I have noticed recently that I am getting recognised in the street a lot more than usual, which is a good indication that things are moving in the right direction. Ninety-nine per cent of the time this is a pleasurable experience with people just wanting to say "Hi!" or to tell me they enjoy my stuff or occasionally shout out a catchphrase (coming up the escalator on the tube the other day I saw a man clock me as he was coming down. I could almost see his brain whirring as he tried to think of something to say to me and what he came up with was a half-hearted shout of "Cumpkins!" which made me laugh. Especially because it must have been confusing for other people around me). Occasionally however the attention is unwanted and intimidating. I had largely forgotten about this as it's been a while since I walked around worried that some idiot or idiots would recognise me and give me a hard time. Or just drunkenly outstay their welcome as has happened in Edinburgh a few times, most notably when I ended up having a mini fight (as you'll know if you've read my book). When I was on TV in the 1990s I used to occasionally feel self-conscious or worried about being recognised in public situations and getting into trouble, even though it hardly ever happened. Once when walking down the street a gang of lads on the other side of the street recognised me and one shouted "There's that prick off the telly. Let's get him!" It was said aggressively and seriously, but I decided the best course of action was to just carry on walking at the same pace and ignore them, in the hope they were just showing off. Luckily it turned out that they were. Another time when I was in Bath having dinner with a friend in a restaurant a group of teenagers spotted me and gathered outside the window, gawping at me and then becoming more boisterous and shouting. Again I ignored them, but they got more offensive and when I went to the toilet two of them followed me down and made threatening comments, but were again only showing off and nothing came of it. Back upstairs after keeping dignified I finally lost my temper and told the group what I thought of them and swore at them a bit, to the disappointment of the other diners who thought I had conducted myself well up until then. Why the staff hadn't moved the kids on I don't know. These kids had just got over excited about seeing someone from the TV in their town but, being teenagers, had to seem cool and detached and so ended up being rude to me, when in all likelihood they probably liked the show. It's a passive aggressive thing that I see quite a bit in fans of my work. I guess most of this stuff now happens on the internet, where people assume you must be a certain way or full of yourself and resolve to take you down with cruel words. Again most people are lovely and understand the relationship and that I don't think I am better than other people because of my starring role as Percy in Servants.
But like I say, in more recent times I have felt fairly anonymous in public, no longer worried about being in public or on the tube and any time I have been noticed it's mainly been by someone who likes me. When I had a Hitler moustache I suppose I again experienced those paranoid feelings of being conspicuous and fear of unprovoked aggression, though once again nothing much happened.
Tonight, on the way home from another preview which had gone OK, although not as well as I had hoped, I was tired and looking forward to my bed. I got on a fairly empty tube carriage and sat down and played Conquest on my iPhone and kept myself to myself. I became aware of a man on the opposite row of seats talking in a loud and drunken voice. He was attempting to engage with a woman sitting there on her own, who was just ignoring him. I decided ignoring him was the best course of action too. If I looked up and caught his eye then he might take that as a signal to try and talk to me too. He was affable enough, but in that very passive aggressive way that I have discussed. He just wanted to be everyone's friend and thought everyone should chat to each other regardless of whether they knew each other or not, but was annoyed when they didn't feel the same, unable to appreciate that perhaps they didn't want to talk to him not because of social convention, but because he was a drunken dick.
I put all my energies and focus into my iPhone so wasn't really paying attention. He ended up talking to another guy a bit further up the carriage. I don't know if they knew each other or not, but they shared a beer. The drunk man was aware that this was strictly speaking illegal and addressed the carriage, "No one minds if I have a beer do they?" but everyone kept their heads down, aware from experience that this situation had the potential to spill over from affability to aggression.
At this time I was not even thinking that the man might recognise me. I just wanted him not to engage with me. Like everyone else I could sense the negative possibilities of this occasion.
I had half an ear on what was going on, just in case things escalated, but outwardly appeared in my own world. And when the man came over and sat near me again I assumed he was having another crack at the woman opposite. Part of me wanted to intervene and tell him to leave her alone, but she was dealing with things OK and I knew I could actually make things worse if I wasn't careful.
I then became vaguely aware that the man was talking to me. He'd clearly recognised me and was asking if I would tell him a joke. As most of you know I will give nearly anyone the time of day and have a chat with them, but I knew this guy was trouble and also he was being pretty rude. He hadn't said hello or tried to introduce himself, he'd just realised who I was and then assumed that because he knew me he was allowed to be over familiar and passive aggressive and that because he wanted to talk to me that I should talk to him. I just concentrated harder on my iPhone and didn't engage. Most people would have taken that as a signal to leave it, but this man was drunk and self-regarding and persisted. But I was in a no win situation. If I talked to him then I would have to carry on a conversation that I didn't want to have with a man who was clearly a prick for maybe the next half an hour and if I ignored him I risked making him more annoyed and more persistent.
