Little Me Read online

  ‘Well done, Matthew. Well done. Very good indeed. Wonderful. Can I give you a note, love? You’re going eighty-five miles an hour and you really only need to go seventy-five.’

  A kind, smart note. But not one I was able to hear or understand, because I was now a star. Move over, Judy Garland.

  There were two more performances. Ego swollen and voice a little tired from so much onstage shouting, I actually tried to convince an older boy who was looking after the technical gear to give me my own radio mic.

  ‘I’m only allowed to give them to the people who have solo songs,’ said poor beleaguered Shaun, whose father happened to be Alvin Stardust.

  I considered this grossly unfair. I was, after all, the money. But my diva demands fell on deaf ears.

  My family was full of praise. My mum, in particular, was thrilled for me, gushing to all and sundry about her marvellous son in the way only a Jewish mother can. We call it kvelling. I joined in too, instructing my friend Mark Weston, who went to Highgate School, to let Barry Edwards know how fantastic I was. In my mind Edwards would be lying in bed at night, kicking himself. ‘Damn! Damn! The one that got away!’

  Other pupils were now stopping me in the corridors and saying nice things. I oozed charm in return, getting whatever I could out of it – usually a Nerd, some Scampi Fries or a bite of someone’s rock-hard Wham bar.

  As the term ended, school was but a distraction. My focus now was on my career. Next stop: the Edinburgh Festival, to rehearse and perform the show all over again, this time as part of the National Youth Music Theatre.

  The cast (including four of us from the Haberdashers’ production) convened at King’s Cross station one Sunday in July 1987 and caught the train together up to Edinburgh.

  Arriving at Heriot-Watt University, where we were all going to be living, I set my bags down and went into the common room, where the casts of two other NYMT shows had already assembled. My jaw dropped as I caught a glimpse of an impossibly handsome bequiffed blond boy in a designer black suit, arguing with one of the staff. I instantly recognised him as one of the kids from a TV show I watched on Channel 4 called The Pocket Money Programme. He looked like a movie star – and he became one. It was Jude Law.

  Clang! Sorry for the name-drop! There’ll be a few along the way. Keep a tally if you like.

  Over the next couple of weeks we set about rehearsing Ramsbottom (we got there!). Many of the cast members were four or five years older than me and had also appeared in a version of the show at their school in south London. There was some consternation amongst them that I had taken the place of the boy who played Accrington Stanley in their production, and I sometimes overheard grumblings of ‘how Tom had done it better’.

  I made some friends – well, some of the younger cast members tolerated me – but I didn’t make it easy for myself. Part of the problem was that I was a Habs boy. I’ll tell you more about the school later on in the book, but put it like this – when you assemble all the new boys on the first day of school in a grand old hall and tell them that they are ‘the cream’ of the country, well, you’re not exactly putting Humility on the school syllabus.

  Up to this point I had struggled to impress in any department. Now that I was finally making a name for myself, I had become insufferable. Back at school it may have been the order of the day to crow about your achievements, but in the outside world people saw us for the entitled little shits we were. And while I had shone in the school production, I was certainly no better than anyone else in the NYMT. But I thought I was and it put a few noses out of joint.

  I had trouble sleeping in the chatty, overpopulated science classroom-turned-dormitory and became tired during rehearsals. As I had done in the school production, I started to lose my voice. I remember feeling ill and mumbling during a run-through and some of the cast asking me to put in a bit more effort.

  In fairness I was just a thirteen-year-old, away from home, going through puberty, and my home life had been rocky. At times I would be holding court, boring the others with the same old stories, but equally I could be moody and sullen, especially after a performance. As a counter to my arrogance, I was never convinced that I had done a good enough job onstage, and I would chastise myself endlessly. To this day I rarely watch things I have been in, because I am almost always mortified by the results.

  There were happy times too. Although I was a nuisance, I could always find someone to while away the hours with, listening to Rick Astley on the radio (number one at the time with ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’), swapping jokes and dance steps.

