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Chapter 3

Big Brother’s Big Risk

Blundersome TV producer and cohort Gareth Roy does a very good impression of my orgasm, having once overheard me dispensing with some effluvia with a couple of young people lit only by the tangerine sea of twinkling LA street lanterns, that make the Hollywood Hills so desirable a residence, and the unnecessary front room gas fire, which also drenched the contorted nude forms in naughty orange. His interpretation sounds a bit like Fred Flintstone launching into his “Yabba-dabba-doo” catchphrase then having a stroke half-way through it – “Yabaa-dadArR$%@!@*ahhhhhh- OOooh”. Wilma is hysterical: “Barney, call an ambulance – made of dinosaur bones. We need a historically inaccurate solution to this comically Neanderthal problem.”

Whilst Gareth may mock my rather fanciful sex celebrations, considering them no doubt to be over-blown Cristiano Ronaldo-style tricks, the women involved seem to like them. And why not? I myself like nothing more than a great big operatic bit of showboating from my partners when it comes to a climax, so why wouldn’t they be the same? I think it must be rather unrewarding for a woman if at the climax of the act some nervous nelly of an Englishman like Gareth drizzles out a teaspoon of cock-porridge without a whimper, perhaps palming over a clammy docket bearing the words “Many thanks, miss, I’ve just done a cum.” Give me the razzamatazz of my Russell Brand, brass band orgasmo-spectaculars any day, any day, any day.

Before I ejaculate I’m a fervid, febrile mass of sexual energy. I’ll do anything, I’m demonically sexy. After I cum I’m a guilty little berk in a sweaty tank top. “Good heavens, Mother, what have I done?” I wonder why the chemical change is so dramatic?

Using what I’ve gleaned about evolutionary psychology from Richard Dawkins and the Flintstones, the post-ejaculatory crash is to prevent Fred roaring off out of the cave the second he’s spunked up, smashing that dimwit Barney in the throat and popping something messy up Betty’s loincloth. God that sentence turned me on. I’m going to have to go on a course that addresses the growing problem of w-ank-imation.

I do at least give my squandered ejaculant a dignified mourning. Picture the funeral of ten million sperm, a congregation of grief-drunk mourners yelping and shrieking, sticking their fingers up their arses – a sepulchral carnival, a festival of mournography.

I am sentimentally attached to my fluids in an “Every sperm is sacred”, Catholic, Pythonesque fashion (Pythons themselves loathe that adjective, so apologies, dear heroes). Perhaps it’s my age, but each kinky cell seems like an opportunity for life. There are church posters that bear the hyperbolic inscription “You’re one in twenty million” – each one of us is a lottery winner before we subdivide, the product of the fastest, strongest sperm. And that applies to proper little weeds like myself, not just Jesse Owens or Michael Flatley. Whether the sperm riverdanced out of the testes or crawled out on its belly, we’re all champions.

I cherish and exalt these moments of sexual bliss, because but for them my life would be an unpunctuated scroll of unremarkable sludge. I’m not given to fist-pumping displays of triumph in my daytime activities – even when they may be warranted – so these nocturnal displays are prized.

When I was informed that I’d got the job hosting Big Brother’s Big Mouth – which changed my life and rescued me from the post-rehab routine of brittle bike rides and underpaid stand-up – I did not cleave the sky like Jimi Hendrix or Thor, I said simply, “That’s good. Thanks.”

The relationship between the British tabloid press and Big Brother is fascinating. They need yet devour each other, like Duncan’s horses in Macbeth, which similarly is a forebear of the apocalypse. Without the tabloid interest, it wouldn’t be the phenomenon it is. In America, where it is denied the tabloid fanfare, Big Brother is an also-ran TV show. A pertinent indication of the distinctions in national character is that in America Survivor, where contestants are stranded on an island and forced to do battle with the elements or be destroyed, is a must-see programme among the descendants of the pioneers. But in England we are drawn to a show where people seldom stray from stifling domesticity and the most incendiary conflagration is likely to be an altercation over the last teacake.

The concept of Big Brother is: twelve or so normal folk live in a camera-saturated house for several months and are voted out by the viewers according to their whims and the way the “housemates” have been edited.

It is titled in tribute to the dystopian Orwellian prediction that in the future we will be observed at all times. The fact that Big Brother can rise to such cultural prominence without its audience acknowledging the source novel, 1984, is one of the show’s greatest achievements – similar credit must go to the programme Room 101 for ignoring the titular implications of their show. In Orwell’s novel, Room 101 is not a receptacle in which to glibly discard pop-cultural trinkets, but the setting for each individual’s personal hell.

