Shrines’ as they hate that I call them. My dad’s account is the very cleverly named MySonDoesJokes – give him a follow, he’d bloody love that. My sister is a bit angry about it, but MyDaughterDoesMediaManagement doesn’t quite have the same ring.
Having supportive parents is wonderful but somewhat annoying for me as an artist. I mean, all good art comes from pain – great artists have suffered and then told their stories to the world through their chosen medium. Thanks to Alison and Rodger being bloody saints means I’ve had none of that. I’m trying to write a book here, Mum and Dad, can you please give me something to work with? They haven’t even had a divorce, the selfish pricks! I’ve tried everything to get something out of them but they are simply too good.
‘Fuck you, Mum and Dad, I’m going to go be a comedian.’
‘Great! We can drive you to all your gigs.’
‘You are missing the point!’
The issue with my supportive parents – other than a lack of exposure to failure, the creation in my head of an imaginary safety net and an inflated sense of self-worth, all of which we will get round to talking about very soon – is the fact that when I say my parents watch everything, I do mean everything. Being the voice of Love Island and knowing that your parents watch is like being a kid watching a film with your parents when a raunchy sex scene would come on (my most vivid memory was the scene in Braveheart; at one point you see actual boobage – as a pre-teen I was in bits!) and you had that horrible moment of knowing that you and your parents were watching sex together, they knew they were watching sex with their child and the whole family would just sit in silence as Mel Gibson had his merry way with Catherine McCormack. Everyone would be transfixed by the screen, which by this time was absolutely covered in people having sex – it looked like the inside of an old phone box coated in those sex-line phone cards. The ones where you phone up and someone talks dirty down the phone to you – or so I’ve been told.
The entire evening would change from a chilled-out ‘movie night’ to a social time-bomb waiting to detonate in sexual congress and awkwardness, which would ultimately result in you praying for the sofa to gain sentience and gobble you up whole, or at least take you through to another room where neither your parents nor scenes of any sort of a sexual nature would be present.
Well, thanks to Love Island I get that feeling every day for an entire summer. And not only am I watching this with my parents, I’m actually talking them through the entire process. Just me giving my parents a step-by-step breakdown of the filth taking pace before their (and my) very eyes.
‘There you go, Father, that’s them off to the outside beds … Now what’s happening is that she has gone down there to perform what I believe is called a b –’
Sorry, I can’t. I just can’t. Anyway, you get the idea – the whole thing can be very grim. The thing I can be grateful for is that when it comes to Love Island my parents play a far more passive role in their viewing experience, because normally when it comes to the TV my parents enjoy something much more immersive. One Easter, I had a Saturday night off work, which for a stand-up comedian is very rare.
The upside of my job is that I’m my own boss and have days to myself to do as I please. In the majority of cases this will take the form of sitting in my pants playing FIFA, as this pleases me very much. However, the same can’t be said for the majority of the population, so as a stand-up comedian you have to work around everyone else’s social calendar. This means weekends and bank holidays are not a time to relax and socialise with friends, but instead mean going to theatres to entertain people who want to relax and socialise with theirs. Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of free time being a stand-up comedian, and people often say to me it must be amazing not working during the day – you can just do what you like. And, to be honest, the first few years are incredible. However, after a couple of years or so there are only so many empty pubs you can sit in, or 14-year-old French kids you can smash on FIFA before the solitude becomes all too much.
Anyway, the point is I had a very rare Saturday night off, so I decided to spend it training up to Edinburgh to surprise my mum and dad. On arrival I walked into our living room to see my parents watching the television, as is customary on a Saturday night; however, my folks were not sitting on the couch as would be customary. My parents were sitting in the middle of the living room, on office chairs, facing away from the television, just staring at the wall. I approached the two pensioners, my brain quickly trying to work out if I could afford to send them both into homes, and asked them what was going on, to which my mother proudly declared: ‘We’re watching The Voice and playing along at home.’
My parents were watching The Voice and only turning around when they liked the voice of the person they were listening to. My mum wasn’t best pleased, however, as good old Dad had refused to turn even once, instead spending his Saturday night angrily perched on an old office chair, screaming into a wall: ‘Shite, he’s shite, she’s shite, everyone’s shite.’ I once mentioned this on Scott Mills’s Radio 1 show, and someone texted in to tell me you can also have the same ‘play along at home’ Saturday night experience by watching Take Me Out with friends and giving everyone a torch. I can imagine that really kicking off after a few bottles of wine have been sunk. Give it a go – tweet me the results!
NEVER GO CARAVANNING WITH YOUR PARENTS
Parents often say they want to give their kids everything their own childhood lacked. How many times have you seen some rich rapper in a television interview speaking about how they’re going to give their kids ‘all the stuff I never had growing up’? But in all honesty does a five-month-old need Gucci slip-ons? Yes, they look cute and durable, but was your childhood irreparably ruined because you didn’t have a pair of diamond-encrusted slippers? I actually think it’s often the negative experiences of growing up that help shape us. Without the rough do you always appreciate the smooth? I now really appreciate going on proper adult holidays, and that most certainly has a lot to do with my holidays growing up.
You see, as a child my parents made a big decision that would have a massive impact on my life for years to come. A decision more and more couples are making in this modern era. They decided … to buy a caravan. Yup, every summer Mum, Dad, my sister and me would cram ourselves into a four-berth and head off to Loch Lomond, Aberfeldy, Biggar, Aviemore or some other Scottish holiday destination that sounds less like an exotic getaway than a Middle Earth council estate, where you expect to see a bunch of orcs stealing lead from a roof or a bunch of elves drinking cider in the park, but instead witness old people attending bingo nights and families in tents entertaining themselves with games of charades.
So despite their fantasyland names, they were far from the exciting world of the ‘Rohan’ Bronx or the ‘Gondor’ high rises – they were caravan parks. And not just any caravan parks – Scottish caravan parks. The wettest places known to man. If you listen very carefully on arrival to any Scottish caravan park you can actually hear David Attenborough narrating Blue Planet. I mean, most kids return from summer holidays with a tan. I would hobble into class with trench foot. Caravans can’t deal with the extremity of Scottish weather. This is the sort of weather that requires bricks and mortar. In the story of the three little pigs not one of them chooses to stay in a caravan. Not one. And one of those idiots opted for hay. That means a pig, a fucking pig, looked at a caravan and thought to himself, ‘Nah, I’d rather live in a house made of horse food.’
I always think that if you’re buying a place of residence, you want to do it somewhere respectable. When we shot off to buy our caravan we went to a field. ‘An area of open land, especially one planted with crops or pasture, typically bounded by hedges or fences’, that’s what the dictionary defines a field as. Not as ‘a really brilliant place to buy a respectable house’. I would say the only thing of any value that has been
