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There she was, looking up at me. Face clenched, eyes raging and blood-shot, prim, lacquered hair waving about like the wild woman of Borneo, she exploded hysterically. ‘Get to the headmaster’s office now!’ she shouted, straining the last words out of her empty lungs.
    I got the cane that day, but I learned a very useful defensive tool that would stay with me for the rest of mylife. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but one day I would even get paid for it. That’s not to say it’s right – if everyone did it, there would be anarchy. But I realized that at last I’d found something at which I could excel.
    I never really conformed at school. I had so few positive learning experiences as a pupil that I can more or less recall each and every occasion I was stimulated. When my interest was piqued, it was as if I had awoken momentarily from a comatose state. I felt enthused, excited, but then we would have to change schools and move on. And just as suddenly as it had begun, it was over and I was out of kilter again.
    The problem was, Dad’s job meant we were always on the move. As he got busier as a performer, we were constantly shifting from place to place. I was at school in Bristol one term, Southport the next, then Eastbourne, Blackpool, back to Bristol again, then eventually to Billericay. So I got used to thinking that things were always going to be temporary – friends, school, where we were staying.

    Me, on the far left, during a cookery class at Lawrence Weston School, Bristol.
    There was never any time for teachers to include me in what was going on, show me how their system worked. How could they? I was never around long enough. So I kept safely out of the way, reclusive, sitting at the back of the class, the new boy, retreating, wandering around in my own imaginary world.
    Agonizingly shy, I would sit there all day in the classroom, heart pounding away, face flushed and sweaty, head bowed, trying not to make any eye contact, just staring blankly at the workbook that was put in front of me, incomplete confusion and terrified of being mocked. I’ve always been odd. I’m just not part of the system, the mainstream, the establishment, the norm. I’ve always been the weird boy at the back of the class.
    But if you point me out, the focus is thrown without warning towards me, and I will play the clod, the goofball or the klutz, stumbling in at the wrong time from the sidelines to disrupt. So used am I to being the oddball, I actually feel safer there. On the edge is good. It’s a nervous reaction, I think, a kind of physical, mental, automatic form of self-defence. If I am suddenly thrust out in front of some lights, I’m like one of those Duracell battery-operated rabbits. I’m off. I never stop.
    For as long as I can remember I’ve been out of step with everyone and everything that’s going on around me. It’s the void where I feel safest. That day in Mrs Taylor’s class, I just did what came naturally. I wasn’t even aware I was doing it.
    All I knew was that suddenly I was accepted, regarded. I didn’t understand it at the time, but comedy by sheer accident would become the vehicle into which I would channel all the stuff I saw and felt. It would be a zone I could visit where no one could tell me I was doing something wrong. Comedy would become the one place where I was able to fit in. I found real life a struggle. Only on stage did I feel at home.

5. The Early Days
    The Lawrence Weston was the only constant in my life. We’d go back there after every summer season and it was the place where I did a lot of my growing up. The estate backed on to a wide, barren piece of scrubland, interspersed with parking facilities for lorries, allotments, ditches and streams. But mostly it was wasteland awaiting developers’ careless drawings. Sandwiched between this vast space and the sky was a huge chemical works. Beyond that was the point where the M4 motorway – which went from east to west – met the