Frankie Boyle - My Shit Life So Far

Our diets at school were laughably terrible. Loads of us would go for chips at lunch – chips and a potato fritter was the top seller. That’s a bag of chips and an enormous chip please. My mum would make me a packed lunch, so I’d spend a fair bit of time trying to barter gammon rolls and Blue Ribband biscuits into something more interesting. There was an ice-cream van outside the front gates that sold single fags and a tuck shop that only seemed to sell choc-ices. I loved it and I’d have appreciated it all even more if I could see myself now – forcing myself to eat a bowl of leaves with my meals in a desperate attempt to stay alive.

I do think kids need better education about nutrition – I didn’t really have a clue about any of that stuff till I read up on it a few years ago. Scientists have found that people who choose to eat crisps, chips and chocolate have a gene linked to obesity. They are now able to identify the group of people with this gene, by looking at a map of Scotland. Apparently, the SNP is to give every schoolchild in Scotland an obesity check. If they can’t fit into one of Alex Salmond’s trouser legs they go on a diet.

One of the fattest boys at my school was called Jerry MacBrayne. There was a rumour that he’d been caught masturbating during chemistry class. Nobody knew if it was true, but we all abused him about it endlessly because there wasn’t much else to do. He had these really fat parents, a fat sister and a wee fat dog. They’d all go jogging together in a nearby park in terry towelling tracksuits. My friend, a mischievous wee lassie called Lesley, lived across from them. She phoned a curry house one night and sent them half the menu as a prank. She said his dad answered the door and looked absolutely delighted.

The idea has been floated that parents of obese children should be fined. Don’t people realise that the parents of fat children are simply misguided? What they’re trying to do is make their kids less attractive to paedophiles. What they’re forgetting is that they’re making it more difficult for them to run away. In Vegas I once saw an incredibly fat man on one of those little mobility scooter things, except he’d driven it onto a moving walk-way, so he didn’t even have to drive. Now that’s lazy.

Live Aid was a huge thing at school. I think it’s fair enough for kids to get excited about something like that. But the adults who bought it should have really been embarrassed. ‘The Christmas bells that ring there are … the clanging chimes of doom?’ Did that really happen? Even at 12, I’d had a host of sexual nightmares that were less weird than the video to that song. If there’s one thing we’ve learned about fighting famine over the years it is this – big music events don’t work. We can tick that off the list. To be honest, you’d have thought that would have been a bit further down the list. It’s amazing to think that at some point there was a meeting where someone said, ‘People are starving in their millions’, and somebody replied, ‘We’d better get a hold of Ultravox and Annie Lennox.’

Seeing the film Gandhi was also a massive thing for me as a kid. I saw a clip of it on TV first, where Gandhi as a young man is thrown off a train because of his race. I just felt this incredible indignation that stuff like that happened in the world. I talked to my dad about it and was absolutely raging. I suppose that was the birth of some kind of political consciousness. Apparently the London Underground is using quotes from Gandhi on the Tube. But I don’t remember his saying, ‘There’s a body on the line at Marble Arch’ in the film. They are using other famous quotes too, but the one from the Koran emptied the train.

I was quite into socialism and read stuff like The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and George Orwell. I was quite an idealistic wee boy and I’d read quite a lot of political stuff by the time I was about 14. By 16 I joined the Labour Party. That didn’t seem like such a great place for an idealist. Or anyone with a low boredom threshold. It’s a rarely mentioned fact that politicians rise through the ranks by being able to sit through endless grim meetings. This inevitably means that we are governed by monsters. A few months of screaming inwardly during speeches about council business and I drifted off. It’s not like our political system even gets stuff done. Motorists now have to dodge a pothole for every 120 yards of road in Britain. It’s estimated it will take 13 years and cost £1 billion before council workers will finish standing around staring at all of them.

Politicians are just innately ridiculous and their lives can’t really bear the weight of much scrutiny. As a teenager I campaigned for Labour in a Glasgow by-election. The candidate was Mike Watson, who seemed like a reasonably genuine, socialist-minded character. He was elected, forgot about the socialism and later became Lord Watson. When I heard that he’d tried to burn down a hotel at the Scottish Politician of the Year Awards I assumed that he’d had a change of heart. Mike must have had an epiphany, I reasoned, surrounded by these braying crooks at their annual backslapper. Realising what he had done with his life he must have tried to bring the whole place down about their heads like a modern-day Samson! I did a gig at that hotel recently and the staff told me that he’d started the fire because they’d stopped serving him at the bar. My dad always had a generally socialist outlook. His philosophy was a strange mixture of apathy and class war. He didn’t want to smash the state but he wished that someone would. The good thing was that he would talk to us about stuff like that and we had an idea that the world might be a bit different from what we saw on the news. Once, my headmistress held a discussion about nuclear war, a subject I had questioned people endlessly about due to fear.

‘Did you know that there are underground bunkers where key people will go when there’s a nuclear alert?’ she asked the generally baffled class.

‘Yes Miss! My dad says that all the top politicians will go there.’

‘That’s right Frankie, a lot of key people will be taken there, so that the country will be able to keep running.’

‘Dad said that if he knew where one was, he’d get a shotgun when the four-minute warning went off and shoot everybody as they went in!’

My music teacher stood in a Glasgow by-election. He was a foaming Nationalist and once demonstrated the battle tactics at Culloden to us using a clipboard (shield) and pen (sword). He got a party political broadcast, which he sung. We all rushed home to see it.

‘Oh, these are my mountains!’ he cried, gesturing at some tower blocks. ‘And this is my glen!’ He was pointing into a local canal, full of rubbish. It was fantastic.

There were pupils who struggled to get through life at school but it was the same for some of the teachers. There was a maths teacher called Mr Hughes: an unfortunately camp heterosexual who for some reason chose to wear shoes with little golden buckles. Everywhere he went kids sang ‘Mr Hughes, the Elephant Man’ to the tune of ‘Over the Hills and Far Away’. He was a lightning rod for spitballs, paper aeroplanes and any kind of improvised missile.

There was a game where kids would inch their tables forward when the teacher turned to write something on the blackboard. Mr Hughes just didn’t have the personal confidence to address it, so we’d all end up crowded round his legs. Sometimes his face would be pressed up against the board. One time he made a joke.

‘What would you measure a waistline in, centimetres or metres or kilometres?’ he asked.

‘Metres’, said Harriet Adams, a reputedly slack lassie, being deliberately unhelpful.

‘I suppose it might be measured in metres if you were Cyril Smith,’ quipped Mr Hughes, chortling at his own joke.