Читать книгу Look who it is!: My Story - Alan Carr, Alan Carr - Страница 7

I remember running and touching a tree, any tree, and then running back to my father and then running to a tree that was a little bit further away and then back to my father and so on. I seemed to have spent my whole childhood breathless, touching trees. If there weren’t trees available, Dad would bring bollards. There would be no escape from the tree touching.

Whilst I was running I would see all the other kids in the park having a kick-around, taking it in turns to be in goal, playing keepy-uppy, their playful laughter and squeals of joy slowly being drowned out by Dad’s ‘One, two, three, four! Quicker! You fat fairy!’ from the other side of the park. He would shout using the same booming voice with just a hint of Geordie that he used every Saturday on the touchline to his own players. I would see them try to shout back, only to be blasted again with that voice, the fools. It would be like arguing with a hand-dryer.

I first started running to try and dislodge some of the puppy fat. It would be just a leisurely run around the fields, nothing too strenuous. Strangely, although I hated sports, I did enjoy running; bounding along the country lanes seemed to clear my head and sharpen my mind. I remember running after school around a field at the back of my house, and as I approached the winning line, which was in fact an old tree with a dangly branch, who did I spot emerging from behind a bush? Yes, my father, with a stopwatch.

‘That’s 29 minutes, 38 seconds. If you’d pushed yourself a bit harder on that hill, you would have made 28 minutes easy.’

Not only had he been spying on me running, I later found out he had tried to enrol me in the local boys’ running team, the Overstone Phoenixes, without me knowing.

‘What’s the point of running if you’re not up against someone?’ he would say. ‘There’s no point, Alan, if there’s no challenge!’

I was a twelve-year-old spectacle wearer with a weight problem. The only challenge I had was finding sports shorts with an elasticated waist. As my father would tell me, football wasn’t about scoring goals, it was about discipline and fitness.

‘Alan, see those kids over there?’

‘What, the ones laughing and having fun?’

‘They’ll never be any good because they’re just kicking the ball about. We’re getting your thighs built up, so they will protect your knees and you won’t get arthritis in later life.’

Dad sure knew how to inject a bit of fun into the proceedings. Arthritis prevention, anyone? Apparently, if I followed Dad’s exercise routine and did the relevant amount of sit-ups every day, not only would I become a top professional footballer, I would be an athlete, an Adonis, from the top of my waxed Mohican down to the gold studs on the soles of my (limited edition) Adidas football boots. Well, that was the plan anyway.

I know what you’re thinking: ‘If you were forced to do so much exercise, how come you’re so fat?’ Well, for a start it’s my glands and, to be frank, Dad put me off playing football. Obviously, I realise you have to do the groundwork, and put the effort in to succeed at your chosen field, but what he didn’t understand was that a child has to be tempted into it in the first place. It is the exhilaration of scoring a goal that enchants a seven year old, an exhilaration that would then hopefully blossom into a career. No one becomes a pilot because they’d enjoyed an in-flight meal; no, they want to fly the bloody thing. My father had inadvertently managed to extract all the fun out of the game for me; on that playing field it was all work, work, work with him.

* * *

It’s been stated in every interview I’ve ever done that my father was a football manager. They write about it as if it’s a punchline to a gag, but it’s true, he has been involved in football all his life and in some respects it is his life, but what people don’t realise is how deep football runs in our family. Almost everyone (well, everyone with a penis) has been a professional footballer at one time or another. Granddad Wilf played for Newcastle United and West Bromwich Albion (if you don’t believe me, his photo is up on the wall as you enter the Hawthorns ground), an uncle played for PSV Eindhoven, cousins and nephews had tryouts at various football clubs up and down the country and of course there was my father, Graham Carr.

If you mention the words ‘Graham Carr’ to a Northamptonian of a certain age, their eyes mist up and a lump appears in their throat – Dad is a local hero. After taking Northampton Town, affectionately nicknamed the Cobblers, from the bottom of the Fourth Division up to the top of the Third Division in the late Eighties (with 103 goals and 99 points in their promotion season, no less), he became literally the talk of the town – just think Alex Ferguson, but on a budget.

Football chants honouring him would echo around the County Ground (Northampton Town Football Club’s home): ‘He’s fat, he’s round, his feet don’t touch the ground, Graham Carr, Graham Carr!’ or my personal favourite, ‘He’s got no hair, but we don’t care, Graham, Graham, Carr, ooh ah!’ I’m sad to say these chants were an apt description of my father. He was fat and round, well, maybe round’s going a bit too far, but he definitely has a bit of a pot belly. He definitely has got no hair. He went bald in his early twenties, something that I am beginning to experience myself. I feel it is only a matter of time before I look in the mirror and see my father looking back.

I don’t care, as long as he’s not shouting out ‘Touch the tree – Fatty!’

Those football chants came from a good place; the fans had a genuine affection for Dad. He had actually played for the Cobblers in the Sixties, their heyday, when they went all the way up from the Fourth Division to the First – and then back down again. He had been popular back then, too. His return as manager was the return of the prodigal son. Complete strangers would approach us as we sauntered around the town centre and take an interest in our lives.

At first the novelty of having people come up to us and say positive things about the Cobblers was nice, but then inevitably they would turn their line of questioning to me.

‘Does he play, Graham?’ they would ask with a nod in my direction or, worse, ruffle my hair and say, ‘What position do you want to play?’

I’d just smile sweetly and watch their face fall when my camp voice trilled, ‘I’m not really into football,’ then carry on listening to the Supremes on my Walkman.