  I loved performing and definitely grew from the experience but offstage I was a polarising figure, still working out how to be part of something, instead of the focus of it. On the last night we were each given a poster advertising the show and we all signed each other’s. One boy simply wrote ‘fuck off’ on mine, in very small letters.

  B – Baldy!

  One of my earliest memories is of being three and a half years old at nursery, watching the other little boys and girls skip out of the classroom and noting how the folds in the backs of their legs were unblemished. My own legs, like my arms and neck, were already riddled with scratches. I had been told repeatedly not to scratch – but if I didn’t scratch then there was nothing to do but wheeze. And, oh, how I wheezed. Dr David said I had eczema and asthma and hay fever and gave me some special cream and a blue-and-white Ventolin inhaler, which I was to use every morning and every night and in between if necessary.

  When the summer came, my eyes got red and puffy and I sneezed and coughed even more. In the winter I caught every cold going. From a young age I felt at odds with my body. This blotchy, dumpy vessel betrayed my boisterous, carefree spirit. I wanted to run, jump, climb – and I did – but within seconds I was bent double at the kerb, gasping for air.

  And yet I remained funny cheeky Matthew. Inquisitive, outgoing, playful, I had many friends, who I entertained with songs and jokes and silly voices aplenty. Even on the sidelines, while the others played football, I would pretend to be a TV commentator. My asthma and eczema were an inconvenience but they didn’t define me.

  However, an event would soon occur that would shape my childhood.

  In 1978, when I was four, Mum and Dad took my older brother Howard and me to Portugal on a family holiday. Our grandmothers – both widowed – joined us.

  I was struck with wonder at the otherness of everything and was easily distracted. I was always lagging a few steps behind, and my poor parents were constantly having to remind me not to wander off on my own.

  One day, while we were walking along the street, I got separated from my family. I looked up and they were nowhere to be seen. I cast my eyes up and down and across the road. There were several people around and from a distance quite a lot of them looked like my mum and dad.

  Eventually, I spotted them, on the other side, waving anxiously at me. I stepped off the kerb, into the road, and was knocked down by a car.

  A small crowd gathered. My distraught father ran over, picked me up off the ground, swore at the driver, kicked the car and carried me off.

  At school I recounted the story to friends and teachers. I enjoyed the drama of it. My father, coming to my rescue. Me, the survivor.

  Two years later, in 1980, aged six, I woke up one morning to find several hairs on my pillow. The next day the same thing happened, only this time there were a lot more. By the end of the summer all of my hair had fallen out.

  I wasn’t initially all that concerned. At four my hair had been blond and curly, but at five it was a big brown pudding bowl and I loathed it. Why couldn’t I have nice short hair like the other boys? I hated having it cut, because it made my neck and back all itchy. Worse, when Mum washed it in the bath I always got soap in my eyes.

  In the changing room at Aylward First and Middle School – a ten-minute walk from our home in the north-west London suburb of Stanmore – I could do nothing but laugh as I easily pulled out the last two or three remaining stran
ds in front of my friends. It didn’t feel real.

  But it was.

  The doctors – and we saw an endless stream of them – concluded that it must have been a delayed response to the shock of being knocked down by the car in Portugal two years earlier.

  And so I was the first six-year-old in my class to learn the word ‘alopecia’.

  Suddenly everything and anything else that I was at that age was eclipsed by the fact that I was the little boy in the town with absolutely no hair. And that is how it was, from the age of six for the remainder of my youth. Right up until I became famous, my lack of hair was considered the most – perhaps even the only – notable thing about me.

  I was never allowed to forget for one moment that I was bald. If I went swimming or to the cinema or got the bus or went to a shop or simply walked down the street, adults and children stared at me.

  ‘You got no hair,’ said the younger kids, pointing.

  Others who had previously called me Matthew now yelled ‘Baldy!’ as I passed by.

  Or ‘Skinhead’ or ‘Slaphead’ – but mainly ‘Baldy’.

