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George Formby – The Intro I decided to become a George Formby impersonator on Christmas Eve. I can tell you that, because it states it clearly in my diary. “Become George Formby.” It’s there in black and white in between a doodle of birds on a telegraph wire and the cryptic message “Remember to”. And, no, I can’t remember what I had to “remember to”. If I had a decent memory, I wouldn’t have to write this kind of thing down. Of course, given the doodles and incomplete phrases, “Become George Formby” might have got in there by mistake. I might have been half-listening to the radio and simply written down a snippet of what I heard. The man on the radio might have said, “wearing dresses did not become George Formby” and I, like a conduit for a voice at a séance, simply wrote down the “become George Formby” bit. I think this is unlikely. In all my research, I have found no indication that Formby was a cross-dresser, or even a mildly annoyed one. I've never been a conduit for anything either, unless you count that time in the electrical storm on Dartmoor. Frankly, it’s bizarre. There has to be an explanation. Perhaps Freud would know, but he’s dead and besides his number’s ex-directory. Why would I suddenly decide to become a George Formby impersonator? It’s not like I was wandering towards Damascus when a sudden bright light blinded me and a man with a big white beard called out to me to turn my life into someone else’s. I’d even have to change the first letter of my name. If Saul decided that to carry on God’s work he’d have to become Paul, then to carry on the work of Saint George Formby, Nicholas would mutate into Dicholas or Picholas and that would upset my mother, who spent over three minutes deciding what to call me in the first place. Perhaps this ambition must have been bubbling away like a coffee percolator at a 1970s fondue evening, rooted deep in my subconscious. Surely, I must have a predestination to be preternaturally chirpy and to play the uke. But I have no recollection of this; it’s just another “remember to”. My friend Brian reckons that it’s been a long-held ambition that I’ve repressed. He says that often I’ve swerved out of the path of oncoming juggernauts with a cod-Lancastrian cry of “Yah, never touched me!” I suspect that if I do that, it’s more for self-preservation and a touch of near-fatal-crash humour than it is because I have any deep-seated ambition to be a Formby impersonator. Besides, notice how it’s always me doing the driving. That’s because his car is always so full of garbage that you can barely squeeze into the driving seat let alone anywhere else. I tried to get into the passenger’s side once, gave up, then tried the back and eventually the hatchback. But there was too much stuff. A quick inventory established that he had a toilet seat lid (broken), a paint-spattered three-rung step-ladder (all rungs broken), a stuffed barn owl mounted on a mahogany plinth (owl and plinth both broken), seven orange crates (broken), two orchestral timpani (broken), a plaster cast of an elephant’s foot (broken), a copy of a picture of that green woman that Boots used to sell (broken), two fishing rods (broken), one gatso speed camera (broken) and a dozen eggs that he’d forgotten he’d bought to make an omelette three Christmases ago (unbroken – miraculously). Oh, and there’s always a small bag of sand, some three-inch lengths of timber, a cat litter tray and a book “Are you taking this to the tip?” I asked. “Oh, no, I’ve only just got the stuff,” he said. “It’ll come in handy.” A passenger stands no chance in Brian’s car. It would be far cheaper for him if he bought a skip and converted it into a car, rather than doing it the other way round. He’s got seven cars on his driveway. They all still work, but as he fills one up, he then has to buy a new one, just because he can’t find the gear-lever anymore. His wife tears her hair out, but he’s come up with a plan to use his cars longer. From now on he’s going to buy automatics. We're still no closer to establishing the reason for this desire to become Formby. I ask around some more. Apparently, according to some of my nearest and dearest and my wife, I also use the phrase “turned out nice again, hasn’t it” on those few days of the year when the sun shines feebly through the clouds in what passes for half the British summer. Occasionally, I even use it in sarcastic mode, during the usual downpours that make up the other half of a British summer. “Turned out nice again” is merely a typical bit of English understated sarcasm as the rain drives in horizontally, although there’s never quite enough of it to provide people in the South of England with enough H2O to keep their golf courses green, their Jacuzzis full or their swimming-pools correctly topped up. Brian also reckons that lurking below the surface of the quiet, restrained suburban exterior of my life is a huge desire to show off. Maybe. Perhaps he’s just jealous that I’ve still got all my hair and how little of it is prematurely grey. Anyway, shouldn't he be cleaning his car? The strange thing is how this entry “Become George Formby” got in my diary at all. It’s not that I haven’t had ambitions in the past, it’s just that now I’m comfortably middle-aged, most of them seem a little bit unlikely, one or two were definitely unsavoury and several were illegal and immoral, but if you don’t tell Jenny Agutter or Catherine Deneuve, neither will I. Looking though my diaries, I am reminded that I did once nurse the ambition to open a Museum of Hypochondria. Just flicking through my journal I can see why it once appealed. There are several records of potentially fatal illnesses recorded in its pages. Yes, in the fascinating archive of my own life, I discover that on July 11th I’d developed a cough, that on January 17th, I’d had a grape pip stuck in a tooth or that on March 21st I’d woken feeling as though I had a cold coming on, although it came to nothing? Some of you may scoff, but you have to look after yourself - writing is a dangerous profession. Flaubert caught syphilis and I suspect he just thought he’d got a bit of skin-burn overdoing it with Fifi L’Amour (English lessons given). Byron probably reckoned he’d got a bit of a tickly throat. Even poor old H.H. Monroe, who penned witty stories under the name of Saki, was just admonishing one of his soldiers for sparking up a fag, when he was shot by a sniper during the First World War, thus being the first official recorded victim of passive smoking. You just can’t tell which way these things will develop. Besides, if illnesses weren’t endlessly fascinating why are there so many programmes on the television based around Doctor’s surgeries and hospitals? We love discussing our ailments. And not just we Brits. Go to any country of the globe and wherever two or three grey-haired ladies are gathered together, you can bet your last Euro that the gleeful talk will be of major gynaecological surgery and what they could and couldn’t do after it. Men, on the other hand, prefer to limit their talk to less intrusive bodily functions, such as farting, belching, peeing and pooing. If we didn’t have such a love affair with our maladies, then why else would such institutions as the Leprosy Museum in Münster or the International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago exist? To keep the men happy, there’s even a chap called Mr. Beany, who lives in Wales and paints himself orange whilst opening his house as a baked bean museum. It’s not precisely medical, but it does tap into the general area of flatulence. My Museum of Hypochondria would have displayed a selection of in-growing toe-nails from the reign of Boadicea, my vast and incomparable collection of Edwardian finger-stalls and discarded poultices from the Crimean War. Hypochondriacs from all over the world would congregate to discuss if an itchy knee could be the first signs of Ebola River Fever or a wart on the knuckle the early stages of MRSA. Perhaps there is a fortune to be made as they gather round the entrance, opening their wallets gingerly so as not to sprain a wrist or dislocate a shoulder extricating their cash. On the downside, they’d only moan about the cost of entry. “I could have had a bottle of Elliman’s Rub for that!” … “Aye, and a gallon jar of mentholated bronchial balsam.” Hypochondriacs hate coughing up, unless they get to examine what they've coughed up in a sputum dish and can compare it with somebody else's phlegm, or at least against a Dulux colour chart. ("I think we should paint the dining-room Morning Catarrh, Daphne!") But maybe the museum would attract more than just hypochondriacs. I once worked with a woman who had Munchausen’s Hypochondrosis by Proxy. It wasn’t enough for her to have the disease – one of her friends had to have it. This gave her an excuse to run the gamut of her mates who’d had everything from malaria to Beri-beri, greenstick fractures to diverticulitis and Huntingdon’s Chorea (both North and South). When everyone else was pretending to be busy by carrying a clipboard or shuffling sheets of paper in and out of order, she would tell us about her friends, all of whom had developed mystery illnesses. Now, as this woman was about as likeable as a nine-inch nail through the foreskin, it seemed unlikely that she had any friends outside work; she certainly didn’t have any amongst us, where we only just managed to put up with the buzz-saw of her tiresome whingeing from one day to the next. Only by sitting on our hands did we avoid strangling her or splitting her head open with a toner cartridge ("ooh, that happened to a friend of mine called Sally, and a nasty gash she had too, went septic, then she got gangrene”). Eventually, purely to keep our sanity and to prevent ourselves from becoming a lynch-mob, we used to invent diseases just to see if her friends had suffered from them. I can safely confirm that at least one of her pals had suffered from one time or another from Gallimaufry’s Sarcoma, Encephalitic arteriosclerosis, Hudson’s Hives, and Menteur’s Syndrome. It’s also sad to report that her best friend Mary had definitely suffered from Orchidic Perambulation, or if not that, something very like it, which put her on her back for a fortnight and