To be honest, I don’t think I’ve got the edge to be a footballer. When I look through Dad’s scrapbooks at some of the newspaper clippings, I see a rock-hard defender – in the thick of the action, fearlessly performing sliding tackles and diving feet first onto some poor opponent’s legs. In fact, old Cobblers fans talk of him in hushed tones, looking over their shoulders cautiously as if he might suddenly burst from the undergrowth and tackle them.

‘He was terrifying alright’, ‘You’d know if your dad had tackled you’, ‘He could take a man down with ease’ – please don’t make your own jokes up. I suppose what I’m calling competitiveness, he’d probably call passion. In terms of sports, he doesn’t understand why anyone would want to do something for fun.

Of course I’d love to be earning £75,000 a week, working two days a week and then spending the rest showing OK! magazine my beautiful mock-Tudor mansion. But you’ve got to remember that when I grew up in the Eighties, football was grim, men in cloth caps with no teeth shouting on terraces and throwing bananas at the black players. It wasn’t the ghetto-fabulous existence that we all know and love today, with the fast cars and Louis Vuitton hand luggage. If I’d known I could have lived that kind of lifestyle, I would have endured my father’s stomach crunches and star jumps. I’d have even touched a few more trees.

One thing that I have been pleased to see, though, is that when it’s cold the Premiership players now wear gloves and leggings. This to me is a personal victory, as I’d proposed these changes at the age of twelve. But did Dad take these pioneering thoughts on board? No, he just said, ‘Only poofs wear leggings.’

To be fair, though, if that competitiveness is the worst aspect of my father, then I’ve been very lucky indeed. I know Dad would get frustrated at my lack of sporting ability, but then again I was shit! Even the kindliest PE teacher would break out in an attack of Tourette’s and start shouting profanities at me. I’ve had a PE teacher snap a hockey stick in frustration at one of my pitiful lobs.

You have to remember, I was the only boy at my Upper School to score an own goal at basketball – look, I got disorientated, and once you’ve seen one basket you’ve seen them all. But at times, I’ll admit, I didn’t really help myself. I remember shouting out at a Northampton Town Football match, ‘He’s behind you!’ instead of ‘Man on!’ It wasn’t deliberate, it’s just that I got carried away. I guess you could say I was being passionate – like my father.

Having a dad in the footballing trade is a bit like having a parent in the army or in the circus: you have to go where the work is. So if there are any children of sergeant majors or bearded ladies reading this, then you’ll know what I mean. I was actually born in Weymouth, Dorset, where Dad had made the leap from player to manager of Weymouth Football Club. To be exact I was born at the Portland Hospital on 14 June 1976. Six pounds ten. I was ‘a beautiful baby boy’. These are my words. I don’t know if anyone called me a beautiful baby boy, but I must have been beautiful at one stage, surely. I didn’t have my glasses or teeth back then, so the odds must be quite good.

I wonder if, as I lay there kicking my little legs in the air in my cot, Dad was imagining little football boots at the end of them and that my little wrinkled hands would be ideal for throw-ins. Mum once told me of when she was heavily pregnant with me and in bed with Dad one night I gave an almighty kick from inside the womb, so hard in Dad’s back that he woke up. It seems I had cruelly raised Dad’s hopes, and I wasn’t even born.

I’ve never been one of those people with a really great memory, and for someone as self-obsessed as me it’s a shame. All those wonderful times when I was the centre of attention gone forever – it’s enough to bring you to tears. In fact, I only have one memory of my first five years, and even that’s a bit shaky because I have been known to absorb stuff off the telly and pass it off as my own life. I remember telling Mum about the time I stopped a woman from having a diamond-encrusted necklace stolen and she said, ‘No, Alan, that was Poirot.’ Then there’s another time when I was with Dad at the seaside in Clacton, sitting on his lap as we slid down a helter-skelter. I remember the sky was blue and cloudless and the squawk of the seagulls made me jump and I cried. Even now I’m not sure whether we were down the tip on a sunny day or watching an episode of Holiday.

My early memories are all seaside-centric. When I try to recollect some of those days, I get little flashbulbs of a Punch and Judy show or the curve of a brightly coloured windbreaker or of myself sitting on the beach sipping a bottle of tea, which apparently was my favourite drink as a toddler.

What I do know is my favourite donkey on Weymouth beach was Pepper and my parents would have to take a detour around the amusements because I would run off into the arcade and lose them among the noise and crowds. They would find me each time in the same motor car clutching the steering wheel.

It can be lovely to hear relations talking about your early years, the sentimentalism tugging on your heart strings, just the act of remembering warming you up.

‘What do you remember about my childhood, Nan?’ I asked recently, all dewy-eyed and expectant.

‘You always jumped in shit!’ she cackled.

Dogshit, donkey shit – any kind of shit, I would just love to step in it. There was one time when my parents had just bought me some brand new shoes from Clark’s. I came out of the shop all excited. Then I spotted some dogshit and without any hesitation jumped in, both feet first. The shoes were so caked they had to be thrown in the bin, which still makes me feel guilty because I realise now how skint my parents were at the time and how they struggled to make ends meet. But why couldn’t Nan talk about my first word or the first time I walked – away from a piece of dogshit?

Other memories bustle for attention. Every morning when I was little, I would stand and look out of the window that overlooked Weymouth beach to watch my father go to work and wave at him as he got into his green Mazda. Sometimes, Dad would say that I would become distracted by the beach, and he would drive round again and again to try to get my attention. My eyes would finally leave what was happening on the beach and reconnect to my father in his car and I would carry on with my waving and he would drive off to work.

For someone who swore that they could never do Dad’s job, our lives have eerily mirrored each other’s. The ridiculous amount of travelling we both do is testament to that. I find it strangely comforting to know that if I’m in some weird village hall performing on the other side of the Pennines, he’ll be somewhere twice as obscure up a mountain watching a football team in the Dordogne.

