the kitchen with blue and white stripes, but Kitty said it was an unnecessary expense. There was a door in the kitchen housing the toilet. The toilet was in the kitchen. Who would design a flat with a loo in the kitchen? Kitty would come home from a hard day at work, kissing me in the kitchen and saying, ‘Hi, darling, something smells good?’
‘Oh no, that’s peach air freshener. I’ve just been to the loo,’ I would say.
The only asset we had was Kitty’s Mini, which would probably have fetched about £500 in Loot. When Kitty had a small collision in Hampstead Garden Suburb that dented the front bumper, the front right wheel was blocked against the bent metal of the car. The result was that the wheel would not turn to the right, as the tyre was blocked. The car was no longer capable of turning right.
Unfortunately, we only had third-party insurance and no means to pay for the repairs. But not wanting to lose our only asset, we continued using the car only turning left. I would carefully plan each journey with an A–Z, so that we could navigate to our destination without having to turn right. We survived for two weeks until I was pulled over by the police for driving the wrong way around a mini-roundabout. Years later I told this story on the BBC panel show Would I Lie to You?, where one team has to tell unlikely stories and the other team has to guess if they’re true or not. I won.
I may have been struggling at this time in my life, but I was gathering material for my later career in television. After my Would I Lie to You? tale, our next car, a white Austin Metro Princess that set me back £395, provided me with several stories for my Top Gear interview in 2009. The petrol gauge was broken, so I had to check the milometer and mentally calculate the miles per gallon to know when I needed to refuel. This worked pretty well until the milometer broke as well. Then I had to drive along guessing how many miles I had driven and then calculate the miles per gallon. This worked less well. Needless to say I ran out of petrol several times and spent a lot of time filling up my jerrycan at petrol stations. The first time it happened, I didn’t have a jerrycan and totally forgot that they were called jerrycans. I said to the petrol station attendant, ‘I need a … oh what’s it called? A … you know … thing you put petrol in …’
And the attendant said, ‘Car?’
The closest I got was ‘petrol suitcase’. Jeremy Clarkson and the Top Gear audience all had a good laugh at the nightmare that was my life at the time.
But, for all our financial woes, Kitty and I were happy, deliriously happy together and in love. We lived on the philosophy that ‘love is all you need’, until the bailiffs knocked on the door and refused to take ‘love’ as payment. Then we realized we would also need some cash. My stand-up ‘career’ was not providing any. I made the semi-finals of the ‘So You Think You’re Funny?’ competition after the performance that Kitty had witnessed. But I did not make the final, let alone win it. I continued to do the occasional new-act night, but they were so few and far between that I had little chance of improving. I also suffered terribly with nerves. At the beginning it was new and exciting and I had the excuse of being a novice. But now there was so much at stake, and with every failure my dream of being a stand-up comedian was moving further away and the reality of becoming a supervisor at Dial-a-Mobile was moving closer.
20
My fellow new acts were beginning to make an impact in the industry, something I was simply not threatening to do. Hannah Chambers, who gave me my first gig at the Comedy Café, was moving into management. She saw all the new acts walking through her doors and was picking the best ones.