I Am What I Am John Barrowman (books that read to you txt) 📖

a couple of bowlfuls, she rubbed my feet until the pain medication kicked in and I fell asleep.6

A month later, a friend’s young son was explaining to someone what had happened to me. He said, ‘Poor John! He fell off his deck and tore all the testicles on his ankle.’

Now that would have really hurt.

CHAPTER EIGHT

‘MR SATURDAY NIGHT’

★

‘All my life I’ve had one dream: to achieve my many goals.’

Homer Simpson, The Simpsons

Five tips from Tonight’s the Night

1 Gaffer tape holds up (and keeps down) anything.

2 Everyone loves you when you bring chocolate biscuits

(M&S Rounds especially).

3 Hold a little back during a rehearsal and the show will pop.

4 Don’t edit me while I’m trying something new

(wait until the second time it doesn’t work).

5 A successful variety show must have a personality

(and not only mine).

Saturday night was sweetie night in our house, especially when we still lived in Scotland and my gran, Murn, and her sister, my Auntie Jeannie, would come over to babysit. Carole, Andrew and I picked our favourites from their sweetie stash – making certain not to touch Murn’s Fry’s Chocolate Cream – and then we’d coorie on the couch and watch Cilla Black, Lulu, Lena Zavaroni,1 Opportunity Knocks or anything with Bruce Forsyth. My childhood Saturday nights had magic and, can I say, a sweetness to them that continued when my family emigrated to the US.2

On special occasions, Murn brought a box of Cadbury’s Milk Tray chocolates with her. We’d all tuck in excitedly, grabbing our favourites – the caramels and the creams – but we were notorious for nibbling the others first. We’d taste all of them, and then we’d return to the box the bitten sweeties we didn’t like.3 Did we ever think of reading the descriptions that came in the box? Puhleeze. For the most part, Barrowmans don’t read directions of any kind. Putting together a table from IKEA? We use only our wits, a screwdriver, and a lot of swearing.

I’d pick a chocolate and if it was a flavour I didn’t like – such as coffee – or something with a hard crunchy centre, I’d bite it to check it really was as yucky as I’d imagined, and then I’d put it back in the box, maybe turning it over so the nibbled bit couldn’t be seen immediately. We all did this. I’m not sure what we were thinking – that maybe the next time someone opened the box, they’d say, ‘Oh, thank God someone already bit into this sweet because now I can see that it’s one I’d like to eat.’

Instead, what would happen is that my mum would open the box to have a chocolate with her coffee the following afternoon or evening, and the box would look like it had been raided by a team of chocoholic mice. She’d eat one anyway, because no one wastes whisky or chocolate in our house. You can see now why ‘life is a box of chocolates’ is not a metaphor I like – because what on earth does it mean if our box of chocolates was always partially regurgitated and the centres were sucked out?

The BBC announced that it had commissioned the pilot of Tonight’s the Night the week after the ‘Ballgate’ incident. I put ‘my boys’ behind me4 and went to work on one of my lifelong career dreams: hosting my own Saturday-night variety show.

The BBC and I began talking two years prior to the actual commissioning announcement about the possibility of me having my own show on prime-time Saturday night. The Kids Are All Right had been a huge success, but the BBC wanted me to do something different: something bigger, with more variety.

A show with all those components was a very tantalizing prospect, and, best of all, it would give me the opportunity to be involved behind the scenes as well as in front of the camera. Gavin and I established Barrowman Barker Productions (BBP) in 2008 so that we’d have more creative input into whatever I do, and so that we could get involved in aspects of the entertainment business where I’m not necessarily a performer. Forming BBP made perfect sense at this point in my career because it united my performing side with my creative side.

During all my years in theatre, I was always bothered by the dichotomy that many producers perpetuated between their talent (that would be me and the other actors) and themselves, sometimes forgetting that without the performers, they could produce themselves right into the dole queue. Tonight’s the Night was not only the unveiling of my Saturday-night entertainment show, it also marked my attempt to unify these two important sides of the entertainment business with Barrowman and Barker’s debut as producers.

Setting up BBP was in itself a new and exciting challenge. As well as attending hours of legal meetings, Gavin and I also created the company’s logo. The image we decided on has a retro feel to it, with an element of the ‘boy’ in it – without being too gay. It’s a man pushing a wheelbarrow with a dog sitting inside it.5 We designed the logo in such a way that if we wanted to make beer mats or T-shirts for gifts,6 the logo would work well.

A major benefit of this new development in my career, however, was that it added yet another string to my bow. I hate being pigeonholed – as an actor, singer, ‘the talent’, whatever. Sometimes producers, and even network heads, want to put me in a nice neat performing niche, but I refuse to go. This is one of the reasons I don’t answer a question that’s often put to me – ‘Which do you prefer: singing or acting; theatre or telly?’ – in the way the asker may want.

My response is always: ‘I’m an entertainer. I love all of them.’

As a case in point, one of the most difficult decisions I’ve ever faced as an entertainer was having to make the choice between television and theatre