Funnily enough it was this incessant travel that bonded us: sitting around the dining table we would often discuss in great detail the benefits of the M40 or ask, ‘Have you been on that new flyover yet?’ while Mum’s eyes would slowly glaze over and she’d try to stick her head in the oven. It also took me a while to recognise back then that the moodiness and sharp exchanges we’d get every Friday night weren’t Dad being grumpy, but merely his anxiety about the game the next day. This is pretty similar to me now as anyone who’s had the misfortune to approach me before I go on stage can testify, receiving a glare or a curt ‘leave me alone’ for their troubles.

* * *

Dad was away quite a bit when I was a kid, but that did mean I could spend a lot of time with my mother. Before my brother Gary was born it was often just us two in the house and the bond that usually connects mother and son became that little bit stronger. People say I look more like my mother than my father. Stop! Get that image of Olive from On the Buses out of your head – my mother is an attractive woman, I’ll have you know. One thing that we share is our sense of humour, and growing up I remember the house just being full of laughter. My mother is very much like me when telling a story; she will get to her feet and start mimicking the person, taking on the different characters and voices.

I remember when my father was away at a match, asking my mother how she met him. She says she was sitting in the stands at Dartford Football Club watching a match where Dad was playing. When Dad scored a goal, he ran over to the stand and pulled a moonie at the supporters.

‘What did you think about that?’ I asked her.

‘I thought, “What an idiot!”’

Well, I guess that’s an icebreaker in anyone’s book. Most romances start with a furtive glance across a crowded room, not by exposing yourself to your loved one. Anyway, my mother not only fell in love with that idiot, she married him.

Dad must have been doing something right at Weymouth, because he was asked to become manager of Dartford, so not for the last time in our lives we were on the move. Now when you’re poor, having a beach on your doorstep and bright, delicious sunshine for what felt like 24 hours a day can take the edge off having empty pockets. Dartford sadly didn’t have any of these things going for it; the tunnel is a wonderful man-made phenomenon, admittedly, and the Thames can be a majestic thing up by the Houses of Parliament, but down near Dartford it looked as grey and weary as the people.

As it happens, we weren’t there for long because Dad became manager of Nuneaton Town Football Club, so yet again we were on the move. Dad, Mum and I journeyed up the M1 in the Mazda. We stayed in Northampton instead of Nuneaton due to the fact Dad had played there in the Sixties and thought it would be a nice place to live.

He was right, it was nice, just nice. Not a little bit naughty, just nice. We moved onto the Moulton Leys estate and lived in a house in a cul-de-sac that overlooked a cornfield. The cul-de-sac was a perfect example of suburbia: young families, pets, people washing their cars every Sunday. We even had our own peeping Tom. He would walk his dog at night and throw a ball up the drives, go to get it and then try to catch a glimpse of a woman through the parted curtains. We knew this because we saw him most nights.

In fact, Mum and the woman across the road, Sue, tried to catch him out one night. Sue left her curtains open and her lights on to lure the pervert while Mum kept our house in darkness and looked out of the window to catch him red-eyed. After a few seductive curtain twitches from Sue had proved fruitless, Mum peered out a bit more closely, but it was only when she looked down that she realised he was actually peeping through her own window. She screamed and he ran off, which left us terrified but strangely excited. Mum quickly rang up Sue and they laughed about it together nervously, feeling triumphant and yet a little bit dirty.

Those were some of the things that Mum and I would get up to whilst Dad was away – stupid, silly things that would make us laugh. They say the devil makes work for idle hands, but he also dabbles in finding work for skint hands. If we’d been able to afford to go to the cinema, we wouldn’t have had to amuse ourselves by capturing local sex pests like some kind of Hetty Wainthropp. The following Christmas, I got an Atari and that kept Mum and me busy till all hours playing PacMan, Space Invaders and Wizard of War.

I used to support Nuneaton Town Football Club and, believe it or not, I used to look forward to the matches, even though they were an unfashionable non-League side. I even used to go to the training nights, where I would have the whole football ground to myself and sit in whatever seat I wanted. I would even climb up the goal nets and splash about in the huge players’ baths. I could do anything I wanted because Dad was the boss. I would obviously knacker myself out on those nights because I remember lying on the back seat of Dad’s car with his sheepskin over me, driving back to Northampton and feeling very safe drifting off along those country lanes.

Mohammed Ali once came to Nuneaton Town Football Club when I was little. It’s true, it’s true – I’ve got photos and everything. The chairman, by some amazing wheeler dealing, got the boxing legend to officiate the ground. I didn’t know who he was back then. I knew he was a boxer, but his fame had sort of passed me by. What I do remember is that he was upbeat, said hello to everyone and took the piss out of Dad’s baldness, with Dad laughing along jovially. I remember him shaking slightly, which of course we now know was the beginning of Parkinson’s. I just wish that at the time I’d understood the importance of meeting such an icon. I wonder if he feels the same about me now that I’m on the telly. I guess I’ll never know.

We were getting quite a name for ourselves in our little cul-de-sac, mainly because we had brought a cat with us from Dartford, Big Puss. We were never inventive with names in our house, and if we’re honest, cats don’t do anything anyway, so Big Puss was quite an apt name. He was a big puss, just a big fat puss. And vicious. Ever since he’d moved to Northampton he’d been terrorising people and cats the length and breadth of the estate.

It was a miracle that he was even with us then. By the time we had arrived at Northampton and we were trying to find our house, he had eaten through the cardboard box that had been meant to hold him in and he wasn’t happy. Mad with rage in fact, he pounced claws first onto Mum’s face and in a moment of panic she threw him out of the car window.

