Common As Muck!: The Autobiography of Roy 'Chubby' Brown Read online

  Copyright

  Published by Hachette Digital

  ISBN: 9781405520478

  Copyright © Royston Vasey 2006

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

  retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior

  permission in writing of the publisher.

  Hachette Digital

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DY

  www.hachette.co.uk

  For Helen, Amy and Reece

  CONTENTS

  Copyright

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue: Blackpool Rock

  1 A Pain in the Neck

  2 Mother Love

  3 First Steps

  4 Away From It All

  5 Borstal Boy

  6 Beat Surrender

  7 Trouble and Strife

  8 Hard Knocks

  9 Chubby Is Born

  10 Maltese Mayhem

  11 Solo Steps

  12 Learning the Ropes

  13 Three’s a Crowd

  14 Gorgeous George

  15 Fruits of Success

  16 Home and Away

  17 Marital Meltdown

  18 Love Conquers Everything

  Acknowledgements

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Boys and girls, throughout this book I have been honest and frank, but in my heart I feel that some of the participants need to be protected by a change of name. I thank them all for adding value and colour to my life. And, last but not least, thanks to you, the great British public (wherever you are), for taking me to your hearts …

  If there’s such a thing as reincarnation, can someone

  please tell me before I give it all away.

  I have been a Jack the lad but it’s better

  than getting no cards on Father’s Day.

  PROLOGUE

  BLACKPOOL ROCK

  ‘YER FAT BASTARD!’

  Blackpool, July 2003. I’m on me home turf, the North Pier. It’s a glorious day and I’m passing through the amusement arcade at the start of the quarter-mile walk along the boards to the theatre at the end of the pier. I’m enjoying the warm summer sun and looking forward to the evening ahead. The show doesn’t start until seven-thirty and this is six o’clock, but I’m always in my dressing room early. It gives me time to soundcheck some songs and to rehearse a few new gags. Keith, my mate, is scuttling along beside me, carrying a Tesco shopping bag with a few cans of lager for before the show, when my good mood is shattered by a Glaswegian bellowing at full tilt.

  Now, I know I’m a fat bastard without anyone telling me. After all, it’s my catchphrase, one that, in less than two hours’ time, more than 1,500 punters will be chanting as I come on stage. But some people go too far.

  ‘Oi, you! Yes, you!’ It’s the Glaswegian again. ‘You big fat cunt!‘

  I turn around. There, in the dead area between the hot-dog stall, the gift shop, the rock shop and the stall selling T-shirts with plastic tits on them, a lump of shite is sitting at a table. Nearby, there’s a gang of lads who’ve got tickets to come and see me. They’re standing at the bar, downing a few jars, getting blathered before the show and starting to take an interest in the rude fucker shouting his mouth off.

  I can see he is what us Teessiders call a hacky get – a miserable, filthy waste of space. But he’s a hacky get with a family, so I know to behave. There’s his wife and his three little kids to consider. They’re about nine, eight and six, I’d guess, and I don’t want to upset them.

  I haven’t had a proper fight in more than ten years. I’ve learned to keep my hands to myself. I don’t want to reawaken bad habits, so I ignore him and keep walking, my eyes fixed straight ahead.

  ‘Oi! I’m talking to you, you big fat bastard,’ the Glaswegian hollers again. I turn around and stare him down.

  ‘Why don’t you just grow up?’ I say. And I keep walking.

  ‘Ah, fuck off!’ The Glaswegian is obviously not going to give up easily.

  I stop walking and slowly turn around, my temper rising inside me like a kettle coming to the boil. From the way that he’s carrying on, it’s clear to me that he’s got no respect for his wife or his kids. He’s certainly got no respect for all the people around him. Every table in the bar is taken and they’re all staring our way, wondering what’s going on. I want to give the lanky lout a bat, show him that I might be fat and I might be old enough to be his grandfather, but that I won’t be spoken to like that. But instead I ignore him and head for the door.