It’s very exciting to work on Big Brother in the UK precisely because of the relationship it has with the national press. Every year there is a scandal of some kind, usually trumped up by the ravenous media but often interesting regardless, particularly if you’re me in 2005 and about to embark on a career in which scandal is a key component. My time working on the show forewarned me of the appetite in the British media for salacious tales and the famed maxim that the truth will never get in the way of a good story.

The first scandal came about on the very first series I worked on, which was Big Brother 4. One of the genuinely intriguing aspects of the show is the social disparity between the housemates and the conflict that can elicit. In the house that year were Victor, a south London gangsta, his chum Jason, a Scottish bouncer, a Portuguese pre-op transsexual – eventual winner Nadia – a couple of gay lads and a few women with remarkable boobs, notably Makosi, of whom more later.

I worked on the show for three years, which encompassed seven seasons. Each one had a scandal which drenched the British papers and several which went international. The debut scandal was built around a violent confrontation between Jason and one of the gays, Marco, who Jason – brilliantly – had accused of taunting him with “a dance of disrespect”. The phrase has stayed with me, as Jason used it as if it were culturally loaded, like it was his own personal N-word. As if his people had been taunted by dances of disrespect from time immemorial by despised oppressors across the border. “At the battle of Culloden the hated British troops mocked their brave Celtic captives with a sickening dance of disrespect in which they camply jiggled their pert little bum-bums at the manacled Scots.”

This daft provocation led to an unbroadcastable brawl that was fucking brilliant to watch – the house boiled over into a riot of slamming doors and screams, cameras couldn’t keep up with the action, it was like watching CCTV footage of a 3am liquor store robbery. It was the actualisation of the unspoken incentive for watching the whole damn shebang – you wanna see ’em fight and fuck. It was primal and exciting and obviously too good to go on telly in an unedited form. I got to watch a pre-sanitised version which they sent to my flat so that I could write jokes about it. When an executive producer realised that this sensitive material had been allowed out of the Elstree studios where the show was made he rightly flipped. “What!! That new presenter, ex-junky lunatic, who had to sign a special contract with a ‘sack on sight of substance abuse’ clause, is in possession of a tape that could get the whole show cancelled??!! Get it back NOW!!”

Tiptoeing around my perspective on the footage and hoping to discover what I might likely say, Shed, an exec from the channel and a lovely quirky bloke, asked me what I thought. “It was amazing,” I blurted, “like when it kicks off on the terraces at football or at a protest and chaos reigns supreme and your blood surges and your gut churns. Also it calls to mind the wise words of the World War One general who said, ‘You cannot rouse the animal in man then expect it to be put aside at will’ – I loved it.” He paused. “Could you not say anything like that on tonight’s show, please?” he said firmly.

He needn’t have worried – when the show began I was a tentative little worm in distressed T-shirt and pumps. I’d yet to transmute into the spiky, lacquered Jack Frost sex sprite that would soon, after a princess’s kiss, a saint’s curse and a chat show godfather’s approving nod, adorn the tabloids like a Big Brother winner. I was still but a squirt sat behind a desk all neat and meek.

The show evolved in time, due to the recruitment of two very funny men, Mark Lucey (Irish blood, QPR heart, all sensitive with a sixth sense of humour, like most people I love) and Ian Coyle (giant Elvis Costello, scouse and dour yet suddenly lachrymose). They infused the show with a Reeves and Mortimer-type joy and with me created some of digital TV’s most memorable catchphrases.

Distinctive and puerile idioms sprung up that assisted us in making a show that went out live and was on five nights a week. Under those conditions you need to evolve a structure and a grammar or it’d never get made. We were fortunate in that we were in tune with an appetite to see the by now huge, phenomenal show undermined from within. We didn’t view the main show with disdain but saw in the minutiae of the disputes and tiny travesties endless domestic humour.

Big Brother was always a rich source of comedy for us. Every day something ridiculous would occur and, over the period we worked together, there were events and characters that made a monumental impact: Kinga, who publicly masturbated with a wine bottle, Pete, the Tourette’s sufferer and unlikely heart-throb, the romance of Preston and Chantelle ... But Big Brother also spawned an icon of such magnitude that she rocketed from the confines of the house and its transient, scratch-and-sniff celebrity and into true stardom – Jade Goody.

When my mum first got cancer I must’ve been around six years old, the age Jade’s eldest son is now. Too young, in fact, to properly comprehend what was happening, but old enough to sense the tingling presence of fear, the averted looks, the stifled, thin-lipped sympathy and muddled, neighbourly compassion. My mum, thank God, did not die, and whilst her cancer returned several times, each time more frightening for me as my innocence waned, to be replaced with dread, she lives still, so I can but imagine the sad confusion of the two bereaved boys.

