as Biggar, Forfar, Sandylands – the list goes on, and at no stage improves in quality. The other issue was that we had to drag our place of residence on the back of a clapped-out Ford Escort, meaning that speed was never really our friend. Hours would be spent travelling for very little reward (distance). When you are an excitable child off on their summer holidays, nothing quite takes the gleam off a four-hour car journey more than having your dad trot up a small hill to say to your mum: ‘I can see our house from here.’ I remember visiting family friends on our ‘holidays’. Like casually popping in for the day. On a holiday. It just wasn’t right. A holiday destination shouldn’t be a place where you can pop in for the day. It’s a holiday, not someone’s front room. I want to go to Mallorca and join a kids’ club run by a depressed actor like all the other normal children!
Now, I don’t want to fully destroy the legend that is the family caravan holiday. I’ve got many happy memories of that place. Yes, it was so cold that I vividly remember my mum having to get more dressed for bed than she had for the hike we had taken earlier that day. Yes, the thing was so small and the beds so close together that every time my dad farted I could genuinely feel my hair blow back. And yes, once I watched a child chop a wasp in half. But there was so much fun to be had fishing, boating, climbing, with the friends we made, the weirdos we met and that time my uncle Bill stopped a family from going home in the middle of the night because they thought a power station was going to blow up. The couple stayed, the power station didn’t obliterate us all, everyone was happy!
There is fun to be had in these places, and as a child sometimes it’s important to have to go and find it. Similarly, every time I now find myself on a sun lounger in my all-inclusive Spanish holiday resort, I think back to that tiny little Elddis caravan, and with a wry smile on my face take a sip on my Corona and realise how lucky I am. I’m now a great big adult that can decide where I want to go on my holidays, and sorry you have to hear this, Mum and Dad, but it isn’t fucking Falkirk.
I’m happy with what I had and delighted with what I’ve now got. Now that’s good parenting. I’m not scarred by the hardships of my childhood holidays, nor am I left with some misplaced sense of entitlement after too many trips to Disneyland as a youngster. And thank God for that, because is there anything on this entire planet more intolerable than a spoilt brat?
I’ve spent many years working in children’s television, and there is nothing more heartbreaking than being told someone important is coming to a filming day and they’re bringing their kid with them. I’d like to say at this point that if you’re someone high up in the world of kids’ TV reading this and you have children and I’ve met them, this definitely isn’t about them. It isn’t. This is about those other pricks and their spoilt-rotten little shits. You know the ones I’m talking about? Good, let’s talk about them.
When children grow up around children’s TV they become the most disruptive little gremlins ever to set foot in a studio. Jaded by the magical world of TV at the age of eight, walking about in a pressed shirt and a pair of chinos like they own the place: ‘Mummy, I’m bored, who’s he?’ I’m a Z-list children’s entertainer, you little shit. A lot of this may be me somewhat ‘projecting’ – as my therapist says, it 100 per cent is – but the point still stands that if you show kids too much of a good thing too young then they may well grow up not appreciating the privileges they have. This could lead to them conducting all sorts of wrongs, for example being rude to one of the greatest BAFTA-award-winning children’s TV presenters of all time. I mean, come on, ‘Who’s he?’ Take a running jump, you absolute tool of an eight-year-old. Again, if you work in kids’ TV, definitely not about your kid. They were lovely.
I don’t want this to come across as a weird ‘my parents are better than yours’ humblebrag, by the way. Similarly, if you missed the irony draped over the whole ‘I’m the greatest kids’ TV presenter of all time’, then that is solely down to my limited writing abilities. I know I’m not the best. I’ve met Phillip Schofield, Tim Vincent, Dick and Dom, Zoë Ball, Angellica Bell and Otis the Aardvark – I’m fully aware of the tough competition I’m up against. Let’s just say I’m top 10 and move on.
An important factor in becoming an adult is to avoid constantly internalising and comparing other people’s lives with your own. As a kid that sort of behaviour used to do you all manner of good: ‘But Ahir’s parents let him stay up until nine on a Friday.’ Boom! Next thing you know you’re watching the ‘late’ film on a Friday night like a proper fucking gangster! Isn’t parental guilt a brilliant thing?
Perhaps all our parents did was try to give us the best life possible, and it was us constantly comparing and contrasting with others that created this illusion that we are smothered and over-protected. Parents can’t protect their children for ever. I mean, I know eight-year-olds that have been told to go fuck themselves. You need to do your own thing, let others do theirs and hope for the best. I can’t beat Otis the Aardvark – he’s a talking anteater, for God’s sake. I’m merely a talking man. In the hearts of British children I’m always coming off second best in that exchange.
Now that I am an adult, or at least trying my bloody best, I think quite a bit about what was going through my mum’s head when she was bringing me up. I’m nearly the same age as she was when she had me. Fuck, I couldn’t imagine having a kid right now. Chances are I’d drop it. But she managed it and I’ve never really asked her how. I had been meaning to interview my mum for ages for this book. I had always managed to find a reason to put it off: it was too late, we were too drunk, my equipment wasn’t working properly. I’ve never actually thought, until right now, why I was so scared to sit my mum down in the podcast chair. I guess it’s the intimacy of it that was the real kicker. We’d never talked about anything like that in real detail, and now, like a true millennial, I had decided not only to have the conversation after three decades of my life, but also to record the whole thing. Freud would have had a field day (and not the type where you purchase a caravan). Sure, the microphones are somewhat phallic, but that sick Austrian quack needn’t know that.
So despite my reservations and fears about what might be said, I decided to sit down and speak to the main woman herself – Alison Stirling, my mother.
Interview with My Mum –
‘I will never make my children old before their time’
ALISON STIRLING
I intended to go back to work, but once I had you I thought, ‘No, there is no way. I don’t want to do that.’ I was kind of brought up in a nursery, and I didn’t think we were going to have a family. I was more shocked than anybody that I would want to give up work for it, but that’s what I wanted to do and so that’s what your dad and I did. That halved the money that came in.
IAIN STIRLING
Yeah, that’s why we had to go on caravan holidays.
ALISON STIRLING
Then Kirsten, your sister, came along 18 months later. The theory was that during the week I would get everything ready so that at the weekend we had family time. People used to say, ‘Oh, I can’t stand this,’ but I used to say, ‘Boring is as boring does.’ And we did a lot. I have to say I felt I loved it, but –
IAIN STIRLING
And you were brill, this is what I’m saying.
ALISON STIRLING
But at the end of the day there is a danger that I sometimes think maybe I didn’t allow you to develop, and, you know, there’s always that ‘If I’d done this, had I done that’ …
IAIN STIRLING
Develop