I was distraught. Can you imagine first seeing your mum savaged by your own pet cat and then seeing it thrown out of a window? I was only five and could have been traumatised for life. I thought the last I would ever see of Big Puss would be his tail whizzing past the wing mirror, but then guess who stalks, six days later, around the side of the house? Big Puss! Via some amazing tracking system that cats seem to have in their head, he had traced us to our new home. What a clever cat! I shouted joyously, ‘Big Puss! You’re alive!’ and ran over to cuddle him, and he bit me. That was Big Puss for you – hard as nails.

Big Puss would terrify the other cats in the neighbourhood, but that was too easy for him – it was the humans he loved to hurt. You would see him in the alley opposite, sprawled out against the wall, his fluffy ginger stomach just waiting to be stroked. A little girl or boy on a scooter would come over and touch that fluffy stomach and then he would pounce and a scream would ring out. Five minutes later the parent would be knocking on our door.

‘D’you know what your cat’s done? Look at that bite mark! And that’s after I’ve mopped up the blood. That animal’s a menace. What are you going to do about it?’

Mum’s answer would always be: ‘Well, you shouldn’t have touched it.’

To be fair, she had a point.

Before long the Carrs’ cat was enemy number one. We caught our next-door neighbour hitting him with a broom after he had attacked her Persian, and later he was even shot in the head with an airgun. Needless to say, he survived. If anything, the shooting just made him a bit more mental. It was only a speeding car in our village ten years later that finally killed him off. Big Puss was a nasty piece of work, but I still miss him.

Eventually the time came when I had to go to school. My first school was Booth Lower and it was on top of what then felt like a massive hill. It isn’t a massive hill at all and now I always laugh at how short it is, but walking up it at the age of five it felt like Kilimanjaro.

I wasn’t really ready to go to school. With Dad always being away training or playing the away games, I had bonded too closely with my mother and would start crying hysterically every time she dropped me off. It wasn’t the actual dropping off that did it – it was seeing her pass by the window afterwards on her way back home. It was like watching her in slow motion, and once she’d crossed the window I would just bawl my heart out.

The teacher was quite sympathetic at first, but that soon changed when my tidal wave of tears flooded into the following week. ‘Alan Carr, pull yourself together!’ Mrs Bellinge roared at me – which made me cry even more. It got so bad that the teacher had to have words with my mother, but after a while, when I realised that my mother would actually be coming back to collect me, I stopped crying.

After that, though, I really got into this school lark. Every day seemed to be sunny and we would dress up and play games in the ‘wild area’, which felt like a jungle then but was actually a piece of land that the caretaker couldn’t be bothered to look after.

I had started making friends, lots of friends. Tellingly, they were all girls. I had no interest in mixing or playing with the boys. I can’t remember it being a conscious decision; like now, I just feel comfortable in female company. Sometimes the group of girls would grow and grow, and from afar it must have looked like a proper harem. It must have been alarming for my parents to see this seemingly endless conveyor belt of girls I would invite for tea.

‘Can Sarah come for tea?’

‘Can Kelly come to tea?’

‘Can Justine come to tea?’

‘Is Sarah your girlfriend?’ Mum would ask.

‘No.’

‘Kelly?’

‘No.’

‘Justine?’

‘No. Just friends.’

One of my best friends was Jenny, an intelligent boyish girl, who was teacher’s pet. It was not long before she started coming to tea, like so many girls had. We had the same sense of humour and really got on. Little did I know, we had more in common than I thought. We lost touch when she went to Northampton School for Girls. I did see Jenny again, but it was in very strange circumstances. Unknown to me, she had had a sex change and became a homosexual called Daniel. Obviously, I never heard about that on Friends Reunited, so you can imagine my shock when I spotted her, sorry him, sitting on the Tube opposite me with a beard. I must have shocked the other commuters when I started jumping and pointing excitedly, shouting, ‘Jenny! Jenny! It’s you, isn’t it, Jenny?’ Anyway, that’s what the future held, but back then we were just two innocent seven-year-old misfits enjoying each other’s company in the playground.

Straight after the football season ended, we’d always go on holiday – to shiver on the Norfolk coast, sheltering from the wind and rain on a caravan park in Great Yarmouth. Great Yarmouth was grey, windswept and grim. I lost track of how many Frisbees I lost one ‘summer’. Dad would buy one from the park shop and pass it to me, I would get ready, all excited, to pass it back to him, and as soon as it left my fingers the gale force wind would whisk it off to Calais.

I will never forget my first night in Great Yarmouth. It’s hard enough to sleep in those bunk beds, especially with the nylon sheets and rough blankets that smell of corned beef. Ugh! I’ll never forget the texture of those scratchy blankets up against my skin – it was like having sex with a leper. (Not that I knew about that then.) And then I was rudely awakened by the caravan rocking.

My indignation was soon replaced by fear, and with my runaway imagination I just knew it was a gang of thugs trying to tip us over into the sea.

I called out to Mum: ‘Someone’s rocking the caravan. Help!’

‘Just go to sleep,’ she said.

‘No, no, it’s rocking even more. Help me! Please, someone!’

‘It’s the wind. Go back to sleep!’ shouted Dad, oblivious to the gang of ne’er-do-wells intent on killing us.

I realised that my parents, normally so vigilant about strange noises and goings-on, really didn’t care. All I could hear from their room was giggling and muffled laughter, as the caravan rocked even more.

I don’t know what finished first, the caravan’s rocking or the commotion from my parents’ room, but at some point I must have drifted off. When I brought it up in the morning, my questioning came up against a wall of silence and I was left contemplating the mystery whilst eating my grapefruit.