  Just as I pass through the door he shouts again. ‘Fuck you, you fucking fat cunt.’

  It’s too much. ‘I’m not putting up with this,’ I mutter to Keith.

  ‘You what?’ Keith replies.

  ‘I said that sackless nowt’s taken a right fucking lend of me.’ And I turn on my heels. ‘I’m gonna have to ploat that cunt.’

  I walk up to him. ‘Have you got something to say to me?’

  ‘Ahh, you’re a big cunt!’

  For a moment I don’t know what to do. This kind of thing happens to me almost every day and it’s a finely judged thing to get it right. Do I take offence or do I let it wash over me? After all, most of the time it’s harmless. Just a couple of fans who don’t know what to say and think it’s okay to be rude. Because I swear and talk about tits, fannies and cocks on stage they think that they can insult me in the street. Like the little old lady who stopped me in my tracks on Blackpool South Pier fifteen years ago. She was in her early seventies and with a man I assumed was her husband. They looked like any other elderly couple, enjoying the sea air and taking in the Golden Mile.

  ‘Eeeh,’ she said. And she put her hand on my chest to stop me. ‘Eeeh, you fat bastard.’

  So I stopped walking. ‘Yes?’ I said, smiling.

  ‘Eeeh, you fat bastard,’ she said again. Then she giggled. ‘Hee hee, you fucking fat bastard.’ By now, the shock element had gone. I was looking at this elderly woman and thinking two things. First, that’s a foul mouth you’ve got on you, especially for a woman of your age. And second, what are you going to say next? I know I’m a fat bastard. Right?

  After the fifth or sixth ‘fat bastard’, I said: ‘Now you’ve recognised me, what do you want?’

  ‘Eeeh, I think you’re fucking great, you fat bastard. Eeeh, you fucking fat bastard.’

  I walked off, half in despair and half in frustration. What else could I do? If I had said owt, she would have thought I was the rude one. I couldn’t win.

  And it’s not just old ladies. One evening, on the way to work, a little girl walked up to me. With blonde hair and blue eyes, she was no more than six or seven years old and absolutely gorgeous. If you ever wanted to paint a picture of a perfect little girl, she would have been it.

  ‘Hello,’ I said, smiling at her and glancing at her parents standing nearby.

  ‘Hello,’ she replied bashfully. ‘You’re a fat bastard, aren’t you?’

  ‘Am I?’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You’re a big fat bastard.’ And she looked around at her parents, who were smiling, beaming with pride at their daughter’s cheek. What kind of parent tells their six-year-old child to go up to a complete stranger and insult them? If I had ever sworn in front of my father, he would have lifted me so high the weather would have changed by the time I got back down.

  Now I can’t tell people how to lead their lives and most of my fans are just great. But there’s always the idiot who thinks it’s fine to shout ‘Hiya, Chubby, you big
fat cunt’ down a supermarket aisle when I’m doing my shopping. It makes me cringe with embarrassment as all the other shoppers stare at me. I can see what they’re thinking: if he wasn’t here, we wouldn’t be hearing that. Or maybe they think that I’m the kind of person who sits in a restaurant and orders their food by saying to the waiter: ‘I’ll have the steak and chips, cunt face’. But I’m not and I never have been. And now, standing in the North Pier bar at Blackpool, I’ve had enough.

  ‘If you are gonna say sommat to me, will you say it to me outside the bar, please?’ I say.

  The muscles in the Glaswegian’s face tighten as I grab him by his T-shirt and wrap my fist around it. I pull him off his chair and drag him thirty feet to the door.

  ‘I’ll fucking kill you, you fat bastard,’ he screams as I skid him across the sticky floor. ‘I’ll fucking glass you.’

  ‘Yes, I know you will,’ I say. The bar is silent. Everybody is watching. The customers in the gift shops stop in their tracks and come out of the shops to have a stare. People eating ice creams stand open-mouthed, watching what is going on.