gave her the dry heaves. By some miracle, all these friends pulled through and in all the dozens of days she took off "sick" only to return with a suntan and a new haircut, not one of them was for a funeral. On the other hand, maybe a Museum of Hypochondria isn’t the great idea I once thought it was. It would only attract people who’ll end up hacking and spluttering all over me. I might catch something. Sticking with becoming George Formby is a more sensible ambition. No, I should celebrate my illnesses, but not in a lasting memorial. Indeed, as it is through illness, injury and incapacity that I ever found myself in the position to become a George Formby impersonator at all, then perhaps becoming him will be that celebration. Permit me to explain, as the Victorian novelists used to write. A couple of years’ back, a small stone lodged itself somewhere in my gall bladder. In a fit of multilingual humour that almost everyone failed to recognise as a joke, I named him Pierre, because he was a gallstone. That was a mistake. You see, you didn't get the joke and you're far cleverer than any of my mates. I should have just called him Astérix the Gallstone, then everyone would have got it. The wicked stone, obviously needing plenty of pseudonyms in the way of all criminal intruders, played me up for months. The pain-killers I got through whilst little Pierre or Astérix clogged up some bile-bearing tube or other had a street value that would make a Colombian drug baron weep from jealousy. As a result, the gallbladder had not only been the bane of my life, despite my attempts to control it through a virtually fat-free diet, but had decided that it would go onto automatic deflate and then stick to the top of my liver. Surgery was to be the cure. Having been on an NHS waiting list for only slightly longer than it takes to master the cello to Festival Hall standard, I awoke from the eventual operation to remove the deflated sac to discover that, instead of the neat key-hole surgery I’d been promised, I had a scar the length of the Preston By-pass under my rib-cage. They gave me another zillion pounds’ worth of morphine-based pain-killers (for which I would like to thank you, the tax-paying British public), but as the pain wore off, so too did the realisation that I no longer had the entire sensation in my left hand. In fact, the fourth and fifth fingers were tingling with constant pins-and-needles. Other patients gathered round my bed to swap loss-of-sensation stories and leaflets from Law firms specialising in medical malpractice. The cause was soon diagnosed. During my lengthy operation, the radia ulna, a nerve running under the fleshy bit of the upper arm, had probably rested for too long on the edge of the surgical trolley. The nerve was crushed and it would take at least 18 months for sensation to return. This meant that my guitar-playing days were, at least temporarily, over. It’s not that I was any good. True, I had been compared to Clapton and Hendrix, but only by someone who said “You’re nowhere near as good as Clapton or Hendrix”. I turned for solace to the ukulele. As it has only four strings, usually nylon, it is easier to play and for many chords, you can just about get away with the number of useable fingers I had left. It’s like a guitar in a different key, but without the two lowest-pitched strings, so you can essentially use all the same chord shapes. Within weeks I was hooked on the little instrument and started a collection that grew with every tax rebate I received. In this country Ukulele = George Formby. Inevitably, people soon began to request that if I wasn’t prepared to play out of ear-shot, that I should at least twang my way through Leaning on a Lamp-post or When I’m cleaning Windows. So, perhaps the fingers, the instruments, the poor parodies, the desire to show off were there. But, couldn’t I become something a little bit more hip, a bit cooler, a bit more streetwise, a bit more down-and-dirty than a George Formby impersonator? What about becoming a Rock God? Yes, I could become the newest sensation. With my electric Ukulele, I could be worshipped by adoring fans as I played to one full house at the Albert Hall after the other. “It’s great to be back in London … Here’s a song that’s been very good for me … you’re such a beautiful audience, I’d like to take you all home with me … I love you too, London.” “Truly the greatest electric ukulele-player of his (or any) generation,” NME. “Just when you thought the ten-minute guitar solo was dead, Corder reinvents it as the fifteen-minute Ukulele solo with his blistering finger-work,” Q Magazine. When I mentioned to my wife that I still might have it in me to be a Rock God, she pointed out that it’s hard for middle-aged men with a weight problem to become Rock Gods. I retorted by pointing out several major international recording artistes such as James Brown, Barry White, Demis Roussos, Elton John and Van Morrison, who are not only older than me, but probably weigh in a few pounds heavier too. “Ah yes,” came the reply, “but they were stars before they got old and fat. Besides some of them are dead.” “What about stand-up