Every time I look in the mirror there is a reminder of my holidays in Great Yarmouth, and it’s not my glowing skin and sun-kissed hair, it’s my teeth. I had been mucking about, as most six year olds do when they’re on their holidays. The windswept beach was a no-go area, and with the potential for it to piss it down at a moment’s notice we had stayed close to the caravan. I had climbed up onto the caravan hook, those horrible metal things that you attach to the back of your car, and had slipped off, banging my mouth so hard that I had to be rushed to hospital and have my gums sewn up. I can remember Dad scooping me up in his arms and Mum, pregnant with my brother Gary (all that caravan rocking had taken its toll), running behind me. I can’t remember much more of that night, but I can remember it starting to rain (what a surprise!) and my parents anxiously trying to flag down a car to take me to hospital.

Once the drama was over, the doctor told Mum that when my adult teeth came through they would either come through black or crooked or both. My poor mother was beside herself. But although my teeth do look as though they’re having a party, I always remind myself that it could have been so much worse: they could have been black stumps poking out my mouth. Thank God for small mercies.

My teeth have always been trouble to me, though. They’re my Achilles’ heel. I don’t know if this is possible, but honestly, I’ve started resenting my own teeth. I know you need them to bite and chew, but they don’t half piss me off. Impacted wisdom teeth, extractions, root canal work – I’ve suffered them all. I chipped one piece off a tooth when I was 12, when someone accidentally turned and whacked a fishing rod in my face.

‘Look,’ I said to my dentist, a lovely man called Lance, ‘why don’t we just cut to the chase and have them all out and fit dentures?’

He smiled sweetly. ‘That won’t be necessary.’

No, of course not. That’s because he knows full well that if I do have dentures his profits will plummet. My crooked white teeth are his pension plan; whenever he sees them coming through the door he thinks, ‘Holiday home!’

The saga of my ill-fated teeth continues. Only last month I was nursing a gaping hole in my gum where a tooth cracked when I was having a crown fitted. The only reason I needed to have the crown fitted in the first place was that after bypassing a Snickers and going for a ‘healthy option’ bag of apricots, I bit into one that hadn’t been pitted and ended up cracking a tooth and killing the nerve. Then I had no choice but to have it extracted. However, Lance is planning to fit me a porcelain crown, an exact copy of my original tooth, he assures me – which I am dreading because when you have teeth as big as mine, it’ll be like sucking on a urinal.

* * *

Back in Northampton, though, in the distant days of childhood, home was a happy place. Mum eventually gave birth to Gary, and so when he was older I had a brother to play with. She had actually asked me the year before, when I was playing with my Evel Knievel figure in the garden, whether I would like a little brother. I can’t remember what I said, but it looks like they went ahead with it anyway.

Even though everything seemed so warm and homely, I still managed to suffer, though, because I was so accident-prone. I remember jumping out of bed on a Monday morning, excited because I had a whole brand new week of school. My family was having new carpets fitted and had taken up the old ones. In my eagerness to run downstairs, I caught my foot under the carpet gripper and ripped all my toenails out. I was in agony and instead of going to school and doing fun things, I had to lie on the settee watching Pebble Mill at One like a prisoner of war.

As with all kids, I was into He-Man and Star Wars, and any money I received would go to buy a figure that I could act out scenes with. Francesca across the road, who was my age, had great girls’ toys, so we would often pool our resources and make up our own fantasy world. For nearly a year Barbie and Skeletor were co-habiting in Castle Grayskull without a care in the world. Our Castle Grayskull was actually a more feminine affair than usual. Under Francesca’s watchful eye, it had a pink chest of drawers, pink curtains and a big pink double bed.

Contrary to what you might think, I scorned the pink frilliness of Barbie’s world and chose to have ‘wars’ with soldiers. Fuelled by Saturday afternoon reruns of Sinbad, I would always have my sword and scabbard at the ready, and if I couldn’t find those, a stick. Looking back, I wish that now I had a tenth of the energy that little Alan used to have. I was a bag of energy, full of beans, always making loads of noise, so much so that Mum cut the tongues out of my Hungry Hippos.

The only glitch in this boyish world that I threw myself into was the time I asked Mum to help me write a letter to Jim’ll Fix It to ask if I could meet Wonder Woman. I knew her name was Lynda Carter, my mother’s maiden name, and I prayed that she was a relative and that at a family wedding she would turn up, obviously dressed as Wonder Woman, and I could meet her and tell everyone I was related to Wonder Woman. Surprisingly enough, she never turned up – it seems Lynda cares more for her career than she does her own flesh and blood.

It was around my eighth birthday that I started having an unhealthy interest in birdwatching, too. For the next three or four birthdays, I asked for binoculars and books on birds – I even subscribed to a birdwatching magazine. Every month, I would become enthralled by the exotic birds that would grace the glossy front cover. Frustratingly, it would always be a flamingo or a frigate with its beautiful red plumage. This was particularly mean as well as misleading to the keen bird-watcher, as such cover stars were native to such tropical paradise as the Galapagos Islands and there was no way a landlocked ornithologist like myself would ever come across one. I would have to make do with the Canada geese and pied wagtails that I saw at Pitsford Reservoir.

One time we got a free tape of birdsong, that you played to get yourself acquainted with the different calls that you would hear when you were in your hide waiting to see your first bird. The twittering coming from the stereo speakers didn’t really have much of an effect on me, but Big Puss went mental. His eyes as big as ball bearings, he stalked the stereo, ferociously intimidating, hungry for bird-meat. In the end, when he couldn’t find a bird, he just jumped on me and bit me instead. He was ruthless, a tireless killer and also a sexual predator, and although he had been castrated he still liked to make love to inanimate objects. My teddy bears, my slippers. He would bite the head of my He-Man and grind mercilessly, making a horny purring sound like a next-door neighbour using a strimmer.