  ‘Now what are you gonna fucking say?’ I snarl as we get outside and I pull him to his feet, pushing him across the boardwalk to the edge of the pier.

  The Glaswegian is unsteady, so I see the swing of his fist coming towards me long before it’s within range. I dodge the punch, turn him around and dig him once in the ribs. He goes down like a sack of shite, then jumps up.

  ‘I’ll fucking kill you!’ he shouts as Keith grabs him. ‘I’m gonna kill him. I’m gonna fucking kill the fat fucker,’ he shouts, kicking Keith at the same time.

  ‘You’ll kill no fucker, else I’ll throw you over the fucking side, you twat,’ I shout. And I mean it. I want to give him a lacing, but Keith has him pinned down on the floor as three security guards come pounding down the pier and grab the lanky Glaswegian. With Keith and the bouncers between us, the Glaswegian tries to throw a few punches but he can’t get near me.

  ‘I wouldn’t if I was you, mate,’ Keith says. ‘I wouldn’t.’

  The Glaswegian is carted away and I head for the theatre. An hour later, I’m on stage. The show’s going well. It’s always a buzz to play Blackpool and I’m more pumped up than usual, the adrenalin from the earlier aggro sharpening my timing and delivery. I leave the stage to a standing ovation and close the door to the dressing room. The first few minutes after any show are always the hardest. The silence after the noise and the adoration of the crowd is particularly lonely. Mulling over the performance, over-analysing the audience’s response to new routines, I sip a cup of tea while the punters file out of the auditorium and into the night.

  There’s a knock at the door. Probably Richie, the tour manager, I think. Letting me know that some fans are waiting for an autograph at the stage door. Or maybe some friends have come backstage and want to say hello.

  ‘Mr Vasey?’ says a voice on the other side of the door. ‘Could you please open the door.’

  Two policemen are standing in the corridor. They charge me with common assault and require me to appear at the police station. The next morning I am arrested, fingerprinted, relieved of the contents of my pockets, my belt and my shoelaces, and led down to the cells.

  The Glaswegian, the coppers tell me, is a heroin addict. He’s in Blackpool at the council’s expense for a weekend’s rehabilitation with his children and wife, who had previously had a court order against him because of his violent behaviour. He provoked me and threw the first punch, yet I am being charged.

  A month later I am in court. The police have dropped their charges, but I am fined two hundred pounds and ordered to pay seventy quid costs and eighty pounds compensation to the Glaswegian for ripping a T-shirt that looked like it cost no more than a fiver. I am recovering from recent throat-cancer operations and my wife is expecting our second child in the next fortnight, but that’s not taken into account by the magistrates. My reputation goes before me and I have to face the consequences.

  I am not particularly proud of what I did, so why do I mention it? Because it’s what this book is about – what it’s like to be Britain’s rudest, crudest, most controversial comic, and what it’s like to live with the consequences of that reputation. But most of all, it’s about where that rudeness, crudity and appetite for controversy came from. I’ve come a long way since I grew up in the toughest of Middlesbrough’s grimmest neighbourhoods, but Grangetown still runs through me like the lettering in a stick of Blackpool rock and I can’t escape it. In the end, I suppose, it’s about how you can take the lad out of Grangetown but you can’t take Grangetown out of the lad. Grangetown is why I became Britain’s foulest-mouthed comic. It drove me to escape a dead-end no-hope future. A hard life on its streets made me fearless. And if you come from where I did, it doesn’t take much to change your opening line from ‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I’m the son of a bricklayer’s labourer. My mother had to take any job when the war was on’ to ‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. My wife’s got two cunts and I’m one of them.’

  CHAPTER ONE

  A PAIN IN THE NECK

  JUST ONE SENTENCE can change your life for ever. The perfectly timed phrase, the gag that brings the house down just because of the way it’s said, or a few simple words that trigger a gasp of shock. Like any comic, I know them well. But nothing had prepared me for the day I walked into a small, dark room cramped with veneered furniture in Stockton-on-Tees. My first thought was that with a bald patch and a thick beard, the man sitting in front of me looked like his head was on upside down, but this was not the time for silly jokes. The man was Dr Martin and the room was his office. He’d called me in to tell me something serious.