comedy?” I retorted, placing her in a half-Nelson position like I used to see Mick McManus do in the late 1960s. Discipline is all. “You need to be funny to do stand up!” She said, moving me quickly through an Argentine headlock, a double chicken-wing camel-clutch and a spinning scissors cross-face before flipping me on my back and then body-slamming me onto the kitchen floor. Whilst I fought for my breath and wondered if I might have perhaps strained one or two intercostals muscles, I realised that it was true. There are many very unfunny comedians and hundreds of bus-pass toting rockers, but they all started out years ago. If I was to make the grade, I would have to do so in some other capacity. But what if I become too famous for my own good? I’m not sure if I could withstand that level of adoration, the sheer numbers of nymphets. How would I feel if I had to hear my Christmas Number One jangling out of the Tannoy in Woolworths every September? No, fame doesn’t attract me. It’s too obsessional. The very concept has been picked over by journalists, playwrights, novelists and commentators - mainly by ones you’ve never heard of. However, the fame-cravers haven’t spotted the catch. Being famous may be handy for some things – I’m sure that it can get you decent restaurant seats, help to get your books published even if you can’t read or write and secure you an upgrade on a long-haul flight. But there’s a downside. If you don’t play the fame game carefully, you can have people door-stepping you for charities they only invented the night before, calling you by your first name despite the fact you’ve never met and taking phone-camera shots of your genitalia in the urinals. It strikes me then that perhaps being famous by being someone else who’s famous means that you yourself don’t have to be famous at all. You can be famous by proxy – just like the Old Whingeing Bat back in my old job could revel in the ill-health of her imaginary friends. It’s like being a look-alike. Shave your head and cover your body with a few mis-spelled hieroglyphs and you can pose as David Beckham. Then, all you need to do is remove the ink with a bit of carbolic, slip on a wig, learn how to speak in full sentences and nobody, but nobody will stop you in the street. Then it occurred to me that there was an even better plan. What about being famous for pretending to be someone famous, but who nobody’s ever heard of? My mate Andy has the best part-time job in the world. He’s the bass player in a Bruce Springsteen tribute band. Who even knows the name of Bruce Springsteen’s bass-player and even if you do, do you know what he looks like? Brilliant, eh? Now, being a stand-in for someone no-one even recognises would be the most anonymous job in the whole world, unless you happen to be a woodwork teacher. Luckily Andy teaches woodwork as well, so around 200 children a week ignore him totally, which is not bad going. However, on a good weekend, up to a thousand adults attending fake Springsteen gigs ignore him totally. Unfortunately, there’s a hitch. I can’t play the bass. Shame. There are dozens of tribute bands out there, all wanting anonymous bass players with additional woodworking skills. So, maybe I’m going to have to become George Formby after all. However, if I am to become George Formby, it’s not just a question of parting my hair and putting on a dinner jacket. I need to have a system, an approach, a means of achieving this ambition. In order to do this, I have made a list of all those accomplishments that I need to acquire in order to be completely unfamous as someone else – if you see what I mean. My path to non-stardom has involved target-setting. Don’t scoff at this. Target-setting is important. How else have successive governments brought this country to its knees? OK, So Mr. Lawson gave away twenty trillion quid on Black Wednesday by not having a clue what the targets were, but that was a long time ago and there’s more than one way to skin a rabbit or plunge ten million mortgagees into despair. These, then are my George Formby Targets, or GFTs as we say in the acronym business. I need to: · Learn to sing · Improve my ukulele playing – more than three chords would be helpful · Develop a Wigan accent, even if I never use it socially · Learn a number of George Formby songs · Conquer the nerves of performing in public · Lose weight · Buy dinner jacket and bow tie · Buy throat tablets · Have costly reconstructive maxillo-facial and dental surgery in order to make myself look like GF My journey to achieve these targets is what you now hold in your hands, unless you’re reading this book on the toilet, which I didn’t want to know anyway. This is my story of how I turned myself from an anonymous hack into the gurning Wigan comedy songster. Take my hand (provided you’ve washed it) and come with me through the highways and by-ways of Formbydom. Oh, and you see that anonymous-looking bloke over there with the bass guitar and a wobbly, wooden bird table marked “7/10, Fair effort”? That’s Andy. He used to be a complete nobody until he became the new Garry Tallent. “Who?” “Exactly. By the way, that boil looks nasty.” |