I knew their mother, Jade Goody, not especially well, but Jade’s defining characteristic was her easy warmth that ingenuously enveloped folk, so perhaps like many people I felt more engaged by her than normal and feel more saddened by her death than I ought. I dislike the fetishisation of grief that accompanied the death of Jade’s forebear, the Princess of Wales – it makes me uncomfortable, as I query its sincerity. Sentimentality is often called the unearned emotion, and intrusive carnivals of public mourning unsettle me. In the case of Jade Goody, however, it is understandable to feel morose: she was a young mum from an awful background who got a break and shrewdly capitalised on it.

For a time she and I shared management, and we met when she came to see several shows of mine at the Edinburgh Festival about five years ago. We all hung out, me, my mum, Jade, some people from the agency and a few of my mates. She was a right laugh, she joined in with everyone and created a garrulous, giddy vibe in bars and cars that elevated the perfunctory time between shows into something which retrospectively seems more special now than it did then. Most of all, though, I was impressed with how she formed an immediate and genuinely sweet bond with my mother, chuckling and chatting with the effortless intimacy that strong yet tender women frequently conjure and which has umbrella’d me from anxiety throughout my life. She also came on a few of my dopey TV shows in later years, where she filled the room with her ebullience and wicked laugh, connecting with the audience in a way that most skilled showmen can only dream of.

One of the charges often levelled at Jade was that she was just a normal girl with no trade or practised skills. Well, people didn’t care, and our heroes are not prescribed to us, we have the right to choose them and the people chose Jade. Fame has long been bequeathed by virtue of wealth and birth, and this was the first generation where it was democratically distributed by that most lowbrow of modern phenomena – reality television. She was a person who, I think due to her class, always had the propensity to irk people. When Big Brother 3 made her famous she was vilified in the papers and bullied in the house, but through her spirit she won people back round and became a kind of Primark Princess with perfumes and fitness videos and endless media coverage – because people were interested in her. They remain interested. Nicola, a woman in her mid twenties, is genuinely heartbroken at the death of Jade. Herself a mother from a working-class background, she obviously connects with this sad narrative in a way that she doesn’t seem to with J.Lo or Jennifer Aniston or Posh Spice, most likely because of Jade’s authenticity and accessibility.

I was uniquely situated when Jade returned to the house and through unschooled social clumsiness blundered into a whooped-up race row. As I said at the time, the incident where the Indian actress Shilpa Shetty was poorly treated by a group of young women was not an example of the sickening scourge of racism but simply a daft lack of education. Jade was a tough girl but utterly lacking in the malice upon which true prejudice depends. The real crime was the slick of spilled newspaper ink and the cathode-conveyed H-bomb that followed this innocuous event. Jade was made the focus of a debilitating wave of righteous loathing and condemnation, a gleefully indignant storm of trumped-up wrath that served the cause of racial harmony not one iota; but that was never its intention. The intention was sacrifice. Well, now Jade Goody is no more – claimed by cancer, a disease often brought on by extreme stress. When my mother was sick, someone unkindly informed me that her illness was my fault, induced by my bad behaviour, and for a long time I believed it.

I’m glad that Jade’s death was handled with saccharine mittens by the papers. She lived and died in the glare of their interest and doubtless benefited from it hugely at times. I recall her tearstained face pegged across some rag as she endlessly sought to be forgiven by the media whom her misconstrued conduct had so incensed. It made me a little angry. She wanted to be accepted, loved, redeemed – and now, through her early death, she is. I hope some of the lessons of this modern fairy tale are learned, that the people who aspire to be like Jade observe the price she paid. I hope her sons are OK and that, on some imperceptible level, contrition is felt by the media that gave Jade Goody everything. And I mean everything.

Jade wasn’t the only contestant I became involved with. I had what I like to refer to as office romances with several housemates. These trysts were inevitable given that my waking life was spent working on that show, which meant I was forever gazing at them on screen and thinking about them or discussing them with Mark and Ian or Nicola.

I met Nicola on Big Brother when the regular make-up lady got pregnant and Nicola was rushed in as a replacement. I didn’t get the original lady pregnant – just to be clear, she was married and in a loving relationship, it had nothing to do with me. Although, not long after starting work with me Nicola, too, was gestating a person in her belly. I adored Nicola instantly, she was incredibly maternal even before she turned her uterus into a bastard factory (literally, she’s not married). Her presence immediately relaxes me. She reminds me of where I’m from and of what’s real and important, she smells clean and laughs dirty. Her hair is all reflective like a shimmering chocolate lake and even when she pulls my quiff a bit or gets mascara in my eye I know she loves me. The four of us, Nicola, Mark, Ian and me, would sit in my fart-ridden dressing-room (I think it was nerves, she hardly ever does it now) and laugh about the show.