This was my first introduction to sex. Mum would come in and hit him with a tea-towel.

‘What’s he doing, Mum?’

‘He’s being dirty.’

So from then on, whenever Big Puss ground away on my teddies or sometimes even me, I would shout, ‘Mum! Big Puss is being dirty! Big Puss is being dirty!’ And Mum would come in with a tea-towel and shoo him away: ‘Dirty cat! Dirty cat!’

I didn’t know what being dirty was – I still don’t think I do – but anyway that’s when I first came across this thing ‘being dirty’, and I learnt it off a big horny ginger tom.

Like most families, the father thinks he rules the roost but it is the mother who is really in control. After my younger brother Gary and I had tired of pleading with our parents for a tortoise, we moved onto dogs. We wanted a pet dog. Dad instantly set out his stall: he wanted a ‘big dog’, a man-dog, a dog that if it was human would enjoy a pint and stare at the barmaid’s arse as she bent down for the cheese and onion crisps. He must have felt pretty emasculated then when we came back with Minstral.

The only way I can describe Minstral is for you to imagine the kind of dog that Paris Hilton has poking out of her handbag at those Hollywood premières. Minstral was a gorgeous little mongrel a few months old with the most expressive face going. His mother had been a pedigree King Charles Cavalier Spaniel, the breeder told us snootily, but a dirty Jack Russell called ‘Rusty’ had sneaked through the cat flap and raped her. It seems the mother had brought shame upon his council house and wanted nothing to do with its bastard offspring, so we took it off his hands.

Contrary to what you might think, Dad and the bastard dog bonded and from that moment on they were inseparable. They would go to bed at the same time, rise at the same time and go for drives together, with Minstral sitting obediently in the passenger seat. The partnership got so intense that Mum thought the dog was resenting her. So much so that she phoned the vet to say that Minstral was giving her dirty looks. I was horrified. I envisaged the vet nodding sympathetically – ‘Yes, Mrs Carr, that’s right, Mrs Carr’ – while trying to switch on ‘speaker phone’ so everyone in the clinic could listen to this ‘weirdo woman’ in a love triangle with a mongrel.

From that moment on, Minstral and Mum both battled for Dad’s affection; it was a battle that would last the next thirteen years. At least Mum still had her figure; Minstral’s had gone to pot, as every morning Dad would proudly walk him to the newsagent and feed him his body weight in Milky Ways. It’s a classic case of an owner killing the dog with kindness, but his argument was that Minstral would look up with those little expectant eyes, and Dad just couldn’t resist forcing what was to a dog the equivalent of a selection box down the poor creature’s throat. The dog must have been good with the old expectant-eyes trick because when I did them to Dad (usually mid-cross-country run, pleading with him to stop) he just ignored me and made me touch another tree, while I was gagging for a Milky Way.

* * *

It’s typical, really, that although I was hearing whispers at school that I was not like the other boys – and I don’t think it was because of my birdwatching – the penny never dropped. A few times I had wondered what they meant by the catcalls, and of course now I know, oh yes, I know now very well what they meant. These cringeworthy moments hover in my memory glowing bright pink in neon shouting, ‘Yoo hoo, over here – remember us.’ Sometimes I was guilty of turning the most mundane tasks into ammunition for the bullies.

Every child loves ice cream, and I was no exception. Whenever the hypnotic melody of the ice-cream van would be heard in our cul-de-sac, time would freeze as every child would first run to their mum and dad and shout, ‘Mum, ice-cream van – can we have one?’ and then run to get their shoes. On one occasion, I couldn’t find my shoes and blind panic set in, because I really wanted a 99. All I could find were Mum’s knee-length zip-up leather boots. I thought, ‘Sod it, I’ll wear those.’

By the time I’d put them on the right feet, zipped them up and found a handbag to match (joke), I could hear the ice-cream van’s engine starting up. I ran straight out of the front door to find my fears were confirmed – he was pulling away! As fast as I could, I chased the ice-cream van through my whole estate in high-heeled boots, shouting, ‘Stop! Stop! I want a 99!’

It was only when I sat down on the kerb, slowly unzipped the boots and coquettishly sucked the flake, that I thought, ‘God, you’re sexy!’ – no, I thought how ridiculous I must look. This was confirmed by the number of neighbours staring and kids giggling.

I knew they were thinking, ‘That’s Graham’s son.’

* * *

Times changed, and when I was eight we stopped going to the freezing wasteland of Great Yarmouth for our holidays and started going on five-hour car journeys behind a string of caravans to Beverley Park in Torquay. That five-hour journey would sometimes take six if my violent car sickness kicked in and I had to vomit on the hard shoulder.

You can imagine the relief when we finally pulled up at Torquay and saw the sun and the crisp blue sky.

‘They call this the English Riviera,’ Mum said, turning round in her seat and smiling at me.

I was amazed. Unlike Great Yarmouth, it really did look like it did in the brochure. (In Great Yarmouth I think they’d superimposed a sun and toilet facilities afterwards.)

Now we were holidaying down south we were joined by an extra person – Nanny Tot. She should have been called Nanny Carr, but my Granddad Wilf was so tall he was nicknamed Tot and it stuck. Nanny Tot didn’t come to Great Yarmouth with us, as she lived in Newcastle, so if she had wanted to get blown around and pissed on, she could just have gone to Whitley Bay, which was cheaper and nearer. When Nanny found out that we would be going to Devon and it would be free, she decided to tag along.

