She made me do it guv …
We all have our celebrity stories but I like to think this one is slightly more interesting than some. Apart from anything else it lasted for a lot longer than the “I found myself in an airport toilet with Lady Gaga” type of encounter. Not that I’m snobbish. For us ordinary mortals any brush with the famous is usually a matter of happenstance and has very little to do with talent on our part – more a case of being in the right place at the right time (or the wrong place at the wrong time from the celebs point of view).
Probably helps to see it from the other side. I once met Mark Williams (Arthur Weasley from the Harry Potter movies) years ago on an unfashionable bit of Brighton beach when I was taking my youngest son for a stroll and a runaround on the children’s playground. The weather was just this side of seeking sanctuary in a greasy spoon, grey and spitting cold needles of wannabe rain (not unlike the precursor to a dementor attack in fact). Mr Williams and I were both wearing coats and scarves and hats and I suspect he was, like me, either nursing a hangover or wishing he was back in bed. Or both.
“Look” I said “it’s Mr Weasley”. My son looked suspicious. The famous actor looked pissed off. “Yes that’s right” he said wearily. “I’m Mr Weasley, Harry Potter’s friend”. The kids went off to play and we sat at opposite sides of the playground like two grumpy older men with hangovers. Which is exactly what we were in my case.
Even less exciting was my encounter with the comedian Arthur Smith on St Mary’s Mount in Guildford. The poor chap was all alone and it was a Sunday morning in the middle of winter. He just wanted some fresh air but I knew he was, like me, a South Londoner. It didn’t help that (recurring theme here) I was slightly hungover and couldn’t remember his name so when I accosted him it was the worst kind of intro possible.
“You’re that comedian bloke” I said.
I could almost hear the groan. You don’t need telepathy.
“Yes” he said. “I am that comedian bloke”.
“Love your work” I said desperately. He nodded and stomped off.
Googling him later I was thoroughly pissed off to find out that we went to the same secondary school. He was four years above me so we would have paced the same corridors and endured the same school dinners for at least three years before I did my O levels and he escaped Sixth Form. If only I had known that. It could have been a very different conversation.
But Jo Brand was something else. We actually worked in the same psychiatric hospital for two years and Jo was a Uni friend of my then wife, as they had both done the same combined degree and psychiatric nursing qualification. So although we were never close mates we did socialise together quite a lot. In fact if you read her first book there is a picture of her in my sister’s back garden on the day my wife and I got married as she was one of the guests. Not that I remember too much about it as I was still hungover from my stag do two nights before. Yes it was that good / bad.
Sometimes I wonder how I have made it to the age of sixty four. For the record my drinking in recent years has been very moderate and I always took more out of booze than it took out of me, as Mr Churchill once said.
Anyway Jo and I moved in the same circles, and I can say categorically that she was as honest, ethical and straight then as she comes across in her books, and as funny in real life as she is on stage, and on the telly. I only ever saw her angry when she felt people had been treated badly at work. She did however have the cleverest and most cutting wit and when my wife and I were discussing getting me some new clothes she chipped in that it was “about time I stopped looking like Man at C&A” – if you don’t get the reference google it. Think tank tops, multicouloured stripes and skin tight flares.
Jo always aspired to write so it is no surprising how accessible her books are. I remember us both turning up alone in a Camberwell pub for an evening with friends and whilst we waited for the crowds we started chatting, and it turned out that had both started writing an entry for some literary competition in a magazine, so we swapped notes. She of course went on to a life of fame and I stayed in the NHS with writing acting purely as a side hustle to help me cope with the ridiculous stresses of the day job.
But there was one incident that I still recall very vividly. We were both part of a crowd in the early nineteen eighties and very pissed one evening when the pub closed and we had to tip out on to the wide pavement. South London pubs then emptied slowly and chaotically with the potmen having to wrestle glasses our of drunken hands without too much violence ensuing.
Jo Brand was sitting in a white van with the sliding door open, turning the steering wheel backwards and forwards with her hands and making rasping noises like a car engine. No-one took much notice of this. It was the sort of thing Jo did. She then got out, said she needed the ladies, and forced her way back into the pub which had still not emptied.
A friend of mine whom I shall call The Dumpster was just as pissed as the rest of us, but he was notorious for having a lower control threshold (on one occasion he walked into the living room in someone’s house at a party, pulled out his willy and was about to piss in the fireplace until redirected by his long suffering wife to the toilet).
“Hey” he said “let’s steal Jo’s van”. Well it seemed like a good idea and I fancied a lift home so a few of us piled in as The Dumpster turned on the engine (the keys still being in the ignition) and we roared off up Camberwell New Road. It would not have made comfortable headlines in the South London Press if we had been caught as we were all nursing at the Maudsley (me in an auxilliary capacity so at least I had no profession registration to worry about – but you get the point). We were laughing at the thought of the look on Jo’s face when she came out of the pub and saw her wheels had vanished and debated how long we should wait before returning the van. Then someone said:
“Jo hasn’t got a van. In fact I’m not even sure she drives”.
It was then that something clicked. Jo had obviously walked out of the pub, seen an empty van with the door open and the keys in the ignition and decided to do what she did best, which was to have a bit of a laugh.
“I reckon it was stolen” said someone.
“Well it certainly bloody is now” came another voice from the tinny interior of the beaten up transit.
We dumped the van and said no more about it, The Dumpster frantically wiping the steering wheel and handbrake clean of prints. The next day we were all, mercifully, on different shifts, so nothing more was said.
Jo became famous. I went to work in patient’s rights then went on to NHS management. My wife and I divorced and she later died very suddenly from cancer. Jo sent our daughter a signed copy of her first book with condolences, which was a very her thing to do. That was the best part of twenty years ago.
In 20I8 I had tickets to see Jo Brand at the Hay Festival as she had just written a new book called Born Lippy. Whilst being interviewed she made a joking remark about her preference nowadays was for older bearded men as they could not run away quickly enough. I was undecided about whether to try and say hello as we had not seen each other for about thirty years but when the question and answer session had nearly petered out I managed to get the microphone for the last shout.
“I’m one of those older bearded men who can’t run very fast” I said and the audience laughed. Jo grinned and stared at me.
“You look very familiar” she said. “Did we used to go out together or something?”. No I said but there was a connection.
“You look like David Baddiel” she said. “When you stood up I thought Dave you made it after all even though you said you weren’t coming”.
I have to say it was a great moment to be compared to David Baddiel by Jo Brand. Two icons of my generation. I was chuffed by association as we say in South London. Afterwards I was last in for the book signing so explained the connection. She signed a copy of Born Lippy for my daughter, we did a selfie and the circle was complete. I felt a curious sense of closure.
Late last year I was standing on the platform of the Jubilee Line at Waterloo on the way to meet my brother at London Bridge. A young group of lads were chatting away and staring at me; then one of then broke from the group and came over.
“Scuse me mate” he said. “Sorry to bovver you and all that but my mate says he thinks you’re that comedian bloke who did Three Lions On A Shirt”.
“David Baddiel”
“Yeah that’s him!”
“Sorry to disappoint you, but no” I said. “Although you’re not the first person to make that mistake…”
Eyecatching 