This piece of good fortune, however, was not then garnished with market-driven plasticity, for the show itself in content was a rambling anarchic shambles where the three of us would harp on about our daily lives and torment each other like a bunch of dopey mates on a Sunday morning – which is what we were. It wasn’t a contrivance, it was legit. The only production came in the form of a few items, like competitions and the occasional (much too occasional, the station’s core listeners would argue) record. The BBC would give us grown-up producers to curtail us and to massage the mayhem into something resembling radio, but I always kicked against authority, usually our stewards would buckle like substitute teachers, and we’d continue with the chaos.
For an idyllic few months, while my fame buzzed along at a manageable level – a growing audience on Big Brother, a devoted MTV following – the 6 Music show was free-form fun. Perfect. We had the piratical spirit of Radio Caroline, it was naughty but in harmony with its listeners who stayed in constant email contact, sending requests and enquiries and flirting with us on MySpace. Me and Matt would bully the impossibly English Trevor about his specs and tank tops and incompetence around women, me and Trev would rile Matt about his hypochondria, and the pair of them would forever try to puncture the fast-expanding bubble of my pomposity. We thrived in the slipstream, sailing up the iTunes charts till the mainstream came a-calling when Kate Moss’s brief fly-over provided a GM boost to the natural crop. When Jonathan Ross, the king of chat, the icon of proletariat triumph in the bourgeois world of television, wanted me to be a guest on his Friday night chat show.
With that appearance and the subsequent brouhaha, the merry burble beneath the radar became a jagged siren that could not be ignored. Fame seeped in through every crack, soon the radio show was sodden with references to my new and exciting life, and we went to the top of the iTunes chart, replacing Ricky Gervais’s record-breaking podcasts.
I was resolutely single and suddenly women were available and I did not sip like a connoisseur, I barged through the vineyard kicking over barrels and guzzling grapes as they grew. Chianti, Bordeaux, Champagne, Thunderbirds – it’s all the same to me, frenzied and famished I chewed through glass and clenched the soil.
This is the kind of conduct that the News of the World and Daily Star relish. Soon the Sunday rags oozed with tales of my misdeeds, ghosts of the past rose from their graves, slung on a négligé and sputtered up half-truths for lazy bucks.
The machinery of celebrity grinds into life with alarming pace and clarity. I was abstracted from myself, cast as Lothario and condemned for crimes of their creation. One night after a gig an attractive girl accompanied me home. Once there I assumed there might be some canoodling, instead she snooped about the place like she’d been sent to flush out a mouse. It was agreed that we’d never be wed and she cleared off. Forty-eight hours later I was astonished to see an exclusive piece in the Sunday Mirror in which she recounted the experience in vulgar detail. It transpired that she was an undercover journalist, UNDERCOVER! Like I was running a sweatshop, or an illegal whelk-picking operation.
Has journalism sunk so that the practitioners of the profession of Bob Woodward and Charles Dickens are truffling out scoops by pretending to be up for bum fumble? Not to expose a terrifying circle of nonces or racists but simply to gain entry into one man’s private life? Would John Pilger, to expose corruption in the developing world, turn up at the palace of some sweltering general smothered in peach lip-gloss with his quim all waxed? I should coco! He’s a professional. She didn’t find much of note, only observing that I had a flat-screen TV and a Jacuzzi (I had neither) and that the cat’s food was in a bowl on the floor – where the hell else would it be? If you put it on the sideboard he can’t reach it and if you put it on the ceiling it falls out.
A few weeks after appearing on Jonathan’s chat show he invited me to his home. It was a glimpse of a possible future. His wife Jane is beautiful, doting and fun, his children are confident, polite, cheeky and balanced (that’s their characters not their names, he’s not that mad), and the house is a vibrant den of pets and pleasure. I saw there a chance to break the chain of dysfunction of which I was the conclusion and to which I still clung.
Could I settle with a beautiful girl who truly loved me and build something real, that would remain after the fanfare and nourish my heart like a Tuscan supper instead of surviving on instant soup and blue drinks? I could not, I was blazing through thin air, spun out on vertigo and fellatio.
At Jonathan’s house, when the canine riot abates and he talks, you can see why he has become the host of a nation’s Friday night. Where confidence ends some new quality is assumed that smoothes you through the evening, relaxed and entertained. Jane will once in a while roll her eyes more deftly than he’ll ever roll an “R” and reminds him that he’s being daft, but they both know it’s thoroughly amusing. Jonathan seemingly himself selects which will be the UK’s next comedy phenomenon, he did it with Vic and Bob, Little Britain, Ricky Gervais, The Mighty Boosh, and now he had chosen me. He has a fine sense of humour – not only is he funny, he also recognises it in others. He has maintained his relevance for decades and, even though he was thought of as cool and edgy when I watched him as a kid, he has now, whilst the country’s most highly paid broadcaster, kept that edge and remained relevant. He is a good bloke. One night after I’d sought sanctuary at his house he gave me a lift home in some daft orange car which, had he not been driving, I’m sure he could’ve worn. The unfamiliar domestic comfort I’d experienced had heightened my awareness of my teetering solitude. For a moment fame felt scary. Jonathan sensed my disease.
“How you coping with it all?”
“Yeah. It’s alright. I feel bit lonely sometimes. A bit exposed.” Jonathan employed compassion. As much compassion as a millionaire entertainer in a sports car, puffing on a huge cigar, can ever be expected to show. He exhaled.
“When you get famous,” he began, “they give you a lot.” The millions, the car, the cigar? I wondered. “But they also take something from you.” He inhaled. “And you don’t ever get it back.” The car then filled with smoke and Jonathan gave me a smile that suggested he’d be there for me if it ever got too tough. I didn’t know just how close.
The kiss and tells ripened through the summer, and every morning paper brought a new harvest. Barely did I have a kiss that didn’t entail a tell. To me though it didn’t seem pejorative, it merely helped the narrative which they’d concocted, in which I was complicit, that I was a wild man Lothario. These terms were actually used – wild man, oddball, sex insect, spindle-limbed lust merchant, sex inspector; I may’ve invented some of them, but that was very much the tone. It suited me, though; it was a type of notoriety that I enjoyed. The more right-wing papers used me as an icon of moral decline. In the Daily Mail I was second only to immigrants and paedophiles as the most dangerous entity to have breached our shores. “Lock up your daughters,” they bawled. If, when you encounter that kind of hysteria, you’re viewing it through a lens of agonised memories of discontent and rejection, it kind of feels like approval. Bruce Dessau, a respected comedy critic, interviewed me for a proper paper and said, “You realise you’re a phenomenon, don’t you?” I genuinely didn’t. I’d noticed now that my lifelong self-obsession seemed to have crept into a consciousness beyond my skull. But as my life has been a devotional pursuit of success, its arrival is only noticeable piecemeal, or when an icon appeared upon the horizon.
“Noel Gallagher was here asking for you,” said the ecstatic barman at the pub in the West End of London where I was doing stand-up, almost clambering over to embrace me. “He asked what time the gig was on and if you were definitely performing, then he left.” Noel Gallagher, yob poet, spitting lyrics and epigrams and scoring a decade with what I’d call nonchalance – if it wasn’t so French and he wasn’t so English. David Walliams lives in Noel’s old house in Belsize Park, Celebrity Strasse. When Oasis ruled the world “Supernova Heights” was his Camelot. My drama school was round the corner and at night