Sunday Herald
Alan Carr’s advice for underwhelming young stand-ups: steal the reviews of a more popular act. The camp comedian was struggling to sell his show at the 2003 Edinburgh Fringe and resorted to “unconventional methods” to fix the problem.
“I photocopied a headline from a review of Jimmy Carr’s show – ‘This Carr is the Rolls Royce of comedy’ – and pasted it on my own poster” he reveals in his autobiography, Look Who It Is! “He was furious (quite understandably) and was seen in the Pleasance Courtyard yanking them off my posters in a rage.”
Recalling the incident now, Carr is suitably contrite. But you suspect a part of him still admires his own barefaced larceny.
“Oh I know, but I’m not too proud about that,” the 32-year-old says. “I bumped into Jimmy the other day and he said how he’d enjoyed listening to the audiobook. He can laugh about it now.”
Carr and his co-host Justin Lee Collins inherited The Friday Night Project, now The Sunday Night Project from his namesake, Rob Rouse and Sharon Horgan, turning an ailing, tacky, post-pub celebrity chat and entertainment show into a successful one. Currently hosting the quiz show Celebrity Ding Dong, which pits the likes of Coronation Street cast members against their Eastenders counterparts, Carr currently rivals his pre-Carrsor for sheer ubiquity on Channel 4, joking about the “family business” after signing a reported £3million exclusive contract with the broadcaster.
You might think that such duplicitous marketing and shrewd negotiating skills would stand Carr in good stead when he tries to impress Sir Alan Sugar in Comic Relief’s forthcoming Celebrity Apprentice.
Yet he maintains that he has “no business acumen at all” and reckons that the experience will be a steep learning curve.
“The people on The Apprentice are so hilarious. ‘I will tread on whoever it takes to get ahead and give 110%’. I find that fascinating. How on earth do you get like that?”
A former toilet attendant and gearbox degreaser, Carr’s book relates his awkward teenage years and a series of mundane jobs before, during and since the drama graduate left Middlesex University. He was working in a call centre till the day before he departed for the Edinburgh Fringe in 2001 and won the BBC New Comedy Award. From a long line of footballers, the eldest son of ex-Northampton Town manager Graham Carr’s stand-up typically focuses on the down-to-earth and everyday, (albeit delivered in his inimitably shrill voice), in contrast to the glamorous circles he’s assumed to move in.
“My comedy is essentially me just taking as I find,” he explains. “I’m thinking of going on tour next year and I’m writing at the moment. It’s hard though, because you don’t want to come across as ‘ooh, I was in the west wing with Clara my maid’, but you don’t want to be patronising by talking about 100 teabags for £1 in Kwiksave either. What makes it worse is that people imagine me forever taking private jets to Elton John’s tiara balls.”
It was during his time as the audience warm-up for Friday Night with Jonathan Ross that he first saw the glitz of showbusiness dissolving before his eyes.
“I was meeting all these amazing people: Cameron Diaz, Justin Timberlake, Jane Fonda, Paul Newman,” he recalls. “But it was a bit depressing really because you see them without their make-up, asking where the toilet is and moodily kicking off. Mind you, I met Grace Jones recently at the Q Awards and she was like stars should be, otherworldly. I’d been told by someone that she lived in Northampton, so I asked her about it and she simply said ‘What is Northampton?’
“These days, you see stars in magazines with their wardrobe malfunctions and stepping in dog’s mess, they’re just the same as everyone else.”
Carr’s debut DVD, Tooth Fairy, sold over 500,000 copies and he’s hoping his autobiography proves just as popular this festive season. Alongside Ding Dong and a new series of the Sunday Night Project starting in December, he’s also More magazine’s celebrity interviewer and is currently narrating Alan Carr’s Comedy Outings on Radio 2.
Comedy has afforded the dentally distinctive presenter “far more opportunities than I’d have got if I’d stuck to acting” and he recently made his movie debut in the upcoming Nativity, alongside Pam Ferris, Martin Freeman and Ashley Jensen. He plays a bitchy theatre critic, helping him to exorcise his Edinburgh Fringe memories of awards judges dozing on his front row and “cookery writers” damning him with one-star reviews.
“It was great because I get sent scripts all the time, but they’re all like ‘ooh, hello boys! Ooh, look at her roots,” he squawks. “This one was improvised so I could do my own lines. They’ll probably cut me out now but I enjoyed it.”
There’s his much-anticipated chatshow to come too.
“I opened the News of the World and it said I’m going to ask the things that Jonathan Ross and Graham Norton are too scared to,” he marvels. “And I’m thinking ‘God, what are they too scared to talk about?’
“I get criticised for being camp. But television is camp. Someone coming down the stairs, pretending that you’re in their living room and saying ‘hello, welcome to my show’? It’s awful, fake, but it’s putting on a show. I really think that camp works well on telly.”
Nevertheless, if fame turns fickle and he finds himself with “my jewellery range out”, “appearing at 1am on QVC”, his next book will “be rather more gossipy”.
“I’ll do a hatchet job, expose how television really works! All the lovely people and all those who’ve really annoyed me. It’ll be a good, old-fashioned slag off!”