  ‘Mr Vasey,’ he said. ‘I’ve got some bad news for you. You have throat cancer.’

  The room spun as if I’d been hit. For once in my life I was speechless. There’d been no gentle warm-up, no light jabs to soften me up before delivering the bad news. The doctor had delivered a knockout with the first punch. It was cancer, he said. Plain and simple. Matter of fact. No warning. Just the truth. Maybe it was better that way. But to me cancer meant only one thing. A painful and imminent death. And, with it, the end of everything for which I had worked for many years. Decades of standing in smoky clubs and shouting into a microphone that I held to my stomach had finally taken its toll.

  To add cruelty to injury, the cancer threatened to tear the very heart and soul out of me. The one thing that I’d always been able to rely upon was my voice. The gift of the gab was my greatest asset. It had rescued me from trouble, turned many crises into mere close scrapes and prevented skirmishes becoming fights. My voice had propelled me from back rooms above pubs, telling jokes to audiences of two or three uninterested punters, to adoring crowds of thousands at the Palladium and Dominion theatres in London or on the North and South Piers at Blackpool. My voice was my fortune, and now it was going to be snatched away.

  The first warning sign had come five years earlier, when two nodules were removed from my vocal cords, a fairly common occurrence for any comic or singer. Now, in 2002, with a tour of Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia and America looming, I had a sore throat that never seemed to get better. Hoping that the nagging pain in my neck was no more than wear and tear, I’d gone to the doctor. The last thing I wanted was to arrive in Australia and find I couldn’t speak.

  ‘I don’t like the look of your throat,’ Dr Martin had said, shining a light into my gullet. ‘I am going to have to do a biopsy.’

  ‘How bad is it?’ I asked.

  ‘We won’t know until we go further down. We are going to have to check down to your chest. Just a little investigation.’

  Now, two weeks later, I was sitting in Dr Martin’s stuffy little office, struggling to come to terms with the outcome of that ‘little investigation’. And it had come as a complete surprise. There was no obvious cause. I didn’t smoke and my days of heavy drinking were long behind me. I would have been no more surprised if he had hit m
e over the head with a baseball bat.

  People say that when you’re facing death, your life flashes before your eyes. And, at that moment, it did. My childhood in Grangetown and the early days playing in bands in Teesside pubs. My first attempts at comedy, then the years spent honing my act on the northern club circuit, working harder than Esther Rantzen’s toothbrush, until I was ready for the big time and ready to become Britain’s most controversial comic. There’d been good times and bad times, but when the kaleidoscope of images came to a rest all that was left was a clear vision of two people: my six-month-old son Reece and my wife, Helen. Sitting in that doctor’s surgery, I thought back to an evening about six months earlier, just after Reece was born. Helen and I were at home, talking things over, when she looked at me seriously. ‘You’ll never marry me, will you?’ she said.

  We’d been together for five years. In that time Helen had transformed my life. But I’d been married before and … well … let’s just say it wasn’t a great success. No, that would be telling a lie. Let’s say it was a complete fucking disaster.

  ‘Well, I won’t say never ever, you know,’ I replied.

  ‘No, you’ve been hurt too much to marry again,’ she said and I could see the disappointment in her eyes.

  ‘Now don’t say never,’ I said. ‘Don’t say never, because we might. We just might …’ And that night I resolved to marry Helen.

  A few months later, we were packing our cases for a holiday in Las Vegas. ‘Take something nice to wear with you,’ I suggested.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Oh, you know, maybe there’ll be a special occasion when we might need something smart.’

  ‘Oh, right … right, I’ll pack my best outfit,’ Helen said innocently.

  A few days later we were sitting in the bar of the Mirage hotel on the Las Vegas Strip, chatting to a couple who had just got married. ‘How do you go about it?’ I asked.