  Apart from my parents’ friend Melvyn, who used to call me ‘Curly’, though I never got it.

  My baldness was a source of amusement, sympathy and revulsion for everyone.

  Some people chose to inform me that I had something called leukaemia. ‘You’re dying,’ said one of the older girls in lunch break one day, matter-of-factly, as she tossed an apple core, missing the bin.

  I pondered if maybe she was right, that perhaps there was something that my parents had thought not to tell me. I accepted I might be dying and I hoped that I had been a good enough boy to go to heaven.

  Initially it was speculated – almost assured – that this was temporary, that my hair would grow back almost as quickly as it had fallen out.

  And it did. A year after it disappeared, it started to return, thinner than before, yes, but this was definitely progress.

  Then it fell out again.

  The search for a cure began in earnest. I was taken out of school here and there and we’d traipse down to central London on the Tube to meet various specialists. Everyone had an opinion; no one had a solution.

  Mum and Dad always did their best to turn the trips into some kind of treat. I’d be taken to tea in a department store or allowed to look around Hamleys. When we went to Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, we would pop in afterwards to Alan Alan’s Magic Spot nearby and I’d choose a Paul Daniels magic trick to take home.

  I was prodded and poked and gazed at with curiosity, but with few conventional medicinal treatments available to us, we started to go down the homeopathic route. A Nigerian family had moved into our road and my brother had become friendly with one of their kids, Azubike (or ‘A-Zed’ for short). His father, having been a doctor in their homeland, was sure he could help and administered some small white pills, which did nothing. Then we bought a few bottles of an elixir made from seaweed, which arrived in the post, and which my dad would rub vigorously into my scalp every evening. After a few weeks we gave up – he had developed a nasty rash on his hands and my hair was still nowhere to be seen.

  On Saturday mornings I started to see a friendly acupuncturist. My dad would sit with me while the acupuncturist stuck needles into me, but that didn’t seem to do anything either. I don’t know anybody who enjoys having needles stuck into them and I was quite relieved when we stopped going.

  I thought little of it at the time, until I was at a party twenty years later, speaking with the wife of another comedian, who was also an acupuncturist. I asked her how business was going and if she had any male clients or just treated women. She explained she worked with both men and women.

  ‘But it’s so intimate,’ I said. ‘Don’t you get embarrassed when you work with the men?’

  She looked at me, puzzled. ‘All therapy has a degree of intimacy, but why would I feel embarrassed?’

  ‘Well,’ I replied, ‘I mean, there you are, sticking needles in someone’s genitalia. That must be weird.’

  ‘Um, that’s … not part of acupuncture,’ she said. ‘No, no, of course it’s not.

  No. Ha.’ I changed the subject as swiftly as I could.

  Now, I suspect that’s perhaps not what you were expecting to read. I mean, it’s clearly alarming. Feel free to swear out loud, if you like.

  I’ve tried to process this a little over the years and I’ve come to the conclusion that I simply don’t know whether the therapist was behaving inappropriately or whether he was genuinely trying to find areas on my body that could stimulate hair growth. Like I say in the Preface, life is sometimes about living without the answers.

  What I will say is that I don’t carry any baggage from the experience with the acupuncturist. I know a comedy producer who once told me that he went to a boys’ only public school and had a swimming teacher who would make all the boys stand in a line in the showers with their legs wide open while he slid through them on the ground.

  I asked him if he was traumatised by the incident.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I just thought it was a bit odd.’

  Well, that’s what I think of the acupuncture. It was a bit odd. Shall we move on?

  In 1981, I was seven years old. And – apart from that brief period when the hair grew back – I had been bald for a year. It became clear – to me, at least – that nothing had worked because nothing was going to work. My dad said he thought ‘the roots might be dead by now’. And that was that.

  I put my efforts into building a collection of caps, which I would proudly show to anyone who came to the house. Whenever a friend or relative went on holiday they were encouraged to bring me back a cap, as a souvenir. At school, other kids would pull my cap off and run away. Sometimes the wind would blow it off – but that didn’t stop me collecting as many as I could find. I had a box full of them.

