in 1980, aged six, I woke up one morning to find several hairs on my pillow. The next day the same thing happened, only this time there were a lot more. By the end of the summer all of my hair had fallen out.
I wasn’t initially all that concerned. At four my hair had been blond and curly, but at five it was a big brown pudding bowl and I loathed it. Why couldn’t I have nice short hair like the other boys? I hated having it cut, because it made my neck and back all itchy. Worse, when Mum washed it in the bath I always got soap in my eyes.
In the changing room at Aylward First and Middle School – a ten-minute walk from our home in the north-west London suburb of Stanmore – I could do nothing but laugh as I easily pulled out the last two or three remaining strands in front of my friends. It didn’t feel real.
But it was.
The doctors – and we saw an endless stream of them – concluded that it must have been a delayed response to the shock of being knocked down by the car in Portugal two years earlier.
And so I was the first six-year-old in my class to learn the word ‘alopecia’.
Suddenly everything and anything else that I was at that age was eclipsed by the fact that I was the little boy in the town with absolutely no hair. And that is how it was, from the age of six for the remainder of my youth. Right up until I became famous, my lack of hair was considered the most – perhaps even the only – notable thing about me.
I was never allowed to forget for one moment that I was bald. If I went swimming or to the cinema or got the bus or went to a shop or simply walked down the street, adults and children stared at me.
‘You got no hair,’ said the younger kids, pointing.
Others who had previously called me Matthew now yelled ‘Baldy!’ as I passed by.
Or ‘Skinhead’ or ‘Slaphead’ – but mainly ‘Baldy’.
Apart from my parents’ friend Melvyn, who used to call me ‘Curly’, though I never got it.
My baldness was a source of amusement, sympathy and revulsion for everyone.
Some people chose to inform me that I had something called leukaemia. ‘You’re dying,’ said one of the older girls in lunch break one day, matter-of-factly, as she tossed an apple core, missing the bin.
I pondered if maybe she was right, that perhaps there was something that my parents had thought not to tell me. I accepted I might be dying and I hoped that I had been a good enough boy to go to heaven.
Initially it was speculated – almost assured – that this was temporary, that my hair would grow back almost as quickly as it had fallen out.
And it did. A year after it disappeared, it started to return, thinner than before, yes, but this was definitely progress.
Then it fell out again.
The search for a cure began in earnest. I was taken out of school here and there and we’d traipse down to central London on the Tube to meet various specialists. Everyone had an opinion; no one had a solution.
Mum and Dad always did their best to turn the trips into some kind of treat. I’d be taken to tea in a department store or allowed to look around Hamleys. When we went to Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, we would pop in afterwards to Alan Alan’s Magic Spot nearby and I’d choose a Paul Daniels magic trick to take home.
I was prodded and poked and gazed at with curiosity, but with few conventional medicinal treatments available to us, we started to go down the homeopathic route. A Nigerian family had moved into our road and my brother had become friendly with one of their kids, Azubike (or ‘A-Zed’ for short). His father, having been a doctor in their homeland, was sure he could help and administered some small white pills, which did nothing. Then we bought a few bottles of an elixir made from seaweed, which arrived in the post, and which my dad would rub vigorously into my scalp every evening. After a few weeks we gave up – he had developed a nasty rash on his hands and my hair was still nowhere to be seen.
On Saturday mornings I started to see a friendly acupuncturist. My dad would sit with me while the acupuncturist stuck needles into me, but that didn’t seem to do anything either. I don’t know anybody who enjoys having needles stuck into them and I was quite relieved when we stopped going.
I thought little of it at the time, until I was at a party twenty years later, speaking with the wife of another comedian, who was also an acupuncturist. I asked her how business was going and if she had any male clients or just treated women. She explained she worked with both men and women.
‘But it’s so intimate,’ I said. ‘Don’t you get embarrassed when you work with the men?’
She looked at me, puzzled. ‘All therapy has a degree of intimacy, but why would I feel embarrassed?’
‘Well,’ I replied, ‘I mean, there you are, sticking needles in someone’s genitalia. That must be weird.’
‘Um, that’s . . . not part of acupuncture,’ she said. ‘No, no, of course it’s not.
No. Ha.’ I changed the subject as swiftly as I could.
Now, I suspect that’s perhaps not what you were expecting to read. I mean, it’s clearly alarming. Feel free to swear out loud, if you like.
I’ve tried to process this a little over the years and I’ve come to the conclusion that I simply don’t know whether the therapist was behaving inappropriately or whether he was genuinely trying to find areas on my body that could stimulate hair growth. Like I say in the Preface, life is sometimes about living without the answers.
What I will say is that I don’t carry any baggage from the experience with the acupuncturist. I know a comedy producer who once told me that he went to a boys’ only public school and had a swimming teacher who would make all the boys stand in a line in the showers with their legs wide open while he slid through them on the ground.
I asked him if he was traumatised by the incident.
‘No,’ he said, ‘I just thought it was a bit odd.’
Well, that’s what I think of the acupuncture. It was a bit odd. Shall we move on?
In 1981, I was seven years old. And – apart from that brief period when the hair grew back – I had been bald for a year. It became clear – to me, at least – that nothing had worked because nothing was going to work. My dad said he thought ‘the roots might be dead by now’. And that was that.
I put my efforts into building a collection of caps, which I would proudly show to anyone who came to the house. Whenever a friend or relative went on holiday they were encouraged to bring me back a cap, as a souvenir. At school, other kids would pull my cap off and run away. Sometimes the wind would blow it off – but that didn’t stop me collecting as many as I could find. I had a box full of them.
Nowadays if you lose your hair as a child – as a boy, at least – you might not care as much. That’s not to diminish the devastation that childhood (or even adulthood) alopecia can wreak on the individual, but there are lots of bald people you can look up to.
There’s the Mitchell brothers in EastEnders. You wouldn’t mess with them, especially Phil. He’s properly hard and you can tell this because he