Nanny Tot was a lovely lady, but frugal to say the least. If she could get out of spending money she would do it. One mention of pocket money would have her diving for her panic button. Once, when I was a baby, she bought me a dress because it was cheaper than a pair of trousers. Gary insists that’s where my ‘trouble’ started.

Every kid is excited when their Nan comes to stay, and we were no exception, but the excitement was doubled because we were going on holiday with ours – yeah! We would collect Nan from the National Express coach station ready for our journey onwards to sunny Devon. She would get off the coach and reach into her bag.

‘Here you are, love. Here’s something for you.’

It would be half a packet of Opal Fruits each – if we were lucky. Sometimes we didn’t get them at all, because if Nanny Tot ever saw a disabled person or someone with learning difficulties, she would put her hand in her bag and whip out our sweets. I remember once in a café Nan going to give a paraplegic my uneaten chips. And if this wasn’t embarrassing enough, Mum then told her off loudly, saying, ‘They want to be treated as equal. They’ve got rights now.’

Nan’s generosity with our sweets to less able-bodied people had a sliding scale of its own – a brain tumour: a whole box of Rowntree’s pastilles; limb missing: Fry’s chocolate cream; retarded: Bounty; while a stutter would equate to two segments of a Terry’s chocolate orange.

Sadly, Nan’s tightness actually affected her hearing.

‘Can I have 50p to have a ride on the donkeys?’ I begged.

She smiled sweetly and carried on with her crossword.

‘Please, Nan!’

It was no good. She couldn’t hear a thing. If Dad was buying us a fish and chip supper, though, her hearing would become so acute she would have put a bat to shame.

Despite the penny pinching, we did have a lovely time together. Mum and Dad would hit the campsite club and me, Nan and Gary would all sit and try and listen to the television over the noise of the rain pelting down the corrugated-iron roof.

If you were in an even-numbered caravan you were a royal and if you were in an odd-numbered caravan you were a rebel. Whenever you walked around the campsite and came across a redcoat he’d ask, ‘What are you?’

‘Rebel!’ we’d all shout the first year, because we were in caravan 181.

The next year we found ourselves royals. ‘What are you?’

‘Royal!’

Honestly, who needs Disneyland when you can have this much fun?

Those holidays in Devon and eventually Cornwall were so idyllic. The sun always seemed to be shining and there was a lovely sense of peace about the place. Gary was getting older and becoming more fun and we were able to do things together.

For all the picture-perfect innocence, it soon became clear that something ominous was shifting inside me, as I discovered one afternoon whilst walking along the beach with my parents.

‘Alan! Stop that. Stop doing that!’ shouted my mother, pointing at me.

‘What?’

I was subconsciously mincing along with my bucket in the crook of my arm like a handbag and twirling the spade around my fingers like a majorette.

‘Hold it properly!’ she insisted.

I personally thought I looked fabulous but I relented and held it ‘properly’. Boring!

I often wonder whether my parents took it as an omen or whether it even registered, but looking back now I realise it was the thin end of the wedge.

The only argument I remember between my parents took place on holiday, though. It was quite serious. Dad had used Mum’s really expensive shampoo and she was horrified.

‘It’s a waste on your head,’ she retorted. ‘You’re bloody bald!’

It seems it was all right for Mohammed Ali to take the piss out of my father’s lack of hair, but not my mother. He opened the caravan door and flung Mum’s shampoo out so far that it cleared the enormous conifers adjacent to our caravan.

Mum cried out, ‘Alan! Alan! Go and find my shampoo!’

Like a sniffer dog I was released onto the campsite in my pyjamas and slippers, searching for this bloody shampoo. I eventually found it outside the camp shop. It was lying in the car park next to two pensioners staring up at the sky, hoping that God would deliver them some expensive hair products too.

* * *

Dad’s star was on the rise again. After keeping Nuneaton top of the League for a couple of seasons, he was spotted by Northampton Town Football club and he decided to leave the non-League and join a club that was actually in a division even if they were at the foot of that division, and basically bankrupt.

When your dad is manager of the football team of the town you are growing up in and the team are enjoying a particularly good season, even if you don’t have the slightest interest in football, people presume you are good at it simply for sharing a surname. I didn’t expect to jump over buildings and lasso criminals because I had a Carter in the family tree now, did I?

Simply being called Carr meant that I was genetically modified to be a world-class striker. So whenever I joined a new school and word got round that Alan Carr (‘What? The really camp one with glasses and buck teeth?’ – ‘Yes that’s him’) was the son of Graham Carr, all the lads, even the tough ones, started hanging around me, inviting me round their houses for tea, asking if I wanted to share a cigarette, offering me a backie on their Grifters. My diary was fit to burst. For once in my life, I was in the midst of a social whirl. Well, let’s just say, this was before they saw me on the pitch.

It didn’t get me off to a good start. On Monday morning the PE teacher Jenko – he was Mr Jenkinson, but we could call him Jenko, and I would end up calling him a lot worse by the time I’d left that playing field, I can tell you – said, ‘We have a celebrity’s son with us today,’ and then went and appointed me captain.

‘Oh no, please, there’s been a terrible mistake,’ I wailed. ‘I’d rather just be here on the sub bench.’

‘I’m sure we’ll all be pleasantly surprised,’ boomed Jenko. They were surprised all right, just not in the way they intended. I lost it, whenever I did get the ball, I couldn’t control it, I forgot which end I was meant to be shooting at, and instead of an almighty kick all I could muster was a toe-punt.

