My Booky Wook: A Memoir of Sex, Drugs, and Stand-Up Read Online Free PDF Page B

reference point that I would have had (even now, I don’t feel like I am enmeshed in any particular identity in that area. Whenever I’m in any kind of social group, I always tend to think I won’t fit in, and gravitate toward an identity that will stand out).
    But, looking back, by the late ’70s and early ’80s, that old-fashioned sense of a monolithic working-class community had largely broken down. Where my nan on my dad’s side lived, at Lillechurch Road in Dagenham, everyone still worked at Ford’s.
    But there was no sense of cultural identity other than that. My granddad Bert had worked there too (my nan had remarried, some years after my dad’s father’s early death). But there was no cohesion. Nothing felt right. Everything seemed broken and ugly, boring and vacant.
    My paternal grandmother was fantastic, though. In terms of how she spoke, the obvious comparison would be Catherine Tate’s “Nan” character, but not hard.* My nan was kind and
    * Catherine Tate is an excellent character comedian, like Tracey Ullman. Her Nan character 28

    Shame Innit ?
    gentle, yet also very strong, and even dominant, in a non-aggressive way. I spent a lot of time in that house in Dagenham, growing up. My nan was an utterly benign presence in my life.
    And throughout my early years—until her death, when I was in my mid-twenties—my nan would fix me with a sympathetic stare, cock her head and say, “Aaah, shame, innit?,” as if my whole existence was vaguely regrettable. This was a sentiment with which I often concurred.
    One of the fi rst facilities I developed to keep some distance between me and adversity was showing off . When I was quite young, I did a Frank Spencer impression for my maternal grandmother—the one I didn’t much get on with.* (My friend Matt Morgan says it’s wrong to have Nan league tables, but I think that element of competition brings out the best in them.) My mum—who was my first audience, and an indulgent one at that—said, “He does a really good Frank Spencer—go on, do it.” So I did it, and everyone really laughed.
    “Do it again, do it again,” they cried. So I did. And they all agreed it wasn’t as good the second time. “No, you’ve lost it. You’ve lost that uncanny knack of impersonating Michael Crawford”—this precious window of opportunity had slammed shut almost as soon as it had opened.
    While the thrill of receiving consistent acclaim for my hilarious impressions was to be denied me for a little while longer, an additional source of dangerous nourishment was my dad’s resis a foulmouthed, working-class, sentimental cow.
    * Frank Spencer is a hapless clown who stars in the BBC sitcom Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em, in which he, weekly, fucks up a new job opportunity with his camp buff oonery, pratfalls and japes while maintaining a relationship with his inexplicably attractive wife, Betty. Th is
    character infiltrated me quite deeply, and has caused me to fuse fruity ineptitude with my inherent heterosexuality.
    29

    RUSSELL BRAND
    ervoir of porn. I think I always had a premature awareness of sexuality, but Ron Brand’s penchant for leaving me to occupy my infant mind with his cache of girlie magazines certainly did nothing to stem the erotic tide.
    I adored the cartoons in Playboy. Either they’d be one page, or sometimes a story drifting toward a climax where someone got their boobs out. There was something quite eerie and perverted about them. I suppose because they were cartoons and porn at the same time, and these are not two things you expect to see together. You kind of feel—especially as a four-year-old child—that cartoons should just be of rabbits, but even the rabbits had erotic connotations in that beloved filthy rag. All these magazines were always clear about the market they were catering for. They were called things like Jugs and Big Ones.
    “And what exactly is our target demographic? What were you hoping to capture at Jugs magazine?”