FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION
That night stays with me to this day for the simple reason that it was the first time in my short lifespan that one of my biggest fears became a reality – a fear all millennials share when it comes to life: the fear of doing it wrong. Fucking up. Becoming an adult is scary and easy to get wrong, so this fear of fucking it up hangs over us like a rain cloud hangs over a cartoon character having a bad day. University costs a fortune, reality-TV stars are millionaires by the age of 21 and everyone on social media seems to be smashing life (as well as avocados). So if you take a wrong turn at any point, well, why did you even bother? Success has changed from a marathon to a sprint and the starting line is very much over-capacity. You’d better make it to the finish and you’d better do it quick! I mean, who wants success in their fifties? You can’t even look good in the photos.
The really weird thing is that for years failure was seen as a necessary rite of passage to success. Like many of you reading this I can often find myself deep in a late-night YouTube hole. And when I’m properly stuck down there, one of my most common places of solace, after blackheads being popped and kittens performing on musical instruments, is the inspirational talk, normally a celebrity collecting an honorary degree with a rolled-up certificate in one hand, a funny hat on his or her head and some inspirational music in the background, which I do hope was added in after. I mean, surely even the most wet-behind-the-ears graduate would realise the ridiculous levels of self-importance attached to bringing your own Enya CD to a university speech. Anyway, the point is that during these talks failure is hyped up beyond belief, fetishised to the young people in the slightly less funny hats who look up in awe.
These stories begin in various ways: ‘I didn’t land my first proper acting job until I was 40,’ ‘I had several failed companies before making my millions aged 55,’ ‘I sawed my own arm off with a penknife.’ Yet despite the severity and diversity of the challenges our speakers have faced, they always end the same … ‘But look at me now.’ You don’t get much more adult than that! Standing in front of an audience being open and frank about all your failings but still managing to have achieved something special – now that is good-quality adulting.
Failure today, however, simply isn’t an option. You must succeed young, without any periods spent on the dole and ideally with all your limbs still attached. Failure to meet this new-found desire to succeed quickly leaves us in a constant state of flux, doubting our every decision. It still blows my mind when I’m watching some reality TV show and I see a 14-year-old being interviewed backstage saying something like ‘I’ve been working my whole life for this’ or ‘This is my one shot.’ I feel like grabbing them and screaming, ‘There’s no rush – when I was 14 I was sitting in a caravan watching someone chop a wasp in half!’
Despite the knowledge that time is on my side I have those moments of doubt every day; sometimes it’s a light murmur under the surface and other times it’s debilitating in its severity, but it’s always there. The feeling that I’m not good enough, I’ve not achieved enough, I’m not happy enough, that’s not good enough, they’re not good enough, I’m not thin enough, my photos don’t get liked enough, my job isn’t impressive enough, I don’t earn enough and so on. It will continue, I imagine, until death. Sweet, blissful death. And even then I’ll be thinking, ‘Oh Christ, I’ve only gone and died – this is embarrassing.’
As depressing as it may sound, these worries are necessary for our journey into adulthood. Without a fear of failure or a desire to achieve we would all just coast along, never really achieving anything. We’ve all got that mate who’s seemingly happy all the time. Who wants to be like them? They’re creepy – constantly smiling, never hungover, big fan of their boss, constantly eating ‘superfoods’. Get in the bin. I’d rather be in a Wetherspoons chatting to my equally hungover friend Karen about how Jim from accounts is a fucking prick, his eyes are too close together, I hate those ‘wacky ties he wears’ and ‘correctomundo’ isn’t an actual word, it’s a waste of oxygen.
Young people today seem to fail to realise how young they actually are. If you are under the age of 25 you have no fucking clue how many bites at the cherry you actually might have. Fuck up a bit. It’s really important. Fuck up. Hell, if you’re reading this on a bus, punch the person sitting next to you. You could go to jail for two years, get out and still be eligible for a young person’s railcard. You are so young. Yet despite this knowledge of our youth, a fear of failing is what seems to pin our generation down. Anyway, enough waffle, let’s get started. Here we go – an adult man who once feared failure, avoided it at all costs, will now retell each and every failure he’s ever had to you, the reader, so you can realise that maybe failure isn’t all that bad.
CHAPTER 1
Mollycoddled
When you watch as much Love Island as I’m contractually required to do, you really do start to become enthralled by every single minute of it. Don’t get me wrong, there are downsides. I mean, essentially I am paid to sit in a small booth while a bunch of young people go into a villa and, well, fuck each other, and then I … watch. For ages. For too long, you might even say. That’s how I pay my mortgage. Worse still, my parents have seen to it that my overly supportive millennial upbringing didn’t end at the point I left home for London to become a stand-up – not a chance. My parents still keep every cutting, record every show and retweet every bit of praise I receive on their own custom-made Twitter accounts, or ‘Iain Shrines’ as they hate that I call them. My dad’s account is the very cleverly named MySonDoesJokes – give him a follow, he’d bloody love that. My sister is a bit angry about it, but MyDaughterDoesMediaManagement doesn’t quite have the same ring.
Having supportive parents is wonderful but somewhat annoying for me as an artist. I mean, all good art comes from pain – great artists have suffered and then told their stories to the world through their chosen medium. Thanks to Alison and Rodger being bloody saints means I’ve had none of that. I’m trying to write a book here, Mum and Dad, can you please give me something to work with? They haven’t even had a divorce, the selfish pricks! I’ve tried everything to get something out of them but they are simply too good.
‘Fuck you, Mum and Dad, I’m going to go be a comedian.’
‘Great! We can drive you to all your gigs.’
‘You are missing the point!’
The issue with my supportive parents – other than a lack of exposure to failure, the creation in my head of an imaginary safety net and an inflated sense of self-worth, all of which we will get round to talking about very soon – is the fact that when I say my parents watch everything, I do mean everything. Being the voice of Love Island and knowing that your parents watch is like being a kid watching a film with your parents when a raunchy sex scene would come on (my most vivid memory was the scene in Braveheart; at one point you see actual boobage – as a pre-teen I was in bits!) and you had that horrible moment of knowing that you and your parents were watching sex together, they knew they were watching sex with their child and the whole family would just sit in silence as Mel Gibson had his merry way with Catherine McCormack. Everyone would be transfixed by the screen, which by this time was absolutely covered in people having sex – it looked like the inside of an old phone box coated in those sex-line phone cards. The ones where you phone up and someone talks dirty down the phone to you – or so I’ve been told.
The entire evening would change from a chilled-out ‘movie night’ to a social time-bomb waiting to detonate in sexual congress and awkwardness, which would ultimately result in you praying for the sofa to gain sentience and gobble you up whole, or at least take you through to another room where neither your parents nor scenes of any sort of a sexual nature would be present.
Well,