Once in a while I’d get a crush on a housemate and it would really add to the excitement of the show, knowing they’d soon be out, all pie-eyed from the flashbulbs, and I’d be there with my hair combed and a bunch of daffodils. I didn’t have affairs with that many housemates; as a percentage it’d barely register, but there were a few and it was bloody brilliant. It was like watching Indiana Jones on telly, then looking out the window on to the patio to see him out there cracking his whip, with his top off and his big, gorgeous brown boobs all jiggling about.

The most reported of my affairs was with Makosi, because I believe she spoke to the papers. Well, kiss and tells have never especially bothered me as I am lucky in my vanilla sexuality. I’m not into anything weird, I just love girls. That woman was delicious, she could’ve kissed and told about the darkest corners of my soul and I’d’ve simply raised a glass to her gold medal knockers and Venusian bum. She was lovely. All the better for having seemingly crept out of my TV set at nightfall and brought my dreams pulsating into reality.

For a fella who was a bit of a chubby nitwit at school, the status I was afforded at this new institution was like a late graduation party. Many of the Big Brother housemates were hapless goons, but a considerable number were bloody easy on the eye-hole and now, looking back, I realise I was lucky. Really lucky to have had such a fun job with such lovely companions and such gorgeous people to flirt with. The show became increasingly successful, ratings grew, and childhood comic idols like Bob Mortimer, David Baddiel and Frank Skinner would tune in, which made me feel sanctioned. My stand-up grew from regular “circuit gigs” above pubs to extravagant cabarets with screaming girls and blokes demanding I repeat my daft catchphrases – “Ballbags, you swine! I pulled down my trousers and pants …” See? Daft. E4, the digital channel we were on, offered me new shows, as did other channels. Lesley Douglas, Controller of the world’s biggest radio station BBC Radio 2 as well as its titchy, digital sibling BBC 6 Music, offered me a show on the latter, and MTV, the station I’d been hurled out of in controversy and disgrace as a worthless junky a few years earlier, came back with the amazing offer of a sexy chat show.

Nicola I kidnapped to install in my ever-growing surrogate family. One way or another I felt kind of isolated as a kid, and consequently as an adult, or tall child or whatever it is I am, I’ve been team building like Brian Clough. Animals, children and the working class comprise the company in which I’ll feel most at ease. I suppose then I should look for a combination of those attributes, buy a caravan and settle down. Though half an hour in bed with a pitbull puppy would be most disconcerting. As my friends grow older (whilst I curiously remain Pan-frozen) there are more children in my life. John Rogers, my invaluable moral barometer and good-humoured collaborator, has a pair of sons that I adore and with whom I can retreat for hours into lies and whimsy, lost in the boundless lunacy of their impulses and thoughts. Oliver, the oldest, is seven now and studious, and quizzes more thoroughly my assertions about unseen pixie kingdoms that thrive unseen beneath the Leytonstone streets. Joey, who is four and a half, has a bazooka mind that shells the world with scenarios and commands that would see an adult condemned to Bedlam. The last time I saw him he told me he wanted me to eat his heart, smiling as he spoke with twinkling wonder. And Nicola has since kicked out her belly squatter, Minnie, a delicate, tiny fairy charwoman.

After a recent work lunch at which most of my misfit tribe were in attendance, John Noel, the terrifying anti-hero of my first book, said as he left the table, “You’ve built a family for yourself there, Russell, the family you’ve always wanted.” Then, strolling towards the restaurant door, he added in the thick Manchester accent he has bequeathed to his eldest, Nik, “Bunch of fuckin’ weirdos, but a family.”

It was not only Nicola who was pregnant at work. I too was up the duff with a ghoulish tummy brood. Inside my gut hummed a chimera. A monstrous amalgamation of glam-rock icons and cartoon characters gestated in my womb. As Big Brother’s popularity grew, the delivery of this beast became imminent. Eventually it burst forth – devouring me whole as I bore it – this spindly liquorice man, this sex-crazed linguistic bolt of tricks and tics and kohl-eyed winks. Clad in black like a hangman or highwayman with dagger boots and hurricane hair came my creation. An organic construction sufficiently macabre to contend with the chemical warfare of modern fame, and though this monster bore my name he did not resemble the delicate schoolboy or battered addict that preceded him – no, this creature was ready.

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