‘There you go, Father, that’s them off to the outside beds … Now what’s happening is that she has gone down there to perform what I believe is called a b –’
Sorry, I can’t. I just can’t. Anyway, you get the idea – the whole thing can be very grim. The thing I can be grateful for is that when it comes to Love Island my parents play a far more passive role in their viewing experience, because normally when it comes to the TV my parents enjoy something much more immersive. One Easter, I had a Saturday night off work, which for a stand-up comedian is very rare.
The upside of my job is that I’m my own boss and have days to myself to do as I please. In the majority of cases this will take the form of sitting in my pants playing FIFA, as this pleases me very much. However, the same can’t be said for the majority of the population, so as a stand-up comedian you have to work around everyone else’s social calendar. This means weekends and bank holidays are not a time to relax and socialise with friends, but instead mean going to theatres to entertain people who want to relax and socialise with theirs. Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of free time being a stand-up comedian, and people often say to me it must be amazing not working during the day – you can just do what you like. And, to be honest, the first few years are incredible. However, after a couple of years or so there are only so many empty pubs you can sit in, or 14-year-old French kids you can smash on FIFA before the solitude becomes all too much.
Anyway, the point is I had a very rare Saturday night off, so I decided to spend it training up to Edinburgh to surprise my mum and dad. On arrival I walked into our living room to see my parents watching the television, as is customary on a Saturday night; however, my folks were not sitting on the couch as would be customary. My parents were sitting in the middle of the living room, on office chairs, facing away from the television, just staring at the wall. I approached the two pensioners, my brain quickly trying to work out if I could afford to send them both into homes, and asked them what was going on, to which my mother proudly declared: ‘We’re watching The Voice and playing along at home.’
My parents were watching The Voice and only turning around when they liked the voice of the person they were listening to. My mum wasn’t best pleased, however, as good old Dad had refused to turn even once, instead spending his Saturday night angrily perched on an old office chair, screaming into a wall: ‘Shite, he’s shite, she’s shite, everyone’s shite.’ I once mentioned this on Scott Mills’s Radio 1 show, and someone texted in to tell me you can also have the same ‘play along at home’ Saturday night experience by watching Take Me Out with friends and giving everyone a torch. I can imagine that really kicking off after a few bottles of wine have been sunk. Give it a go – tweet me the results!
NEVER GO CARAVANNING WITH YOUR PARENTS
Parents often say they want to give their kids everything their own childhood lacked. How many times have you seen some rich rapper in a television interview speaking about how they’re going to give their kids ‘all the stuff I never had growing up’? But in all honesty does a five-month-old need Gucci slip-ons? Yes, they look cute and durable, but was your childhood irreparably ruined because you didn’t have a pair of diamond-encrusted slippers? I actually think it’s often the negative experiences of growing up that help shape us. Without the rough do you always appreciate the smooth? I now really appreciate going on proper adult holidays, and that most certainly has a lot to do with my holidays growing up.
You see, as a child my parents made a big decision that would have a massive impact on my life for years to come. A decision more and more couples are making in this modern era. They decided … to buy a caravan. Yup, every summer Mum, Dad, my sister and me would cram ourselves into a four-berth and head off to Loch Lomond, Aberfeldy, Biggar, Aviemore or some other Scottish holiday destination that sounds less like an exotic getaway than a Middle Earth council estate, where you expect to see a bunch of orcs stealing lead from a roof or a bunch of elves drinking cider in the park, but instead witness old people attending bingo nights and families in tents entertaining themselves with games of charades.
So despite their fantasyland names, they were far from the exciting world of the ‘Rohan’ Bronx or the ‘Gondor’ high rises – they were caravan parks. And not just any caravan parks – Scottish caravan parks. The wettest places known to man. If you listen very carefully on arrival to any Scottish caravan park you can actually hear David Attenborough narrating Blue Planet. I mean, most kids return from summer holidays with a tan. I would hobble into class with trench foot. Caravans can’t deal with the extremity of Scottish weather. This is the sort of weather that requires bricks and mortar. In the story of the three little pigs not one of them chooses to stay in a caravan. Not one. And one of those idiots opted for hay. That means a pig, a fucking pig, looked at a caravan and thought to himself, ‘Nah, I’d rather live in a house made of horse food.’
I always think that if you’re buying a place of residence, you want to do it somewhere respectable. When we shot off to buy our caravan we went to a field. ‘An area of open land, especially one planted with crops or pasture, typically bounded by hedges or fences’, that’s what the dictionary defines a field as. Not as ‘a really brilliant place to buy a respectable house’. I would say the only thing of any value that has been bought in a field is a field.
Once or twice a year the Stirling posse would pack up and head off on our epic adventures to mystical faraway lands, such as Biggar, Forfar, Sandylands – the list goes on, and at no stage improves in quality. The other issue was that we had to drag our place of residence on the back of a clapped-out Ford Escort, meaning that speed was never really our friend. Hours would be spent travelling for very little reward (distance). When you are an excitable child off on their summer holidays, nothing quite takes the gleam off a four-hour car journey more than having your dad trot up a small hill to say to your mum: ‘I can see our house from here.’ I remember visiting family friends on our ‘holidays’. Like casually popping in for the day. On a holiday. It just wasn’t right. A holiday destination shouldn’t be a place where you can pop in for the day. It’s a holiday, not someone’s front room. I want to go to Mallorca and join a kids’ club run by a depressed actor like all the other normal children!
Now, I don’t want to fully destroy the legend that is the family caravan holiday. I’ve got many happy memories of that place. Yes, it was so cold that I vividly remember my mum having to get more dressed for bed than she had for the hike we had taken earlier that day. Yes, the thing was so small and the beds so close together that every time my dad farted I could genuinely feel my hair blow back. And yes, once I watched a child chop a wasp in half. But there was so much fun to be had fishing, boating, climbing, with the friends we made, the weirdos we met and that time my uncle Bill stopped a family from going home in the middle of the night because they thought a power station was going to blow up. The couple stayed, the power station didn’t obliterate us all, everyone was happy!
There is fun to be had in these places, and as a child sometimes it’s important to have to go and find it. Similarly, every time I now find myself on a sun lounger in my all-inclusive Spanish holiday resort, I think back to that tiny little Elddis caravan, and with a wry smile on my face take a sip on my Corona and realise how lucky I am. I’m now a great big adult that can decide where I want to go on my holidays, and sorry you have to hear this, Mum and Dad, but it isn’t fucking Falkirk.
I’m happy with what I had and delighted with what I’ve now got. Now that’s good parenting. I’m not scarred by the hardships of my childhood holidays, nor am I left with some misplaced sense of entitlement after too many trips to Disneyland as a youngster. And thank God for that, because is there anything on this entire planet more intolerable than a spoilt brat?
I’ve spent many years working in children’s television, and there is nothing more heartbreaking than being told someone important is coming to a filming day and they’re bringing their kid with them. I’d like to say at this point that if you’re someone high up in the world of kids’ TV reading this and you have children and I’ve met them, this definitely isn’t about them. It