Finally he got the message that I wasn't interested, though kept up a monologue to the other passengers about how I was pretending to ignore him. He went back over to his drinking buddy and though I couldn't hear it all he was clearly discussing with the guy who I was. The friend didn't know me so he had to tell him I was a comedian, but now he was riled by my reaction to him, he was explaining that I was, of course, shit. He didn't seem aware of the fact that he had been the one who had wanted to engage with a person that he now apparently thought was rubbish. He was doing this for my benefit, not realising that far from being insulted that it would only make me feel glad that I hadn't conversed with a man who apparently only wanted to talk to me because he recognised me, even though he didn't like what I did. He almost made me laugh when he described me as like Rob Chubby Brown only a bit more intellectual, which was at least an imaginative attempt at an insult from someone too drunk to think clearly. But essentially he was annoyed that I had ignored him, was taking this as evidence of the fact that I was up myself, rather than daring to acknowledge the truth that it was because he was a rude dick and he wasn't going to let it go.
So far I had acted with dignity, but this rudeness was wearing me down and I was feeling threatened and remembering the downside of being even a vaguely recognisable figure.
The man, who I hadn't even looked at up to now, then came back to the opposite seat, reached over, touched me on the knee and again said, "Go on, tell us a joke." Again he was affable enough. There was no direct threat, and yet he couldn't see that this unwarranted interference was aggressive in its own way. He had encroached on the space of someone who clearly wanted to be left alone, he had touched me without any indication that that would be OK and worst of all he was just coming up to a comedian that he didn't know in a public place and asking me to tell him a joke, to be his performing monkey. And let's not forget he had just been loudly slagging me off only seconds before. It wasn't the greatest seduction I had ever experienced.
And I lost my cool a little bit. Not to the point that I was going to start anything physical, although in a few minutes I would be annoyed enough to want to. But I looked up at him to see a small, wiry man, with tattoos on his arms, holding a beer bottle and looking at me imploringly and I told him to fuck off and leave me alone.
"Don't be like that," he said, "I just want you to tell me a joke. There's no need to be aggressive."
I told him that it was clear that I didn't want to be disturbed and that he was being rude and that he should leave me alone.
"I'm not being threatening, so why are you being threatening?" he asked.
"But you are being threatening. You're making everyone feel uncomfortable and if you talk to someone and they don't talk back that is generally a signal to leave them alone."
"No one else is threatened by me," he said.
I asked the woman if she had been threatened, but she didn't want to get involved and that was fair enough. Nor did I.
The drunk guy then went back on the assault, telling me how unfunny I was and how I had confirmed everything he'd thought about me. He apparently knew I would be like this.
"Right," I tetchily said, "So you thought in advance that I was funny and you knew that I was also a cunt, that's what you thought about me, but evenso you wanted to come over and ask this unfunny cunt to tell you a joke. You'd think if you had thought that in advance that you a) wouldn't want to hear a joke from someone who wasn't funny or b) talk to someone who you suspected was an unfriendly cunt."
Alas he was too far gone to understand the logic of what he was claiming. "I've seen you live," he informed me, "And you were shit. You aren't funny."
"So why ask me to tell you a joke? It doesn't make sense. Fuck off."
"Don't tell me to fuck off," he said, for the first time the crapulous affability in his eyes turning to something approaching aggression. I wondered if that beer bottle was about to be swung into my head. Everyone else in the carriage was sitting stock still trying not to get involved, except for a man sitting near me who was laughing a bit at my attempts to deal with this idiot. I wasn't scared though, "I'll tell you to fuck off if I want mate, if you deserve it. And you do deserve it. Leave me alone."
But he wasn't going to leave me alone. Just as I'd known at the start, he had wanted me to engage with him and now I had this would continue for as long as I was in the carriage with him. I was annoyed with myself for losing my temper and I had been much ruder than I intended. But I had been severely provoked. I was hot headed by now and worried about how things might progress, so I decided to leave the carriage at the next stop and hope he didn't follow me.
"Yeah that's right. Leave!" he said as if this was some kind of victory for him. "And try writing some jokes."
I attempted to shout something back at him about trying to not get so pissed that he couldn't think, but I should have just left it. I went into the next carriage, a bit red faced and flustered, where a mother was sitting with her three young boys. She looked a bit shocked and worried, clearly having heard the shouting and I reassured her that it was fine and that I was just escaping a drunk man.
It was a lot more fun in this carriage. The kids were on sugar highs eating doughnuts and ginger biscuits. One had a tube of sugar paste to decorate the biscuits but was just sucking the yellow liquid directly out of the tube. The mother was trying womanfully to cope with these exuberant boys and did a pretty good job of treating the situation with humour and firmness. They made me laugh a good deal, which was a relief after what I'd just been through. I cast the occasional glance to the next carriage to check that my nemesis was not thinking of encroaching on this scene.
After a few weeks where I have been enjoying comedy more than ever and loving the progress I have been making, this was a little reminder of the downside. But it's a minor downside. And although this drunkard probably hoped he might make me question my ability to make people laugh by telling me I had no jokes (which I would pretty much acknowledge to be true) I am now confident enough in myself to know that I am funny enough to do this job. When we were on TV I think I secretly felt that I might not be that funny and had just got lucky (I was wrong about that, but I was more insecure then) but now it's going to take more than one drunk man asking me to tell him a joke and then telling me that my jokes are rubbish when I won't tell him one to bring me down.
Doubtless he will go on, if he remembers any of this, to tell people what an arrogant dick I am and how I am up myself. So if you hear stories like that about anyone, do consider the possibility that it's the person telling the story who is the dick. After all I was eight days sober and in quite a good mood before this happened (weirdly I had just been thinking about how last time I gave up drinking drunk people would gravitate towards me, like I was a drunkard version of the little kid in Sixth Sense "I see drunk people").