Dizzy, I turned round to face them, and they looked at me as if to say, ‘This isn’t what I ordered.’ It was true; instead of being this athletic dynamo nutmegging the opposition, weaving with ease and scoring with flair, I was flailing up and down like Goldie Hawn in Bird on a Wire. I lasted five minutes and as punishment was made to collect the ball from the other side of the dual carriageway – which admittedly I had kicked over there, but not all the way over there, to be fair, it had ricocheted off a woman walking her dog.

I admit sometimes I brought the humiliation on myself, but more often than not it was induced by the PE teachers themselves. Jenko was all right, I suppose. I mean, he wasn’t malicious, he just couldn’t understand why some people were good at sports and others weren’t. Jenko was the final one in a long line of unimpressed PE teachers.

I can cope with unimpressed, but it’s the sadistic ones I find repulsive. It was during my years at the Middle School that I encountered the worst one of the lot. She was Mrs O’Flaherty. God, I hated that woman, and I still do. She hated me, too. There was no love lost when I finally left. She covered for Science, and I remember getting one of my first ever migraines during her lesson. She refused to let me out and I had to sit through a lesson on poly-photosynthesis with a paralysed face and what felt like a tsunami of pain flooding around my brain. I hate it when people say migraines are just ‘headaches but a bit worse’, it really is like saying tuberculosis is a chesty cough – they bloody hurt.

Ooh! I detested that Mrs O’Flaherty. I can still remember those piggy eyes and her bowl haircut: she looked like Joan of Arc – after the fire. Every tennis lesson she partnered me with Matthew, who had learning difficulties, yes learning difficulties, so how was I supposed to improve? Oh, and don’t think I didn’t notice that everyone else had proper professional tennis rackets and proper professional tennis balls, while Matthew and I were given these rackets so large that I swear if we waved them about in the air enough we could have landed a Boeing 747.

To add insult to injury, our balls were made of sponge. All the other lads got to play outside, apart from us. Apparently, according to Mrs O’Flaherty, if she let Matthew and me play outside, our balls would blow away. So we had to stand in the school hall watching the other kids outside, listening enviously to the ‘thwock’ of professional rackets hitting professional balls over professional nets.

Poor old Matthew was simple, bless him. I know you can’t say that nowadays but he was simple, he didn’t know what was going on. But I did! That’s what made it so frustrating. I tried to show him the difference between the others’ tennis balls and our sponge balls, mainly by throwing them at his head – which is wrong, I know, but I get frustrated too, you know. How am I supposed to improve my backhand if I’m demoted to home-helping my opponent? It just wasn’t fair.

Physical Education is the only lesson on the school syllabus where you don’t get any help if you’re no good at it. Physical it is, Education it ain’t. No arm around your shoulder, no comforting word from a teacher, just a great big dollop of contempt and sarcasm. Can you imagine the headlines if little Susie in English couldn’t spell scissors, and so was forced to do an extra lap of the library in her vest and pants and then have her arse whipped with a wet towel? The Daily Mail would have a field day. You can see why kids today don’t want to do exercise and would rather sit at home playing martial arts games on their Nintendo. I wish I’d done that, too – not because I like martial arts, but because the next time Mrs O’Flaherty tried to humiliate me, in one swift Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon style I’d do a body slam, with a nipple twist, and finish it off with a scissor kick – that would show her! I’d be a hero, and all the fat kids would pick me up and carry me around on their morbidly obese shoulders.

My heart goes out to any kids who are, shall we say, athletically challenged. I understand ‘Sport’ now that I’m older; it’s not so much to do with skill and finesse, it’s about Fear. Sliding tackles, scrums, tobogganing, it’s all about being fearless. I definitely wasn’t fearless – no, I had Fear aplenty, Fear and Worry in abundance. One of the reasons for my Fear was the fact that I would read everything, read and read and read – it’s true, ‘Ignorance is bliss’. So when it finally came to starting a game of rugby, all the other boys were imagining running down the field (what’s a rugby pitch called?) and scoring a magnificent try. Meanwhile, I would be remembering that article I read about the bloke who’s a paraplegic due to a hooker falling on his neck. Oh no, not for me, thanks, you go on, boys, you knock yourselves out – how the hell are my glasses going to stay on with a cauliflower ear?

Whether it was me being a chicken-shit or some deeper Darwinian self-preservation thing kicking in, I feared the scrum and all it entailed. I remember Mum pulling my immaculate rugby kit from my bag and accusing me of playing truant. How dare she? I had played rugby. I’d run my little socks off up and down the field. I’d just avoided the muddy bits.

* * *

Overall, though, it takes more than a few isolated moments to dim a wonderful childhood. Yes, we had our ups and downs, but if you’re expecting Alan’s Ashes you’re going to be bitterly disappointed. I haven’t really had much scandal in my life either. Seriously, at one point I was thinking of getting an uncle to interfere with me just so I could add a bit of pathos.

And I grew up in one of the most boring towns in England.

Northampton is famous for shoes and, apart from the Express Lift Tower, a listed building that in certain lights looks like a concrete dildo, its main landmark is the Northampton Boot and Shoe Museum, which we’d get dragged around every other year on a school trip. The museum contains a plaster copy of the shoe of one of the elephants that Hannibal used to climb over the Alps. Need I say more? Just imagine getting a guided tour of a massive Freeman, Hardy & Willis, only shitter.

‘Excuse me,’ I said, taking a replica of one of Marie Antoinette’s shoes off the display and holding it out to the curator, ‘do you have this in a six?’

‘Alan Carr!’ shouted the teacher. ‘Put that back at once!’

With a weary sigh, I replaced the replica. I just wanted to add a bit of sparkle. Was that a crime?