  Nowadays if you lose your hair as a child – as a boy, at least – you might not care as much. That’s not to diminish the devastation that childhood (or even adulthood) alopecia can wreak on the individual, but there are lots of bald people you can look up to.

  There’s the Mitchell brothers in EastEnders. You wouldn’t mess with them, especially Phil. He’s properly hard and you can tell this because he speaks really quietly. In drama, the quieter you are, the harder you are. This makes Phil Mitchell a British Don Corleone, and he doesn’t even need to put grapes in his cheeks either. Sorry, Marlon.

  You’ve got Vin Diesel, who is in those Fast & Furious films, and probably lots of other films with explosions in them, but I’ve never actually seen young Vincent in anything, so I’m not the one to ask. But anyway – him.

  Bruce Willis.

  And Demi Moore too, come to think of it (G.I. Jane).

  The Rock. Who isn’t actually a real rock. Although real rocks don’t tend to have hair either, so he is aptly named.

  Gail Porter.

  Me.

  Dara O’Briaiaian.

  Ian Wright Wright Wright.

  And Homer Simpson (virtually).

  There will be more. Go and look on Wikipedia. But don’t forget to come back and read the rest of this book. I tend to get trapped in a Wiki hole when I go there. I was reading about a disaster in a colliery for an hour yesterday.

  Anyway, back when I was lickle, there were FOUR BALD PEOPLE.

  Kojak, the TV detective. I’ve never seen the show. I was too young to watch it. But I know he was bald and he had a lollipop. People used to call me Kojak all the time and say ‘Who loves ya, baby?’

  Yul Brynner from The King and I.

  The bald guy in The Benny Hill Show (whose head Benny used to pat and who was the reason for people constantly patting mine).

  And Duncan Goodhew, who was a swimmer.

  You’d see Duncan on telly all the time. If he wasn’t actually competing in an event, he was being interviewed on Saturday Superstore, or appearing in an advert, or sticking his head through a hole on Game for a Laugh w
hile a blindfolded contestant felt it and had to identify what it was, with hilarious consequences.

  Duncan Goodhew was wonderful. And, encouraged by my parents, I wrote him a letter and sent a photo of my little bald self.

  It wasn’t long before a handwritten reply from Duncan himself arrived on the doormat. ‘Hi Matt! You look great in your photo!’ he told me. Also in the envelope were some badges. My favourite was a bright blue one, with a drawing of Duncan’s grinning face and the caption ‘Bald Is Beautiful’. I wore it every day.

  Whenever my friend Duncan was on TV, someone would ask him how he lost his hair. He had been climbing a tree, he said, and fell out of it. The shock had made his hair fall out. I used to joke that it was my head he landed on, and that’s how I’d lost mine.

  Duncan would talk about how he believed not having hair actually helped him when competing, because it meant he had less resistance in the water.

  Duncan was a winner.

  I’ve never met you, but I love you, Duncan Goodhew. You taught me that being bald was something you could actually use to your advantage. Thank you.

  Being bald has helped me in my career. Would I have had my big break as a baby in Shooting Stars if I had had a full head of hair? My baldness has made me distinctive, yet also allowed me to transform myself. Stick a wig on and I’m someone else. Swap the wig and I’m now another person. Perfect.

  My childhood was tough, yes. No one wants to feel eternally self-conscious, constantly stared at, teased, mocked and bullied. But also it’s important to get things into perspective.

  When I was seven it was announced that a new ‘handicapped’ boy called Michael would be joining our class. Miss Robbins told me that I was to look after him.

  Michael had – has – cerebral palsy. Tottering in with a winning smile on his first day, none of us found it easy to understand what he was saying. But in time, we learned his patterns and rhythms, knew to wait patiently because it took him longer to speak.

  Michael was smart, funny, sweet and never complained about anything. He found writing a challenge so he did his work on a special computer. Michael was a marvel.